No one called out objections. Captain Armus frowned, then nodded unenthusiastically. Commander Yin made to sit down again, but it looked more like she fell into her seat as her legs gave way.

Geary turned back to Captain Casia. “Captain, were your actions in command of Conqueror in the last battle also the result of following orders from someone other than the acting fleet commander?”

Casia hesitated, then shook his head roughly. “No one is responsible for my actions but me.”

Why did Casia have to display admirable behavior now? “All right, then. Colonel Carabali, please instruct your Marines on Conqueror and Orion to take Captain Casia and Commander Yin into custody and prepare them for transfer to Illustrious. Captain Casia, Commander Yin, please leave this conference.”

Casia took a moment to glare around in defiance, then reached for the controls at his location and disappeared. Commander Yin, her hand visibly shaking, followed suit quickly.

After that, discussing movements of the fleet seemed anticlimactic. Geary brought up the star display, a three-dimensional image of nearby space hovering over the table. “We’re going to take advantage of our victory here to continue toward Alliance space. Our next objective will be Branwyn. I don’t expect to encounter any resistance there, but we’ll be prepared for mines at the jump exit and a possible Syndic delaying force.” He pointed onward, to a dim red star a few light-years from Branwyn. “After that, we head for Wendig. That star system is supposed to be totally abandoned. Unless something unexpected happens in Wendig, we’ll then continue on to Cavalos.”

“Why not Sortes?” Captain Armus asked.

Geary indicated the star system in question. “Because it has a Syndic hypernet gate. We’ve inflicted serious losses on the Syndics at Kaliban and since, but we’re low on a lot of supplies and many of our ships have sustained damage. I’d prefer to avoid another major battle until our auxiliaries have had time to manufacture all of the fuel cells, expendable weapons, and replacement parts they can using the raw materials we’ve acquired here, and until our warships have had time to repair as much damage as possible.”

“But we can still try to use that hypernet gate to get home,” Armus argued. Apparently Geary’s earlier praise wasn’t going to incline Armus to accept Geary’s plans quietly.

“I believe, Captain Armus,” Geary stated patiently, “that the Syndics will ensure that they have sufficient means on hand at that hypernet gate to destroy it before we could reach it.”

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” No one answered him, causing Armus to frown and look around impatiently. “We easily survived the collapse of the hypernet gate in this star system.”

“We were very, very lucky,” Captain Cresida replied. “Next time, every ship in this fleet might be destroyed.”

Duellos nodded. “Not to mention what the gate collapse did to this star system. I won’t speak for anyone else, but I have enough on my conscience as it is.”

“Will the Syndics follow orders to destroy another gate after what happened here?” Commander Neeson asked.

“I would think that would depend on whether they hear what happened at Lakota,” Duellos speculated. “And whether they believe it. Some surviving Syndic civilian ships are already headed for jump points to spread the news and ask for help, but we have to assume that the Syndic leadership will attempt to downplay the disaster here, censor the news to the maximum extent possible, and to the degree it admits something happened, blame it on our actions.”

“They’ve shown us a weapon,” Captain Kila spoke again. “We can still use it. If we send out detachments to destroy hypernet gates in every Syndic star system with them that we pass near, we can-”

“We can die,” Captain Tulev interrupted. “You saw what happened to the Syndic warships that destroyed the hypernet gate in this star system. How many suicide missions do we launch until we run out of ships?”

“We ask for volunteers,” Kila noted calmly. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to inflict incalculable damage on the Syndicate Worlds.”

“Damage?” Commander Landis of Valiant shook his head. “I want those Syndic bastards to suffer as much as anyone, but wiping out star systems at one blow?”

“You’ve bombarded Syndic worlds,” Captain Armus pointed out.

“Yes, I have,” Landis agreed. “But this was different. I felt sick watching it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve fought damned hard for the Alliance. I’ll keep fighting for it as long and as hard as I have to. But I don’t want to see that happen to any more habitable worlds, theirs or ours.”

Kila’s lips bent upward in a brief smile. “That’s all right, Commander. I’m sure we won’t have trouble finding enough volunteers.”

“Even assuming we could find such volunteers,” Geary cut in, “I will not approve or allow suicide missions as long as I command this fleet.”

Commander Vendig of Exemplar spoke quickly. “We could use robotic ships, crewed by artificial intelligence. Pull off the crews, and-”

A chorus of yells drowned out Vendig, one voice rising above the others. “Unleash armed AIs with instructions to wipe out human-occupied star systems? Are you insane?”

Captain Badaya was shaking his head and spoke into the renewed quiet that followed the outburst. “Commander Landis brought up an ugly truth. What happened at Lakota could happen at any Alliance star system with a hypernet gate. If the people of the Alliance see our records of what happened in this star system, they’ll demand that our own hypernet system be shut down. Who wants a bomb that big sitting in their backyard?”

“We can’t just shut the hypernet down,” Captain Cresida interjected. “It’s a finely balanced net of energy. There’s no way just to turn it off.”

“Why the hell did we build it?” someone demanded.

For some reason everyone looked at Geary. He gazed back at them. “Don’t ask me. I wondered the same thing, and I wasn’t around when it was built. But we’re stuck with it, and so are the Syndics.”

“There has to be a solution,” Commander Neeson insisted. “As long as those gates are up, they’re potential weapons. If we could figure out a way to employ them as weapons and hold that threat over them, the Syndics wouldn’t dare-” He paused, looking stricken, and stared around. “They could figure it out, too. The destructive potential of the hypernet gates is vastly greater than any weapons we or the Syndics have been able to employ before. We and the Syndics could literally wipe each other out.”

That cat was now completely out of the bag. Geary nodded. “That had occurred to me. Who wants to start a war of species extinction? Captain Kila?”

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.