“Right.” Tanya raised her fork. “It’s Ganymede rock lobster. Vat grown, of course, since Ganymede is a bit far to go for a lobster dinner.”

  “It’s not bad,” Rogero said. “Is this a traditional recipe?”

  “My cooks said it’s called thermidor,” Desjani said. “I considered having them serve some of the vat-grown steaks that taste like chicken, but we had the lobsters on ice, and you know that old warning about leaving Ganymede rock lobsters in the fridge for too long.”

  “I thought that was just a legend,” Bradamont said.

  “So was he,” Desjani said, pointing at Geary. “Welcome aboard to both of you, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” Colonel Rogero said. “Admiral, I’ve never had the chance to thank you for your orders to Honore Bradamont, making her your representative at Midway. Neither of us believed we could ever see each other again. You made that happen.”

  Geary waved away the words. “I owe more than that to an officer like her. To be honest, it was Victoria Rione’s idea.”

  “Rione?” Bradamont asked in disbelief. “That bi—”

  “Hey,” Tanya Desjani interrupted. “Hero of Unity Alternate. Dead battle sister.” She raised her wineglass again. “Honor her memory.”

  “She was still a rhymes-with-witch,” Bradamont grumbled after the toast.

  “Yeah, she was,” Tanya said. “But she died with honor. And she did give the admiral the idea of stationing you at Midway.”

  “Then I for one consider her to be a paragon of human virtue,” Colonel Rogero said, smiling.

  “How are you both doing?” Desjani asked in a not-too-subtle change of topic. “Your uniforms aren’t Syndic, but they aren’t Alliance. Have you run into any problems aboard because you’re wearing them?”

  “I can fight my own battles, Tanya,” Bradamont replied with a half smile to remove any sting from the words.

  Desjani took another drink, setting the glass down as she shook her head. “Anywhere else, that’s true. But Dauntless is my ship. Which means any battles aboard Dauntless are my battles.”

  “I’ll concede that,” Bradamont said. She looked to one side, a slight frown forming. “Nothing much in the way of problems. Most of the crew are interested, and treat me as if I was still an Alliance fleet captain. There are a few, all junior sailors, who seem hostile. I don’t know what’s going on there, but when one of them tried to dis me I took him apart. Verbally,” Bradamont added with another smile.

  “I wish I’d been there to help dice that sailor into smaller pieces,” Desjani said. “Verbally.” She glanced at Geary. “The new recruits.”

  “What does that mean?” Bradamont asked.

  “There’s a percentage, we don’t know how large, of our new recruits who joined to defend the Alliance against the aliens and other foreign threats,” Geary explained. “Not just the Syndics. Any external, um, danger as they define danger.”

  “Oh, great,” Bradamont said, stabbing a piece of “lobster” on her plate with extra force. “Now that the war is over the patriots are crawling out of the woodwork to save the Alliance.”

  “Something similar is happening in the regions still controlled by the Syndicate,” Colonel Rogero said. “We’ve heard there’s been an increase in volunteers to be snakes.”

  “The Syndicate’s Internal Security Service,” Bradamont explained. “The nice people who arrest, torture, and murder anyone suspected of being insufficiently loyal to the Syndicate. Can you believe that people volunteer to do that?”

  “I’ve met a few on the Alliance side who would probably do it if they thought they could get away with it,” Desjani said.

  “Too many people see what they know crumbling,” Geary said. “And are willing to do anything to prevent that.”

  Rogero gave a somber nod, chewing as if not tasting his food. “Back on Midway, and in the surrounding star systems, we were happy to see the Syndicate crumble. There’s been a price to pay for our freedom, though.” He grimaced. “I hope the people of Kane can overcome the traumas they’ve endured. The ones I spoke with when we were there were too eager for the blood of their enemies.”

  “I emphasized to President Wake at Kane that I owed a personal debt to Colonel Aragon, and would be very unhappy if she or any of her people were harmed,” Geary said. “What about this new leader in the region? Imallye?”

