Bit of Analysis: HH Crown of Slaves

[Ahriman238]

"Hali Sowle, you are cleared to leave orbit." E.D. Trimm checked the screen again, more out of habit that anything else, just as a final precaution against the very remote possibility that an unauthorized flight—or possibly even a bolide, as statistical unlikely as that was—might have blundered into the freighter's projected course.

"Hali Sowle, signing off."

The freighter is off, looks like they're not getting this done as a short term mission.

Anton heard a slight choking sound. At a guess, he thought Victor was trying to suppress a laugh. Fortunately, the momentary lapse was small enough that the scrambling equipment would disguise the slight break from what was supposed to be the body language of a couple having a quiet but rather fierce argument.

The equipment they had wasn't really top of the line. For that, they'd have needed Manticoran gear which could potentially cause trouble. But the stuff they'd obtained on the black market in Neue Rostock—Victor's contact Thiêu Chuanli was a veritable cornucopia of handy items—was plenty good enough for their purposes. The equipment not only protected against sound detection efforts, which any well-designed scrambling equipment would do, but it also produced just enough in the way of visual distortion to make lip-reading impossible and even interpreting body language all but impossible for any but a trained expert—and then, only if the people being interpreted were incapable of acting at all.

Victor Cachat, on the other hand, was a pretty decent actor. As you'd expect from a secret agent. And Yana had a natural flair for it.

The difference between an adequate and a great privacy field.

Unlike the scrambling equipment, the com device was top-of-the-line, cutting edge equipment. More precisely, it was bleeding edge equipment, specially designed for Anton by one of Manticore's top electronics firms, for a cost that was normally associated with the price of air cars, not personal handheld communication equipment.

Anton could afford it. Or, rather, Catherine Montaigne could afford it. Anton was stubborn about not relying on Cathy for his personal financial needs, but he didn't hesitate to tap into her enormous fortune when it came to his professional work.

-snip-

That done, he slid the com into his pocket. He made no attempt to disguise the motion, or the device itself. He was just a man finishing some routine work. To anyone who examined it, the com unit would seem to be a perfectly normal if somewhat expensive item produced in the Solarian League. Only if someone really attempted to break into the device would they be able to discover otherwise—and, by then, the com unit's self-destruct mechanism would have been triggered and there'd be nothing to examine but a small pile of smoldering slag.

And Anton and Victor's comm units.

He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."

"Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "

"Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "

Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.

"You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."

Zilwicki snorted. "Not usually the way the highlands of Gryphon are described!"

"Try growing up in a Dolist slum in Nouveau Paris. Trust me, Anton. The difference is huge. I'm not talking in terms of any scale of misery, mind you. I'm simply talking in terms of how narrow a view of the universe you're provided with. When I entered StateSec Academy, for all practical purposes I had no real knowledge of the universe beyond what I'd grown up with. Which wasn't much, believe me. That's . . ."

He paused for a moment. "I know a lot of people think I'm inclined toward zealotry. I suppose that's fair enough. What has changed, as the years have passed, is that my understanding of the universe has become . . . well, very large. So while I still retain the fundamental beliefs I had as a teenager, I can now put those beliefs in a much better context. I can, for instance, spend hours discussing politics with Web Du Havel—as I have, any number of times—listening to his basically conservative views without automatically dismissing those views as the self-serving prattle of an elitist."

Anton smiled. "Web just doesn't fit that pigeonhole, does he?"

"No, he doesn't. And while I still disagree with Web—for the most part, though by no means always—I do understand why he thinks the way he does. To put it another way, my view of things hasn't changed all that much, but it's no longer monochromatic. Does that make sense?"

Anton nodded. "Yes, it does."

"All right. If my view of the world was monochromatic, growing up in a Nouveau Paris slum under the Legislaturist regime, try to imagine just how little there is in the way of subtle shadings for a young man or woman who grew up here, as a seccy under the thumb of the Mesan regime."

Anton couldn't help but wince.

"Yeah," said Victor. "That's the problem, Anton. It's not that these kids are too fanatical. Frankly, I don't blame them one damn bit for their zeal and fervor. The problem is that they see everything in black and white. Forget the colors of the spectrum. They don't even recognize the color gray, much less any of its various shades."

In short, some of the young seccy resistance that Saburo X put them in touch with are a bit prone to going off half-cocked.

Furthermore, while they were young, and suffered from the haphazard education that all seccies received, they were very far from dull-witted or incapable. To Anton and Victor's surprise, for instance, when the group had been asked to provide them with a powerful explosive device, they'd proudly presented them a few days later with a low-yield nuclear device. Nothing jury-rigged either. The device was a standard construction type used in terraforming, designed and built by a well-known Solarian company. The best Anton and Victor had expected had been something chemical and homemade.

Victor and Anton asked for a bomb in case they need an explosion to cover their extraction, the locals found them an industrial-use nuke.

Anton nodded. He didn't want to know the details, anyway. "How'd you disable the locator beacon?"

Hansen's face went blank. He and the other youngsters in the room—David Pritchard, Cary Condor and Karen Steve Williams—exchanged glances.

"What's a locator beacon?" asked Williams.

There's that inconsistent education.

"Did you honestly think Mesans—hell, anybody—let nuclear explosive devices roam around loose?"

"Please be quiet, everyone," said Anton. "This is . . . really quite tricky."

He heard Victor suck in a little air. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of someone else shrieking My God—doom is almost certain! Cachat knew what a genuine expert Zilwicki was when it came to these things. If he admitted it was . . . really quite tricky . . .

Complete silence proved to be too much for the youngsters. "You mean . . . they can figure out where the thing is?" whispered Pritchard.

"To within three meters, as a rule," said Victor. He was back to speaking tonelessly. "At which point they have several options, although they'll probably settle for one of the first two."

Pritchard's eyes—quite wide they were, at the moment—stared at him appealingly, and Victor shrugged.

"First, they can send out the elite commando unit to retrieve it, with lots of very big, very nasty, and very efficient guns. Plenty to"—he gave the basement a quick scan—"well, to give all the walls down here a nice even coating of new paint. The color known colloquially as BGB. Blood, guts and brains." He smiled ever so slightly at his extremely attentive young audience. It was not a pleasant expression. "Or, second, they can detonate the device. True, that second option's usually a bit extreme, but they might not really care a lot about that. Especially if they figure out who's got the damned thing."

Cheerful thoughts on why people don't usually liberate the industrial nukes.

In a perfect world, he'd have reprogrammed the beacon to simulate a legitimate location. But there were simply too many unknown factors to risk doing that, here. They'd just have to hope that no one had spotted the device "wandering" over the past period. If they hadn't, they wouldn't spot the missing device now until a complete physical inventory was made. Fortunately, that didn't usually happen more than once a year, even with devices as potentially dangerous as these. Modern locator beacons were so accurate, reliable and tamper-resistant that people usually just relied on a periodic check of the beacons themselves.

And, also, fortunately, most people tended to equate "tamper-resistant" with "tamper-proof." Being fair, there really weren't very many people in the galaxy who could have done what Anton had just done.

Apparently disabling the beacons is a rather rare skill.

Adrian Luff . . .

That was mostly bad news, according to Victor. Zilwicki really had no opinion of his own. He'd recognized the name from his days working for Manticoran naval intelligence, but that was about it.

Cachat knew more about him, as you'd expect, although he'd never actually met the man. According to Victor, Luff wasn't an especially brutal or harsh man, certainly not by StateSec standards. He'd scarcely been what a professional Manticoran or Havenite naval officer would have thought of as a fleet commander, but at least he'd had a far better idea than most of his SS fellows about which end of the tube the missile came out of. And while no StateSec officer assigned to ride herd on the People's Navy was likely to be a total novice where brutality and discipline was concerned, Luff had understood that breaking a man's spirit wasn't the best way to produce a warrior when you needed one.

That might speak well of the man, but Anton would have been a lot happier if this rogue StateSec military force—which was a very powerful one; he and Victor had been able to learn that much for sure and certain—had as its commander someone like Emile Tresca. Tresca, at one time the commandant of StateSec's prison planet, had been notorious for his viciousness and sadism. On the other hand, nobody in their right mind would have put him in charge of a frigate, much less an entire fleet.

Anton's thoughts on Luff, the self-promoted "commodore" leading the People's Navy in Exile. Incidentally, Victor and Anton know about the impending operation against Torch but have decided no to try and escape to carry warning home because a.) they're pretty confident the Mayans will catch wind of such maneuvers on their own, and maybe the Erewhonese b.) they won't be much use in a naval fight, either one of Torch's allies will defend it or all is lost and c.) what they're doing here and now is sort of important in it's own right.

Irvine wore the traditional gray smock of a general laborer genetic slave. The smock's shoulder carried the stylized image of a cargo shuttle, which marked its wearer as a ground crewman at the Green Pines shuttle port, and the three chevrons above the shuttle marked him as a senior supervisor—in effect, a trustee. Irvine had the heavyset, muscular build to go with that smock, and if he'd cared to open his mouth and display it, his tongue carried the barcode of a slave, as well. In fact, physically, he was a slave—or, at least, clearly the product of a slave-bred genotype. Except, of course, for the fact that unlike real genetic slaves, he had the enhanced lifespan of a gamma line.

Mesa Security's agent in the slave population, genetically a slave in every way right down to the barcode, except for an enhanced lifespan.

It was a fact which the Alignment's star lines seldom discussed, even among themselves, that genetically, they were much more closely related to Manpower's slaves than they were to the vast majority of humanity. For centuries, the slave lines had been the laboratories of the Long-Range Planning Board—the place where newly designed traits could be field-tested, tried out, and then either culled or incorporated into those same star lines and conserved. The LRPB had been careful to work from far behind the scenes, even (or, perhaps, especially) within the Manpower hierarchy, but its access to Manpower's breeding programs had always been a major factor in its successes.

One consequence of that was that even the Alignment's alpha and beta lines shared a whole host of genetic markers with Manpower's slaves. None of those slaves had ever received the entire package of one of the star lines, of course, just as none of them had received prolong, yet there was an undeniably close relationship between them.

This is sort of obvious when you think of it, one of life's little ironies.

There'd been the occasional discussion of increasing the numbers of agents like Lajos, especially as the Audubon Ballroom had grown in sophistication and audacity. There were those (and he knew Steven Lathorous was one of them) who believed the Ballroom's capabilities were reaching the point of genuinely threatening to uncover the truth of the Alignment's existence. The people who felt that way were most likely to press for the creation of additional deep-penetrators, yet however cogent their arguments might be, the considerations of the Alignment's "onion strategy" continued to preclude the possibility. The Alignment had always relied on misdirection, stealth—on not being noticed in the first place, rather than building the sort of rockhard firewalls which were likely to attract the very attention it sought so assiduously to avoid.

Ironically, the limited numbers of available deep-penetration agents was part of what had made them so successful for so long. Not even Manpower knew that some of its "slaves" were nothing of the sort. That had made life hard for quite a few of Irvine's predecessors and fellows. In fact, the conditions of their "slavery" had cost more than one of them his life along the way, despite everything the Alignment's penetration of Manpower's bureaucracy had been able to do to protect them. But it also meant their security was absolute. No one outside their controls and handlers even dreamed of their existence, and keeping things that way meant holding their total numbers down to something manageable. The Ballroom was aware of the dangers of counter-penetration of course. There'd always been some of that, just as there would always be human beings who could be bribed—or coerced by terror and threats against those they loved—to spy upon their fellows. At least some of the Alignment's agents had been identified as exactly that, over the years, and paid the price the Ballroom exacted from traitors. Yet all of them had died without anyone ever realizing who—and what—they actually were.

The Alignment's deep cover slave agents, and why they exist in such tiny numbers.

Not surprisingly, the Ballroom's efforts to penetrate Mesa were unceasing. It would have been amazing if they hadn't been, and given the percentage of the planetary population which consisted of genetic slaves, the opportunity for that sort of effort was obvious. Despite that, the Ballroom had never managed any high level penetration. Part of that, McBryde admitted less than totally happily, was because of the brutal efficiency of the official Mesan security apparatus. He was just as happy not to be associated with that apparatus himself, yet he had to admit that sheer brutality and terror could be effective ways of cowing potential rebels.

Those same techniques, however, also produced rebels, and those were the people the Ballroom looked for. They were also the people Alignment Security's deep-penetration agents looked for, as well, and once they'd been found, it was far more efficient and effective to watch them—to let them attract other potential rebels into identified little clusters. Eventually, of course, any given cluster would probably reach a point at which it was sufficiently large and sufficiently well organized to become a genuine threat, at which point it would have to be eliminated. Until that point was reached, though, it was better to know who to be watching than to eliminate them and start over from scratch again and again.

Why the cell Anton and Victor are working with haven't had a hammer dropped on them yet. Lajos is now arguing they should lower the boom because the Ballroom seems to have connected to them via these two newcomers.

"I mean two people I've never seen before at all, hanging around with Carl Hansen and his group. One of them is working as a waiter in Steph Turner's restaurant."

"Who's she?"

Lajos waved his hand dismissively. "Just a woman who owns a small restaurant that caters to the seccy trade. Divorced, one kid, a teenage daughter. I've never mentioned her before, as I recall, since I don't think she's more than vaguely connected to the underground, if she's even connected at all."

McBryde nodded. Given the fact that slaves made up sixty percent of Mesa's population and seccies made up another ten percent, the anti-slavery underground was vast and extensive. For the most part, the underground concentrated on activities that were not directly threatening to the Mesan order: smuggling slaves out and contraband in; maintaining a network of social services that made up to a degree for the lack of such services provided by the government; and so forth. Only a small percentage of the underground's members had direct and close ties to the Ballroom or engaged in violent activities. If Lajos had been in the habit of reporting every seccy who had any connection at all to the underground or even the Ballroom, neither he nor Jack would ever be able to get any sleep. You had to be practical about these things.

This sounds familiar somehow, an underground so pervasive everyone has some contact with it.

They might have kept Ballroom agents from establishing any significant presence here on the planet, but Ballroom operatives seldom provided anything useful in the way of information, either. Partly because the Ballroom understood operational security at least as well as anyone else in the galaxy. It compartmentalized information tightly, and it applied the "need-to-know" rule ruthlessly. More than that, any of its operatives who possessed truly sensitive knowledge were also provided with the means for reliable self-termination. More than one of them had chosen surgically implanted explosive devices, which had taken their share of security personnel with them over the years.

Those who return to Mesa for the Ballroom tend towards the "You'll never take me alive!" attitude. Hard to blame them.

He gazed at them curiously. Whatever the StateSec man's purpose might be, if Irvine's suspicion that the other one also came from outside the Mesa System had any validity, then the waiter wasn't a seccy at all, even though he was working for one. McBryde had always wondered what went on inside the heads of escaped genetic slaves who voluntarily walked straight back into the lion's den. Unlike some of his fellows, he'd always respected their courage, and of late he'd begun to understand the kind of personal outrage which motivated many of them far better than he'd ever understood it before. Still—

His thoughts slithered to a halt. Somehow—he never knew how—he managed to keep his eyes from widening or his jaw dropping, but it was hard.

It can't be, his brain insisted quietly. Not here. Not even those two would be ballsy enough!

Yet even as his brain insisted, he knew better. The one sitting at a table was a thoroughly unremarkable-looking, almost slightly built young fellow. If Jack hadn't been told he was a Havenite, he would have assumed that the man was descended from any of several general laborer lines. But the other . . . At a glance, you might assume the other was obviously descended from a heavy labor line. But Jack knew Irvine was right. This was no line ever developed by Manpower. The guy was simply much too short for that incredible physique. When Manpower developed a line specifically for muscular power, they made them big all around. It would have been foolish not to do so, as a practical matter, and probably even genetically difficult.

Uh oh, recognized. And Mesan heavy-labor slaves tend to be massive as well as just muscular.

He grimaced at the thought, but there was some truth to it. Enough, in fact, that he'd been careful to inhale the nanotech busy scavenging the stuff out of his own bloodstream as quickly as it got there. Sleep weed, also known as "old sleepy" and just plain "weed," was one of the Mesan slave labor force's intoxicants of choice. It was more addictive than alcohol (for most people, at least), yet it was also less expensive, and it didn't produce a hangover. With persistent use (and most of its users smoked it very heavily), it did produce some nasty respiratory problems, but that usually took several decades. Given the fact that very few genetic slaves lived much more than five or six decades, total, it was scarcely a pressing concern for the slaves who smoked it.

Sleep Weed, the narcotic of choice for genetic slaves, and nanotech for protecting oneself from the effects.

"Something else?" The waiter arched one eyebrow, his expression calm, and McBryde nodded. "What can I get you?" the other man asked, setting down the coffee pot to pull his battered order pad out of his pocket and key the screen.

"Something from off-world," McBryde said softly.

The waiter didn't even twitch. His shoulders didn't tense; his eyes didn't narrow; his expression didn't even flicker. He was good, McBryde thought, but, then, he'd already known that. Just as he knew that at this particular instant his own life hung by the proverbial thread.

"I think you're in the wrong place for that," the waiter replied in obvious amusement. "In this joint, we're lucky to get our hands on local produce that doesn't poison the customers!"

"Oh, I don't doubt that." McBryde snorted with an edge of what he was astonished to discover was genuine amusement. "On the other hand, I wasn't thinking about the menu . . . Captain Zilwicki."

"Then you're really in the wrong place," the waiter said calmly. It wasn't a calm McBryde found particularly reassuring, but he made himself smile and twitch the extended index finger in a cautionary sort of way.

Well this will be fun.

"Before you attempt to twist my head off like a bottle cap—probably with a degree of success I'd regret—" McBryde continued, "consider your situation. I'm sure you and Agent Cachat have several alternative escape strategies, and it's entirely possible that several of my fellow 'customers' would be delighted to help you slit my throat before taking your leisurely and well-planned leave. On the other hand, I wouldn't be sitting here running the risk of your doing exactly that if I hadn't taken a few precautions of my own, now would I? And if it should happen that I'm wired, then whoever's at the other end of the link already knows what's going on here, doesn't he? Which, presumably, means my backup—assuming, of course, that I was clever enough to arrange one—would undoubtedly arrive before my lifeless body hit the floor. So before either of us does anything the other one would regret, why don't you and I talk for a moment."

"While we waste enough time for your goons to close in, you mean?" Zilwicki inquired calmly.

"If my 'goons' were planning on closing in on you, Captain, I'd for damn sure have had them do it before I sat here in arm's length of you and blew the whistle on myself, now wouldn't I?"

Good thing he really is here to talk.

"Sit," Anton Zilwicki invited, pointing at the chair opposite him across the table. McBryde obeyed the one-word command, and Zilwicki slid a second cup of coffee across to him.

"This is better than the crap we have to serve out there," he said, this time making no effort to hide his Gryphon accent. "Of course, it could be laced with all sorts of deadly poisons. Would you like me to take a sip first?"

"Why?" McBryde smiled crookedly. "If I were going to poison me, I'd've taken the antidote first myself, then put the poison in both cups."

They still have the Princess Bride on Mesa?

"Of course, there's no telling what kind of devious strategy—other than getting your hands on me and my associates, that is—you might have in mind."

"Of course," McBryde acknowledged. "And, as it happens, I do have a strategy in mind. I don't know that I'd call it 'devious,' but I do rather suspect that it's going to come as a surprise to you."

"I'm not especially fond of surprises." There was an undeniable note of warning in Zilwicki's deep voice, McBryde noticed.

"This one might be the exception to your rule, Captain," he replied calmly. "You see, I want to defect."

Oh, okay. That works out pretty well for everyone, McBryde is close to the other disgruntled Mesan, Herlander Simoes, and knows enough about the Alignment to really hurt them. That's perfect, except for the short term where they have to smuggle two defectors out of of Mesa with zero advance warning.

[Simon_Jester]

The freighter is off, looks like they're not getting this done as a short term mission.

Given that the objective was "here, infiltrate this enemy planet with only a vague idea of what you're looking for," that's no surprise.

Victor and Anton asked for a bomb in case they need an explosion to cover their extraction, the locals found them an industrial-use nuke.

Anton nodded. He didn't want to know the details, anyway. "How'd you disable the locator beacon?"

Hansen's face went blank. He and the other youngsters in the room—David Pritchard, Cary Condor and Karen Steve Williams—exchanged glances.

"What's a locator beacon?" asked Williams.

There's that inconsistent education.

In a darkly comedic way, this... would actually do quite a lot to explain why there has never been a successful slave uprising on Mesa. If half-baked types like this are the best the local revolutionaries can produce, it'd be an uphill battle for them to accomplish anything.

Also an excellent illustration of why, if you have an underclass and you fear the possibility of them rebelling, not educating them and not giving them ready access to information on the wide world makes your position a lot safer.

