TGoaW-103

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==Chapter 103 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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The watch was an Neuvo-antique...
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...made of brass and clockwork. Elizabeth wound it once a day, and checked its setting twice a day. The primary benefit, was emotional, but also pragmatic. In the brief period after a jump, the chronometers have to reset, computers are down and manual instruments-especially instruments that are unaffected by EM flux or electromagnetic pulse, gives a certain advantage over waiting for the digital instruments to re-synch on the shipboard network.
Every Coast Guard crew has one, just as every Coast Guard ship has rotational calculators and what are effectively slide-rules in addition to paper charts, and every rated Navigator knows how to use those, with the telescopes and other analog instruments, to plot position and velocity.
"They're banging with Radar."
She nodded at the report, "Keep us cold for now, I want to see their idea of a search pattern."
At just reaching sixteen next week, Elizabeth Ngo had spent half her life learning from the most advanced naval mind in human history-the SLS Tabiranth. She knew SLDF doctrine, and the revised Kowloonese doctrine developed by Tabby and Li by heart, she had the best chance of winning possible with a veteran crew in a veteran patrol...
But smart people try not to underestimate their opponents, and Liz was no dummy-she wanted to see what the Clanners were doing, especially since they were confident enough to use the same kind of ships she was-to even demand to use them.
"Lead ship's venting atmo. I think that one's Cooper." she observed.
The Snow Raven crewed vessels had fallen into a traditional SLDF boxed-search pattern-a method developed by the Terran Hegemony centuries before the Reunification War.
"Huh...that's bait." she mused aloud. "RTO, send to the rest of the Patrol, Wing Pairs, keep thrust profiles minimum, wolfpack pattern two."
"Ayeh, Mum."
Low-powered lasers flashed from turret, to a receptor on the next ship, more reliable than tight-beam if you know where to aim it, much harder to pick up with detectors.
It's a patience game now, watching the opposition to see what they are going to do, so you can turn it on them, but Liz had possibilities, and patterns, wheeling in her mind.
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103