  Bradamont and Rogero exchanged glances. “Dangerous,” Rogero said. “Not insanely so, but ruthless. She played the Syndicate well enough to get her own little empire set up, which is impressive as well as worrisome. Her long-term goals are uncertain.”

  “She hates President Iceni,” Bradamont added. “Some old grudge related to Imallye’s father. She claims that won’t drive her actions, but . . . let’s say we’re going to keep an eye out toward Iwa.”

  “That was a tough fight there against the enigmas and the Syndics, wasn’t it?” Desjani asked.

  “Yeah. A four-way fight between the enigmas, Midway’s flotilla, a Syndic flotilla, and Imallye’s flotilla,” Bradamont said, looking grumpy. “I missed it because I was defending Midway. Did you hear how they took out the buried enigma base?”

  Tanya Desjani nodded, smiling. “A thirty-kilometer-wide rock dropped from space. General Drakon sent me videos of the impact.”

  “I was so mad I missed that. If I’d been there, we would’ve used a sixty-kilometer-wide rock.”

  “Only sixty? I’d have dropped a one-hundred-kilometer-wide rock from orbit,” Tanya said. “Just break the whole planet into asteroids.”

  “It’s the only way to be sure,” Honore Bradamont agreed. “When you really want to destroy something, there’s nothing like a woman’s touch.”

  Tanya grinned. “Hey, that reminds me. Do you know anything about General Drakon’s daughter?”

  Even Geary picked up on the chill that rose on the other side of the table after Desjani’s question.

  “Why do you ask?” Colonel Rogero said in a suddenly formal and unrevealing tone of voice.

  “Because at the diplomatic reception the general asked the admiral and me to personally sponsor his daughter when she visits the Alliance someday. I gather that’s not going to happen for at least several years yet, but we were . . . a bit curious about his daughter.”

  “I see. He asked that of you.” Rogero rubbed his lower face, thoughts running behind his eyes. “And you want to know who the mother is.”

  “Only if that is important,” Geary said as Desjani nodded in agreement.

  “The mother can’t be separated from the child, even though the mother is . . . hopefully . . . dead.”

  “They buried her,” Bradamont said.

  “That means less with Roh Morgan than it does with most people,” Rogero said. “You met Colonel Morgan during one of your visits to Midway Star System, didn’t you, Admiral?”

  “Yes,” Geary said.

  “How did she strike you?”

  He paused to think, knowing that Tanya Desjani was giving him an arch look. “Beautiful and dangerous.”

  Rogero nodded. “You need to add one word. Psychotic.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Someone faked her initial psych screening, and thereafter Morgan learned how to break into the system on her own and gundeck her psych evals. Whatever else you could say about her, Morgan was a brilliant hacker and assassin.” Rogero’s face twisted. “Everyone knew that she was fanatically loyal to General Drakon. We didn’t know she was literally insanely loyal. And since she kept faking her psych evals she never got any treatments.”

  “Why did General Drakon—?” Desjani began, staring at Rogero.

  “I don’t know,” Rogero said. “He doesn’t talk about it. I gather it was a matter of shame for him. General Drakon never followed Syndicate practices that winked at sexual coercion. He didn’t sleep with subordinates. I don’t know how Morgan managed it, but I know it wasn’t something he did frequently. I’d be surprised if it had happened more than once.”

  “She’s dead now?” Geary said.

  “Yes. Morgan and two others, during the general’s wedding to the president.”

  “When you say ‘during the wedding,’ ” Desjani asked, “do you mean ‘during’ in the sense of ‘in that same time frame,’ or ‘during’ in the sense of ‘blood on the wedding garments’?”

  “The latter.”

  “Maybe,” Geary said, looking at Desjani, “if she heard that, your mother would stop complaining about our wedding.”

  “In your dreams. I’m never going to be forgiven for not having a full state wedding with at least half the Kosatkan royal family in attendance. So, this Colonel Morgan wanted General Drakon’s child out of some distorted sense of hyper-loyalty?”

