Which was the reason he was the one running the squadrons through their paces while Tremaine and Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness managed the training scenario.

Unlike the morning’s two previous sessions, this was an all up exercise, with live hardware, not simply a simulation. The task force was currently transiting between two grav waves under impeller drive, which meant that ships without Warshawski sails—like LACs—could maneuver without being destroyed the instant they left their hanger bays. It also put a maximum limit on the time window for the exercise, since the hyper-capable ships would be entering the next grav wave in a tiny bit over three hours from now.

Now, as Tremaine watched, the battlecruiser squadron Admiral McKeon had detached from his screen to play the aggressor’s role altered course to head directly towards the LACs which were obviously deploying to attack them. At the same time, the clear, clean icons which had represented them on PriFly’s master plot disappeared into a mushy haze of jamming and decoys.

“Bet Commander Baker didn’t much like that, Skipper,” Harkness observed with a nasty grin, and Tremaine chuckled.

“I did warn him we’d arranged a few surprises,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but I bet he never figured you’d let Admiral Atwater’s squadron turn Ghost Rider loose on him!”

“It’s not my fault he wasn’t around when Dame Alice did the same thing to us,” Tremaine shot back. “And just because the Peeps don’t have anything to match Ghost Rider doesn’t mean the Andies haven’t come up with something a lot closer to it than we’d like.”

“No argument there, Skip,” Harkness agreed in a much more serious tone. Although he was only a chief warrant officer, he was holding down a lieutenant commander’s duty slot himself, as Werewolf’s senior LAC flight engineer. That made him effectively the chief electronics technician and ordnance officer for the entire task force’s carrier force. As such he had clearance for access to all of the official ONI briefings on the situation in Silesia, and to say he’d been less than impressed by their thoroughness would have been a masterpiece of understatement.

“Matter of fact,” he went on after a moment, watching Baker’s carefully orchestrated maneuver disintegrate into apparent mass confusion as he and his tac officers tried to compensate for the sudden loss of at least eighty-five percent of their sensor capabilities, “I picked up on something yesterday that I meant to mention to you, Sir.”

“Like what?” Tremaine asked, never taking his eyes from the display’s icons. The seeming confusion was settling down into a revised attack pattern with a speed and precision which surprised him pleasantly. It was obvious that the sudden increase in his targets’ electronic warfare capabilities had come as a complete surprise to Baker, exactly as Tremaine had intended, but the commander hadn’t panicked. He’d realized he still had time before he entered the battlecruisers’ engagement envelope, and he was adopting a rather more defensive formation, with the missile-armed Ferrets moving up to screen the energy-heavy Shrikes with their own decoys and jammers. Obviously he’d reached the same conclusion Tremaine would have in his place; against such capable EW, he was going to have to get in close with the Shrikes’ grasers rather than relying on a missile engagement, and the Ferrets’ electronic warfare birds were his best chance to do that.