Torch of Freedom

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 perso

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 perso

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 clinching slightly at the thought of what he was about to do, then turned back to Hartman.

"Have Yvo

"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."