"Now," Abigail continued, satisfied there was no need to dwell on her point, "conceding that the initial misidentification and failure to realize the enemy flagship was only simulating damage were the primary causes of what happened, there were also a few other missteps. For example, when the flanking destroyer began to pull out to swing around you, you changed heading to close the range. Was that an optimal decision... Ms. Pavletic?"
"In retrospect, no, Ma'am," Ragnhild replied. "At the time, and given what we all believed the situation to be, I would have done exactly the same thing. But looking back, I think it would have been better to maintain our original course even if our misinterpretations had been accurate."
"Why?" Abigail asked.
"The tin can wasn't going to get outside the Kitty's missle env-"
The midshipwoman chopped herself off abruptly, and her face turned an interesting shade of deep, alarming red. Abigail felt her lips quiver, but somehow-thank Tester!-she managed to keep from chuckling, or even smiling, and completing Pavletic's destruction. A stricken silence filled the compartment, and she felt every middy's eyes upon her, awaiting the thunderbolt of doom certain to incinerate their late, lamented colleague for her deadly impiety.
"Outside the, ah, who's what, Ms. Pavletic?" Abigail asked calmly, as soon as she felt reasonably certain she had control of herself.
"I'm sorry, Ma'am," Ragnhild said miserably. "I meant Hexapuma . Outside Hexapuma's missile envelope."
"I gathered you were referring to the ship, Ms. Pavletic. But I'm afraid I still haven't quite caught the name by which you called her," Abigail said pleasantly, eyes holding the honey-blond midshipwoman steadily.
"I called her the Kitty , Ma'am," Ragnhild admitted finally. "That's, ah, sort of our unofficial nickname for her. Just among ourselves, I mean. We haven't used it with anyone else."
"You call a heavy cruiser the ' Kitty ,'" Abigail said, repeating the name very carefully.
"Um, actually, Ma'am," Leo Stottmeister said, speaking up manfully in Ragnhild's defense-or at least to draw fire from her, "we call her the Nasty Kitty . It's... really meant as a compliment. Sort of a reference to how new and powerful she is, and, well..."
His voice trailed off, and Abigail gazed at him as levelly as she had at Pavletic. Several seconds of tense silence stretched out, and then she smiled.
"Most crews end up bestowing nicknames on their ships," she said. "Usually it's a sign of affection. Sometimes it isn't. And some are better than others. A friend of mine once served in a ship— William Hastings , a Grayson heavy cruiser-which ended up called Shivering Billy because of a nasty harmonic she picked up in two of her forward impeller nodes one fine day. Then there's HMS Retaliation , known to her crew as HMS Ration Tin , for reasons no one seems to remember. Or HMS Ad Astra , a perfectly respectable dreadnought which was known as Fat Astor when she was still in commission. Given the alternatives, I suppose ' Nasty Kitty ' isn't all that bad." She saw them beginning to relax and smiled sweetly. "Of course," she added, " I'm not the Captain."
The newborn relaxation vanished instantly, and she smothered another stillborn chuckle. Then she shook her head and pointed at Pavletic again.
"Before we were interrupted, I believe you were going to explain why turning towards the destroyer wasn't, after all, the best available option, Ms. Pavletic?"
"Uh, yes, Ma'am," the midshipwoman said. "I was saying that she wasn't going to be able to get outside our missile envelope, whatever she did. Not with Mark 16s in the tubes. If she'd tried to swing wide enough for that, she'd have taken herself out of any position to attack the convoy, and she literally didn't have the time and accel to pull it off whatever she tried to do. So if we'd maintained our course, we could still have engaged her without turning our backs on the Peep flagship."
"Which would also have kept our forward sensors oriented on the 'heavy cruiser,'" Helen added, and Abigail nodded with a slight smile of approval.
"Yes, it would," she agreed. The forward sensors aboard most warships, including Hexapuma , were significantly more capable than their broadside sensors, because they were more likely to be the ones their crews relied upon when pursuing a fleeing enemy. Given the "bow wave" of charged particles which built up on the forward particle shielding of any vessel as it approached relativistic velocities, the sensors designed to see through it had to be more capable. Which meant they would have been more likely than Hexapuma's broadside sensors to see through the enemy's EW.
