Invincible

NINE

The Marines had penetrated about a third of the way into the superbattleship when the bear-cows suddenly appeared before them in dozens of locations at once. The once-eerily-deserted passageways filled with noise and the thunder of weapons as Marines traded shots with masses of Kicks filling the spaces from overhead to deck.

“They’re in armor!”

“Look out! On the right!”

“Durien is down!”

“Keep shooting!”

“There are too damn many of them!”

“Accesses overhead! They’re shooting down through them!”

“My grenade clip is empty!”

“Somebody pick up Sierra! She’s still alive!”

“Eat this, you bastards!”

Gradually, the sergeants and corporals started to regain comm discipline, the initial ambushes settling into Marines holding their positions and pouring fire from every weapon they could bring to bear down the passageways where the bear-cows kept pressing forward behind weapons that combined assault rifles with rectangular shields.

“We’re running low on energy and ammo.”

“Fall back. Everyone fall back.”

“The Kicks are using the bodies of their dead as shields!” a Marine yelled. “Pushing their dead ahead of them! Our shots can’t get through to the live ones!”

“Fall back,” the order came down again. “Don’t do a staged withdrawal by fire teams. Get everyone back fast. We’re feeding in the reserves and establishing defensive positions closer to the outer hull. Get back now.”

Geary stared at the battle scenes, watching one where what seemed to be a solid plug of dead bear-cows whose armor had been ravaged by Marine fire was being pushed down a passageway. The muzzles of weapons stuck out from the bodies of the dead, carried by the living bear-cows behind, spraying fire at the Marines who were falling back toward the outer hull.

He pulled out of the close-up views, trying to grasp what General Carabali was doing. The image of the superbattleship on his display had gradually filled with more details as the Marines went into the ship, and now Geary could see the symbols marking Marine units heading back everywhere.

Why was Carabali ordering her units back so far, so fast? She was giving up precious gains, which might be very hard to retake if the bear-cows set up more defenses and ambushes.

Geary’s hand hovered over his comm controls. Has Carabali lost her nerve? I need to ask why she’s reacting this way, why—

His eye caught activity on a cluster of views in one area of the superbattleship. The Marines there had fallen back past a defensive barrier, which, after a furious burst of fire that tore apart the protective barrier of the dead and riddled the front ranks of the bear-cows, was itself falling back, toward where yet another defensive line was setting up heavy weapons. Similar activity was occurring all over the superbattleship, but Geary’s attention focused on this spot as the retreating Marines were suddenly hit by Kicks who had infiltrated above, below, and to the sides of them, moving through the many side corridors and accesses too small for the Marines.

A minute later, and that platoon of Marines would have been cut off and swamped, but they were far enough back and close enough to the Marines behind them that a flurry of defensive fire and some vicious hand-to-hand fighting got the platoon through the danger.

Geary let his hand fall. She knew. General Carabali realized what the bear-cows could do on their own ground with the superior numbers they have. Instead of standing firm while her strongpoints are surrounded, she’s pulling them back faster than the Kicks can envelop them, taking a heavy toll of the attackers every step of the way.

“Admiral? Are your comms working properly?” Desjani asked in a voice that promised serious repercussions for her comm officer.

“My comms are fine,” Geary said. “The problem was with me. I almost forgot that General Carabali knows her job a lot better than I know her job.”

As the Marines fell back toward the outer hull, the volume of space they had to defend grew larger as the diameter of the superbattleship’s hull grew. But Carabali was feeding in reinforcements and pulling her forces together into hedgehogs at intersections of the largest passageways, able to fire to all sides with heavy weapons as the bear-cows kept pressing onward. Under the concentrated fire of those heavy weapons, augmented by the fire of the Marine hand and shoulder-fired weapons, the tight ranks of the Kicks dissolved as they tried to drive into contact with the human invaders.

“How many of them are there?” a Marine yelled.

Some of the bear-cows had pushed through to the compartments where the initial penetrations had occurred, rushing the combat engineers defending the bridgeheads there. The combat engineers lacked the heavy weapons of the line Marines, but they made up for that with demolitions and other tools of their trade. Geary winced as he watched the havoc wrought by the engineers as they wiped out the Kicks coming against them. Those portions of the enemy ship would yield little of use to those seeking to learn more about the bear-cows and their technology.