And, also, fortunately, most people tended to equate "tamper-resistant" with "tamper-proof." Being fair, there really weren't very many people in the galaxy who could have done what Anton had just done.

Apparently disabling the beacons is a rather rare skill.

If it weren't, they'd probably invent better beacons. Also, most of the people who do have the skills probably work for planetary governments quite capable of procuring their own nuclear devices...

This sounds familiar somehow, an underground so pervasive everyone has some contact with it.

Uh... how so?

Also, it's kind of inevitable in such a highly class-stratified society. There's a tremendous intergenerational depth to the underground networks of such a society, although the 'underground' in question may not actually be interested in revolting against the status quo.

[Beowulf]

This explains why they can't have the CM drive first: the nodes on the CM missile/warhead bus are by necessity enclosed inside the warhead compartment of the larger cataphract, and we know that the nodes have to be outside the hull or they'd slag it (cf. Sirius in OBS). This also explains why they are so much larger, specifically length-wise, than single-drive missiles: the hull of a CM is longer than the normal warhead bus of the same size missile, and explains why they are weaker, as well.

Why would they be? Sirius' nodes were partially inside her hull so she could pretend to be a freighter. The Cataphract isn't going to convince anybody it's anything other than a two-stage missile so why not have the nodes out in the open from the word go? It's not like they need to worry about aerodynamic drag so why would they need to be inside the warhead compartment?

I think it was mentioned that the Sirius's nodes were jacked out of the hull when they were powered up.

[Batman]

So? Unlike Sirius the Cataphract has no reason to hide its second stage nodes inside the hull.

[Simon_Jester]

The relevant point is that Sirius could not possibly fire up its impeller nodes while they were physically inside the hull. The nodes may not need to be configured exactly as they are on a starship, but at least a major part of each node do need to be exposed to outer space directly, not tucked away inside the hull.

Therefore, if, for whatever reason, the Cataphract missile is actually literally a two-stage missile in the sense we understand it, with a first stage that logically must fire and which propels a bus containing the second stage... it would certainly explain why the stages must be fired in the sequence they are, despite the negative consequences for the missile's engagement envelope.

[Beowulf]

I just noticed you'd bolded a bit. Sorry. My point above was that impeller nodes must be exposed.

I'm going to have to fall back that it only be necessity needs to be in the warhead compartment if the form actual needs to match your typical impeller missile. That said, all the one's we've seen have that form factor. It might be due to packaging, but if that were the case, I'd expect a perfectly cylindrical missile, rather than one that looks like a dildo. I'll admit that pinnaces don't have that classic impeller driven form, but they may do trade-offs for that, that reduce the efficiency of the impeller drive (can't have as much acceleration, takes more mass, etc), that don't affect the pinnaces much, but are unacceptable for a missile.

Beyond that, it's likely that fully enclosing the second stage is advantageous. The room around the second stage could be used for other equipment. Capacitor rings, for example, are likely actually ring shaped, and so would have a hollow center that the second stage could telescope into. Ditto RCS fuel (Storm from the Shadows has a diagram of the Mk16 missile with RCS thrusters and fuel).

[Ahriman238]

Manpower didn't want its ex-slaves back, especially after they'd enjoyed such a taste of freedom and vengeance. No, what Manpower wanted was to see Torch erased from the face of the galaxy, preferably in a way which would thoroughly discourage any future, similarly uppity thoughts on the part of its property. And the Eridani Edict's prohibition of deliberate, genocidal attacks on planetary populations was aimed at star nations—which knew the Solarian League Navy would come to call on them if they violated its restrictions. Since Manpower wasn't a star nation, and there was no legal mechanism for the Solarian League Navy to go after a non-Solarian corporation, the Edict was a moot point as far as it was concerned. And since its mercenaries represented a force which no longer had a star nation to call its own, the actual officers and crews carrying out the operations wouldn't be particularly concerned by the Edict, either. All of which meant the attackers would probably settle for pasting the planet with a few "accidental" cee-fractional missile strikes. A half-dozen hundred-ton missiles hitting the planet at sixty percent or so of light-speed should pretty much pasteurize its ecosystem and anyone living in it. Forty-gigaton-range fireballs tended to have that effect.

Interesting that they acknowledge that they can get gigaton impacts from kinetic missiles.

The lightweight pods in Charade's bays were simply too stripped down for any sort of extensive independent deployment. They required too much external power supply, just for starters, and the people who'd designed them had deliberately accepted limited—very limited—operational lifetimes for their onboard systems. All of which meant Stensrud couldn't simply stack the things in Torch orbit and then get her ship the hell out of the way.

Looks like the Mayans and Erewhonese either don’t have system-defense pods or they're just too big for the improvised podlayers.

"Why?" Butry glared at the housing. "Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!"

"Well, they are . . . mostly," Andrew acknowledged. "Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one"—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotorlike device longer than his arm—"is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump."

Apparently "even a hyper generator has some moving parts" and the stabilizers can get worn out. In this case, though, the part in question is pretty much a metal rod, surely they can handle that in-house?

"It can't just be fixed?"

"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.

"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way on God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."

He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."

He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."

Well apparently they have the tools needed to make the tools and resources he'd need for a short-term replacement part. I.e. some welding gear, a lathe and a micrometer, even if he'll be muttering about primitive tools for all the weeks it'll take.

"Might even be months. There's really no way to know ahead of time. The bottom line is this, Ganny. Unless we replace the worn out parts now, this equipment is likely to go out completely once we put any real stress on it. At that point, we're dead in the water. We'd still have power, so it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening. We could probably survive for at least a year. But we'd just be drifting in space until I could fix it. And, like I said, that could take anywhere up to half a year."

Apparently it's only a nothing part until you haven't got one. Seems they can survive a year in space off on-board resources.

Perhaps that was because the planet enjoyed mild and pleasant climatic conditions. Even the dead of winter, except in the polar regions, was no worse than a mild winter day on Haven. It didn't even begin to compare with the ferocious winter conditions of Zilwicki's native Gryphon, and the hypothermia of a Sphinxian winter would have clear-cut the planetary population like one of Old Earth's Final War bioweapons.

Mesa's summers were probably tougher on human beings than its winters—but the summers weren't bad either. The planet's sun was a G2 star virtually identical to Sol, and Mesa itself was almost a twin of Earth. Not quite. The gravity was almost identical, but Mesa had slightly more land surface. That might have made the climate more extreme than Earth's, with less of the ameliorative effect of oceans. But Mesa was about forty light-seconds closer to the system primary and had a much smaller axial tilt—only nine degrees, in contrast to the home planet's twenty-three and a half. So the average temperature was somewhat higher and the seasonal variations quite a bit smaller.

On most of the planet's surface, in fact, winter never brought any snow at all. But the planet had taken the name of "Mesa" from the high, tableland mesa near the center of its largest continent where the survey party placed its initial base camp on the planetary surface. What eventually became the planet's capital city had developed there, for the same largely accidental reasons that most cities on most worlds came into existence. Being at a greater altitude than most of the planet, and with a definitely continental effect, the weather in the capital was probably worse than almost anywhere else on Mesa.

Apparently despite the howling snowstorm at the moment, Mesa generally has a very mild climate.

Anton and Victor now knew a lot more about the true nature of Mesa's political system than they had when they landed on the planet, or than any other Manticorans or Havenites still knew. Jack McBryde had been cagey about imparting information to them, in each of the secret meetings they'd had since the initial contact. He'd peeled off that data much like the onion he used to depict the centuries-old strategy of the shadowy conspiracy he'd introduced to them as "the Alignment." Being as sparing as possible, each time, in the hopes of bargaining for a better deal.

Still, he'd had to give them a lot already. It was just a crude fact of life that a person seeking to defect had less in the way of bargaining power than the people in a position to provide a new life for him or her. And neither Anton nor Victor was in any mood to be charitable.

Apparently McBryde has spent months slowly describing the Alignment to Victor and Anton, trying to keep his value to them to ensure they'll extract him.

As Victor had quipped sarcastically after their third meeting with McBryde, paraphrasing a line from one of his favorite movies, it was as if an officer at one of the ancient Nazi death camps was suddenly to exclaim: "I am shocked—shocked!—to discover genocide at Auschwitz!" (Anton had understood the reference, but he'd had to explain it to Yana.)

+10 for the Casablanca reference.

"How many people then, do you think?"

"At a guess, just one," replied Victor. "McBryde doesn't have a wife or children—or significant other of any kind, so far as we've been able to determine. I get the feeling he's rather close to his family, but I'd be astonished if someone with his training and experience would do anything to compromise them. There's no possible way he could get all of them off the planet, parents and siblings both. And for all we know some of his brothers and sisters have children of their own."

Cachat leaned forward over the kitchen table, leaning his weight on his arms. "He's putting them all at a considerable risk already, it seems to me. Once he leaves, there'll be hell to pay, even if there's no indication that any of them knew what he was planning. If this were Haven under Pierre and Saint-Just, his family would probably all be executed anyway. But from everything we've been able to determine, this Mesan Alignment doesn't operate that crudely."

Seems the Alignment isn't too big on 'just in case' purges.

As she did every morning, the Amazon had gone out to check the astrogation records. Entries and exits from the system by all merchant and passenger ships—most military craft, too—were kept up to date and publicly available.

Checking those records on a daily basis was a perfectly legal activity, but it was always possible that someone might be monitoring them. So, Yana used a different method every day to search the data. Sometimes a public library, and never the same one twice in a row; sometimes the commercial shipping offices—there were lots of those in the city; and once she'd even gone down to the Extrasolar Commerce Authority itself and used their computers.

"The Hali Sowle just entered the system again," she said quietly, not wanting to disturb Anton's train of thought. She didn't know Zilwicki as well as Victor did, but she had a near-superstitious respect for the man's fabled ability to work his way through any problem.

Victor nodded. "Any word yet as to their permitted length of stay?"

She shook her head. "No, but it'll probably be on the records by tomorrow. No later than the day after that, for sure. I'll say this for Mesa. Their bureaucrats aren't slouches."

Victor chuckled. "And this is . . . praise?"

Seems they've been here a while now, at least on Mesa starship arrivals and departures are publicly available information.

"Victor, unless I'm very badly mistaken, Jack McBryde is starting to get desperate and wants off the planet as soon as possible."

Victor frowned. "Why? He's essentially the head of security here. Well, one of them, anyway. But you'd be hard pressed to think of anyone who could disguise what he's doing as well as he could. Even if someone does spot him up to something questionable, he could almost certainly provide some sort of half-reasonable explanation. A good enough one, at least, to give him time to make his escape."

"I don't think it's his own situation that's pressing on him, Victor. I think—and I'll be the first to admit there's a lot of guesswork on my part—that it's this mysterious other person's situation that's driving most of the timetable here."

"Ah." Victor sat down and took a sip from his coffee, then thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then took another sip.

"I'm not about to second-guess you, Anton. So let's put everything on the table when we meet McBryde in two days. Tell him it's put-up-or-shut-up time, and offer the very big carrot of being able to get him and his Mysterious Other off the planet almost immediately."

They're right, Herlander Simoes is reaching the end of his project and his use to the Alignment, and that is the major factor in McBryde's rush.

"I was about to tell you. Inez Cloutier just got back yesterday—and she's got a definite offer from whoever the top dog is. Probably Adrian Luff, if we're right."

"Good offer?"

"Better than I'd imagined. There must be somebody out there who knows more about the workings of Saint-Just's field operations than I figured there'd be. I guess my, ah, reputation has preceded me."

"Not as Victor Cachat, I hope?"

"No. Well . . . probably not. Almost certainly not. It's always theoretically possible that they've figured out exactly who I am and are laying a clever trap. But they work closely with the Alignment, obviously—so if they've figured out who I am, why not just report me and let the Mesans right here do the wet work?" He shook his head. "No, they're probably figuring me for another one of Saint-Just's young troubleshooters. I wasn't the only one, by any means. There were at least a dozen others I knew of, and probably two or three times that many. Who knows? Now that Saint-Just's dead, probably no one. If there was ever a man who kept his own counsel, it was Oscar Saint-Just."

Again, the idea of a few dozen people like Victor Cachat is really scary.

The fact that Cachat had made what amounted to the ultimatum was a signal in itself, Jack knew. As their negotiations had progressed, Zilwicki and Cachat had fallen into the familiar roles of "good cop/bad cop." McBryde recognized the routine, of course—which Cachat and Zilwicki would know perfectly well—but that didn't really make much difference. The routine was ancient because it was so effective.

All the more effective here, Jack thought wryly, when your option as the "good cop" was Anton Zilwicki! As part of any other pairing except with Victor Cachat, Zilwicki would have been playing the "bad cop."

We will still have this cliche in the future as well.

"Let me finish. And, second, I can tell you how—in layman's terms; I don't have the background to understand the technical aspects of it myself—the Mesan Alignment asassinated Ambassador Webster, got Colonel Gregor Hofschulte to attempt to assassinate Crown Prince Huan, and got a Lieutenant Meares to attempt to assasinate Honor Harrington and William Henry Tyler to attack your own step-daughter Berry, Anton. Among other attacks. Trust me, there are more of them—and more successful ops—than you people even guess yet. Including"—He looked squarely at Cachat—"the one which . . . inspired, shall we say, one Yves Grosclaude to kill himself, if that means anything to you."

For the first time since he'd met Victor Cachat, an actual expression came to the Havenite's face. It was a very faint expression, true, but between that little frown and the slight pallor, Jack knew the reference had registered.

Zilwicki was frowning at Cachat. "Does that mean anything to you?"

"Yes," Victor said softly. "Something Kevin's suspected—" He shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't talk about it, Anton. This is one of those places where the interests of my star nation and yours probably aren't the same."

Apparently there have been plenty more lone gunmen we haven't seen. Also, considering just a few months ago you both went to Honor to tell her Haven didn't spike the peace conference, how does it benefit Haven not to tell Anton that Mesa caused the shooting war to resume in the first place?

"Okay. And what do you want in exchange? Keep in mind, Jack, that because of the—ah—unusual nature of this partnership between Victor and me, neither one of us can offer you asylum in our own systems. Eventually, I imagine you'll probably wind up on Erewhon, or somewhere in Maya Sector. For the time being, though, you'll be sequestered on Torch and I can pretty well guarantee that one of the very first people who'll be talking to you is Jeremy X. He's not likely to be friendly, either."

Fun conversation I'm sure that'd be.

"Here. I made this up as a sort of . . . good will gesture, I suppose you'd call it. It doesn't have any technical stuff on the assassination technique itself. As I say, the best understanding I have of it myself is only what you might call an informed layman's grasp. Basically, though, it's a new approach to medical nanotech, only this one's virus-based and does replicate on its own."

He saw the surprise—and alarm—in all three of his listeners' eyes, and shrugged.

"I don't know how they arranged it, but everything I've seen from the operational side stresses that they're confident they've built in a control mechanism to keep it from getting away from them. And that they need a DNA sample of the intended 'host' before they can design the weapon for a given mission."

In the Honorverse, because of the Final War they're all a bit gun-shy regarding both genetic enginerring and self-replicating nanotech. It seems each lone gunman batch is customized to the DNA of the target, so they need a sample, plus the Mesans have some sort of failsafe to keep it from replicating out of control, we're not told what, I suspect a kill-switch or a built-in limitation into how many generations it can spawn.

"It basically builds its own dispersed architecture, bio-based computer," McBryde replied levelly. "It taps into its host's neural system, but it's totally passive until the host encounters whatever triggering event was preprogrammed into it. At that point, it . . . takes over." He waved one hand vaguely, clearly frustrated by his inability to describe the process more clearly. "As I understand it, it can only be programmed to carry out fairly simple, short term operations. It does have some limited AI function, apparently, but not very much. And it can't override the host's own efforts to reassert control of his voluntary muscles indefinitely. No longer than four or five minutes, apparently."

Lone gunmen can carry out only simple tasks, and the control only lasts 4-5 minutes. Other than that, basically how it works, from a layman's perspective.

"And this is?"

"Well, let's just say that when I started thinking about how well I could explain this thing to you, I realized the answer was 'Not Too Damned Well,' " McBryde replied with a slight smile. "So it occurred to me it might be as well for me to provide any supporting evidence I could. That"—he indicated the chip—"is the best version of that supporting evidence I was able to get my hands on without tripping too many internal lines. It's the report of the field agent who supervised the Webster assassination. It includes names, places, and dates . . . and also describes the hack of the bank records he used to implicate the Havenite ambassador's driver. Plus the elimination of the hacker who carried it out. I imagine there's more than enough in there that can be corroborated from the Old Earth investigation, once you know where to look."

And he gives them hard data, the report from the assassination of James Webster on Earth.

"Ours not to reason why, Sir," Captain Adelaide Granger, the commanding officer of Trajan's dreadnought flagship, replied with a wry grin.

-snip-

All three of his subordinates admired and respected Trajan—he wouldn't have been selected as Task Force Four's commanding officer if he hadn't been widely regarded as one of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's two or three best flag officers. Normally, he was also an excellent boss. But there was no denying that he had his moods, and frustration tended to make him more than a little . . . prickly.

Meet the MSDF, system defense for the planet Mannerheim. Mannerheim is famed for two things; first having the largest and most powerful individual SDF of any Solarian League member world, second for their long, bitter and above all public opposition to Mesa and Manpower Inc. In fact, the Alignment has been hard at work for an awfully long time cultivating Mannerheim's "nothing to do with Mesa" image, specifically so it can serve as their cats-paw in the League and someday will serve to rebuild the shattered League, in the Alignment's image.

Anyway, the MSDF has at least one dreadnought, probably more, and 4 active task forces.

Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

I suppose having a very public naval arm is one way for the MAN to get doctrinal experience.

"They aren't going to figure out anything about it that's going to do them any good, Addie," Trajan countered. "Besides, they've already figured out just about anything that could be deduced from their end, or they never would have gotten their survey ship through to SGC-902 in the first place. For all the good that did them."

He grimaced, and so did Granger and Nyborg. Hasselberg, on the other hand, only shrugged.

"I admit that was . . . unpleasant, Sir," the chief of staff said. "It was clearly within policy and Commodore Ganneau's instructions, though."

"I'm fully aware of both those points, Niklas." Trajan's voice was considerably frostier than normally came Hasselberg's direction. "I'm also aware, however, that it was a single cruiser—and one that was the next best thing to totally obsolescent, at that—and Ganneau had an entire battlecruiser squadron sitting there, with two of them already at action stations and knowing exactly where anything from the other end had to come out. Do you really think a Manty skipper would have been stupid enough to fight with eight battlecruisers sitting there ready to turn his ship into plasma? Ganneau had the option of ordering him to surrender; he just refused to take it."

So, the Torch wormhole goes to SGC (Stargate Command?)- 902. And it was a 'Mannerheim' BC squadron sitting on the other side.

he reason Ganneau's squadron had drawn the duty of watching the Alignment's end of the Verdant Vista Bridge in the first place was that judicious personnel assignments similar to those which had been tweaked in Task Force Four's favor had led—purely coincidentally, of course—to the Sixth Battlecruiser Squadron's being exclusively officered and manned by what happened to be Mesan star-lines. None of them were going to mention what had happened to anyone else, but if a Manticoran survey vessel had been brought in by vessels of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force . . .

Apparently they've penetrated Mannerheim enough that they control not only the CNO and five most ranking admirals but were able to crew a BC squadron entirely with Mesans with no one any the wiser.

It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a "brown dwarf," of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.

It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.

No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.

Well Junctions have multiple termini, they're just usually closer together and related. Still, SGC-902 connects both to Torch and a major Junction near Mannerheim, the Felix system.

Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a survey expedition backed by the "Jessyk Combine" and operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason not to broadcast the Combine's discovery.

Lots of use to the Alignment, and heck just to Jessyk, in knowing about wormholes no one else does. Actually that does lead me to wonder, Manticore never knew about their Junction til Axelrod tried to take it. How long do you think you could keep that secret from an inhabited system? On the one hand, ships appearing and disappearing beyond the hyper-limit wouldn't be surprising at all, but if they did a lot of FTL travel they'd have to notice the resonance zone, but maybe in an impoverished verge system you could pull it off.

Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.

The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.

What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.

Mannerheim's use to Mesa, Felix has 4 wormholes. SGC-902, Darius and two others.

They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as "black" as they had the entire colony in Darius.

In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim.

Layers within layers, you join the Mannerheim SDF with a sparkle in your eye, hoping to make the galaxy safer, and learn about a secret wormhole junction. So you keep one of the Alignment's secrets and from there they just keep you on the line.

Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt.

