Echoes Of Honor

straightforward. 'I’ll 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 Queen’s 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 Ashford’s bird. The LAC sat there all alone, awaiting the service crews who would minister to it in time for the afternoon’s exercises, and he nodded to himself. He wouldn’t 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 hadn’t, and the dark- haired, dark-eyed captain turned to look at the lieutenant commander who commanded the errant vessels.

'Ah, well, actually, Ma’am—' 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 much—it 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.

'I’m still trying to track it down, Skipper,' Ashford replied. 'It looks like we hit a glitch in the tac computer programming. We’re pulling the code to run comparisons against the master files just in case, but at this point, my best bet is human error—mine, I’m afraid—on 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 must’ve 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 hadn’t yet decided whether or not a LAC wing’s commander was supposed to have a staff—officially) keyed the holo back into movement at the unspoken order. Everyone watched Ashford’s 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 wouldn’t have hurt a bit; the bad news is that that’s only because every one of Commander Ashford’s 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 wouldn’t 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 harder—well, aside from the adrenaline rush, the terror, and the dying—than real attack missions. Which only made sense. In actual combat operations, you would almost always carry out only a single attack per launch—assuming 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 who’d 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 she’d 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.

Jacquelyn Harmon knew exactly what the officers before her were thinking, and she hid an internal smile. Lieutenant Commander Ashford was going to be moderately livid when he and his people finally did track down the problem, she thought. Assuming that they recognized how it had happened when they found it. And, after all, finding it was another part of their exercise mission, even if they hadn’t known that when they started looking, and it would be interesting to see if they went the step further to figuring out the 'how' and the 'why' as well as the 'what.' Although, she reminded herself, Ernest was too sneaky to make figuring out what had happened easy. She glanced at the bland-faced ensign, shook her head mentally, and then looked away.

So young and innocent looking for such a depraved soul, she thought cheerfully. And the fact that he and PO Smith served together in Leutzen didn’t hurt, now did it? But I do want to see Ashford’s reaction if he ever realizes I had his own section chief slip a deliberately rigged modification into his original mission download.

Not that recognizing that it had been deliberate was going to be easy. The file corruption which had transposed Ashford’s perfectly correct heading change when he punched it in, while freakish, looked exactly like something that could have happened accidentally. Bruce McGyver had bet her five bucks Ashford’s crew would never realize they’d been snookered, but one reason Harmon liked Ashford (though she wasn’t about to tell him so) was that he was not only smart but as thorough as they came. If anybody was likely to realize he’d been had, Ashford was the one... and if he did, he was going to inherit one of the empty squadron commander slots as a reward. But playing with his head to evaluate him for promotion had been only a secondary objective of the exercise, she reminded herself, and cleared her throat.

'Whatever the cause of the problem, however,' she went on, 'let’s look at the consequences, shall we?' She nodded to McGyver again, and someone groaned aloud as the sudden chink in the LACs’ attack plan opened the door to a cascade of steadily accelerating miscues by other squadron and section COs... none of whom had the excuse that Harmon and Takahashi had jiggered their software.

And that had been the real point of her devious machinations, Harmon thought, watching the carefully orchestrated strike disintegrate into chaos, because one thing was damned sure. The first law of war was still Murphy’s, and units as fragile as LACs had better learn to show it even more respect than anyone else.

* * *

'Well it certainly looked like they got the point, Skipper,' Lieutenant Gearman remarked with a grin as the