She nailed another thirty-two missiles in the fleeting seconds she had to engage them. Another eleven laser heads wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof or floor of her impeller wedge. Of the fifteen remaining potential attack missiles, seven turned out to be ECM platforms.
Eight weren't.
The universe heaved about Helen as eight laser heads detonated as one, lashing her ship with deadly bomb-pumped fury. The computers running the simulation had tied Auxiliary Control's grav plates into the sim. Now the midshipmen's senses insisted that AuxCon was twisting and bucking, that Hexapuma's entire massive hull was flexing , as transfer energy blasted into her. The cruiser's protective sidewalls had bent and blunted most of the incoming lasers, and the ship's armor absorbed still more damage. But those missiles had come from a battlecruiser, not another cruiser. They were capital ship missiles, and Peep warheads were bigger and more powerful than Manticoran warheads as compensation for their less capable ECM and EW. No cruiser sidewall in the galaxy could have actually stopped them.
"Hits on Beta Three, Beta Five, and Alpha Two!" Ragnhild announced from Engineering, even as alarms shrilled. "Heavy casualties in Impeller One! We've lost Sidewall Two, Four, and Six! Radar Two and Lidar Two down! Direct hits on Graser Four and Graser Eight, and Missile Four, Six, and Ten are out of the net! Magazine Three is open to space! Heavy damage between Frame Three-Niner and Frame Six-Six!"
Hexapuma's acceleration fell as enemy fire hammered her forward alpha and beta nodes. Her starboard sidewall fluctuated as more hits smashed the forward generators. Then it came back up-at greatly reduced strength-as Ragnhild spread the capacity of the surviving generators to cover the deadly gap. If not for the skew turn Helen had ordered, which had twisted Hexapuma up on her side relative to the Peep battlecruiser, interposing her impeller wedge on the direct attack bearing, it would have been even worse.
Not that what they had wasn't bad enough.
"Evasion pattern Delta-Qu bec-Seven!" she snapped. "Half-roll us inverted, Helm!"
"Delta— Qu bec-Seven, aye!" Senior Chief Waltham responded. "Rolling ship now!"
The maneuver whipped Hexapuma's wounded starboard side away from the enemy. It turned her impeller wedge away from the maximum protective angle, but it brought her undamaged port broadside to bear and put the weakened sidewall farther away, made it a harder target. The decoys were fully on-line now, too. That might make a difference...
And, Helen thought grimly, our starboard sensors have been shot to shit. At least this way we can see the bastards!
D'Arezzo sent a double broadside of his own roaring off towards the enemy. It crossed the enemy's second broadside seconds after launch, and the plot was a seething confusion of incoming and outgoing missile wedges cutting holes in Hexapuma's sensor coverage like old-fashioned gunsmoke, more counter-missiles stabbing into the Peep's massive attack wave, laser clusters firing furiously, and then-
AuxCon heaved madly one last time, and every light went out.
The absolute blackness lingered for the prescribed fifteen seconds. Then the master plot came back up, and two blood-red words floated in the darkness before them like a disembodied curse.
"SIMULATION OVER," they said.
"Be seated, Ladies and Gentlemen," Abigail Hearns said, and the midshipmen sat back down in the briefing room chairs from which they'd risen as she entered the compartment.
She walked briskly across to the head of the table and took her own seat, then keyed her terminal on-line. She glanced once at the notes it displayed, then looked up with a faint smile.
"That could have gone better," she observed, and Helen writhed mentally at the stupendous understatement of that mild sentence. She hadn't been hammered that brutally in a simulation since her second form. An ignoble part of her wanted to blame her command team. Especially, she realized with a flicker of guilt, her tactical officer. But however tempting that might be, it would have been a lie.
"Ms. Zilwicki," Abigail said, looking at her calmly, "would you care to comment on what you think went wrong?"
The younger woman visibly squared her shoulders, but that was the only outward sign she allowed of the intense frustration Abigail knew she must be feeling at this moment.
"I made a poor initial tactical assessment, Ma'am," she said crisply. "I failed to properly appreciate the actual composition of the opposition force and based my tactics on my incorrect understanding of the enemy's capabilities. I also failed to realize the enemy flagship was only simulating impeller damage. Worse, I allowed my initial errors to affect my interpretation of the enemy's actual intentions."
"I see." Abigail considered her for a moment, then looked at Midshipman d'Arezzo. "Would you concur, Mr. d'Arezzo?" she asked.
"The initial assessment was certainly inaccurate, Ma'am," d'Arezzo replied. "However, I should point out that as Tactical Officer, I was the one who initially evaluated the Peep flagship as a heavy cruiser, just as I also classified her as damaged by our fire. Ms. Zilwicki formulated her tactics based upon my erroneous classifications."
Zilwicki's eyes flicked sideways to the midshipman's profile as he spoke, and Abigail thought she detected a trace of surprise in them. Good, she thought. I still haven't figured out exactly what her problem with d'Arezzo is, but it's time she got over it, whatever it may be.
"Ms. Zilwicki?" she invited.
"Uh." Helen gave herself a mental shake, embarrassed by her own hesitation. But she hadn't been able to help it. The last thing she'd expected was for self-absorbed Paulo d'Arezzo to voluntarily assume a share of the guilt for such a monumental fiasco.
"Mr. d'Arezzo may have misidentified the enemy flagship and the extent of its damage, Ma'am," she said after a heartbeat, shoving her surprise aside, "but I don't believe that was his fault. In retrospect, it's obvious the Peeps were using their EW to spoof our sensors into thinking Bogey One was a heavy cruiser-and an old, obsolete unit, at that. Moreover, CIC made the same identification. And whatever his assessments might have been, I fully concurred with them."
Abigail nodded. D'Arezzo was right to point out his ID errors, but Zilwicki was equally right to bring up CIC's matching mistake. The Combat Information Center's primary responsibility, after all, was to process sensor data, analyze it, plot it, and display the necessary information for the ship's bridge crew. But the -tactical officer had access to the raw data herself, and it was one of her responsibilities to assess-or at least demand a CIC recheck of-any ship ID or damage state which struck her as questionable. And if d'Arezzo had looked carefully enough at the "heavy cruiser's" emissions signature, he probably would have noticed the tiny discrepancies Abigail had carefully built into the Havenite's false image when she tweaked Lieutenant Commander Kaplan's original scenario.
"That's true enough, Ms. Zilwicki," she said after a moment. "As were Mr. d'Arezzo's comments. However, I believe both of you are missing a significant point."
She paused, considering whether or not to call on one of the other midshipmen. From Kagiyama's expression she suspected he knew where she was headed, and having the point made by one of their fellows would probably give it more emphasis-and underscore the fact that they should have thought of it themselves at the time. But it could also lead to resentment, a sense of having been put down by one of their own.
"I'd like all of you to consider," she said after a moment, instead of calling on Kagiyama, "that you failed to make full use of the sensor capabilities available to you. Yes, at the moment the enemy brought up their impellers, they were already within your shipboard sensor envelope. But they were far enough out, especially given that sensor conditions in hyper are never as good as in n-space, that relying solely on shipboard capabilities gave away sensor reach. If you'd deployed a remote array, you would almost certainly have had sufficient time to get it close enough to the 'heavy cruiser' to burn through its EW before it managed to draw you so badly off balance and out of position."
She saw consternation-and self-recrimination-flicker through Zilwicki's eyes. Clearly, the sturdily built midshipwoman was unaccustomed to losing. Equally clearly, she disliked the -sensation...especially when she thought it was her own fault.