Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  "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 squar
ed!"

  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.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  "Missile launch!"

  Commander Raycraft's head jerked around in astonishment. That couldn't be right! Hammer Force was still eleven million kilometers from the enemy!

  "Many missiles, multiple launches!" Travis Siegel said. "Estimate three hundred ninety-plus—repeat, three-zero-niner-plus!"

  "What the hell—?" Raycraft heard Commander Dobbs's muttered question, although the corner of her mind which was paying attention to such things felt confident he'd never meant to say it aloud. On the other hand, exactly the same question was burning through her own brain as she stared at the plot.

  It was ridiculous. Hammer Force was at least three million kilometers outside the powered envelope of even a Javelin or Trebuchet shipkiller, and firing missiles that would go ballistic, unable to pursue evading targets, that far short of their intended victims was stupid! A useless waste of ammunition! They couldn't possibly think they could—