All in all, Smith considered the design concept an enormous improvement over what hed had to put up with in Leutzen. The LACs outmassed the assault shuttles hed worked with there by a factor of around thirty-five, yet the six-ship section he had responsibility for here was actually easier to stay on top of than the six-shuttle section hed been assigned aboard Leutzen. Of course, the thought of what might happen to the ships hull integrity if some ill-intentioned Peep managed to land a hit on one of these nice, large, efficient, and vulnerable LAC bays hardly bore thinking on, but that was an inescapable consequence of Minotaurs designed role.
"Okay, Sandford. Youre on," he said as he stepped from the work stands last rung to the deck of the access tube. "Get the replacement in and let me know when youre ready to test it. Check?"
The bow of the LAC reared above them, and despite its minuscule size compared to a ship like Minotaur, it dwarfed his entire work party. Which put the rest of the ship into a sobering perspective for people who normally saw it only from the inside.
"Aye, PO." The tech whod caught the warped drive shaft waved it in acknowledgment. "Should take us about another fifty minutes, I guess."
"Sounds reasonable," Smith agreed, arching his shoulders and massaging his aching back again. Getting the damaged component out had been a major pain, but putting the replacement back in should be relatively straightforward. "Ill be around on Thirty-Six if you need me," he went on. "Caermon has something she wants to discuss about the main radar array."
"Gotcha," Sandford agreed, and Smith nodded and headed off. He did have one other little stop to make, but it was on the way to Bay Thirty-Six where Caermon waited for him, and he grinned as he tapped the data chip in his pocket. He liked Lieutenant Commander Ashford a lot, he really did, but there was something undeniably delicious about receiving not simply official sanction but actual orders to put one over on an officer.
Helps keep them humble, it does, he reflected cheerfully. And humble officers are more likely to remember just who really runs the Queens Navy. On the other hand, protection from on high or not, I hope to hell he never figures out I was the one who did it to him!
He grinned again and paused as he reached the access tube to Ashfords bird. The LAC sat there all alone, awaiting the service crews who would minister to it in time for the afternoons exercises, and he nodded to himself. He wouldnt get a better chance, he thought, and sauntered down the tube with a guileless expression.
"And just what the hell did you think you were doing here, Ashford?" Captain Harmon inquired genially as she used an old-fashioned, nonilluminated pointer to gesture at the frozen holo display above the ready room tac table. Tiny LACs, no larger than the nail of her little finger, swarmed in it, color-coded by squadron, as they "attacked" a holo of Minotaur half again the length of her arm. Most of the thirty-six LACs had altered course in the second or so before she had frozen the display, turning so that their bows were pointed directly at Minotaur, but one section of six hadnt, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed captain turned to look at the lieutenant commander who commanded the errant vessels.
"Ah, well, actually, Maam" Ashford began, then exhaled. "Actually," he admitted in an almost but not quite resigned voice, "I was screwing up by the numbers."
"A concise if not particularly helpful analysis," Harmon agreed, but without the biting edge the lieutenant commander had dreaded. His honesty had bought him that muchit was the ones who tried to weasel or excuse their mistakes (or, worse, shuffle responsibility off on someone else) who quickly learned to fear the sharpness of her tongue. Nor did she stop there. Two squadron commanders had already been sent packing, one of them with an efficiency report so scathing it would require a special act of God for her ever to hold a command again.
"Would you happen to know why you screwed up?" she asked now, holding the pointer across her body in both hands.
"Im still trying to track it down, Skipper," Ashford replied. "It looks like we hit a glitch in the tac computer programming. Were pulling the code to run comparisons against the master files just in case, but at this point, my best bet is human errormine, Im afraidon the input from one of the post-launch mission updates. Kelly was busy running an acceleration recompute when the update for this particular maneuver came in, so I took over the computer and input the change. And I mustve gotten it wrong, because when we hit the way point for the turn-in, the computers turned us one-eighty in the opposite direction."
"With this result," Harmon agreed, and nodded.
Commander McGyver, effectively her chief of staff (although The Book hadnt yet decided whether or not a LAC wings commander was supposed to have a staffofficially) keyed the holo back into movement at the unspoken order. Everyone watched Ashfords section turn directly away from Minotaur... at which point every LAC in it instantly flashed a lurid crimson as they exposed the after aspects of their wedges to the carrier and the point defense laser clusters playing the parts of broadside lasers and grasers took the "up the kilt" shots and blew them away. McGyver hit the freeze key again, stopping all motion, and the "dead" LACs hung in the display like drops of fresh blood.
"Had this been an actual attack, rather than a training exercise," Harmon observed dryly, "the consequences of this little error would have been rather permanent. The good news is that it wouldnt have hurt a bit; the bad news is that thats only because every one of Commander Ashfords people would have been dead before they knew it. We can not have something like this happen to us on an actual op, ladies and gentlemen."
She held their eyes, her own stern, until every head had nodded. Then her gaze softened as she looked back at Ashford.
"For the record," she told him, "Commander McGyver, Comfmander Stackowitz and I have all reviewed the chips, and your theory about what happened makes sense. It was a long session, and we threw a lot of updates and mission profile plan changes at you, too. We probably wouldnt have to make anywhere near that many changes to the canned profile in a real op."
One or two people nodded again. Training operations were almost always harderwell, aside from the adrenaline rush, the terror, and the dyingthan real attack missions. Which only made sense. In actual combat operations, you would almost always carry out only a single attack per launchassuming that everything went right and you actually found the enemy at all. But on training flights, you were likely to be tasked with several different "attacks" in a single sortie, and the people whod planned your mission profiles could be counted on to spend at least some of their time throwing in surprise elements specifically designed to screw things up as severely as possible at the least opportune moment.
Everyone understood why that was, just as they understood that the fact that Harmon and her wing command staff were building an entire doctrinal concept from the ground up required her to be even more ruthless than usual. Still, one or two of her section and squadron leaders had been heard to lament the fact that shed added Ernest Takahashi to her mission planners. Almost everyone liked the cocky young ensign, but his reputation had preceded him. The story of his modifications to the Kreskin Field flight simulators had put all of them on their guards... which had proved an unfortunately foresighted reaction.