"Hyper translation!" Citizen Commander Pierre Stravinsky announced suddenly, his voice sharp.
Citizen Commodore Luff's head snapped around, eyes narrowing, but Stravinsky didn't even notice. The ops officer was leaning forward, staring intently at his display. A handful of seconds ticked by, then Stravinsky looked up, meeting Luff's gaze.
"They're directly astern of us, Citizen Commodore," he said. "Range right on twelve million kilometers—sixteen point sources. All we've got so far are the impeller signatures, but they're accelerating after us at four-point-seven-five KPS-squared."
Luff frowned, then looked at Citizen Commander Hartman and raised his eyebrows.
"Hard to say, Citizen Commodore," she said in response to the unspoken question. "It could be anybody. But whoever it is, they're obviously responding to us. They must have had a picket out beyond the limit, monitoring their sensor platforms." She shrugged. "Now whoever it was has come back with friends."
"But what sort of friends?" Luff murmured, half to himself, and glanced at Captain Maddock.
The Mesan only shrugged in turn—which, Luff had to admit, was about all anyone could have done at this point. At twelve million kilometers, it was going to take the better part of forty seconds for any light-speed emissions from the suddenly appearing bogeys to reach them. On the other hand, Hartman clearly had a point about how those bogeys happened to be there, and that suggested several very unhappy possibilities to the citizen commodore. First, it suggested that someone had known, or at least strongly suspected, that an attack like this one was coming. People didn't "just happen" to set up this sort of elaborate response unless they thought they might need one, and responses didn't come in this quickly unless the people behind them were poised and ready. Second, if these bogies had been summoned by a system picket which had detected and identified them before going for help, then, unlike Luff, they ought to have a very good notion of what was on the other side. Which suggested that they thought they had the firepower to do something about it. . . .
Don't leap to any conclusions, Adrian, he reminded himself. At that acceleration rate, there can't be anything back there bigger than a battlecruiser—not unless it's got a Manty compensator, and the Manties are too busy closer to home to be worrying about us at a time like this. But if they've got an accurate count on us, then they know they're outnumbered by three-to-one. So if they don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser, they have to be lunatics.
Or desperate.
The citizen commodore grimaced unhappily at that thought. Given that these bogeys clearly had been waiting in hyper, then somehow word of the attack must have leaked after all. And if some warning of the attack had leaked, then the defenders might know—or have guessed—Operation Ferret's true objective. In which case, the people accelerating after them might well be desperate enough to pursue the PNE no matter how outnumbered they were.
If that were my planet, if that were my family down there on it, I'd be going after anybody who planned on doing what we plan on doing whether I really thought I could stop them or not, he thought grimly.
On the other hand, he might just be wrong about whether or not the Manties could have shaken a task group loose for something like this, especially if they'd had enough warning to know it was coming.
"Time for us to get back across the limit, Astro?"
"Just a moment, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Philippine Christiansen replied. She punched numbers quickly, then looked back at him. "Approximately thirty-nine minutes assuming current acceleration, Citizen Commodore. Twenty-one minutes if we go to maximum military power."
"And how long for these bogeys to reach missile range of the hyper limit, Citizen Commander Stravinsky?" Luff asked.
"Assuming they maintain their acceleration profile and that their missiles have a powered range of seven-point-five million kilometers from rest, approximately . . . seventeen minutes, Citizen Commodore."
Luff grunted. He strongly suspected that whoever that was back there had undershot his planned translation point. Unless he had multidrive missiles, he was a good four million-plus kilometers outside his own missile range at the moment, and that had to represent an astrogation error. Luff rather doubted that he'd wanted to arrive at a range where he couldn't immediately engage the people attacking Torch, after all. But if he'd undershot, he hadn't undershot by a large enough margin for Luff to change his mind, reverse acceleration, kill his current velocity, and then get back across the hyper limit and disappear into the alpha bands before he could be engaged.
Of course, any engaging would take place at very long-range, he reflected. They probably couldn't score a whole lot of hits before we hypered out, no matter what they've got back there.