"Once the decision to close on and engage Bogey Three had been made," she continued, "there was the question of fire distribution. While ensuring the prompt destruction of your target was appropriate, a full double broadside represented a considerable margin of overkill. Given that, it might have been wiser to throw at least a few more birds at the 'heavy cruiser' at the same time. If nothing else, that would have required her to defend herself, in which case it might have become evident she had a lot more point defense and counter-missile tubes than a heavy cruiser ought to have. In addition, if she really had been the heavy cruiser she was pretending to be, and if you actually had inflicted the damage she was pretending you had, her defenses might have been sufficiently compromised for you to land additional hits with only a portion of your full missile power. That, however, could definitely be argued either way. Concentration of fire's a cardinal principle of successful tactics, and although the destroyer wasn't yet in range to threaten the convoy, she was the closer threat. And, of course, if the 'heavy cruiser' had actually suffered the impeller damage you believed she had-and if she'd been unable to repair it-you'd have had plenty of time to deal with her."
She paused again, watching her students-although it still felt peculiar to consider people so close to her own age -"students"-digest what she'd just said. She gave them a few seconds to consider it, then turned back to Ragnhild Pavletic.
"Now, Ms. Pavletic," she said with a pleasant smile. "About your damage control response to the initial damage. Had you considered, when Sidewall Two was destroyed, the possibility of rerouting..."
Chapter Seven
"I feel like an idiot," the young woman half-snarled. Her dark-brown eyes flashed angrily, but the two men sitting across the private table from her in the busy, dimly lit restaurant bar didn't worry about that. Or, rather, they weren't worried that the anger was directed at them. Agnes Nordbrandt was furious about a lot of things lately. Which, after all, was what had brought them together.
"Better to feel like an idiot than to get snapped up by the graybacks," one of the men replied. The nickname referred to the Kornatian National Police's charcoal gray tunics.
"Maybe." Nordbrandt tugged irritably at the blond wig covering her own black hair. One of the others quirked an eyebrow, and she snorted. "Getting arrested might just give me a more visible platform!"
"For a day or two," the other man said. He was obviously the senior of the two, and his physical appearance-medium brown hair, medium brown eyes, average features, medium -complexion-was so eminently forgettable that Nordbrandt felt irritably certain he'd never bothered with a disguise in his life. "Possibly even for a few weeks. Hell, let's be generous and give it three months. Then they'll sentence you, send you off to do your time, and you'll vanish from the political equation. Is that what you really want?"
"Of course it isn't." Nordbrandt's eyes darted around the dim room.
A large part of her current irritation, as she was perfectly well aware, stemmed from her dislike for having a conversation like this in a public place. On the other hand, the man she knew only as "Firebrand" was probably right. Given the paucity of modern technology in the Talbott Cluster, the other patrons' background noise probably provided all the cover they needed. And there was something to be said for hiding in plain sight to avoid suspicion in the first place.
"I didn't think so," Firebrand said. "But if you have any inclinations that way, I'd really like to know now. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to see the inside of anybody's jail, whether it's right here on Kornati or in some Manty prison far, far away. Which means I'm not especially interested in working with anyone who might want a firsthand penology tour just so she can make a political statement."
"Don't worry," Nordbrandt grunted. "You're right. Letting them lock me up would be worse than pointless."
"I'm glad we agree. And do we agree on anything else?"
Nordbrandt looked at him across the steins of beer on the table between them, studying his expression as intently as the poor light permitted. Unlike many people living in the Verge-that vast, irregular belt of marginal worlds beyond the Solarian League's official borders-she was a prolong recipient. But she really was almost as young as she looked. Only the cruder, less effective first-generation prolong therapies were available here on Kornati. They halted the apparent aging process at a considerably later point in a recipient's life than the more recently developed second— and third-generation therapies. At thirty-three, Nordbrandt was a whippet-thin, dark-complexioned woman who seemed to vibrate with the unending internal tension of youth, anger, intensity, and commitment.