Torch of Freedom

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 ru

"The enemy's reduced acceleration, Citizen Commodore!" Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky said suddenly. "It's dropped a full kilometer per second squared!"

Luff looked quickly up from the plot at the ops officer's a

"I don't think they'd be killing any of their acceleration if they weren't pretty close to where they wanted to be," he said quietly.

"No, Citizen Commodore," she agreed, eyes meeting his, and he nodded. Then he turned back to Stravinsky.

"Open fire, Citizen Lieutenant Commander!" he said crisply.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

"Missile launch!"

Commander Raycraft's head jerked around in astonishment. That couldn't be right! Hammer Force was still eleven million kilometers from the enemy!

"Many missiles, multiple launches!" Travis Siegel said. "Estimate three hundred ninety-plus—repeat, three-zero-niner-plus!"

"What the hell—?" Raycraft heard Commander Dobbs's muttered question, although the corner of her mind which was paying attention to such things felt confident he'd never meant to say it aloud. On the other hand, exactly the same question was burning through her own brain as she stared at the plot.

It was ridiculous. Hammer Force was at least three million kilometers outside the powered envelope of even a Javelin or Trebuchet shipkiller, and firing missiles that would go ballistic, unable to pursue evading targets, that far short of their intended victims was stupid! A useless waste of ammunition! They couldn't possibly think they could—

Oh, yes, they could, a tiny voice told her. We've got Mark-17-Es in the pods—what if they've got something of their own over there? Something we didn't know about any more than they knew about the Mark-17?

She remembered her own earlier thoughts about the possibility of missile pods on the other side. Escaped StateSec crews would also have known all about the existence of multidrive missiles. For that matter, Manpower had certainly known about them since shortly after their first use, and the fact that the SLN still hadn't done anything about it didn't mean everyone else was equally blind. So, yes, they could have a surprise of their own.

She looked at the acceleration numbers coming up on the plot. So far, they looked exactly like the profile of a Javelin anti-ship missile set for a three-minute, maximum-range burn, and she wanted to believe that was what they actually were. But that tiny voice told her they weren't. That not even a bunch of StateSec lunatics would have opened fire at this range unless they genuinely believed they could hit their targets.

"Missile launch!" Lieutenant Womack's report interrupted Rozsak's side conversation with Edie Habib. "CIC estimates four hundred missiles inbound, Sir!"

Rozsak's eyes whipped to the main plot, and for just a moment, he could only stare at the icons in disbelief. As he saw the missile vectors stretching out from the battlecruisers he'd pursued deeper and deeper into the Torch System for the last forty-seven minutes, they seemed just as pointless—just as foolish—as they seemed to every one of his junior officers. But then his face hardened into granite. Much as a part of his mind wanted to regard this as a panic reaction, an act of desperation as the enemy saw Alpha Two closing upon him, he knew it wasn't. His mind raced through exactly the same analysis Laura Raycraft had just considered, and for just a moment, even his formidable control wavered.

But it was only for a moment, and his voice didn't even quaver as he turned back to Kamstra's com image.

"Open fire," he said flatly.

Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.

Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.

So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.

There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.

The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.