by David Poyer
* * *
SHE was actually enjoying herself by the time she got to CIC. Petty Officer Eastwood was running an intercept scenario, but paused it for the inspection. Cheryl moved through here quickly, since she didn’t want to hold up the drill. After nearly a year at war the space seemed worn already. The seat covers were faded. The decks were scuffed, especially beneath the consoles, where booted feet had rested 24/7. But everything seemed to have been freshly swept and free of dust. The low hum of ventilating fans crooned like a lullaby.
She’d fought her war from here. She paused at the command desk, where her ass had been planted for so many weary hours, interspersed with minutes of pure terror. Hard to believe the second Pacific war, the Third World War, whatever they were going to call it in the history books, might really be over, despite the caveats she’d given the crew.
One large screen display had the current fused picture up. She glanced at the VR helmet in its rack, and shuddered. She’d spent enough time with her head stuck in that thing, thank you.
The screen showed Russia to the west: the rugged, mountainous Asian coastline the tsars had wrested from the Manchu emperors two centuries before. Sparsely populated, and economically nearly worthless, but somehow that never stopped the Russians from wanting more. To the south stretched Hokkaido, northernmost of the main islands of Japan.
Again, staring at the screen and scratching absently at her neck, she pondered what Downie, the compartment cleaner, had said. A daydream, probably, made up from the crew’s homesick longings. But sometimes scuttlebutt was more like foresight than fantasy.
If this really did turn out to be a lasting peace …
Then a massive demobilization was certainly in the cards. Back home, Congress was debating the future. Of the Pacific, and thus, the future of the Navy. With Europe’s revitalization, the country now maintained only a token presence in the Atlantic and Med, except for the battle groups maintaining the chokehold on Iran, the sole remaining holdout of the Opposed Powers.
Fleet had sounded her out about participating in a congressionally mandated force-structure study. Someone had to decide what fleet units would be kept on, and which would be returned to mothballs or even scrapped. Getting the Navy’s views on record, at least, before Congress tied on a blindfold and started wielding a blunt machete.
Postwar cuts tended to be murderous. The reactivated units, Spruances, Perrys, Los Angeleses, and Ticonderogas pulled from mothballs to pad out numbers at the low end of the warfighting spectrum, would go first, scrapped or sold off to allies. Ditto the converted merchantmen that had served as jeep carriers and missile barges. They’d either be sold or returned to their peacetime roles. Savo and the others of her class would probably survive. But the Early Bird had reported a proposal to shrink the fleet from wartime’s 670 active units down to fewer than 200, not counting the autonomous Hunters. And there were already questions about whether the carriers had paid their way in this war.
But you couldn’t design a fleet in a strategic or budgetary vacuum. They’d have to examine cost, tactical doctrine, forward-presence models, and national strategy to see what the Navy would look like going forward.
“Resume the drill, Captain?” Eastwood murmured, at her side.
Cheryl masked a yawn with a gloved hand, and nodded.
* * *
SHE ended her inspection on the bridge. Here, so many decks up she’d taken an elevator to reach it, the untenanted air lay quiet. These days a warship was conned from a citadel far belowdecks. The remaining humans were sealed from the outside air, cocooned like fragile Delftware in armor and shock mounting. The pilothouse was only manned up leaving or returning to port.
The next class of ships might not have a bridge at all. The space was becoming a vestigial appendage, like the cockpit on a submarine sail. Eventually it might pass out of physical existence entirely. Like the “quarterdeck,” which had been a real location in the age of sail, but now existed only as a ceremonial fiction, floating wherever the officer of the deck was stationed.
All was change. Everything remained in flux. And never more so than in the afterlight of a disastrous war.
Musing on that, she let herself out onto the little balconylike wing. Opened her arms wide and stretched, welcoming the cool of the open air after a whole morning spent inside. Far below, four Hunter autonomous drones were rafted alongside. Two autonomous Orca submarines were moored outboard of them. A few technicians in blue coveralls clambered about them, and umbilicals snaked down, feeding them shoreside power and updating their artificial brains.
