by David Weber
Commander David Carte, the CO of Marksman's sister ship Sharpshooter, was also the commanding officer of Light Cruiser Division 7036.3, while Commander Laura Raycraft of the Artillerist commanded LCD 7036.2. Commander Iain Haldane commanded both the cruiser Ranger and also LCD 7036.1, to which Marksman was assigned, which got that job, at least, off of Kamstra's shoulders. Lieutenant Commander Jim Stahlin commanded the destroyer Gustavus Adolphus, while Lieutenant Commander Anne Guglik commanded Gustavus Adolphus' sister, Hernando Cortés. Like the Marksmans, the Warrior-class destroyers were something entirely new in (theoretically) Solarian service—twenty thousand tons larger and far more lethal than the SLN's standard Rampart-class. Unlike the Marksmans, they were also official units of the SLN, although no one outside the Maya Sector or the Republic of Erewhon realized just how big and powerful they actually were. Commander J.T. Cullingford, Commander Melanie Stensrud, and Commander Anne Warwick completed the ship commanders present, although none of them commanded what were technically warships (as far as anyone outside the Maya Sector or Erewhon knew, at any rate). What they did command was something considerably more dangerous—the first three of the Masquerade-class "freighters" delivered by CIG.
"All right," Rozsak said after they'd all settled back into their chairs, "it looks very much like what we thought was going to happen is going to happen. So in the next couple of days, all of us are going to be heading off to Torch 'for maneuvers.' "
No one said a word, and he was pleased to observe that their expressions were mostly alert and thoughtful, with nothing approaching consternation. Of course, it wasn't as if what he'd just said came as any great surprise to them, but it was also true that the step they were about to take would be about as close to irrevocable as actions came.
Not that all of them hadn't been heading for it for a very, very long time now.
"Edie"—he twitched his head briefly to his right, at Habib—"will be giving all of us the detailed appreciation and basic ops plan in a minute, but before she does, let me go ahead and—at the risk of being a bit redundant, under the circumstances—run over the high points." He smiled slightly. "Redundancy is one of the privileges which comes with my lordly flag rank, you all understand."
Most of them smiled, and Stahlin chuckled.
"Basically," Rozsak continued a bit more seriously, "life is getting more interesting out of our way. Given what happened to the Manties and the Havenites at the Battle of Manticore, neither of them is going to have any attention to spare for events in our neck of the woods, and Admiral McAvoy has confirmed to me that he's under orders to keep the Erewhonese Navy close to home."
He shrugged.
"We've shared our intelligence about what seems to be headed Torch's way with both the Torches and the Erewhonese. Jiri's impression—and mine—is that both of them consider the intel reliable, even though we protected one of our better sources from them. Given the fact that Thandi Palane only has a handful of frigates and McAvoy's under orders to stay home, though, there isn't a whole lot either of them can do with it. Under the circumstances—including the fact that we're the ones with the treaty with Torch—Governor Barregos has directed us to deal with it. That's where you people come in.
"I wish we didn't have to take the wraps off this early." He made the admission unflinchingly. "And, conversely, since we do have to take the wraps off, I wish we had more of the new hardware already trained up and ready to go. Unfortunately, however, in light of the Battle of Monica, we've been forced to substantially revise our estimate of the forces Manpower could make available to its proxies rather drastically upward. That means we can't count on holding what they could be throwing at Torch with nothing but the War Harvests and three Morrigans."
Most of his subordinates nodded soberly at that. The War Harvest-class represented the largest destroyer design in current SLN inventory. The fact that the Maya Sector had been assigned a full flotilla of them (although Destroyer Flotilla 3029, the flotilla in question, was one ship short of the eighteen it should theoretically have had) was an emblem of the Sector's economic importance. The three elderly Morrigan-class light cruisers which had been assigned to lead the flotilla's three squadrons, on the other hand, were an emblem of Frontier Security's . . . ambiguous feelings where Oravil Barregos was concerned. Although they'd been refitted with first-line electronics, they were very little larger than the destroyers they'd been assigned to work with—less than half the size of the Marksmans, in fact.
