"It's confirmed, Ma'am—Alpha Two," Lieutenant Cornelia Rensi said.
"Thank you, Cornelia," Commander Raycraft acknowledged, then turned to her "staff." Actually, aside from Lieutenant Commander Michael Dobbs, who'd been added to Artillerist's complement expressly to act as Light Cruiser Division 7036.2's chief of staff, Acting-Commodore Laura Raycraft's staff officers were identical to Commander Laura Raycraft's ship's officers. That was the main reason she'd chosen, unlike Luiz Rozsak, who had ensconced himself on Marksman's flag bridge, to fight her ship and lead her division from Artillerist's command deck.
"Not much of a surprise, Ma'am, is it?" Dobbs said now, and she shook her head.
Like Dobbs, she'd always anticipated that Alpha Two was the most likely of the scenarios Luiz Rozsak and his officers had worked out. In fact, she'd felt it was so likely that she'd lobbied hard in favor of concentrating the entire task group in hyper-space. She knew Rozsak had been tempted to agree with her, but she'd also known he wasn't going to. As he'd pointed out to her, somebody had to be in a position to cover the inner system just in case it should happen they'd guessed wrong after all and the Peep mercenaries came in on more than one bearing. Which was how her own ship and Archer happened to be sitting here in orbit as the flagship of "Anvil Force," along with Commander Melanie Stensrud's Charade and Lieutenant Commander Hjálmar Snorrason's four Warrior-class destroyers: Genghis Kahn, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar. They were accompanied by Commander Maria Le Fossi's three light cruisers and the seventeen ships of Destroyer Flotilla 2960—not to mention eight frigates of the Royal Torch Navy—but those other ships were there for slightly different reasons.
It was a lot of hulls, even though her own light cruiser division had been chosen because it had one less ship than either of Light Cruiser Squadron 7036's other two divisions. In fact, Anvil Force almost certainly had more ships than it was going to need. But since Anvil Force's true primary mission was to prevent any long-range missiles from getting through to Torch, redundancy had become a beautiful thing.
And if those people are prepared to go to maximum-rate fire, or if it turns out they're carrying full loads of pods tractored to their hulls, we may just turn out not to be all that "redundant" after all, she reflected grimly.
There was no evidence, aside from the weapons Technodyne had provided for the Republic of Monica that anyone outside the Haven Quadrant had been experimenting with pods. Even the Technodyne pods had been pure system defense weapons, never designed for offensive deployment a la Manticore or Haven, and all of Jiri Watanapongse's sources insisted that the SLN still dismissed the entire concept as the primitive, ineffectual thing it had been decades ago. But StateSec refugees who'd deserted after the Royal Manticoran Navy's ferociously successful Operation Buttercup brought the First Havenite War to a screeching halt would have a very different attitude towards them, and it was at least possible they'd managed to communicate that attitude to their Manpower sponsors. And if the thought of Manpower's putting advanced weaponry into production was ridiculous, so was the thought of Manpower's being able to make literally dozens of ex-SLN battlecruisers available to proxies like the Republic of Monica . . . or a lunatic fleet of StateSec holdouts.
So, yes, it was possible, however unlikely, that these people had missile pods of their own. And if they could generate enough saturation to overload the defenders' missile defenses . . .
They'd only have to get lucky with a handful of them, at relativistic speeds, she reminded herself.
"I have to say," Dobbs continued, "that I really kind of wish we'd gone with Alpha One instead of Alpha Two." She glanced at him, and he grimaced. "I understand the logic, Ma'am. I just don't like sitting around on my hands while someone else does all the heavy lifting."
"I can't say I don't feel at least a little the same," Raycraft admitted. Alpha One would have turned Anvil Force into a true anvil, with the light cruisers and Hjálmar Snorrason's destroyers advancing from Torch to catch the attackers between themselves and Rozsak's Hammer Force. "On the other hand, the Admiral was right. Alpha One probably would be a case of gilding the lily. If he can't do the job with six of the Marksmans, we probably couldn't do it with eight, either. Besides, I imagine there'll be time to go to Alpha Three, if it comes to it. And if it doesn't, then not giving ourselves away with active impeller signatures strikes me as a pretty good notion."
"Oh, I agree, Ma'am," Dobbs told her mildly, and she snorted once, then turned back to Siegel.
