Everyone understood why that was, just as they understood that the fact that Harmon and her wing command staff were building an entire doctrinal concept from the ground up required her to be even more ruthless than usual. Still, one or two of her section and squadron leaders had been heard to lament the fact that she’d added Ernest Takahashi to her mission planners. Almost everyone liked the cocky young ensign, but his reputation had preceded him. The story of his modifications to the Kreskin Field flight simulators had put all of them on their guards… which had proved an unfortunately foresighted reaction.

Jacquelyn Harmon knew exactly what the officers before her were thinking, and she hid an internal smile. Lieutenant Commander Ashford was going to be moderately livid when he and his people finally did track down the problem, she thought. Assuming that they recognized how it had happened when they found it. And, after all, finding it was another part of their exercise mission, even if they hadn’t known that when they started looking, and it would be interesting to see if they went the step further to figuring out the “how” and the “why” as well as the “what.” Although, she reminded herself, Ernest was too sneaky to make figuring out what had happened easy. She glanced at the bland-faced ensign, shook her head mentally, and then looked away.

So young and innocent looking for such a depraved soul, she thought cheerfully. And the fact that he and PO Smith served together in Leutzen didn’t hurt, now did it? But I do want to see Ashford’s reaction if he ever realizes I had his own section chief slip a deliberately rigged modification into his original mission download.

Not that recognizing that it had been deliberate was going to be easy. The file corruption which had transposed Ashford’s perfectly correct heading change when he punched it in, while freakish, looked exactly like something that could have happened accidentally. Bruce McGyver had bet her five bucks Ashford’s crew would never realize they’d been snookered, but one reason Harmon liked Ashford (though she wasn’t about to tell him so) was that he was not only smart but as thorough as they came. If anybody was likely to realize he’d been had, Ashford was the one… and if he did, he was going to inherit one of the empty squadron commander slots as a reward. But playing with his head to evaluate him for promotion had been only a secondary objective of the exercise, she reminded herself, and cleared her throat.

“Whatever the cause of the problem, however,” she went on, “let’s look at the consequences, shall we?” She nodded to McGyver again, and someone groaned aloud as the sudden chink in the LACs’ attack plan opened the door to a cascade of steadily accelerating miscues by other squadron and section COs… none of whom had the excuse that Harmon and Takahashi had jiggered their software.

And that had been the real point of her devious machinations, Harmon thought, watching the carefully orchestrated strike disintegrate into chaos, because one thing was damned sure. The first law of war was still Murphy’s, and units as fragile as LACs had better learn to show it even more respect than anyone else.