"No." Rozsak shook his head. "I never thought you were wrong about it, Edie." He turned away from the plot and smiled wryly at Habib. "In fact, the reason I was so ambivalent about it was because it really is a coin-toss kind of decision." He shrugged. "In the end, it's all about defending the planet, though, and I'm not going to second-guess my decision about Snorrason at this point. It's just . . ." He grimaced. "It's just that I've got this itch I can't quite seem to scratch."

"What sort of 'itch,' Boss?" Habib's expression was much more intent than it had been.

Luiz Rozsak was an intensely logical man, she thought. Despite the easy-going attitude which had been known to deceive friends, as well as adversaries, he was anything but casual or impulsive. His brain weighed factors and possibilities with an assayer's precision, and he was usually at least two or three moves ahead of anyone else in the game. Yet there were times when a sort of instinct-level process seemed to kick in. When he did make decisions on what might seem to others like mere impulses or whims. Personally, Habib had come to the conclusion long ago that his "whims" were actually their own version of logic, but logic that went on below the conscious level, so deep even he stood outside it as it operated on facts or observations his conscious mind didn't realize he possessed.

"If I knew what sort of itch it was, then I'd know how to scratch it," he pointed out now.

"If I can help you figure out what's itching, I'll be glad to lend a hand," she said. He looked at her, and she shrugged. "You've gotten an occasional wild hair that didn't go anywhere, Boss, but not all that damned often."

"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.

And what would never, ever let him forgive himself if somehow the StateSec renegades in front of him got through to the planet of Torch.

If he's feeling a little . . . antsy, it sure as hell shouldn't be surprising, she thought.

"Well," she said out loud, "maybe it is your biggest game so far, Boss. But your record in the minors strikes me as pretty damned good. I think you're ready for the majors."

"Why," he smiled at her, "so do I. Which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to make me totally immune to butterflies, after all."

"Message from Admiral Rozsak, Ma'am," Lieutenant Rensi reported. "Hammer Force will be reducing acceleration in"—the communications officer glanced at the time display—"four and a half minutes."

"Thank you, Cornelia," Laura Raycraft said, and glanced at Lieutenant Commander Dobbs. "Do you think they'll decide to surrender after all when they find out about the Mark-17-Es?" she asked quietly.

"I don't know, Ma'am," Dobbs replied. "But if it was me, I'd sure as hell fall all over myself surrendering!" He shook his head. "Of course, if it was me, I'd've broken off and headed for home the minute the Admiral came out of hyper. This is a busted op if I've ever seen one. Even if they manage to take out the planet, somebody's going to be left to pass on their ship IDs to the Navy and everybody else out this way."

"The same thought occurred to me," Raycraft agreed. "And if I were them, I'd be damned worried about multidrive missiles. I know we've identified ourselves as Solarian, but they have to have figured out that these are Erewhon-built ships, and in their shoes, I'd be figuring that meant those two 'freighters' behind the Admiral were probably stuffed with MDMs. Of course, we are talking about StateSec types, and nobody with the brains to pour piss out of a boot would still be dreaming about 'restoring the Revolution' in Nouveau Paris. Anybody who's that far out of touch with reality obviously isn't very good at threat analysis to begin with."

"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.