Torch of Freedom

reservations at all—or if there's something you think we should revisit—this is the time to bring it up.'

The others looked at one another, and then all of the ship commanders looked at Habib. Several eyebrows were raised, as if inviting the chief of staff to bring up anything they might have forgotten, but she only looked back and shook her head. Then she turned to Rozsak.

'I'm not saying something won't come up during the exercises, Sir. With that proviso and sheet anchor, though, I'd have to say I agree with your assessment. It's not perfect, but the tactical problem's got too many nasty pointy things growing out of it for 'perfect.' We've done our best to disaster-proof things, though, and I think it'll get the job done.'

She was right about the thorniness of the situation, Rozsak reflected. It wasn't that any single one of his objectives here in Torch was all that complicated. It was simply that some of them were fundamentally incompatible.

First and foremost, there was the need to protect the planet itself. And it was entirely too likely—indeed, a virtual certainty as far as he, Habib, and Watanapongse were concerned—that the StateSec outlaws Manpower had recruited had no interest at all in putting 'boots on the ground.'

Manpower didn't want its ex-slaves back, especially after they'd enjoyed such a taste of freedom and vengeance. No, what Manpower wanted was to see Torch erased from the face of the galaxy, preferably in a way which would thoroughly discourage any future, similarly uppity thoughts on the part of its property. And the Eridani Edict's prohibition of deliberate, genocidal attacks on planetary populations was aimed at star nations—which knew the Solarian League Navy would come to call on them if they violated its restrictions. Since Manpower wasn't a star nation, and there was no legal mechanism for the Solarian League Navy to go after a non-Solarian corporation, the Edict was a moot point as far as it was concerned. And since its mercenaries represented a force which no longer had a star nation to call its own, the actual officers and crews carrying out the operations wouldn't be particularly concerned by the Edict, either. All of which meant the attackers would probably settle for pasting the planet with a few 'accidental' cee-fractional missile strikes. A half-dozen hundred-ton missiles hitting the planet at sixty percent or so of light-speed should pretty much pasteurize its ecosystem and anyone living in it. Forty-gigaton-range fireballs tended to have that effect.

Which, in turn, meant providing enough missile defense close to the planet to keep that from happening.

Rozsak's second objective was, while accomplishing the first one, to suffer as few casualties of his own as possible. That meant using his range and maneuver advantages to the full. Unfortunately, units placed to provide missile defense around the planet would be effectively anchored to Torch. They wouldn't be able to maneuver freely without exposing the planet.

His third objective was to accomplish the first two without revealing his new weapons' capabilities to anyone outside the Torch System. Frankly, he didn't want anyone else to find out about them, even the Torches. That wasn't going to happen, of course, but it was particularly important to keep anyone in the Solarian League from finding out if at all possible.

Fourth, the best way to accomplish that third objective, was to see to it that no one who might be interested in sharing his discoveries with people Rozsak didn't want finding out about them just yet—which was to say, no one at all from the attacking force—escaped.

Individually, each problem was relatively straightforward; in combination, they demanded a tricky judgment of capabilities, possibilities, and threats. And, try as they might, neither he nor any of his staff had been able to come up with a solution to their problems which didn't violate the principle of concentration of force. To make this work was going to require the division of his forces, and that was a notion Luiz Rozsak hated with every tactician's bone in his body.

But, he reflected, as that old proverb Oravil is fond of quoting says, 'Needs must when the Devil drives.' And the Devil is sure as hell driving this one.

'I think you're right, Edie,' he said out loud, then turned to Commander Raycraft and Commander Stensrud. 'Still, Laura, you and Melanie are the ones who're going to have the toughest job if anything goes wrong with the interception. I wish we had the four-pod rings aboard Charade. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we could just go ahead and deploy the pods and pull Melanie back out of the inner system.'

Raycraft and Stensrud nodded in unison. The lightweight pods in Charade's bays were simply too stripped down for any sort of extensive independent deployment. They required too much external power supply, just for starters, and the people who'd designed them had deliberately accepted limited—very limited—operational lifetimes for their onboard systems. All of which meant Stensrud couldn't simply stack the things in Torch orbit and then get her ship the hell out of the way.

'I can't say I'm particularly enthralled by the limitations myself, Sir,' Raycraft acknowledged. 'On the other hand, I'll have a lot more missile defense than you will. And if your jaw of the nutcracker does what it's supposed to, it probably won't matter a lot.'

'I know.' Rozsak snorted in amusement. 'The problem is that I've never been all that enthralled'—he used her own verb deliberately—'by operational planning that includes words like 'probably won't.' '

Someone else chuckled in matching amusement, but then the admiral set his coffee cup firmly aside with an air of finality.

'All right. I think we have a plan. Now let's see how it works out as an exercise. Edie, I want you and Dirk- Steven to set that up ASAP. We don't know how long we have before the bad guys come calling, but it's always best to err on the side of pessimism in a case like this. That means we're not going to be able to spend a lot of time actually working on this in real space, so get the sims loaded to everybody. Hopefully, we'll be able to have at least one run through with everything short of live fire exercises from the Masquerades, so be ready to tweak the simulations on the basis of anything we discover in the process.'

'Yes, Sir,' Edie Habib replied in a rather more formal than usual tone. 'A lot of this is going to come straight out of the playbook we've been working on,' she continued, 'so I think we can probably set up the exercise pretty quickly. We can probably be ready to go by . . . what?' She arched an eyebrow at Kamstra as she spoke. 'Tomorrow morning, Dirk-Steven?'

'Better make it afternoon,' Kamstra advised after a moment's thought. 'I've noticed Murphy tends to turn up during the planning process, as well.'

'A cogent thought,' Habib agreed, and turned back to Rozsak. 'Make that tomorrow afternoon, Sir. Right after lunch.'

'Good,' Rozsak said. 'In that case, I think we can adjourn.'

* * *

'So how bad is it?' Ganny El leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.

Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.

But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a 'jackleg mechanic,' and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.

'Pretty damn bad, Ganny. It could go out at any time.'

'Why?' Ganny glared at the housing. 'Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!'

'Well, they are . . . mostly,' Andrew acknowledged. 'Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one'—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotor-like device longer than his arm—'is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump.'

'It can't just be fixed?'