by David Weber
The two of them had spent more additional hours than Abigail cared to recall working out under Senior Chief Madison's critical eye. Shobhana insisted it had been a fair exchange, that she'd gained at least as much in terms of proficiency and skill as she'd been able to give Abigail in terms of attitude, but Abigail disagreed. Her training scores had gone up dramatically, and she still treasured the memory of the first time she'd taken down a male classmate in just three moves in front of her entire class.
But even now, the ghost of her initial self-doubt lingered. She'd overcome her hesitance to tackle friendly opponents in a training environment, but would she be able to do the same thing in real-world conditions if she had to? And if she couldn't—if she hesitated when it was for real, when others depended upon her—what business did she have in the uniform of the Sword?
Fortunately, Lieutenant Stevenson was unaware of her self-doubt. He'd approached her as a sparring partner on the basis of her raw scores from Senior Chief Madison, and she'd accepted with every outward sign of enthusiasm. That accursed hesitancy had reared its ugly head once more, and he'd twitted her gently about it for the first couple of sparring sessions. But she was getting on top of it again, and this time she intended to stay there.
"I especially liked that variant on the Falling Hammer," he told her now, rubbing the back of his protective helmet. "Unfortunately, I don't think I'm limber enough to twist through it that way. Certainly not straight out of a sitting leg sweep like that!"
"It's not that hard, Sir," she assured him with a smile. "Senior Chief Madison showed me that one one afternoon when I started getting a little uppity. The trick is getting the right shoulder back and up simultaneously."
"Show me," Stevenson requested. "But this time, let's take it slow enough that we don't rattle my brain around inside my skull!"
"So how did Ms. Hearns' sparring session go this afternoon?" Lieutenant Commander Abbott asked.
"Looked like it went pretty well, actually, Sir," Senior Chief Posner replied with a slight chuckle. "Of course, coup de vitesse isn't really my cup of tea, y'know, Commander. But it looked to me like the Lieutenant thought he was going to take her down fast, only it didn't quite work out that way."
"I take it she's gotten over that shyness of hers, then?"
"I don't know if 'shyness' was ever really the right word for it, Sir. But whatever it was, yeah, she seems to be over it. In spades, actually! Seems like asking Lieutenant Stevenson to work with her was one of your better ideas."
"Her training file suggested that could be an ongoing problem area," Abbott said with a shrug. "It seemed like a good idea to get her back up on the horse with someone outside her Academy classes, and the Lieutenant is pretty sensitive and flexible . . . for a Marine."
"Well, Sir, I think he's gotten her out of whatever her shell was," the petty officer agreed with another chuckle. Then he grimaced slightly. "But now that we're more or less on top of that one, have you had any more thoughts about our Mr. Grigovakis?"
It was Abbott's turn to grimace. A good OCTO aboard any warship was half teacher, half taskmaster, half mentor, and half disciplinarian for the midshipmen committed to his care. Which came to quite a few halves. He doubted that any midshipman ever really appreciated the fact that an officer candidate training officer who did his job properly wound up running almost as hard and as fast as his snotties did. Which was one reason a smart OCTO depended heavily on his senior noncommissioned assistant when it came to managing his charges.
"I wish I knew," the lieutenant commander admitted after a moment.
"If I had my druthers," Posner said a bit sourly, "I'd arrange for him to spar with Ms. Hearns, Sir. I realize he's a pain in the ass to everyone, but he seems to have a special problem with Graysons. And nasty as he's been to her when he thinks no one's looking, she might just take the opportunity to trim him down to size. Painfully."
"Don't tempt me, Senior Chief!" Abbott chuckled. "It would be sort of fun, though, wouldn't it?" he went on wistfully after a moment. "I'll bet we could sell tickets."
"Sir, I don't believe you could get anyone to bet against you on that one."
"Probably not," Abbott conceded. "But we do have to figure out some way to show him the error of his ways."
"Could always call him in for a counseling session, Sir," Posner pointed out.
"I could. And I guess if it keeps up, I may have to. But I'd really rather find a way for him to figure it out for himself. I can always hammer him for it, but if he only acts like a human being because someone orders him to, it's not going to stick." Abbott shook his head.
"Sir, I agree that it's better to show a snotty the error of his ways than to just lecture him about it. But with all due respect, Mr. Grigovakis has the makings of a genuine pain in the ass as an ensign if someone doesn't straighten him out pretty quick."
