And the second salvo had been fired with an even higher initial acceleration. It was already overtaking the first launch, and Helen knew exactly what was about to happen.

Suckered, goddamn it! she thought. That's no heavy cruiser-it's a frigging battlecruiser pretending to be a heavy cruiser! Just like it was pretending to be damaged so I'd ignore it while I concentrated on swatting destroyers. And those are MDMs. MDMs launched with enough oomph on their first-stage drives to bring them all in as one, huge, time-on-target salvo.

"Helm, hard skew port! Electronics, I want two November-Charlie decoys-deploy them to starboard and high! Tactical, redesignate Bogey One as primary target!"

She heard her voice snapping the orders. They came sharp and clear, almost instantly, despite the consternation and self-reproach boiling through her. But even as she issued them, she knew it was too late.

At the range at which the enemy had fired, Hexapuma had a hundred and fifty seconds to respond before the incoming laser heads reached attack range and detonated. If she'd had another two minutes, maybe even one, the decoys Helen had ordered deployed— too damned late, damn it to hell! -might have had time to suck some of the fire away from their mother ship. As it was, they didn't.

Helen watched her plot and swore as the two Peep broadsides merged... and their combined acceleration suddenly leapt upward. That TO over there knew her job, damn it. She had more than enough range to reach her target, so she'd set her birds' first-stage drives to terminate and their second-stage drives to kick in as soon as her separate broadsides had matched base vectors. They would burn out much more rapidly, but the new settings would get them to Hexapuma even more quickly than d'Arezzo-and Helen-had estimated. They'd be coming in faster, as well. And even if she burned out the second stage completely, she'd still have the third. There'd be plenty of time left on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers.

And the bastards knew exactly what they were doing when they timed it, too, she thought viciously. We have to cut the downlinks to our attack birds to free up the tracking and datalinks to deal with the damned battlecruiser!

The offensive missiles would continue to home on the targeted destroyer, but without guidance from Hexapuma 's onboard sensors and computers, the odds of any of them attaining a hard lock went down drastically, especially at such an extended range. Which meant the destroyer was probably going to survive, as well.

"Third enemy launch!" d'Arezzo announced, as the still-rolling enemy battlecruiser continued to pump missiles towards Hexapuma , and Helen punched the arm of her command chair in frustration. Hexapuma was going to be hurt badly, even if she survived the opening double broadside. With battle damage -hammering her capabilities back, those follow-up salvos were going to be deadly.

D'Arezzo's counter-missiles zipped out, racing to meet the initial attack. There'd be time for only two defensive launches against it, and Helen bit her lip, watching the midshipman's fingers dance and fly. He was hunched slightly forward in his bridge chair with totally focused intensity, and she saw the light codes for his initial counter launch blinking from strobing amber to blood-red as the individual counter-missiles' internal seekers locked onto their designated targets. As each of his birds "saw" its own target, it dropped out of Hexapuma 's shipboard control queue, freeing additional tracking capacity and control downlinks for the counter-missiles in his second-tier launch.

He was good, she acknowledged. Not quite as good as she or Aikawa were, perhaps. But then, both of them had known before they ever reached the Island that they wanted to be tactical officers, generalists, whereas d'Arezzo's emphasis had been on the new EW systems. For an electronics snot, he was doing damned well.

Too bad it wasn't going to be well enough.

Peep missiles didn't carry as much ECM as Manticoran. Despite all the improvements in their technology since the last war, Haven was still playing catch-up in a lot of areas. But the ECM they did have was much better than it once had been, and d'Arezzo's plot jumped in the electronic equivalent of a gibbering fit as a complex orchestration of countermeasure emitters activated at the last possible moment.

Two— thirds of d'Arezzo's counter-missiles lost lock as the blizzard of jamming lashed at them. Again, it was all a matter of timing. If they'd had more time, the defensive missiles might have been able to adjust and reacquire. If the range at launch had been longer, the attacking missiles would have been forced to bring up their ECM sooner, because they would have been intercepted farther out. That would have given d'Arezzo's onboard systems and more powerful computers a longer look at the emitters' patterns. Would have allowed him to analyze them and refine his counter-missiles' solutions against them while they were still accepting downlinked control data from Hexapuma . Would have allowed him a third-tier launch.

But none of those things were going to happen, and the Havenite missiles broke past the first-tier counter-missiles almost completely unscathed. The second-tier birds did better, taking out fourteen of the attack missiles. But that left sixty-six still -incoming. Some of them had to be dedicated ECM platforms, with no laser heads, and CIC had identified half a dozen of them and designated them to be ignored by defensive fire. There had to be more of them, but there was no time to sort them out; every one of the other missiles had to be considered an attack bird, and Hexapuma 's last-ditch point defense lasers began to fire with computer-controlled desperation.