If Mannerheim suddenly showed an interest in the system, someone was going to wonder why. Aside from the Jessyk survey (which had been poaching on someone else's property, not that one would have expected that consideration to weigh heavily with Jessyk, of course), no one had ever bothered to update the original survey of the system. But if Mannerheim started offering to acquire the colonization rights, that was almost inevitably going to change, since the contending "owners" would certainly suspect (correctly) that Mannerheim knew something about it that they didn't. So they'd go and take a look for themselves, in the course of which they would discover the junction for themselves. At which point all manner of litigation, claims, counterclaims, and demands for immense compensation would come frothing to the surface.

So Mannerheim had the perfect cover for keeping the junction's existence under wraps while it very carefully and quietly, through a web of agents and arm's-length associations, sought to acquire ownership of Felix for itself without anyone's noticing. Those members of the MSDF who were not themselves Mesans but who were aware of the Felix Junction's existence knew exactly why they were supposed to keep their mouths shut about it. And they didn't know that the "official" survey information which had been shared with them didn't include the Darius Terminus . . . or the SGC-902-36-G Terminus.

The legal complexities. Outside a certain radius of a star, and 10 LY certainly counts, part of claiming any stellar real estate is demonstrating the ability to hold it, as well as having a legal claim to it.

"To be honest, Sir," Captain Granger's voice was very serious, almost somber, "that's only part of the reason for my own reservations about this operation. We're not planning on moving in on Verdant Vista, anyway. Not until we need a back door into the Haven Quadrant, at any rate, and we've waited around for two hundred years without doing that. I know that's probably going to change in the not too distant future, but the decision about when to finally use it is going to lie with us, and not anyone else, as long as no one figures out what's going on, at least. And we're all pretty much in agreement that the Manties aren't really likely to be able to do that. I'm damned sure they're not going to keep feeding survey ships into a terminus nothing ever comes back from, at any rate! So there's no need for the attack or any of its . . . collateral damage."

So there is a secondary terminus to Torch. That's why it's strategically important, it's not only part of Mesa's (small, at least I think) secret wormhole network, it's their speedy backdoor into the Haven Quadrant. Where it goes is anyone's guess, Haven, Silesia, the Andermani, or space in-between (It'd be kind of funny if Torch connected to one of the other theoretical Manticoran wormholes, though then Manticore might try and assert control over the Junction as they have elsewhere) but if there's one thing better than having a wormhole to deliver your ships and supplies right near your enemy, it's having a wormhole they don't even suspect exists. Darius, their main construction and fleet base, to Felix to SGC-902 to Torch to wherever, total travel time, probably a couple hours.

"Well, Sir," his flag captain glanced at Commander Nyborg, then back to Trajan, "it occurred to us that it might not be a bad idea for us to begin at least playing around with a 'notional dual-drive missile.' I don't want to make it anything too close to current MAN hardware capabilities, but I do think it would be a good idea to start stretching our tac officers' minds in that direction. So, what Ildikó and I were thinking is that we'd take the position that at least some of the reports about current Manty capabilities may have a stronger basis in fact than the SLN is prepared to admit. On that basis, we could then sketch out the capabilities of something approaching current MAN hardware."

A Solly SDF willing to acknowledge the possibility of MDMs and start exploring tactics and counter-tactics. Obviously controlled by Mesa which knows damn well it's all true, else the sky might fall at the very idea.

"So, Jack . . . how much longer do you think it'll be till the Center hands me my severance pay?"

"Not long, actually," McBryde admitted.

Jack McBryde, at least he's brutally honest.

"Thank you," he repeated, "but, be honest with me, Herlander. You do want to get even, don't you?"

Simões looked at him silently for several seconds. Then his nostrils flared, and his face took on a strange, hard expression—a focused expression, harsh with hatred.

"In a heartbeat, Jack," he admitted, and it was almost as if he found it a relief to say the words out loud, even to McBryde, the man—the friend, as well as keeper—whose job it was to keep him from achieving exactly that. "Oh, in a heartbeat. But even if I wanted to, how could I? It's not like I'm in a position to accomplish anything on the grand scale. And, to be honest, I could spend the rest of my life 'getting even' and never come close to what those bastards deserve."

He looked McBryde straight in the eye, letting him see the anger, the hatred, the concentrated bitterness, and McBryde nodded slowly.

"That's what I thought," he said quietly. "But tell me this, Herlander. If I were to show you a way you could get even, or make a down payment, at least, would you be interested?"

Simões' eyes narrowed. McBryde wasn't surprised. Even now, after the months they'd known one another, despite the fact that Jack McBryde was probably closer to Herlander Simões' soul than anyone else in the universe, there had to be that instant suspicion. Was this the Alignment's final betrayal? The "friend" completing Simões' destruction by luring him into an overtly treasonous statement?

McBryde understood that, and he made himself sit calmly, looking back at the other man, waiting while Simões' highly competent brain followed that same logic chain to its conclusion. There was no need for McBryde to "lure" him into anything—there'd been more than enough past conversations to provide all the evidence Alignment Security needed to lock him away for the next several decades, at the very least.

The seconds trickled past, tensely, slowly, and then Herlander Simões drew a deep breath.

"Yes," he said, his voice even softer than McBryde's had been. "Yes, I'd be interested. Why?"

Seems McBryde and Simoes have gotten to an interesting point in their relationship, where Herlander is willing to admit treasonous thoughts to his security-appointed minder.

He realized he was sitting there, frozen in astonishment, and gave himself an impatient shake. It still didn't make any sense to him, but he triggered the fast forward, watching the take from the bug, and there was no question what he was seeing.

What the fuck is Jack McBryde doing sitting around drinking coffee in a dive like Turner's? That's so far outside his bailiwick it's not even funny. And if he's going to run an op on my turf, why the hell didn't he tell me he was?

Lajos Irvine, the slave-snitch from before recognizes Jack in the restaurant.

"Okay, I can't argue with any of that. But why is tomorrow significant?"

"I already told Bardasano that it'd be best to have our last meeting on a Saturday. There won't be a lot of people around in the Gamma Center, so I said it'd be more relaxing for you. Make it easier for me to get whatever final wrapup information you might be able to provide." He shrugged. "I was planning to stall until next Saturday—maybe even the one after that—but given the new developments we should do it right away."

Herlander took a deep breath. "Okay. What should I do?"

"Early tomorrow morning, go to this address." He slid a piece of paper across the table. "Memorize it and destroy the note. Someone will be there to take you to the rendezvous with the people who'll be taking us off the planet. I'll meet you there later, after I finish some last business at the Gamma Center."

And just like that, defection operation begun.

David Pritchard shook his head. "No, it's straightforward enough. After whoever-it-is-whose-name-remains-unknown leaves this 'Gamma Center' place—which I'll be told by a signal from Karen—I park the air car in the lot of the sports stadium next door and walk away, giving myself plenty of time to get clear. Cary will trigger the device we've already planted in the old Buenaventura tower as soon as word comes from Carl that he's on his way to the spaceport with whoever-it-is. Then I blow mine."

"It probably won't even scratch the 'Center,' " Hansen said, "given how deep it's buried. But it should do some major damage to Suvorov Tower." Like the other members of his group, Hansen had only the vaguest notion, even now, of what the Gamma Center truly was, but he didn't have to know what it was as long as he knew it was important to the authorities he hated with every fiber of his being. "Suvorov's right on top of it," he continued, "so the scorpions're bound to assume the Center's the real target of whatever is happening."

Pritchard had a sour look on his face. "I still don't understand why we're taking so much effort to keep the casualties down. That part of the city, the only seccies around will be servants and janitors."

"Which is exactly why we're doing it this way, David." Karen Steve Williams was making no effort to hide her unfriendliness. "Those servants and janitors are our people too, you know, even if you don't care about them. As it is, we'll be killing a few of them. But at least this way—and it'll help a lot that it's on a Saturday—it shouldn't be too bad."

The plan to cover their escape, by having the junior resistance setting off bombs and making it look like a Ballroom strike against Gamma Center.

"I agree with Karen. David, try to hold the bloodlust to a reasonable minimum, will you? It'd be a different story if you could park the air car in Suvorov's own garage—"

"Better still, park it right in the middle of Pine Valley Park," Pritchard said savagely. Pine Valley was the park at the exact center of Green Pines, and Green Pines was inhabited only by freeborn citizens—and wealthy and very well-connected ones, at that. The Gamma Center's hidden location was well inside the Green Pines city limits, but it was on the commercial side of the city.

"Yeah, sure, that'd be great—except there's no way you're parking an air car in or near either place and getting out safely. Not with the security they've got. The parking lot of the sports stadium is as close as we can realistically get."

Pritchard was not happy with the arrangement. Even a nuclear device—as small as the one he had, anyway—wasn't going to do that much damage to a buried, hardened installation. Not when it was set off out in the open, in an empty parking lot, more than a kilometer from its target, anyway.

The City of Green Pines and the park near the center of it.

This particular passageway could be reached from a hidden entry in the basement of one of the tenements not far from Steph Turner's restaurant. The passageway ran for fully two kilometers thereafter under the city's streets. They'd use the next-to-last exit, which would put them within easy walking distance of the delivery van that would take them into the spaceport itself. By the time they reached the van, Carl Hansen and the two Mesan defectors should already have arrived. All of them except Carl and Victor—Carl as the driver; Victor as his helper—would be hidden in the crates in the van's interior. Unless the security guards at the spaceport insisted on physically searching the van, including breaking into the crates, everything should work fine. Among the many items Victor had obtained from the ever-helpful Triêu Chuanli had been shipping containers that were not only environmentally sealed but even had equipment designed to block the sort of instrumental inspection that security guards were usually satisfied with.

The escape plan, complete with underground passage and environmentally sealed cargo containers to ship them up to orbit.

It wasn't likely at all that these guards would insist on a physical search. That area of the spaceport was given over to shipments to and from the smaller and less reputable freighters in orbit. It was taken for granted that a certain amount of smuggling was being carried out. Carl's bribes should be enough to do the trick.

If not . . . Well, Victor was there. With the same Kettridge Model A-3 tucked up his sleeve. There was at least a chance—not a bad one, either—that he could kill all the guards before they could send out a warning. From there, they might be able to make it to the Hali Sowle's tender and get into low orbit before anyone really knew what had happened. There were so many such tenders coming and leaving that unless the authorities spotted which one they were in, they might be able to get aboard the Hali Sowle undetected.

The contingency plan is not so smooth.

"Well, that's it," Yana said. "Victor, I have to say it's been a real pleasure sleeping with you night after night after night in the sure and certain knowledge that I would get no thrills whatsoever."

"Oh, stop whining. If I had given you any thrills—and Thandi found out—you'd get the thrill of a lifetime."

Yana grinned. "A very short lifetime."

"They don't call her Great Kaja for nothing."

Just made me laugh.

Anton knew that, as a purely practical proposition, his reluctance to use nuclear devices was pointless. You could even argue—as Victor certainly would—that it was downright silly. The human race had long since developed methods of mass destruction that were more devastating than any nuclear device ever built. The former StateSec mercenaries who'd soon be trying to destroy Torch on Mesa's behalf wouldn't be using nuclear weapons. It would take far too many of them, and why bother anyway? They'd be using missiles, of course, but they'd be using them as kinetic weapons. Accelerated to seventy or eighty percent of light-speed, they'd do the trick as thoroughly as any "dinosaur killer" in galactic history, but it wouldn't be because of any nuclear warheads! For that matter, a few large bolides—nothing fancier than rocks or even ice balls—could have done the job just fine, if the attackers had only had the time to accelerate them to seventy or eighty thousand KPS, which was barely a crawl by the standards of an impeller-drive civilization. It would simply be faster and simpler to use missiles than piss around with rocks and ice cubes.

That said, for a lot of people in the modern universe—and Anton happened to be one of them—nuclear weapons carried a lingering ancient horror. They had been the first weapons of mass destruction developed and used by human beings against each other. For that reason, perhaps, they still had a particular aura about them.

Of course, that was exactly the reason Hansen and his group—certainly David Pritchard—were so determined to use nuclear explosives. Not only were they in the grip of a ferocious anger going back centuries, but the knowledge which Anton and Victor had given them that Mesa planned to destroy Torch had given that fury a tremendous boost. Stripped to its raw and bleeding essentials, the attitude of Hansen's people could be summed up as: So the scorpions want to play rough, do they? No problem. Rough it is.

Attitudes towards nukes, including Anton's own reluctance vs Victor's pragmatism and the kids' wanting to make a point.

For a moment, hearing a slight rustling noise to his left, Anton stopped and turned toward it. That was just a reflex action on his part, making clear to anyone who contemplated attacking him that such a course of action would be most unwise.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps even beneficial. Anton had no hope that the people behind this "Mesan Alignment" scheme could be brought to see reason. Just the information McBryde had already given them made it obvious that, for all their intellect and acuity, they'd abandoned reason centuries ago. But maybe they could be intimidated, in the same crude manner that Anton was even now intimidating whoever lurked in that darkness to the side of the passageway.

Probably not. Almost certainly not. But was it still worth a try?

What decided him in the end, though, was none of that. It was nothing more sophisticated than the impulses driving Hansen and Pritchard and their people. These Mesan Alignment people and their Manpower stooges were, after all, the same swine who had kidnapped one of his daughters, tried to murder another, tried to murder his wife—him too, of course, but he held no grudge about that—and were now trying to murder his daughter again.

To hell with it. Let them burn.

Conscience eased.

Late that night, Lajos came to his decision. Much as he hated to take the risk, he didn't see where he had any choice. He'd have to tell Bardasano.

Tomorrow, early in the morning. It'd take a fair amount of persuasion before he could get past Bardasano's aides, since he was not one of the people she had any regular contact with. Trying to do it at night was probably impossible.

Tomorrow would be soon enough, anyway. It wasn't as if Jack was going anywhere.

I dunno Lajos, there's a lot going on tomorrow. You sure snitching out your boss can't wait until Monday?

[VhenRa]

Well, if its one of the most powerful in the Solarian League. Well, lets look at what we know. Beowulf has 36 SDs from memory, that gives us a rough baseline standard for high-end at very least. Yes, Beowulf has a fleet that when White Haven was born.. was actually much much larger then the RMN, in wallers anyway.

[Simon_Jester]

Interesting that they acknowledge that they can get [forty] gigaton impacts from kinetic missiles.

That's a low estimate. By about a factor of fifty, for an MDM; by about a factor of about six, for a single drive missile.

The lightweight pods in Charade's bays were simply too stripped down for any sort of extensive independent deployment. They required too much external power supply, just for starters, and the people who'd designed them had deliberately accepted limited—very limited—operational lifetimes for their onboard systems. All of which meant Stensrud couldn't simply stack the things in Torch orbit and then get her ship the hell out of the way.

Looks like the Mayans and Erewhonese either don’t have system-defense pods or they're just too big for the improvised podlayers.

Since said improvised podlayers are tiny compared to real capital ships, the "too small" answer seems fairly likely. Manticoran defense pods have an onboard fusion plant. I don't know what Haven does- maybe just makes the pods huge enough to carry the power supply they need.

Apparently "even a hyper generator has some moving parts" and the stabilizers can get worn out. In this case, though, the part in question is pretty much a metal rod, surely they can handle that in-house?

Normally yes, but...

"It can't just be fixed?"

"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.

"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way on God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."

He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."

He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."[/quote]Well apparently they have the tools needed to make the tools and resources he'd need for a short-term replacement part. I.e. some welding gear, a lathe and a micrometer, even if he'll be muttering about primitive tools for all the weeks it'll take.[/quote]Right. In other words, the ship does not have a functioning machine shop. Which is an idiotic piece of cheapskatery, but it's the sort of thing real people do skimp on sometimes.

Again, the idea of a few dozen people like Victor Cachat is really scary.

On the other hand, it seems like a lot of them (lacking Cachat's specific experiences) would have been fanatical StateSec loyalists. Some would have died on Haven with Saint-Just during the course of Theisman's coup. Others... hm.

A few dozen Victors, minus casualties.

This may help to explain why the Republic of Haven needed about three or four years to finally get everything under control and suppress the last of the uprisings, holdouts, and random warlords in their own space. On the other hand, it also grants me a new respect for the fact that the Republic's military and security forces managed to pull it off at all.

All the more effective here, Jack thought wryly, when your option as the "good cop" was Anton Zilwicki! As part of any other pairing except with Victor Cachat, Zilwicki would have been playing the "bad cop."

We will still have this cliche in the future as well.

Well, it's a real thing that's actually been in use for a long time. Specifically identifying it with policemen is a bit less certain- but then, McBryde is himself a security officer, so his truisms, sayings, and analogies will mostly come from police and security work.

Also note that we still use a lot of ancient Roman and Greek sayings (translated into English), and used even more of them up until classical literature and languages fell out of fashion in our educational system about half a century ago.

Apparently there have been plenty more lone gunmen we haven't seen. Also, considering just a few months ago you both went to Honor to tell her Haven didn't spike the peace conference, how does it benefit Haven not to tell Anton that Mesa caused the shooting war to resume in the first place?

Cachat is not sure it is advantageous to tell Manticore that there actually was a person editing and screwing with the Havenite diplomatic correspondence during the runup to Thunderbolt. At the moment, much of the galaxy believes that Manticore is simply lying about what Haven actually said in their notes. The Manticorans know they received insane and provocative diplomatic documents, but as an agent of the Havenite government Cachat may make it premature to say something with far-reaching consequences like "Pritchart didn't really want a war, it was all that rotten and conveniently dead Giancola!"

Especially since Giancola's death really was an accident and Mesa had nothing to do with it.

In the Honorverse, because of the Final War they're all a bit gun-shy regarding both genetic enginerring and self-replicating nanotech. It seems each lone gunman batch is customized to the DNA of the target, so they need a sample, plus the Mesans have some sort of failsafe to keep it from replicating out of control, we're not told what, I suspect a kill-switch or a built-in limitation into how many generations it can spawn.

One interesting question is, how much time do you need to cook up a batch once you have the DNA sample?

Anyway, the MSDF has at least one dreadnought, probably more, and 4 active task forces.

Beowulf has thirty-six of the wall. If Mannerheim can match them it has about as many.

Remember that many of these systems are independently about as wealthy as, oh, Manticore. They may not be engaged in a full war mobilization, but it really isn't much of a stretch for them to procure a few dozen heavy capital ships, especially since they can purchase from the League Navy's suppliers who have a large, efficient production line for the things.

Apparently they've penetrated Mannerheim enough that they control not only the CNO and five most ranking admirals but were able to crew a BC squadron entirely with Mesans with no one any the wiser.

Or, possibly, with Mannerheim-eans who are members of the Alignment. That really is pushing it in my opinion; it'd make more sense for Mannerheim to covertly procure battlecruisers and deliver them to the real Mesan Alignment Navy.

Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a survey expedition backed by the "Jessyk Combine" and operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason not to broadcast the Combine's discovery.

Lots of use to the Alignment, and heck just to Jessyk, in knowing about wormholes no one else does. Actually that does lead me to wonder, Manticore never knew about their Junction til Axelrod tried to take it. How long do you think you could keep that secret from an inhabited system? On the one hand, ships appearing and disappearing beyond the hyper-limit wouldn't be surprising at all, but if they did a lot of FTL travel they'd have to notice the resonance zone, but maybe in an impoverished verge system you could pull it off.

The resonance zone is the trickiest part, although if the resonance is weak it might not be noticeable. Or there might be other natural hyperspace phenomena that cause similar effects (imprecise navigation, difficulty with transitioning into or out of hyperspace).

Aside from that, if your star system doesn't have elaborate early warning arrays (or those early warning arrays are in some way keyed not to detect ships transitioning into and out of hyperspace near the wormhole mouth)... you might never really notice. Most wormhole terminii are too far from the inner system for impeller activity to be detected reliably by shipboard sensors.

So there is a secondary terminus to Torch. That's why it's strategically important, it's not only part of Mesa's (small, at least I think) secret wormhole network, it's their speedy backdoor into the Haven Quadrant...

And other places, apparently?

A Solly SDF willing to acknowledge the possibility of MDMs and start exploring tactics and counter-tactics. Obviously controlled by Mesa which knows damn well it's all true, else the sky might fall at the very idea.

Well, Beowulf is probably doing the same.

Honestly, I bet a number of SDFs are. I mean, the Maya Sector knows damn well about MDMs and so on, and while they may be better placed to know than any other Solarian entity, and they have an unusually ambitious governor who wants to break them away from the League at large... they're not the only people with the resources and cunning to figure out that something serious is going on.

That said, for a lot of people in the modern universe—and Anton happened to be one of them—nuclear weapons carried a lingering ancient horror. They had been the first weapons of mass destruction developed and used by human beings against each other. For that reason, perhaps, they still had a particular aura about them.