Geary, appalled by the carnage, couldn’t take his eyes off the screens where the bear-cows pitted their numbers and their hand weapons against the concentrated firepower of the Marines. In some places, the Kicks actually managed to reach the hedgehogs, hurling themselves at the perimeters in solid ranks that threatened to submerge the Marines. Geary saw Marines being knocked down despite the superior strength of their combat armor, some of the Marine lines wavering as the hedgehogs were compressed on all sides. Packed in ever tighter inside their defensive perimeters, the Marines were unable to move, unable to do anything but keep firing with weapons glowing from waste heat.

Carabali had been watching, though. More Marine reinforcements had been arriving, leaping from shuttles into the improvised air locks on the outer hull, being brought inside the hull as fast as possible. Those Marines were formed into shock teams, who now stormed into the passageways leading to the most heavily beleaguered hedgehogs, catching the attacking Kicks from behind.

One by one, the hedgehogs under the heaviest pressure were relieved, the Marines pushing out to form wider defensive positions and keep the bear-cows from being able to concentrate against isolated strongpoints.

The assaults against the Marine positions faltered here, then there, then at each point where the Kicks had surged ahead. The attacks paused, leaving a sense of a foe taking breaths and trying to regain enough strength to continue the fight. Before that pause could extend, Carabali issued new orders, and everywhere the Marines moved out of their hedgehogs and defensive lines, blowing holes through bulkheads to bypass passageways choked with dead bear-cows.

“Tough bastards,” a Marine said as he skirted a solid wall of unmoving bear-cows, their armor torn, blobs of purplish blood filling the air in the absence of gravity.

“Good thing there weren’t more of them,” one of his companions agreed.

“There are more of them,” their sergeant barked. “Keep your weapons ready, your mouths shut, and your eyes sharp.”

As the Marines moved farther into the ship, they encountered scattered pockets of Kicks, who hurled themselves forward in hopeless, desperate attacks that ended only when the last of them was dead. Geary watched the symbols of the Marine units spread back through the superbattleship, then onward past the points where the crew had counterattacked.

“What the hell?” a lieutenant asked as her unit entered a very large area near the center of the ship, a vast compartment whose ceiling soared six meters high. But the deck of the compartment wasn’t a deck, it was vegetation, row upon row of crops set into growing containers, the tops of multiple stems on each plant heavy with seeds or fruit or maybe something that was both seed and fruit.

“Food and oxygen resupply combined in one,” a sergeant remarked, pulling himself down to examine a long line of growing containers. “My father worked on a farm like this in a sealed city before Huldera Star System was abandoned. And, unless I miss my guess, this is how those bear-cows recycled at least some of their waste products, as fertilizer. Good things these troughs are sealed so stuff couldn’t float away when the gravity went off.”

The sergeant’s squad made noises of revulsion, suddenly taking great care where they put their hands and feet.

More units stumbled across similar compartments, then one platoon sounded an alert that drew Geary’s attention. “Lieutenant, I think we found a control station. It doesn’t look big enough for a full power core.”

“How would you know, Winski?”

“I helped take a Syndic battleship at Welfrida, that’s how. That was a lot smaller ship than this thing, and it had a bigger control station than this one.”

“Tanya,” Geary said, “take a look at this.” He also forwarded the image to Captain Smythe. “What do you think?”

Desjani sounded doubtful. “A secondary control station, maybe. That’s not big enough even for the power core of a ship the size of Dauntless.”

Smythe agreed but added something else. “It may be that what we find will all look like secondary control stations. I’ve been watching as the Marines fill in the deck plan on that superbattleship, and I am ever more convinced that the bear-cows avoided using one or two major power sources, instead choosing to use multiple lesser power sources. Maybe that was for backup. Redundancy. Or maybe in a ship of that size it made sense to distribute the power sources rather than run lines all over from one or two sources located in one area.”

“Why didn’t they blow it up?” Geary asked the question again.

“Maybe it didn’t occur to them. Maybe they beat the predators on their world by refusing to give up, instead fighting to the last breath and the last Kick to kill their opponents.” Smythe blinked, his expression twisting. “When you showed me the images of that control room, I saw some of the passageways on that ship. What they’re like now, filled with so many dead. Why would they keep fighting? Why die in a hopeless struggle?”