"If these people come in even with just the forces we already know have been recruited by Manpower," Rozsak continued, "they'd be in a damned good position to beat up on our 'official' ship list. If they come in with any substantial additional combat power, our people would be toast. And unlike that asshole Navarre, Manpower's 'proxies' won't have any official connection to Mesa. Our estimate is that that will make them a lot less likely to back down to keep the SLN from getting pissed off at Mesa—since Mesa can always say 'Who? Us? No, no, no. We didn't have a thing to do with all that mayhem and destruction!' " He shook his head. "They're headed for Torch to turn Torch into a smoking cinder, people . . . and it's going to be up to you to see to it that that doesn't happen."
He paused for a moment, letting them digest what he'd just said, then tipped his chair back slightly.
"Does anyone have any comments at this stage?" he invited.
There was silence for a moment while people glanced at one another, then Kamstra faced Rozsak up the length of the table.
"I don't think any of us have any questions about 'why,' Sir," he said. "I imagine there are a few little concerns about exactly 'how,' though. And about hardware availability. So far, J.T. is the only one of our arsenal ship skippers who's actually had the opportunity to roll pods in an all-up live-fire exercise. We've spent a lot of hours in the simulators, of course, but that's not quite the same thing. And then there's the question of how many pods we'll have when the credit actually drops."
"Those are all valid concerns," Rozsak acknowledged, "and I think you'll find Edie and her people have dealt with them in their ops plan. Nobody's pretending we're delighted with the compromises we're going to be forced to adopt, but to paraphrase a pre-space politician by the name of Churchill, perfect operational conditions obtain only in Heaven . . . and admirals who insist on them before they'll take action seldom get there."
Someone—it wasn't Stahlin, this time—chuckled, and Rozsak grinned briefly.
"I know we've hit a few snags in the production pipeline," he went on, "but, especially since this intel on Torch came up, we've been pressing Carlucci—and McAvoy—on the pod numbers. Our best guess at this point is that by the time we reach Torch, we should find a couple of Carlucci freighters waiting for us with somewhere around fifteen hundred pods. That won't be quite enough for a complete load-out on all three of the Masquerades, and we'll probably be short on EW birds, but it'll still give us a hell of a lot more punch than anyone else is going to be expecting us to have. What it's not going to give us is a lot of ammunition to use up in those live-fire exercises you were talking about, Dirk-Steven. Exercises which, I hasten to add, I entirely agree we ought to be carrying out. Since these are going to be the six-pod rings, though, they aren't going to be reusable, so even if we had the replacement birds to load into them, we wouldn't be able to reload after the exercise."
Heads nodded soberly around the table.
The transitional ship types which had been produced for the Maya Sector in the Carlucci yards were experimental, in one sense, but used proven technological components, in another. The new Warrior-class destroyers were almost ten percent larger even than the War Harvest-class, yet they had twenty-five percent fewer missile tubes and forty percent fewer energy weapons in each broadside than the much smaller Rampart-class. That lesser throw weight had been emphasized in the various reports being sent back to Old Chicago, since it had helped to assuage any possible fears over the combat power of the ships Barregos was building for himself out in Maya. Wh
at hadn't been emphasized was that the energy weapons in question were all grasers (not the Ramparts' much lighter—and less powerful—lasers); that the ships carried almost twice the anti-missile defenses of a standard SLN destroyer, that they carried substantially more missiles per tube; and that the missiles in question were the same ones carried by the Royal Manticoran Navy's light units at the close of the First Havenite War. Nor had anyone mentioned the improvements in inertial compensator improvement which gave a Warrior a thirty percent acceleration advantage over Rozsak's War Harvest-class destroyers. It was probably as well for the blood pressure of various senior SLN officers that they were blissfully unaware of just how enormous an increase in combat power all of that represented.