"I know. I know." Abbott sighed. "But at least it looks like he's the only problem child we still have. And however . . . unpleasant a personality he may have, at least he's got the makings of a competent pain-in-the-ass ensign."
"If you say so, Sir," Posner said, with that edge of respectful doubt which was the privilege of the Navy's senior noncoms.
Abbott gazed at him out of the corner of one eye and wondered what the senior chief's opinion of Gauntlet's commanding officer might be. It was a question the lieutenant commander could never ask, of course, much as he might like to. And to be fair, which Abbott sometimes found it difficult to be in Captain Oversteegen's case, the CO didn't seem to take malicious enjoyment in deliberately planting barbed comments under the skins of others the way Grigovakis did. And he never used his rank to snipe at someone junior who couldn't respond in kind, either, the way Grigovakis did with the ratings of Gauntlet's crew when he thought no one was looking. Oversteegen could be equally infuriating, in Abbott's opinion, but he didn't appear to do it on purpose. In fact, if it just hadn't been for that incredibly irritating accent of his—and the way family patronage had obviously enhanced his career—even Abbott wouldn't have had any real problems with the captain.
Probably.
"Well, keep thinking about it," he told Posner after a moment. "If you can come up with something, let me know. In the meantime, we've got some non-snotty business to take care of."
He turned back to his desk terminal and punched up a document.
"Commander Blumenthal says the Captain wants a live-fire exercise for the broadside energy mounts this afternoon," he continued. Posner's eyes brightened, and the ATO smiled. "In fact, the commander says the Captain has signed off on expending a few decoy drones as live targets."
"Well, hot damn," Posner said. "Full-power shots, Sir?"
"Eventually," Abbott told him. "We want to get as much use out of them as we can before we expend them, though. So we'll go with the mount laser designators for the first couple of passes. We'll score hits regularly for evaluation on the lasers. But then," he continued with a grin, "we'll toss out the decoys on an evasion pattern and give each mount a single full-power shot under local control. Sort of a pass-fail exam, you might say."
He looked up from the outline of the exercise plan, and he and Posner smiled broadly at one another.
* * *
The graser mount compartment was crowded. It always was at action stations, even without the need to pack an extra body into the available space.
At least the designers had made some provision for the necessity, however, which meant that Abigail had a place to sit. It wasn't much of one, squeezed in between the mount captain's station and the tracking rating's. In fact, she just barely fitted into it, and she suspected that it had been designed specifically as a convenient niche for midshipwomen, since she doubted anyone much larger than that could have been crammed into the available space.
The good news was that Chief Vassari, Graser Thirty-Eight's mount captain, was a good sort. He didn't have that air of exaggerated patience some long-service noncoms seemed to assume naturally around any mere snotty. Ab
out the only positive thing Abigail could say about that particular attitude was that at least it beat the deliberate testing some enlisted and noncommissioned personnel indulged in. She was willing to admit that testing had its place—after all, she thought with a small, secret smile, she was a Grayson—but that didn't mean it was an enjoyable experience.
Chief Vassari fell into neither category. He was simply an all-around competent person who appeared to assume that someone could do her job until she proved differently. Which naturally made it even more important than usual to prove that she could.
Some of Abigail's classmates had always hated weapons drill, at least on the energy mounts. She understood intellectually that some people had an emotional objection to being sealed into a tiny, armored compartment while its atmosphere—and the atmosphere of its surrounding spaces—was evacuated. On an emotional level, though, she'd always thought that was a silly attitude. After all, a starship was nothing but a hollow space filled with air surrounded by an effective infinity of nothingness. If you were going to have trouble with spending time suited up in vacuum, then you should have made another career choice. On the other hand, she supposed it could be a simple case of claustrophobia. There really wasn't very much space in here, and it wasn't unusual for a weapons crew to spend hours at a time strapped into place, living on their suit umbilicals. All so that there would be a live, human presence on the mount if combat damage should suddenly cut it off from Tactical's central computers.
Of course, today's exercise assumed that every single energy mount in the starboard broadside had been thrown back into local control. Abigail couldn't imagine what sort of damage could have cut all of the broadside's weapons off from central control without destroying the ship outright, but that was hardly the point. The object was to train each individual crew for the unlikely day on which it might be the single lucky mount that was cut off.