“I guess they thought they’d die anyway and wanted to go down swinging.” Geary had disliked the bear-cows. No, he had hated them for forcing the fights in the Pandora Star System and here, but he had to feel grudging respect for them as well, just as Desjani did. It was easy to see why they had overrun their world, wiping out all competition.

But that was just one more reason why they couldn’t be allowed to follow this fleet back to human space.

The Marines spread through the superbattleship, breaking down into smaller and smaller forces, wiping out smaller and smaller gatherings of remaining Kicks, who still refused to surrender and attacked until they were killed. Occasionally, a tiny group of bear-cows stampeded away from the Marines, but the moment the aliens hit a dead end, they turned and charged their pursuers.

The human invaders found vast barracks, subdivided by airtight hatches but otherwise sprawling for long distances. Everywhere, there were compartments set up for eating, as if the bear-cows grazed nearly constantly. The Marines found what could only be hospitals, the operating equipment undersized so that the complexes seemed oddly and disturbingly like children’s playrooms. Armories empty of weapons. More control rooms.

Finally, a squad came across the bridge of the superbattleship, a compartment where command seats were backed up by what seemed like stadium seating, as if dozens of spectators routinely watched events there.

“That is so weird,” Desjani said. “What is that about?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Geary replied.

General Carabali called in, professionally deadpan as she made her report. “Organized resistance has ceased aboard the superbattleship, Admiral, but I can’t say it’s safe yet. Not until we’ve gone over it much more carefully. My Marines aboard that ship will remain in a combat footing, and any fleet personnel coming aboard will require Marine escorts.”

“Thank you, General,” Geary said. “Damned good job. My congratulations on your success and my condolences on your losses.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“Are there any bear-cows still alive?”

“The Kicks fought until they were killed, or if we started to physically overcome them they died. We don’t know if there’s a suicide device on them or in their armor, or if it’s some mental thing. They also slaughtered their unconscious wounded if there seemed a chance of their being captured.”

“Ancestors preserve us.”

Carabali made a face. “If you think about it, Admiral, if you were a cow, and you knew the fate awaiting any of your fellow cows who were captured, then the Kick actions make sense. They were protecting their injured from a fate worse than death. My Marines are searching through the enemy dead for any Kicks who were injured so badly they were rendered unconscious but weren’t subsequently killed by their own comrades to ‘save’ them from us.”

Now Carabali hesitated. “Speaking of the enemy dead… Admiral, after any battle there is the matter of enemy remains to address. Our policy on that varied during the war, as you know, even though our opponents were fellow humans. But since you assumed command, we have dealt with remains with all due dignity and respect. But now… Admiral, there are so many dead crowding that ship. Long stretches of some passageways are impossible to get through, and there’s a tremendous amount of blood floating around so we don’t dare restart ventilation even if we knew the right controls. What should we do with them?”

How could they give decent burials to that many enemy dead, especially when many of the bodies weren’t intact but blown into pieces?

But they had to get them out of the ship, or, within a few days, it would turn into an unlivable hell.

“General, we’ll treat them as best we know how. Working parties will have to collect the enemy dead. Fleet medical will want to retain some specimens; but otherwise, they are to be gathered at one of the cargo docks. A service will be said each time the dock is full, then the bodies will be ejected en masse on a trajectory aimed at the star, and we’ll start filling the dock again.”

“Yes, sir. It would help if we could get sailors to assist in those working parties. It’s not a pleasant job, and there’s a lot to collect.”

Geary shook his head, looking at the fleet status readouts. “General, every sailor I’ve got is working almost around the clock either repairing their own ship or on tiger teams assisting other ships. I have to give priority to getting my ships as combat-ready as possible as soon as possible.” What other resources did he have? The senior officers rescued from the Syndic labor camp on Dunai. The Syndic citizens rescued from the enigma race. There weren’t that many of either, but it was something. “I will ask for volunteers among our two groups of passengers to assist in the cleanup and will see if the auxiliaries have any equipment that can handle the task on its own.”

Carabali let her disappointment show but nodded. “I do understand. No one is taking it easy right now. But even a few personnel besides Marines assisting in the task would be welcome.”

“I’ll have someone there, General.”

