Someone—it wasn't Stahlin, this time—chuckled, and Rozsak grinned briefly.
"I know we've hit a few snags in the production pipeline," he went on, "but, especially since this intel on Torch came up, we've been pressing Carlucci—and McAvoy—on the pod numbers. Our best guess at this point is that by the time we reach Torch, we should find a couple of Carlucci freighters waiting for us with somewhere around fifteen hundred pods. That won't be quite enough for a complete load-out on all three of the Masquerades, and we'll probably be short on EW birds, but it'll still give us a hell of a lot more punch than anyone else is going to be expecting us to have. What it's not going to give us is a lot of ammunition to use up in those live-fire exercises you were talking about, Dirk-Steven. Exercises which, I hasten to add, I entirely agree we ought to be carrying out. Since these are going to be the six-pod rings, though, they aren't going to be reusable, so even if we had the replacement birds to load into them, we wouldn't be able to reload after the exercise."
Heads nodded soberly around the table.
The transitional ship types which had been produced for the Maya Sector in the Carlucci yards were experimental, in one sense, but used proven technological components, in another. The new Warrior-class destroyers were almost ten percent larger even than the War Harvest-class, yet they had twenty-five percent fewer missile tubes and forty percent fewer energy weapons in each broadside than the much smaller Rampart-class. That lesser throw weight had been emphasized in the various reports being sent back to Old Chicago, since it had helped to assuage any possible fears over the combat power of the ships Barregos was building for himself out in Maya. What hadn't been emphasized was that the energy weapons in question were all grasers (not the Ramparts' much lighter—and less powerful—lasers); that the ships carried almost twice the anti-missile defenses of a standard SLN destroyer, that they carried substantially more missiles per tube; and that the missiles in question were the same ones carried by the Royal Manticoran Navy's light units at the close of the First Havenite War. Nor had anyone mentioned the improvements in inertial compensator improvement which gave a Warrior a thirty percent acceleration advantage over Rozsak's War Harvest-class destroyers. It was probably as well for the blood pressure of various senior SLN officers that they were blissfully unaware of just how enormous an increase in combat power all of that represented.
The Marksman-class would have come as an even more unpleasant surprise, had anyone in the Sol System had the least idea of their actual specifications. In many ways, what the Marksman really represented was a slightly downsized prewar RMN Star Knight-class heavy cruiser with updated electronics, energy weapons, and missiles and a substantially downsized crew. Her compensator gave her an acceleration rate which, while inferior to a Warrior's, was still twenty-eight percent better than a War Harvest's, and she carried the Mark-17-E, the Erewhon-built version of the Manticoran Mark-14 missile then-Captain Michael Oversteegen had used to such good effect at the Battle of Refuge three T-years earlier. They weren't multidrive missiles; in fact, Manticore had abandoned further development on them when the Mark 16 dual-drive missile proved a practical concept for cruiser-sized tubes. But they were substantially longer ranged than anything in the Solarian inventory, and in the latest Erewhonese version, they mounted heavier laser heads (although with fewer lasing rods) than were carried by any Solarian combatant short of the wall of battle. They were also, unfortunately, much too large to be fired out tlineof the Warriors' missile tubes, far less by any of the older, Solarian-built units under Rozsak's command, and the Marksmans carried only thirty of them for each of the six tubes in each broadside.
Had any SLN observer taken a good look at one of Rozsak's "light cruisers," he might have observed two interesting external peculiarities. First, their weapons seemed a bit asymmetrically arranged. Although they showed the very respectable (especially for a light cruiser) broadside armament of six missile tubes, five grasers, twelve counter missile tubes, and eight point defense stations, there was a peculiar gap in the middle of each broadside—one just about large enough to have accommodated two additional missile tubes. Second, they seemed to have an awful lot of additional planar arrays stuck in some odd-looking places.
The reason for the apparent peculiarity was that the ships had been designed with eight broadside missile tubes, not six. As built, however, two tubes in each broadside had been replaced by lots and lots of additional fire control. The compartments which had been intended to mount the missile tubes had then been sealed with solid plugs of armor—armor which, in fact, was substantially heavier than that which protected her actual weaponry. The peculiar plethora of arrays dotting her flanks provided the telemetry links for all that fire control, which gave them—despite the fact that they mounted only six tubes each—enough capability to simultaneously control sixty missiles in each broadside firing arc.
Ultimately, all of that massively redundant fire control would be removed and replaced with the missile tubes of the original 'official' design. At the moment, however, they were half the key to Rozsak's entire strategy for covering the gap until the Maya Sector began to take delivery of a substantial force of Erewhon-built ships-of-the-wall of its very own.
The other half of the key was represented by the Masquerades—the ships which had received the unofficial type designation of "arsenal ship."
Based loosely on the Silesian-designed Starhauler "modular" merchant ship, the Masquerade massed a shade over two million tons. The original Starhauler design had featured a downsized standard, configurable internal cargo hull, surrounded by an outer shell of "container" spaces. The idea had been to produce a vessel which could transport individually loaded cargo modules which could be dropped off in transit without taking time for routine offloading procedures. On paper, it had offered many advantages although, in practice, it had proven less successful.
What Carlucci had done in designing the Masquerade as a similar "modular merchant ship" for the Maya Sector was to eliminate the internal cargo hold entirely. Instead, each ship had sixteen pod bays arranged along each side, and each bay had its own power and life support connections, since part of the idea was that the ship could also be fitted with passenger-carrying pods or climate-controlled or refrigerated pods. That potential power demand also explained why a merchant ship had not one, but two fusion plants.
Commercially, the ship was a pure boondoggle, which, Rozsak had no doubt, would be painfully evident to anyone back on Old Earth who ever actually looked at it as a practical freight hauler. No one was doing that, of course, given the rationale for their construction which he and Barregos had crafted for Solarian consumption.
Militarily, the Masquerade was probably the best illustration of the principle of mounting sledgehammers in eggshells Luiz Rozsak had ever seen or imagined. In fact, it was really more of a case of mounting pile-drivers in soap bubbles, as far as he was concerned.
Each of the Masquerade's pod bays just happened to be deep enough to mount three of the Erewhonese Space Navy's standard missile pods stacked end-to-end. It was considerably wider than a single missile pod, however, and CIG had been considerate enough to design a mounting for multiple pods. The initial design accommodated six pods in three rows of two pods each, but an improved design mounting only four pods each in a true "ring" arrangement was just entering production.