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The convoy consisted of merchantships with a maximum acceleration less than half that of the attackers. There was no way a fat, wallowing herd of merchies could possibly evade them at this point. So they could have killed their drives long ago and come in ballistic without the betraying grav signature of their impeller wedges. Which, under these conditions, would probably have allowed them to get all the way into their own powered missile range before they were ever seen. For that matter, against someone without the Ghost Rider platforms—and without the platforms deployed even in hyper, she allowed herself to reflect with a certain complacency—they could very well have gotten into energy range before anyone saw them coming.
So why hadn't they'd done that?
Because they want me concentrating on these people, she thought. They showed themselves to me on purpose, when they didn't have to. Which means that sometime in the next five or six minutes . . .
"Priority active and passive sensor sweep," she said sharply. "I want Galahad'sand Lancelot'salpha and beta platforms sweeping astern. Have Roland sweep directly ahead of the convoy. Ivanhoe is to continue to hold the known contacts on her platforms. And I want ours to sweep this volume, right here."
She dropped a cursor into the master plot, using it to sketch an arc directly on the opposite side of the convoy from the known contacts.
Acknowledgments came back quickly. There were still rough spots in Tristram's tactical crews, and they'd only come in second in the squadron's "top gun" competition. It had been a very close second, however, and they'd actually been edged out of first primarily because HMS Gawain had managed (somehow) to squirm around and block what should have been the fatal shot fromTristram's broadside lasers with her wedge. That particular turn of events had scarcely been the tactical department's fault, and everyone in it knew that. In fact, in some ways, Abigail's people seemed to take a sort of perverse pride in being robbed of what they considered to have been their rightful victory by the intervention of the Demon Murphy. And the exercise had pulled them together as a group. They'd really buckled down since, and their rough spots were nowhere near as rough as they had been.
"New contacts!" Pettigrew a
My, aren't we clever? Abigail thought, so intent on watching the three new scarlet icons blink into existence on the plot that she didn't even notice the looks she got from one or two of the simulator's occupants as they spotted the enemy exactly where Lieutenant Hearns had obviously expected to spot him. The five we already knew about to keep us looking in that direction while these three come whooping in on almost an exactly reverse heading to pincer us. If we see the first five and turn away from them, we run directly into the others. And if we don't see them, if we concentrate on the ones we know about, then these people sneak in close and put daggers in our backs just about the time their buddies are starting to get into range.
"Designate the new contacts the Beta group," she heard her own voice saying. "Prepare to flush the pods. Attack pattern Papa-Three and set for forty-six thousand gravities. We'll put all of them on the Beta targets and take the Alphas with internal tubes!"
"Aye, aye, Ma'am! Setting pods for Papa-Three on the Beta targets; drive setting four-six thousand gravities."
Abigail itched to enter the firing commands herself. If this had been a real combat situation, rather than a simulation, that was exactly what she would have been doing. But it was a simulation, and its purpose was not to have her doing things she knew perfectly well she could handle at need. It was to train the rest of her team to do those things . . . and her to rely upon them to do it.
"Beta targets designated and locked in, Ma'am," Lieutenant Molyneux reported barely twenty seconds later. "Missile drives set for four-six-thousand gravities acceleration."
"All units report pod separation and on-board fusion initiation," MT 1/c Kaneshiro a
"Target acquisition!" Molyneux reported as the computers aboard the "flat pack" missile pods which had just fallen away from the destroyers' hulls and cleared their impeller wedges, turned on their on-board thrusters to align themselves with their designated targets.
"Launch!"
"Launching, aye!"
None of the destroyers had been carrying the maximum possible external load of pods. They couldn't without begi
Seven hundred and fifty capital missiles went shrieking away from the convoy, straight into the teeth of only three targets. Three targets which had continued closing at the next best thing to sixty thousand kilometers per second for just under thirty-two seconds since they'd been detected . . . and whose impeller wedges were still just starting to come up when the missiles launched. It took those missiles two hundred and sixty-one seconds to reach their destinations, and two hundred and fifty of them went slashing in on each of the battlecruisers.
The Solarian ships had clearly been prepared for the possibility that they might be detected on the way in. Their missile defense crews had obviously been waiting at maximum readiness, because their counter-missiles began launching almost instantly, and they were firing a lot of them. But Abigail had anticipated that anyone smart enough to set up something like this and actually pull it off wouldn't exactly be just sitting there with her hands in her lap. That was why she'd committed all of her pods to this attack. It was almost certainly going to be a case of overkill, but she wanted nothing threatening her back while she dealt with the more numerous but individually weaker Alpha bandits, and that meant putting the Beta targets out of action as quickly—and thoroughly—as possible.
The other side's counter-missiles were actually more effective than she'd expected, and she wondered if BuWeaps had updated their projected effectiveness on the basis of the captured Solly hardware the Navy had been able to examine after the Battle of Monica. They were certainly more effective than the Monicans' counter-missile fire had been then! On the other hand, those were supposed to be Solarian crews behind those launchers this time around, too, which could also explain why BuWeaps might have increased their kill probabilities.
She watched narrowly as the counter-missiles picked off almost three hundred of the attack birds. Manticoran defenses would have done considerably better than that, but, then, Manticoran defenses had been designed to survive against the volume of fire produced by pod-launched missiles, and the Sollies' defenses . . . hadn't been.
Despite everything the Solarian counter-missiles could do, four hundred and fifty-plus Manticoran missiles got through to the i