Of course, that was exactly the reason Hansen and his group—certainly David Pritchard—were so determined to use nuclear explosives. Not only were they in the grip of a ferocious anger going back centuries, but the knowledge which Anton and Victor had given them that Mesa planned to destroy Torch had given that fury a tremendous boost. Stripped to its raw and bleeding essentials, the attitude of Hansen's people could be summed up as: So the scorpions want to play rough, do they? No problem. Rough it is.

Attitudes towards nukes, including Anton's own reluctance vs Victor's pragmatism and the kids' wanting to make a point.

Another point is that a nuclear device is a bomb, and can potentially be concealed (as we see here). An impeller-drive missile is inherently too big and bulky to be used by terrorists, unless said terrorists are operating from a hundred thousand ton platform.

Also, you can see an impeller drive missile coming and block it (with another ship's wedge, if nothing else); a nuclear device smuggled into position is another story.

I dunno Lajos, there's a lot going on tomorrow. You sure snitching out your boss can't wait until Monday?

Eh, Irvine has taken a lot of crap over the years in the name of snitching on people to the Alignment.

To a normal man, snitching on your boss is one of the most important career decisions of his life. To Lajos Irvine, it's Saturday.

[SpottedKitty]

but if they did a lot of FTL travel they'd have to notice the resonance zone, but maybe in an impoverished verge system you could pull it off.

The resonance zone is the trickiest part, although if the resonance is weak it might not be noticeable. Or there might be other natural hyperspace phenomena that cause similar effects (imprecise navigation, difficulty with transitioning into or out of hyperspace).

I thought I'd read that Weird Stuff™ like a Resonance Zone only happened in a binary system with a wormhole, like Manticore, because of the two adjacent hyper limits causing hyperspace stresses that you just don't get in a single-star system. I know big enough planets have their own hyper limits, but they're tiny compared to a star's, and Manticore-A and -B are similar sizes.

[Terralthra]

The resonance zone of wormholes n general is "less than reliable" hyperspace navigation, but the MWJ is something insane.

Any wormhole terminus associated with a star formed a conical volume in hyper, with the wormhole at its apex and a base centered on the star and twice as wide as its hyper limit, in which hyper-space astrogation became less than totally reliable. The bigger the terminus or junction, the stronger the resonance effect...and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, with its multiple termini, was the largest ever discovered. The resonance wave it produced was more of a tsunami, and it didn't just make astrogation "less than reliable." It made it the next best thing to flatly impossible, and any transition within the resonance (assuming someone could have plotted one in the first place) would have been no more than a complicated way to commit suicide.

[SpottedKitty]

Ah, gotcha. Been a while since I last read that one, and it hasn't bubbled back to the top of my "read this next" list yet.

[Simon_Jester]

but if they did a lot of FTL travel they'd have to notice the resonance zone, but maybe in an impoverished verge system you could pull it off.

The resonance zone is the trickiest part, although if the resonance is weak it might not be noticeable. Or there might be other natural hyperspace phenomena that cause similar effects (imprecise navigation, difficulty with transitioning into or out of hyperspace).

I thought I'd read that Weird Stuff™ like a Resonance Zone only happened in a binary system with a wormhole, like Manticore, because of the two adjacent hyper limits causing hyperspace stresses that you just don't get in a single-star system. I know big enough planets have their own hyper limits, but they're tiny compared to a star's, and Manticore-A and -B are similar sizes.

I suspect all planets have their own hyper limits- it's just that nobody notices if the planet is low-mass and already well inside a star's hyper limit. In other words, any habitable planet.

Gas giants are massive and typically far enough outside the hyper limit* that their own hyper limits are noticeable. But an isolated mass of space rock probably has a limit too- albeit one small enough as to be nigh-irrelevant for practical purposes given Honorverse drive technology.

*(at least in Sol-like star systems; the more exoplanets we observe in real life the more of our prejudices we need to check at the door)

[Ahriman238]

Jack McBryde felt a curious brittle, singing hollowness swirling around inside him as he offered his retinal pattern to the scanner and slid his hand through the biometric security sensors as he'd done so many times before. Even now, it was almost impossible for him to believe—really believe—that this was the last time he would ever do it.

Biometrics at the Gamma Center entrance.

Lajos Irvine showed up at Steph Turner's diner at eight in the morning, as Bardasano had instructed him to do, feeling distinctly unhappy with this assignment. His unhappiness stemmed from two factors.

First, he disliked—intensely—getting orders that were vague to the point of being oatmeal.

Check out the diner and see if you can spot anything suspicious. Let me know right away on my private com if anything turns up. While you're doing that, I'll be putting McBryde through the wringer to find out what the hell he thinks he's doing.

How snitching went, Irvine goes to the diner.

The second source of his unhappiness, and an even greater one, was shuffling along the street about a hundred meters behind him. In addition to giving him vague instructions, Bardasano had also insisted on saddling Lajos with what she called "backup." Three people from one of her "special units"—whatever the hell that meant—who'd be there to provide him with whatever force he might need.

With some sloppy and obvious backup.

He wasn't even carrying a weapon. If for no other reason, because he was legally as well as genetically a seccy, and seccies were forbidden to possess firearms of any kind. Even having a knife whose blade was longer than six centimeters would get you arrested, if you were found with it.

I am so very unsurprised that seccies, and presumably slaves, are forbidden from having weapons.

Jack would really have preferred to take care of all of this yesterday, yet he hadn't quite dared. In some ways, it might not be necessary at all, but he wasn't prepared to settle for "might not" at this point. There was too much data in his computer files, too much information about Simões, too much that might point an alert investigator in the right direction before Zilwicki and Cachat could get them off-planet and out of the system.

Even more important than wiping away any fingerprints he might inadvertently have left, though, was the need to create a diversion. He and Simões were both going to be missed, probably before they could get off-planet, and certainly before they could get out-system. McBryde was pretty sure he'd figured out which of the non-Mesan ships currently in the star system was Zilwicki and Cachat's chariot, and if he could figure it out, so could someone else. So, since they were going to be missed anyway, setting up a suitable school or two of red herrings seemed in order. And the best place to do that was from right here, in his office.

Jack's gone in to work to both clear the trail and cause a major diversion.

Anton knew what would happen the moment the three newcomers settled into their seats. Victor would have spotted them when they came in, just as instantly and surely as Zilwicki had. And he'd have drawn the same conclusion. One agent might simply be a spy. Three, especially acting in such obvious unison, meant the hammer was on its way down. Something had blown. Somehow, somewhere—who knew?—but it had definitely blown.

Cachat's philosophy in that situation was to shoot the hand holding the hammer before they got it all the way up. He'd only been waiting for that inevitable psychological moment when even the most experienced and hardened commando feels the comfort of his or her weight settling into a seat, and relaxes just that tiny little bit.

Giving Victor Cachat that "tiny little bit" was like giving a great white shark a "tiny little bite."

Anton didn't even try to join in. He was as far out of Cachat's league here as the Havenite was when it came to manipulating security software. He'd just get in his way. What he did do was activate the jamming device he carried with him. If the three people who'd come in had recorders, none of them would now operate.

Victor took out the woman first. From the seating pattern they'd assumed in the booth, she was probably the leader. Two shots to the head, without a center mass preliminary. That was useful against someone on their feet, especially with a small gun like the Kettridge, but more likely to be a waste of time with someone seated at a table.

Then he double-tapped both of the men. Then he took several strides across the room and shot all three of them again. One shot each, taking just an extra split second to aim and make sure the shots were fatal. That was probably unnecessary, since they were almost certainly dead anyway. But Cachat was a firm adherent to the principle that if it was worth doing, it was worth doing well.

He then went to stand at the door. That both prevented anyone from leaving and gave him a clear view of everyone in the diner so that—

"Anyone who tries to use a personal com—so much as takes one in hand—I will shoot dead. Just sit still. None of you still alive are at risk."

That wasn't entirely true, of course. By the time Victor started to point to the man under the table, Anton was already there. He reached under, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him out.

"I'm afraid you're a suspicious sort of fellow," he said mildly. "You ducked a bit too soon."

So much for Irvine and his backup.

Jack had actually prepared the chip several days ago, but there were too many random security checks of the Center's electronic systems for him to have risked downloading his handiwork any sooner than he absolutely had to. When the time came, though, all hell was going to be out for noon as the carefully sequenced messages—and computer-controlled acts of sabotage—raced outward. They'd start right here in the Center, invading computer memories, reducing critical molecular circuitry to slag, and then moving on to invade the Long-Range Planning Board's systems. He doubted they'd get very deep, but he could be wrong. He and Simões had combined the hyper-physicist's expertise and McBryde's knowledge of the security systems when they'd set up the attacks, so there was at least a significant chance they'd manage to do some real damage before their electronic minions were defeated. In the meantime, the master execution programs would be bootstrapping themselves about from one high security system to another and generally wreaking all the havoc they could. Coming from so deep inside, they were almost certain to cause far more chaos and confusion—not to mention damage—than any of the cyber-security types' worst nightmares had ever envisioned.

And while all that was going on, his own frantic messages would be being dumped to the system, feverishly seeking to alert his superiors to Simões' berserk efforts to punish the Alignment for everything it had done to his daughter and to him. They'd been very carefully crafted to create the impression that McBryde was in personal pursuit of Simões . . . and that the two of them were headed directly for Mendel, where Simões intended a suicide run on the capital itself.

That would be the final touch, the perfect cover for their escape, because that fearless protector of the Alignment, Jack McBryde, would stop the madman who'd become his friend by ramming his explosive-laden air car in midair short of the city's airspace. It would be a very large, very noisy explosion, and any wreckage would be distributed (harmlessly) over large areas of wooded countryside just outside Mendel. Eventually, it would become evident to the crash investigators that there were no human remains strewn about with it, but given how pulverized the wreckage was going to be, it would probably take them a while to reach that conclusion. By which time—

McBryde's plan for a diversion, and the sophistication of their cyber-attack. Including the planned faked death that would take days to unravel.

"Oh, yeah? Well, let me tell you, buddy, you're gonna need a better story than 'I got bored pushing chips around' for this one. Unless I miss my guess, Bardasano's on her way to the Center right now to personally rip you a new one for screwing around with procedure this way. I don't think she's feeling very amused, Jack."

And here's where that brilliant plan goes off the rails.

"Steph, shut up." Anton met the restaurant owner's glare stolidly. "There's no point yelling at me. I'm sorry it came to this, but it did. You have no choice. You either come with us, bringing your daughter, or you'll be dead within a week. So will Nancy."

She sagged a little. "Dammit, I told you I had no part—and didn't want any part—of Saburo's business."

"We're not actually Ballroom. But that's no help to you, because from the standpoint of the people running this planet, we're a lot worse. They will kill you, Steph. You and Nancy both—after squeezing you dry even though there's nothing to squeeze. They'll never believe you weren't involved."

Despairingly, her eyes looked around the kitchen. "But . . . this is all I have. Everything in the world."

Anton smiled. "Well, as far as that goes, you're in luck. Winning the lottery sort of luck. I'm stinking rich, Steph. My wife is, rather. But Cathy's been donating to good causes since she was a kid. She won't blink at setting you up with a restaurant way better than this one."

And they're adding Stephanie Turner (the diner owner) and her daughter to the escape plan.

His hands went back to the computer keyboard, and he called up one of the sequences he'd just installed. It wasn't in the order he'd planned on activating it, but it ought to do the trick, and he bared his teeth as the central computer's memory was adjusted to show that Herlander Simões had entered his office with him. Information on the personnel movements in and out of the Center was automatically copied to an off-site stand-alone system. He could have reached the off-site system from his personal terminal here in the Center if he'd wanted to erase the information in it, but that was the last thing he wanted, because that stand-alone system was what was going to cover Simões' escape . . . he hoped. He felt a sudden, deep pang of sorrow as he thought about the sergeant down at the entrance foyer, but he couldn't warn the man without undoing Simões' cover.

New plan, and computer records will now reflect that Simoes was with McBryde in Gamma Center.

A climate controlled crate—with top-of-the-line air scrubbers and what looked like an emergency backup air tank—that appeared, from the outside, as if it was carrying nothing more delicate than heavy machinery.

It was lit inside, too. Very dimly, but it was still light. He'd expected to make the whole trip in darkness, which he hadn't been looking forward to at all.

The woman looked at her timepiece, for perhaps the hundredth time. "They should be here soon," she muttered. "Well. Maybe another half hour."

Herlander's eyes, moving around with interest, were arrested by a panel in one of the corners of the crate.

Good God. Is that scrambling equipment? Where did they get this stuff?

Crate for smuggling people onto the ship. Well, a crate as designed by Q branch.

As he headed toward the rear exit, he heard Victor saying to the people held captive: "Here's how it is. We have associates standing guard outside both doors, front and back. Anyone who tries to leave within five minutes will be shot. No warning, no discussion, you will simply be dead. Once five minutes are up"—he pointed to the far wall—"according to that time display, you can leave the diner. Go anywhere you want. My own advice, take it or leave it, is that you'd be wise to pretend you were never here. This place has no recording or security equipment, except whatever these corpses brought with them, and we took care of that. So you can probably get away with it."

He started walking across the room toward the back exit. "Or you can report the incident to the authorities, who will certainly treat you with the respect traditionally given to seccies. It's your choice."

Half a minute later, he and Anton and the two women and their captive were in the escape passageway.

Instructions to the diner patrons.

"I'm just not positive," said the black-eyed man.

"It's your call," said the waiter.

The black-eyed man stepped back. "He needs to be out for at least four hours."

"Not a problem." The waiter came to stand right in front of Lajos. He looked as wide as the sea.

"I'd say this was going to hurt me more than it hurts you, but that'd be ridiculous."

The sledgehammer fist didn't hurt at all, oddly enough. Or, if did, Lajos could never remember.

Why take Lajos from the diner and show him the escape tunnel if you were just going to knock him out and leave him?

He tapped a combination into his personal com. It was a one-time, untraceable combination—one he'd set up through his own security connections, even as he'd hoped he'd never need it. It buzzed only once, and then Herlander Simões's voice answered. McBryde could hear the tension in it, the recognition that he wouldn't have been calling on this combination unless something had gone seriously wrong.

"Yes?" Simões said.

"Eggshell," McBryde replied, and heard an audible inhalation as the emergency codeword registered.

"I—" Simões began, then stopped. There was the harsh sound of someone clearing his throat. "Understood. Thanks. I . . . won't forget."

Thorough man, Jack McBryde, he even arranged a one-time comm and a code word for if he wasn't going to make it out.

Jack killed the circuit connecting him to Simões and began punching more keys. It was a long, complicated sequence this time—one carefully designed so that no one would ever enter it by accident—and he felt his stomach knotting with tension as the security fences went down, one by one, each seeking and demanding its own confirmation. He was probably the only person on the entire planet who had all of the required security codes, and even he wasn't supposed to have all of them. It was supposed to be a "two-man" rule situation, but McBryde had always recognized that if they were actually needed, there might not be time to get the designated "second man" online before it was too late.

So he got both of the needed codes for the Gamma Center's self-destruct.

"If he's going to blow the Gamma Center, we should alert Cary to wait and blow the Buenaventura at the same time. If we're lucky, the Mesans will think the acts were coordinated ahead of time."

He was a bit relieved at the prospect of setting off the device hidden in the basement of the Buenaventura this early on a Saturday morning. The tower itself was abandoned, and situated in an old industrial area that was mostly vacant. There were bound to be some casualties, but at least they'd be kept to a minimum.

Unfortunately, from Anton's viewpoint, they couldn't simply abort the explosion. Destroying the Buenaventura was the key to their faked escape records—which they now probably needed more than ever.

There was no longer any point, however, in setting off the explosion at the sports stadium. First, because David Pritchard might very well get killed when McBryde detonated the nearby Gamma Center. Secondly, what was the point anyway? David's bomb couldn't possibly do as much damage as McBryde's measures would.

The new plan.

"Oh, hell and damnation," he sighed.

"What's the matter?" asked Victor.

Carl handed him the com. "Read it for yourself."

Victor looked at the screen.


FUCK YOU
COWARDS
FUCK YOU

Daivd Prichart.... did not take the abort command well, and they didn't tell him it's because there's another nuke going off that will render his superfluous.

His forefinger came down on a single macro, and he watched over the lift car's internal pickup as Bardasano's head snapped up in astonishment. The lift car stopped, alarms began to wail all over the Center, and Jack McBryde bared his teeth in a smile. Security doors slammed shut throughout the Center, and "fire alarms" started screaming in the commercial tower above it. There probably still wouldn't be time for Suvorov to be completely evacuated—and for all of the evacuees to get far enough clear—but the casualty count had just been materially decreased, and that was good.

-snip-

Bardasano was still punching keys when McBryde's computer accepted the last authorization code he'd entered and asked for one more. This one had to be given orally, with voiceprint authentication.

"Scorched Earth," he said very carefully.

And away we go. Doubt pulling the fire alarm will help much, but at least there will be less people there on a Saturday.

The people who'd guided the Mesan Alignment for centuries and had built Gamma Center were far removed from the half-crazed ancient despots whose response to disaster was often to burn their cities down around them. Scorched Earth was not a suicide program in the normal sense of the term—although, if triggered, it would certainly kill everyone in the Center at the time.

But its purpose was rational, not emotional—and certainly not hysterical. Scorched Earth was not designed to kill people, much less to kill people outside the Center who just happened to be living in the city. That would happen, but only as a byproduct. No, the sole and single function of Scorched Earth was to destroy the Center itself, so completely and thoroughly that no enemy could possibly glean anything from its ruins.

The bomb amounted to a shaped charge on a gigantic scale. It was specifically designed to cause maximum damage to the Center itself—and minimal damage to anything beyond.

It worked as planned, too. Unfortunately, "minimal damage" when done by a fifty kiloton nuclear device, no matter how well planned and executed, is only "minimal" by the peculiar standards of people who design and build nuclear weapons.

50 Kt bomb for the self destruct, at the very bottom of the facility and hopefully unable to reach above ground.

.

Once the first tier of the network started going down, watchdog systems sprang into action, of course, but not quickly enough to prevent some fairly awesome destruction. Very few of the major subsystems escaped altogether unscathed.

The military was much less severely affected, for several reasons. First, because by the very nature of things the military preferred standalone systems wherever possible. Second, because Alignment Security was very carefully partitioned off from the official Mesan secret services and the star system's official military forces, which meant access points were strictly limited. Third, because in the case of the military, the gateways which existed were under the control of the admirals of the clandestine Mesan Alignment Navy, and without much more time to work with, McBryde's cybernetic saboteurs were unable to wiggle their way through. Fourth, because McBryde had possessed nowhere near as much access to the MAN's authorization codes. And, fifth, because there simply wasn't time for his programs to get through before the Gama Center—and its computers—ceased to exist.

But there were far more links from Alignment Security's primary net to most of the other, openly maintained civilian intelligence agencies, and those were under the control of the Alignment, not the agencies which didn't even know they'd been penetrated. Indeed, they were specifically set up to allow Alignment Security to sneak in and out of the "official" databanks tracelessly—to co-opt those banks' data without anyone outside Alignment Security's ever being the wiser. The people who had designed the system had always realized that all those backdoors hopelessly compromised the official agencies' security, but since the Alignment was the one doing the compromising, they hadn't lost much sleep over the thought.

Jack's cyber-attack and Alignment computer security.

Only one attack fully succeeded, even so, but it was the one upon which he'd lavished the most care and effort, and he wasn't taking any chances on simply erasing the data he was after. Oh, no. His attack came equipped with the specific security codes for the computers in question, triggering the command sequence which reformatted their molecular circuitry itself. Turned those computers' memories into solid, inert chunks of crystalline alloy from which Saint Peter himself could not have recovered one single scrap of data. And because the man who'd prepared that attack came from so high inside Security itself, he'd known where all the backups were maintained . . . and how to reach them, too.

In that one successful attack, over ninety percent of all Mesan records concerning the Ballroom—those of the "official" agencies and the Alignment's alike—simply vanished. And since Mesa still considered Torch an extension of the Ballroom, all the Alignment's data on Torch went with it.

All gone, except for whatever scraps survived in partial form in other locales. No doubt there were enough of those scraps to reconstitute much of that data in the fullness of time, yet it was a task which would take literally years . . . and never be anything remotely like complete.

The day after Scorched Earth, Jeremy X himself could have walked openly down the streets of any Mesan city, giving DNA samples at every corner, without anyone being the wiser, unless he was spotted by one of the very few Mesans who'd encountered him personally and survived the experience.

