David Weber - Torch of Freedom

Not that all of them hadn't been heading for it for a very, very long time now.

"Edie"—he twitched his head briefly to his right, at Habib—"will be giving all of us the detailed appreciation and basic ops plan in a minute, but before she does, let me go ahead and—at the risk of being a bit redundant, under the circumstances—run over the high points." He smiled slightly. "Redundancy is one of the privileges which comes with my lordly flag rank, you all understand."

Most of them smiled, and Stahlin chuckled.

"Basically," Rozsak continued a bit more seriously, "life is getting more interesting out of our way. Given what happened to the Manties and the Havenites at the Battle of Manticore, neither of them is going to have any attention to spare for events in our neck of the woods, and Admiral McAvoy has confirmed to me that he's under orders to keep the Erewhonese Navy close to home."

He shrugged.

"We've shared our intelligence about what seems to be headed Torch's way with both the Torches and the Erewhonese. Jiri's impression—and mine—is that both of them consider the intel reliable, even though we protected one of our better sources from them. Given the fact that Thandi Palane only has a handful of frigates and McAvoy's under orders to stay home, though, there isn't a whole lot either of them can do with it. Under the circumstances—including the fact that we're the ones with the treaty with Torch—Governor Barregos has directed us to deal with it. That's where you people come in.

"I wish we didn't have to take the wraps off this early." He made the admission unflinchingly. "And, conversely, since we do have to take the wraps off, I wish we had more of the new hardware already trained up and ready to go. Unfortunately, however, in light of the Battle of Monica, we've been forced to substantially revise our estimate of the forces Manpower could make available to its proxies rather drastically upward. That means we can't count on holding what they could be throwing at Torch with nothing but the War Harvests and three Morrigans ."

Most of his subordinates nodded soberly at that. The War Harvest -class represented the largest destroyer design in current SLN inventory. The fact that the Maya Sector had been assigned a full flotilla of them (although Destroyer Flotilla 3029, the flotilla in question, was one ship short of the eighteen it should theoretically have had) was an emblem of the Sector's economic importance. The three elderly Morrigan -class light cruisers which had been assigned to lead the flotilla's three squadrons, on the other hand, were an emblem of Frontier Security's . . . ambiguous feelings where Oravil Barregos was concerned. Although they'd been refitted with first-line electronics, they were very little larger than the destroyers they'd been assigned to work with—less than half the size of the Marksmans , in fact.

"If these people come in even with just the forces we already know have been recruited by Manpower," Rozsak continued, "they'd be in a damned good position to beat up on our 'official' ship list. If they come in with any substantial additional combat power, our people would be toast. And unlike that asshole Navarre, Manpower's 'proxies' won't have any official connection to Mesa. Our estimate is that that will make them a lot less likely to back down to keep the SLN from getting pissed off at Mesa—since Mesa can always say 'Who? Us? No, no, no. We didn't have a thing to do with all that mayhem and destruction!' " He shook his head. "They're headed for Torch to turn Torch into a smoking cinder, people . . . and it's going to be up to you to see to it that that doesn't happen."

He paused for a moment, letting them digest what he'd just said, then tipped his chair back slightly.

"Does anyone have any comments at this stage?" he invited.

There was silence for a moment while people glanced at one another, then Kamstra faced Rozsak up the length of the table.

"I don't think any of us have any questions about 'why,' Sir," he said. "I imagine there are a few little concerns about exactly ' how ,' though. And about hardware availability. So far, J.T. is the only one of our arsenal ship skippers who's actually had the opportunity to roll pods in an all-up live-fire exercise. We've spent a lot of hours in the simulators, of course, but that's not quite the same thing. And then there's the question of how many pods we'll have when the credit actually drops."

"Those are all valid concerns," Rozsak acknowledged, "and I think you'll find Edie and her people have dealt with them in their ops plan. Nobody's pretending we're delighted with the compromises we're going to be forced to adopt, but to paraphrase a pre-space politician by the name of Churchill, perfect operational conditions obtain only in Heaven . . . and admirals who insist on them before they'll take action seldom get there."

Someone—it wasn't Stahlin, this time—chuckled, and Rozsak grinned briefly.

"I know we've hit a few snags in the production pipeline," he went on, "but, especially since this intel on Torch came up, we've been pressing Carlucci—and McAvoy—on the pod numbers. Our best guess at this point is that by the time we reach Torch, we should find a couple of Carlucci freighters waiting for us with somewhere around fifteen hundred pods. That won't be quite enough for a complete load-out on all three of the Masquerades , and we'll probably be short on EW birds, but it'll still give us a hell of a lot more punch than anyone else is going to be expecting us to have. What it's not going to give us is a lot of ammunition to use up in those live-fire exercises you were talking about, Dirk-Steven. Exercises which, I hasten to add, I entirely agree we ought to be carrying out. Since these are going to be the six-pod rings, though, they aren't going to be reusable, so even if we had the replacement birds to load into them, we wouldn't be able to reload after the exercise."

Heads nodded soberly around the table.

The transitional ship types which had been produced for the Maya Sector in the Carlucci yards were experimental, in one sense, but used proven technological components, in another. The new Warrior -class destroyers were almost ten percent larger even than the War Harvest -class, yet they had twenty-five percent fewer missile tubes and forty percent fewer energy weapons in each broadside than the much smaller Rampart -class. That lesser throw weight had been emphasized in the various reports being sent back to Old Chicago, since it had helped to assuage any possible fears over the combat power of the ships Barregos was building for himself out in Maya. What hadn't been emphasized was that the energy weapons in question were all grasers (not the Ramparts' much lighter—and less powerful— lasers ); that the ships carried almost twice the anti-missile defenses of a standard SLN destroyer, that they carried substantially more missiles per tube; and that the missiles in question were the same ones carried by the Royal Manticoran Navy's light units at the close of the First Havenite War. Nor had anyone mentioned the improvements in inertial compensator improvement which gave a Warrior a thirty percent acceleration advantage over Rozsak's War Harvest -class destroyers. It was probably as well for the blood pressure of various senior SLN officers that they were blissfully unaware of just how enormous an increase in combat power all of that represented.

The Marksman -class would have come as an even more unpleasant surprise, had anyone in the Sol System had the least idea of their actual specifications. In many ways, what the Marksman really represented was a slightly downsized prewar RMN Star Knight -class heavy cruiser with updated electronics, energy weapons, and missiles and a substantially downsized crew. Her compensator gave her an acceleration rate which, while inferior to a Warrior 's, was still twenty-eight percent better than a War Harvest 's, and she carried the Mark-17-E, the Erewhon-built version of the Manticoran Mark-14 missile then-Captain Michael Oversteegen had used to such good effect at the Battle of Refuge three T-years earlier. They weren't multidrive missiles; in fact, Manticore had abandoned further development on them when the Mark 16 dual-drive missile proved a practical concept for cruiser-sized tubes. But they were substantially longer ranged than anything in the Solarian inventory, and in the latest Erewhonese version, they mounted heavier laser heads (although with fewer lasing rods ) than were carried by any Solarian combatant short of the wall of battle. They were also, unfortunately, much too large to be fired out tlineof the Warriors ' missile tubes, far less by any of the older, Solarian-built units under Rozsak's command, and the Marksmans carried only thirty of them for each of the six tubes in each broadside.