"How long until the Admiral has Hammer Force in position?" she asked.
"It looks like they came up about two million klicks short on their planned translation, Ma'am," Siegel replied, and Raycraft nodded. She already noticed that Lieutenant Wu's astrogation had been a little off, and she wasn't surprised. In fact, she was all in favor of coming up short in a situation like this one, herself. "Assuming constant accelerations across the board, though," Siegel continued, "Hammer Force will close to the specified range in about fifty-eight minutes. At that point, the enemy will be just under a hundred and twelve million kilometers—call it six-point-two light-minutes—from Torch."
Raycraft nodded again, then turned to the com image of Lieutenant Richard McKenzie, Artillerist's chief engineer.
"Stand ready on the wedge, Richard. We may want it in an hour or so."
* * *
"Velocities have equalized, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Pierre Stravinsky said quietly, and Adrian Luff glanced at the master plot again.
There'd been no further communication with Admiral Rozsak, assuming it really was Admiral Rozsak behind them, although that didn't necessarily strike him as a good sign. Not that anything the other man might have said was going to cause him to rethink his own plans and options at this point. He'd decided what he was going to do, and he wasn't going to start second-guessing himself at this late point.
The range between his ships and their pursuers had opened while the bogeys made up their initial velocity disadvantage. With an acceleration advantage of just under one kilometer per second, that had taken 9.75 minutes. The range between them had risen to just over 13.3 million kilometers during that time; now that velocities had equalized at 7,886 KPS, the range had begun to drop once again. From here on, their pursuers would steadily eat away the distance between them.
He looked up and beckoned for Citizen Commander Hartman to join him. She stepped up on his left side, gazing at the plot with him, and he waved one hand at its icons.
"They're still almost eleven million kilometers short of the hyper limit," he observed, "so I suppose it's remotely possible they really don't have MDMs over there and they're trying to run a bluff on us. They could still be hoping our nerve will crack and we'll break off . . . and planning on hypering back out instead of coming across the limit after us and getting into standard missile range, if we don't. Just between you and me," his tone was dry enough to evaporate the Frontenac Estuary back home in Nouveau Paris, "I'd really like to think that's what's happening here. Unfortunately, what I think is really happening is exactly what you and Stravinsky suggested from the outset. Those are Erewhonese ships, whoever's aboard them, and those two big bastards are mil-spec freighters loaded with missile pods. The question I've been turning over in my mind for the last five or six minutes is how close they're going to want to get before they start rolling pods at us. May I assume you've been devoting some thought to the same problem?"
"Yes, Citizen Commodore." Hartman gave him a smile of her own, although hers showed a bit more of the tips of her teeth. "As a matter of fact, Pierre and I have been kicking that around, and we've consulted with Citizen Captain Vergnier and Citizen Commander Laurent, as well."
"And have the four of you reached a consensus?"
"We're all agreed on what they're going to try to do," Hartman replied. "We're still a little divided over the exact range they're looking for, though. Obviously, they're planning to close to a range lower than twelve million kilometers, or they would have fired before the range began to open. That being the case, they're clearly trying to get their fire control close enough to give them a reasonable hit percentage, exactly as Pierre suggested, which makes a lot of sense, if those six cruisers are the only fire control platforms they plan on using. Personally, I think they want to come as close as they can while staying out of our range, so I'm figuring eight million klicks. That would put them a half million kilometers outside standard missile range, and they've obviously got the acceleration advantage to hold the range at that point if they choose to.
"Pierre agrees with me, but he thinks they'll shoot for nine million klicks in order to give themselves a little more wiggle room after our birds go ballistic. Citizen Captain Vergnier and Citizen Commander Laurent argue that with two freighters full of missile pods, they'll probably be willing to start wasting ammunition sooner than that, so they're both thinking in terms of something more like ten million klicks."
Luff nodded thoughtfully.
"I think I'm inclined to agree with Stravinsky," he said. "If it weren't for the fact that they have got those two ammo ships back there, I'd agree with you and shave it a little closer, because that extra five hundred thousand kilometers is going to cost them a little accuracy. But Olivier and Citizen Commander Laurent have a point about how much ammunition they've got to burn. And the fact that it looks like they're bringing the ammo ships in with them suggests to me that they probably would like at least a little more time and distance for evasive maneuvers after our birds' drives go down."
