* * *
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 or without their captains' approval—and set up in the piracy business for themselves, especially since the mercenaries would want to disassociate themselves as thoroughly as possible from those responsible for Operation Ferret. There wasn't anything he could do about that, though, and if it happened, it happened. It wasn't exactly as if the ships in question were going to be an enormous loss to his heavy combat power, although he would deeply regret losing the commerce-raiding platforms they represented once it was time to begin actual, sustained operations against the counterrevolutionary regime.
But that's for the future, he reminded himself grimly. First we have this . . . other thing we have to accomplish.
He glanced at Maddock again, jaw muscle clenching slightly at the thought of what he was about to do, then turned back to Hartman.
"Have Yvonne send the message, Millicent," he said.
* * *
"General message to all units from the flagship, Citizen Commander," Citizen Lieutenant Adolf Lafontaine said.
Arsène Bottereau looked up, raising one hand to pause his three-way conversation with Citizen Lieutenant Commander Rachel Barthumé, Jacinthe's XO, and Citizen Lieutenant George Bacon, her tactical officer.
"Put it on the main display, Adolf," Bottereau instructed, and watched as Adrian Luff's stern-faced image appeared.
"In just a few moments, we will execute Operation Ferret," the commodore said without any of his usual formal (actually, Bottereau usually thought of them as "pompous") opening remarks. "I know all of you are prepared for what will shortly be required of us. I also know some among us continue to feel certain reservations about it. I sympathize with you, but it's time to put those reservations aside. We are committed, citizens, not just to this operation but to the eventual final
liberation of the entire People's Republic. In a very real sense, what we are about to do today has been forced upon us by the unspeakable treachery of the enemies of the People who betrayed all they were sworn to uphold and protect. In order to visit the retribution those criminals so richly deserve upon them, we must first possess the means, and that is the real reason we are here today."
He gazed at them from displays scattered throughout the task force, and his eyes were hard.
"We will carry out this operation," he said flatly. "We will discharge our obligations to the benefactors who have supplied us with so many ships, so many weapons. And when we carry out this operation, it will be the first step in a journey which will return us one day to Nouveau Paris itself as the guardians of the Revolution to which all of us swore our own allegiance and loyalty so many years ago. We will redeem those oaths, citizens, and those vile traitors who have betrayed everything the People's Republic fought so long to achieve will regret their contemptible actions.
"Luff, clear."
* * *
Someone cleared her throat discreetly, and Luiz Rozsak looked up from his dinner conversation with Edie Habib. A very fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and extraordinarily youthful-looking lieutenant stood in the open dining cabin door.
"Yes, Karen?"
"Sorry to disturb you, Sir," Lieutenant Karen Georgos said politely, "but we've just received a priority message from Nat Turner. She reports the arrival of an unidentified force, headed in-system on a least-time approach to Torch, at zero-seven-four-three, local. They made their translation just about a light-second short of the hyper limit at five hundred KPS. Rate of acceleration is three-point-eight-three-niner KPS-squared. Turner's CIC identifies the bogeys as four Warlord-class battlecruisers, ten Indefatigable-class battlecruisers, eight Mars-class heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and sixteen destroyers. Five of the light cruisers appear to be Bridgeports, and Turner is calling all of the destroyers War Harvests."
Karen Georgos was the youngest member of Rozsak's staff, but she was remarkably levelheaded, despite her youth, and her voice was very calm as she delivered her report.
Rozsak glanced at the bulkhead-mounted chrono. It was late evening, by shipboard time (which, by ancient tradition, was kept set to Greenwich Mean Time aboard all units of the Solarian League Navy), but one of its multiple displays was set to Torch planetary time, and his mind did the math automatically. If the bogeys had made their alpha translation at 7:43, local, then they'd been in normal-space for almost four minutes now. They'd still be a minute or so short of the hyper limit—no one wanted to hit a hyper limit too closely, especially when that limit lay inside a gravity wave, like the Torch System's, which made things even more complicated than usual for an astrogator.
He reached out to activate the terminal built into his dining table, but—
"I make it right on two hundred minutes from his alpha translation to the planet, if he's going for a zero-zero, Boss," Edie Habib said before he actually touched it. She was looking at the display of her minicomp, her expression thoughtful. "Call it a hundred and forty minutes for a straight flyby." She looked up at Rozsak. "Turner did a good job getting us the data this quickly."
Rozsak nodded. He'd been impressed by the Royal Torch Navy from the outset. It had been obvious to him, as his units exercised with it, that quite a few members of its officer corps had come from professional naval backgrounds before immigrating to Torch. Several of them spoke with pronounced Beowulf accents, and at least three of the frigates' skippers had clearly been born and raised—and trained—on Manticore, although all of them appeared to be descended from genetic slaves. The RTN might be tiny, but with that hard kernel of professionalism as a starting point, and with the ruthless training schedule Thandi Palane had insisted upon, its crews were as good as any he'd ever seen. He wasn't surprised by how promptly Nat Turner had been able to identify the invaders' ship classes, but as Habib had said, the frigate had done an outstanding job to get the information to him so rapidly.
Now it's time I do something with it, he thought.
"Well, they're here," he said, and turned to his other dinner guest. "Dirk-Steven, I think we'd better get underway. Given the numbers, it looks like Alpha Two's our best bet."
"Yes, Sir," Commodore Kamstra acknowledged, and began speaking quietly into his personal com as Rozsak returned his attention to Georgos.
"Thank you, Karen," he said. "I assume that's for me?"
"Yes, Sir," she replied, laying the memo board in his outstretched hand.
"We'll see you on Flag Bridge in a few minutes," Rozsak continued. "Go ahead and rout out the rest of our people and get them assembled there, please."
"Of course, Sir." Georgos braced briefly to attention, then disappeared, and Rozsak smiled across the table at Habib.
"Is it my imagination, or has Karen gotten even younger since we got to Torch?"
"It's just having Thandi back in reach again, Boss." Habib smiled. "I knew they'd been buddies, but I hadn't realized how badly Karen had missed her."
"I know—neither had I," Rozsak agreed, but his tone was more absent than it had been, and his attention was on the memo board's display.
"Alpha Two's been activated, Sir," Kamstra reported, then pushed back from the table. "With your permission, I'll head for the command deck now."
"Of course, Dirk-Steven." Rozsak looked up, meeting his flag captain's eyes levelly. "Please go ahead and send Turner a 'well-done' for getting this to us so quickly, too. I should've remembered to have Karen do that for me."
"I'll see to it, Sir." Kamstra gave his superior a respectful nod, smiled briefly at Habib, and headed for the dining cabin door.
"Sounds like Manpower's really loaded these bastards up with firepower, Boss," Habib commented, bringing Rozsak's attention back to her. She was gazing down at the memo board herself, her expression thoughtful. "Ten ex-SLN battlecruisers?" She shook her head and looked up at him with a tart smile. "They don't exactly believe in subtle, do they?"
"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.
"True, 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 War
lords 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."