Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  The Haven Quadrant was hundreds of light-years from the League, and the SLN's total disinterest in the Manticore-Haven conflict had been obvious for years. As far as the man-in-the-street's view of things was concerned, Solarian public opinion since the resumption of hostilities had tended to favor Haven over Manticore, and at the moment, given the confrontation between the League's interests and Manticore in the Talbott Cluster, there was little doubt that Solarian antipathy towards the Star Kingdom had hardened significantly. But all of that could—would—change in a heartbeat in the wake of an Eridani Edict violation. The Edict was the single element of Solarian foreign policy which enjoyed near-universal acceptance and support from all of the League's citizens. If Havenite units violated it . . .

  But we aren't "Havenite units" anymore. That's the entire reason Manpower wanted to use us in the first place. We're deniable. Even if they do know we're Havenite, even ex-State Security, no one in the League is going to go after the People's Republic for anything we do.

  Which, unfortunately, wouldn't do a single thing to mitigate the consequences for the PNE. The Eridani Edict carried no specific injunction to go after non-state violators with the full fury of the Solarian League Navy, but Adrian Luff nourished no illusions. The Solarian League wouldn't give a damn about attacks on Havenite shipping, or the Havenite navy. And Luff could slaughter his one-time fellow citizens in whatever numbers he chose without arousing the least Solarian ire . . . as long as he did it without resorting to the actions the Eridani Edict outlawed.

  But if the PNE crossed this line, and if the League knew it had, that indifference would vanish. At the very least, he and his people would become pariahs, with every man's hand turned against them. Luff had learned a great deal, over his years of exile, about the astonishing depth of the Solarian League's basic, all-encompassing inefficiency. It was actually worse than the pre-Pierre People's Republic had ever been, in some ways. But, by the same token, he'd gained a bone-deep awareness of the League's sheer, stupendous size and power. If it decided the People's Navy in Exile needed to be hunted down, sooner or later, the PNE would be run to earth and destroyed.

  But if we don't do this, we lose the only real outside support we've been able to find. And what happens to our morale, our cohesion, if that happens? For that matter, if Rozsak really knows who we are, really knows we were prepared to do this, then we're tainted in Solly eyes, no matter what happens!

  "Accept his com request," he heard himself say. "No visual, and run the outgoing audio through the computers."

  * * *

  "We have a response, Sir. Sort of, anyway," Karen Georgos announced.

  "Took them long enough," Edie Habib half-muttered, and Rozsak gave her a half-smile.

  "There's a forty-second transmission delay," he pointed out. "They didn't dither as long as I expected them to, actually."

  Habib snorted softly, and Rozsak looked at Georgos.

  "Put it through, Karen."

  "Yes, Sir. Coming up now," the com officer replied, and the display in front of Rozsak went abruptly blank.

  "What can I do for you, Admiral Rozsak?" a voice inquired. It was smoothly modulated, without any readily discernible accent, and Rozsak raised one eyebrow at Georgos before keying his own pickup.

  "Computer generated?" he asked . . . quite unnecessarily, he was certain.

  "Yes, Sir." She shrugged. "I can't guarantee it without a complete analysis, but it sounds to me like they're using our own hardware and techniques. Somebody at the other end is talking to the Nightingale, and the AI's generating a completely synthesized voice. There's no way anyone would be able to determine anything about the actual speaker's voice from this."

  "That's what I thought," he said.

  He'd have done exactly the same thing, if he'd found himself in the place of whoever was at the other end of that com link. In fact, he had used the Nightingale on occasions when deniability was more useful in the Solarian League's view of things. But if he wasn't surprised by that, he was slightly surprised by how irritating he found it.

  Mostly that's because Karen's right—he's using our own tech against us. Which makes being pissed off with him even sillier, given what we're planning to do with "our own tech" in the increasingly less distant future.

  He brushed that thought aside, squared his shoulders, looked directly into his own pickup, and brought it online.

  "You can immediately break off your attack on the planet Torch," he said flatly. "I remind you that the Solarian League has signed a mutual defense treaty with the Kingdom of Torch. Any attack on Torch will be deemed an attack upon Solarian territory, and any violation of the Eridani Edict's anti-genocide protocols will lead to your summary destruction."

  There was a forty-second delay as his words sped across to the PNE flagship. Then, forty seconds after that, his blank com display spoke again.

  "I appreciate your position, Admiral," it said. "Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comply with your demands. Not to mention the fact that you don't seem to have the means to accomplish our 'summary destruction' at this particular moment."

  At least he's not trying to pretend this is only some kind of "friendly port visit," Rozsak thought.

  "I don't?" He smiled thinly. "You might want to remember that appearances can be deceiving. And even if that isn't the case, the Solarian League Navy as a whole definitely does have the means."

