Torch of Freedom

noticed that the damned rotor shaft is snapped? Not warped, not bent, not deformes—snapped? Which doesn't even mention the collateral damage the thing did when it went! And—thanks to a pair of frigging cowboys I could name—the parts we need to fix it are in a garbage bin somewhere down on the surface of Mesa!'

His volume had risen steadily through the course of his explanation. That might have had something to do with how long he'd spent throwing up after the violent nausea of the totally unexpected crash translation. Or, of course, it might have stemmed from some other concern, Brice supposed.

Most likely not, though.

Victor Cachat didn't seem disturbed, however. Neither did Anton Zilwicki.

'Trust us, will you, Andrew?' Victor said. 'Nothing that can happen to us now is remotely as bad as what would have happened had we not gotten off Mesa in time.'

Andrew was still glaring. 'It's going to take months to get that generator working again!'

Zilwicki shrugged. 'I admit that's unfortunate—but mostly because I'm worried what's going to happen before we can finally get our news back home. Just drifting in space for a few months by itself—we've got power, right? Plenty of food and water, too—is no big deal. That's why they invented chess and card games and such.'

* * *

Andrew didn't stay mad for long. He was no stranger to hard and tedious labor and a damn good card player. But what overrode all those issues was that if Zilwicki and Cachat hadn't dumped the spare parts a certain Steph Turner wouldn't be on board the ship.

Given the right circumstances—especially the right company—there was actually a lot to be said in favor of drifting through space for months.

* * *

Brice would certainly have agreed with that proposition. He'd been worried, at first, that he'd have to engage in a constant emotional wrestling match with Ed and James. But within two days, Nancy somehow made it clear that if she was going to get interested in any of them, it was going to be Brice. At that point, being reasonably good sports and excellent friends, Ed and James stepped aside.

Why did she have that preference? Brice had no idea. Maybe girls climbing into crates got imprinted like ducks climbing out of eggs. At the age of ten, he'd understood girls just fine. Five years later, everything about them was a mystery.

Chapter Fifty-Five

'Alpha translation in twelve minutes, Citizen Commodore,' Citizen Commander Hartman reported.

'Thank you, Millicent,' Citizen Commodore Adrian Luff said with deliberate calm. He glanced around the flag bridge of his new flagship, inhaled a deep, unobtrusive breath of satisfaction at the disciplined efficiency of his personnel, and then looked at the 'adviser' standing courteously beside his command chair.

Captain Maddock looked like his own calm, professional self—despite what Luff had always thought of as the truly ridiculous uniform of the Mesa System Navy. There were times Luff was actually tempted to like Maddock, but the moments were few and far between. However courteous the Mesan might be, and Luff was willing to admit the captain took pains to be as courteous as possible, no officer of the People's Navy in Exile could ever forget what Maddock really represented.

Their keeper. Their paymasters' agent. The 'technical adviser' whose real function was to make certain the PNE was prepared to do exactly what it was told, when it was told to, and where it was told to do it. And the fact that their paymasters were something as loathsome as Manpower only made what he symbolized even worse. The Mesan captain was the living reminder of every single nasty little accommodation Luff had been forced to make, all of the sordid lengths to which he and his people had been forced to go in their crusade to maintain something which could someday hope to oppose the counterrevolutionaries who had toppled the People's Republic.

There were times, especially late at night, when he found it difficult to sleep, when Adrian Luff had found himself wondering if that 'someday' would ever come. Now he knew it would. Although no one—including himself —would have argued for a moment that the odds weren't still enormously against the PNE's ultimate victory (or even its survival), at least they had a chance now. However poor and tattered it might be, it was a chance, and he told himself—again—fiercely that buying that chance was worth even what they were about to do at Manpower's orders.

He glanced at the master plot whose icons showed the ships of his fleet, translating steadily down the alpha bands as they rode one of hyper-space's gravity waves towards the normal-space wall. There were more—lots more—of those icons than there had been, including a solid core of battlecruisers. The ten ex- Indefatigables were smaller than the four Warlord-C-class ships, like his own Bernard Montgomery, which had remained loyal to the Revolution, and they were woefully underprovided—by Haven Quadrant standards, at least—with active antimissile defenses. But he had to admit that their basic electronics fit was better than anything the People's Republic had ever had, even though the software driving those electronics had required considerable tweaking. And they had a healthy number of broadside tubes, although the standard Solarian anti-ship missiles, frankly, were pieces of junk.

On the other hand, from his Mesan contacts, he knew the SLN was in the process of upgrading all of its standard anti-ship missiles, and he had to admit that the Cataphracts in his battlecruisers' magazines were better than anything the People's Navy—or State Security—had ever been able to provide him with. They weren't as good as the multidrive missiles the damned Manties had introduced (and which Theisman and his never-to-be- sufficiently-damned counterrevolutionaries had since developed), but they offered a far greater capability than the PNE had ever before possessed, and they could be launched internally, rather than requiring pods.

His eight heavy cruisers were all Mars-D-class ships which had escaped the counterrevolutionaries, but five of his light cruisers—all of them, actually, except for the Jacinthe, Félicie and Véronique— were Solarian Bridgeport-class ships, essentially little more than upsized War Harvest-class destroyers. The Bridgeports had three more energy mounts per broadside and substantially more magazine space than the War Harvests, but they had the same number of tubes and were even more woefully underequipped than the Indefatigables, proportionally, with active missile defense.

All sixteen of his destroyers were War Harvests, and seven of their captains weren't exactly what he'd call reliable. StateSec's naval forces had been heavily weighted towards heavy cruisers and battlecruisers, and most of the rest of the SS's units had been ships-of-the-wall. Their real function had been to ensure the reliability of the regular People's Navy ships with which they had been stationed (which was why most of them had been destroyed in action when the regular Navy's ships deserted in such droves to the counterrevolutionaries), and that had put a heavy emphasis on firepower and size. Which meant, of course, that very few StateSec warships had been mere light cruisers or destroyers. He'd really have preferred to promote internally to provide commanding officers for all of the destroyers with which Manpower had provided the People's Navy in Exile, but it had been far more important to provide solidly Havenite complements for his heavier units first, and adding so many Indefatigables to his force mix had eaten up qualified officers at an alarming rate. In fact, he'd been forced to promote quite a few enlisted personnel to officer's rank just to do that much.

Providing similarly solid officer complements for the destroyers had been impossible, so he'd had no choice but to rely on more of the mercenaries (there was no point using any other term to describe them) with which Manpower had supplied him. He'd chosen his nine Havenite destroyer skippers as much for toughness of mind as capability, but although he hadn't discussed it with anyone outside his own staff and flag captain, he had serious doubts about how many of those ships the PNE was going to be able to hang onto after Operation Ferret. It was much more likely, in his opinion, that the mercenary-officered light units were going to mysteriously disappear—with