All data on Torch and the Ballroom is gone and irretrievable, because Jack triggered the 'fry the computer in case of compromise' systems.

E.D. Trimm stared at the main screen in her operations center, unable to believe what she was seeing. All the many ships were still shown. They could still track any of them, whether approaching or leaving or in orbit. Presumably, if they scrambled furiously, they could open up manual lines of communications if any of the ships was in danger of colliding with another.

But the rest of the information was lost. Gone. Vanished.

"Which ship is which?" she half-wailed.

And another casualty is Mesa's records of which ship in their space is which.

David Pritchard's air car was caught in the blast and blown wildly off course. He barely managed to avoid a wreck. Rather, the automatic pilot did. David's air car skills were pretty rudimentary, as was true of most seccies.

When his head cleared he saw that he'd overflown the stadium. He looked back, and despite his fury, his eyes widened as he saw the shattered wreckage of what had been Suvorov Tower. The structures of counter-grav civilizations were tough almost beyond belief, and Suvorov had been the better part of a kilometer tall, yet so broad that it looked almost squat. Now it looked like the broken, smoke-and-flame-spewing fang of some hell-spawned monster. The towers on either side were heavily afire, their façades badly shattered, yet they'd coffer-dammed much of the blast effect. Suvorov might be a total loss, and several square blocks of Green Pines' commercial district had been savagely mangled, but—as the people who had planted that charge had planned—the residential portions of the city were untouched.

Damage from Scorched Earth, Prichart's air car (with a trunk nuke) is crashing.

"Climb in, all of you!" she said, heading for the shuttle's cabin. "We can still make our schedule. Barely. Brice, seal them in."

The crates were segregated by sex. Zilwicki, Cachat and the man Brice didn't know in one. Yana and the two new women in the other. The crate inhabited by the men was crammed full. The one inhabited by the women was . . . not.

Loading up.

David Pritchard managed to land the air car on the parking apron without wrecking it. But the landing was about as rough as any landing an air car could survive without suffering significant damage.

He could see a pair of city cops turning toward him, and he snarled. They weren't even security legbreakers—just two of those pretty, duded up, glorified nannies who took care of the kinds of people who lived in Green Pines. The kind of people David Pritchard hated from the very bottom of his soul. The kind of people he could see beyond the cops, laughing and talking while their kids played in the park, enjoying the morning sun. They were turning now, those happy faces, staring at the huge plume of smoke rising to the west. He could see their owners gesticulating at the rising cloud, could almost hear their babbling curiosity.

From the look on the cops' faces—concern, mostly—he realized the men must assume that he himself was a scorpion in good steading. Someone whose vehicle had been damaged by the blast, perhaps, and who'd had to set it down wherever he could and as quickly as he could.

He scanned the area, for a few seconds. There was no way to escape, in the time he'd have.

So be it. He'd expected as much. He pulled out the device's control unit and began keying in new timing instructions.

So David decides to set off his nuke in a crowded park, in an affluent residential area.

signed—nor could they have been—to withstand that sort of overpressure. They disintegrated into thousands of slivers which would have ripped Collin Detweiler apart if he'd still been standing there. As it was, everything inside the penthouse from the furniture down to the bedding was turned into shreds and the shreds themselves ignited by the thermal pulse.

Ceramacrete was incredibly strong, however—and the buildings at Green Pines had been designed with the possibility in mind that they might be subject to attack from terrorists. The ceramacrete towers in Nouveau Paris which surrounded the Octagon had managed to survive its destruction during Esther McQueen's coup attempt—and that blast had been far more powerful than the one set off in Green Pines.

Collin Detweiler's tower was far enough from ground zero to be well outside the fireball. Moreover, the interior walls protected him from the effects of radiation as well as keeping the fires in the outer apartments from spreading into the inner corridors and elevator shafts.

So, he was still alive when the rescue teams arrived. Battered into a pulp by the effects of the blast, with multiple broken bones and contusions and lacerations seemingly covering his entire body. Barely alive, but alive—and given modern emergency medical techniques, that was enough to ensure his survival.

And the blast heavily injures, but does not kill, Collin Dettweiler.

Yet another ship was leaving orbit. That was hardly unusual, in and of itself, given the traffic that came in and out of the Mesan system. But there were now at least twice as many ships leaving as there normally would have been.

Whatever had happened down on the surface of the planet to have caused this chaos, it had obviously spooked a lot of ship captains.

She still had no idea which ship was which. But—for once—that jackass Blomqvist had proved to be useful. His jury-rigged system for gauging ship tonnages seemed to be working pretty well. So at least E.D. could separate the big boys from the flotsam and jetsam.

"What's their mass?"

He studied the screen for a few seconds. "I make it about a million tons. Give or take a quarter of a million, you understand."

Trimm waved her hand. "Doesn't matter. It's a small fry. No point in worrying about it with everything else on our plate. I'm not sending out what few pinnaces we have available to check anything smaller than four million tons."

And a clean getaway by our heroes.

Less than an hour after they made their upward alpha translation, Andrew Artlett was completely and totally vindicated.

Mainly because they'd just made an unscheduled—and most unpleasant—downward translation.

Well. mostly clean. The FTL crapped out and they dumped the spare parts they were picking up on Mesa to make room on the shuttle.

"Trust us, will you, Andrew?" Victor said. "Nothing that can happen to us now is remotely as bad as what would have happened had we not gotten off Mesa in time."

Andrew was still glaring. "It's going to take months to get that generator working again!"

Zilwicki shrugged. "I admit that's unfortunate—but mostly because I'm worried what's going to happen before we can finally get our news back home. Just drifting in space for a few months by itself—we've got power, right? Plenty of food and water, too—is no big deal. That's why they invented chess and card games and such."

Well, there's that. I hope they have a bit more to pass the time with than card games and chess.

And with the defection done, all that remains is the Battle of Torch.

[Simon_Jester]

He wasn't even carrying a weapon. If for no other reason, because he was legally as well as genetically a seccy, and seccies were forbidden to possess firearms of any kind. Even having a knife whose blade was longer than six centimeters would get you arrested, if you were found with it.

I am so very unsurprised that seccies, and presumably slaves, are forbidden from having weapons.

I suspect that the "no knives" restriction refers to carrying it around on your person, though; knives are utility items and it'd be nearly impossible to run, for example, a restaurant without one.

Why take Lajos from the diner and show him the escape tunnel if you were just going to knock him out and leave him?

It doesn't make perfect sense to me, my best guess is:

Because they don't know what he knows or whether he might have information on them that would interfere with their escape plan. So they're trying to get him out of the immediate area and into a place where he won't be found by the police until it's too late for him to interfere.

If with some medical wizardry they can bring him back to consciousness quickly, he might still know enough to be a threat by telling someone else whatever he knows.

But if he's sprawled unconscious in a tunnel underground and won't come to on his own for hours, they'll probably be off planet before he's in a position to do anything.

And away we go. Doubt pulling the fire alarm will help much, but at least there will be less people there on a Saturday.

Well, the biggest hazard is the building collapsing into the hole left behind by a subterranean nuclear explosion, so if anyone actually makes it out of the building itself and to a respectable distance before it blows up, they have a much higher chance of survival than they would otherwise.

All data on Torch and the Ballroom is gone and irretrievable, because Jack triggered the 'fry the computer in case of compromise' systems.

Having those be triggerable online really wasn't the best plan...

Physically destroying a computer and its contents really should be doable only from the physical location of that computer. You want a way to scuttle the computer if it's about to be captured by an enemy, but if it's literally located within your home base, you have the physical access to do that. Allowing it to be blown up remotely only helps your enemy.

[Ahriman238]

He wasn't even carrying a weapon. If for no other reason, because he was legally as well as genetically a seccy, and seccies were forbidden to possess firearms of any kind. Even having a knife whose blade was longer than six centimeters would get you arrested, if you were found with it.

I am so very unsurprised that seccies, and presumably slaves, are forbidden from having weapons.

I suspect that the "no knives" restriction refers to carrying it around on your person, though; knives are utility items and it'd be nearly impossible to run, for example, a restaurant without one.

On the other hand, if they'll let you get away with a blade under six centimeters, that should be long enough for most purposes.

Why take Lajos from the diner and show him the escape tunnel if you were just going to knock him out and leave him?

It doesn't make perfect sense to me, my best guess is:

Because they don't know what he knows or whether he might have information on them that would interfere with their escape plan. So they're trying to get him out of the immediate area and into a place where he won't be found by the police until it's too late for him to interfere.

If with some medical wizardry they can bring him back to consciousness quickly, he might still know enough to be a threat by telling someone else whatever he knows.

But if he's sprawled unconscious in a tunnel underground and won't come to on his own for hours, they'll probably be off planet before he's in a position to do anything.

I'd buy it easier if Anton and Victor hadn't debated (albeit quickly and largely silently) whether or not they were going to kill Lajos once they got somewhere private. For that matter, it could have been simply wanting to do the deed out of side or buying time to make the decision.

All data on Torch and the Ballroom is gone and irretrievable, because Jack triggered the 'fry the computer in case of compromise' systems.

Having those be triggerable online really wasn't the best plan...

Physically destroying a computer and its contents really should be doable only from the physical location of that computer. You want a way to scuttle the computer if it's about to be captured by an enemy, but if it's literally located within your home base, you have the physical access to do that. Allowing it to be blown up remotely only helps your enemy.

I suspect that wasn't an intentional design feature so much as McBryde knew how to electronically tamper with the records in a manner that would be detected and set off the anti-tampering system to destroy the records.

[Ahriman238]

Captain Maddock looked like his own calm, professional self—despite what Luff had always thought of as the truly ridiculous uniform of the Mesa System Navy. There were times Luff was actually tempted to like Maddock, but the moments were few and far between. However courteous the Mesan might be, and Luff was willing to admit the captain took pains to be as courteous as possible, no officer of the People's Navy in Exile could ever forget what Maddock really represented.

Their keeper. Their paymasters' agent. The "technical adviser" whose real function was to make certain the PNE was prepared to do exactly what it was told, when it was told to, and where it was told to do it. And the fact that their paymasters were something as loathsome as Manpower only made what he symbolized even worse. The Mesan captain was the living reminder of every single nasty little accommodation Luff had been forced to make, all of the sordid lengths to which he and his people had been forced to go in their crusade to maintain something which could someday hope to oppose the counterrevolutionaries who had toppled the People's Republic.

The irony in a StateSec man resenting the guy assigned to assure his reliability is staggering. How does it feel, Adrian Luff, from this side of the fence?

He glanced at the master plot whose icons showed the ships of his fleet, translating steadily down the alpha bands as they rode one of hyper-space's gravity waves towards the normal-space wall. There were more—lots more—of those icons than there had been, including a solid core of battlecruisers. The ten ex-Indefatigables were smaller than the four Warlord-C-class ships, like his own Bernard Montgomery, which had remained loyal to the Revolution, and they were woefully underprovided—by Haven Quadrant standards, at least—with active antimissile defenses. But he had to admit that their basic electronics fit was better than anything the People's Republic had ever had, even though the software driving those electronics had required considerable tweaking. And they had a healthy number of broadside tubes, although the standard Solarian anti-ship missiles, frankly, were pieces of junk.

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.

Forces attacking Torch, beginning with two short squadrons of BCs, 4 Haven built and 10 Solly. We see that the People's Navy in Exile think little of Solarian attack missiles, as well as their missile defenses, and again Solly software and doctrine lags considerably behind their hardware. Oh, and the dual-drive Cataphracts, it seems, can be fired from internal launchers with little or no refitting.

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.

And a squadron each of heavy and light cruisers, along with details on the Bridgeport-class. A cruiser with the same number of tubes as a destroyer? Kind of odd, I admit.

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.

And a 16 Solly-built destroyer flotilla gives us a final count of 14 BC, 8 CA, 8 CL, 16 DD. There are entire worlds, heck Torch is one, that can only dream of that sort of naval firepower. On the other hand, the idea they could 'take back' Haven like this is laughable. Oh, and the actual Peeps are spread thin enough almost half the destroyers are conned by mercenaries of the sort filling out everyone's crews.

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.

Apparently all SLN ships run on Greenwich time.

Rozsak nodded. He'd been impressed by the Royal Torch Navy from the outset. It had been obvious to him, as his units exercised with it, that quite a few members of its officer corps had come from professional naval backgrounds before immigrating to Torch. Several of them spoke with pronounced Beowulf accents, and at least three of the frigates' skippers had clearly been born and raised—and trained—on Manticore, although all of them appeared to be descended from genetic slaves. The RTN might be tiny, but with that hard kernel of professionalism as a starting point, and with the ruthless training schedule Thandi Palane had insisted upon, its crews were as good as any he'd ever seen. He wasn't surprised by how promptly Nat Turner had been able to identify the invaders' ship classes, but as Habib had said, the frigate had done an outstanding job to get the information to him so rapidly.

The Royal Torch Navy, including a fair number of Beowulfian and Manticoran officers even if so far they've only the handful of frigates.

"Commander Habib almost certainly has a point about their active defenses, Robert," he said out loud. "But I think we're going to have to assume these people have the Aegis upgrade. I know—I know!" He half-raised one hand. "The units at Monica didn't have Aegis. Well, they didn't have Halo, either, and I think we're going to have to assume these people have that, too. If they don't, there's no harm done. If they do have them, though, and we assume they don't, things could get uglier than they have to. So, assuming they do, tell me what you think that means for targeting priorities."

Rozsak may not have a lot of combat experience relative to other commanders in the series, but he's got the professional caution down pat.

"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.

The absolute minimum effect Halo can be expected to achieve, against people who know the system inside and out is a -15% hit rate. Which is actually pretty good considering the considerable advantage Rozsak's people have over anyone else who might be running into Halo.

"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."

And Halo and Aegis together still won't make a ship as tough a nut as the Haven Quadrant powers have been turning out since mid-war.

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 Oravil Barregos were counting on, when he came right down to it.

Rozsak's estimate of Battle Fleet readiness, which I'm inclined to believe. He's generally less prejudiced than most Solly officers we've seen and has a lot riding on this assessment.

"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."

And yep, Rozsak pulls a Sidemore-style ambush on them.

"According to CIC, it looks like eight units in the hundred and twenty-five-ton range, six in the two hundred and eighty-five hundred-ton range, and two at around two million tons, Citizen Commodore."

"And they're all pulling four-point-seven-five KPS-squared?" Hartman asked just a bit sharply.

"Yes, Citizen Commander," Stravinsky replied, and Hartman grimaced.

"It seems the Erewhonese are here after all, Citizen Commodore," she said, turning back to Luff. "Nothing that size could pull that much accel without an improved compensator."

Size and accel, oh and representing the good guys in this fight we have 2 podlaying fast freighters, 6 Marksman heavy cruisers (basically Star Knights with a couple less tubes in exchange for tons of extra fire-control links and 8 destroyers for screen.

"Sir, we're beginning to pick up grav pulses. Whoever that is behind us is using an FTL com to talk to someone further in-system."

"Manties?" Luff asked rather more sharply than he'd intended to as visions of great big, nasty multidrive missiles flickered through his brain.

"I don't think so, Citizen Commodore," Kamerling replied. "The pulse rate and the modulation are both wrong. It's a bit more sophisticated than we were seeing out of the Manties during the final phases of the last war, but based on our current intel, it's a lot less sophisticated than anything we'd expect to see out of them now."

Because they weren't streaming video then. The Mayans at least have FTL comm, no surprise given how tight they are with Erewhon. Also, much amused that even years later Luff has this Pavlovian fear-response to Manties.

"But Erewhon doesn't have anything anywhere near that tonnage range," Luff pointed out.

"They don't have any warships in that tonnage range, Citizen Commodore," Hartman replied grimly. "What they could have back there, though, is a couple of smallish freighters with mil-spec compensators and cargo holds packed full of missile pods."

-snip-

"If they had MDMs, they'd already be shooting at us," he heard his own voice say calmly. "Twelve million kilometers is less than a quarter of the powered range they're supposed to have."

"Agreed, Citizen Commodore," Hartman said. "But everything we've seen suggests the real problem is that they've got more range than they have fire control capability. If they're chasing us with a pair of missile freighters, then those six heavy cruisers are probably planning on acting as forward fire control platforms. They'll try to bring them in close enough to improve their hit probabilities—probably just to the edge of single-drive missile range—while they keep the freighters far enough back to be outside our own range of them when they roll the pods."

And the PNE actually reasons out pretty much exactly what Rozsak is doing, and plans to do.

"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."

-snip-

"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."

-snip-

"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."

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."

Pre-battle attempt at diplomacy. Nightingale anonymizer and Torch is still pretty sparsely populated, 4-5 million.

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. 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.

The plan was quick in-and-out with no one to ID them, but Luff decides to go forward anyway.

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."

See, to my way of thinking if you were really a radical egalitarian and hated slavery as much as any Havenite, this would be a good time to shoot the political officer and announce that you'd like to defect, particularly if he could have set up a precautionary scenario in advance, like Bounty waay back in the second book.

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.

Most of Rozsak's screen and another podlayer are in Torch orbit, ready to defend against incoming missiles and maybe come out to meet the attackers and trap them between two MDM-capable forces. But for now the plan is for Anvil Force to sit tight in orbit.

"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."

Debate over when the Mayans will fire.

He'd waffled back and forth, with uncharacteristic ambivalence, over the question of where he should deploy Hjálmar Snorrason's four destroyers. After the Marksmans, the big Warrior-class destroyers were the most capable antimissile ships he had, in the area-defense role, at least. The Royal Torch Navy's frigates had turned out to be remarkably capable (for such small units) of looking after themselves in a missile-heavy environment, but they simply weren't big enough and didn't have enough counter-missile magazine capacity to be effective in the sustained area-defense role. He'd been tempted to tack Snorrason's ships onto Hammer Force, as Habib had suggested, just in case they'd found themselves forced into the enemy's missile envelope after all. But he'd decided in the end that protecting Torch was more important. It was extraordinarily unlikely that any of the ex-Peep attackers were going to get close enough to hit the planet with anything short of dead, easily picked off missiles which had long since gone ballistic. The consequences if it turned out that airy assumption was in error might well prove catastrophic, however, and providing against that eventuality took precedence over the equally remote possibility of Hammer Force straying into the enemy's missile envelope.

The most capable missile defense platforms wound up in Torch orbit with Anvil, just in case.

"Maybe." It was his turn to shrug. "And maybe," he lowered his voice a bit more, "it's opening-night nerves, too. This game's just a bit bigger-league than any I've played in before, you know."

Habib started to laugh, but she stopped herself before the reaction reached the surface. She'd stood at Rozsak's shoulder through all manner of operations—against pirates, against smugglers, against slavers, terrorists, rebels, desperate patriots striking back against Frontier Security. No matter the operation, no matter the cost or the objective, he'd never once lost control of the situation or himself.

Yet even though all of that was true, she realized, this would be his first true battle. The first time naval forces under his command had actually met an adversary with many times his own tonnage of warships and hundreds of times as many personnel. And, she reflected grimly, the price if he failed would be unspeakable.

Many of the people who thought they knew Luiz Rozsak might have expected him to take that possibility in stride. And, in some ways, they would have been right, too. Edie Habib never doubted that whatever happened to the planet of Torch, Rozsak would never waver in the pursuit of his "Sepoy Option." But Habib probably knew him better than anyone else in the universe, including Oravil Barregos. And because she did, she knew the thing he would never, ever admit—not even to her. Probably not even to himself.

She knew what had truly driven him to craft the "Sepoy Option" so many years before. She knew what hid beneath the cynicism and the amoral pursuit of power he let other people see. Knew what truly gave him the magnetism that bound people as diverse as Edie Habib, Jiri Watanapongse, and Kao Huang to him.

Death rides for everyone, and a bit of character insight into Rozsak, really just hints that there is more to his character than we've seen, a motivating incident.

"Missile launch!"

Commander Raycraft's head jerked around in astonishment. That couldn't be right! Hammer Force was still eleven million kilometers from the enemy!

"Many missiles, multiple launches!" Travis Siegel said. "Estimate three hundred ninety-plus—repeat, three-zero-niner-plus!"

The PNE fire first, and it says a lot about the series that my first thought is "only 400 missiles? Amateurs."

Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.

So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.

The Cataphract DDM.

There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.

The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile, could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.

The payload suffers, the BCs and heavies can fire only DD-CL missiles, SDs could fire BC-scale missiles and the capital version fits only in missile pods. Oh, and they only have half the usual number of rods, so generally a lot less bang.

Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.

On the other hand, even a CM drive seems to have doubled the effective range of standard missiles.

"Defense X-Ray-Charlie-Three, aye," Robert Womack acknowledged. "Fire plan Delta-Zulu-Niner, aye. Warlords are alpha-priority targets!"

