David Weber - The Service of the Sword

Of course, today's exercise assumed that every single energy mount in the starboard broadside had been thrown back into local control. Abigail couldn't imagine what sort of damage could have cut all of the broadside's weapons off from central control without destroying the ship outright, but that was hardly the point. The object was to train each individual crew for the unlikely day on which it might be the single lucky mount that was cut off.

Unfortunately, Graser Thirty-Eight was the last energy weapon in the starboard broadside, which meant that Abigail, Chief Vassari, and their people had been sitting here for what seemed like forever with nothing to do but watch other people miss the target.

"Stand by, Thirty-Six," Commander Blumenthal said over the com.

"Thirty-Six standing by," a cultured voice responded, and Abigail grimaced. Commander Blumenthal and Lieutenant Commander Abbott had decided to add an additional wrinkle to this afternoon's exercise and announced that each of Gauntlet 's four middies would be acting as the captain of the energy mount to which he or she was assigned. The announcement had not been greeted with universal joy by the crews of the weapons concerned. There was always fierce competition between crews during these exercises, both for bragging rights and because of the special privileges which were normally awarded to the winning mount. Having a mere snotty sitting in the command seat was not considered the best way to enhance one's chances of emerging victorious. Not that anyone would have guessed from Arpad Grigovakis' tone that he had any doubts at all about the outcome. Or that he'd been sitting there waiting almost as long as Abigail had, for that matter.

"Beginning run," Commander Blumenthal announced, and Abigail stared down into the minute plot provided between her and Chief Vassari's stations.

Although all control stations were manned, the grasers themselves weren't fully on line... yet. Instead, the crews would be "firing" the laser designators to which their weapons were normally slaved. Unlike the grasers themselves, the designators lacked the power to actually damage the sophisticated drones being used as targets, which would allow each target to be used several times. But the drones would sense and report the amount of energy each laser put on target—assuming it was lucky enough to score a hit at all—to establish the performance of each crew.

Unlike the master plot in CIC or the main fire control plot on the command deck, the tiny on-mount displays were not driven from the main sensor arrays. Instead, they relied upon their mounts' lidar, which had a much narrower field of view. Neither their software nor their imagers were as good as those available to CIC or Commander Blumenthal, either. But that was sort of the point, Abigail reminded herself, watching intently as the corkscrewing, rolling drone swept down Gauntlet 's starboard side.

The erratic base course was bad enough, but the drone's rotation on its axis made things even worse. She watched a sidebar readout as the drone flashed by at a range of fifty thousand kilometers, and her lips pursed in unwilling sympathy for Grigovakis. His crew seemed to be managing to track the bobbing, weaving drone surprisingly well, but its spinning motion turned its impeller wedge into a flashing shield. The drone wasn't rotating at a constant speed, either, she noted. At a mere fifty thousand klicks, there wasn't a whole lot of time to analyze its erratic rotation, and Graser Thirty-Six's energy-on-target numbers were abysmally low. Under three percent, in fact.

"Doesn't look so good, does it, Ma'am?" Chief Vassari muttered to her over their dedicated private com link.

"It's the rotation," she replied quietly. "The spin is blocking the laser. It's catching them between pulses."

"Yes, Ma'am," Vassari agreed, and Abigail frowned.

Like any shipboard energy weapon, Gauntlet 's grasers fired in burstlike pulses, and the laser designators were synchronized to simulate the grasers' normal pulse rate for the exercise. That pulse rate was high enough that a ship-sized opponent couldn't have rotated its wedge in and out of position rapidly enough to avoid significant damage. In the time it took an impeller wedge over a hundred kilometers across to rotate, each graser would have gotten off sufficient pulses to guarantee at least one or two hits, assuming that its targeting solution was accurate.

But the drone'swedge was less than two kilometers across, and at least ninety percent of Graser Thirty-Six's pulses were being shrugged aside by the spinning wedge. The same thing had happened to the other grasers which had engaged the drone, but Thirty-Six's energy-on-target totals were pretty pathetic even compared to the other mounts. Both Karl and Shobhana had done better, although neither of them was exactly in the running for the victor's trophy.

"Tell me, Chief," Abigail said thoughtfully, "do the on-mount computers keep track of all the firing runs?"

"They display all the EOT numbers, but they only log the totals for their own mounts to memory, Ma'am," Vassari replied. He turned his head, gazing at her narrowly through his helmet visor. "Why?"

"I wasn't thinking about performance numbers, Chief," Abigail told him. "I meant, do the computers plot target motion each time the drone makes a run?"

"Well, yes, Ma'am. They do," Vassari said, then smiled slowly. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking, Ma'am?" he asked.

"Probably," she admitted with an impish grin. "But is our software up to the analysis?"

"I think so," Vassari said, in the tone of a man who would have liked to scratch his chin thoughtfully.

"Well, we'd better get it set up quickly," Abigail said, gesturing with her helmet at the plot. "They'll be starting Thirty-Six's second run any minute now."

"Yes, Ma'am. How do you want me to handle it?"

"I'm hoping that the drone's running on a canned routine rather than generating random evasion maneuvers. If it is, then there's probably a repeat point where it resets. Look for that. And if we've got the capacity, let's run each individual pass for pattern analysis and see if we can't load an automatic recognition trigger into the firing sequence."

"If the Midshipwoman will allow me, Ma'am," Vassari said with a huge grin, "I like the way her mind works."

"Tell me that if we manage to pull it off, Chief," Abigail replied, and he nodded and began punching commands into his console.

Abigail sat back and watched as the drone flashed through the second of Graser Thirty-Six's firing passes. This time Grigovakis' crew did considerably better... which still left them with very low numbers. Not that they were alone, and Abigail wondered who was actually responsible for the drone's axial rotation. No one had warned any of the crews that it might be coming, and that didn't strike her as a typical Commander Blumenthal idea. It sounded exactly like something Captain Oversteegen might have decided to throw into the equation, however, and her smile grew nastier at the thought of possibly overcoming one of the captain's little ploys.

The drone returned to its starting point for Graser Thirty-Six's third and final solo designator run, and she turned to glance at Chief Vassari.

"How's it coming, Chief?" she asked quietly.

"Pretty good... maybe, Ma'am," he replied. "We've got good plots on about half the previous runs. Looks like we never got a tight enough lock with our on-mount sensors on the other half, so we don't have a complete data set. The computers agree that it's repeating a canned routine, but we'd really need at least half a dozen more passes to isolate the point at which the routine resets to zero. On the other hand, we've got hard analyses on at least twenty separate runs. If it repeats one of those, and if we've got good enough sensor lock to spot it, we should be in business."