It took nearly two days of careful exploring, using Marines assisted by small, robotic probes that could get into any area of the ship before it was declared officially taken by General Carabali. Long before that, human engineers who were desperately needed to help conduct repairs on Geary’s ships had been hauled off those jobs to try to figure out the controls on the superbattleship and render everything safe.

The engineers on the auxiliaries had offered up a half dozen decontamination units, mobile devices designed to enter ships and remove any sort of contagion or pollution. They vacuumed up blood from the air, scrubbed it from bulkheads, decks, and overheads, collected pieces of what the engineers called random biological remains, and scooped up relatively intact dead bear-cows in large numbers to deliver to the designated cargo dock, giving relief to tired and resentful Marines. Midgrade fleet and Marine officers rotated at the dock, each reciting the words of the standard burial service over each mass of dead Kicks before they were sent on their final journey to the star here.

The Marines had found amid the bear-cow dead six who were still alive but too badly injured to arouse to consciousness. The six were transferred to medical quarantine on Mistral while the fleet doctors tried to figure out how to keep them alive.

“What the hell are we going to do with that thing?” Desjani grumbled on the third day. She was exhausted, they were all exhausted. “We are taking it with us, right?”

“Yes. We have to.” Geary knew that she knew the answer as well as he did.

“How?”

That question was a lot harder. “I’ll ask Captain Smythe.” Geary rubbed his eyes, realizing how woolly his mind was after so many days with too little sleep as he supervised so much repair work and everything else. “All units, this is Admiral Geary. Tomorrow is rope yarn. All hands are to relax, sleep, eat, and recharge. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”

Desjani frowned at him in disbelief. “We can’t afford a day off. And why do they call it rope yarn anyway?”

“I know we can’t, and I don’t know.”

“What?”

“My point exactly,” he said. “We’re all running on empty, our minds fuzzy from fatigue. We need rest, we need a reset, so our efforts can be a lot more effective.”

Captain Smythe protested as well. “My engineers don’t need a rest, Admiral. It will blunt their momentum. They can easily go two or three more days without a break.”

“Are you saying your engineers are fully effective and will remain so if they keep working without a break for two or three more days?” Geary asked.

“Absolutely. Of course, the frequency of hallucinations and erratic behaviors will go up a bit more on an accelerating curve—”

“Give them a rest, Captain Smythe. That’s a firm order. I will be checking to see that the stand-down is enforced.”

Of course, even though Geary made an effort to sleep in, he couldn’t avoid all work that day.

“I request a personal conference,” Captain Badaya said, his image standing in Geary’s stateroom.

Badaya looked as subdued as Geary had ever seen him. “Granted. Sit down, Captain.”

“Thank you, Admiral.” Badaya took a seat in his own stateroom, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “You already have my formal report of the recent action.”

“Yes. You didn’t spare yourself.”

“Nor should I have!” Badaya sat back. “I blew it. I could not have anticipated that Titan would lose some of her propulsion when she did, or that Incredible would take damage to one of her main propulsion units at the same time as the shields on Illustrious collapsed, but I should have reacted better and faster when that did happen. If not for Captain Geary, the majority of the ships under my direct control would probably have been destroyed and the rest severely damaged.”

“That decision of Captain Jane Geary’s should not have worked out as well as it did,” Geary pointed out.

“It was still the right decision,” Badaya insisted. “I was busy trying to figure out how to save my entire formation, which I couldn’t do, but she recognized that some sacrifice would be necessary. Now, I realize you don’t publicly humiliate officers, even those who deserve it, and you and I both know some of those I speak of in that regard. But I wanted to tell you that I will not contest any other officer being put in command of a subformation in which my battle cruiser is a part. I understand that everyone will see that as a demotion, but I understand that I failed in a higher command position. Perhaps with time, I’ll figure out how to handle things better. If you feel it is appropriate, I will also not object to giving command of the Sixth Battle Cruiser Division to Captain Parr of the Incredible. He is not as experienced as I am, but he is a fine and skilled officer.”

Geary watched Badaya for a few moments before answering. “It could have been done better. It could have been done a lot worse.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“I was remembering my first commanding officer on my first ship,” Geary said. “I was still a new officer, only about a month after reporting aboard, when I made a big mistake. My department head almost took my skin off. The executive officer almost popped my eardrums. That took most of the morning. Then the captain called me in.”

“That must have been one hell of a mistake,” Badaya observed.

