Take a solution to the Brownian Movement problem; add everything that is known about spatial strategy; stir well with the enemy's probable interpretation of the signals from the torpedoes—and hope like hell.
The first ingredient is relatively easy to determine, the second very much less so, and the third is almost pure intuition.
Figures began to pop up on the screen. The FCO watched them, unmoving, his face a rigid mask. Then suddenly, he began to punch data into the torpedo-firing robots.
Roysland narrowed his eyes as he watched. The aJ projectors didn't require that much computation. If the aJ's were fired now, the Enlissa ship wouldn't have a chance to fire. And yet, statistics showed that—
Why?
The FCO's masklike face began to acquire a sheen of perspiration in the glowing lights of the control room as he watched the screen and punched methodically at the fire control board. It was work that no robot could do; it required the shrewdness, intuition, and foresightedness that is a peculiar quality of the human mind.
Without warning, the FCO jabbed violently at the white stud that stood at the edge of his panel. He jerked his finger off, and his hand seemed to freeze for a second. He had done the irrevocable; he had fired every torpedo in the ship.
The X-69 now possessed no armament except the aJ guns.
The first volley of screenbusters left the ship and slammed suddenly into the ultravelocity that only an unmanned torpedo is capable of. Even an antiacceleration field isn't one hundred per cent perfect. In no-space drive, a ship can accelerate at the spatial equivalent of better than a hundred thousand gravities without hurting the crew. But the tremendous acceleration of a war torpedo would crush any human body to a monomolecular film.