David Weber - Torch of Freedom

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 personnel to officer's rank just to do that much.

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 Yvonne send the message, Millicent," he said.

"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."

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 dinner conversation with Edie Habib. A very fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and extraordinarily youthful-looking lieutenant stood in the open dining cabin door.

"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.