"You and Pierre may well be right, Citizen Commodore." Hartman shrugged. "The important thing, though, is that they are bringing the ammo ships in. They've still got time to drop them off well back from the firing line, but I think if they were going to do that, they already would have. At their current velocity, they're committed to crossing the hyper limit now—assuming they want to stay in n-space where they can roll pods after us, at any rate—and with the observed range of even early generation MDMs, they wouldn't have to've gotten even this close to bring us under fire. The fire control ships, yes, but not the ammo carriers."
"Agreed." The citizen commodore grimaced. "I suppose it's something of a judgment call. Leave them well back, but essentially unprotected if it should happen we've got somebody still waiting in hyper to pounce, or bring them along with you, where your fire control ships and destroyers can keep an eye on them but they still don't have to come quite into our missiles' envelope."
"I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they're thinking, Citizen Commodore. And, in their position, I'd have done the same thing. Less because I'd be afraid the other side actually had left somebody in hyper 'to pounce,' as you put it than because, with that kind of range advantage over the known threat, there wouldn't be any reason not to protect myself against the possibility of an unknown one sneaking in on me, however remote that might be."
"Exactly. Of course," Luff bared his teeth, "it'd be a pity if it turned out they were protecting themselves against the wrong 'known threat.' "
"Yes, Citizen Commodore." Hartman returned his predatory smile. "That would be a pity, wouldn't it?"
* * *
"About another ten minutes, Sir," Edie Habib observed quietly, and Rozsak nodded.
They'd been in pursuit of the StateSec renegades for over half an hour, and they'd cut the range back to just barely more than the twelve million kilometers at which they'd begun the chase. Their overtake velocity was over fifteen hundred kilometers per second, and there was no way the enemy could escape them now.
"We'll reduce acceleration to three-point-seven-five KPS-squared at eleven million kilometers," he decided. "No point closing any faster than we have to."
"Yes, Sir," Habib replied, but her tone was a bit odd, and when he glanced at her, he realized she'd been gazing at his own profile with a slightly quizzical look.
"What?" he asked.
"I was just wondering what it is you didn't go ahead and say just now."
" 'Didn't go ahead and say'?" It was his turn to give her a quizzical look. "What makes you think there's anything I didn't go ahead and say?"
"Boss, I've known you a long time," she said, and he chuckled.
"Yes, you have," he agreed. Then he shrugged. "Mostly, I was just thinking about Snorrason."
"Wondering if I was right all along, were you?" she asked with an arched eyebrow, and he grinned.
He'd waffled back and forth, with uncharacteristic ambivalence, over the question of where he should deploy Hjálmar Snorrason's four destroyers. After the Marksmans, the big Warrior-class destroyers were the most capable antimissile ships he had, in the area-defense role, at least. The Royal Torch Navy's frigates had turned out to be remarkably capable (for such small units) of looking after themselves in a missile-heavy environment, but they simply weren't big enough and didn't have enough counter-missile magazine capacity to be effective in the sustained area-defense role. He'd been tempted to tack Snorrason's ships onto Hammer Force, as Habib had suggested, just in case they'd found themselves forced into the enemy's missile envelope after all. But he'd decided in the end that protecting Torch was more important. It was extraordinarily unlikely that any of the ex-Peep attackers were going to get close enough to hit the planet with anything short of dead, easily picked off missiles which had long since gone ballistic. The consequences if it turned out that airy assumption was in error might well prove catastrophic, however, and providing against that eventuality took precedence over the equally remote possibility of Hammer Force straying into the enemy's missile envelope.
"No." Rozsak shook his head. "I never thought you were wrong about it, Edie." He turned away from the plot and smiled wryly at Habib. "In fact, the reason I was so ambivalent about it was because it really is a coin-toss kind of decision." He shrugged. "In the end, it's all about defending the planet, though, and I'm not going to second-guess my decision about Snorrason at this point. It's just . . ." He grimaced. "It's just that I've got this itch I can't quite seem to scratch."
"What sort of 'itch,' Boss?" Habib's expression was much more intent than it had been.