“Oh, yeah. Big enough that I won’t say what it was. But my captain called me in, junior officer me all quivering after the dressing-downs I had already gotten, and he said to me in a calm voice, ‘Mistakes are how we learn.’ He let me stare at him in amazement for a long moment, then he added in a voice like frozen nitrogen, ‘Don’t ever make that mistake again.’ Then he dismissed me.”

Badaya laughed. “The hell you say.”

“The point is, I learned more from those two sentences from him than I did from the screaming directed at great length at me by my department head and the executive officer. That captain managed to chew me out and convey continued confidence in me with those two sentences. After that, I never let him down. I wanted to be certain I never let him down.” Geary leaned back, deliberately relaxing his posture. “Yes, you screwed up. You know you screwed up. I will make further decisions on subformation commanders taking that into account, and you know I have to, but I will also take into account what you did right and have done right. There will be no changes in command of the Sixth Battle Cruiser Division. I have no problems with Captain Parr, who as you say has proven himself a fine officer, but you still have my confidence as commander of that division.”

It took perhaps half a minute for Badaya to answer, his voice rough with emotion. “You really are him, you know. I’ve heard people say no one could actually be Black Jack, but—”

“I’ve made my share of mistakes.” Geary paused, realizing this was a moment he could use for other reasons. “Especially in areas I’m not trained in. Captain Badaya, the fact that many of the politicians running the Alliance aren’t doing a very good job of it and haven’t done a very good job of it doesn’t mean you or I would do better than they have.”

Badaya looked back at Geary steadily, thoughts moving behind his eyes. “That’s a point,” Badaya finally conceded. “Do you ever feel overwhelmed during a battle, Admiral? Like too much is happening, and you don’t know what the right thing to do is?”

“Of course I do.”

“As you were saying that last, about the politicians, I imagined myself making political decisions in a crisis. It was all too easy to imagine feeling overwhelmed.” He paused. “That’s why you’re still letting them do most things, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” A partial lie, which made Geary cringe internally. Badaya thought Geary was actually directing the government now, behind the scenes. That had been necessary to avoid the chance of a coup in Geary’s name though without his approval, but Geary had been wanting to work his way out of that perception ever since he had been forced to adopt it. “As bad as they may be at it, most of them anyway, they’re still better at it than I am. There are some who are terrible by any standard, but there are also some who are good by any standard. And, most important, they derive their power from having been chosen by the people of the Alliance.”

Badaya bent an arch look at Geary. “The people of the Alliance would choose you if you asked for that openly.”

“I know.” Give him the full truth now. “That scares the hell out of me.”

“Understandably.” Badaya stood up, saluting. “Thank you, sir.”

His comm panel chimed the moment Badaya’s image vanished. “What did he want?” Desjani asked.

“He apologized,” Geary said.

“He apologized? Foot-in-mouth Badaya? Damn.” Desjani had never taken well Badaya’s often clumsy comments about her and Geary. “You are a miracle worker, aren’t you?”

“Very funny. Are you resting?”

“Resting? Me? Oh, yes, sir. I’m resting so hard that I’m sleeping in my sleep.”

“Tanya, set a good example for your crew.”

She offered him a rigidly proper salute. “Yes, Admiral. I hear and obey.”

With both Captain Badaya and Captain Desjani gone, Geary rubbed his eyes, thinking about trying to sleep…

Six bells chimed in spaced pairs across the ship’s general announcing system, followed by a voice saying “Admiral, Alliance fleet, arriving.”

An admiral. There were only two other sources of Alliance fleet admirals in this star system, among the liberated prisoners of war aboard Mistral and Typhoon. But none of them should be coming to Dauntless.

Geary was reaching toward his comm panel when it came to life, Desjani once again gazing out at him. “Admiral Lagemann has arrived on a shuttle and requests a meeting with you, Admiral.”

“Admiral Lagemann?” His sudden tension just as quickly gave way to relief. A personal visit was unusual, but not that strange with so many shuttles winging between ships. “Certainly. Send him to my stateroom.”

Admiral Lagemann took only five minutes to reach Geary’s stateroom, nodding in greeting as he entered. Geary was actually meeting him in person for the first time. “There was a shuttle run between Dauntless and Mistral, so I thought I’d take advantage of that to see you. I owe you a report, Admiral Geary.”

