Torch of Freedom

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 di

"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 Nate 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 dosomething with it, he thought.

"Well, they're here," he said, and turned to his other di

"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 the 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 that?"

"Edie, they're pla

"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.

"A point, 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.