'If she does, then we eliminate her, however fast and dirty we have to do it,' Saint-Just said simply. 'We won't have any choice, no matter what fallout may result. A dead, martyred McQueen will be a hell of a lot less threat to us than a live McQueen organizing firing squads of her own!'
'Agreed.' Pierre sighed heavily. 'But if push comes to shove and we have to remove her, we'll need someone on hand to replace her. Someone who could pick up where she left off against the Manties without picking up where she left off plotting against us. And someone we're fairly certain wasn't part of whatever she may — or may not, God help us — be planning.'
'You're certainly right about that. I wouldn't want to put any money on Giscard or Tourville or any of their crowd. We've discussed that before, and my concerns about their loyalty to us are only heightened by the success they've achieved under McQueen. They'd almost have to be feeling more loyal to her than they were before Icarus.' He rubbed his chin again. 'I don't know, Rob. I can think of a half dozen admirals whose loyalty I'd feel confident about, but I'm afraid most of them fall well short of McQueen's military competence. Then, too, if I feel sure where their loyalties lie, I'm quite sure the Navy does, too. Which means they'd almost certainly be seen as our creatures, whereas McQueen's been seen as one of their own. I could live with that, but I'd rather not provide any incentive for her replacement's new subordinates to start right out feeling disloyal to him.' He grinned mirthlessly. 'Clearly what we need is an outstanding commander, outside McQueen's circle, who was never so loyal to us as to make the rank and file immediately suspicious of him but who has no ambitions of his own.'
'And Diogenes thought he had trouble looking for an honest man!' Pierre snorted. 'Just where do you expect to find this paragon?'
'I don't know.' Saint-Just chuckled. But then his face hardened, and there was no humor at all in his voice when he spoke again. 'I don't know — yet. But I've already started looking, Rob. And if I find him, then I think my estimate of Citizen Secretary McQueen's indispensability will undergo a small reevaluation.'
'It looked pretty good to me, Scotty.' Captain (Junior Grade) Stewart Ashford leaned over Scotty Tremaine's shoulder to study the tac simulator's display. It showed only the results of the exercise, not the 'attack' itself, but the number of 'dead' LACs was depressingly high, and he winced as he contemplated it. 'I certainly thought it was going to work when we discussed your attack plan. So what happened?'
'I got overconfident, Stew.' Scotty Tremaine sighed. 'That's what happened.'
'How?' Ashford demanded. He tapped keys, then pointed almost accusingly at the plot as it obediently altered to a static display of the situation just before the start of the attack. 'They didn't have a sniff of you to this point, or the escorts would've already opened fire. You were in clean within — what? A hundred and eighty k-klicks? And closing with an overtake of over ten thousand KPS. And an accel advantage of almost five hundred gees over the merchies! They were dead meat.'
'Yep.' Tremaine gazed dolefully at the icons of the simulated freighters which had been his LAC wing's objectives, then gave Ashford a crooked grin.
There were only a few T-years' difference in their ages, but Ashford, part of HMS Minotaur's original LAC wing and now the COLAC of HMS Incubus, had already enjoyed almost a year of hands-on training with actual hardware. Incubus was officially carried on the Ship List as CLAC-05, and she was rather closer to the original Minotaur in design than Hydra was. Not that the differences were pronounced, although Hydra, on a bit less tonnage, actually carried twelve more LACs. She paid for it with somewhat lower magazine capacity for her shipboard launchers, but given the fact that a LAC carrier had no business getting close enough to other starships to shoot at them (and be shot at by them), that was a trade-off Tremaine was perfectly happy to accept. But Hydra would be CLAC-19 when she finished working up in another month or so, and her own LACs were only beginning to arrive. Which meant that unlike Ashford, Tremaine and his wing had been forced to do almost all of their training in simulators.
And it didn't help any that Stew and his friends poached the entire first production run of the new birds, either, Tremaine reflected. But there was no rancor in the thought. The COLACs for all six of the first group of carriers had served as squadron commanders under Jackie Harmon. They were, in fact, the only squadron COs to survive Second Hancock, and they'd paid cash for their promotions. Less than half of HMS Minotaur' s wing had survived the battle, but they'd massacred the Peep battleships once the enemy's formation came unglued. Ashford's own LAC crew had a confirmed total of three battleship kills, and his squadron as a whole had killed five.
If anyone in the Service had earned the right to trade in their original Shrike — class LACs for the new Shrike-A s, they were the ones.
Besides, Tremaine gloated, they may've gotten the Shrike-As, but my people got the first B models, and we got the Ferrets at the same time Incubus and her people did. And even if we hadn't, Stew's a nice guy. He's saved me a hell of a lot of grief by taking me under his wing, so to speak, too.
'They were dead meat, all right. Except for one little detail the Admiral neglected to mention to us.' He tapped the play key, and watched with that same crooked grin as the sim unfolded.
Everything went exactly as planned — right up to the moment his LACs reached graser range, turned in to attack... and four of the eight 'merchantmen' dropped their ECM. Three superdreadnoughts and a dreadnought opened fire simultaneously, and not even the powerful bow-walls of the Shrike-B or the Ferret could stave off the devastating effects of a ship of the wall's energy batteries. Sixty-three of Tremaine's LACs 'died' in the first broadsides, and the remaining forty-five, squadron organizations shot to hell, scattered wildly. Thirty of them managed to roll ship and yank the throats of their wedges away from the capital ships, but one of the SDs was a Medusa —class, and she was already rolling pods. Not even the Shrike-B, with her aft-facing laser clusters and countermissiles could stave off that sort of firepower, and only thirteen of Tremaine's LACs had managed to escape destruction. Seven of them had been so badly damaged that they would have been written off on their return to Hydra (in real life, at any rate).
'Hoooo, boy!' Ashford shook his head in sympathy... and sudden wariness. 'The Old Lady's always been on the sneaky side, but this is the first time she ever did something like that. No warning at all?'
'None,' Tremaine replied with a sort of morbid pride. 'Of course, as she was happy to point out afterward, not a one of us — including me — ever bothered to make a specific, visual confirmation on the targets. We trusted out sensors, instead, and we shouldn't have relied solely on them. After all, she did warn us that we were going up against Manticoran `merchies,' so someone in the wing should have reflected on what that meant in terms of EW upgrades for any possible escorts she hadn't warned us about. We didn't. And before you ask, yes, I specifically got her permission to show this to you. Permission, I might add, which I received with somewhat mixed emotions.'
'Mixed?' Ashford looked up from the display and crooked an eyebrow.
'Well, misery loves company, Stew. It was embarrassing as hell to get handed my head this way, and I think I would have taken a certain comfort from having it happen to all the rest of you, too.' Ashford chuckled, and Tremaine's eyes twinkled as he went on. 'But then I thought about it, and something else occurred to me. If she went to such lengths to swat my wing in such an abundantly nasty way, and if she doesn't mind if I warn you about how she did it ahead of time, then what does that say about the nastiness she must have in mind to surprise you? I mean, after all, you're forewarned now, so she's going to have to come up with
