Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “The G-four is the first solid-state infantry weapon,” he bellowed. “It has very few moving parts.”

  A slight murmur passed through the tight knot of marines. They were familiar with the weapons specs, having intensively trained with them back in the United States. But still, it was a hell of a thing to wrap your head around.

  “And this is the standard battle load.” His audience stared at the long thin strip of ceramic munitions like children at their first magic show. “The ammo strip is placed in the barrel like this. An electrical charge ignites the propellant casing, driving the slug out with such velocity that, even with a three-round burst, you will feel no kickback—at least not before the volley leaves the muzzle.

  “Tomorrow, when we move ashore to the range, each of you will be allotted three hundred rounds. I suggest very strongly that before then you take advantage of the full VR tutorial we’ve loaded into your training sets. The base software package is a standard Asian urban conflict scenario, but we’ve added modules specifically tailored for operations in Jakarta and Surabaya.”

  With deployment less than a fortnight away, similar scenes were being replayed throughout the U.S.-led Multinational Force accompanying the Kandahar. Twelve thousand very serious men and women drilled to the point of exhaustion. They were authorized by the UN Security Council to use whatever force was necessary to reestablish control of the capital, Jakarta, and to put an end to the mass murder of Indonesia’s Chinese and Christian minorities. Everybody was preparing for a slaughter.

  In the hundred-bed hospital of the Kandahar the Eighty-second’s chief combat surgeon, Captain Margie Francois, supervised her team’s reaction to a simulated missile strike on an armored hovercraft carrying a marine rifle company into a contested estuary.

  Two thousand meters away, the French missile frigate Dessaix dueled with a pair of Raptors off the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton.

  In the other direction, three thousand meters to the west, two British trimaran stealth destroyers practiced their response to a successful strike by suicide bombers whose weapon of choice had been a high-speed rubber boat. Indeed, Captain Karen Halabi, who had been on the receiving end of just such an attack as a young ensign, drilled the crew of the HMS Trident so fiercely that in those few hours they were allowed to sleep, most dreamed of crazy men in speedboats laden with TNT.

  JRV NAGOYA, 1046 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  As diverse as these ships were, one still stood out. The Joint Research Vessel Nagoya was a purpose-built leviathan, constructed around the frame of an eighty-thousand-tonne liquid natural gas carrier. Her keel had been laid down in Korea, with the fit-out split between San Francisco and Tokyo, reflecting the multinational nature of her funding. She fit in with the sleek warships of the Multinational Force the way a hippo would with a school of swordfish.

  Her presence was a function of the speed with which the crisis in Jakarta had developed. The USS Leyte Gulf, a stealth cruiser from the Clinton’s battle group, had been riding shotgun over the Nagoya’s sea trials in the benign waters off Western Australia. When the orders came down that the carrier and her battle group were to move immediately into the Wetar Strait the Nagoya had been left with no choice but to tag along until an escort could be assigned to shepherd her safely back to Hawaii. It was a situation nobody liked, least of all Professor Manning Pope, the leader of the Nagoya team.

  Crouched over a console in his private quarters, Pope muttered under his breath as he hammered out yet another enraged e-mail directly to Admiral Tony Kevin, commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Command. It was the ninth such e-mail he had sent in forty-eight hours. Each had elicited a standardized reply, not from the admiral himself mind you, but from some trained monkey on his personal staff.

  Pope typed, stabbing at the keys:

  Need I remind you of the support this Project elicits at THE VERY HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT. I would not wish to be in your shoes, Admiral Kevin, when I explain to your superiors that we have gone over budget while being dragged into this pointless fiasco. The NAGOYA is a research vessel, not a warship, and we should have been allowed to continue our trials unmolested in the perfectly safe testing range off Perth. As small as they are, the Australian navy are more than capable of fending off any drunken fishermen who might have strayed too close.

  Therefore I DEMAND that we be freed from this two-penny opera and allowed to return to our test schedule as originally planned. I await your earliest reply. And that means YOURS, Admiral Kevin. Not some junior baboon!

  That’ll put a rocket under his fat ass, thought Pope. Bureaucrats hate it when you threaten to go over their heads. It means they might actually have to stagger to their feet and do something for a change.

  Spleen vented for the moment, he keyed into the vidlink that connected him with the Project control room. A Japanese man with a shock of unruly, thick black hair answered the hail.

  “How do we look for a power-up this morning, Yoshi?” Pope asked. “I’m anxious to get back on schedule.”

  Standing at a long, curving bank of flatscreens Professor Yoshi Murayama, an unusually tall cosmic string theorist from Honshu, blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “I can’t see why not from this end. We’re just about finished entering the new data sets. We’re good to go, except you know that Kolhammer won’t like it.”

  “Kolhammer’s a chickenshit,” Pope said somewhat mournfully. “I really don’t care what he thinks. He’s not qualified to tell us what we can and cannot do. You are.”

  “Like I said,” the Japanese Nobel winner responded. “I don’t see a problem. Just a beautiful set of numbers.”

