Torch of Freedom

And given our intel about their relationship with Barregos and Rozsak, Rozsak really could be back there, too, Adrian. The fact that those are Erewhonese ships doesn't mean they couldn't have Solly 'advisors' aboard. Don't forget that while you're trying to rationalize your way through all this. And that treaty he's talking about really exists, too, so it's entirely possible Rozsak is aboard one of those Erewhonese cruisers, even if there's not another single Solly in sight, in order to formally bring the League into all this.

The thoughts flashed through his brain, and even as they did, he knew there wasn't much point to them. Not really. He was committed, and he'd committed all of his people along with him. The day they'd accepted these ships from Manpower, pinned all their hopes for restoring the Revolution on Manpower's material support, they'd also accepted this mission. And unless there was enough firepower out there to actually stop them, they had no choice but to carry it out.

'I appreciate the warning, Admiral Rozsak,' he heard himself say, 'but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ignore it. In return, though, I warn you that any use of force against this task group will be met in kind.'

He pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair, shutting down his pickup, and turned back to his staff.

'All right,' he said with a thin smile, 'despite Admiral Rozsak's having identified himself for us, I think you and Yvonne are essentially right about who these people are, Millicent. And I think you're right about the hardware available to them and what it is they're planning to do to us. So, since we can't run away from them even if we wanted to, I think we should just go ahead and do exactly what they expect us to.'

Chapter Fifty-Seven

'It's confirmed, Ma'am—Alpha Two,' Lieutenant Cornelia Rensi said.

'Thank you, Cornelia,' Commander Raycraft acknowledged, then turned to her 'staff.' Actually, aside from Lieutenant Commander Michael Dobbs, who'd been added to Artillerist's complement expressly to act as Light Cruiser Division 7036.2's chief of staff, Acting-Commodore Laura Raycraft's staff officers were identical to Commander Laura Raycraft's ship's officers. That was the main reason she'd chosen, unlike Luiz Rozsak, who had ensconced himself on Marksman's flag bridge, to fight her ship and lead her division from Artillerist's command deck.

'Not much of a surprise, Ma'am, is it?' Dobbs said now, and she shook her head.

Like Dobbs, she'd always anticipated that Alpha Two was the most likely of the scenarios Luiz Rozsak and his officers had worked out. In fact, she'd felt it was so likely that she'd lobbied hard in favor of concentrating the entire task group in hyper-space. She knew Rozsak had been tempted to agree with her, but she'd also known he wasn't going to. As he'd pointed out to her, somebody had to be in a position to cover the inner system just in case it should happen they'd guessed wrong after all and the Peep mercenaries came in on more than one bearing. Which was how her own ship and Archer happened to be sitting here in orbit as the flagship of 'Anvil Force,' along with Commander Melanie Stensrud's Charade and Lieutenant Commander Hjálmar Snorrason's four Warrior-class destroyers: Genghis Kahn, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, andJulius Caesar. They were accompanied by Commander Maria Le Fossi's three light cruisers and the seventeen ships of Destroyer Flotilla 2960—not to mention eight frigates of the Royal Torch Navy—but those other ships were there for slightly different reasons.

It was a lot of hulls, even though her own light cruiser division had been chosen because it had one less ship than either of Light Cruiser Squadron 7036's other two divisions. In fact, Anvil Force almost certainly had more ships than it was going to need. But since Anvil Force's true primary mission was to prevent any long-range missiles from getting through to Torch, redundancy had become a beautiful thing.

And if those people are prepared to go to maximum-rate fire, or if it turns out they're carrying full loads of pods tractored to their hulls, we may just turn out not to be all that 'redundant' after all, she reflected grimly.

There was no evidence, aside from the weapons Technodyne had provided for the Republic of Monica that anyone outside the Haven Quadrant had been experimenting with pods. Even the Technodyne pods had been pure system defense weapons, never designed for offensive deploymenyt ala Manticore or Haven, and all of Jiri Watanapongse's sources insisted that the SLN still dismissed the entire concept as the primitive, ineffectual thing it had been decades ago. But StateSec refugees who'd deserted after the Royal Manticoran Navy's ferociously successful Operation Buttercup brought the First Havenite War to a screeching halt would have a very different attitude towards them, and it was at least possible they'd managed to communicate that attitude to their Manpower sponsors. And if the thought of Manpower's putting advanced weaponry into production was ridiculous, so was the thought of Manpower's being able to make literally dozens of ex-SLN battlecruisers available to proxies like the Republic of Monica . . . or a lunatic fleet of StateSec holdouts.

So, yes, it was possible, however unlikely, that these people had missile pods of their own. And if they could generate enough saturation to overload the defenders' missile defenses . . .

They'd only have to get lucky with a handful of them, at relativistic speeds, she reminded herself.

'I have to say,' Dobbs continued, 'that I really kind of wish we'd gone with Alpha One instead of Alpha Two.' She glanced at him, and he grimaced. 'I understand the logic, Ma'am. I just don't like sitting around on my hands while someone else does all the heavy lifting.'

'I can't say I don't feel at least a little the same,' Raycraft admitted. Alpha One would have turned Anvil Force into a true anvil, with the light cruisers and Hjálmar Snorrason's destroyers advancing from Torch to catch the attackers between themselves and Rozsak's Hammer Force. 'On the other hand, the Admiral was right. Alpha One probably would be a case of gilding the lily. If he can't do the job with six of the Marksmans, we probably couldn't do it with eight, either. Besides, I imagine there'll be time to go to Alpha Three, if it comes to it. And if it doesn't, then not giving ourselves away with active impeller signatures strikes me as a pretty good notion.'

'Oh, I agree, Ma'am,' Dobbs told her mildly, and she snorted once, then turned back to Siegel.

'How long until the Admiral has Hammer Force in position?' she asked.

'It looks like they came up about two million klicks short on their planned translation, Ma'am,' Siegel replied, and Raycraft nodded. She already noticed that Lieutenant Wu's astrogation had been a little off, and she wasn't surprised. In fact, she was all in favor of coming up short in a situation like this one, herself. 'Assuming constant accelerations across the board, though,' Siegel continued, 'Hammer Force will close to the specified range in about fifty-eight minutes. At that point, the enemy will be just under a hundred and twelve million kilometers—call it six-point-two light-minutes—from Torch.'

Raycraft nodded again, then turned to the com image of Lieutenant Richard McKenzie, Artillerist's chief engineer.

'Stand ready on the wedge, Richard. We may want it in an hour or so.'

* * *

'Velocities have equalized, Citizen Commodore,' Citizen Lieutenant Commander Pierre Stravinsky said quietly, and Adrian Luff glanced at the master plot again.

There'd been no further communication with Admiral Rozsak, assuming it really was Admiral Rozsak behind them, although that didn't necessarily strike him as a good sign. Not that anything the other man might have said was going to cause him to rethink his own plans and options at this point. He'd decided what he was going to do, and he wasn't going to start second-guessing himself at this late point.

The range between his ships and their pursuers had opened while the bogeys made up their initial velocity disadvantage. With an acceleration advantage of just under one kilometer per second, that had taken 9.75 minutes. The range between them had risen to just over 13.3 million kilometers during that time; now that velocities had equalized at 7,886 KPS, the range had begun to drop once again. From here on, their pursuers would steadily eat away the distance between them.