The Marksman-class would have come as an even more unpleasant surprise, had anyone in the Sol System had the least idea of their actual specifications. In many ways, what the Marksman really represented was a slightly downsized prewar RMN Star Knight-class heavy cruiser with updated electronics, energy weapons, and missiles and a substantially downsized crew. Her compensator gave her an acceleration rate which, while inferior to a Warrior's, was still twenty-eight percent better than a War Harvest's, and she carried the Mark-17-E, the Erewhon-built version of the Manticoran Mark-14 missile then-Captain Michael Oversteegen had used to such good effect at the Battle of Refuge three T-years earlier. They weren't multidrive missiles; in fact, Manticore had abandoned further development on them when the Mark 16 dual-drive missile proved a practical concept for cruiser-sized tubes. But they were substantially longer ranged than anything in the Solarian inventory, and in the latest Erewhonese version, they mounted heavier laser heads (although with fewer lasing rods) than were carried by any Solarian combatant short of the wall of battle. They were also, unfortunately, much too large to be fired out of the Warriors' missile tubes, far less by any of the older, Solarian-built units under Rozsak's command, and the Marksmans carried only thirty of them for each of the six tubes in each broadside.
Had any SLN observer taken a good look at one of Rozsak's "light cruisers," he might have observed two interesting external peculiarities. First, their weapons seemed a bit asymmetrically arranged. Although they showed the very respectable (especially for a light cruiser) broadside armament of six missile tubes, five grasers, twelve counter missile tubes, and eight point defense stations, there was a peculiar gap in the middle of each broadside—one just about large enough to have accommodated two additional missile tubes. Second, they seemed to have an awful lot of additional planar arrays stuck in some odd-looking places.
The reason for the apparent peculiarity was that the ships had been designed with eight broadside missile tubes, not six. As built, however, two tubes in each broadside had been replaced by lots and lots of additional fire control. The compartments which had been intended to mount the missile tubes had then been sealed with solid plugs of armor—armor which, in fact, was substantially heavier than that which protected her actual weaponry. The peculiar plethora of arrays dotting her flanks provided the telemetry links for all that fire control, which gave them—despite the fact that they mounted only six tubes each—enough capability to simultaneously control sixty missiles in each broadside firing arc.
Ultimately, all of that massively redundant fire control would be removed and replaced with the missile tubes of the original "official" design. At the moment, however, they were half the key to Rozsak's entire strategy for covering the gap until the Maya Sector began to take delivery of a substantial force of Erewhon-built ships-of-the-wall of its very own.
The other half of the key was represented by the Masquerades—the ships which had received the unofficial type designation of "arsenal ship."
Based loosely on the Silesian-designed Starhauler "modular" merchant ship, the Masquerade massed a shade over two million tons. The original Starhauler design had featured a downsized standard, configurable internal cargo hull, surrounded by an outer shell of "container" spaces. The idea had been to produce a vessel which could transport individually loaded cargo modules which could be dropped off in transit without taking time for routine offloading procedures. On paper, it had offered many advantages although, in practice, it had proven less successful.
What Carlucci had done in designing the Masquerade as a similar "modular merchant ship" for the Maya Sector was to eliminate the internal cargo hold entirely. Instead, each ship had sixteen pod bays arranged along each side, and each bay had its own power and life-support connections, since part of the idea was that the ship could also be fitted with passenger-carrying pods or climate-controlled or refrigerated pods. That potential power demand also explained why a merchant ship had not one, but two fusion plants.
Commercially, the ship was a pure boondoggle, which, Rozsak had no doubt, would be painfully evident to anyone back on Old Earth who ever actually looked at it as a practical freight hauler. No one was doing that, of course, given the rationale for their construction which he and Barregos had crafted for Solarian consumption.