Luiz Rozsak was an intensely logical man, she thought. Despite the easy-going attitude which had been known to deceive friends, as well as adversaries, he was anything but casual or impulsive. His brain weighed factors and possibilities with an assayer's precision, and he was usually at least two or three moves ahead of anyone else in the game. Yet there were times when a sort of instinct-level process seemed to kick in. When he did make decisions on what might seem to others like mere impulses or whims. Personally, Habib had come to the conclusion long ago that his "whims" were actually their own version of logic, but logic that went on below the conscious level, so deep even he stood outside it as it operated on facts or observations his conscious mind didn't realize he possessed.
"If I knew what sort of itch it was, then I'd know how to scratch it," he pointed out now.
"If I can help you figure out what's itching, I'll be glad to lend a hand," she said. He looked at her, and she shrugged. "You've gotten an occasional wild hair that didn't go anywhere, Boss, but not all that damned often."
"Maybe." It was his turn to shrug. "And maybe," he lowered his voice a bit more, "it's opening-night nerves, too. This game's just a bit bigger-league than any I've played in before, you know."
Habib started to laugh, but she stopped herself before the reaction reached the surface. She'd stood at Rozsak's shoulder through all manner of operations—against pirates, against smugglers, against slavers, terrorists, rebels, desperate patriots striking back against Frontier Security. No matter the operation, no matter the cost or the objective, he'd never once lost control of the situation or himself.
Yet even though all of that was true, she realized, this would be his first true battle. The first time naval forces under his command had actually met an adversary with many times his own tonnage of warships and hundreds of times as many personnel. And, she reflected grimly, the price if he failed would be unspeakable.
Many of the people who thought they knew Luiz Rozsak might have expected him to take that possibility in stride. And, in some ways, they would have been right, too. Edie Habib never doubted that whatever happened to the planet of Torch, Rozsak would never waver in the pursuit of his "Sepoy Option." But Habib probably knew him better than anyone else in the universe, including Oravil Barregos. And because she did, she knew the thing he would never, ever admit—not even to her. Probably not even to himself.
She knew what had truly driven him to craft the "Sepoy Option" so many years before. She knew what hid beneath the cynicism and the amoral pursuit of power he let other people see. Knew what truly gave him the magnetism that bound people as diverse as Edie Habib, Jiri Watanapongse, and Kao Huang to him.
And what would never, ever let him forgive himself if somehow the StateSec renegades in front of him got through to the planet of Torch.
If he's feeling a little . . . antsy, it sure as hell shouldn't be surprising, she thought.
"Well," she said out loud, "maybe it is your biggest game so far, Boss. But your record in the minors strikes me as pretty damned good. I think you're ready for the majors."
"Why," he smiled at her, "so do I. Which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to make me totally immune to butterflies, after all."
* * *
"Message from Admiral Rozsak, Ma'am," Lieutenant Rensi reported. "Hammer Force will be reducing acceleration in"—the communications officer glanced at the time display—"four and a half minutes."
"Thank you, Cornelia," Laura Raycraft said, and glanced at Lieutenant Commander Dobbs. "Do you think they'll decide to surrender after all when they find out about the Mark-17-Es?" she asked quietly.
"I don't know, Ma'am," Dobbs replied. "But if it was me, I'd sure as hell fall all over myself surrendering!" He shook his head. "Of course, if it was me, I'd've broken off and headed for home the minute the admiral came out of hyper. This is a busted op if I've ever seen one. Even if they manage to take out the planet, somebody's going to be left to pass on their ship IDs to the Navy and everybody else out this way."
"The same thought occurred to me," Raycraft agreed. "And if I were them, I'd be damned worried about multidrive missiles. I know we've identified ourselves as Solarian, but they have to have figured out that these are Erewhon-built ships, and in their shoes, I'd be figuring that meant those two 'freighters' behind the admiral were probably stuffed with MDMs. Of course, we are talking about StateSec types, and nobody with the brains to pour piss out of a boot would still be dreaming about 'restoring the Revolution' in Nouveau Paris. Anybody who's that far out of touch with reality obviously isn't very good at threat analysis to begin with."