He glanced once more at Maddock, this time unobtrusively, out of the corner of one eye. The Mesan captain had to know why Luff had asked Christiansen those two questions, but if he was concerned about the citizen commodore's possible decision, no sign of it showed in his expression. Which could mean confidence on his part, or simply that he knew Luff knew what would happen to any hope of further support from Manpower if he blew this mission off. Or, for that matter, it could even mean Maddock would be simply delighted if the PNE scampered off to safety, taking his own personal skin along with it.
Part of Luff wanted to do exactly that. There was always the distinct possibility that the people chasing him truly were confident of their ability to deal with him if they caught him. And if they were, they might be right.
Of course, they might be wrong, too, he told himself. Especially if they don't know about the Cataphracts. But be honest with yourself, Adrian. What you're really thinking is that this could offer you an excuse not to do something you don't want to do, anyway.
"Citizen Commodore, we're getting some tonnage estimates from CIC," Stravinsky said.
"What kind of estimates?"
"According to CIC, it looks like eight units in the hundred and twenty-five-ton range, six in the two hundred and eighty-five hundred-ton range, and two at around two million tons, Citizen Commodore."
"And they're all pulling four-point-seven-five KPS-squared?" Hartman asked just a bit sharply.
"Yes, Citizen Commander," Stravinsky replied, and Hartman grimaced.
"It seems the Erewhonese are here after all, Citizen Commodore," she said, turning back to Luff. "Nothing that size could pull that much accel without an improved compensator."
"Excuse me, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Yvonne Kamerling, Luff's staff communications officer, said. Luff frowned reflexively at the interruption, but he smoothed the expression quickly. He knew Kamerling wouldn't have broken in on him and Hartman at a moment like this if she hadn't believed it was important.
"What is it, Yvonne?"
"Sir, we're beginning to pick up grav pulses. Whoever that is behind us is using an FTL com to talk to someone further in-system."
"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. 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 run to earth and destroyed.
But if we don't do this, we lose the only real outside support we've been able to find. And what happens to our morale, our cohesion, if that happens? For that matter, if Rozsak really knows who we are, really knows we were prepared to do this, then we're tainted in Solly eyes, no matter what happens!
"Accept his com request," he heard himself say. "No visual, and run the outgoing audio through the computers."
* * *
"We have a response, Sir. Sort of, anyway," Karen Georgos announced.
"Took them long enough," Edie Habib half-muttered, and Rozsak gave her a half-smile.
"There's a forty-second transmission delay," he pointed out. "They didn't dither as long as I expected them to, actually."
Habib snorted softly, and Rozsak looked at Georgos.
"Put it through, Karen."
"Yes, Sir. Coming up now," the com officer replied, and the display in front of Rozsak went abruptly blank.
"What can I do for you, Admiral Rozsak?" a voice inquired. It was smoothly modulated, without any readily discernible accent, and Rozsak raised one eyebrow at Georgos before keying his own pickup.
"Computer generated?" he asked . . . quite unnecessarily, he was certain.
"Yes, Sir." She shrugged. "I can't guarantee it without a complete analysis, but it sounds to me like they're using our own hardware and techniques. Somebody at the other end is talking to the Nightingale, and the AI's generating a completely synthesized voice. There's no way anyone would be able to determine anything about the actual speaker's voice from this."
"That's what I thought," he said.
He'd have done exactly the same thing, if he'd found himself in the place of whoever was at the other end of that com link. In fact, he had used the Nightingale on occasions when deniability was more useful in the Solarian League's view of things. But if he wasn't surprised by that, he was slightly surprised by how irritating he found it.
Mostly that's because Karen's right—he's using our own tech against us. Which makes being pissed off with him even sillier, given what we're planning to do with "our own tech" in the increasingly less distant future.
He brushed that thought aside, squared his shoulders, looked directly into his own pickup, and brought it online.
"You can immediately break off your attack on the planet Torch," he said flatly. "I remind you that the Solarian League has signed a mutual defense treaty with the Kingdom of Torch. Any attack on Torch will be deemed an attack upon Solarian territory, and any violation of the Eridani Edict's anti-genocide protocols will lead to your summary destruction."
