War Of Honor

At least they were better than yesterday's, he reminded himself wryly. And, after all, that's what exercises are intended to do—find the problems so you can make things better.

He would have preferred to be leading the attack in person, for several reasons. One of the things he most treasured about his assignment as the task force's senior COLAC was that despite his lofty position in its command hierarchy, he still got to go out in space with his perso

Besides, there wasn't much of an option about it. Even with grav-pulse FTL communications, LACs operated much too far away from their motherships to be controlled from there. As Jackie Harmon had established with the very first LAC group, any COLAC's proper place was out with his attack birds and their crews.

But at the moment, Commander Baker, HMS Cockatrice's COLAC, was subbing for him. After Werewolf herself, Cockatrice, Admiral Truman's flagship, was the next senior of the task force's CLACs, which meant that if anything happened to Tremaine, it would be up to Baker to take over. From what Tremaine had seen of him so far, the tall, black-haired commander had all the required skills and ability, but he was short on experience. He also still tended to think a bit too much like the destroyer skipper he'd been slated to become before he found himself transferred into the expanding LAC community. He was developing the proper "LAC jock" attitude, but he still had a few rough edges and he needed a bit more confidence.

Which was the reason he was the one ru

Unlike the morning's two previous sessions, this was an all up exercise, with live hardware, not simply a simulation. The task force was currently transiting between two grav waves under impeller drive, which meant that ships without Warshawski sails—like LACs—could maneuver without being destroyed the instant they left their hanger bays. It also put a maximum limit on the time window for the exercise, since the hyper-capable ships would be entering the next grav wave in a tiny bit over three hours from now.

Now, as Tremaine watched, the battlecruiser squadron Admiral McKeon had detached from his screen to play the aggressor's role altered course to head directly towards the LACs which were obviously deploying to attack them. At the same time, the clear, clean icons which had represented them on PriFly's master plot disappeared into a mushy haze of jamming and decoys.

"Bet Commander Baker didn't much like that, Skipper," Harkness observed with a nasty grin, and Tremaine chuckled.

"I did warn him we'd arranged a few surprises," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but I bet he never figured you'd let Admiral Atwater's squadron turn Ghost Rider loose on him!"

"It's not my fault he wasn't around when Dame Alice did the same thing to us," Tremaine shot back. "And just because the Peeps don't have anything to match Ghost Rider doesn't mean the Andies haven't come up with something a lot closer to it than we'd like."

"No argument there, Skip," Harkness agreed in a much more serious tone. Although he was only a chief warrant officer, he was holding down a lieutenant commander's duty slot himself, as Werewolf's senior LAC flight engineer. That made him effectively the chief electronics technician and ordnance officer for the entire task force's carrier force. As such he had clearance for access to all of the official ONI briefings on the situation in Silesia, and to say he'd been less than impressed by their thoroughness would have been a masterpiece of understatement.

"Matter of fact," he went on after a moment, watching Baker's carefully orchestrated maneuver disintegrate into apparent mass confusion as he and his tac officers tried to compensate for the sudden loss of at least eighty-five percent of their sensor capabilities, "I picked up on something yesterday that I meant to mention to you, Sir."

"Like what?" Tremaine asked, never taking his eyes from the display's icons. The seeming confusion was settling down into a revised attack pattern with a speed and precision which surprised him pleasantly. It was obvious that the sudden increase in his targets' electronic warfare capabilities had come as a complete surprise to Baker, exactly as Tremaine had intended, but the commander hadn't panicked. He'd realized he still had time before he entered the battlecruisers' engagement envelope, and he was adopting a rather more defensive formation, with the missile-armed Ferrets moving up to screen the energy-heavy Shrikes with their own decoys and jammers. Obviously he'd reached the same conclusion Tremaine would have in his place; against such capable EW, he was going to have to get in close with the Shrikes' grasers rather than relying on a missile engagement, and the Ferrets' electronic warfare birds were his best chance to do that.

"I was reading through those reports Grayson Naval Intelligence copied to us," Harkness said, his own eyes watching approvingly as Baker adapted to the new parameters of his problem. "I know everyone knows the Graysons don't know squat compared to our own all-knowing intelligence pukes. But I gotta tell you, Skip, I didn't like what the GSN had to say about Andy 'tronics systems."

"What?" Tremaine turned to look at the CWO in surprise . . . and chagrin. "I must have missed that one, Chief."

"Well, there's a lot to wade through," Harkness told him. "And I have to admit the indexing system they used seems kinda skewed. This one was tucked away under an engineering head, not tactics, which is probably why I noticed it and you didn't."

"Thanks, but stop making excuses for me and tell me what it said," Tremaine commanded with a lopsided grin, and Harkness shrugged.

"Like everything else, it's all a matter of interpreting a mighty slim data sample, Skip. But the Graysons managed to 'acquire' access to a confidential report from the Confed Navy. Looks to me like they probably crossed a couple of palms with good old-fashioned dollars.

"Anyway, however they got it, it's a report from one of the Sillies' cruiser captains. Seems he happened along just as a 'privateer' the entire Confed Navy had been trying to catch up with for over six months sailed straight into an Andy ambush. This particular Confed skipper seems to me to've been a couple of cuts above the average for a Silly officer. He'd already IDed the pirate, and he was busy sneaking up on it, using his own stealth systems, when a pair of Andy destroyers and a heavy cruiser just 'suddenly appeared' and blew the raider into dust bu

"'Suddenly appeared'?" Tremaine repeated, and Harkness nodded.

"His exact words, Skip. Now, I know the Sillies' sensors aren't worth a hell of a lot, and I know their sensor techs aren't usually up to our standards, or even the Peeps'. But from his report, this bird runs a mighty taut ship for a Silesian, and he was real careful to emphasize that none of his people got so much as a sniff of the Andies until all three dropped their stealth and opened fire."

"What was the range?" Tremaine asked intently.

"That's what bothered me the most," Harkness admitted. "It looked to the guy writing the report like the pirates never saw the Andies at all, but those bastards tend to be even slacker than most Confed navy crews, so that don't necessarily prove a thing. But the Silly cruiser was only about four light-minutes from the nearest Andy ship when she opened fire, and she hadn't seen a damned thing, either."