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Abigail couldn't tell exactly how many of her attack birds actually survived long enough to detonate, but it was obviously enough.
Beta One simply disappeared. Beta Two staggered, the impeller wedge which had just come up and stabilized fluctuating madly as x-ray lasers slammed into—and through—her sidewalls and armor. Then her forward impeller room went down completely, and she turned away, leaking atmosphere and water vapor in clear proof of massive penetrations of her core hull. Her active sensor emissions vanished almost completely in equally clear proof that her missile defenses and fire control had been hammered into wreckage.
Beta Three didn't seem to have been hammered quite as badly as Beta Two. Not at first. But then, ten seconds after Beta One, she suddenly broke in half. There was no stupendous explosion, no sudden, insane spike in her impeller wedge to explain it. She simply . . . broke up.
It was only a simulation, but even so, Abigail felt an icy chill blowing up and down her spine as she tried to picture the structural failure which could have produced that result. But then she shook herself. The Alpha bandits were still out there. They probably had no idea—yet—what had happened to the Beta bandits, given their limitation to light-speed transmissions from any recon platforms they might have deployed. But they were going to find out shortly.
Five minutes had elapsed since she gave the order to fire. Only five minutes, in which two battlecruisers had been totally destroyed and a third had been hulked. And during which the range to the Alpha bandits had fallen to 51,474,268 kilometers . . . which just happened to be 21,000 kilometers inside the range of a Mark 16 dual-drive missile against a target closing at 61,000 km per second. It would take the bandits another nine minutes to reach their own range of the convoy, however, and the Mark 16's new Mod G laser heads were going to make that just a bit difficult for them, she thought with a sharklike smile.
"Fire Plan Tango-Seven," she said.
"So, how do you really like her, Naomi?"
Aivars Terekhov gri
The di
Which, Kaplan reflected, said quite a bit about how the Royal Navy regarded one Aivars Terekhov.
She also remembered the reserved, withdrawn captain who had joined HMS Hexapuma's company on effectively zero notice. There was still a lot of that captain in the commodore sitting across his dining cabin table from her, but now the humor and the warmth behind those arctic blue eyes found it far more difficult to hide from her. And this, she reminded herself, was a purely social occasion. He'd invited her to di
"Should I assume, Sir," she responded to his question primly, "that the 'her' in question refers to Tristram?"
"Yes, you should," Terekhov agreed. "I mean, I know any destroyer has to be seen as something of a step down from a heavy cruiser. And I certainly wouldn't care to suggest that a modicum of disappointment on receiving such a lowly command might not be understandable. Still, as destroyers go, she doesn't seem that bad. Of course, I understand from Commodore Chatterjee that she only came in second in the tactical competition. But I'm sure that if an officer of your caliber really buckles down and applies herself, most of those nagging little problems will speedily disappear."
He regarded her so earnestly across the table that she felt a very strong temptation, despite the difference in their ranks, to kick him smartly in the kneecap. Instead, she leaned back in her own chair, nursing her wineglass, and pursed her lips thoughtfully.
"I'm deeply touched by your concern for me, Sir," she told him. "And, I suppose I ought to admit, it was something of a wrench to leave the Kitty—although, to be honest, I don't actually remember doing that. Something to do with being unconscious at the time, I imagine. Still, when they offered me Tristram, I recognized the sort of challenge where my experience in rectifying more senior officers' errors could stand me in good stead. I feel we've made considerable progress, although we clearly still have some way to go to achieve the level of proficiency I'd truly like. Still, I'm confident we'll get there in the end. After all, I know exactly what not to do when bringing along a new ship's company."
She smiled sweetly at him, and he laughed.
"Touché!" He raised his own glass in salute and took a sip. Then his expression sobered a bit as he lowered the glass again.
"Seriously," he said, "is she as much fun as you expected her to be?"
"In some ways, yes," she replied, equally seriously. "In other ways, all joking aside, it's been even harder than I expected to knock off all the rough edges. I knew we were sailing with a green ship's company, but I don't think I'd let myself freely admit just how green some of them really were. And even though she doesn't have that big a crew, she's one hell of a first hyper-capable command, Sir!" She shook her head. "I hope I don't screw it up."
"If anybody at Admiralty House thought that was likely to happen, you wouldn't have her," Terekhov pointed out. "And as someone who's had the opportunity to watch you in action, I don't think it's likely to happen, either. Nobody can ever know what kind of circumstances may come along and bite someone on the ass—what happened to us on our last deployment is proof enough of that! But barring some sort of major disaster of someone else's making, I don't expect you to put any blots in your copy book, Commander."
"Thank you," she said quietly.
"No need to thank me for telling the truth," he said wryly. "And if you want to talk about the possibility of screwing up, don't forget who they decided to give a brand-new squadron to, either!" It was his turn to shake his head. "It's one thing to hijack a squadron nobody decided to give you in the first place. I've discovered that it's quite another to worry about disappointing people who wanted you to have it. And I suppose, if I'm going to be honest, that one reason I was teasing you about Tristram is how much I've discovered I miss the white beret."