“Colonel Carabali.”

The Marine nodded.

“Prepare your Marines. I’d like to see your plan for handling this no later than five hours before we reach the planet.

“Are there any questions?” Geary asked the entire group.

“How will we handle the Syndic military base on the fifth planet?” someone asked.

“That’s yet to be determined,” Geary advised. He could see dissatisfaction rippling around the table. To many of his commanders, the only good Syndic was a dead Syndic, and no opportunity to kill Syndics should be passed up. “I’ll remind you that the installations in this system are obsolete. It costs the Syndics to keep them running. Leaving those installations intact means Syndic funds spent on them and means Syndic troops trained and committed to them. If that base turns out to be a real threat, we’ll take it out. Otherwise, I’m not interested in doing the Syndics a favor by removing it from the list of things they need to worry about.”

He paused, trying to remember what else he’d planned on saying. “We won’t know if this is real until the Marines see Alliance prisoners of war at that camp. Everyone needs to stay alert.” He couldn’t imagine even the Syndics would risk the population of a habitable world in order to try to destroy a few more Alliance ships, but then he’d seen a lot of things since he’d been rescued that he had never imagined. “We have a chance to do a great good for people who never expected to be liberated. Thank the living stars for that, and let’s do our ancestors proud.”

The crowd dwindled with the usual amazing speed as the virtual images of ship captains vanished like popping soap bubbles, both Numos and Faresa disappearing on the very heels of Geary’s dismissal. Captain Desjani, with a meaningful glare at the place where those two had apparently been sitting, shook her head and then excused herself before leaving the compartment the old-fashioned way by walking out.

As Geary had hoped, the reassuring image of Captain Duellos remained at the end. Duellos also indicated the places where Numos and Faresa had been. “I wouldn’t have said this before, but those two are a danger to this fleet.”

Geary sat back, feeling weary and rubbing his forehead. “You wouldn’t have said that before what?”

“Before four ships of this fleet set off on an insane charge.” The image of Duellos seemed to walk up to Geary and take the next seat. “Valiant! Glorious! Brainless! I have no proof, but I know Numos was behind that.”

“I figure he is, too. But,” Geary admitted bitterly, “the lack of proof is a problem. My command of this fleet is still far too shaky. If I start sacking commanding officers, especially one with Numos’s seniority, without being able to prove misconduct I might find way too many of my other ships valiantly and brainlessly dashing into minefields.”

Captain Duellos looked down and grimaced. “The lesson of those four ships was a powerful one. No matter what lies Numos encourages, everyone will remember that you were right to warn those ships off and to avoid chasing pell-mell after a few Syndic HuKs.”

Geary couldn’t help a snort of derision. “You’d think being right would gain me a little more credit than that. What do you think? Will everyone follow my orders when we approach the fifth planet?”

“At this point, yes.”

“Do you have any idea where that nonsense about Co-President Rione came from?”

Duellos looked mildly surprised. “I assumed you two were on friendly terms, but even if you’re extremely friendly, it’s no affair of mine. Co-President Rione is not an officer or sailor under your command, and a personal relationship with her has no bearing on your performance in command.”

Geary stared for a moment, then laughed. “Personal relationship? With Co-President Rione?”

This time Duellos shrugged. “Scuttlebutt declares that you spend time together alone.”

“For conferences! I need her advice.” Geary laughed again. “By our ancestors, Victoria Rione doesn’t like me at all! She makes no bones about it. I frighten her because she worries I’ll turn into Black Jack Geary at any moment and sail this fleet home to depose the elected leaders of the Alliance and become god-emperor or something.”

“Co-President Rione is a shrewd and intelligent woman,” Duellos observed with absolute seriousness. “She’s told you she doesn’t like you?”

“Yes! She-” Come to think of it, Rione had several times expressed distrust of Geary, but he couldn’t remember at the moment her ever saying she didn’t like him. “Yeah, I think so.”

Duellos shrugged again. “Whether she does or not makes no difference. I say once more, she is not your subordinate, not in the military at all, and any personal relationship with her is perfectly appropriate. Should one occur.”

Geary couldn’t help a third laugh as he bade farewell to Captain Duellos, but as he began to leave the room, he paused in thought. Surely Rione’s spies in the fleet had reported to her the rumors about a relationship between her and Geary. Why hadn’t Rione told him of those rumors when she’d spoken of the other rumors?

Could the iron politician he’d dealt with actually be embarrassed by the rumors? But if so, why had she continued visiting him?

Geary leaned one arm against the bulkhead for a moment, staring at the deck, remembering the first days after he was revived from the survival sleep that had kept him alive for a century, a span of time in which everyone in his life had died in battle or of old age. The shock of learning that everyone he had once known and loved, men and women, were long dead had led him to wall off the idea of new relationships. The ice that had once filled him seemed almost gone, but it still occupied that one place, afraid to retreat and let warmth grow again.

He’d lost everyone once. It could happen again. He didn’t want it to hurt so much the next time.

THE fifth planet looked like exactly the sort of place made for a Syndic labor camp. Too far from its sun to ever know a true summer, most of the world seemed to be featureless fields of tundra that on rare occasions ran into bare, jagged mountain ranges rising like islands from the sea of low, tough vegetation. Glaciers extending from the poles appeared to hold a good portion of the planet’s water, with only shallow, small seas dotting the areas not covered by ice. Looking at the dismal place, Geary didn’t have any trouble understanding why Sutrah hadn’t been deemed worthy of the expense of a hypernet gate. Unless the fourth planet was an absolute paradise, which it certainly wasn’t since it was a shade too close to its sun and probably unpleasantly warm. Sutrah was just the sort of place that had ceased to matter when the Syndic hypernet was created.

Once, using the system jump drives that could take ships from star to star, anyone going anywhere had to traverse all of the star systems in between. Every one of those systems was guaranteed a certain amount of traffic passing through en route to other destinations. But the hypernet allowed ships to go directly from one star to another, no matter how far the distance between them. Without the ships passing through, and without any particular value other than as the homes of people who had suddenly found themselves living in nowhere, the systems off the hypernet were slowly dying, with everyone who could migrate moving to hypernet-linked systems. The human communities on the fifth planet of Sutrah were fading even faster than usual. Judging from what the Alliance sensors could see, fully two-thirds of the former habitations on the world were now vacant, showing no signs of heating or activity.

Geary focused back on the depiction of the labor camp on the fifth planet. There were mines nearby, which might represent actual economic value but also might exist solely as a place to work the life from the prisoners in the camp. There weren’t any walls, but then there didn’t have to be. Outside the camp was nothing but those empty fields of tundra. Escape would simply be suicide, unless someone tried to get out through the landing field, and there walls of razor wire did exist.