David Weber - Torch of Freedom

Luff felt himself nodding slowly in agreement with his subordinates' logic. Given the Erewhonese Navy's capabilities, it made perfect sense. In fact, it was probably what he'd be doing. And it explained why sixteen ships were chasing forty-eight. It didn't matter how outnumbered they were if their weapons could reach their enemies and their enemies weapons couldn't reach them.

Of course , he thought coldly, there's a tiny flaw in their logic . They don't know—

"Citizen Commodore, we have an incoming transmission," Kamerling said, and Luff turned back towards her. "It's from a Rear Admiral Rozsak."

Luff's eyes widened abruptly, and he heard a hiss of indrawn breath from Hartman. Rozsak? It couldn't be—not with those observed acceleration rates! And yet . . .

"Who is it addressed to, Yvonne?" he asked.

"To you , Citizen Commodore," she replied. "Not by name, but—With your permission, Citizen Commodore?"

She indicated the secondary com display at his command station, and he nodded. A moment later, the face of a man Luff had never met, but recognized instantly, appeared on the display.

"This is Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak, Solarian League Navy." The voice was cold, hard. "I wish to speak to the senior officer of the State Security forces currently planning to attack the sovereign planet of Torch."

Luff felt an icy hand squeeze his heart as a crawl from CIC across the bottom of his display confirmed that, according to Leon Trotsky 's intelligence base, the image he was looking at and the voice he was listening to truly did belong to the senior Solarian naval officer in the region. Who obviously knew who they were.

No , he thought a heartbeat later. No, he knows what we are—or he thinks he does, anyway—but not who we are. The Warlords and the Mars-Cs would make him pretty sure we're State Security, even if he'd never had any idea at all what was coming. Besides, if he knew names and faces, he'd be using them now—asking for me by name. He'd know exactly how badly that would shake the nerve of any CO in my position .

He felt a flicker of relief at the thought, even though he knew it was irrational. If it wasn't the Erewhonese back there, if it really was the Solarian League Navy, the consequences for all of the PNE's plans and hopes could be catastrophic.

The Haven Quadrant was hundreds of light-years from the League, and the SLN's total disinterest in the Manticore-Haven conflict had been obvious for years. As far as the man-in-the-street's view of things was concerned, Solarian public opinion since the resumption of hostilities had tended to favor Haven over Manticore, and at the moment, given the confrontation between the League's interests and Manticore in the Talbott Cluster, there was little doubt that Solarian antipathy towards the Star Kingdom had hardened significantly. But all of that could— would— change in a heartbeat in the wake of an Eridani Edict violation. The Edict was the single element of Solarian foreign policy which enjoyed near-universal acceptance and support from all of the League's citizens. If Havenite units violated it . . .

But we aren't "Havenite units" anymore. That's the entire reason Manpower wanted to use us in the first place . We're deniable. A "mercenary" outfit—one the current regime in Nouveau Paris has outlawed and no one else is willing to support, openly, at least. Even if they do know we're Havenite, even ex-State Security, no one in the League is going to go after the People's Republic for anything we do .

Which, unfortunately, wouldn't do a single thing to mitigate the consequences for the PNE . The Eridani Edict carried no specific injunction to go after non-state violators with the full fury of the Solarian League Navy, but Adrian Luff nourished no illusions. The Solarian League wouldn't give a damn about attacks on Havenite shipping, or the Havenite navy. And Luff could slaughter his one-time fellow citizens in whatever numbers he chose without arousing the least Solarian ire . . . as long as he did it without resorting to the actions the Eridani Edict outlawed.

But if the PNE crossed this line, and if the League knew it had, that indifference would vanish. At the very least, he and his people would become pariahs, with every man's hand turned against them. Luff had learned a great deal, over his years of exile, about the astonishing depth of the Solarian League's basic, all-encompassing inefficiency. It was actually worse than the pre-Pierre People's Republic had ever been, in some ways. But, by the same token, he'd gained a bone-deep awareness of the League's sheer, stupendous size and power. If it decided the People's Navy in Exile needed to be hunted down, sooner or later, the PNE would be run to earth and destroyed.

But if we don't do this, we lose the only real outside support we've been able to find. And what happens to our morale, our cohesion, if that happens? For that matter, if Rozsak really knows who we are, really knows we were prepared to do this, then we're tainted in Solly eyes, no matter what happens!

"Accept his com request," he heard himself say. "No visual, and run the outgoing audio through the computers."

"We have a response, Sir. Sort of, anyway," Karen Georgos announced.

"Took them long enough," Edie Habib half-muttered, and Rozsak gave her a half-smile.

"There's a forty-second transmission delay," he pointed out. "They didn't dither as long as I expected them to, actually."

Habib snorted softly, and Rozsak looked at Georgos.

"Put it through, Karen."

"Yes, Sir. Coming up now," the com officer replied, and the display in front of Rozsak went abruptly blank.

"What can I do for you, Admiral Rozsak?" a voice inquired. It was smoothly modulated, without any readily discernible accent, and Rozsak raised one eyebrow at Georgos before keying his own pickup.

"Computer generated?" he asked . . . quite unnecessarily, he was certain.

"Yes, Sir." She shrugged. "I can't guarantee it without a complete analysis, but it sounds to me like they're using our own hardware and techniques. Somebody at the other end is talking to the Nightingale, and the AI's generating a completely synthesized voice. There's no way anyone would be able to determine anything about the actual speaker's voice from this."

"That's what I thought," he said.

He'd have done exactly the same thing, if he'd found himself in the place of whoever was at the other end of that com link. In fact, he had used the Nightingale on occasions when deniability was more useful in the Solarian League's view of things. But if he wasn't surprised by that, he was slightly surprised by how irritating he found it.

Mostly that's because Karen's right—he's using our own tech against us. Which makes being pissed off with him even sillier, given what we're planning to do with "our own tech" in the increasingly less distant future .

He brushed that thought aside, squared his shoulders, looked directly into his own pickup, and brought it online.

"You can immediately break off your attack on the planet Torch," he said flatly. "I remind you that the Solarian League has signed a mutual defense treaty with the Kingdom of Torch. Any attack on Torch will be deemed an attack upon Solarian territory, and any violation of the Eridani Edict's anti-genocide protocols will lead to your summary destruction."

There was a forty-second delay as his words sped across to the PNE flagship. Then, forty seconds after that, his blank com display spoke again.

"I appreciate your position, Admiral," it said. "Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comply with your demands. Not to mention the fact that you don't seem to have the means to accomplish our 'summary destruction' at this particular moment."