by David Poyer
The problem was, her own enemy had already pinpointed her location, and probably her dispositions as well. The Russians had improved their overhead observation all through the war, augmented with nanosatellites nearly as advanced as the Allied MICE network.
“They’ve got to pretty much know exactly where we are,” she muttered to Chief Terranova.
The round childlike face of her lead sensor chief was unworried. “That’s gotta be good, Skipper. Right? When they see us parked smack in their way.” When Cheryl didn’t answer, Terranova added, “We going to the helmets? I gotta know, ta run the displays.”
She said reluctantly, “Uh, sure. I mean, yes.”
“You don’t much like that helmet, do you, Skipper? Wait’ll you see the new upgrade. Uploaded it yesterday. You’ll wanta live in there now.”
Cheryl half smiled but didn’t rise to the bait. She pulled the headgear down off the rack, adjusted her faded, threadbare olive-and-black shemagh for padding—it was about the only thing she had left from the old Savo, since most of her clothes and gear had gone down with the ship—and settled the heavy VR helmet down on her shoulders.
A moment of pinched dark, swimming with phosphenes. Then the world lit.
The screens swam before her eyes as she struggled to refocus. A stream of cool air caressed the back of her neck. The ship status readout glowed on. She could toggle through it to check every space, every system, and count the remaining weapons in her magazines.
She clicked past it to the battlespace display, and gasped. The Flight 8 software was so far past visual quality it seemed more vivid, more convincing, than reality itself.
She floated a hundred thousand feet up, looking down and across and around on 360 degrees of blue-green sea. Latitude and longitude lines crossed it, and the display instantly populated with altitude readouts when she blinked.
She blinked again, and the electromagnetic presentation appeared. Radar, radio, and microwave laser and data transmissions wavered, sheer slowly fluttering curtains of violet, cornflower, jade, indigo. Neutral, friendly, and hostile contacts were displayed as NATO symbols, though she could switch to video from drones, or even direct view when they were in line-of-sight range. The mirrors of Savo’s lasers doubled as powerful telescopes. When she glanced down, she looked through the hull, to a rugged, corrugated sea-bottom that wavered many fathoms down.
She cocked her head and her avatar rotated in the air. There was Savo, a blue JTDS symbol. She blinked and it transformed into real-time video. The cruiser was rolling, plowing through heavy, cream-topped seas the hard gray of wet steel. A wave rolled up her down-slanted bow, smashing apart as it hit a V-shaped shield, and Savo shuddered despite her massive size. White spray blew back over the laser mounts like gauzy veils as she slowly rolled upright again, plowing on.
Cheryl was viewing it through the lenses of a recon drone far above. And somewhere below, nestled within meters of steel and Kevlar armor, crouched a small, soft larva that was … herself?
And yet, not. Her old human self was no longer bound by its old senses. She’d left it miles behind, sitting motionless in a foam-contoured chair, hands lying lightly on the armrests.
Only the maddening itch below her armpits, both of them now, reminded her she was still mortal.
A voice in her ears murmured. Though not a human one. AALIS, her ship, was fused and integrated now with Sea Eagle, the tactical AI that would direct the battle once it started. “COMEX. COMEX,” it pronounced in tranquil, sexless tones.
And the exercise began.
* * *
THE fleets of 1905 had converged in line ahead, battleships and cruisers steaming like articulated trains. Togo had won by “crossing the T,” maneuvering to concentrate the whole weight of fire of his broadside-on line against one Russian ship at a time, as they charged toward him.
But since World War II, American task forces had transited and fought in concentric formations. The highest-value units—carriers and tankers—were nestled in the center. Cruisers and destroyers were stationed farther out, for antiaircraft defense. Beyond them, radar pickets reached out with electronic feelers to detect threats and localize targets. Aircraft had the job of searching even farther out, while beneath the waves submarines sanitized the line of advance, to guard against ambush.
That formation had had its advantages, when information was scarce and the outermost units served primarily as sensors, feeding information to a central decision maker. But now data could exist everywhere simultaneously. Each ship and plane was a node that shared information instantly with all other nodes. In other words, distributed operations.