Unfortunately, Graser Thirty-Eight was the last energy weapon in the starboard broadside, which meant that Abigail, Chief Vassari, and their people had been sitting here for what seemed like forever with nothing to do but watch other people miss the target.
"Stand by, Thirty-Six," Commander Blumenthal said over the com.
"Thirty-Six standing by," a cultured voice responded, and Abigail grimaced. Commander Blumenthal and Lieutenant Commander Abbott had decided to add an additional wrinkle to this afternoon's exercise and announced that each of Gauntlet's four middies would be acting as the captain of the energy mount to which he or she was assigned. The announcement had not been greeted with universal joy by the crews of the weapons concerned. There was always fierce competition between crews during these exercises, both for bragging rights and because of the special privileges which were normally awarded to the winning mount. Having a mere snotty sitting in the command seat was not considered the best way to enhance one's chances of emerging victorious. Not that anyone would have guessed from Arpad Grigovakis' tone that he had any doubts at all about the outcome. Or that he'd been sitting there waiting almost as long as Abigail had, for that matter.
"Beginning run," Commander Blumenthal announced, and Abigail stared down into the minute plot provided between her and Chief Vassari's stations.
Although all control stations were manned, the grasers themselves weren't fully on line . . . yet. Instead, the crews would be "firing" the laser designators to which their weapons were normally slaved. Unlike the grasers themselves, the designators lacked the power to actually damage the sophisticated drones being used as targets, which would allow each target to be used several times. But the drones would sense and report the amount of energy each laser put on target—assuming it was lucky enough to score a hit at all—to establish the performance of each crew.
Unlike the master plot in CIC or the main fire control plot on the command deck, the tiny on-mount displays were not driven from the main sensor arrays. Instead, they relied upon their mounts' lidar, which had a much narrower field of view. Neither their software nor their imagers were as good as those available to CIC or Commander Blumenthal, either. But that was sort of the point, Abigail reminded herself, watching intently as the corkscrewing, rolling drone swept down Gauntlet's starboard side.
The erratic base course was bad enough, but the drone's rotation on its axis made things even worse. She watched a sidebar readout as the drone flashed by at a range of fifty thousand kilometers, and her lips pursed in unwilling sympathy for Grigovakis. His crew seemed to be managing to track the bobbing, weaving drone surprisingly well, but its spinning motion turned its impeller wedge into a flashing shield. The drone wasn't rotating at a constant speed, either, she noted. At a mere fifty thousand klicks, there wasn't a whole lot of time to analyze its erratic rotation, and Graser Thirty-Six's energy-on-target numbers were abysmally low. Under three percent, in fact.
"Doesn't look so good, does it, Ma'am?" Chief Vassari muttered to her over their dedicated private com link.
"It's the rotation," she replied quietly. "The spin is blocking the laser. It's catching them between pulses."
"Yes, Ma'am," Vassari agreed, and Abigail frowned.
Like any shipboard energy weapon, Gauntlet's grasers fired in burstlike pulses, and the laser designators were synchronized to simulate the grasers' normal pulse rate for the exercise. That pulse rate was high enough that a ship-sized opponent couldn't have rotated its wedge in and out of position rapidly enough to avoid significant damage. In the time it took an impeller wedge over a hundred kilometers across to rotate, each graser would have gotten off sufficient pulses to guarantee at least one or two hits, assuming that its targeting solution was accurate.
But the drone's wedge was less than two kilometers across, and at least ninety percent of Graser Thirty-Six's pulses were being shrugged aside by the spinning wedge. The same thing had happened to the other grasers which had engaged the drone, but Thirty-Six's energy-on-target totals were pretty pathetic even compared to the other mounts. Both Karl and Shobhana had done better, although neither of them was exactly in the running for the victor's trophy.
"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 running on a canned routine rather than generating random evasion maneuvers. If it is, then there's probably a repeat point where it resets. Look for that. And if we've got the capacity, let's run each individual pass for pattern analysis and see if we can't load an automatic recognition trigger into the firing sequence."
"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 canned routine, but we'd really need at least half a dozen more passes to isolate the point at which the routine resets to zero. On the other hand, we've got hard analyses on at least twenty separate runs. If it repeats one of those, and if we've got good enough sensor lock to spot it, we should be in business."
"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.
"Beginning run," Blumenthal told her, and Abigail held her breath as the drone came slashing back down Gauntlet's side yet again.
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.
