“Would you happen to know why you screwed up?” she asked now, holding the pointer across her body in both hands.

“I’m still trying to track it down, Skipper,” Ashford replied. “It looks like we hit a glitch in the tac computer programming. We’re pulling the code to run comparisons against the master files just in case, but at this point, my best bet is human error—mine, I’m afraid—on the input from one of the post-launch mission updates. Kelly was busy running an acceleration recompute when the update for this particular maneuver came in, so I took over the computer and input the change. And I must’ve gotten it wrong, because when we hit the way point for the turn-in, the computers turned us one-eighty in the opposite direction.”

“With this result,” Harmon agreed, and nodded.

Commander McGyver, effectively her chief of staff (although The Book hadn’t yet decided whether or not a LAC wing’s commander was supposed to have a staff—officially) keyed the holo back into movement at the unspoken order. Everyone watched Ashford’s section turn directly away from Minotaur… at which point every LAC in it instantly flashed a lurid crimson as they exposed the after aspects of their wedges to the carrier and the point defense laser clusters playing the parts of broadside lasers and grasers took the “up the kilt” shots and blew them away. McGyver hit the freeze key again, stopping all motion, and the “dead” LACs hung in the display like drops of fresh blood.

“Had this been an actual attack, rather than a training exercise,” Harmon observed dryly, “the consequences of this little error would have been rather permanent. The good news is that it wouldn’t have hurt a bit; the bad news is that that’s only because every one of Commander Ashford’s people would have been dead before they knew it. We can not have something like this happen to us on an actual op, ladies and gentlemen.”

She held their eyes, her own stern, until every head had nodded. Then her gaze softened as she looked back at Ashford.

“For the record,” she told him, “Commander McGyver, Commander Stackowitz and I have all reviewed the chips, and your theory about what happened makes sense. It was a long session, and we threw a lot of updates and mission profile plan changes at you, too. We probably wouldn’t have to make anywhere near that many changes to the canned profile in a real op.”

One or two people nodded again. Training operations were almost always harder—well, aside from the adrenaline rush, the terror, and the dying—than real attack missions. Which only made sense. In actual combat operations, you would almost always carry out only a single attack per launch—assuming that everything went right and you actually found the enemy at all. But on training flights, you were likely to be tasked with several different “attacks” in a single sortie, and the people who’d planned your mission profiles could be counted on to spend at least some of their time throwing in surprise elements specifically designed to screw things up as severely as possible at the least opportune moment.