Valiant

Kila looked steadily back at Geary but said nothing. Captain Tulev pointed one finger toward the star display. “Show us, please, Captain Geary. Play back the recording of what happened after the hypernet gate collapsed.”

He didn’t want to view that again, even in miniature, but Geary brought up the records, setting them to play at a vastly accelerated speed so that the shock wave rolled across the image of Lakota Star System in about thirty seconds.

It was quiet after the recording finished, then Tulev indicated where the images of the ruined star system had played out. “We should send this to the Syndics. They don’t have anything like it because so many of their sensors were destroyed by the energy wave. Send it to the ships leaving this star system for help, and to as many others as we can, and make sure they can send it onward.”

“So they can figure out what the gates can do sooner?” Armus asked sarcastically.

“They don’t need our help to do that,” Cresida answered. “They’ve already got records of what happened at Sancere, and even the dimmest mind can look at the damage to Lakota Three, calculate the amount of energy it took to do that, and work back the planet’s orbit and rotation to confirm that what hit it came from the hypernet gate location. But if we send what we have out now, which we can sanitize of any data about the collapse of the hypernet gate that we want to try to keep from the Syndics, it will prove that we didn’t cause all of that destruction.” She glared around the table. “My reputation, like Commander Landis’s, speaks for itself.

I don’t want to be blamed for what happened here. It’s over the line. I’ll kill as many Syndics as I have to kill to win this war. I don’t want to kill any star systems.”

“Yes,” Tulev agreed. “It’s important the Syndics know we didn’t do this, so there will be no popular demand for retaliation in kind. Also important is the impact it will have on the Syndic population.” He gestured at the star display again. “They’ll see it, all over, no matter how much the Syndic leaders try to suppress it. They’ll see what can happen to a planet with a hypernet gate in the same star system. What do the Syndic leaders say then? If they try to blame us, their people in star systems with hypernet gates will fear we could do the same to their worlds. If those leaders try to claim they can stop us, their people will want to know why they didn’t stop us in Lakota. If they say their people need not fear Alliance attacks of this nature because it was not an Alliance attack that caused it, then their people will demand to know what did cause it.”

Everyone thought about that, and grim smiles started appearing on a lot of faces.

“They’ll be in an impossible position,” Badaya noted approvingly. “That’s a brilliant suggestion, Captain Tulev. It will generate intense public worry all through Syndic space and confront the Syndic leaders with serious problems in how to handle mass fear of the hypernet gates.”

Commander Neeson, looking concerned, shook his head. “But what happens when our people hear about it? We can’t keep that news from crossing the border into Alliance space. We’ll face the same problem.”

“Our leaders need to know this problem exists,” Captain Badaya stated. He gave Geary a meaningful look. As far as Badaya was concerned, Geary should be the only leader of the Alliance, a dictator backed by most of this fleet. Commander Yin hadn’t been totally paranoid in her worries, though Geary himself wanted nothing to do with the idea.

“We need to figure out what to do, too,” Badaya continued, “before the Syndics decide to attack our gates.”

Geary frowned, worried again about what the Alliance’s elected leaders might decide, then saw Captain Cresida nodding.

“I think we can counter this threat,” she stated. “I’ve been thinking. We have two experimental results to draw on now, the only two known cases of collapsing hypernet gates. This fleet has the only full sets of observations from both incidents. With that data, I can refine the targeting algorithm we used at Sancere, make it more reliable and more certain to minimize energy output from a collapsing gate.”

“What good does that do?” Badaya demanded. “We can’t get close enough to a Syndic gate to stop them in time, and we don’t want to destroy our own gates.”

“But if the Syndics tried to destroy one of our gates,” Cresida replied, “and we had attached self-destruct charges to all of the gate tethers, tied into an automated safe-collapse program that would trigger if the gate suffered enough damage-”

The wave of relief was almost palpable. “We could make sure none of our gates destroyed their own star systems!”