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But the drone'swedge was less than two kilometers across, and at least ninety percent of Graser Thirty-Six's pulses were being shrugged aside by the spi
"Tell me, Chief," Abigail said thoughtfully, "do the on-mount computers keep track of all the firing runs?"
"They display all the EOT numbers, but they only log the totals for their own mounts to memory, Ma'am," Vassari replied. He turned his head, gazing at her narrowly through his helmet visor. "Why?"
"I wasn't thinking about performance numbers, Chief," Abigail told him. "I meant, do the computers plot target motion each time the drone makes a run?"
"Well, yes, Ma'am. They do," Vassari said, then smiled slowly. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking, Ma'am?" he asked.
"Probably," she admitted with an impish grin. "But is our software up to the analysis?"
"I think so," Vassari said, in the tone of a man who would have liked to scratch his chin thoughtfully.
"Well, we'd better get it set up quickly," Abigail said, gesturing with her helmet at the plot. "They'll be starting Thirty-Six's second run any minute now."
"Yes, Ma'am. How do you want me to handle it?"
"I'm hoping that the drone's ru
"If the Midshipwoman will allow me, Ma'am," Vassari said with a huge grin, "I like the way her mind works."
"Tell me that if we manage to pull it off, Chief," Abigail replied, and he nodded and began punching commands into his console.
Abigail sat back and watched as the drone flashed through the second of Graser Thirty-Six's firing passes. This time Grigovakis' crew did considerably better . . . which still left them with very low numbers. Not that they were alone, and Abigail wondered who was actually responsible for the drone's axial rotation. No one had warned any of the crews that it might be coming, and that didn't strike her as a typical Commander Blumenthal idea. It sounded exactly like something Captain Oversteegen might have decided to throw into the equation, however, and her smile grew nastier at the thought of possibly overcoming one of the captain's little ploys.
The drone returned to its starting point for Graser Thirty-Six's third and final solo designator run, and she turned to glance at Chief Vassari.
"How's it coming, Chief?" she asked quietly.
"Pretty good . . . maybe, Ma'am," he replied. "We've got good plots on about half the previous runs. Looks like we never got a tight enough lock with our on-mount sensors on the other half, so we don't have a complete data set. The computers agree that it's repeating a ca
"I guess that's just going to have to be good enough, Chief," she said, watching the numbers for Grigovakis' crew's final firing pass come up on her display. They were the best of the three, but even so they weren't anything to get excited about. The best energy-on-target they'd been able to come up with was under fifteen percent of max possible. That would have been more than sufficient to destroy a target as small as the drone, assuming the graser itself had been firing, but it was still a pretty anemic performance.
"We're up next," she pointed out, and Vassari nodded.
"Stand by, Thirty-Eight," Blumenthal's voice said, almost as if the tac officer had been able to hear her, and she keyed her com.
"Thirty-Eight, standing by," she acknowledged formally.
"Begi
Graser Thirty-Eight's lidar reached out for the target. The drone was small and elusive, but they also knew exactly where to begin looking for it.
"Acquisition!" the tracking rating a
"Acknowledged," Abigail replied, and turned to look at Vassari. The chief was staring intently at his display, and when she glanced into her own, Abigail saw the red sighting circle projected across the drone's small bead of light. The targeting solution looked good, but although the energy mount was tracking smoothly, holding the drone centered in the cross-hairs, it wasn't firing.
Abigail felt the other five members of Graser Thirty-Eight's crew staring at her, but she kept her own eyes on the plot. It had seemed like a good idea when she and Vassari came up with it; now, she wasn't nearly as certain. The drone was almost a third of the way through its pass, and still the laser designator hadn't fired. If it didn't do something soon, they were going to come up with a score of zero, and none of the other mounts had managed to do quite that poorly. She hovered on the brink of ordering Vassari to open fire anyway, on the theory that at least something would have to get through, but she closed her lips firmly against the temptation. It either worked, or it didn't; she wasn't going to second-guess herself in mid-flight and risk losing any opportunity of success. Besides, even if she—
"Got it!" Chief Vassari barked suddenly, and the laser designator "opened fire" before the words were fully out of his mouth.
Abigail watched the plot's sidebar, and her face blossomed in a huge smile as the rest of her crew began to cheer and whistle. The computers had identified the repetition of one of the earlier fly-bys, and Vassari's fire plan had instructed them to synchronize the mount's pulse rate with the recognized spin rate of the target. It meant that they weren't pumping out the maximum possible amount of destructive energy, but what they were pumping out was precisely timed to catch the drone at the moment that it turned the open side of its wedge towards the ship. The energy-on-target total shot up like a homesick meteor, and Abigail wanted to cheer herself as the laser designator systematically hammered the drone.
"Sixty-two percent of max!" Vassari proclaimed exultantly as the drone completed its run. "Damn, but—!" He caught himself, and looked at Abigail with a sheepish expression. "Sorry about that, Ma'am," he said contritely.
"Chief," she said around a grin, "I'm from Grayson, not a convent. I've heard the word before."
"Well, in that case," he replied, "damn, but that was fun!"
"Damned straight it was," she agreed with a chuckle, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Now, if it just repeats the same maneuver sequence from where we got it indexed on this pass, we should really kick some butt on the next one."
"Not too shabby, Thirty-Eight," Commander Blumenthal observed over the com in a tone of studied understatement. "Of course, there are still two more runs to go. Stand by for second run, now."
"Thirty-Eight, standing by," Abigail responded, and the drone came slashing back at them again.
"I suppose we should all congratulate you," Arpad Grigovakis said.
The four snotties stood in the rear of the briefing room in which Commander Blumenthal and Captain Oversteegen had just completed their dissection of the afternoon's exercises. Commander Watson hadn't attended, since she'd had the bridge watch, but all of the department heads had been present. By now, most of the other officers had already dispersed to other tasks, but Oversteegen, Blumenthal, and Abbott were still engaged in a quiet-voiced discussion, and the middies hadn't yet been dismissed by their OCTO. Which left them in the seen-but-not-heard-mode with which all middies were intimately familiar, and Grigovakis had kept his voice down accordingly.