Her formation now was anything but circular. And, really, nothing that would even have been recognizable as a formation to a commander from the twentieth century.
Cheryl hadn’t come up with this disposition herself. DEVGRUWEST served as the fleet’s capability development hub. AALIS had communicated with Sea Eagle, the Navy’s cloud-based AI there, which had in turn consulted with Battle Eagle, the overarching Allied strategic artificial intelligence.
After the mysterious demise of the Chinese AI, Jade Emperor, Battle Eagle had planned operations, fought back cyberattacks, and conducted its own crippling offensives in cyberspace. It had largely been responsible for winning the war, in the view of some pundits. Now, the op plan it had developed for Trident Junction included a tactical grid to connect the various nodes, plus backup data storage uplinked to satellites and downlinked to a surface-based comm chain. A way to connect the various ship and land-based AIs, to render tactical advice to the commander in real time.
The artificial intelligences had recommended a steaming formation unlike any she’d ever seen. Gliding effortlessly across the sky, her avatar looked down on a seemingly random mix of units large and small. Scattered across hundreds of square miles of sea, it hardly seemed organized at all. If anything, it was more like a random scattering, a crushable foam filled with far too much empty space.
Since the Japanese wouldn’t be joining, her task force would consist of Savo Island and one single modern Korean unit, Jeonnam, currently en route from Pusan. She had four submarines, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah, and John Warner. Sea Eagle had placed three subs north of Savo, with Utah behind Cheryl, in the approach from the East China Sea. Which made sense, to guard against any attacks from behind. Her surface escorts consisted of two wartime-construction Improved Burke–class destroyers, Dixie Kiefer and Christos Katsetos, and three Wartime Flight 3 missile frigates. Goodrich, Montesano, and Patrick Hart had operated with her before; she knew and trusted their captains to fight smart and persevere until the end.
Far ahead, halfway up the Sea of Japan, the unmanned hunters scouted: USV-34, -20, -7, and -16. Most of the data streaming to her about the oncoming Russians were from them, and from the drones whose inputs they and the nanosatellites were forwarding. Her two Orca Flight 1 autonomous submarines, USS-4 and -13, were far out in front, covering Sakhalin and the Soya Strait. They were controlled from Idaho.
She toggled to the antisubmarine presentation. Savo herself was operating in fairly shallow waters, but to the northwest the depths dropped to over two thousand meters. Perfect operating depths for enemy submarines. AALIS highlighted five unidentified contacts strung along the coast, with three vibrating patches that denoted possible threats as well, though not yet localized enough for targeting purposes.
Five to eight possible subsea threats. Again, not a good force ratio.
She toggled to the air picture, but—aside from a few contacts over Japan and Korea, the latter probably humanitarian missions to serve rescue and reconstruction—the battlespace stretched empty. Thus far, at least. Her request to Higher for carrier air support hadn’t been answered. But with three modern Aegis-equipped ships, she should be able to fight off a modest air attack.
A coordinated, well-timed barrage of hypersonic missiles, though … She was pretty confident her ABM defenses would take out a Zircon-C. The hypersonic traveled at Mach 9, a
nd reports claimed it was shielded from radar with plasma stealth. But after discussing its parameters with Terranova, Cheryl felt Savo was up to the job. The chief felt she could tune above or below whatever electron plasma frequency the incoming warhead displayed.
But a ship’s magazines carried only so many rounds, and those she’d expended at the end of the war hadn’t been replaced. She still had lasers, but the forward mount tended to overheat and she wasn’t sure she wanted to trust the ship’s survival to the after one.
Bottom line: depending on how many missiles the oncoming fleet might fire in salvo, she could be overwhelmed. If the Japanese provided land-based support, that would help. But expending their remaining Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis Ashore missiles to save her would leave their homeland undefended, if Moscow decided on horizontal escalation.
She wondered when they would ever be satisfied with what they had. The Russians, that is. Hadn’t everyone suffered enough?
