Of course, she probably thought she was facing only ships of the wall, too.

· · • · ·

“Another message from the COLAC, Skipper,” Chief Petty Officer Lawrence announced. Flanagan turned her command chair to face Switchblade’s com officer and waved one hand in an unspoken “tell me” command. She tried very hard not to let the gesture radiate her disgust, but she knew she’d failed.

“Captain al-Salil instructs all Shrike commanders to remember to close to minimum range before firing,” Lawrence said as expressionlessly as possible.

“Acknowledge,” Flanagan replied, and this time she didn’t bother with concealing her emotions. It wasn’t as if it was going to matter very much longer, and she knew her entire squadron must be as disgusted as she was. Both LAC groups had been accelerating steadily to meet the oncoming Peeps for over two hours. They were less than forty minutes from intercept, and the idiot was still sending fatuous, stupid “reminders” instead of anything approaching useful attack orders.

She supposed, in fairness (although she had very little interest in being fair to al-Salil under the circumstances), that he had specified an attack plan… of sorts. Unfortunately, like the missile loads his LACs were carrying, Attack Plan Delta-Three, was purely generic, little more than a vague set of objectives and procedures. It had been obvious to Flanagan for months that neither al-Salil nor Schumacher had believed, even as the diplomatic situation worsened, that the Peeps would dare to attack Tequila. So neither of them had spent much time or effort thinking about serious defensive plans. All of their thinking had been directed towards maintaining “system security” against any purely local disorder or some sort of scouting foray or harassment the Peeps might have attempted with light forces. Delta-Three would probably have worked fairly well against a destroyer sweep, or a few flotillas of light cruisers. Even a battlecruiser squadron or two. Against what they actually faced, it was about as useful as a screen door on an airlock.

At least it looked as if the Peep commander must have missed almost as many classes in tactics as Flanagan’s superiors had, because her formation might have been purposely designed to actually let Delta-Three hurt her. Flanagan wasn’t certain what the Peep was thinking of, but the attack commander wasn’t making any effort to deploy her escorting units in the sort of anti-LAC defensive shell the RMN had devised in its own wargames. She was keeping all of her cruisers tucked in unreasonably tight. They’d be able to mass their energy fire effectively against the Shrikes as the LAC groups closed in for point blank energy attacks, but they were interfering with one another’s long-range sensor envelopes, and they were going to offer extremely vulnerable targets to the massed missile fire the Ferrets would be pumping out any minute now.

She watched the Peep icons change color on her own tactical repeater as al-Salil’s tactical officer designated missile targets. The escorting cruisers turned crimson, one by one, as the COLAC assigned a massive overkill to them. In some respects, it was an admission of despair, a concession that the cruisers were the only ships they had the firepower to kill, although Flanagan doubted that al-Salil would have admitted it. Delta-Three called for a converging attack, taking out the flank guards first, to clear a path for the graser-armed Shrikes to execute a minimum-range attack on the core of any enemy force. Which would have been all well and good if their targets had been battlecruisers, or even battleships. Against superdreadnoughts with their sidewalls up and their weapons on-line, the Shrikes would be impossibly lucky to inflict damage that was more than merely cosmetic.