Hammer Force's formation began to shift. There wouldn't be time for it to make a great deal of difference before that first enormous salvo arrived, but defensive fire plans and responsibilities shifted far more rapidly—and radically—as X-Ray-Charlie-Three went into effect. And, at the same moment, Hammer Force's two arsenal ships started spitting rings of missile pods into space in massive, twelve-second spasms.

Rozsak would have preferred to launch them even more rapidly—to get all of them out of their suddenly imperiled pod bays. They would have fallen steadily astern at Hammer Force's still mounting velocity, and they would have been vulnerable to proximity kills, but that would still have been better than what his tightly knotted stomach muscles knew was about to happen.

Unfortunately, they didn't have the endurance. They were still the original, lightweight pods, and they had to launch their missiles almost instantly. He couldn't hold them back, and twelve seconds was about the tightest window for effective fire control he could manage, especially since his cruisers were going to have to take the missiles under control in successive waves.

Reaction to the incoming, limited endurance of their pods.

The good news—such as there was and what there was of it—was that the minimum cycle time on a Flight VII Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's SL-13 shipboard launchers was thirty-five seconds. The earlier Indefatigables, with the older SL-11-b had the same theoretical cycle rate, but their feed queues were infamous for breaking down if they were pushed much above one launch every forty-five seconds. And as he watched the seconds ticking down, he realized at least some of those ex-Solarian ships had to be Flight V or Flight VI. Thirty-five seconds came and went, and still no second salvo had launched. It had to come any time now, though, and—

There! The second salvo had finally launched, but three of Rozsak's missile waves were already slicing downrange, and more were punching steadily out of Masquerade and Kabuki.

Oh come on, even the lower firing rate is double that of Saladin/Thunder of God from the second book. Am I really supposed to buy that Solly ships are that inferior to the starting point for both Haven and Manticore?

"Estimate three hundred and sixty inbound," Stravinsky continued. "Acceleration rate four-five-one KPS-squared. Time of flight, two-one-seven seconds. Missile Defense is tracking and Halo is active."

Luff's eyes narrowed. That acceleration was lower than he'd expected—in fact, it was lower than his own birds' primary drives, far less the final sprint drive! That meant his flight time was going to be lower than theirs, not higher!

"Second wave launch!"

Damn! They were punching the damned things out at twelve-second intervals! At that rate, they'd be putting better than three salvos into space for every one he sent back at them! That was close to three missiles for each of his.

"Maximum rate fire," he said harshly.

Rozsak's salvos are smaller, but he can get them off much faster.

"Targeting change," he said flatly. "Go for the cruisers."

"First salvo is already committed, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky replied. "Retargeting second salvo now."

Luff nodded, his eyes never leaving the plot. He hadn't counted on how rapidly they'd be rolling those waves of pods. He'd hoped he could kill the ammunition platforms before they got very many missiles into space, cut the hostile fire off at the source. Unfortunately, he no longer had time for that. Taking out the freighters would still be worthwhile, but with so many shipkillers already headed his way, it was more imperative that he beat down the enemy's fire control, first.

Relatively rare instance of retargeting missiles midflight.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, if they'll let you get away with a blade under six centimeters, that should be long enough for most purposes.

That's two and a half inches, roughly. It's barely manageable as a table knife, and totally impractical for food preparation, wilderness survival, and the like.

Forces attacking Torch, beginning with two short squadrons of BCs, 4 Haven built and 10 Solly. We see that the People's Navy in Exile think little of Solarian attack missiles, as well as their missile defenses, and again Solly software and doctrine lags considerably behind their hardware. Oh, and the dual-drive Cataphracts, it seems, can be fired from internal launchers with little or no refitting.

On the other hand, we get real confirmation that Solarian electronics is superior to first-line Peep hardware from before the cease-fire, significantly better.

What's lacking is the actual hardware, which does not reflect the kind of considered judgment and combat experience that went into designing both the RMN and the PN in the late 19th century.

And a squadron each of heavy and light cruisers, along with details on the Bridgeport-class. A cruiser with the same number of tubes as a destroyer? Kind of odd, I admit.

If it's a missile-heavy destroyer that is "up-gunned" with more beams to make it a viable energy combatant, not so much.

I mean, the Manticoran Apollo-class had five tubes... and so did some of their (prewar) destroyers.

Rozsak may not have a lot of combat experience relative to other commanders in the series, but he's got the professional caution down pat.

Well, he may not have much naval experience, but he has tons and tons of ground experience suppressing various rebels. Much of it when he had to come in and pull OFS's chestnuts out of the fire. So while he may not be an experienced naval tactician, he understands his equipment well enough to know the broad implications of "the enemy might have frontline Solarian hardware," and his ground combat experience tells him to prepare for the worst.

The absolute minimum effect Halo can be expected to achieve, against people who know the system inside and out is a -15% hit rate. Which is actually pretty good considering the considerable advantage Rozsak's people have over anyone else who might be running into Halo.

Including, frankly, Manticore- although on the other hand, the Manticorans have a qualitative edge over the technology that goes into the Halo platforms.

"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."

And Halo and Aegis together still won't make a ship as tough a nut as the Haven Quadrant powers have been turning out since mid-war.

To be fair, the Warlord is physically a much larger ship and mounts a far higher density of active missile defense and jammers. I suspect that Halo/Aegis refits to an Indefatigable would make its missile defenses more than a match for those of, say, a prewar Havenite Sultan-class. Or, say, a Manticoran prewar Homer-class or Reliant.

See, to my way of thinking if you were really a radical egalitarian and hated slavery as much as any Havenite, this would be a good time to shoot the political officer and announce that you'd like to defect, particularly if he could have set up a precautionary scenario in advance, like Bounty waay back in the second book.

Actually yes, that would make a lot of sense. The counterpoint is that Luff is a political fanatic, and that there's a strong sense in warfare of being "committed" to an attack in a way that makes it very difficult to break off. Often this results in very serious mistakes.

On the other hand, even a CM drive seems to have doubled the effective range of standard missiles.

A standard drive would have quadrupled it.

The main advantage of the second drive is that the missile just keeps going, continuing outwards while still powered and under guidance, at the high speed achieved by the first drive at burnout. As I discussed, it actually makes more sense to use the high acceleration missile stage first and a slower-endurance "cruising stage" later in the flight profile, if you're trying purely to enhance your striking range. However, that's not the only factor under consideration.

Oh come on, even the lower firing rate is double that of Saladin/Thunder of God from the second book. Am I really supposed to buy that Solly ships are that inferior to the starting point for both Haven and Manticore?

If so, it is probably because no one foresaw the need properly.

The 'official' (tech bible) standard for capital ship missile magazines in the RMN during Roger III's buildup is one round per minute for two hours; that may suggest what the typical sustained rate of fire WAS for a capital ship at the time.

And with the "sidewall burner" type missiles of the 1860s PD, that makes sense. They really aren't going to penetrate enemy missile defense very effectively, no matter how fast you fire them. And their individual firepower is annihilating so against a target feeble enough to stand a chance of missing them, you only need one or two hits.

But if you seriously intend to build a laser-head combatant that can saturate enemy missile defenses, then and only then do you need to shoot faster.

That said, it really is jarring and arguably a very bad choice on Weber's part, one that he essentially forced on himself by giving Luff so many of those big battlecruisers that their combined Cataphract-A broadsides would wipe out Rozsak's command if it weren't for the slow rate of fire.

[VhenRa]

Also tells you the Indefatigable-class has been (or rather was) in production for awhile. Given they are up to Flight VII.

[Simon_Jester]

True, although some RMN classes made it up to Flight IV within twenty or thirty years. Then again, that was wartime design evolution.

[Ahriman238]

X-Ray-Charlie Three was still coming fully online. There hadn't been time to complete the redeployment it envisioned, but the cruisers responsible for managing Hammer Force's defensive fire in the outer defense zone were up and tracking. Counter-missiles raced outward, using their hugely overpowered impeller wedges to sweep holes in the incoming fire. But the sudden burst of speed from the Cataphracts' second-stage "sprint drive" had taken Rozsak's tactical officers by surprise. None of the fire control solutions had allowed for it, and kill percentages in the outer zone were less than half of what they ought to have been. Far too many of the first salvo's shipkillers broke past the outer intercept zone, and more counter-missiles erupted from the destroyers tasked to back up the cruisers as they raced into the middle intercept zone.

Laser clusters trained around, tracking, waiting for the incoming fire to enter their own range, then spat rods of coherent lightning to meet them. Fireballs glared and flashed, and despite the "sprint mode" surprise, Hammer Force killed one hundred and thirty-seven of the attacking missiles.

Two hundred and sixty-five got through.

A little over a third of the first incoming from the Peeps stopped, despite the high accel of the second drive throwing a lost of their counter missiles off.

Pain ripped through Luiz Rozsak as he watched Rifleman die, but there was no time to grieve. More hits slammed in, and Rifleman's sister ship Ranger staggered. Her impeller strength fell, over half her starboard broadside was turned into some mangled junk, but she held her place in the formation, and Lieutenant Commander Haldane was already rolling ship, bringing her port broadside to bear.

The destroyers of Lieutenant Commander Stahlin's Division 3029.2 were all on the cruisers' engaged flank when the wave of destruction swept across them. Rozsak doubted that they'd even been targeted, but his formation shift had taken them between the incoming missiles and Hammer Force's cruisers. He hadn't planned it that way, but the effect was to turn them into living missile decoys, and the Warriors' sheer size worked against them. The missiles raining down on them were in autonomous control, this far from the ships which had launched them, and they were nearsighted and narrow-minded without their telemetry links. Those which had lost their original targets as a result of the formation shift looked around for new ones, and a Warrior-class ship was more than big enough to satisfy the targeting criteria of AIs which had been told to go and kill cruisers.

Francisco Pizarro and Cyrus stumbled out of formation as furious lasers hammered them like brimstone lightning. Pizarro broke up seconds later, while Cyrus coasted onward, wedge down, life pods spilling from her flanks. Her sister ship Simón Bolivar, in Anne Guglik's Division 3029.3, staggered as she took half a dozen hits of her own, then turned away, rolling ship, fighting to bring her un-mangled broadside's counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters to bear.

And casualties from the inbound.

And SLNS Kabuki shuddered as a pair of lasers slammed into her.

Only two of them. That was all that got past her defenders, all that got through to her, and she was two million tons of starship. Yet she was also totally unarmored, without any of a warship's armor, or internal bulkheads, or built-in survival features. Rozsak had accepted that when he conceived the class, because he'd had no choice, and now he remembered his own earlier thought about pile-drivers and soap bubbles.

The hits blew completely through that unarmored hull. They ripped massive holes straight through the heart of her, smashing missile bays, snapping structural members, shattering her fabric with contemptuous ease. Her secondary reactor went into emergency shutdown, and four of her alpha nodes exploded. Only the fact that she'd been built with mil-spec impeller rooms' massive circuit breakers saved her from instant destruction, and data codes indicating critical structural damage appeared under her icon.

And they took a huge bite out of the Sollies' podlaying capability. Those fast freighters really are fragile.

Leon Trotsky's counter-missiles began to launch. The big ship's active antimissile defenses were far weaker than they ought to be for something her size, but the Aegis system which had been added to them went some way towards repairing that weakness. It was scarcely what Luff would have called a sophisticated solution, but there was a certain brutal elegance to the concept. Simply rip out a couple of broadside launchers, use the space they'd previously occupied for additional counter-missile fire control, and then use two of the remaining launchers to toss out canisters of defensive missiles. Even under optimal conditions, Aegis cost the ship which mounted it at least four offensive tubes per broadside. Normally, Luff would have considered it an equitable deal, given Trotsky's original feeble defenses; now, he missed those shipkillers badly.

Pretty sure I already covered Aegis, but just in case.

The Halo EW platforms deployed around the ship wove their protective cocoon, as well. He hadn't been especially impressed by Halo when his Manpower backers first showed it to him. The platforms were far less effective than the Manticoran tethered decoys the People's Navy had confronted over the years. But he'd changed his mind—provisionally, at least—once he saw them in action against his own ships' targeting capability in exercises. Yes, individually each platform was only marginally more effective than the ones which had equipped the PNE's ships when they initially fled the counterrevolutionaries. But Halo didn't depend on single platforms. It depended on multiple platforms—five of them in each broadside, for an Indefatigable, more for ships-of-the-wall—to generate multiple false targets and provide remote jammer nodes in carefully integrated defensive plans. And since they were small enough to be carried in substantial numbers, they could be quickly replenished as they eroded—as planned—under incoming fire.

And Halo, it seems the individual Halo decoys are only a bit better than Haven end-of-war. Then again, by the end of the war pretty much all Haven EW was purchased Solly EW.

Luiz Rozsak's first salvo arrived on target, three hundred and sixty strong. But sixty of those missiles had gone to local control five seconds before they should have when Rifleman's telemetry links were taken brutally off-line at the source. The Erewhonese-built Mark-17-E's onboard seekers and AI were better than those of most navies, yet they fell immeasurably short of the capabilities of the Royal Manticoran Navy's new Apollo. They did their best, but most of them wasted themselves for minimal return, spreading out, scattering themselves among four different targets. Only two of them got through to their intended prey at all, and the damage they inflicted was scarcely crippling.

A less than 4% hit rate for unguided Mayan/Erewhoni DDMs.

Delta-Zulu-Niner was about as subtle as a battle ax. Luiz Rozsak was up against battlecruisers, and powerful as the Mark-17-E was, no one was going to confuse it with a true capital missile. It was more powerful than most battlecruisers carried, but at the cost of carrying fewer lasing rods. That meant fewer potential hits per missile, and those individual hits weren't going to do the sort of damage an all-up MDM could do, either. In fact, no one really knew exactly how well the Mark-17 was going to perform against targets with battlecruiser-range armor, and so Delta-Zulu-Niner concentrated all three hundred of the missiles that stayed under shipboard control until their planned handoff points on just two targets.

The Mayan/Erewhoni missiles are big for cruiser and even BC missiles, but have fewer lasing rods and lack the firepower of true capital/pod missiles. Though they're still far more potent than Cataphracts. Still, 150 missiles apiece are adequate to kill a BC. 2 down, 12 to go.

They're going for the Warlords first. They're trying to kill our most effective missile-defense platforms.

They were, and their laser heads were far more powerful than he would have believed anything smaller than a capital ship missile could mount. Worse, their fire was immeasurably heavier than he'd imagined six heavy cruisers could possibly control. No ships that size should have that many control links!

But these ships obviously did, and something icy ran down his spine as one of Stravinsky's secondary displays posted the percentage of hits which had gotten through to the two battlecruisers. Saturation explained a lot of it, but the defenses still should have stopped a lot more than they did. The incoming missiles clearly carried extraordinarily good penetration EW . . . and the people behind them clearly knew exactly what they were doing.

Focusing fire on the Peep-built ships, since they have the best missile defense.

But EW or no, whatever those damned things are, they aren't MDMs, he thought. Bad as they are, they're not doing enough damage per hit for capital laser heads . . . and isn't that a comfort when there are so damned many of the bastards? I was right to shift priority to their cruisers. I just hope to hell I shifted soon enough!

The Erewhoni/Mayan MDMs themselves aren't carry capital/pod warheads.

Rozsak's second salvo concentrated its fury on the battlecruisers Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne.
The PNE's missile defense officers had better data than they'd had against the previous wave, but twelve seconds wasn't enough time for them to apply it to their fire solutions, crank it into their EW profiles, adjust their formation and their thinking. Worse, the loss of Bernard Montgomery and Alexander Suvorov had punched holes into their defensive fire assignments.

It takes time to adjust to new data, new tricks and tactics. But in any fight time is the thing you need the most, and have the least of, and the Peeps can't adjust between the first and second salvos to take advantage of what they've learned.

Adrian Luff's expression was bleak as Charlemagne's icon disappeared from his plot. Napoleon Bonaparte, which had once been SLNS Indurate, was marginally luckier than the Warlord. She continued onward, rolling slowly on her axis, shedding bits and pieces of hull and clutches of life pods, yet at least her people were getting off. She might even have been salvageable, but she was clearly a mission-kill, completely out of the fight.

There must really be Solly attack officers back there. They sure as hell don't seem very distracted by the Halo platforms, anyway!

Concentrating fire, taking out the Warlords two at a time. Also, a different attacker would naturally lose a lot more missiles to the Halo decoys, but Rozsak and his people are a lot more experienced with the system than Luff is.

They came rocketing in, and if many of them had clearly had their telemetry links shot out from under them, far more of them hadn't. His missile-defense officers had had longer than their PNE counterparts to digest—and apply—the lessons they'd learned from Luff's first salvo, and it showed. They knew about the shipkillers' final "sprint mode" now. They were allowing for it, and their long-range counter-missile fire was far more effective . . . but it was also coming from fewer launchers, and there were fewer point defense clusters to back them up.

He winced internally as SLNS Gunner's back broke strewing the cruiser's shattered hull—and her crew—across unforgiving vacuum. In the same cataclysmic instant, her sister, Sniper, took at least five hits that sent her lurching out of formation before she somehow managed to recover. Cyrus took three more hits of her own and quietly broke up; her sister Frederick II died in a far more spectacular flash which momentarily rivaled the brilliance of Torch, itself.

Rozsak's people have time, and they're ready for the second drive to be the high-accel one, but they've lost ships of their own already and with less launchers they continue to take casualties.

And then the missile storm closed on Kabuki.

He didn't know how many missiles got through to her. There couldn't have been very many . . . not that it mattered. Her merchant hull was straw in the furnace as the bomb-pumped lasers broke her bones and spat out the splinters. She disintegrated into torn and tattered wreckage, spreading outward from the center of what once had been a two million-ton starship . . . and its crew.

Two thirds of his cruisers were damaged or destroyed, half his destroyers—and Kabuki—were gone, and it was only the second salvo.

Lost a podlayer, plus over half their fire-control cruisers and half the screen. This fight isn't really going well for either side- more of a race to the bottom, and there's still an awful lot of missiles already in space and inbound on each group.

Yet any satisfaction he felt had to be weighed against the loss of almost half his own battlecruisers. Hammer Force's third salvo had destroyed PNE Sun Tzu and reduced PNE Oliver Cromwell to a staggering wreck. Six ships was barely twelve percent of his own total force, but they represented a far larger percentage of his total tonnage. And, infinitely worse, they were all battlecruisers . . . and only the battlecruisers had Cataphracts or the fire control to handle them.

And once the MDM capable ships are all dead....

Luiz Rozsak's fourth salvo came slicing in.

His two undamaged cruisers could still handle sixty missiles each, but Ranger and Sniper, combined, could handle only sixty more. Hammer Force split its hundred and eighty shipkillers into two ninety-missile salvos and sent them ripping in on the battlecruiser Isoroku Yamamoto, Luff's last Warlord, and the limping wreck of the Oliver Cromwell.

There were fewer missiles in each salvo, and Luff's missile-defense officers had learned a great deal more about the Mark-17-E, but there was only so much they could do. They needed time to reorganize, to restore their formation, and there was no time. There were only the incoming waves of missiles, screaming into their teeth at the rate of five every minute. Their individual effectiveness might be eroding as more and more of those missiles came in without benefit of shipboard control, but they were still coming, and the defenders had to treat each of them as its own individual threat.

Getting near the end now, clearly. At this point over half the platforms originally controlling the missiles at launch are dead, only 180 missiles are under control, but the Peeps don't know which missiles are and have to honor the threat of every missile.

"Message to Citizen Commodore Konidis," he heard his own voice saying crisply, decisively. "If we lose communication, he's to continue with the mission as per our original orders."

"Yes, Citizen Com—"

The arrival of Luiz Rozsak's missile storm interrupted Citizen Lieutenant Kamerling's acknowledgment.

There was no way for Hammer Force's tactical officers to identify the PNE's flagship. That was all that had spared Leon Trotsky in their initial salvos. But probability plays no favorites. Eventually, the uncaring odds catch up with everyone, and Luff had been correct. This time it was, indeed, Trotsky's turn.

A hundred and eighty missiles hurled themselves at her and her division mate, Mao Tse-tung, and there was no stopping them. Or no stopping enough of them, anyway. They'd been lost in the clutter of autonomously-guided missiles until the very last instant, and they came down like a battle ax.

The fifth Mayan salvo cripples and mission-kills Trotsky and Mao, taking out the flag bridge with Luff on it in the process. With his death, command devolves to Citizen-Commodore Santander Konidis, on the Chao Kung Ming.

Then the citizen commodore returned his attention to his plot, and any reassurance Sanchez might have engendered disappeared as George Washington and Ho Chi Minh staggered out of the missile holocaust.