Yeah, that might be the future.
The next generation of warships might go to sea without berthing areas, mess decks, crew’s lounges, barbershops, ship’s stores, laundries, sick bays … Without any humans aboard at all, fighting units could be a lot smaller. Probably cheaper, too. And if the worst happened, no one would need to explain things to grieving families …
Past the black whalelike Orcas, Soya Bay opened out, blue and wind-ruffled, barriered only by a breakwater. A saucer-shaped security drone skated slowly along the horizon, scanning down to the seabed with magnetic sensors and radar. A low sun glittered to the east. Past that lay thirty miles of dark sapphire sea, then Sakhalin … Russian territory.
During the war the Japanese had hastily built and dredged Wakkanai, originally a small commercial port, into a modest naval base and logistics hub. Right now it mainly supported her own task force, plus the Japanese northern squadron. The base was strategically located, though requiring a difficult sea detail, and there wasn’t really enough pier space to accommodate more than two cruiser/destroyer-size units at a time. A military airstrip ten miles to the south accommodated fifteen JSDF fighters and a Patriot battery.
She wandered back into what was still called the chartroom, though there were no longer paper charts. Well, only a few as final backup, rolled tightly and stowed in a rack in the overhead. As she filched one down and unscrolled it, smoothing it out on the table, a few dust motes sprang free, sparkling in the sunlight. The chart they’d used for Operation Chromite, the decapitation strike on North Korea.
Her note taker cleared his throat behind her. Cheryl flinched; she’d forgotten he was still following her. “Yeoman. What is it?”
“Are we done, ma’am? Want me to clean up these notes, put ’em up on the LAN?”
“Sure. Yes, thank you. We’re done.”
He started to turn away, but lingered. “So … what happens next, Skipper?”
Apparently she and Downie weren’t the only ones pondering possible futures. “Next? We transition to peacetime steaming, I guess.”
“Um, well, I heard we’re headed back. To Guam, then San Diego. Ma’am.”
“I heard that too. But it’s just a rumor, Yeoman. I haven’t gotten anything official.”
He looked quickly away, as if he knew better, and she felt a flash of annoyance. No; anger. Did they think she was hiding things from them? “I have the same questions as everyone else, believe me,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, casual, workaday. “As soon as I know something concrete, I’ll pass it to everyone over the 1MC.”
Trying not to show what she felt … as she so often had to do. Smiling when she didn’t want to smile. Feigning confidence when she was scared shitless. Acting as if she knew what she was doing, when she was really making it all up as she went along half the time. Finding a secluded corner to scratch furiously at her butt crack, when the spreading itch threatened to drive her crazy.
Well, now that the war was over, maybe there’d be less of all of that. If the fucking itching, “psychogenic pruritus,” as one shore- side doctor had called it, really was her body’s response to sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, terror—
The 1MC snapped on. “Commanding officer, please contact the XO in the wardroom,” it stated.
Her hand went to her belt, for her radio. But no. Maybe it would be better to … She crossed with swift strides to her command chair. Hit the 2
1MC. “This is the captain. XO there?”
“Wait one, ma’am … Here he is.”
“Commander?”
“Skipper? Where are you?” Mills’s voice.
“Bridge. Finishing the inspection. What’s going on?”
“Flash message. I’ll send a runner, but can you log on up there, come up on high side nanochat, Fleet command?”
“On it.” She told her terminal, “This is Captain Staurulakis. Alice, log me on.”
“Logging on, Skipper,” said AALIS, the ship’s command computer.
Task Force satellite chat unscrolled on the screen. She found the latest message. From Fleet.
Bootstrap: To Tangler
FLASH FLASH FLASH
Forces from Russian Federation EMD preparing to occupy portions of eastern Heilongjiang and possibly port of Dalian. Russian Pacific Fleet at enhanced readiness for sortie en route Sea of Japan. Commence reconstitute Sea of Okhotsk task force 73.3 rdvu ASAP PIM as per TG Cdr directs. Prepare to intercept. Dirlauth. Enders
A chill harrowed her spine. “Bootstrap,” the message initiator, was Seventh Fleet. Dick Enders was its J-3, the operations deputy. Shorn of its acronyms, and supplied with what she could infer, the message directed her to reassemble her scattered task force and prepare for battle forthwith. So much for a lasting peace … She dictated a quick acknowledgment, then signed off.
