David Weber - Torch of Freedom

"Judging from our own exercises, and the data we've amassed on our new birds' capabilities, Sir," Womack said after a moment, "and bearing in mind that we know exactly how Halo works, which means we know how to allow for it, we can probably expect it to degrade our targeting and fire control by about . . . say, fifteen percent. It might be a little worse than that; it might be a little better than that. A lot's going to depend on operator proficiency, and there's no way we can know about that one way or the other ahead of time.

"At the same time, we're starting from a significantly better probability of hit percentage, thanks to the Erewhonese upgrades, so we still ought to have a significant advantage in terms of accuracy over anything they've got. And I doubt very much that the Havenite-built ships have Halo, at all. I could be wrong, but the onboard side of the system would have to have been squeezed in somewhere, and there's not room for that without taking something else fairly big out to compensate.

"To be honest, I think Aegis would be a bigger problem for us, at least where the Indefatigables are concerned. If they've got it, they're going to be able to thicken up their missile defenses quite a bit. They're still going to be weaker in point defense clusters than the Havenite units, but they'll be able to kill more of our birds in the outer and middle defense zones. Of course, the downside for them is that they're going to have standard SLN counter-missiles in the tubes—and the canisters—and they aren't as good as ours. And using Aegis is going to decrease their shipkiller throw weight, as well."

He paused, head slightly cocked, as if considering what he'd just said, then shrugged.

"Bottom line, Sir, is that the combination of Halo and Aegis will probably give us a per-missile hit probability against an Indefatigable that's only thirty-five or forty percent better than against a Warlord . Assuming the people on board the ships are fully familiar with their systems and trained to Frontier Fleet standards, that is."

Rozsak felt his lips twitch slightly at Womack's qualifying last sentence. "Frontier Fleet standards" implied a degree of contempt for Frontier Fleet's Battle Fleet colleagues which was unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon one's viewpoint) fully justified. Probably because Battle Fleet spent all of its training time firing simulated missiles at simulated defenses all under the command of officers who not only never had seen combat but almost certainly expected that they never would see it. And in an environment where umpires and simulation managers knew better than to make potential enemies out of future senior officers by grading their results too critically. Luiz Rozsak was familiar with Frontier Fleet's own version of the Solarian League's institutional arrogance from direct, personal experience, but he fully shared Womack's estimate of Battle Fleet's capabilities. In fact, it was one of the things he and Oraville Barregos were counting on, when he came right down to it.

"All right," he said. "That's about what I expected. The bad news is that it's going to take lots of missiles to kill these people—probably a lot more missiles than we'd estimated. The good news is that we've got 'lots of missiles' to do it with. Lieutenant Wu," he looked at the com image of Lieutenant Richard Wu, Marksman 's astrogator, "how long to normal-space?"

"We'll be making our translation in seventy-five seconds, Admiral." Wu's voice was remarkably calm, given the translation conditions Alpha Two called for.

"N-space velocity after translation?"

"Two-point-five thousand KPS, Sir," Wu replied, and more than one face grimaced.

Rozsak's wasn't one of them, but he understood perfectly. Crash hyper translations were never excessively pleasant, and crossing the alpha wall into normal-space fast enough to carry that much velocity across the interface would be even more unpleasant than normal. And they'd be able to manage it in such a short time window only because Torch lay in a gravity wave, which made enormously higher rates of acceleration possible.

On the other hand, it also made minor errors in astrogation into potentially catastrophic ones, he reflected.

"Well, Richard," he said, smiling at the astrogator, "let's all hope you've got your sums right."

"Hyper translation!" Citizen Commander Pierre Stravinsky announced suddenly, his voice sharp.

Citizen Commodore Luff's head snapped around, eyes narrowing, but Stravinsky didn't even notice. The ops officer was leaning forward, staring intently at his display. A handful of seconds ticked by, then Stravinsky looked up, meeting Luff's gaze.

"They're directly astern of us, Citizen Commodore," he said. "Range right on twelve million kilometers—sixteen point sources. All we've got so far are the impeller signatures, but they're accelerating after us at four-point-seven-five KPS-squared."

Luff frowned, then looked at Citizen Commander Hartman and raised his eyebrows.

"Hard to say, Citizen Commodore," she said in response to the unspoken question. "It could be anybody. But whoever it is, they're obviously responding to us. They must have had a picket out beyond the limit, monitoring their sensor platforms." She shrugged. "Now whoever it was has come back with friends."

"But what sort of friends?" Luff murmured, half to himself, and glanced at Captain Maddock.

The Mesan only shrugged in turn—which, Luff had to admit, was about all anyone could have done at this point. At twelve million kilometers, it was going to take the better part of forty seconds for any light-speed emissions from the suddenly appearing bogeys to reach them. On the other hand, Hartman clearly had a point about how those bogeys happened to be there, and that suggested several very unhappy possibilities to the citizen commodore. First, it suggested that someone had known, or at least strongly suspected, that an attack like this one was coming. People didn't "just happen" to set up this sort of elaborate response unless they thought they might need one, and responses didn't come in this quickly unless the people behind them were poised and ready. Second, if these bogies had been summoned by a system picket which had detected and identified them before going for help, then, unlike Luff, they ought to have a very good notion of what was on the other side. Which suggested that they thought they had the firepower to do something about it. . . .

Don't leap to any conclusions, Adrian , he reminded himself. At that acceleration rate, there can't be anything back there bigger than a battlecruiser—not unless it's got a Manty compensator, and the Manties are too busy closer to home to be worrying about us at a time like this . But if they've got an accurate count on us, then they know they're outnumbered by three-to-one. So if they don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser, they have to be lunatics .

Or desperate .

The citizen commodore grimaced unhappily at that thought. Given that these bogeys clearly had been waiting in hyper, then somehow word of the attack must have leaked after all. And if some warning of the attack had leaked, then the defenders might know—or have guessed—Operation Ferret's true objective. In which case, the people accelerating after them might well be desperate enough to pursue the PNE no matter how outnumbered they were.

If that were my planet, if that were my family down there on it, I'd be going after anybody who planned on doing what we plan on doing whether I really thought I could stop them or not , he thought grimly.