Read The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian for Free Online

think?”
    “I recommend that we do it, Admiral. It is a risk. It involves putting our confidence in people whose understanding of concepts like keeping their word is extremely elastic. But it will solve our problem as well as theirs.”
    “Self-interest,” Charban said. “They want this to work more than we do.”
    “Exactly. It would be unpleasant for us if we were to leave here with Boyens still holding superior firepower to the people of Midway, but it would be a disaster for Midway.”
    “All right,” Geary repeated. “I’ll send the agreed code word to the freighter, and we’ll get this going. If it doesn’t work, there might be hell to pay.”
    Rione shook her head, looking tired again. She had aged on this trip, and now seemed a decade older than when he had first met her. “Hell is going to get paid no matter what we do. There are no painless options, Admiral. Have the authorities here accepted your offer to leave Captain Bradamont at Midway as a liaison officer for the Alliance?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. We can use that. CEO Boyens is about to catch a little hell himself.”

TWO
    IT would require about two weeks for the plan proposed by the rulers of Midway to come to fruition. Two weeks during which the fleet should have been heading toward home. But scanning down the long, long list of repair work still required on many of his ships, Geary tried to make the best of it. “What ever happened to those plans for fully automated nanobased repair systems on ships?” he asked Captain Smythe, commanding officer of the auxiliary ship
Tanuki
and senior engineer in the fleet.
    Smythe mimicked choking. “The same thing that always happens. The last test, to my knowledge, was about five years ago. The second generation of nanos started attacking ‘healthy’ parts of the test ship, except for those nanos that developed into nanocancer and began replicating out of control and harming critical systems. It took about two days for the ship’s repair system to turn it into a total wreck.”
    “The same problem as a hundred years ago,” Geary agreed.
    “And for long before that. We’re still working on trying to keep the repair and immune systems in our own bodies from going haywire and killing us quickly or slowly,” Smythe pointed out. “And those had who knows how many millions of years to develop. Making something that fixes anything that goes wrong but doesn’t damage things that are fine is not a simple problem.”
    “What did they do with the last test ship?”
    “An automated tug towed both test ship and itself into the nearest star. Good-bye nanos. Nobody wanted to risk them infecting other ships. You could lose a fleet that way before you knew what was happening.”
    “How long before we can leave?” Geary asked.
    “Today. Or tomorrow. Or a few months from now. Admiral, there’s only so much my auxiliaries can do. Some of the damage our ships have sustained requires a full repair dock. The longer we spend here, the better condition all of our ships will be in, but we’ll never hit one hundred percent until we get home.” Smythe cocked a questioning eyebrow at Geary. “Do you expect to face more fighting before then?”
    “I have no idea. I hope not, but I don’t know. We’ve got the biggest threat magnet in the human-occupied region of space with us.”
    “Ah, yes,
Invincible
.” Smythe looked both unhappy and enticed. “Have you been aboard her? There are so many puzzles inside that ship. I wish we could dig into them.”
    “We can’t risk it, Captain.”
    “I may be able to isolate something so we can at least try to figure out how it works,” Smythe pleaded. “My people will work it up on their own time. They’re itching to get their hands on that Kick equipment.”
    “Send me your proposal,” Geary said reluctantly, “and I’ll think about it.”
    Have you been aboard her?
No, he hadn’t.
The chance to visit a truly alien construction, to see the work of intelligent,