“Heilongjiang,” she muttered. “Alice, where’s that? Heilongjiang? And where and what is Dalian?”
The map the AI brought up on the screen outlined an awkwardly shaped tongue of China stuck out tauntingly into Russian territory north of Vladivostok. When she toggled to overhead imagery, the terrain looked mountainous and barren in the west, flatter and probably more productive toward the coast. But Russia cupped it, and had stationed heavy forces in eastern Siberia throughout the war, despite Moscow’s role supplying Zhang’s regime with weaponry, energy, and diplomatic cover.
The information that came up on the other name froze her to ice where she stood. Dalian was a port city with an excellent harbor. It lay at the north end of the Yellow Sea, west of the Korean Peninsula. The city had been Russia’s before, as Port Arthur, the eastern terminus of the Manchurian Railway. The Russians had administered it again, briefly, after World War II.
As a forward base in north China once again, and as an ice-free port on the Pacific, it would be strategically located to put naval pressure on Japan and a reunified Korea.
Already Moscow was moving its chess pieces forward. Probing the board for weakness.
Just as they’d taken advantage of China every time in history it had suffered.
She touched a knuckle to her lips, considering. Her task force had been built around Savo Island, two Japanese Aegis destroyers, Chokai and Ashigara, and one modern Korean unit, Jeonnam. She had four submarines, Arkansas, Idaho, Guam, and John Warner and Utah, replacing the lost Guam.
Antisubmarine defense … Her surface escorts were two missile frigates, Goodrich and Montesano. The unmanned Hunters moored alongside, USV-34, -20, -7, and -16, and Flight One Orcas USS-4 and -13, would serve for early warning. As would her manned attack subs, which she would post farther north.
As for air defense … She had helicopters and onboard drones, but no carrier air on call. Four Aegis units should be able to fight off an air attack, though, and the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force should be standing by.
If, that is, Japan felt like confronting the Russians on behalf of the Chinese. Which might not seem in their national interest, considering their recent losses in the battles to recover the Ryukyus. Japan had so few young people, and robots couldn’t do all the fighting.
No. She’d have to have carrier support. Something to ask for, urgently, right now, before getting under way.
She scratched under her arms, staring sightlessly down on the forecastle, where her undermanned First Division people were overhauling the lifelines. And what about her crew? They expected to go home. How would they take going to sea again? Possibly, going into battle, against a new enemy?
The 21MC lit again. Mills’s voice again. “Captain? We went to GQ down here on a sailing plan. Contacted Chokai and Ashigara. Jeonnam, we can’t reach. Goodrich and Montesano will get under way from Sasebo. Arkansas and Utah are pierside in Pusan; they can be under way in four hours. Permission to get them to sea?”
“Granted. What do you suggest as a rendezvous point?”
“Chief Van Gogh advises we head everybody to join up east of Tsushima. In the Korea Strait. That way if the Pacific Fleet comes down the Sea of Japan, we’ll be in a blocking position.”
She debated the pros and cons, but only briefly. Higher would send more specific orders. “Make it so. But set the rendezvous for farther north—around latitude forty. Give us more sea room. Present a less concentrated target.”
The exec rogered and signed off.
She let herself out on the wing, and leaned on the splinter shield again. Below, on the decks of the Hunters, the indolent movements of the maintainers were already giving way to bustle and shouts. The itching flamed like maddening fire, at her armpits, neck, scalp. She closed her eyes, sagging into the steel. Suddenly wishing all she had to worry about was paperwork and inspections and training schedules. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck it to hell … they had to. They just had to do it.”
Maybe it wasn’t peace after all.
But she wasn’t really sure she could stand doing war all over again.