"And maybe they're figuring on taking the time to hunt down anybody or anything that might be able to pass their emissions signatures on to anyone else, too," Dobbs said more darkly. Raycraft raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "If they don't think they're looking at MDMs, Ma'am, then they have to think they've got an overwhelming advantage in weight of metal. Against what they've seen so far, assuming equal missile ranges, they probably could mop up everything we've got and then take their time making sure they've also destroyed anyone with a record of their emissions. If they managed that, there wouldn't be any evidence to prove who'd done it . . . which is what they've been planning on all along, isn't it?"
"You may be right about that. No," Raycraft shook her head, "I'm sure you are right about it. Unfortunately for them, they don't have equal missile ranges, now do they?"
* * *
Adrian Luff watched his own plot, and despite the impending clash, despite his own lingering revulsion at the mission he'd been assigned, he felt oddly . . . calm.
He and his ships were committed. They had been, from the moment Luiz Rozsak's force turned up behind them, and they knew it. Luff's initial attack plan had gone disastrously awry the instant those ships translated out of hyper, and everyone aboard all of his ships knew that, as well, just as they knew he'd refused to break off even when challenged in the name of the mighty Solarian League. Yet there was surprisingly little evidence of panic aboard Leon Trotsky and the other ships of the PNE. StateSec secret policemen they might once have been, uniformed enforcers of a brutal regime who'd become little more than common pirates since the fall of the People's Republic, yet they were more than that, as well.
However foolish the rest of the universe might think they were to dream of restoring the People's Republic and the Committee of Public Safety, it was a dream to which they had genuinely committed their lives. It was what bound them together, and in the binding they had found strength. The long months of preparation for a mission virtually none of them wanted to carry out had forged them back into a unit, an organized force, and in the forging they'd gained a temper they had never known before. Even some of the mercenaries Manpower had recruited to fill out their ranks had been forged into that same sense of unity, of purpose. Singly, they might still be the lunatic holdouts, the renegades, the agents of brutality the galaxy considered all of them to be, but together, they truly were the People's Navy in Exile.
They had that now, and Luff wasn't giving it up. Whatever the cost, whatever the consequences, they would be the People's Navy in Exile, or they would be nothing at all.
* * *
As Gowan Maddock sat on Adrian Luff's flag bridge, watching the kilometers between the citizen commodore's ships and their enemies dwindle steadily away, he realized just how badly he (and the rest of the Mesan Alignment) had underestimated these people. Oh, they were still lunatics—crackpots! But they were lunatics who refused to panic. Crackpots who'd accepted that they were probably going to die in pursuit of their lunacy, yet refused to relinquish the madness which empowered them.
He sat in his own command chair, watching Luff engage in a deadly version of the ancient Old Earth game of "chicken," and knew that in their quixotic quest, the men and women of the People's Navy in Exile had become something far greater—something far tougher and much more dangerous—than he'd ever admitted to himself before.
* * *
"Coming up on the specified deceleration point in thirty-five seconds, Sir," Lieutenant Womack said quietly.
"Thank you, Robert," Luiz Rozsak replied, his own eyes intent as he watched the master plot.
Masquerade and Kabuki had fallen back a bit, placing themselves behind Kamstra's cruisers and their destroyers. The range between Marksman and the enemy battlecruisers had fallen to the specified eleven million kilometers, and as he'd pointed out to Habib, there was no point closing the rest of the way to their chosen firing point too rapidly. Even at the Masquerades' maximum deceleration rate, it would have taken them over three minutes simply to decelerate to zero relative to the enemy, and that was assuming the other side kept running at its own current acceleration. Slowing their own overtake acceleration by one kilometer per second squared meant it would take them an additional thirteen minutes to enter his chosen engagement range . . . and that their overtake velocity would be down to less than 500 KPS when he did. If he needed to, he could hold that range forever—or open it still further, for that matter—even with his arsenal ships and even if the other side went to a zero compensator margin trying to catch him.
* * *
"The enemy's reduced acceleration, Citizen Commodore!" Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky said suddenly. "It's dropped a full kilometer per second squared!"
Luff looked quickly up from the plot at the ops officer's announcement, then turned to Hartman.
"I don't think they'd be killing any of their acceleration if they weren't pretty close to where they wanted to be," he said quietly.
"No, Citizen Commodore," she agreed, eyes meeting his, and he nodded. Then he turned back to Stravinsky.
"Open fire, Citizen Lieutenant Commander!" he said crisply.