  "True," the anonymous voice acknowledged eighty seconds later. "But for the rest of the SLN to accomplish that it will have to be able to find us. And I think—Admiral Rozsak, was it?—that it might behoove you to consider the potential consequences for your current forces. You may find this difficult to believe, but I would prefer not having to kill anyone who doesn't have to die today."

  Despite the artificiality of the voice, Rozsak thought he could actually hear an edge of sincerity in that final sentence.

  And isn't it big of him to offer to allow us to run away so he "only" has to kill the four or five million people on Torch?

  "That's very kind of you," he said out loud, his voice cold. "If, however, you do not break off your attack run on Torch, I will engage you, and if that happens, quite a few people are going to get killed today. You may believe you have a sufficient advantage to defeat my own forces with minimal casualties. I assure you, if you do think that's the case, that you're wrong. And I also hereby inform you that your violation of the Torch hyper limit with an unidentified military force is considered a deliberate hostile act by the Kingdom of Torch and by the Solarian League. I officially instruct you at this time to change course immediately and leave the Torch System on a least-time course. If you do not comply with those instructions, deadly force will be used against you."

  * * *

  "—will be used against you."

  Adrian Luff looked around his flag bridge. Most of his personnel had their eyes focused upon their own displays, their own command consoles, but he knew where their ears were focused. And from the body language around him, from the expressions and partial expressions he could see, he knew the majority of them were thinking exactly what he was thinking—that here was the opportunity to break off. The excuse they could offer to their "Manpower" masters.

  And, at the same time, they were also thinking—again, like him—that the PNE's Warlords and Mars were too distinctive to simply fade away into the background of other pirate and mercenary warships wandering about the galaxy. If the emission signatures of those ships got back to the SLN, got circulated throughout the League and all of the minor, independent star nations, they'd be easy to identify. So whatever degree of personal anonymity he and his crews, as individuals, might be able to maintain, as a group, they would be marked men and women. There might not be a star nation against which the Eridani Edict could be enforced in this case, but that wouldn't prevent anyone from classifying them as pirates . . . and under acknowledged interstellar law, the punishment for piracy was death.

  But we've come too far, he thought harshl
y. We've clawed our way too far back towards who we used to be, what we used to stand for. And without Manpower's support, we'll never have the logistics base to be anything but pirates. Murderers and scum—ten-a-credit hired killers, not "defenders of the Revolution." If we walk away from this mission, we lose that.

  A corner of his brain tasted the bitter, bitter irony of the decision he confronted. In order to restore the soul of the Revolution, to redeem his own star nation once again, he faced an action which would stain his own soul forever. And, he discovered, despite the Revolution's official atheism, he did have a soul, or something that thought it was a soul, anyway. A soul that didn't want to do this . . . yet saw no option to doing it which wasn't even worse.

  And for all I know, that's not really Luiz Rozsak back there, at all, he told himself. We're not the only people with the Nightingale or its equivalent, after all, and Millicent and Yvonne have to be right about where the ships came from, anyway. They're not Manties, they're not Theisman's, and they sure as hell aren't Sollies, whoever may be claiming to be in command of them—not with those acceleration curves and FTL com capability. That only leaves the Erewhonese. Given the fact that Erewhon is in bed with the Torches, it'd make sense for them to have decided to protect Torch, if they got a sniff of the operation. But they could still have expected us to be a lot weaker than we are. They may have figured that six of their cruisers could take the force they thought was coming, using their missile pods. If they did, and if they're having second thoughts now, this could be a bluff. They could be waving the future threat of the SLN at us to convince us to break off when Rozsak isn't actually within fifty light-years of Torch.

  And given our intel about their relationship with Barregos and Rozsak, Rozsak really could be back there, too, Adrian. The fact that those are Erewhonese ships doesn't mean they couldn't have Solly "advisors" aboard. Don't forget that while you're trying to rationalize your way through all this. And that treaty he's talking about really exists, too, so it's entirely possible Rozsak is aboard one of those Erewhonese cruisers, even if there's not another single Solly in sight, in order to formally bring the League into all this.

  The thoughts flashed through his brain, and even as they did, he knew there wasn't much point to them. Not really. He was committed, and he'd committed all of his people along with him. The day they'd accepted these ships from Manpower, pinned all their hopes for restoring the Revolution on Manpower's material support, they'd also accepted this mission. And unless there was enough firepower out there to actually stop them, they had no choice but to carry it out.

  "I appreciate the warning, Admiral Rozsak," he heard himself say, "but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ignore it. In return, though, I warn you that any use of force against this task group will be met in kind."

  He pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair, shutting down his pickup, and turned back to his staff.

  "All right," he said with a thin smile, "despite Admiral Rozsak's having identified himself for us, I think you and Yvonne are essentially right about who these people are, Millicent. And I think you're right about the hardware available to them and what it is they're planning to do to us. So, since we can't run away from them even if we wanted to, I think we should just go ahead and do exactly what they expect us to."

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  "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," Si
egel 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?"