4
USNS Mercy, T-AH-19 The South China Sea
HIS chest is cast of solid pain. Each breath hurts as it’s pulled into his lungs, but he’s not taking those breaths.
Horror. Horror …
Someone has jammed a sharp stick down his throat. His eyes stream tears. Something hard slurps noisily down by his jaw, sucking drool from his scorched mouth.
Huge spidery shapes shift within the smoke, striding about. They cut writhing mucus-yellow shadows from the bloody sun. The gas-warning alarm in his mask chirrups, chirrups. A formation of silvery disks whir over a hundred feet up. He searches desperately for cover, but they hum on inland, ignoring his squad. The big Indonesian, the guy with the Javelin launcher, keeps asking a question he doesn’t understand. Far above, contrails lacerate the sky like scars.
Confused. Everything so pinche confused …
The short, dark-haired Marine only very slowly becomes aware he is not actually on the battlefield. That just now he seems to be lying motionless in a soft bunk. Unless this too is just a dream, within a dream. And that some machine is chuffing and clicking beside his head.
His name … it’s not … got it. It’s Hector. Hector Ramos.
But where the fuck is he?
He’s aboard ship, maybe? Still waiting to hit the beach? Hard to tell. But then, where’s his weapon? He’s a machine gunner. He remembers that perfectly clearly, though everything else is dim, dreamlike, muddled. The solid weight of the weapon. The king of the battlefield. The king fucks the queen … Who said that, who yelled it into his ear, on a hot day, in a hot wind choked with bitter dust … He can’t remember. It slides away, vanishes, maybe a memory, maybe a dream, maybe a nightmare.
Groans come from around him. The thing, the machine, chuffs and clicks, on and on. When he pries crusted lids painfully open at last the light is a blue dim. He can’t see much, and his head doesn’t seem to want to turn.
But there really is something jammed deep in his throat. Something hard. A bone, sticking far down his throat—
He raises himself on one arm, clawing at it. Only his arm doesn’t move. He fights with all his strength to lift a hand and jerk the foreign thing out. The bone. The stick.
But he can’t move.
Sheer terror shakes him. He’s been … taken over by some other being. A demon. An alien. He has to push it off, and get this choking, hard thing out of his chest. But he can’t move. He can’t move.
A light flashes near his head. Something hard is pinching his
ear. He fights to breathe, to struggle, but he can’t. The device chuffs and clicks. He can feel his chest rising and falling in sync with the labored noise. His lungs, inflating and deflating. But he has no control over his own breath. No control over anything. It’s insane, it can’t be real. The thing keeps puffing and clicking by his head, laboring, regular, maddening.
Oh Jesus oh God get this thing out of my throat.
Ayudarme, ayudarme.
Jesus God help me.
But Jesus doesn’t come.
His brain spins dizzily down a twisting rathole of panic. Back to the beach. Back to the battlefield. Back.
He welcomes it now: the bloody sun, the mucus-yellow shadows, even the invigorating terror as the shapes shift in the murk ahead, around, behind them. At least here, he can move! He signals the squad forward, and trots toward the buildings in the distance.
Yet still, beside his head, something chuffs and wheezes, on and on.
* * *
A dark shape looms over Hector. It is the nightmare terror. His demon. He comes awake terrified all over again, struggling to move, but unable to. That’s the worst thing. He can’t fucking move.
The shadow speaks, this time in a woman’s voice, “Sergeant Ramos? It’s okay. You got to calm down, all right? Or we’re gonna have to put you out again.”
He puts a hand to his throat, gagging. Only his hand won’t. His eyes water. The blue light. He jerks his eyeballs from side to side, trying to signal whoever this is. Something sharp is burning in his dick. Ya vale madre, he’d say, if he could say anything.
“Sergeant Ramos, I’m your nurse. Nurse Donovan. We had to put a tube down into your lungs, to let a machine help you breathe. Then we had to give you something so you wouldn’t keep trying to pull it out. That’s why you can’t move. It’s temporary. A drug-induced paralysis. But everything’s going to be all right. We’ve got you. We’re taking care of you. Do you understand? Blink for me if you understand. Please.”