Then she remembered.
The Russians hadn’t suffered at all. Mainly, they’d just profited, cheering from the sidelines as the other superpowers clawed at each other’s eyes and ripped each other’s guts out.
Now, like some lurking scavenger shark, they were moving in, intent on tearing bloody chunks off the loser.
Okay, keep Higher informed at all times … She cut her eyes to bring up high side nanochat. Her fingers flexed, and some circuit she didn’t see spelled out letters. Her message went out Flash priority, reporting her task force on station, and once more requesting air and tanker support. Requesting high-level intervention as well, to beg for Japanese missile support and any available forces from the remnants of China’s navy and air force.
Requesting reinforcements, from anywhere they could be found.
It wasn’t just to cover her ass. But if worse came to worst, no one would be able to say she hadn’t sounded the alarm.
At last she hit Send, and sagged back in her chair. Her palms itched. She glanced down at her avatar’s hands. They were smooth. Unsullied. The skin didn’t itch, or erupt, or bleed. Her virtual hands looked perfect. Even the nails were neatly done, and squared off with French tips. “Nice,” she muttered, envious.
Now all she had to do was wait.
The sea spread out below, calm, unfurrowed. Except … far below her, on the sea bottom, something was creeping into the field of view.
At first she couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe just a disturbance, an anomaly, or a jutting rock marring the smooth sediments of the bottom. Gradually her brain assembled it into something recognizable, though. Lying on its side, half buried.
The crumpled, broken wreck of a ship sprawled far beneath, half digested by the muck of the abyss. She couldn’t tell what kind, but it contained iron. The magnetic readouts told her that. Imperial Russian? One of Rozhestvensky’s doomed battleships, from so many years before? Or a casualty of World War II, a Japanese maru blasted apart by American torpedoes?
She couldn’t tell, and didn’t really want to know.
She just didn’t want Savo Island, or any of her other ships, to join it.
8
Headed East
DAN motored out Route 90, toward the sunrise. The first day out from Seattle passed in a blur of wind, noise, and speed. The highway stretched before him nearly empty. Now and then he’d veer into the passing lane to overtake a slower-moving truck, but not often. Traffic in the other direction, headed back toward Seattle, was heavier, but still sparse. Far fewer vehicles than he’d expected, even in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. For hours on end he was alone on the highway, devouring four lanes of empty pavement with the only sound the dronesong of the engine, a vibration in his windscreen, and his worry.
The guy at the factory had said Nan was headed east, in a refrigerator truck filled with medications, being escorted by a motorcycle gang. But Dan saw no other bikes, much less a pack of them, though he kept his eyes peeled and slowed to peer carefully down each exit ramp he passed. His own machine felt heavy, awkward, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was built that way. It also had a wobble in the front end at around forty miles an hour, nearly sending him off the road once when he’d overcorrected.
So he didn’t go forty.
Cryptic inscriptions started appearing on the road surface west of Spokane, spray-painted in big swoops of Day-Glo orange. Eventually, recalling the shipboard radiological training, he decoded it: radiation dosages, probably in either millirems or millisieverts per hour, plus the date the survey had been taken. Eventually he deduced that whoever was spray-painting the markings was maybe three days ahead of him, also headed east.
The numbers climbed as he neared Spokane. As he motored through, the turnoffs and side streets lay eerily empty. Looking down from the overpasses as he went through, as far as he could make out the city was intact, but deserted. Evacuated early on, apparently, since he didn’t see any smoke, fire, or other signs it had actually been hit.
Which was going to make it harder to do what he’d intended. Namely, ask along the way if anyone had seen Nan and her entourage-slash-captors.
A UPS truck stood parked at an off-ramp. No keys, but the gas cap was unlocked. He deployed his hose and filled the bike up with the pink-tinted high-eth wartime fuel substitute. He searched the nearby undergrowth until he found a couple of discarded two-liter soda bottles. He filled them, too, stowed them in a saddlebag, and pushed on.