She nailed another thirty-two missiles in the fleeting seconds she had to engage them. Another eleven laser heads wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof or floor of her impeller wedge. Of the fifteen remaining potential attack missiles, seven turned out to be ECM platforms.

Eight weren't.

The universe heaved about Helen as eight laser heads detonated as one, lashing her ship with deadly bomb-pumped fury. The computers running the simulation had tied Auxiliary Control's grav plates into the sim. Now the midshipmen's senses insisted that AuxCon was twisting and bucking, that Hexapuma 's entire massive hull was flexing , as transfer energy blasted into her. The cruiser's protective sidewalls had bent and blunted most of the incoming lasers, and the ship's armor absorbed still more damage. But those missiles had come from a battlecruiser, not another cruiser. They were capital ship missiles, and Peep warheads were bigger and more powerful than Manticoran warheads as compensation for their less capable ECM and EW. No cruiser sidewall in the galaxy could have actually stopped them.

"Hits on Beta Three, Beta Five, and Alpha Two!" Ragnhild announced from Engineering, even as alarms shrilled. "Heavy casualties in Impeller One! We've lost Sidewall Two, Four, and Six! Radar Two and Lidar Two down! Direct hits on Graser Four and Graser Eight, and Missile Four, Six, and Ten are out of the net! Magazine Three is open to space! Heavy damage between Frame Three-Niner and Frame Six-Six!"

Hexapuma 's acceleration fell as enemy fire hammered her forward alpha and beta nodes. Her starboard sidewall fluctuated as more hits smashed the forward generators. Then it came back up-at greatly reduced strength-as Ragnhild spread the capacity of the surviving generators to cover the deadly gap. If not for the skew turn Helen had ordered, which had twisted Hexapuma up on her side relative to the Peep battlecruiser, interposing her impeller wedge on the direct attack bearing, it would have been even worse.

Not that what they had wasn't bad enough.

"Evasion pattern Delta-Qu bec-Seven!" she snapped. "Half-roll us inverted, Helm!"

"Delta— Qu bec-Seven, aye!" Senior Chief Waltham responded. "Rolling ship now!"

The maneuver whipped Hexapuma 's wounded starboard side away from the enemy. It turned her impeller wedge away from the maximum protective angle, but it brought her undamaged port broadside to bear and put the weakened sidewall farther away, made it a harder target. The decoys were fully on-line now, too. That might make a difference...

And, Helen thought grimly, our starboard sensors have been shot to shit. At least this way we can see the bastards!

D'Arezzo sent a double broadside of his own roaring off towards the enemy. It crossed the enemy's second broadside seconds after launch, and the plot was a seething confusion of incoming and outgoing missile wedges cutting holes in Hexapuma 's sensor coverage like old-fashioned gunsmoke, more counter-missiles stabbing into the Peep's massive attack wave, laser clusters firing furiously, and then-

AuxCon heaved madly one last time, and every light went out.

The absolute blackness lingered for the prescribed fifteen seconds. Then the master plot came back up, and two blood-red words floated in the darkness before them like a disembodied curse.

"SIMULATION OVER," they said.

"Be seated, Ladies and Gentlemen," Abigail Hearns said, and the midshipmen sat back down in the briefing room chairs from which they'd risen as she entered the compartment.

She walked briskly across to the head of the table and took her own seat, then keyed her terminal on-line. She glanced once at the notes it displayed, then looked up with a faint smile.

"That could have gone better," she observed, and Helen writhed mentally at the stupendous understatement of that mild sentence. She hadn't been hammered that brutally in a simulation since her second form. An ignoble part of her wanted to blame her command team. Especially, she realized with a flicker of guilt, her tactical officer. But however tempting that might be, it would have been a lie.

"Ms. Zilwicki," Abigail said, looking at her calmly, "would you care to comment on what you think went wrong?"

The younger woman visibly squared her shoulders, but that was the only outward sign she allowed of the intense frustration Abigail knew she must be feeling at this moment.

"I made a poor initial tactical assessment, Ma'am," she said crisply. "I failed to properly appreciate the actual composition of the opposition force and based my tactics on my incorrect understanding of the enemy's capabilities. I also failed to realize the enemy flagship was only simulating impeller damage. Worse, I allowed my initial errors to affect my interpretation of the enemy's actual intentions."