  “Of course.” Pope nodded. “Everyone else feel the same?” he asked, raising his voice so that it projected into the room beyond Murayama. The space was surprisingly small for such a momentous undertaking, no bigger than a suburban living room really. Large glowing monitors shared the area with half a dozen senior Project researchers, each staffing a workstation.

  His question caught them off-guard. Their boss enjoyed a hard-won reputation as a thoroughly unpleasant little prick with an amazingly rigid pole up his ass. A couple of them exchanged quick glances, but nobody said anything for a few moments until Barnes, their magnetic ram technician, ventured a reply.

  “Well, it’s not our fault we fell behind. But you can bet we’ll get blamed if we don’t hustle to catch up.”

  “Exactly!” Pope replied. “Let’s prepare for a test run at point-zero-one efficiency. That should be enough to confirm a stabilized effect with the new figures. Are we all agreed?”

  They were.

  HMAS MORETON BAY, 1049 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had slept six hours out of the last forty-eight. As the defensive systems operator of the troop cat Moreton Bay, she felt herself directly responsible for the lives of four hundred soldiers and thirty-two crewmembers. The Moreton Bay was a fat, soft, high-value target; so much more tempting for would-be martyrs or renegade Indonesian forces than the Clinton, or the Kandahar, or any of the escort vessels. The software for the catamaran’s Metal Storm CIWS—Close-In Weapons System—had been twitching and freezing up ever since they’d loaded the update patches during the last refit in Sydney. Nguyen, at the tail end of a marathon hacking session, had just come to the conclusion she’d be better off trashing the updates and reverting to the old program.

  She rubbed her eyes and swiveled her chair around to face Captain Sheehan. The ancient mariner seemed to read her mind.

  “You want to dump the new system, Lieutenant?” he asked, even before she had a chance to speak.

  Damn, she thought. How does he do that?

  “I don’t really want to, sir, but it’s buggy as hell. The pods are just as likely to target us as any incoming.”

  Sheehan rubbed at his chin beneath the thick beard he had sported for as long as Nguyen had known him. “Okay,” he agreed after a moment’s thought. “Tell the Clinton we’re going to take them offline for—how long to
reload the old software?”

  Nguyen shrugged. “A few minutes to deep-six the garbage code, five and a half to reload the classic. Say ten to be sure.”

  “Okay. Tell the Clinton we’re taking the pods offline for fifteen minutes to change over the programming, so we’ll need them to assign us extra cover through CBL. The Trident’s closest, she’ll do nicely.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Rachel, genuinely grateful to be released from the burden of hacking the software on her own.

  Sheehan watched her closely for a moment longer, then turned to peer out through the tinted blast windows of the cat’s bridge. The sea surface was nearly mirror still.

  Nguyen worried that he might order her to stand down for a few hours. After all, they wouldn’t be deploying for another two weeks, and they’d be in port as of this evening. But she’d never be able to sleep until she was sure the problem had been solved.

  “How’s your thesis going, Lieutenant?” he asked as she shut down the windows on the screen in front of her.

  “I haven’t really had time to work on it since we left Darwin, sir,” she confessed. “But it’s not due for three months. I should be right to finish it.”

  “Still comparing Haig and Westmoreland?”

  “With reference to Phillip the Second,” she added, “you know, sent the Armada, started the Eighty Years War, wrecked the Castilian Empire.”

  “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence,” quoted Sheehan.

  “You’ve read Tuchman?” she said.

  “Many years ago, for my own dissertation,” he nodded. “What was it she called Phillip?”

  “The surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns,” said Nguyen.

  Sheehan smiled in remembrance. “That’s right, she did . . . Anyway, reload the software, then get some sleep.” She started to protest, but the look on his face stopped her. “I don’t want to see you back here for at least six hours.”

  JRV NAGOYA, 1156 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  Morley and Dunne were hunkered down in front of the snack machine, trying for a casual look, but everything about them screamed conspiracy. They were fixated on a jumbo Snickers bar that had been half dislodged and was threatening to fall into the dispensing bin for free.

  “You can rock the machine five degrees off the perpendicular,” said Morley, who was overweight, out of shape, and physically incapable of doing any such thing. This wasn’t the first jumbo candy bar he had encountered.

  “Or we could just buy another Snickers,” protested Dunne. “Then we’d get two for the price of one.”

  “Jeez, Sharon, you’re such a narc. You won’t boost a fucking freebie, but one word from Doctor Frankenstein back there and you’d sell out your own grandmother to make him happy. He’s evil, I tells ya! E-e-e-e-e-v-i-l.”

  “Knock it off, dickhead,” she hissed. Sharon Dunne was the youngest of Manning Pope’s team, a Caltech graduate with a first-class thesis on quantum foam manipulation. She was also a far-distant descendant of the poet John Donne, and a goth lesbian with a hard-on for the oeuvre of Johnny Depp. As she contemplated the chocolate bar, she drummed her fingers on the snack machine. They were covered in black nail polish and chunky pewter death head rings.

  “And anyway, Jonathon,” she chided, “I didn’t exactly see you stepping forward to make your big speech about how he’s Meddling With Powers Beyond His Control.”

