Torch of Freedom

'Manties?' Luff asked rather more sharply than he'd intended to as visions of great big, nasty multidrive missiles flickered through his brain.

'I don't think so, Citizen Commodore,' Kamerling replied. 'The pulse rate and the modulation are both wrong. It's a bit more sophisticated than we were seeing out of the Manties during the final phases of the last war, but based on our current intel, it's a lot less sophisticated than anything we'd expect to see out of them now.'

'I see.'

Kamerling was probably right, Luff thought. It made sense, anyway. Then again . . .

'How confident is CIC about those tonnage estimates?' he asked Stravinsky. The ops officer looked at him, and the citizen commodore waved a hand. 'I'm thinking about those reports on the Manties' new battlecruiser class. Two million tons is too small to be a waller, even a dreadnought, but isn't that new battlecruiser of theirs supposed to mass right around that much?'

'The Nikes actually come in at around two and a half million, Citizen Commodore,' Captain Maddock said before Stravinsky could respond. Luff transferred his gaze to the Mesan, who shrugged. 'That intelligence has been pretty conclusively confirmed, according to our sources,' he said. 'And I think your CIC crews are too good to underestimate a mass reading by twenty percent at this short a range.'

'Captain Maddock has a point, Citizen Commodore,' Hartman said. 'Coupled with what Yvonne's just told us about their communications, it's got to be the Erewhonese.'

'But Erewhon doesn't have anything anywhere near that tonnage range,' Luff pointed out.

'They don't have any warships in that tonnage range, Citizen Commodore,' Hartman replied grimly. 'What they could have back there, though, is a couple of smallish freighters with mil-spec compensators and cargo holds packed full of missile pods.'

Luff felt his stomach muscles tighten. Their 'benefactors' ' latest intelligence reports all insisted that Erewhon's multidrive missile capability was extremely limited compared to that of Manticore. Or, for that matter, of the counterrevolutionaries in Nouveau Paris, at this point. But even with the original, first-generation Manty MDMs they would outrange anything he had. Except—

'If they had MDMs, they'd already be shooting at us,' he heard his own voice say calmly. 'Twelve million kilometers is less than a quarter of the powered range they're supposed to have.'

'Agreed, Citizen Commodore,' Hartman said. 'But everything we've seen suggests the real problem is that they've got more range than they have fire control capability. If they're chasing us with a pair of missile freighters, then those six heavy cruisers are probably planning on acting as forward fire control platforms. They'll try to bring them in close enough to improve their hit probabilities—probably just to the edge of single-drive missile range—while they keep the freighters far enough back to be outside our own range of them when they roll the pods.'

'That makes a lot of sense, Citizen Commodore,' Stravinsky said. 'Assuming they are Erewhonese—and given what Yvonne's just said about their FTL com, I think the Citizen Commander's right about that—I agree they could be firing on us now, if our two bigger bogies are freighters and they are carrying MDMs. But Citizen Commander Hartman's also absolutely right about the accuracy penalty they'd pay at this range. Manties might not worry about that, if there's anything to the scraps we've heard about the Battle of Lovat, but Erewhon's accuracy at extended MDM range is going to be extremely poor. At the same time, they brought a lot more velocity over the alpha wall with them than we did, and they've got the acceleration edge on us—or, at least, their heavy cruisers do—so they must figure they can bring us into the range they want before we get into our own powered envelope of the planet. They may have lots of missiles, but why waste a bunch of them at this kind of range when they don't have to?'

Luff felt himself nodding slowly in agreement with his subordinates' logic. Given the Erewhonese Navy's capabilities, it made perfect sense. In fact, it was probably what he'd be doing. And it explained why sixteen ships were chasing forty-eight. It didn't matter how outnumbered they were if their weapons could reach their enemies and their enemies weapons couldn't reach them.

Of course, he thought coldly, there's a tiny flaw in their logic. They don't know—

'Citizen Commodore, we have an incoming transmission,' Kamerling said, and Luff turned back towards her. 'It's from a Rear Admiral Rozsak.'

Luff's eyes widened abruptly, and he heard a hiss of indrawn breath from Hartman. Rozsak? It couldn't be—not with those observed acceleration rates! And yet . . .

'Who is it addressed to, Yvonne?' he asked.

'To you, Citizen Commodore,' she replied. 'Not by name, but—With your permission, Citizen Commodore?'

She indicated the secondary com display at his command station, and he nodded. A moment later, the face of a man Luff had never met, but recognized instantly, appeared on the display.

'This is Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak, Solarian League Navy.' The voice was cold, hard. 'I wish to speak to the senior officer of the State Security forces currently planning to attack the sovereign planet of Torch.'

Luff felt an icy hand squeeze his heart as a crawl from CIC across the bottom of his display confirmed that, according to Leon Trotsky's intelligence base, the image he was looking at and the voice he was listening to truly did belong to the senior Solarian naval officer in the region. Who obviously knew who they were.

No, he thought a heartbeat later. No, he knows what we are—or he thinks he does, anyway—but not who we are. The Warlords and the Mars-Cs would make him pretty sure we're State Security, even if he'd never had any idea at all what was coming. Besides, if he knew names and faces, he'd be using them now—asking for me by name. He'd know exactly how badly that would shake the nerve of any CO in my position.

He felt a flicker of relief at the thought, even though he knew it was irrational. If it wasn't the Erewhonese back there, if it really was the Solarian League Navy, the consequences for all of the PNE's plans and hopes could be catastrophic.

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. A 'mercenary' outfit—one the current regime in Nouveau Paris has outlawed and no one else is willing to support, openly, at least. 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