The original six-pod configuration offered a greater throw weight per "ring," but the pods it contained were stripped down, with very lightweight grav-drivers. They weren't quite intended as single-shot weapons, but they would require extensive refurbishing before they could be used a second time. The currently available pods also contained the Mark-17-E, not full-scale multi-drive missiles.

The four-pod version's component pods, on the other hand, were far more robust., They'd be reloadable and reusable without requiring enough additional maintenance to amount to something just short of actual rebuilding, and they'd have the independent endurance to be deployed for up to a week at a time. Even more significantly, their individually larger pods would be loaded with the Mark-19, the ESN's most recent MDM variant.

Given the fact that there were sixteen pod bays in each of a Masquerade's broadsides, each arsenal ship carried up to ninety-six pods, which, with the six-pod ring gave her a total of five hundred and seventy-six pods. That was more firepower than was carried by the vast majority of pod superdreadnoughts three times her size. Unfortunately, those missiles were all she carried. She was a merchant design, with zero armor, no integral point defense capability, no core hull, no life support redundancy, no military-grade lifepods, no integral firecontrol even for her own pods, and no integral electronic warfare capability. If a genuine warship—even a dinky little pre-Manticore LAC—ever got into weapons range of her, she (and her crew) would disappear quickly from the cosmos. Which was why she wasn't supposed to get into weapons range of anyone else. Instead, she was supposed to lie safely out of range of an opponent with no multidrive missiles, launching salvo after salvo of pods which would then be taken under control by the Marksmans, with all of those redundant telemetry links.

Eventually, her class would also be provided with specially designed "combat pods" which would contain things like counter missile tubes, point defense stations, sidewall generators, additional life support, fire control, electronic warfare systems, and the like. Unfortunately, all the "combat pods" in the galaxy would never turn her into a proper warship which could hope to survive even minimal damage. Even more unfortunately at the moment, none of those specially designed combat pods were yet available for the only three Masquerades of which Maya had so far taken delivery.

"As I say, we're going to be short on expendable ammunition for at least another month or so," Rozsak continued. "It's not the missiles themselves; it's the pod rings. Carlucci is concentrating on getting as many of them produced as quickly as possible, even at the expense of pulling people and capacity off the combat pods, and he's moved the four-pod rings—and the Mark-19s for them—up in the production cute, as well. But it's probably going to be sometime late in October before CIG actually gets any of those new goodies delivered to us at Torch. In the meantime, we're just going to have to do the best we can with the simulators, and, frankly, I expect that to be pretty damned good, given the caliber of our people."

The praise implicit in his last sentence was even more gratifying to his subordinates because of the matter-of-fact tone in which it was delivered, and he smiled slightly as he recognized the pleasure in their expressions.

"Any other comments or questions?" he asked.

"I imagine there are probably a few more thoughts chasing around in people's heads, Sir," Kamstra replied. "On the other hand, as you just pointed out, Edie probably has answers for most of them already built into her ops plan. Considering which, I think we should go ahead and let her bring us all up to speed. I'm sure if there are any questions left afterward, she and Jiri will be able to dispose of them."

"And, of course, if disposing of them should prove to be beyond their merely mortal capabilities,I will be available to dispense wisdom from on high," Rozsak agreed benignly. This time, the response was a chorus of laughter, no mere chuckles, and he gave them all a much broader smile. Then he waved one hand in Habib's direction.

"The stage is yours, Edie."

Chapter Forty-Two

"Do you really think there's someone here who'd be interested in hiring us?" Yana's eyes, as she inspected the interior of the bar, were as skeptical as her tone of voice. "Talk about a dive."

"No, I don't. DuChamps wouldn't have spent that much time with me if they were just thinking of pawning me off in a routine transaction."

"Then why are we here?"

"A test, I figure. Dusek wants to see if I really have the credentials."

Sitting across from him at the small table in a corner, Yana continued her casual inspection of the place. So it would seem to any observer, at any rate. The fact that she spent at least a minute doing so would be understandable enough. Any woman as good-looking as she was would have a few trepidations about being in the place.

Victor had done some quiet checking after Triêu Chuanli had more-or-less ordered him to spend time at the Rhodesian Rendezvouz. He'd discovered, not to his surprise, that the placewas notorious for being a hangout for mercenaries, even by the standards of notoriety that held sway in the worst seccy district of Mesa's capital city. It was one of those places where the police were said to always come in pairs—except no policeman had set foot in the Rhodesian Resort in over eight years. According to the stories he'd heard, the last one to do so had left in a body bag.

There'd been no repercussions, apparently. The cop had been new to the police force and trying a private shakedown of the bar. If the owner hadn't had his own people take care of the problem, the district's police captain probably would have done it for him.

Victor had spent years in districts similar to Neue Rostock. For a spy like himself, they were often good places to go to ground or set up an operation. There were some disadvantages to working with criminals, to be sure. But the one great offsetting advantage was that very few hardened criminals were burdened with anything in the way of idle patriotic impulses. As long as they got paid, they didn't care who you were or why you were doing whatever you were doing—which they didn't want to know, anyway.

Every planet with a large population had districts like this in their major cities. The Neue Rostock was by no means the worst Victor had run across. Two of the slum areas in Nouveau Paris, one of them less than a mile from where he'd been born, were just as rough or worse. And, everywhere, there were certain standard practices. Not quite formal rules, but very close. One of them was that any establishment—certainly one like the Rhodesian Rendezvous—had to pay off the cops to stay in business. But the pay-offs were done in a proper and orderly manner, from the top down. Freelance policemen were not welcome and usually didn't last long.

The only thing out of the ordinary at all about Mesa was that the police were almost completely indifferent to what happened in the seccy slums. The cops left the maintenance of order in these districts to the bosses who ran them. As long as they got their baksheesh, they simply didn't care what happened there. And, being fair about it, the bosses probably maintained order at least as well as the police would have done, and the cut they took from every business was no worse than taxes would have been.

Still, it was a rough sort of order—at least, in a place like the Rhodesian.

"It'll be the three at the table on the south wall," Yana predicted. "The ones who came in a few minutes ago."

She spoke softly also; but, just as Victor had done, she relied on their scrambling equipment to protect them from being overheard by eavesdroppers. Nobody would think anything of that, either. Such equipment was pretty much de rigueur in a place like this. If there was any blind trust or milk of human kindness to be found on the premises, it'd be in the paws of a blind mouse hiding in a hole somewhere.