  “Only partly,” Rogero said. “General Drakon only spoke of this to me once, but if you’re going to host his daughter someday you should know of it. Morgan’s plan was to raise their daughter to be an unbeatable warlord who would conquer all of human space and become empress of humanity.”

  After several seconds of silence, Tanya shook her head. “And to think I accused my mother of having exaggerated ambitions for me. Is that why General Drakon is worried about his daughter? Because her mother had a second home in cloud cuckoo land?”

  “Yes,” Colonel Rogero said. “He’s determined to save her.”

  “Huh.” Tanya Desjani nodded with grudging admiration. “I wouldn’t have tagged the general as a loving daddy type, but I have to respect that he intends fighting for his daughter.”

  Rogero shrugged, his fork lightly touching his food. “General Drakon is both extremely loyal to his people and very stubborn. He doesn’t give up. Even when Roh Morgan was completely unraveling he was trying to save her. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he will do all he can to save his own daughter.”

  “Can’t everything be fixed these days?” Geary asked. “Mental and emotional problems like that?”

  “Yes and no,” Bradamont said. “There’s still that thing called personality. Someone like Morgan can be technically mentally and emotionally sound, yet still be a total shipwreck. If you removed everything that could make someone irrational, overly emotional, obsessive, and impulsive in the wrong ways, what was left wouldn’t be human. It’d be a machine.”

  Desjani grinned. “Like that one guy you dated when you were an ensign?”

  “We do not speak of that,” Bradamont said.

  The conversation wandered into safer ground for the rest of the meal, Bradamont offering reassuring stories of her acceptance by those at Midway, and she and Desjani telling stories about each other.

  But as the meal was winding up, Rogero adopted a formal tone again. “Admiral, I want to inform you that I have in my possession combat records of the encounter on the ground at Iwa. General Drakon authorized me to share those with you.”

  “Just with me?” Geary asked.

  “I asked if anyone else could see them and the general said yes. He wants your experts to see them.”

  “So you’d be willing to present your information to our Marines?”

  Rogero nodded. “We have a common foe. If we’re going to defeat them, it’s going to need everything we’ve both got.”

  “We’ve got three thousand Marines,” Desjani said.

  “That’s not enough. Ten times that number wouldn’t be enough.” He paused, eyes hooded in thought. “Since Iwa, I’ve been thinking about what my soldiers and I experienced. We know the enigmas are obsessed with their privacy. You’ve told us that when you passed through enigma space they had clear internal borders. Like humans, the enigmas have apparently fought each other. So, imagine if you’re a being obsessed with hiding everything about yourself. What kind of ground combat systems do you develop?”

  Geary frowned as he realized the implications. “Something that hides me, and can see the enemy despite their efforts to hide.”

  “And that’s your first priority!” Rogero said. “For all of their history of combat against each other. Not killing the enemy. Remaining hidden, and being able to kill them before they spot you. That’s what we encountered on the ground at Iwa. Nothing we had could survive to get a single look at the enigmas. But they seemed to see us as if we were in a fishbowl.”

  “What about scouts in stealth suits?” Desjani asked.

  “The snakes sent some Viper scouts in before my people landed,” Rogero said. “The latest and best stealth available to the Syndicate. They all died within seconds.”

  “Couldn’t you fire blind?” Geary said. “Keep the enigmas’ heads down and score hits by chance?”

  “We had to, out of desperation,” Rogero said. “But put yourself in the situation. Every time one of our weapons fired, it produced a signature giving away its exact location to the enigmas, who could then target it. We were firing blindly, and every shot from us told them exactly where we were. But their own shots often had no signature we could detect to pinpoint their origin. You know where that kind of thing would end. We were firing and moving immediately, but it was still a losing game.”

  “But you managed to get almost all of your people off the planet,” Bradamont said, leaping to Rogero’s defense. “As well as the surrendered Syndicate workers and their families.”

  “I wasn’t dropped on that planet to conduct a successful retreat,” Rogero said, frowning down at his plate. “But it was fortunate we were able to get so many off the planet.”