But the orange numbers kept rising. When they hit 150 per hour he started to sweat. First of all, if it was in millirems, he was getting about ten times as high an exposure as it would be if it was millisieverts. The type of radiation mattered too—alpha radiation, neutrons, or gamma—but he was pretty sure fallout would be mostly alpha and thus a direct one-to-ten conversion factor. Accumulated over time … He pondered it uneasily for mile after mile. There was no safe dose. Once you hit about 100 rem, especially over a short period, you could expect active sickness: nausea, low white blood count, hair loss, weakness, immune system compromise, and so on. If those painted numbers got much higher, he’d be running a real risk just being out here on the highway.
But those were only the overt, immediate symptoms. Even at doses below the levels that made you noticeably ill, the risk of cancer later started to climb.
He shook his head, squinting into the wind, bent over the handlebars as he blew along, goosing the Honda up to seventy, eager to get through the city. But then, the readings he was seeing were several days old. Surely some of the fallout had decayed since then.
Bottom line, though, there was probably a pretty damn good reason he was alone on the road. He was picking up dosage the longer he stayed out here. Letting himself in for some bad shit. If not immediately, later on.
Still, he pushed on. Didn’t stop, except once to piss, and even then stamped the dust off his boots before he got back on. Keeping a close eye on the numbers. Which kept rising.
Until they peaked somewhere past Coeur d’Alene. Then began to drop as he turned south, crossed a bridge, and left the deserted suburbs behind for a long valley.
He breathed a little easier as the orange digits stabilized at 20. Not great, but he could stand it for a while.
The highway twisted between deserted-looking wooded hills green with summer foliage. Discreet signs informed him he was in a national forest. And that only he could prevent wildfires. The air was scented with pine and juniper and sun-warmed wildflowers, a hot dry summery smell, pleasant even when you were blowing through at sixty miles an hour. He stayed at that speed, with sixty-five on the downgrades. He had plenty of throttle left, but seventy had seemed scarily fast. He wasn’t really used to the bike and had no idea how long ten-year-old tires would last. He didn’t want to be going eighty if one blew. Especially since he was riding without a helmet.
Toward dusk the valleys deepened and the hills grew steeper. They were covered with dry-looking grass and low twisted trees and scrub. Along some stretches the builders had chiseled down through the rock that stood t
o left and right. Its drilled-out cross sections showed striated sediments in pale shades of red and gray and brown, pale jewellike tones hidden for millennia deep in the earth.
He grew worried again, and not only about his daughter. The gauge had started out full, since the staff at the pharma plant had filled the tank. He’d refueled in Spokane, from the UPS truck. But as the day went on the needle seemed to fall faster and faster. Obviously, there wasn’t as much energy in the pale pink ersatz gasoline.
He slowed to fifty to stretch whatever was left. The highway stayed empty, the valleys picturesque but still deserted. He didn’t pass any towns, or signs for any kind of rest stop, plaza, or wayside. And steadily the hills grew more rugged, steeper, the rock cuts deeper, the valleys narrower and tiding with shadow. The air grew chillier too; he must be gaining elevation.
The low-fuel light glared orange. He pulled over and kicked the stand down. Swung his legs off, and stretched the kinks out of back and legs. Massaged his aching butt. Then poured the contents of both two-liter bottles glug-glugging into the tank.
The warning light dimmed slowly, as if reluctant. This amount probably wouldn’t take him much farther. He pulled back onto the road, and a few minutes later spotted a side road that looked like it might lead to a forest service facility. Instead it dead-ended at a graveled turnaround. He had to skid to a halt, wheel the heavy bike around, and gun it back to the highway.
Another worry: the spray-painted notations on the highway were rising again, climbing once more as he pushed east.
Yeah, now he remembered. Some of StratCom’s missile fields had been north of here. The numbers quickly reached 150 millirems per hour. Granted, that was last week’s reading, but radiation didn’t decay all that fast. Actually, it depended on what isotopes were in the fallout, but he had no clue to its composition.
