The questioning had actually been quite mild. Marian kept her eyes lowered and answered in a monotone, hoping and praying that they weren’t using sensors to monitor her vital signs. But they didn’t grab her and throw her into a cell. Instead, they told her she could leave the complex and take two days break. She couldn’t tell if it was intended as a reward for putting up with their confinement or if her superiors wanted to bring in others to sweep the offices.
Back home, she discovered her children. They’d been brought in, somehow, and left tied up on their beds. Marian pulled them into her arms and started to cry. They hugged her back, awkwardly, as soon as she untied them.
“They didn’t touch us,” Gayle assured her. “They just told us that you would have to pay.”
“I did,” Marian admitted. “I paid for your safe return.”
And then she started to cry again.
Chapter Thirteen
“Enemy fleet approaching, sir,” Penny said, as the exercise began. “I read fifty-two superdreadnaughts, nine arsenal ships and seventy-nine smaller ships.”
“Good,” Wachter said. “Let’s see how this goes.”
Penny flinched at his tone, even though his anger wasn’t directed at her. The first two exercises they’d carried out had been absolute disasters, mitigated only by the awareness that they’d identified a pair of incompetent officers who had thoroughly deserved being removed from command. A third officer had been shot for disobeying orders in the face of the enemy, which Wachter had sardonically pointed out would have been forgiven if his disobedience had actually led to a victory. Instead, it had cost a dozen superdreadnaughts.
Or it would have, if it had been real, Penny thought. The rebels could have knocked Morrison over with a squadron of battlecruisers and bad intentions.
She leaned back in her chair, watching as the Morrison Fleet settled down into the compact formation they’d devised for coping with mass missile swarms. There should have been four hundred starships in the formation, but seventy-two of them were still being repaired after competent crews had been assigned to man them. Several starships had been pronounced so wasted that they’d had to be cannibalised, then shipped to the breakers. It was chilling to realise that a few more years would have seen the entire squadron waste away.
“Enemy fleet is locking weapons on us,” the tactical officer reported. “I can’t break the locks.”
Penny smiled. She had no idea how many improvements the Geeks could or would make to rebel sensor systems, but she’d ramped up the simulation enemy’s capabilities as much as possible. It would be impossible to hide from them without using a cloaking device — and that would pose its own problems when so many starships were in close proximity.
“Hold formation,” Wachter ordered. “Let them come to us.”
The first time they’d held the exercise, the incompetent commanders had panicked and ordered their squadrons to scatter. It hadn’t surprised Penny when the simulated rebels had obliterated them — or when the commanders had claimed, afterwards, that the exercise had been a fraud. After all, they hadn’t known the outcome in advance. Wachter had countermanded the orders quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent the rebels from defeating them.
“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Missile range in seven minutes.”
Penny sucked in her breath. It wasn’t easy to bring an enemy fleet to battle, not when the flicker drive allowed the enemy to disengage and vanish if the battle seemed to be turning against him. The only way to force an enemy to fight was to target somewhere they had to defend, ensuring that the enemy had no choice but to stand and fight. She’d seen that proven often enough as the rebels had danced around Admiral Percival, eventually bringing the full weight of their fleet to bear against Camelot. And then the rebels themselves had had to defend Camelot against attack.
She watched, dispassionately, as the two fleets converged. The enemy commander would probably hold fire until they reached a closer range… unless, of course, the simulation had thought of something new. It wasn’t really innovative — true AI was banned, after the first few attempts at producing it had ended badly — but it was quite capable of surprising people.
“Missile separation,” the tactical officer snapped. Once again, Penny watched as an impossible wave of missiles roared towards her formation. “I read…”
He broke off. “I read over thirty thousand missiles, sir,” he said. “I…”
“Return fire,” Wachter ordered, calmly. “And then reformat the formation for efficient point defence.”
The massive superdreadnaught rocked as it unleashed its first barrage, emptying the external racks and then launching missiles from the internal tubes. It looked puny compared to the sheer throw weight of the arsenal ships, although Penny knew that they had fewer targets. Once they had shot their bolt, the arsenal ships were useless until they could reload. She wasn’t surprised to see them flicker out as soon as their drives recycled.
“All point defence systems online,” the tactical officer said. “Missiles will enter engagement envelope in ninety seconds…”
Penny watched as the timer ticked down to zero. Wachter had redesigned the formation entirely, placing three-quarters of his smaller craft in position to shield the superdreadnaughts. He’d even added gunboats to the formation, although Penny knew that the gunboats would be lucky to get one or two shots off before the missiles roared past them. The ECM might offer more attractive targets to the missiles, she hoped. A missile that wasted itself on an ECM drone pretending to be a superdreadnaught was one that wouldn’t hammer against a real superdreadnaught.
The display seemed to flare with light as the point defence opened fire. Missiles had no shields, nothing to protect them from a direct hit apart from speed and sheer weight of numbers. But the rebels had fired so many that even wiping out two-thirds of them wouldn’t save the Morrison Fleet from taking heavy damage. Penny gritted her teeth as several superdreadnaughts were overwhelmed and destroyed in quick succession, their crews too inexperienced to evade the missiles or simply flicker out when their shields started to collapse. Other ships ran up damage rapidly, including a pair of superdreadnaughts that fell out of formation and lagged behind. Their drives had been badly damaged. One of them would be lucky to make it back to the repair yard under her own power.
“Enemy fleet has taken damage, sir,” the tactical officer said.
Wachter sighed. “Underling’s descriptive inability syndrome again?”
Penny smiled, even though the tactical officer was flushing bright right. It was a long-standing joke that underlings only gave vague reports, a joke that lost its humour when she’d realised that giving an accurate report might result in being shot for bringing bad news. She glanced down at her display and smiled to herself. Four enemy superdreadnaughts had been destroyed, two more had been badly damaged. Several smaller ships had vanished without trace.
But the rebels were still steering towards the Morrison Fleet. Either they were confident of winning a missile duel or they had something else up their sleeves.
“Hold the range open,” Wachter ordered. There was no point in closing to energy range when the Morrison Fleet held the missile advantage. Now the arsenal ships had shot their load, the rebels had fewer launchers and no external racks. “Continue firing.”
There were Admirals, Penny knew, who would have seen their manoeuvre as a retreat. The rebels were trying to push closer to them, after all, which forced the fleet to fall back against Morrison. But it was working. The rebels were inflicting damage, yes, but they were taking damage too. By the time Wachter could no longer fall back, they would be ground down to dust.