  Geary shook his head. “What you’re describing, hiding and hitting the enemy before that enemy even sees you, is what the Syndics, and we, initially faced thanks to the quantum-coded worms in our fleet software. The enigmas actually found a way to completely blind all of our sensors to them by sabotaging our sensor software. They’d been able to wipe out Syndic warships with impunity thanks to that.”

  “We checked out our own ground combat systems repeatedly,” Rogero said. “They had been infected by those worms at one time, before your people warned us about them, but showed no signs of the worms at Iwa. The enigmas might be doing some things humanity literally hasn’t even thought of yet.”

  “Like quantum-coded worms,” Geary said. “We have some nonmilitary scientists with us, on Boundless. Do you have any objection to my sharing your records with them?”

  “General Drakon said anyone.”

  “Good.”

  “That reminds me,” Desjani said to Bradamont. “There’ve been some upgrades to the fire control systems that I think you’d be interested in. The admiral already said I could show you all of it.”

  “Cool. Tomorrow?”

  “Sure. I’ve got some inspections lined up in the morning. Say thirteen hundred, meet at my stateroom?”

  “I’ll be there,” Bradamont promised as she and Rogero stood to leave. “You had me at ‘fire control systems upgrades.’ ”

  Immediately after Bradamont and Rogero had left, Geary stood gazing at the door to his stateroom.

  “That went well,” Desjani said. “What’s got you suddenly looking depressed?”

  He looked over at her, not trying to conceal his feelings. “The enigmas. They won’t talk to us. They keep attacking us. They’re so obsessed with their privacy that they commit mass suicide rather than surrender. We can’t even go in on the ground with overwhelming force to try to capture most of them alive. Everything we learn about them, every experience we have with the enigmas, seems to be pushing us toward one single solution.”

  “Genocide,” Desjani said. “Coexistence is impossible, so we have to wipe them out.”

  He was struggling with the answer to that when she said something else.

  “But we’re not going to do that.” It wasn’t a question. She’d made a firm statement, and now smiled for a moment at his surprised reaction. “You didn’t expect to hear that from me? Someone who once bombarded Syndic cities? Let me tell you something you probably haven’t figured out yet. Yes, I thought we had to bombard cities, kill civilians indiscriminately, in order to win that war. But I hated it. I thought we’d been forced into doing that by the actions of the Syndics, and that’s one of the reasons why I hated them. After you came back and reminded us of certain things, I made a private vow that I would never be forced into any course of action again. I can make choices, and I will make choices.”

  “But if there is only one choice—”

  “Jack, I can think of three times this fleet was doomed. No way out. We were all going to die. And then someone saw another choice that no one else had. In two cases that was you. At Unity Alternate, it was Victoria Rione. Just because we can’t see another choice with the enigmas right now doesn’t mean another choice doesn’t exist or won’t exist. Maybe the entire universe is pushing us to commit genocide of the enigmas. I don’t like being pushed. I will not make that choice, and I know you won’t make it. Am I right?”

  He smiled. “You’re always right.”

  “Hey, you’re learning. So, are we good?”

  “Yes.” Relieved, something else slipped out right after that. “I love you.”

  “We’re on duty, Admiral,” Tanya Desjani said, waving an admonitory finger at him. But she smiled as she said it before turning to leave his stateroom.

  The conversation about Drakon’s daughter had reminded Geary of something else, though. “Did Michael have children?”

  Desjani looked back at him, her smile gone. “That’s something you need to ask Jane about.”

  “Do you know?” he asked, aggravated that no one would answer what should be a simple question.

  “I’m not getting in the middle of that,” she said. “It’s between you and Jane. Ask her.”

  And since he couldn’t ask Jane while the fleet was in jump space, that’s where he had to leave it.

  * * *

  AND so they came to Pele.

  The enigmas had been recently stirred up by the ill-fated Rift Federation expedition, and had been in this star system in force to try to ensure that Passguard never made it home. There was no way of knowing how many of those enigma warships might still be here, poised to hit any retaliatory attack sent by humans.