David Weber - The Service of the Sword

"I guess that's just going to have to be good enough, Chief," she said, watching the numbers for Grigovakis' crew's final firing pass come up on her display. They were the best of the three, but even so they weren't anything to get excited about. The best energy-on-target they'd been able to come up with was under fifteen percent of max possible. That would have been more than sufficient to destroy a target as small as the drone, assuming the graser itself had been firing, but it was still a pretty anemic performance.

"We're up next," she pointed out, and Vassari nodded.

"Stand by, Thirty-Eight," Blumenthal's voice said, almost as if the tac officer had been able to hear her, and she keyed her com.

"Thirty-Eight, standing by," she acknowledged formally.

"Beginning run," Blumenthal told her, and Abigail held her breath as the drone came slashing back down Gauntlet 's side yet again.

Graser Thirty-Eight's lidar reached out for the target. The drone was small and elusive, but they also knew exactly where to begin looking for it.

"Acquisition!" the tracking rating announced.

"Acknowledged," Abigail replied, and turned to look at Vassari. The chief was staring intently at his display, and when she glanced into her own, Abigail saw the red sighting circle projected across the drone's small bead of light. The targeting solution looked good, but although the energy mount was tracking smoothly, holding the drone centered in the cross-hairs, it wasn't firing.

Abigail felt the other five members of Graser Thirty-Eight's crew staring at her, but she kept her own eyes on the plot. It had seemed like a good idea when she and Vassari came up with it; now, she wasn't nearly as certain. The drone was almost a third of the way through its pass, and still the laser designator hadn't fired. If it didn't do something soon, they were going to come up with a score of zero, and none of the other mounts had managed to do quite that poorly. She hovered on the brink of ordering Vassari to open fire anyway, on the theory that at least something would have to get through, but she closed her lips firmly against the temptation. It either worked, or it didn't; she wasn't going to second-guess herself in mid-flight and risk losing any opportunity of success. Besides, even if she—

"Got it!" Chief Vassari barked suddenly, and the laser designator "opened fire" before the words were fully out of his mouth.

Abigail watched the plot's sidebar, and her face blossomed in a huge smile as the rest of her crew began to cheer and whistle. The computers had identified the repetition of one of the earlier fly-bys, and Vassari's fire plan had instructed them to synchronize the mount's pulse rate with the recognized spin rate of the target. It meant that they weren't pumping out the maximum possible amount of destructive energy, but what they were pumping out was precisely timed to catch the drone at the moment that it turned the open side of its wedge towards the ship. The energy-on-target total shot up like a homesick meteor, and Abigail wanted to cheer herself as the laser designator systematically hammered the drone.

"Sixty-two percent of max!" Vassari proclaimed exultantly as the drone completed its run. " Damn , but—!" He caught himself, and looked at Abigail with a sheepish expression. "Sorry about that, Ma'am," he said contritely.

"Chief," she said around a grin, "I'm from Grayson, not a convent. I've heard the word before."

"Well, in that case," he replied, " damn , but that was fun!"

"Damned straight it was," she agreed with a chuckle, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Now, if it just repeats the same maneuver sequence from where we got it indexed on this pass, we should really kick some butt on the next one."

"Not too shabby, Thirty-Eight," Commander Blumenthal observed over the com in a tone of studied understatement. "Of course, there are still two more runs to go. Stand by for second run, now."

"Thirty-Eight, standing by," Abigail responded, and the drone came slashing back at them again.

"I suppose we should all congratulate you," Arpad Grigovakis said.

The four snotties stood in the rear of the briefing room in which Commander Blumenthal and Captain Oversteegen had just completed their dissection of the afternoon's exercises. Commander Watson hadn't attended, since she'd had the bridge watch, but all of the department heads had been present. By now, most of the other officers had already dispersed to other tasks, but Oversteegen, Blumenthal, and Abbott were still engaged in a quiet-voiced discussion, and the middies hadn't yet been dismissed by their OCTO. Which left them in the seen-but-not-heard-mode with which all middies were intimately familiar, and Grigovakis had kept his voice down accordingly.

Not that keeping its volume down had prevented it from sounding thoroughly sour.

"Darn right we should!" Karl Aitschuler grinned at Abigail and slapped her on the shoulder. There was nothing at all sour about his manner, and Shobhana was grinning even more broadly than Karl.

"I should think so," she agreed. "Seventy-nine percent of max possible overall? I'm not sure, but I think that probably ought to count as a record against a target like that!"

"No doubt it does," Grigovakis conceded, still in that sour-grapes tone. "On the other hand, what are the odds that that sort of targeting solution is going to come up in real life?" He snorted. "Seventy-nine percent or seven percent—either one of them would have destroyed a target that size if it had been for real."

"Sure, but I don't seem to remember Thirty-Six scoring seven percent overall, either," Karl said a bit more sharply.

"Well, at least we didn't take advantage of a freak opportunity that's never going to repeat against a real target, did we?" Grigovakis shot back.

"What, you don't think missiles are ever going to use canned routines?" Aitschuler snorted with an edge of contempt.

"Besides," Shobhana said, glaring at Grigovakis, "one of the things an alert tac officer is supposed to do is recognize any advantage or opportunity she can generate! Which is exactly what Abigail did."

"I never said that it wasn't," Grigovakis replied in a slightly more defensive tone. "All I said was that it's not a circumstance that's likely to repeat in real life, and that that leads me to question just how representative of our actual abilities the entire exercise was."

"What you really mean," Karl said coolly, "is that you're pissed off because Abigail and her crew kicked everybody else's butts—including yours."

"Well, yes." Grigovakis chuckled. It was obviously intended to be a rueful sound, but he didn't quite pull it off. "The truth is, I don't like coming in second best," he said with an air of candor. "And I like coming in seventeenth even less. So I guess maybe I didn't take it very well." He showed Abigail his teeth in what could have been called a smile by the charitable. "Sorry about that, Abigail. But don't think I'm not going to try to return the favor next time. And maybe next time I'll be in the Tail-End Charlie position."

"And what does that mean?" Shobhana asked tartly.

"Only that because Abigail's crew fired last, no one else had the opportunity to match her score by using the same technique," Grigovakis replied innocently.

"No one else had the opportunity because no one else came up with the same idea," Karl told him in disgusted tones.

"Well, of course they didn't. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Although," he looked thoughtful, "to be perfectly honest, Abigail didn't, either."

" What? " Karl managed at the last moment to hold the volume down to something their seniors might not notice, but the strength of the glare he bent upon Grigovakis more than compensated.