The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast Read Free

do this. It told the world, we’re on this side of the Great Wall, and all the rest of you are on the other. Those pyramids must have really impressed people a long time ago, too. And the four ancestors on the mountain? It didn’t just honor them, it also honored their people, and their homes, and what they believed in. All of those things were symbols. Symbols that helped define the people who built them.”
    He nodded slowly. “All right. And?”
    “What’s the symbol of the Alliance?”
    “There isn’t one. Not like that. There are too many different societies, governments, beliefs—”
    “Wrong.” She pointed at him.
    Geary felt that vast sinking sensation that sometimes threatened to overwhelm him. “Tanya, that’s—”
    “True. I told you. You still don’t understand us.” Her face saddened. “We stopped believing in our politicians a long time ago, and that meant we lost belief in our governments, and what is the Alliance but a collection of those governments? It can’t be stronger than they are. We tried putting faith in honor, but you reminded us how that caused us to warp the meaning of ‘honor.’ We tried putting faith in our fleet and our ground forces, but they failed, you know they did. We were fighting like hell and dying and killing and not getting anywhere. Until you came along. The man who we had been told all of our lives was everything the Alliance was supposed to be.”
    Tanya tapped the wall next to them. “Black Jack isn’t just this wall, the guy who physically protected the Alliance from external enemies, he’s also that Great Wall and those pyramids and those four ancestors. He’s the image of the Alliance, the thing citizens think of that
means
the Alliance. That’s why he is the only one who can save it.”
    He had to look away once more, to gaze across that sere landscape again, seeing overlaid upon it images of the battles he had already fought, of the men and women already dead. “Senator Sakai said something like that to me, but he was a lot more pessimistic.” During the war with the Syndicate Worlds, the Alliance government had created the myths around Black Jack to inspire and unify its people at a time when the example of that sort of hero was desperately needed. Now the man that myth had been built around somehow had to save the Alliance that had created it. “Ancestors help me.”
    “Well, duh, isn’t that what we’ve just been talking about?”
    Geary felt a crooked smile form and looked at her again. “I never would have guessed what people born during the war were thinking. What would I do without you?”
    “You’d be lost,” Desjani said. “Totally, hopelessly lost. And don’t you ever forget it.”
    “If I do, I’m sure you’ll remind me.”
    “Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just go back to being me.” Her gesture this time encompassed the crowd maintaining its respectful distance behind them. “To these people, I’m commanding officer of the most impressive warship they have ever seen. I’m the girl who wiped out the so-called warships of the so-called Shield of Sol that had been bullying their way around this star system while pretending to protect it from inferior forms of human life like you and me.”
    “Too bad for the Shield of Sol that we debased humans from the distant stars are a lot better at fighting battles than they were,” Geary said.
    Tanya grinned. “Pure bloodlines, lots of medals, and pretty ships are no substitute for smarts, lots of firepower, and experience. Anyway, the people here at Sol think what I am, what I’ve done, is all pretty remarkable. Once we get home to the Alliance, though, everybody there is once again going to be looking at me as just the consort of Black Jack.”
    He felt anger at that, anger that banished the despair of moments earlier. “You aren’t anyone’s consort. You’re Captain Tanya Desjani, commanding officer of the Alliance battle cruiser
Dauntless
. That’s the only way everyone should