"Hoooo, boy!" Ashford shook his head in sympathy... and sudden wariness. "The Old Lady's always been on the sneaky side, but this is the first time she ever did something like that. No warning at all?"
"None," Tremaine replied with a sort of morbid pride. "Of course, as she was happy to point out afterward, not a one of us—including me—ever bothered to make a specific, visual confirmation on the targets. We trusted our sensors, instead, and we shouldn't have relied solely on them. After all, she did warn us that we were going up against Manticoran 'merchies,' so someone in the wing should have reflected on what that meant in terms of EW upgrades for any possible escorts she hadn't warned us about. We didn't. And before you ask, yes, I specifically got her permission to show this to you. Permission, I might add, which I received with somewhat mixed emotions."
"Mixed?" Ashford looked up from the display and crooked an eyebrow.
"Well, misery loves company, Stew. It was embarrassing as hell to get handed my head this way, and I think I would have taken a certain comfort from having it happen to all the rest of you, too." Ashford chuckled, and Tremaine's eyes twinkled as he went on. "But then I thought about it, and something else occurred to me. If she went to such lengths to swat my wing in such an abundantly nasty way, and if she doesn't mind if I warn you about how she did it ahead of time, then what does that say about the nastiness she must have in mind to surprise you? I mean, after all, you're forewarned now, so she's going to have to come up with something really wicked for you, don't you think?"
His smile was beatific, but Ashford's vanished abruptly. His expression was absolutely blank for several heartbeats, and then he glared at Tremaine.
"You are a sick, sick man, Commander Tremaine."
"Guilty as charged. But I'll be looking forward to seeing what she does to you."
"Yeah? Well this is all your fault anyway, you know."
"My fault? And just how do you figure that? I'm the one she did it to first!"
"Uh-huh. But she wasn't doing this kind of stuff at all before she went back to Saganami Island for that conference last week. You and I both know who she spent all that time conferring with, now don't we? And if not for you and those other jokers on Hades, Duchess Harrington wouldn't have been available to help her think up this sort of thing, now would she?"
"Um." Tremaine scratched an eyebrow. "You know, you're right. I hadn't thought about it, but this is exactly the sort of thing Lady Harrington would've done. Heck, I've seen her do it, for that matter!" He gazed back down at the display for several seconds, then nodded. "And I know exactly why she and Admiral Truman did it, too."
"Naturally evil and sadistic natures?" Ashford suggested, and Tremaine laughed.
"Hardly. Nope, they wanted to remind me—all of us, actually, because I'm sure this was only the first whack—just how fragile these birds are. I figure we can mix it up with screening units, including battlecruisers, at just about any range, and we can probably go in against battleships with a good chance of success. But against proper ships of the wall?" He shook his head. "Unless we've got an absolutely overwhelming numerical advantage, there's no way we could realistically hope to take out a dreadnought or a superdreadnought. And even then, there'd be an awful lot of empty bunks in flight crew territory afterward! Which is one of the points they wanted to make."
"One of the points?" Ashford looked at him quizzically, and Tremaine shrugged.
"Yep. I feel confident that we'll be hearing about several others when the Admiral drops by for our debrief, but I can already tell you what at least one of them will be." He paused, and Ashford made a little "go on" gesture. "Lady Harrington's said it a million times, Stew: there are very few true 'surprises' in naval combat. 'Surprise' is what happens when someone's seen something all along... and thought it was something else. Which is a pretty fair description of what happened here, don't you think?"
"Yeah, I suppose it is," Ashford said after a moment. "Then again, how likely is it that Peep ECM could fool us at that short a range?"
"I don't know. Maybe not very... but it'd be even less likely if we were watching for it, now wouldn't it? And come to think of it, I know at least one Peep tac witch who probably could fool us."
Ashford looked up from the display, eyes bright with curiosity, but he reined himself in quickly. Tremaine could almost feel the intensity with which the captain longed to ask him just which Peep tactical officer he'd managed to strike up a personal acquaintance with. But he didn't ask... and Tremaine chose not to tell him. In fact, he rather regretted having said a thing about it. Like the other survivors from Prince Adrian, he'd made a point of not saying a word to anyone about the efforts Lester Tourville and Shannon Foraker had made to see to it that they were treated decently. By now, ONI knew Tourville was one of the Peep admirals who'd trounced the Allies so severely in Esther McQueen's offensive, and it looked like Foraker was still his tac officer. Given that, Tremaine supposed it would have made sense, in a cold-blooded, calculating sort of way, to see if they couldn't convince State Security to shoot the two of them. But the survivors had decided, individually and without discussion or debate, to keep their mouths shut. The newsies had crawled all over every escapee from Hell they could find—indeed, Scotty was amazed that Dame Honor and Nimitz (or Andrew LaFollet) hadn't killed or even crippled a single reporter, given how relentlessly they'd hounded "the Salamander"—but not one report had mentioned Tourville or Foraker.
"In any case, it won't hurt a bit for us to be on guard against this kind of thing," he said after a moment, nodding at the display. "And truth to tell, I'll bet she and the Admiral saw it as an opportunity to work on anti-LAC tactics of their own."
"You don't really think the Peeps are going to be able to match our birds, do you?" Ashford failed to keep the incredulity entirely out of his voice, and Tremaine chuckled.
"Not anytime soon, no. On the other hand, don't get too uppity about the differences in our hardware. I had an opportunity to look at a lot of their stuff up close and personal, and it's not as bad as you might think. Not as good as ours, in most cases, but better than most of our people seem to assume." He paused, then grimaced. "Well, better than I'd ever assumed, anyway, and I doubt I was unique."
"Then how come they keep getting their ears pinned back?"
"I said their stuff wasn't as good as ours... but most of it's probably as good as anything anyone else has. Their real problem is that they don't know how to get the best out of what they've already got. Their software sucks, for instance, and most of their maintenance is done by commissioned personnel, not petty officers and ratings. Oh—" Tremaine waved both hands "—they don't have anything like the FTL com, and they haven't cracked the new compensators, the new beta nodes, or any of that stuff. But look at their missile pods. They're not as good as ours, but they go for a brute force approach to put enough extra warheads into a salvo to pretty much even the odds. And think about Ghost Rider. It's going to be years before they can match our new remote EW capability, but if they wanted to accept bigger launchers and lower missile load-outs, they could probably match the extended range capabilities of Ghost Rider's offensive side. Heck, build the suckers big enough, and they could do it with off-the-shelf components, Stew!"