"And maybe they're figuring on taking the time to hunt down anybody or anything that might be able to pass their emissions signatures on to anyone else, too," Dobbs said more darkly. Raycraft raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "If they don't think they're looking at MDMs, Ma'am, then they have to think they've got an overwhelming advantage in weight of metal. Against what they've seen so far, assuming equal missile ranges, they probably could mop up everything we've got and then take their time making sure they've also destroyed anyone with a record of their emissions. If they managed that, there wouldn't be any evidence to prove who'd done it . . . which is what they've been planning on all along, isn't it?"
"You may be right about that. No," Raycraft shook her head, "I'm sure you are right about it. Unfortunately for them, they don't have equal missile ranges, now do they?"
Adrian Luff watched his own plot, and despite the impending clash, despite his own lingering revulsion at the mission he'd been assigned, he felt oddly . . . calm.
He and his ships were committed. They had been, from the moment Luiz Rozsak's Hammer Force turned up behind them, and they knew it. Luff's initial attack plan had gone disastrously awry the instant those ships translated out of hyper, and everyone aboard all of his ships knew that, as well, just as they knew he'd refused to break off even when challenged in the name of the mighty Solarian League. Yet there was surprisingly little evidence of panic aboard Leon Trotsky and the other ships of the PNE. StateSec secret policemen they might once have been, uniformed enforcers of a brutal regime who'd become little more than common pirates since the fall of the People's Republic, yet they were more than that, as well.
However foolish the rest of the universe might think they were to dream of restoring the People's Republic and the Committee of Public Safety, it was a dream to which they had genuinely committed their lives. It was what bound them together, and in the binding they had found strength. The long months of preparation for a mission virtually none of them wanted to carry out had forged them back into a unit, an organized force, and in the forging they'd gained a temper they had never known before. Even some of the mercenaries Manpower had recruited to fill out their ranks had been forged into that same sense of unity, of purpose. Singly, they might still be the lunatic holdouts, the renegades, the agents of brutality the galaxy considered all of them to be, but together, they truly were the People's Navy in Exile.
They had that now, and Luff wasn't giving it up. Whatever the cost, whatever the consequences, they would be the People's Navy in Exile, or they would be nothing at all.
As Gowan Maddock sat on Adrian Luff's flag bridge, watching the kilometers between the citizen commodore's ships and their enemies dwindle steadily away, he realized just how badly he (and the rest of the Mesan Alignment) had underestimated these people. Oh, they were still lunatics—crackpots! But they were lunatics who refused to panic. Crackpots who'd accepted that they were probably going to die in pursuit of their lunacy, yet refused to relinquish the madness which empowered them.
He sat in his own command chair, watching Luff engage in a deadly version of the ancient Old Earth game of "chicken," and knew that in their quixotic quest, the men and women of the People's Navy in Exile had become something far greater—something far tougher and much more dangerous—than he'd ever admitted to himself before.
"Coming up on the specified deceleration point in thirty-five seconds, Sir," Lieutenant Womack said quietly.
"Thank you, Robert," Luiz Rozsak replied, his own eyes intent as he watched the master plot.
Masquerade and Kabuki had fallen back a bit, placing themselves behind Kamstra's cruisers and their destroyers. The range between Marksman and the enemy battlecruisers had fallen to the specified eleven million kilometers, and as he'd pointed out to Habib, there was no point closing the rest of the way to their chosen firing point too rapidly. Even at the Masquerades' maximum deceleration rate, it would have taken them over three minutes simply to decelerate to zero relative to the enemy, and that was assuming the other side kept running at its own current acceleration. Slowing their own overtake acceleration by one kilometer per second squared meant it would take them an additional thirteen minutes to enter his chosen engagement range . . . and that their overtake velocity would be down to less than 500 KPS when he did. If he needed to, he could hold that range forever—or open it still further, for that matter—even with his arsenal ships and even if the other side went to a zero compensator margin trying to catch him.
"The enemy's reduced acceleration, Citizen Commodore!" Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky said suddenly. "It's dropped a full kilometer per second squared!"
Luff looked quickly up from the plot at the ops officer's announcement, then turned to Hartman.
"I don't think they'd be killing any of their acceleration if they weren't pretty close to where they wanted to be," he said quietly.
"No, Citizen Commodore," she agreed, eyes meeting his, and he nodded. Then he turned back to Stravinsky.
"Open fire, Citizen Lieutenant Commander!" he said crisply.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
"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!"
"What the hell—?" Raycraft heard Commander Dobbs's muttered question, although the corner of her mind which was paying attention to such things felt confident he'd never meant to say it aloud. On the other hand, exactly the same question was burning through her own brain as she stared at the plot.
It was ridiculous. Hammer Force was at least three million kilometers outside the powered envelope of even a Javelin or Trebuchet shipkiller, and firing missiles that would go ballistic, unable to pursue evading targets, that far short of their intended victims was stupid! A useless waste of ammunition! They couldn't possibly think they could—
Oh, yes, they could, a tiny voice told her. We've got Mark-17-Es in the pods—what if they've got something of their own over there? Something we didn't know about any more than they knew about the Mark-17?
She remembered her own earlier thoughts about the possibility of missile pods on the other side. Escaped StateSec crews would also have known all about the existence of multidrive missiles. For that matter, Manpower had certainly known about them since shortly after their first use, and the fact that the SLN still hadn't done anything about it didn't mean everyone else was equally blind. So, yes, they could have a surprise of their own.
She looked at the acceleration numbers coming up on the plot. So far, they looked exactly like the profile of a Javelin anti-ship missile set for a three-minute, maximum-range burn, and she wanted to believe that was what they actually were. But that tiny voice told her they weren't. That not even a bunch of StateSec lunatics would have opened fire at this range unless they genuinely believed they could hit their targets.