Which, unfortunately, wouldn't do a single thing to mitigate the consequences for the PNE. The Eridani Edict carried no specific injunction to go after non-state violators with the full fury of the Solarian League Navy, but Adrian Luff nourished no illusions. The Solarian League wouldn't give a damn about attacks on Havenite shipping, or the Havenite navy. And Luff could slaughter his one-time fellow citizens in whatever numbers he chose without arousing the least Solarian ire . . . as long as he did it without resorting to the actions the Eridani Edict outlawed.
But if the PNE crossed this line, and if the League knew it had, that indifference would vanish. At the very least, he and his people would become pariahs, with every man's hand turned against them. Luff had learned a great deal, over his years of exile, about the astonishing depth of the Solarian League's basic, all-encompassing inefficiency. It was actually worse than the pre-Pierre People's Republic had ever been, in some ways. But, by the same token, he'd gained a bone-deep awareness of the League's sheer, stupendous size and power. If it decided the People's Navy in Exile needed to be hunted down, sooner or later, the PNE would be run to earth and destroyed.
But if we don't do this, we lose the only real outside support we've been able to find. And what happens to our morale, our cohesion, if that happens? For that matter, if Rozsak really knows who we are, really knows we were prepared to do this, then we're tainted in Solly eyes, no matter what happens!
"Accept his com request," he heard himself say. "No visual, and run the outgoing audio through the computers."
"We have a response, Sir. Sort of, anyway," Karen Georgos announced.
"Took them long enough," Edie Habib half-muttered, and Rozsak gave her a half-smile.
"There's a forty-second transmission delay," he pointed out. "They didn't dither as long as I expected them to, actually."
Habib snorted softly, and Rozsak looked at Georgos.
"Put it through, Karen."
"Yes, Sir. Coming up now," the com officer replied, and the display in front of Rozsak went abruptly blank.
"What can I do for you, Admiral Rozsak?" a voice inquired. It was smoothly modulated, without any readily discernible accent, and Rozsak raised one eyebrow at Georgos before keying his own pickup.
"Computer generated?" he asked . . . quite unnecessarily, he was certain.
"Yes, Sir." She shrugged. "I can't guarantee it without a complete analysis, but it sounds to me like they're using our own hardware and techniques. Somebody at the other end is talking to the Nightingale, and the AI's generating a completely synthesized voice. There's no way anyone would be able to determine anything about the actual speaker's voice from this."
"That's what I thought," he said.
He'd have done exactly the same thing, if he'd found himself in the place of whoever was at the other end of that com link. In fact, he had used the Nightingale on occasions when deniability was more useful in the Solarian League's view of things. But if he wasn't surprised by that, he was slightly surprised by how irritating he found it.
Mostly that's because Karen's right—he's using our own tech against us. Which makes being pissed off with him even sillier, given what we're planning to do with "our own tech" in the increasingly less distant future.
He brushed that thought aside, squared his shoulders, looked directly into his own pickup, and brought it online.
"You can immediately break off your attack on the planet Torch," he said flatly. "I remind you that the Solarian League has signed a mutual defense treaty with the Kingdom of Torch. Any attack on Torch will be deemed an attack upon Solarian territory, and any violation of the Eridani Edict's anti-genocide protocols will lead to your summary destruction."
There was a forty-second delay as his words sped across to the PNE flagship. Then, forty seconds after that, his blank com display spoke again.
"I appreciate your position, Admiral," it said. "Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comply with your demands. Not to mention the fact that you don't seem to have the means to accomplish our 'summary destruction' at this particular moment."
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, theSolarian League Navy as a whole definitely does have the means."
"True," the anonymous voice acknowledged eighty seconds later. "But for the rest of the SLN to accomplish that it will have to be able to find us. And I think—Admiral Rozsak, was it?—that it might behoove you to consider the potential consequences for your current forces. You may find this difficult to believe, but I would prefer not having to kill anyone who doesn't have to die today."
Despite the artificiality of the voice, Rozsak thought he could actually hear an edge of sincerity in that final sentence.
And isn't it big of him to offer to allow us to run away so he "only" has to kill the four or five million people on Torch?
"That's very kind of you," he said out loud, his voice cold. "If, however, you do not break off your attack run on Torch, I will engage you, and if that happens, quite a few people are going to get killed today. You may believe you have a sufficient advantage to defeat my own forces with minimal casualties. I assure you, if you do think that's the case, that you're wrong. And I also hereby inform you that your violation of the Torch hyper limit with an unidentified military force is considered a deliberate hostile act by the Kingdom of Torch and by the Solarian League. I officially instruct you at this time to change course immediately and leave the Torch System on a least-time course. If you do not comply with those instructions, deadly force will be used against you."
"—will be used against you."
Adrian Luff looked around his flag bridge. Most of his personnel had their eyes focused upon their own displays, their own command consoles, but he knew where their ears were focused. And from the body language around him, from the expressions and partial expressions he could see, he knew the majority of them were thinking exactly what he was thinking—that here was the opportunity to break off. The excuse they could offer to their "Manpower" masters.
And, at the same time, they were also thinking—again, like him—that the PNE's Warlords and Mars were too distinctive to simply fade away into the background of other pirate and mercenary warships wandering about the galaxy. If the emission signatures of those ships got back to the SLN, got circulated throughout the League and all of the minor, independent star nations, they'd be easy to identify. So whatever degree of personal anonymity he and his crews, as individuals, might be able to maintain, as a group, they would be marked men and women. There might not be a star nation against which the Eridani Edict could be enforced in this case, but that wouldn't prevent anyone from classifying them as pirates . . . and under acknowledged interstellar law, the punishment for piracy was death.
But we've come too far, he thought harshly. We've clawed our way too far back towards who we used to be, what we used to stand for. And without Manpower's support, we'll never have the logistics base to be anything but pirates. Murderers and scum—ten-a-credit hired killers, not "defenders of the Revolution." If we walk away from this mission, we lose that.