Militarily, the Masquerade was probably the best illustration of the principle of mounting sledgehammers in eggshells Luiz Rozsak had ever seen or imagined. In fact, it was really more of a case of mounting pile-drivers in soap bubbles, as far as he was concerned.
Each of the Masquerade's pod bays just happened to be deep enough to mount three of the Erewhonese Space Navy's standard missile pods stacked end-to-end. It was considerably wider than a single missile pod, however, and CIG had been considerate enough to design a mounting for multiple pods. The initial design accommodated six pods in three rows of two pods each, but an improved design mounting only four pods each in a true "ring" arrangement was just entering production.
The original six-pod configuration offered a greater throw weight per "ring," but the pods it contained were stripped down, with very lightweight grav-drivers. They weren't quite intended as single-shot weapons, but they would require extensive refurbishing before they could be used a second time. The currently available pods also contained the Mark-17-E, not full-scale multi-drive missiles.
The four-pod version's component pods, on the other hand, were far more robust. They'd be reloadable and reusable without requiring enough additional maintenance to amount to something just short of actual rebuilding, and they'd have the independent endurance to be deployed for up to a week at a time. Even more significantly, their individually larger pods would be loaded with the Mark-19, the ESN's most recent MDM variant.
Given the fact that there were sixteen pod bays in each of a Masquerade's broadsides, each arsenal ship carried up to ninety-six pods, which, with the six-pod ring, gave her a total of five hundred and seventy-six pods. That was more firepower than was carried by the vast majority of pod superdreadnoughts three times her size. Unfortunately, those missiles were all she carried. She was a merchant design, with zero armor, no integral point defense capability, no core hull, no life support redundancy, no military-grade lifepods, no integral firecontrol even for her own pods, and no integral electronic warfare capability. If a genuine warship—even a dinky little pre-Manticore LAC—ever got into weapons range of her, she (and her crew) would disappear quickly from the cosmos. Which was why she wasn't supposed to get into weapons range of anyone else. Instead, she was supposed to lie safely out of range of an opponent with no multidrive missiles, launching salvo after salvo of pods which would then be taken under control by the Marksmans, with all of those redundant telemetry links.
Eventually, her class would also be provided with specially designed "combat pods" which would contain things like counter-missile tubes, point defense stations, sidewall generators, additional life support, fire control, electronic warfare systems, and the like. Unfortunately, all the "combat pods" in the galaxy would never turn her into a proper warship which could hope to survive even minimal damage. Even more unfortunately at the moment, none of those specially designed combat pods were yet available for the only three Masquerades of which Maya had so far taken delivery.
"As I say, we're going to be short on expendable ammunition for at least another month or so," Rozsak continued. "It's not the missiles themselves; it's the pod rings. Carlucci is concentrating on getting as many of them produced as quickly as possible, even at the expense of pulling people and capacity off the combat pods, and he's moved the four-pod rings—and the Mark-19s for them—up in the production chute, as well. But it's probably going to be sometime late in October before CIG actually gets any of those new goodies delivered to us at Torch. In the meantime, we're just going to have to do the best we can with the simulators, and, frankly, I expect that to be pretty damned good, given the caliber of our people."
The praise implicit in his last sentence was even more gratifying to his subordinates because of the matter-of-fact tone in which it was delivered, and he smiled slightly as he recognized the pleasure in their expressions.
"Any other comments or questions?" he asked.
"I imagine there are probably a few more thoughts chasing around in people's heads, Sir," Kamstra replied. "On the other hand, as you just pointed out, Edie probably has answers for most of them already built into her ops plan. Considering which, I think we should go ahead and let her bring us all up to speed. I'm sure if there are any questions left afterward, she and Jiri will be able to dispose of them."
"And, of course, if disposing of them should prove to be beyond their merely mortal capabilities, I will be available to dispense wisdom from on high," Rozsak agreed benignly. This time, the response was a chorus of laughter, no mere chuckles, and he gave them all a much broader smile. Then he waved one hand in Habib's direction.