Washington's tactical links were still up, although Sanchez would be astonished if even half her offensive and defensive weapons remained effective. Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, was completely out of the net—another clear mission-kill.

My God, I'm down to three effective battlecruisers—and that's counting Washington as effective!

It didn't seem possible. Surely six heavy cruisers couldn't have mangled the PNE's battlecruisers this way!

It's those goddammed pods. They just keep pouring them on, and they're ripping us to pieces!

News flash, missile pods can be effective force multipliers. You'd think the Peeps would know this by now. Just three PNE BCs left.

Adrian Luff's third salvo came down on Hammer Force like a guillotine.

SLNS Sniper blew up as fresh hits blasted through her defenses, adding catastrophically to her earlier damage.

There were no life pods.

David Carte's Sharpshooter lurched off course as half the beta nodes in her forward ring went down. More hits slammed into her like the hammers of hell, yet somehow she hauled back on course, maintaining her heading, her surviving missile defenses still in operation.

That should take Rozsak down to three cruisers, two of them half-crippled. Plus his podlaying fast freighter and four-

More missiles pounded down on the destroyer William the Conqueror. Her desperate point defense stopped twenty-seven laser heads short of detonation range; eleven others got through, and Conqueror blew up as spectacularly as Sniper . . . and with just as few survivors.

Make that three destroyers for screen.

And then, with a sort of horrible inevitability, five laser heads got past the tattered defensive umbrella of Luiz Rozsak's two surviving cruisers and his three remaining destroyers. Bomb-pumped lasers ripped out yet again, enveloping SLNS Masquerade's unarmored hull in a spider web of lightning, and suddenly Rozsak had no more arsenal ships.

And they lost the podlayer. Two cruisers? They should still have Ranger, Sharpshooter, and Marksman. Not that it matters that much, without fresh pods they're pretty much done once the en route missiles arrive.

There were three hundred sixty missiles in each of those waves, but all three of his remaining cruisers between them could manage only a third of them, and that wasn't going to be good enough.

Which was why he'd ordered Charlie-Zulu-Omega. They'd trained for the possibility, but they'd never tried it in action. As far as Rozsak knew, no one had, and he would never have attempted it against an intact missile defense. But Hammer Force had already torn great, bleeding wounds in the StateSec renegades' anti-missile defenses. It might just work . . . and it wasn't as if he had a lot of options.

There wasn't time to implement Charlie-Zulu-Omega before his next two waves arrived, but the one after that would be different.

So cute. Actually Shannon Foraker beat you to your CZO by several years. But the present Republic Navy has no reason to share that data with Luff's ex-pats.

Citizen Commodore Konidis felt a surge of hope as he watched the same pattern emerge.

For the first time, the enemy's targeting had gone after the wrong prey. The hammer of destruction came crashing down on what was left of Mao Tse-tung and Leon Trotsky, and neither one of them was contributing a thing to the PNE's offensive fire.

By now Rozsak is limited to controlling 120 missiles at a time, or exactly a third of each salvo. That's all she wrote for both Trotsky and Mao.

Konidis knew he should have felt more pain as Napoleon Bonaparte blew up. Worse than that, he knew he would feel that pain—every gram of it—if he himself survived this day. Yet for now, right this second, what he felt was something quite different. He'd lost only a single ship this time, and, once again, one which had already been mission-killed.

Salvo eight only kills Napoleon. And I have to wonder, because there was a Robespierre among the BCs too, did no Peep consider the stunning historical coincidences of their revolution and it's similarities to France?

He had three times as many missiles as he had control links, even with his surviving destroyers tied in. Given the toughness of their targets, and the defensive capability the enemy still possessed, sixty-missile salvos weren't going to be enough. Especially not when the missiles already in the pipeline were all he was going to get. Which was why Marksman was no longer controlling sixty missiles; she was controlling a hundred and eighty, and her wounded sisters, Ranger and Sharpshooter, were controlling another hundred and eighty.

The only way they could do it was by rotating each of their available command links through three separate missiles, and the degree of control they could exercise was significantly diminished. But "diminished" control was enormously better than no control at all.

Yep, CZO is rotating the control links, spending a second or two on a missile than moving on.

Santander Konidis bit off the question as all three hundred and sixty missiles in Hammer Force's ninth wave suddenly reacted as one. The abrupt shift took all of his remaining missile defense officers by surprise, and dozens of counter-missiles wasted themselves on missiles whose totally unexpected course changes took them out of the CMs' envelope.

Half the mighty salvo went screaming in on PNES Marquis de Lafayette, and the already badly damaged battlecruiser vanished in a bubble of hell-bright brilliance. That was terrible enough, but the other half crashed through the desperate defensive laser fire of Lafayette's so far undamaged sister, PNES Thomas Paine.

It took longer, this time. The incoming fire wasn't as finely focused, as finely controlled. More of the missiles came in staggered, not concentrated into a single devastating moment of simultaneous destruction.

Not that it mattered.

Almost set and match, what's the bill, Konidis?

He had exactly one battlecruiser left, Citizen Captain Kalyca Sakellaris' Maximilien Robespierre. Oh, the hulks which had once been George Washington and Ho Chi Minh continued to stagger along in formation with her, somehow, but they were as thoroughly out of the battle as any of their consorts which had already ceased to exist.

His eyes went back to the main plot, where the impeller signatures of six hostile starships continued to burn. The PNE's fourth salvo would reach those distant signatures in another five seconds, and Thomas Paine hadn't been destroyed until she and Robespierre had already cut their telemetry links.

It's the last salvo that's going to go in before they take Robespierre out, he thought coldly. They've already cut their control links to their next wave, too—probably to the next two waves, given how tightly sequenced they are. Nothing we can do is going to affect what those missiles do, and there's no way they're going to miss targeting Robespierre. So it all comes down to this. Either we take them out this time, or they've got—he glanced at a plot sidebar—another fifteen salvos already coming down on us.

Almost to the end then, with one or two salvos settling all (however many more are still winging their way towards the Peeps.)

There should be smoke, he thought. There should be the smell of blood, screams. There shouldn't be this . . . this antiseptic order. We should be feeling what's happened to the rest of the squadron.

Shut up, stupid, he told himself. Talk about misplaced survivor's guilt! He shook his head, surprised to feel a slight, biting smile twisting his lips. Before you start wallowing in that kind of crap, wait and see if you're going to survive after all!

Rozsak's feelings on the surreal nature of space combat.

"Attack range in ten seconds," Robert Womack said quietly. "Eight seconds. Seven sec—Status change!"

It was scarcely unexpected, and Rozsak watched with something very like detached calm as sixty missiles suddenly separated themselves from their companions—more than half of them in obedience to the directions of tactical officers who were already dead by the time the shipkillers obeyed their instructions—and came streaking directly in on Sharpshooter and Marksman.

The ECM on this salvo was better than it had been on any of the others. Obviously, the people who'd launched it had gone right on refining their data, updating their penetration profiles, even as they and their consorts were disintegrating under Hammer Force's relentless fire. Worse, only Marksman's missile defenses were anything like intact.

It was too late for counter-missiles—they'd been largely wasted, killing other missiles. No one had been able to identify the actual attack birds until they identified themselves by suddenly lunging for their targets, and their autonomously controlled fellows—over three hundred of them—had camouflaged them, hidden them, absorbed the fire which ought to have killed them.

Now point defense clusters blazed desperately, but there was too little response time. Over half of them got through, and Luiz Rozsak's command chair shock frame hammered him viciously as SLNS Marksman's immunity came to an end at last.

Only 17% attack missiles?

Hernando Cortés seemed to run into some invisible barrier in space. The big Warrior-class destroyer simply disintegrated, and Stahlin watched sickly as the badly damaged Simón Bolivar broke in two. His own Gustavus Adolphus, somehow miraculously still undamaged, and her division mate, Charlemagne—which most definitely was not undamaged—were suddenly Hammer Force's only surviving destroyers.

And they hadn't even been the primary targets.

The destroyers took a pounding.

"Direct hit on Impeller One!"

"Captain, we've lost helm control!"

"Direct hit Missile-One. Missile-Three and Five out of the net!"

"Counter-Missile-Niner out of the net! Counter-Missile-Eleven reports heavy casualties!"

"Sir, we've lost five betas out of the forward ring!"

"Heavy damage aft! Hull breach, Frames One-Zero-One-Five through One-Zero-Two-Zero! We have pressure drop, decks three and four!"

Damage to Marksman.

And even as the energy blasted into Marksman, he saw SLNS Sharpshooter disappear from his plot forever.

Two damaged cruisers and two destroyers. A quarter what Hammer Force was ten minutes ago.

Santander Konidis snarled in triumph as half the enemy impeller signatures were blotted away. But even as he snarled, Hammer Force's tenth missile salvo howled down on the People's Navy in Exile.

Three hundred and sixty Mark-17-E missiles hurtled straight into Maximilien Robespierre's teeth. It was scarcely a surprise. Everyone had known exactly who those missiles would target, but they'd had only twelve seconds to react to the knowledge. Every counter-missile that could be brought to bear, every point defense cluster which could possibly reach that wave of destruction, blazed desperately. Scores of missiles were intercepted by counter-missiles. Over seventy more were torn apart by close-in laser fire.

It wasn't enough.

Last BCs gone, now we just have the two cruiser squadrons and an equal number of destroyers, less any killed by strays.

"That's the last of them, Sir," Robert Womack said wearily ninety-eight seconds later.

Luiz Rozsak nodded, equally wearily, and glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot.

Five hundred and twelve seconds. Less than nine minutes. That was how long it had taken, from the enemy's initial missile launch to the attack of Hammer Force's final wave of missiles.

How could less than nine minutes leave him so exhausted? With so much sick regret?

He looked at the tally boards, wincing internally as he saw the names of all the ships Hammer Force had lost, and saw the answer. SLNS Gunner, Rifleman, Sharpshooter, Sniper, Francisco Pizarro, Simón Bolivar, Hernando Cortés, Frederick II, William the Conqueror, Kabuki, Masquerade . . .

Of the sixteen ships he'd taken into combat, only four survived—Dirk-Steven Kamstra's Marksman, her sister, Ranger, and the destroyers Gustavus Adolphus and Charlemagne. Somehow, and he couldn't pretend to understand how, Jim Stahlin's Gustavus Adolphus was totally untouched. Charlemagne and Ranger, on the other hand, were little more than still barely mobile hulks, and Marksman wasn't much better.

Mayan losses, and by honorverse standards this was a remarkably quick battle.

Fourteen battlecruisers, three heavy cruisers, and two light cruisers. The light cruisers had been almost accidents, killed by the autonomous missiles of Hammer Force's last nine salvos. Marksman and Ranger, even with Gustavus Adolphus' support and even rotating telemetry links, had been able to control barely ninety missiles, which had been only a quarter of the total in each of the salvos which had been launched before Kabuki's and Masquerade's destruction. There'd been no more effective fire coming from the enemy to distract his tactical officers after Maximilien Robespierre's elimination, but less than a hundred missiles had been too little too batter through the PNE's tattered defenses if they'd been spread between multiple targets. So he'd concentrated on taking out the big Mars-class heavy cruisers and letting the rest of the shipkillers go wherever they went under their onboard AIs' direction. To be honest, he was surprised they'd achieved as much as they had.

Kills. So at the moment the People's Navy in Exile has 5 CA, 6 CL, and 16 DD. 27 ships in all.

"All right, Dirk-Steven," he said, turning back to the com which linked him to Marksman's bridge. "It's out of our hands now. Let's see about killing our velocity and heading back to pick up survivors."

Rozsak breaks off, to the immense relief of the surviving Peeps.

We can break off without attacking the planet. We can take our losses and run, and no one will ever be able to prove we had an Eridani Edict violation in mind when we arrived. For that matter, Torch has formally declared war on Mesa. That would make us legitimate mercenaries in Mesan service, if that was what we wanted to claim . . . and if we don't violate the Edict. So, in theory, at least, our survivors should become prisoners of war if they do make it to the planet, which would put them under the Deneb Accords' protection.

In theory.

He tipped back in his command chair, thinking hard.

The problem was that he couldn't quite convince himself that a planet of ex-slaves, whose government contained quite a few theoretically retired members of the Audubon Ballroom, were going to just forgive and forget. If Rear Admiral Rozsak knew why the PNE had come to Torch, it was extraordinarily unlikely that the Torches didn't know it, too. Which suggested to Santander Konidis that they weren't going to be extraordinarily concerned about how the rest of the galaxy might regard the "welcome" they extended to the people who'd been about to genocide their home world.

If we go ahead and take out the planet, we can hang around to pick up our life pods afterward. What's left of Rozsak's force isn't going to want to tangle with us, now that it's lost its ammunition ships. And I've still got eleven cruisers and sixteen destroyers. I don't care if the entire frigging "Royal Torch Navy" is waiting in orbit around the planet, they aren't going to be able to stand up to that without Rozsak's magic missiles to back them up! But if we do hit the planet, Rozsak's surviving ships are never going to let us get into range to take them out, too. And that means he'll get away clean with his sensor data . . . and the entire galaxy will know who did it.

Thinking things through.

"As I see it, we have two options," he told her. "First, we can go ahead and carry out the operation, then try to pick up all of our surviving personnel before leaving the system. Assuming we succeed in doing that—and that we've got sufficient shipboard life support for it—there won't be any prisoners for anyone to interrogate. Despite that, though, I feel confident there are going to be enough recoverable bodies for conclusive DNA identification if someone checks back with Nouveau Paris for matches against our personnel files. Which would mean that Rozsak's basic analysis of who we are and where we came from—and, therefore, who we came here for—would be clearly validated, as far as the galaxy at large is concerned. My understanding of our initial operational plan was that Manpower wanted to avoid that. That anonymity was a primary operational objective."

He paused again, and, once more, she simply looked at him, waiting.

"Our second option is to abandon the direct attack on Torch," he said. "We have more than sufficient firepower to overwhelm anything Torch—I mean, Verdant Vista—has left. We could take out any warships they might have in orbit as we overfly the planet, then come back and take our time destroying their orbital infrastructure. Given the fact that the system's current regime has declared war on both Manpower and Mesa, that would be completely legal within the constraints of the accepted rules of war. We'd still have to worry about how the Solarian League might choose to react to what's happened to Rozsak's ships, but, legally speaking, Mesa and Manpower could make a strong argument that our actions were justifiable in light of Rozsak's announced intention to attack us if we didn't break off our completely legitimate operation against Verdant Vista."

To her credit, the Mesan overseer does go with option 2. Which matters little because...

"All right," the citizen commodore went on briskly, "first, I think we—"

"Excuse me, Citizen Commodore."

Konidis frowned at the interruption and turned his head.

"What is it, Jason?" he asked rather more sharply than he normally spoke to his ops officer.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Citizen Commodore." Something about Citizen Lieutenant Commander Petit's expression sent a sudden icicle down Konidis' spine. "I'm sorry to interrupt," Petit repeated, "but CIC's just picked up three fresh impeller signatures breaking planetary orbit."

"And?" Konidis asked when Petit paused. The planet was still well over a hundred million kilometers away, far outside any range he would have had to worry about even if he'd still had Cataphracts in his magazines.

"And CIC has tentatively identified them, Citizen Commodore," the operations officer said quietly. "They make it two more of those Erewhonese cruisers . . . and another ammunition ship."

It took Santander Konidis almost five seconds to realize he was staring numbly at Petit, and the silence on PNES Chao Kung Ming's flag bridge was absolute.

Guys, meet Anvil Force. End to chapter and battle both.

[Simon_Jester]

Mayan losses, and by honorverse standards this was a remarkably quick battle.

Well.

Pre-MDM engagements took a long time because both sides would spend a long time flinging volley after relatively small volley of missiles at each other in an attempt to chip away the other guy's defenses. This could take hours, because the ships physically couldn't launch missiles fast enough to empty their magazines in much less time than that.

Full-up MDM engagements tend to be protracted because they involve such enormous distances, with ships taking a long time to get into position. Plus, it takes nine minutes for a three stage MDM to even fly its full potential range or anything close to it. And such MDM actions are usually fought between capital ships that have the missile defense capability to just tank enormous salvoes and keep fighting. So aside from apocalyptic exchanges of fire from super-stacked-up patterns of pods (i.e. the murder-suicide between Second Fleet and Home Fleet at First Manticore), things take a while to unfold.

At Torch, both sides have relatively anemic missile defense, such that neither side is really capable of shooting down the entire incoming salvo and taking only minimal damage. And Roszak's command in particular has effectively no ability to keep surviving missile hits and still launch offensive weapons, and they know it. So it's a contest to see who can fire the most light, easily spammed missiles at the maximum possible rate, in hopes of being the last one standing after both sides get done being blown up by the other's missiles.

For capital ship formations to do the same thing to each other is very much a possibility (as seen at First Manticore), but they generally do it from longer ranges, so things have a bit more time to unfold.

[VhenRa]

Uh. Fairly sure those Mark 17-Es aren't MDMs (Be it full-up or DDMs) but instead extended time single-drive missiles. Like the missiles the Saganami-B is equipped to fire. The Erewhon made MDMs hadn't arrived yet.

[Ahriman238]

Leonard Detweiler, the CEO and majority stockholder of the Detweiler Consortium, a Beowulf-based pharmaceutical and biosciences corporation, found himself with a great deal of money and not a great deal of sympathy with the Beowulf bioethics code which had emerged following Old Earth's Final War and Beowulf's leading role in repairs to the brutally ravaged mother world. Almost five hundred years had passed since that war, and Detweiler believed it was long past time that mankind got over its "Frankenstein fear" (as he described it) of genetic modification of human beings. It simply made sense, he believed, to impose reason, logic, and long-term planning on the random chaos and wastefulness of natural evolutionary selection. And, as he pointed out, for almost fifteen hundred years, mankind's Diaspora to the stars had already been taking the human genotype into environments which were naturally mutagenic on a scale which had never been imagined on pre-space Old Earth. In effect, he argued, simply transporting human beings into such radically different environments was going to induce significant genetic variation, so there was no point in worshiping some semi-mythic "pure human genotype."

Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.

Snippet of a history book on Leonard Dettweiler, founder-hero to the Mesans and why and how this whole thing started. This dates him to about four hundred years before the present time of the series. Before the discovery of wormholes, and around the time of first contact with treecats.

She spoke informally because in the weeks since what had come to be called the Battle of Torch, a quiet but profound sea change had swept through the small number of Torch's leaders who knew the truth about the Stein assassination and the events that had followed on The Wages of Sin and elsewhere. A change in the way they looked at Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak.

Before the battle, they'd considered Rozsak an ally, true enough. But it had been purely an alliance of convenience and not one of them had personally trusted the admiral. No farther than I could throw him—when I was a toddler, was the way Jeremy had put it. Indeed, not only had they not trusted Rozsak, they'd been deeply suspicious of him.

Today, it was still unlikely (to say the least) that anyone was going to confuse the admiral with a saint. But it was impossible to match the previous assessment of Rozsak as a man driven solely, entirely and exclusively by his own ambition with the admiral who'd led the defense of Torch at such an incredible cost to his own forces and risk to his own life.

A man driven by a fierce ambition, yes. Solely by ambition, however . . . No. That, it was no longer possible to believe.

Well, he did still assassinate Hieroynmous Stein. But I suppose this earns him a certain degree of trust.

At that, the growing warmth of Torch's inner circle toward the admiral was a candle, however, compared to the enthusiastic embrace with which Torch's population had greeted the Mayan survivors of the battle. Any officer or enlisted person in the fleet who went down to the planet—and there none who didn't, except for those still too badly injured to make the trip—swore then and thereafter that there was not, never had been, and never would be a shore leave better than the one they enjoyed on Torch in the weeks that followed the battle.

No one on Torch doubted that those Mayan fighting men and women had saved the planet's population from complete destruction. Not once the StateSec officers who survived the battle and the ones who surrendered afterward started talking.

The Torches in general love Rozsak and all his Mayans now, roughly as fiercely as the Graysons revere Honor and for similar reasons.

And they started talking very quickly, and they talked and talked and talked. Their immediate fear had been that Torch would hand them over to the Republic of Haven. Then Jeremy X and Saburo started interrogating, and within two days it was the profound hope of every StateSec officer that they would be turned over to the Haven navy.

Jeremy X's notions concerning "the laws of war" and the proper rules governing the treatment of POWs would have met with the approval of Attila the Hun. And while Berry Zilwicki might have squelched Jeremy, she wasn't going to squelch Saburo.

He started every interrogation by placing a holopic between himself and the person being interrogated. "Her name was Lara. And her ghost really, really, really wants you to tell me everything you know. Or her ghost is going to get really, really, really peeved."

