Shobhana didn't reply instantly, and Abigail felt herself lean forward in her own chair, urging her friend on.
'Recommend we change heading to starboard in six minutes, Sir,' Shobhana said, almost as if she'd heard Abigail's encouragement.
'Reasons?' Oversteegen asked sharply.
'Sir, Bogey One will have closed into extreme energy range in approximately five-point-seven-five minutes, but she's still coming straight for us. I think she's convinced we're just going to go on running rather than turn and fight against such odds. I think she'll hold her course, trying to bring her own chasers into action, but according to CIC she's a Warlord-C, without bow wall technology. So if we time it properly, we might be able to put an entire energy broadside right down her throat even at extreme range.'
There was a moment of taut silence. Then Oversteegen spoke again.
'Concur,' he said simply. 'Make it so, Tactical.' He paused again, then added, 'And call the shot.'
'Aye, aye, Sir!' Shobhana replied exultantly, and Abigail's eyebrows arched in astonishment. That was the sort of order Lady Harrington might have given under similar circumstances, but she would never have expected to hear it out of Oversteegen.
She watched the crimson bead of Bogey One charging hard after Gauntlet, just as Shobhana had predicted. If Abigail had been in command of that battlecruiser, no doubt she would have been doing exactly the same thing. An Edward Saganami–class ship like Gauntlet was a powerful, modern unit, but scarcely a match for a Warlord–class battlecruiser in close action. The logical course for any ship as heavily overmatched as Gauntlet was in this instance was to run as fast and as hard as she could in the hopes that she might score a lucky missile hit on one of her pursuers' impeller nodes and somehow escape action.
The only problem was that Gauntlet had been surprised in a situation which gave the bogeys too much overtake advantage for even the newest generation of Manticoran inertial compensator to overcome. Which meant that escape was virtually impossible, whatever the heavy cruiserdid. And Shobhana was right; if they couldn't outrun Bogey One, then their best choice was the bold choice.
Bogey One swept closer and closer, battering away at Gauntlet with her chase armament. Fortunately, the Peeps—no, she corrected herself, the Havenites— didn't have the equivalent of Ghost Rider. That meant they couldn't fire the same sort of effective off-bore missile broadsides a Manticoran or a Grayson ship might have. Bogey One was restricted effectively to the fire of her bow tubes and energy mounts, which meant her missile fire was far too light to penetrate Gauntlet's active and passive defenses, whereas Gauntlet was able to reply with a steady rain of fire from her broadside tubes. It wasn't as effective as it would have been if she'd had a proper broadside firing arc that let her use her main fire control. Even with Ghost Rider technology, she lacked the telemetry channels without a broadside arc to provide full-time control to more than eighteen birds at a time. She could share her available links on a rotating basis, but that could be risky in a high-EW environment, and it always led to at least some degradation in control. For that matter, not even a missile with Manticoran EW had much chance of survival at this range against the sort of defensive firepower an alert battlecruiser's forward point defense could pour out. But even though only a handful of them were getting through, they were enough to pepper the Warlord with what had to be an infuriating rain of superficial hits.
Of course, if Shobhana's maneuver failed and Bogey One managed to get broadside-to-broadside with Gauntlet . . .
'Helm, come starboard nine-five degrees, roll one-five degrees to port, and pitch up four-zero degrees on my mark,' Shobhana said.
'Starboard nine-five, roll one-five to port, and pitch up four-zero, aye, Ma'am!' the helmswoman responded crisply, and Abigail held her breath as another double handful of seconds trickled past. Then—
'Execute!' Shobhana snapped, and HMS Gauntlet snapped up and around to starboard even as she rolled to present her broadside to her huge, charging opponent.
It was the universe's turn to hold its breath, but the sim's AI decided that Gauntlet's unanticipated maneuver had completely surprised Bogey One's hypothetical flesh-and-blood captain. The battlecruiser held her course, her chase armament continuing to hammer away at where she'd thought Gauntlet was going to be, even as the Manticoran cruiser swerved and rolled.
And then Gauntlet's broadside grasers swung onto target and fired.
The range was still long, and the armor protecting a battlecruiser's forward hammerhead was thick. But there was no bow wall, the range wasn't long enough, and the armor was too thin to withstand the sledgehammers of energy Shobhana Korrami sent crashing into it. It shattered, and the grasers ripped into the ship it had been supposed to protect. The range was too great for the grasers to completely disembowel a ship as big and tough as a Warlord, but they could do damage enough. The torrent of destruction smashed the battlecruiser's chase armament into wreckage, and the big ship's wedge fluctuated madly as her foreword impeller ring was blown apart.
The savagely wounded ship swung sharply to port, snatching her mangled bows away from her impudent opponent and bringing her own starboard broadside to bear. But Shobhana's helm orders had already sent Gauntlet streaking back onto her original course, and the Manticoran cruiser went bounding ahead under maximum military power at almost six hundred gravities. Wounding a kodiak max badly enough to run away from it was one thing; standing still to let it rip you apart after wounding it was quite another.
A tornado of missiles came crashing after Gauntlet from Bogey One's undamaged broadside, and Bogey Two—no longer in any doubt as to which was decoy and which was actual cruiser—charged after her, as well. Damage sidebars flickered as a handful of hits from the enemy's laser head missiles punched through Gauntlet's sidewalls, but her active defenses were too good and her passive defenses just good enough to fend off the tide of destruction while she pulled steadily away from the lamed battlecruiser.
Bogey Two continued the pursuit for another ten minutes, but she was no match for Gauntlet without the Warlord's support, and her skipper—or, at least, the sim's artificial intelligence—knew it. The enemy cruiser had no intention of finding herself all alone in energy range of a ship which had just crippled a battle cruiser, and she broke off before Gauntlet could lure her out from under the Warlord's missile umbrella.
'Well, that was certainly an interestin' . . . adventure,' Captain Oversteegen remarked. 'All hands, secure from simulation. Division officers, we'll convene in my briefin' room for the post-simulation critique at zero-nine- hundred.' He paused for a moment, then surprised Abigail once again with something which would have sounded suspiciously like a chuckle from anyone else. 'Commander Blumenthal, you may consider yourself excused from the debrief, in light of your many and serious wounds. I believe that Actin' Tactical Officer Korrami can take your place today.'
Abigail didn't actually see Lieutenant Stevenson's hand coming. In fact, she couldn't have analyzed exactly what it was she did see. It might have been a slight shift in the Marine's weight, or perhaps it was the way his shoulder dipped ever so slightly, or it might even been nothing more than a flicker of his eyes. Whatever it was, her own right arm moved without any conscious thought on her part. Her forearm intercepted the left hand slicing towards her head and parried his arm wide to the outside, her own left hand shot out and upwards in a palm thrust to his chin, and her torso pivoted as she twisted in a circle to her left.
The lieutenant's head snapped back as her palm impacted on his jaw, but his right arm looped up and around, and his hand snaked back down on the inside of her left elbow. His fingers closed on her upper arm, his own arm straightened, binding hers, and he shifted his weight to the outside, even as his right ankle hooked into the back of her left calf.
Abigail's feet went out from under her, and the lieutenant's considerably greater weight yanked her
