Torch of Freedom

shrugged. 'You've gotten an occasional wild hair that didn't go anywhere, Boss, but not all that damned often.'

'Maybe.' It was his turn to shrug. 'And maybe,' he lowered his voice a bit more, 'it's opening-night nerves, too. This game's just a bit bigger-league than any I've played in before, you know.'

Habib started to laugh, but she stopped herself before the reaction reached the surface. She'd stood at Rozsak's shoulder through all manner of operations—against pirates, against smugglers, against slavers, terrorists, rebels, desperate patriots striking back against Frontier Security. No matter the operation, no matter the cost or the objective, he'd never once lost control of the situation or himself.

Yet even though all of that was true, she realized, this would be his first true battle. The first time naval forces under his command had actually met an adversary with many times his own tonnage of warships and hundreds of times as many personnel. And, she reflected grimly, the price if he failed would be unspeakable.

Many of the people who thought they knew Luiz Rozsak might have expected him to take that possibility in stride. And, in some ways, they would have been right, too. Edie Habib never doubted that whatever happened to the planet of Torch, Rozsak would never waver in the pursuit of his 'Sepoy Option.' But Habib probably knew him better than anyone else in the universe, including Oravil Barregos. And because she did, she knew the thing he would never, ever admit—not even to her. Probably not even to himself.

She knew what had truly driven him to craft the 'Sepoy Option' so many years before. She knew what hid beneath the cynicism and the amoral pursuit of power he let other people see. Knew what truly gave him the magnetism that bound people as diverse as Edie Habib, Jiri Watanapongse, and Kao Huang to him.

And what would never, ever let him forgive himself if somehow the StateSec renegades in front of him got through to the planet of Torch.

If he's feeling a little . . . antsy, it sure as hell shouldn't be surprising, she thought.

'Well,' she said out loud, 'maybe it is your biggest game so far, Boss. But your record in the minors strikes me as pretty damned good. I think you're ready for the majors.'

'Why,' he smiled at her, 'so do I. Which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to make me totally immune to butterflies, after all.'

* * *

'Message from Admiral Rozsak, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Rensi reported. 'Hammer Force will be reducing acceleration in'—the communications officer glanced at the time display—'four and a half minutes.'

'Thank you, Cornelia,' Laura Raycraft said, and glanced at Lieutenant Commander Dobbs. 'Do you think they'll decide to surrender after all when they find out about the Mark-17-Es?' she asked quietly.

'I don't know, Ma'am,' Dobbs replied. 'But if it was me, I'd sure as hell fall all over myself surrendering!' He shook his head. 'Of course, if it was me, I'd've broken off and headed for home the minute the Admiral came out of hyper. This is a busted op if I've ever seen one. Even if they manage to take out the planet, somebody's going to be left to pass on their ship IDs to the Navy and everybody else out this way.'

'The same thought occurred to me,' Raycraft agreed. 'And if I were them, I'd be damned worried about multidrive missiles. I know we've identified ourselves as Solarian, but they have to have figured out that these are Erewhon-built ships, and in their shoes, I'd be figuring that meant those two 'freighters' behind the Admiral were probably stuffed with MDMs. Of course, we are talking about StateSec types, and nobody with the brains to pour piss out of a boot would still be dreaming about 'restoring the Revolution' in Nouveau Paris. Anybody who's that far out of touch with reality obviously isn't very good at threat analysis to begin with.'

'And maybe they're figuring on taking the time to hunt down anybody or anything that might be able to pass their emissions signatures on to anyone else, too,' Dobbs said more darkly. Raycraft raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. 'If they don't think they're looking at MDMs, Ma'am, then they have to think they've got an overwhelming advantage in weight of metal. Against what they've seen so far, assuming equal missile ranges, they probably could mop up everything we've got and then take their time making sure they've also destroyed anyone with a record of their emissions. If they managed that, there wouldn't be any evidence to prove who'd done it . . . which is what they've been planning on all along, isn't it?'

'You may be right about that. No,' Raycraft shook her head, 'I'm sure you are right about it. Unfortunately for them, they don't have equal missile ranges, now do they?'

* * *

Adrian Luff watched his own plot, and despite the impending clash, despite his own lingering revulsion at the mission he'd been assigned, he felt oddly . . . calm.

He and his ships were committed. They had been, from the moment Luiz Rozsak's Hammer Force turned up behind them, and they knew it. Luff's initial attack plan had gone disastrously awry the instant those ships translated out of hyper, and everyone aboard all of his ships knew that, as well, just as they knew he'd refused to break off even when challenged in the name of the mighty Solarian League. Yet there was surprisingly little evidence of panic aboard Leon Trotsky and the other ships of the PNE. StateSec secret policemen they might once have been, uniformed enforcers of a brutal regime who'd become little more than common pirates since the fall of the People's Republic, yet they were more than that, as well.

However foolish the rest of the universe might think they were to dream of restoring the People's Republic and the Committee of Public Safety, it was a dream to which they had genuinely committed their lives. It was what bound them together, and in the binding they had found strength. The long months of preparation for a mission virtually none of them wanted to carry out had forged them back into a unit, an organized force, and in the forging they'd gained a temper they had never known before. Even some of the mercenaries Manpower had recruited to fill out their ranks had been forged into that same sense of unity, of purpose. Singly, they might still be the lunatic holdouts, the renegades, the agents of brutality the galaxy considered all of them to be, but together, they truly were the People's Navy in Exile.

They had that now, and Luff wasn't giving it up. Whatever the cost, whatever the consequences, they would be the People's Navy in Exile, or they would be nothing at all.

* * *

As Gowan Maddock sat on Adrian Luff's flag bridge, watching the kilometers between the citizen commodore's ships and their enemies dwindle steadily away, he realized just how badly he (and the rest of the Mesan Alignment) had underestimated these people. Oh, they were still lunatics—crackpots! But they were lunatics who refused to panic. Crackpots who'd accepted that they were probably going to die in pursuit of their lunacy, yet refused to relinquish the madness which empowered them.

He sat in his own command chair, watching Luff engage in a deadly version of the ancient Old Earth game of 'chicken,' and knew that in their quixotic quest, the men and women of the People's Navy in Exile had become something far greater—something far tougher and much more dangerous—than he'd ever admitted to himself before.

* * *

'Coming up on the specified deceleration point in thirty-five seconds, Sir,' Lieutenant Womack said quietly.

'Thank you, Robert,' Luiz Rozsak replied, his own eyes intent as he watched the master plot.

Masquerade and Kabuki had fallen back a bit, placing themselves behind Kamstra's cruisers and their destroyers. The range between Marksman and the enemy battlecruisers had fallen to the specified eleven million kilometers, and as he'd pointed out to Habib, there was no point closing the rest of the way to their chosen firing point too rapidly. Even at the Masquerades' maximum deceleration rate, it would have taken them over three minutes simply to decelerate to zero relative to the enemy, and that was assuming the other side kept running at its own current acceleration. Slowing their own overtake acceleration by one kilometer per second squared meant it would take them an additional thirteen minutes to enter his chosen engagement range . . . and that their overtake velocity would be down to less than 500 KPS when he did. If he needed to, he could hold that range forever—or open it still further, for that matter—even with his arsenal ships and even if the other side went to a zero compensator margin trying to catch him.