So, within a few days, they knew everything—at least, everything that had been known by Santander Konidis and the other surviving officers.

Questioning the surrendered and survivors of the Battle of Torch.

Thereafter, however—quite to the surprise of Konidis and his subordinates—all threats and mistreatment had stopped. Within a month, all of the StateSec survivors had been relocated onto an island and provided with the wherewithal to set up reasonably comfortable if austere living quarters, along with a sufficient food supply brought in once a week under heavy guard.

The armed forces of Torch placed no guards on the island itself, and didn't even maintain a naval patrol beyond a small number of vessels. But the more adventurous of the StateSec forces who experimented with the possibility of trying to escape by sea soon gave it up. It turned out that the lifeforms in Torch's warm oceans were every bit as exuberant as the ones in its tropical rain forests. Especially the predator that looked like a ten-meter long cross between a lobster and a manta ray, and whose dietary preferences seemed to exclude rocks but absolutely nothing else.

This imprisonment by marooning, no guards whatsoever, seems to be more and more common in the honorverse. Ah well, it's a practical solution when you've got a whole planetary surface to play with.

That measure had been taken at Rozsak's request.

"I'd really be much happier if I knew that none of those survivors was in a position to tell anyone—and that includes Haven—exactly what happened here and what weaponry I possessed and what tactics I used."

"Certainly, Admiral," Web Du Havel had said. "But . . . ah . . . that still leaves the population of Torch itself. Which, at last count, numbers a little over four and a quarter million people and grows—this is immigration alone—by almost fifteen thousand people every T-week."

Rozsak had shrugged. "It's not a perfect world. But the State Sec survivors would have an incentive to talk—spill their guts, rather, once Haven gets hold of them—and your people don't. In fact, from what I've heard, you've launched a very effective public campaign to establish and maintain tight security."

"Yes, we have," Hugh had said.

Berry had glanced at him, smiled—and then made a face. "I still think 'loose lips sink ships' is a corny slogan."

Shameless theft! I like it. Torch is kind of sparsely populated still, 4.25 million. But rapidly growing as more ships carrying former slaves arrive each week.

Du Havel had waved that aside. "Don't worry about it. The one thing Torch is not, is poor, even with having to provide initial support for most immigrants, who usually arrive with nothing much more than the clothes they're wearing. But the support doesn't normally last long, because the job market is booming. Plenty of pharmaceutical companies have been quite happy to come here and replace Manpower's operations with their own."

Torch seems to be doing very well economically, even without charging people money to use their magic space anomaly.

"Are you sure, Luiz?" Berry repeated now. "You paid a terrible price for this ship, and the others."

For a moment, Rozsak's face looked a bit drawn. "Yes, we did. But there are some very good reasons why it'd be better if the surviving StateSec ships were pressed into Torch service rather than Mayan service."

And Rozsak gives all the ships captured to the Torches for their own navy.

Put this in perspective, for the last year since it began, the Torch Navy has consisted of 8 frigates. Said frigates are admittedly probably the most badass tiny ships anyone's made in a long time, being essentially a double-size Manty LAC with 2 forward grasers, and as many missiles and CMs as a Ferret. Only export Manty EW, though.

Today, the Torch Navy has 5 CA, 6 CL, 16 DD and 8 FG. The frigates were supposed to be a springboard to a bigger navy, providing training for shipboard life and operations. Plus, I seem to recall they were concerned about the cost of maintaining a Fleet, even if Web seems a lot more sanguine about financial matters right now.

Oh well, it will work out, and even if it takes them a while to crew all the ships, Manticore at least will be reinforcing Torch after this. I snipped that part from near the end of Storm from the Shadows, since Elizabeth didn't say to what extent, only that it had to be done. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if a squadron of Saganamis didn't turn up, maybe even Nikes. And Torch still has the ongoing support of Manticore, Haven, Erewhon and Maya, some investment early on in their future could do a lot of good.

Now that I think about it, Torch is sort of like the anti-Grayson. Their planet is a jungle hell-world stuffed with carnivorous megafauna because life flourishes so easily there. Where Grayson had a huge body of seasoned spacers but had tons of catching up to regular technology and industry to make something of themselves, Torch has considerable starting wealth and a vast pool of skilled and technical labor conversant with all the commonly-used hardware but few if any spacers. In general where Grayson began from religious fundamentalism and can sometimes remain pretty parochial, Torches are cosmopolitan and looking for somewhere to lay down roots. Most of all, where Grayson graduated from a piddling interstellar war and enemy to fighting a major one alongside Manticore, Torch declared war on the real major enemy from day one while Manticore was still preoccupied with a comparatively local and less dangerous foe.

"The truth is, that they'd be white elephants as far as we're concerned. There are . . . reasons we'd just as soon not have anyone from Old Earth poking around in Maya, Berry, and if we start taking ex-Havenite ships into service, someone's likely to do just that."

"And they're not likely to when word of the battle gets there? Or were you thinking you could get away with just not mentioning it?" Berry knew she looked skeptical. "We're willing to keep our mouths shut, Luiz, but don't forget all of those pharmaceutical companies. I imagine we're going to have newsies out here from the League sometime real soon now, and there's no way we're going to be able to keep the fact that there was a battle here in the system under wraps when that happens! Weapons and actual losses are one thing, but . . ."

She gave a little shrug, and he nodded.

"Understood. But we're going to tell the galaxy it was the Erewhon Navy that did the real fighting. Our ships were limited to the flotilla everyone knows about, watching the planet against any missiles that might have come your way. And we don't plan on advertising how heavy our losses were, either." It was his turn to shrug, with a flicker of pain in his eyes. "We can't keep the rest of the galaxy from knowing we lost some people out here, but all our official reports are going to indicate that the people we lost were acting as cadre to help fill out the Erewhonese crews. The only people who could tell anyone different are stuck on your island, and no newsie—or League flunky—is going to get to them there, now are they?"

How Rozsak is going to obscure what really happened here from the bean-counters on Earth.

She returned from the Spartacus in a pensive mood. Visiting that ship had driven something home to her in a way that the inconvenience of living in what amounted to a bunker had not. Life—even with prolong—was simply too damn short to dilly-dally around the fundamentals.

Oh hey, they named the new flagship Spartacus.... Nah, I already ruined that joke.

So, when she returned to the palace, her first words were to Saburo.

"You're promoted, starting immediately. Now please leave Hugh and me alone, for a bit."

Saburo nodded, and left the room.

Hugh's face had no expression at all. As the months had gone by, Berry had learned that he was very good at that. It was one of the things she planned to change.

"Have I displeased you, Your Majesty?"

"Not hardly. I just can't deal with this any longer. I want your resignation. Now."

Hugh didn't hesitate for more than perhaps a second. "As you wish, Your Majesty. I resign as your chief of security."

"Don't call me that. My name is Berry and you damn well don't have any excuse any longer not to use it."

He bowed, slightly, and then extended his elbow. "All right, Berry. In that case, may I escort you to J. Quesenberry's?"

And so Berry resolves her romantic subplot with her bodyguard, by getting him to resign to be with her.

Uh. Fairly sure those Mark 17-Es aren't MDMs (Be it full-up or DDMs) but instead extended time single-drive missiles. Like the missiles the Saganami-B is equipped to fire. The Erewhon made MDMs hadn't arrived yet.

The honorverse wiki agrees with you, I seem to recall them as pod-launched DDMs and the transition to full MDMs. I'll look back for references tomorrow.

[Ahriman238]

"Nobody with a working brain would expect otherwise," Collin's brother, Benjamin, put in. "I've been pointing that out to you for—what? Two or three weeks, now?"

"Something like that," Collin acknowledged with a smile that mingled humor, resignation, and lingering discomfort.

"And did your brother also point out to you—as, now that I think about it, I believe your father has—that you could have delegated more of this? You damned near died, Collin, and regen"—Albrecht looked pointedly at his son's still distinctly undersized left arm—"takes time. And it also, in case you hadn't noticed, is just a teeny-tiny bit hard on the system."

After a few weeks of regen, Collin Dettweiler's new arm is still undersized.

But as he'd just pointed out to Collin (with massive understatement), the regeneration therapies placed enormous demands upon the body. Even with the quality of medical care a Detweiler could expect and the natural resiliency of an alpha-line's enhanced constitution, simply regrowing an entire arm would have been a massive drain on Collin's energy. When that "minor" requirement was added to all of the other physical repairs Collin had required, some of his physicians had been genuinely concerned about how hard he'd been pushing himself.

Alpha-lines are tougher too.

"Well, that said," his father went on, "I take it you've decided Jack McBryde really was a traitor?"

"Yes," Colin sighed. "I have to admit, part of me resisted that conclusion. But I'm afraid it's almost certain that he was."

"Only 'almost'?" Benjamin asked with a sort of gentle skepticism. Collin looked at him, and Benjamin arched one eyebrow.

"Only almost," Collin repeated with a rather firmer emphasis. "Given the complete loss of so many of our records and the fragmentary—and contradictory, sometimes—nature of what survived, almost any conclusion we could possibly reach is going to be tentative, and especially where motivations are concerned. But I take your point, Ben, and I won't pretend it was an easy conclusion for me to accept."

They saw through (though it took a while) all the chaff McBryde kicked up and IDed him as a defector.

"We ran this recording through every cross check," Collins said. "The man on the left is definitely Anton Zilwicki, within a ninety-nine-point-nine percent probability. Outside the world of statistics, that means 'for damned sure and certain.' There's simply no question about it. That phenotype of his is obviously hard to disguise, and everything else matches. Not the face, of course . . . although it does match the face of the waiter in Irvine's recording."

"And the other man is . . . ?"

"Yes, Father." Collin nodded. "It's Victor Cachat. To be precise, it's Victor Cachat within an eighty-seven-point-five percent probability. We don't have anywhere near as much imagery on him as we had on Zilwicki, thanks to that documentary the Manties did on him a while back. That gave us a lot smaller comparison sample for Cachat, so the analysts' confidence level is considerably lower. I think they're just throwing out sheet anchors, though. For myself, I'm entirely confident it's Cachat."

They also IDed Anton and Victor, but think they died in the nuking. Could Anton have faked the footage of them near the nuke?

"I can't rule out the possibility that Zilwicki is—was—better at this than any—or, for that, matter all of—our people are. Frankly, it seems vanishingly unlikely that one man, no matter how good he may be, is going to be better than an entire planet's worth of competing cyberneticists. Still, I'll grant the possibility. But no matter how good he may have been, he was still playing in our front yard. If we'd been playing on his territory, I'd feel a lot less comfortable with our conclusions, but could Anton Zilwicki, using only the equipment and software he was able to smuggle onto Mesa—or obtain on the black market once he got here—get around the best protocols we've ever been able to create, with all the advantages of operating on our own home planet, and do it so seamlessly that we can't find a single trace of it?"

He shook his head.

"Yes, it's theoretically possible, but, in the real world, I really don't think it's likely at all."

Boy will you be surprised.

"But the truth is that even if they hadn't been, for all practical purposes, right at the center of the fireball, we still wouldn't have gotten much from DNA analysis. Cachat is—was—a Havenite, born in Nouveau Paris itself, and StateSec did a pretty fanatical job of eliminating any medical records that might ever have existed when Saint-Just tapped him for special duties. No way we could get our hands on a sample we knew was his DNA. We'd have a better chance of getting a sample of Zilwicki's DNA, but he was from Gryphon. Nouveau Paris' population is an incredible stew, from everywhere, and Gryphon's population's genetic makeup isn't particularly distinct, either, so we couldn't even narrow an otherwise unidentified trace to either planet. We might have had a chance of identifying the Scrag—generically, at least—but even then only if she'd been a lot farther from the hypocenter. Ground zero, I should say. Technically, 'hypocenter' applies only to air bursts."

Apparently StateSec went to some effort to remove Victor's history from the public record, including his medical records and DNA. Probably right after the coup, when he came to the personal attention of Saint-Just and was named Citizen Special Investigator.

"What we think most likely happened is that two separate sequences of events crossed each other. Jack, trying to defect with Simões, decided he was being doublecrossed. So, he planned to destroy Cachat and Zilwicki in a manner that would eliminate any trace of them, any evidence that could connect him to them. He'd figure we'd assume the Buenaventura explosion was an act of terrorism by the Audubon Ballroom. Don't forget, he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for being in Gamma Center that day, with Simões. It had been on his calendar for at least two weeks. In fact, he'd specifically memoed Isabel about it."

-snip-

"So you're assuming McBryde didn't find out about the doublecross until he and Simões had already met in his office," Albert said.

"Yes, and that's where the second sequence of events comes into play. What Jack overlooked—probably because he'd been out of the field long enough for his fieldcraft to get rusty—was the possibility that Irvine might have set up his own surveillance equipment and spotted him meeting Zilwicki. Irvine didn't recognize Zilwicki as Zilwicki because we hadn't spread that information far enough down the chain for him to have any idea what Zilwicki actually looked like. But he did understand that something fishy was going on, so he alerted Isabel. He got through to her on the same morning Jack's negotiations with Zilwicki and Cachat collapsed, and she went down to the Gamma Center to find out just what the hell Jack was up to."

"In other words, it was just really bad timing from McBryde's point of view," Albert mused. "He'd probably have gotten away with killing Cachat and Zilwicki, and he must've had plans for dealing with Simões, too, in the event that his defection fell through. But then Isabel showed up out of the blue, and he realized the wheels had come completely off. There was no way he was going to get away with it, and he knew what the penalty would be, so he committed suicide and took out Cachat and Zilwicki at the same time."

What the Mesans think happened. Well, Collin has a theory that McBryde, a guy he'd previously tagged as too principled/squeamish for field work, killed Victor and Anton to keep them from escaping to spread word of the Alignment, sort of a last-ditch atonement effort.

"Exactly. And, before you ask, Father, no, I can't be absolutely certain that the records which show Simões was there also weren't somehow faked. It wouldn't have been as hard for Jack to successfully fake those records as it would've been for Zilwicki to do the same thing at the Buenaventura, but why should he have? There's no way he himself wasn't present when he destroyed the Gamma Center. That much we know for certain, because Scorched Earth had to be triggered by someone inside the facility. It can't—couldn't—be done by remote control."

He scowled.

"In fact, it wasn't supposed to be possible for Scorched Earth to be triggered by any single person, either, no matter where they were. Trust me, some people have already . . . heard from me about that one. Jack figured out a way to circumvent the two-man protocols, and nobody was supposed to be able to do that."

They can nuke the data-storage remotely, but the self-destruct could only be activated from on-site.

"Am I right in assuming that you don't propose to punish McBryde's family?" he asked.

"No. We have no reason to think any of them were involved. None. Oh, we've questioned them, of course, thoroughly, and it's obvious they're deeply distraught and grieving. Defensive, too. I think they're in denial, to some extent, but I also think that's inevitable. What I haven't seen is any evidence that any of them knew a thing about Jack's plans. And, frankly, I'm positive Jack would never have involved them. Not in something like this, whatever his own motives may have been, he'd never have put his parents, Zachariah, or his sisters at risk. Not in a million years."

In this much, they're an improvement on the old Peep security apparatus, no reprisals against McBryde's family beyond questioning.

"And Irvine?"

"You know, Father," Collin smiled crookedly, "he's actually the one bright spot in all this. He was completely loyal, start to finish, he was smart enough to realize something was happening that shouldn't have been, even if he didn't have a clue what that 'something' really was, and he's the only one involved who did his job properly."

"So your thoughts are—?"

"Well, he wants a field assignment, but, frankly, I don't think that's going to be possible any time soon." Collin shook his head. "He knows too much about what happened—especially now, after all the interrogations. We can't put him out, use him for a deep-penetration agent, with all of that rattling around inside his head. By the same token, his genotype doesn't really lend itself well to any other assignment. So, what I've been thinking, is that we might bring him all the way inside."

And the stool pigeon gets a promotion, brought inside the onion and fully briefed.

The months they'd spent since their escape from Mesa drifting on the Hali Sowle had been the equivalent of months spent in the most densely populated apartment in creation. You'd think that a freighter massing slightly over a million tons would have enormous empty reaches, but . . . it didn't. Or, rather, it did . . . but it was a working commercial vessel, nothing more. Despite the capaciousness of its huge cargo holds, the living quarters were small and Spartan. Neither Ganny nor Uncle Andrew would have reacted kindly if Brice had proposed that time be taken from the repair work needed to get the ship's drive working again to turn some of the freight compartments into additional living quarters so that he might have a chance to spend some time alone with Nancy, either. It was best not to even think how Zilwicki or Cachat would have reacted to that suggestion, and, just to complete the unfairness of the universe, there'd been the minor fact that every square meter of every cargo hold was covered by the bridge security and monitoring cameras. So even though there were all those vast stretches of space, Brice had been gloomily certain that any effort on his part to inveigle Nancy out into them would have been instantly discovered.

A bit on the time they spent floating dead in space after escaping Mesa. It seems there's surprisingly little space on a merchie, because every possible space is given over to cargo. Oh and Brice Butry bonds with the daughter of the restaurant owner, Nancy, bringing his romantic subplot to an end. I'm so happy.... I never have to hear or think about it again.

"Anyway, the guys on the Custis"—EMS Custis was the Erewhonese repair ship which had been at the station as part of the ongoing work to turn Parmley Station into something that still looked like a decrepit and mostly abandoned amusement park but was actually quite a powerful fortress—"agreed to make a quick hop to get replacements for us. I think their skipper probably works for the people we got Hali Sowle from in the first place. Anyway, he obviously thinks we should use real parts to fix the hyper generator."

Remember the part where the BSC wanted to turn their amusement park station into a sort of safehouse/depot/discreet fleet base for anti-slavery operations? That part is going well.

That had been part of the deal. Every member of the clan still young enough was being transported to Beowulf in order to begin prolong treatments. The order in which they'd go was determined by their age. Those like Sarah Armstrong and Michael Alsobrook who were getting close to the limit would be sent first, of course. Brice and Ed and James were not at the top of the list, but he figured they'd be going pretty soon.

The Butry clan and Nancy are getting all-expense paid prolong therapy.

"I don't know if I can get any work on Torch," he whined.

"Are you kidding? It won't be all that long, you numbskull, before the whole damn galaxy knows that Andrew Artlett is the mechanical wizard—the jackleg mechanic of all time—who got the Hali Sowle through on its desperate mission. Your problem won't be finding work, it'll be dodging Mesan assassination squads."

The diner owner and Butry mechanic are immigrating to Torch.

"I think the Republic owes us a stipend too, Victor. 'Course, I don't expect one as big as Beowulf's, much less as big as the one I figure I'll be squeezing out of the Star Kingdom." Friede Butry gave Victor Cachat a twisted smile of her own. "I realize you Havenites are the poor cousins in this part of the galaxy."

Ganny Butry sure has no problem getting paid by multiple people for the same job.

"I told you, you're just wasting your time. Sure, I'll put in a word for you. Be glad to. But after that, it'll work its way up the ladder until—don't hold your breath—it finally reaches Those Who Decide Such Things." Cachat shrugged. "After that . . . ? You've been around a lot longer than I have, Ganny. You know what bureaucrats are like."

She said nothing for a few seconds. Just studied him with an intensity Victor didn't understand and even found a little disturbing.

Then she said: "I forget sometimes, the way you're still a babe in the woods when it comes to certain things."

"What does that mean?"

"Victor Cachat, your days of being on the bottom rungs of the ladder—or of the totem pole, if that means anything to you—are coming to an end. In about as spectacular a manner as you could imagine. A few weeks from now—sure as hell, a few months from now—a 'word put in' by Victor Cachat will be putting fleets into motion. Or whatever the flamboyantly notorious galactic super secret agent equivalent of that is, anyway. So I figure you're good for the stipend—to which I will point out that you just agreed."

In the literal sense that learning of the Alignment's existence and aims is definitely going to set fleets in motion, but I believe Victor remains just chief of a secondary priority sector.

Ganny chuckled. "Didn't think of that, did you? I found out yesterday from one of the BSC people that Anton Zilwicki appeared in a widely broadcast vid documentary a while back. So you've got some catching up to do. And since he's already nailed down the monicker of 'Cap'n Zilwicki, Scourge of the Spaceways,' you'll need to come up with something different. For the documentaries they'll be doing about you, I mean. My own recommendation would be either 'Black Victor' or 'Cachat, Slaver's Bane.' "

"I'm a spy."

Ganny shook her head sympathetically. "No, Victor Cachat. You were a spy."

That I'm even more skeptical of, and both those proposed names are terrible. With that we bring Torch of Freedom to a close. Don't know when (not entirely sure if) I'll be covering Cauldron of Ghosts.