There was a forty-second delay as his words sped across to the PNE flagship. Then, forty seconds after that, his blank com display spoke again.
"I appreciate your position, Admiral," it said. "Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comply with your demands. Not to mention the fact that you don't seem to have the means to accomplish our 'summary destruction' at this particular moment."
At least he's not trying to pretend this is only some kind of "friendly port visit," Rozsak thought.
"I don't?" He smiled thinly. "You might want to remember that appearances can be deceiving. And even if that isn't the case, the Solarian League Navy as a whole definitely does have the means."
"True," the anonymous voice acknowledged eighty seconds later. "But for the rest of the SLN to accomplish that it will have to be able to find us. And I think—Admiral Rozsak, was it?—that it might behoove you to consider the potential consequences for your current forces. You may find this difficult to believe, but I would prefer not having to kill anyone who doesn't have to die today."
Despite the artificiality of the voice, Rozsak thought he could actually hear an edge of sincerity in that final sentence.
And isn't it big of him to offer to allow us to run away so he "only" has to kill the four or five million people on Torch?
"That's very kind of you," he said out loud, his voice cold. "If, however, you do not break off your attack run on Torch, I will engage you, and if that happens, quite a few people are going to get killed today. You may believe you have a sufficient advantage to defeat my own forces with minimal casualties. I assure you, if you do think that's the case, that you're wrong. And I also hereby inform you that your violation of the Torch hyper limit with an unidentified military force is considered a deliberate hostile act by the Kingdom of Torch and by the Solarian League. I officially instruct you at this time to change course immediately and leave the Torch System on a least-time course. If you do not comply with those instructions, deadly force will be used against you."
* * *
"—will be used against you."
Adrian Luff looked around his flag bridge. Most of his personnel had their eyes focused upon their own displays, their own command consoles, but he knew where their ears were focused. And from the body language around him, from the expressions and partial expressions he could see, he knew the majority of them were thinking exactly what he was thinking—that here was the opportunity to break off. The excuse they could offer to their "Manpower" masters.
And, at the same time, they were also thinking—again, like him—that the PNE's Warlords and Mars were too distinctive to simply fade away into the background of other pirate and mercenary warships wandering about the galaxy. If the emission signatures of those ships got back to the SLN, got circulated throughout the League and all of the minor, independent star nations, they'd be easy to identify. So whatever degree of personal anonymity he and his crews, as individuals, might be able to maintain, as a group, they would be marked men and women. There might not be a star nation against which the Eridani Edict could be enforced in this case, but that wouldn't prevent anyone from classifying them as pirates . . . and under acknowledged interstellar law, the punishment for piracy was death.
But we've come too far, he thought harshly. We've clawed our way too far back towards who we used to be, what we used to stand for. And without Manpower's support, we'll never have the logistics base to be anything but pirates. Murderers and scum—ten-a-credit hired killers, not "defenders of the Revolution." If we walk away from this mission, we lose that.
A corner of his brain tasted the bitter, bitter irony of the decision he confronted. In order to restore the soul of the Revolution, to redeem his own star nation once again, he faced an action which would stain his own soul forever. And, he discovered, despite the Revolution's official atheism, he did have a soul, or something that thought it was a soul, anyway. A soul that didn't want to do this . . . yet saw no option to doing it which wasn't even worse.
And for all I know, that's not really Luiz Rozsak back there, at all, he told himself. We're not the only people with the Nightingale or its equivalent, after all, and Millicent and Yvonne have to be right about where the ships came from, anyway. They're not Manties, they're not Theisman's, and they sure as hell aren't Sollies, whoever may be claiming to be in command of them—not with those acceleration curves and FTL com capability. That only leaves the Erewhonese. Given the fact that Erewhon is in bed with the Torches, it'd make sense for them to have decided to protect Torch, if they got a sniff of the operation. But they could still have expected us to be a lot weaker than we are. They may have figured that six of their cruisers could take the force they thought was coming, using their missile pods. If they did, and if they're having second thoughts now, this could be a bluff. They could be waving the future threat of the SLN at us to convince us to break off when Rozsak isn't actually within fifty light-years of Torch.
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."