“About what?” he asked, unable to recall with his mind cluttered by everything he had to deal with in the aftermath of the battle and the capture of the bear-cow superbattleship. “It’s nice to meet you at last. Have a seat.”

“Thank you.” Lagemann sat down, looking around Geary’s stateroom with a small smile. “Nothing fancy, but it’s home, eh?”

“That’s a good way to describe it.” He didn’t have any other home. There was his home world, Glenlyon, where the cult of Black Jack had burned the brightest. The idea of going back there, to a world filled with familiar places but empty of all of the people he had once known who had died during the last century, to a world that would treat him as some superhuman hero, was more frightening than facing battle.

“It’s not too different from my last flagship.” A wry look crossed Admiral Lagemann’s face. “Also a battle cruiser. Invincible.”

“Invincible? I wonder how many Invincibles ago that was,” Geary said.

“Probably a dozen. I was in Syndic hands long enough, and everyone knows how long Invincibles last. I don’t know why I was foolish enough to put my flag on one of them. May I?” Lagemann reached for the display controls, bringing up the regions of space that the fleet had traversed. “You asked for an assessment of what we thought the enigmas might be up to.”

And had then forgotten about it. Thank goodness he had remembered to delegate that task. “What did you conclude?”

“A stab in the back.” Lagemann grinned lopsidedly. “Big surprise, huh?” He highlighted one star. “We jumped from here to the bear-cow star, Pandora. The enigmas were following us there with a fair-sized force, but they didn’t chase us to Pandora, doubtless knowing exactly what awaited us there. Now, since they knew what defenses the bear-cows had, the enigmas would have been justified in concluding that our chances of getting out of Pandora in one piece were pretty damned small.”

“It wasn’t a situation I’d want to be caught in again,” Geary agreed.

“So, if we fought our way back to this enigma star, going back the way we came, what remnants of our force reached them would be chewed up. A reasonable conclusion for the enigmas to make. They could leave a blocking force there to deal with whatever made it back to them. But that wouldn’t prevent another human fleet from showing up and driving through their space in the future.”

Lagemann shifted the star display back toward human space. “No. If they are going to ensure that no more humans come knocking, they need to lock the front door.”

“Pele?” Geary asked. “There’s nothing there.”

“No. But for us to get to Pele we had to go through—”

“Midway.” He stared at the star display, appalled. “The enigmas will try to eliminate our ability to use Midway as a stepping-stone into their territory.”

“That’s our assessment. At the least, they could move in and collapse the hypernet gate there the old-fashioned way, by shooting out all of the tethers. Are you sure the Syndics have systems on their gates that ensure a collapse doesn’t devastate the whole star system?”

“I’m certain of it,” Geary said. “We spotted the equipment on the hypernet gate at Midway when we came through there last.”

Lagemann chewed his lip, looking morose now. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out how much damage a collapsing hypernet gate could do. Nova-scale energy bursts. And we built those damned things in all of our most valuable star systems.”

“That’s what the enigmas wanted when they secretly leaked the technology to us,” Geary said. “They wanted the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds to build huge bombs in our own star systems. Either we and the Syndics would figure out they were weapons as well as transportation devices and use them to cripple or even exterminate humanity, or the enigmas would use them that way if we humans were too smart or moral to engage in self-genocide.”

“I wouldn’t have placed a lot of bets on us being too smart to do that,” Lagemann said. “But that plan fell through. Now the enigmas have to stop us one star system at a time. And the way to stop us is to take out Midway as a place we can use to stage new incursions into enigma territory. They could well have started that retaliation force on its way almost as soon as we jumped for Pandora.”

Midway couldn’t repel a strong attack by the enigmas. The Syndics there, if the authorities at Midway still answered to the Syndicate Worlds’ government, had only a small flotilla of cruisers and Hunter-Killers to protect the star system. Nor would reinforcements likely be coming, not with the Syndicate Worlds’ mobile forces crushed by Geary during the last stages of the war and the remnants of its military overstretched as the Syndicate Worlds’ government tried desperately to hold on to star systems breaking away from it everywhere.

The only other thing that Midway had to muster in its defense was a promise that he, Admiral Geary, had made to defend them against the enigmas.

But he was very far away from Midway now, with either spider-wolf or enigma territory blocking his way back.