Torch of Freedom

'Edie, they're planning an Eridani Edict violation, whatever they want to call it. Compared to that, what's a dozen or so Indefatigables one way or the other?'

'Point,' Habib conceded.

'Well.' Rozsak looked at his half-full wine glass thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged and drained it. 'Let's be getting to the flag deck.'

* * *

'All right, people, they're here,' Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak said six minutes later, smiling thinly at his staff on SLNS Marksman's flag bridge. 'Unfortunately, we hadn't counted on quite how many people they were bringing to the party,' he observed.

'I can't say I'm too happy about those emission signatures, either, Sir,' Lieutenant Commander Thomas Szklenski said from his quadrant of the outsized com screen which tied Flag Bridge to Auxiliary Control. As in the Royal Manticoran Navy, Marksman's Erewhonese designers had placed the emergency command deck as far from the cruiser's normal bridge as they possibly could and still keep it inside the armored protection of her core hull. As Marksman's executive officer, AuxCon was Szklenski's battle station, and his brown eyes were narrow as he contemplated the tactical plot in front of him. 'Ten Solarian battlecruisers?' He shook his own head as he unwittingly echoed Habib's earlier remark. 'Where the hell did they get their hands on those?'

'At least they're all Indefatigables, not Nevadas,' Lieutenant Robert Womack pointed out from his own com display. Womack, the cruiser's tactical officer, was with Commodore Kamstra on Marksman's command deck.

'A point, Robert,' Rozsak acknowledged. 'On the other hand, I don't think we can afford to assume Manpower just picked these things up in a boneyard somewhere. From all the reports we've seen, the units they supplied to Monica had first-line electronics on board. I don't think there's any reason to hope these units don't.

'No, Sir,' Habib agreed, gazing down at the plot. 'At the same time though,' she looked up again, 'the Indefatigables' missile defenses are going to be a lot weaker than what those four Warlords will be able to manage.'

'Oh, thank you, Edie!' Rozsak said, shaking his head at her with a much broader smile. 'It's such a comfort to know I can always count on you to find the silver lining in even the darkest cloud.'

'You're welcome, Sir,' Habib replied from behind a perfect poker face, and Rozsak waved a finger under her nose.

'You can be replaced, you know,' he warned her, and she nodded.

'I realize that, Sir,' she said gravely.

'Good!'

Rozsak gave his finger one more wave, then turned his attention back to Lieutenant Womack. The lieutenant, like most of the other officers physically or electronically present, was smiling at the byplay between the admiral and his chief of staff. That was a good sign, Rozsak thought, especially given the tactical plot's current display.

I've been telling everyone we had to assume they'd been heavily reinforced, but I never figured on there being this many of them, he told himself. At least I picked the right threat axis . . . assuming, of course, that they haven't given these bastards even more ships than we've already seen to come sneaking in from somewhere else! He suppressed an urge to shake his head as his own eyes went back to the plot. On the other hand, let's not get too carried away here, Luiz. They're already using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut, given the resistance they undoubtedly expect. Given their firepower advantage, there's no point in their trying to fool around with some kind of fancy misdirection.

'Commander Habib almost certainly has a point about their active defenses, Robert,' he said out loud. 'But I think we're going to have to assume these people have the Aegis upgrade. I know—I know!' He half-raised one hand. 'The units at Monica didn't have Aegis. Well, they didn't have Halo, either, and I think we're going to have to assume these people have that, too. If they don't, there's no harm done. If they do have them, though, and we assume they don't, things could get uglier than they have to. So, assuming they do, tell me what you think that means for targeting priorities.'

'Yes, Sir.'

Womack frowned in obvious thought for several seconds, his eyes looking off-screen, where they were no doubt considering the command deck's repeater plot. Rozsak waited patiently. The one hole he had not yet filled in his own staff was Operations. He needed to do something about that, and he intended to, although he didn't expect Dirk-Steven Kamstra to be especially delighted when the commodore found out who Rozsak had in mind for the position. Despite his youth, Robert Womack had thoroughly demonstrated both his competence and his levelheadedness, and Rozsak had been impressed by his performance since they'd arrived here in Torch. He had every intention of stealing Womack from Kamstra as soon as the current operation was over. What mattered at the moment, though, was that in the course of the task force's exercises, the lieutenant had demonstrated a better grasp of the Mark-17-E missile's capabilities—and limitations—than Rozsak himself had, in some ways.

'Judging from our own exercises, and the data we've amassed on our new birds' capabilities, Sir,' Womack said after a moment, 'and bearing in mind that we know exactly how Halo works, which means we know how to allow for it, we can probably expect it to degrade our targeting and fire control by about . . . say, fifteen percent. It might be a little worse than that; it might be a little better than that. A lot's going to depend on operator proficiency, and there's no way we can know about that one way or the other ahead of time.

'At the same time, we're starting from a significantly better probability of hit percentage, thanks to the Erewhonese upgrades, so we still ought to have a significant advantage in terms of accuracy over anything they've got. And I doubt very much that the Havenite-built ships have Halo, at all. I could be wrong, but the onboard side of the system would have to have been squeezed in somewhere, and there's not room for that without taking something else fairly big out to compensate.

'To be honest, I think Aegis would be a bigger problem for us, at least where the Indefatigables are concerned. If they've got it, they're going to be able to thicken up their missile defenses quite a bit. They're still going to be weaker in point defense clusters than the Havenite units, but they'll be able to kill more of our birds in the outer and middle defense zones. Of course, the downside for them is that they're going to have standard SLN counter-missiles in the tubes—and the canisters—and they aren't as good as ours. And using Aegis is going to decrease their shipkiller throw weight, as well.'

He paused, head slightly cocked, as if considering what he'd just said, then shrugged.

'Bottom line, Sir, is that the combination of Halo and Aegis will probably give us a per-missile hit probability against an Indefatigable that's only thirty-five or forty percent better than against a Warlord. Assuming the people on board the ships are fully familiar with their systems and trained to Frontier Fleet standards, that is.'

Rozsak felt his lips twitch slightly at Womack's qualifying last sentence. 'Frontier Fleet standards' implied a degree of contempt for Frontier Fleet's Battle Fleet colleagues which was unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon one's viewpoint) fully justified. Probably because Battle Fleet spent all of its training time firing simulated missiles at simulated defenses all under the command of officers who not only never had seen combat but almost certainly expected that they never would see it. And in an environment where umpires and simulation managers knew better than to make potential enemies out of future senior officers by grading their results too critically. Luiz Rozsak was familiar with Frontier Fleet's own version of the Solarian League's institutional arrogance from direct, personal experience, but he fully shared Womack's estimate of Battle Fleet's capabilities. In fact, it was one of the things he and Oraville Barregos were counting on, when he came right down to it.

'All right,' he said. 'That's about what I expected. The bad news is that it's going to take lots of missiles to kill these people—probably a lot more missiles than we'd estimated. The good news is that we've got 'lots of missiles' to do it with. Lieutenant Wu,' he looked at the com image of Lieutenant Richard Wu,Marksman's astrogator, 'how long to normal-space?'

'We'll be making our translation in seventy-five seconds, Admiral.' Wu's voice was remarkably calm, given