David Weber - Torch of Freedom

At least he's not trying to pretend this is only some kind of "friendly port visit," Rozsak thought.

"I don't?" He smiled thinly. "You might want to remember that appearances can be deceiving. And even if that isn't the case, the Solarian League Navy as a whole definitely does have the means."

"True," the anonymous voice acknowledged eighty seconds later. "But for the rest of the SLN to accomplish that it will have to be able to find us. And I think—Admiral Rozsak, was it?—that it might behoove you to consider the potential consequences for your current forces. You may find this difficult to believe, but I would prefer not having to kill anyone who doesn't have to die today."

Despite the artificiality of the voice, Rozsak thought he could actually hear an edge of sincerity in that final sentence.

And isn't it big of him to offer to allow us to run away so he "only" has to kill the four or five million people on Torch?

"That's very kind of you," he said out loud, his voice cold. "If, however, you do not break off your attack run on Torch, I will engage you, and if that happens, quite a few people are going to get killed today. You may believe you have a sufficient advantage to defeat my own forces with minimal casualties. I assure you, if you do think that's the case, that you're wrong. And I also hereby inform you that your violation of the Torch hyper limit with an unidentified military force is considered a deliberate hostile act by the Kingdom of Torch and by the Solarian League. I officially instruct you at this time to change course immediately and leave the Torch System on a least-time course. If you do not comply with those instructions, deadly force will be used against you."

"— will be used against you."

Adrian Luff looked around his flag bridge. Most of his personnel had their eyes focused upon their own displays, their own command consoles, but he knew where their ears were focused. And from the body language around him, from the expressions and partial expressions he could see, he knew the majority of them were thinking exactly what he was thinking—that here was the opportunity to break off. The excuse they could offer to their "Manpower" masters.

And, at the same time, they were also thinking—again, like him—that the PNE's Warlords and Mars were too distinctive to simply fade away into the background of other pirate and mercenary warships wandering about the galaxy. If the emission signatures of those ships got back to the SLN, got circulated throughout the League and all of the minor, independent star nations, they'd be easy to identify. So whatever degree of personal anonymity he and his crews, as individuals, might be able to maintain, as a group , they would be marked men and women. There might not be a star nation against which the Eridani Edict could be enforced in this case, but that wouldn't prevent anyone from classifying them as pirates . . . and under acknowledged interstellar law, the punishment for piracy was death.

But we've come too far , he thought harshly. We've clawed our way too far back towards who we used to be, what we used to stand for. And without Manpower's support, we'll never have the logistics base to be anything but pirates. Murderers and scum—ten-a-credit hired killers, not "defenders of the Revolution." If we walk away from this mission, we lose that .

A corner of his brain tasted the bitter, bitter irony of the decision he confronted. In order to restore the soul of the Revolution, to redeem his own star nation once again, he faced an action which would stain his own soul forever. And, he discovered, despite the Revolution's official atheism, he did have a soul, or something that thought it was a soul, anyway. A soul that didn't want to do this . . . yet saw no option todoing it which wasn't even worse.

And for all I know, that's not really Luiz Rozsak back there, at all , he told himself. We're not the only people with the Nightingale or its equivalent, after all, and Millicent and Yvonne have to be right about where the ships came from, anyway. They're not Manties, they're not Theisman's, and they sure as hell aren't Sollies, whoever may be claiming to be in command of them—not with those acceleration curves and FTL com capability. That only leaves the Erewhonese. Given the fact that Erewhon is in bed with the Torches, it'd make sense for them to have decided to protect Torch, if they got a sniff of the operation. But they could still have expected us to be a lot weaker than we are . They may have figured that six of their cruisers could take the force they thought was coming, using their missile pods. If they did, and if they're having second thoughts now, this could be a bluff. They could be waving the future threat of the SLN at us to convince us to break off when Rozsak isn't actually within fifty light-years of Torch.

And given our intel about their relationship with Barregos and Rozsak, Rozsak really could be back there, too, Adrian. The fact that those are Erewhonese ships doesn't mean they couldn't have Solly "advisors" aboard. Don't forget that while you're trying to rationalize your way through all this. And that treaty he's talking about really exists, too, so it's entirely possible Rozsak is aboard one of those Erewhonese cruisers, even if there's not another single Solly in sight, in order to formally bring the League into all this .

The thoughts flashed through his brain, and even as they did, he knew there wasn't much point to them. Not really. He was committed, and he'd committed all of his people along with him. The day they'd accepted these ships from Manpower, pinned all their hopes for restoring the Revolution on Manpower's material support, they'd also accepted this mission. And unless there was enough firepower out there to actually stop them, they had no choice but to carry it out.

"I appreciate the warning, Admiral Rozsak," he heard himself say, "but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ignore it. In return, though, I warn you that any use of force against this task group will be met in kind."

He pressed a stud on the arm of his command chair, shutting down his pickup, and turned back to his staff.

"All right," he said with a thin smile, "despite Admiral Rozsak's having identified himself for us, I think you and Yvonne are essentially right about who these people are, Millicent. And I think you're right about the hardware available to them and what it is they're planning to do to us. So, since we can't run away from them even if we wanted to, I think we should just go ahead and do exactly what they expect us to."

"It's confirmed, Ma'am—Alpha Two," Lieutenant Cornelia Rensi said.

"Thank you, Cornelia," Commander Raycraft acknowledged, then turned to her "staff." Actually, aside from Lieutenant Commander Michael Dobbs, who'd been added to Artillerist 's complement expressly to act as Light Cruiser Division 7036.2's chief of staff, Acting-Commodore Laura Raycraft's staff officers were identical to Commander Laura Raycraft's ship's officers. That was the main reason she'd chosen, unlike Luiz Rozsak, who had ensconced himself on Marksman 's flag bridge, to fight her ship and lead her division from Artillerist 's command deck.

"Not much of a surprise, Ma'am, is it?" Dobbs said now, and she shook her head.

Like Dobbs, she'd always anticipated that Alpha Two was the most likely of the scenarios Luiz Rozsak and his officers had worked out. In fact, she'd felt it was so likely that she'd lobbied hard in favor of concentrating the entire task group in hyper-space. She knew Rozsak had been tempted to agree with her, but she'd also known he wasn't going to. As he'd pointed out to her, somebody had to be in a position to cover the inner system just in case it should happen they'd guessed wrong after all and the Peep mercenaries came in on more than one bearing. Which was how her own ship and Archer happened to be sitting here in orbit as the flagship of "Anvil Force," along with Commander Melanie Stensrud's Charade and Lieutenant Commander Hjálmar Snorrason's four Warrior -class destroyers: Genghis Kahn , Napoleon , Alexander the Great , and Julius Caesar . They were accompanied by Commander Maria Le Fossi's three light cruisers and the seventeen ships of Destroyer Flotilla 2960—not to mention eight frigates of the Royal Torch Navy—but those other ships were there for slightly different reasons.