David Weber - Torch of Freedom

It was a lot of hulls, even though her own light cruiser division had been chosen because it had one less ship than either of Light Cruiser Squadron 7036's other two divisions. In fact, Anvil Force almost certainly had more ships than it was going to need. But since Anvil Force's true primary mission was to prevent any long-range missiles from getting through to Torch, redundancy had become a beautiful thing.

And if those people are prepared to go to maximum-rate fire, or if it turns out they're carrying full loads of pods tractored to their hulls, we may just turn out not to be all that "redundant" after all , she reflected grimly.

There was no evidence, aside from the weapons Technodyne had provided for the Republic of Monica that anyone outside the Haven Quadrant had been experimenting with pods. Even the Technodyne pods had been pure system defense weapons, never designed for offensive deploymenyt ala Manticore or Haven, and all of Jiri Watanapongse's sources insisted that the SLN still dismissed the entire concept as the primitive, ineffectual thing it had been decades ago. But StateSec refugees who'd deserted after the Royal Manticoran Navy's ferociously successful Operation Buttercup brought the First Havenite War to a screeching halt would have a very different attitude towards them, and it was at least possible they'd managed to communicate that attitude to their Manpower sponsors. And if the thought of Manpower's putting advanced weaponry into production was ridiculous, so was the thought of Manpower's being able to make literally dozens of ex-SLN battlecruisers available to proxies like the Republic of Monica . . . or a lunatic fleet of StateSec holdouts.

So, yes, it was possible, however unlikely, that these people had missile pods of their own. And if they could generate enough saturation to overload the defenders' missile defenses . . .

They'd only have to get lucky with a handful of them, at relativistic speeds , she reminded herself.

"I have to say," Dobbs continued, "that I really kind of wish we'd gone with Alpha One instead of Alpha Two." She glanced at him, and he grimaced. "I understand the logic, Ma'am. I just don't like sitting around on my hands while someone else does all the heavy lifting."

"I can't say I don't feel at least a little the same," Raycraft admitted. Alpha One would have turned Anvil Force into a true anvil, with the light cruisers and Hjálmar Snorrason's destroyers advancing from Torch to catch the attackers between themselves and Rozsak's Hammer Force. "On the other hand, the Admiral was right. Alpha One probably would be a case of gilding the lily. If he can't do the job with six of the Marksmans , we probably couldn't do it with eight, either. Besides, I imagine there'll be time to go to Alpha Three , if it comes to it. And if it doesn't, then not giving ourselves away with active impeller signatures strikes me as a pretty good notion."

"Oh, I agree, Ma'am," Dobbs told her mildly, and she snorted once, then turned back to Siegel.

"How long until the Admiral has Hammer Force in position?" she asked.

"It looks like they came up about two million klicks short on their planned translation, Ma'am," Siegel replied, and Raycraft nodded. She already noticed that Lieutenant Wu's astrogation had been a little off, and she wasn't surprised. In fact, she was all in favor of coming up short in a situation like this one, herself. "Assuming constant accelerations across the board, though," Siegel continued, "Hammer Force will close to the specified range in about fifty-eight minutes. At that point, the enemy will be just under a hundred and twelve million kilometers—call it six-point-two light-minutes—from Torch."

Raycraft nodded again, then turned to the com image of Lieutenant Richard McKenzie, Artillerist 's chief engineer.

"Stand ready on the wedge, Richard. We may want it in an hour or so."

"Velocities have equalized, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Pierre Stravinsky said quietly, and Adrian Luff glanced at the master plot again.

There'd been no further communication with Admiral Rozsak, assuming it really was Admiral Rozsak behind them, although that didn't necessarily strike him as a good sign. Not that anything the other man might have said was going to cause him to rethink his own plans and options at this point. He'd decided what he was going to do, and he wasn't going to start second-guessing himself at this late point.

The range between his ships and their pursuers had opened while the bogeys made up their initial velocity disadvantage. With an acceleration advantage of just under one kilometer per second, that had taken 9.75 minutes. The range between them had risen to just over 13.3 million kilometers during that time; now that velocities had equalized at 7,886 KPS, the range had begun to drop once again. From here on, their pursuers would steadily eat away the distance between them.

He looked up and beckoned for Citizen Commander Hartman to join him. She stepped up on his left side, gazing at the plot with him, and he waved one hand at its icons.

"They're still almost eleven million kilometers short of the hyper limit," he observed, "so I suppose it's remotely possible they really don't have MDMs over there and they're trying to run a bluff on us. They could still be hoping our nerve will crack and we'll break off . . . and planning on hypering back out instead of coming across the limit after us and getting into standard missile range, if we don't. Just between you and me," his tone was dry enough to evaporate the Frontenac Estuary back home in Nouveau Paris, "I'd really like to think that's what's happening here. Unfortunately, what I think is really happening is exactly what you and Stravinsky suggested from the outset. Those are Erewhonese ships, whoever's aboard them, and those two big bastards are mil-spec freighters loaded with missile pods. The question I've been turning over in my mind for the last five or six minutes is how close they're going to want to get before they start rolling pods at us. May I assume you've been devoting some thought to the same problem?"

"Yes, Citizen Commodore." Hartman gave him a smile of her own, although hers showed a bit more of the tips of her teeth. "As a matter of fact, Pierre and I have been kicking that around, and we've consulted with Citizen Captain Vergnier and Citizen Commander Laurent, as well."

"And have the four of you reached a consensus?"

"We're all agreed on what they're going to try to do," Hartman replied. "We're still a little divided over the exact range they're looking for, though. Obviously, they're planning to close to a range lower than twelve million kilometers, or they would have fired before the range began to open. That being the case, they're clearly trying to get their fire control close enough to give them a reasonable hit percentage, exactly as Pierre suggested, which makes a lot of sense, if those six cruisers are the only fire control platforms they plan on using. Personally, I think they want to come as close as they can while staying out of our range, so I'm figuring eight million klicks. That would put them a half million kilometers outside standard missile range, and they've obviously got the acceleration advantage to hold the range at that point if they choose to.

"Pierre agrees with me, but he thinks they'll shoot for nine million klicks in order to give themselves a little more wiggle room after our birds go ballistic. Citizen Captain Vergnier and Citizen Commander Laurent argue that with two freighters full of missile pods, they'll probably be willing to start wasting ammunition sooner than that, so they're both thinking in terms of something more like ten million klicks."