  At that Morley lost interest in the chocolate bar. He grimaced and whispered theatrically, “Yeah, well, I didn’t fancy getting my head torn off again. Dude went ballistic when I pointed out that hole in his last solution. I thought he was gonna throw me over the side of the fucking boat.”

  They both glanced around the small canteen as though Pope might suddenly materialize, like Hannibal Lector with a knife and fork.

  “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” Dunne countered. “We could brown out the fleet again. That was fun, really, watching Kolhammer tear Pope a new asshole. I’d pay good money to see something like that again.”

  “Yeah, or we could rip open the Hellmouth and let out all kinds of orcs and vampires and shit,” said Morley.

  “Oh, give it a rest, you geek. You know, the guys on the Manhattan Project thought there was a chance the first A-bomb would blow up the whole world, with a blast that would ignite the atmosphere, then just keep getting bigger and bigger. But it didn’t, did it? It was never going to.”

  “Yeah, well, d’you ever read that story where they photographed the inside of a nuclear explosion?”

  “Yeah, yeah, and they saw the face of Satan. It was cool. But they were looking in the wrong place. I’ve already seen the real Satan. His name is Pope, and he’s going to cut off your dick and use it as a swizzle stick if we’re late getting back for the test run.”

  “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Just let me get this Snickers bar.”

  ADMIRAL’S QUARTERS, USS HILLARY CLINTON, 1148 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  Admiral Kolhammer’s cheeks ached from the effort of maintaining the anodyne grin he had fixed in place. A reasonable man, he kept repeating to himself. I am a reasonable man.

  “You would have to agree though, wouldn’t you, Admiral . . .”

  Kolhammer held up his hand. “No, I would not, Ms. Duffy.”

  The reporter smiled as she sucked the end of her pencil. She wore dark, wine-colored lipstick, and it accentuated the disconcerting gesture. “You don’t even know what I was going to say,” she protested mildly.

  “I’m just saving you time by pointing out that I don’t have to agree with whatever it is you’re about to say,” Kolhammer explained as equably as he could manage. Every time this woman confronted him, he felt as though he were trapped in a torture that never ended.

  He was rarely able to enjoy the luxury suite that had been set aside for his quarters on the Clinton, and it irked him that this obnoxious woman was ruining the few minutes’ break he’d taken today. He should have listened to Lieutenant Thieu, his PR officer. If he’d given her a few minutes on the flag bridge, Duffy would have been floundering in his natural environment, surrounded by his people and overwhelmed by the pace of activity. In contrast, the admiral’s quarters were like a serviced apartment in an expensive hotel. No doubt she felt right at home here.

  He resolved to be less generous in the future.

  “Well,” she continued, oblivious to his chagrin, “it doesn’t take a master’s in international relations to see that sending a white man’s force to intervene in a religious civil war is a recipe for disaster. Regional governments like Malaysia may be desperate for the U.S. to deal with the Indonesian problem, but you would have to agree that they’d be reluctant to contribute their own forces. Especially since this action will be denounced throughout the Muslim world as another Christian crusade.”

  Still Kolhammer managed to keep the mask of civility in place. Clearly this woman was no fool. She had obviously done her research, and her line of questioning wasn’t far from the hard truth he faced in trying to manage this first-rate clusterfuck of a mission.

  “I’m afraid there are a number of holes in that argument, Ms. Duffy,” he answered in a pleasant, level tone. “But most importantly, you seem to have mistaken me for the secretary of state. No doubt she would be happy to answer your question, but I’m afraid my job isn’t to argue, analyze, or set our government’s foreign policy; I simply do my best to see that it’s carried out. Any first-year political science student would understand the distinction.”

  He allowed himself a slightly wolfish grin at that. To the reporter’s credit, she didn’t even blush.

  “And are you equipped to carry out that policy, Admiral? This Multinational Force is a bit of a kludge, isn’t it?”

  He actually laughed. Once again she had given voice to his private thoughts, using the very words he would have used—if he had felt like putting a bullet into his career. He turned the moment of bleak amusement back on he
r.

  “Ms. Duffy, I have the better part of a carrier battle group here, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, and some of the very best assets our friends and allies could pour into the breach at short notice. The Rising Jihad talk a mighty good game, but until now they’ve been terrorizing office workers and unarmed, illiterate peasants. I wish them the best of luck should they try it with us.”

  “But you’re also facing renegade units of the Indonesian armed forces, are you not, and intervention by Beijing if the mass murder of the ethnic Chinese population continues?”

  “Once again you’re asking me to comment outside my area of responsibility. I can only remind you that the Chinese government fully supported the creation of this force and voted for it in the Security Council. And as for the TNI, yes, a number of units have gone over to the insurgency, but the majority of the Indonesian armed forces are standing with the legitimate, elected government. As a matter of fact, we have two Indonesian navy ships sailing with us. They will accompany the Multinational Force at every stage of this operation.”

  Duffy smiled as if at some private joke, further irritating Kolhammer. He suspected she was well aware of the Sutanto and the Nuku, and already knew that they were little better than state-sponsored pirates. But mercifully she chose not embarrass him over it.

  “The majority of the Indonesian armed forces have simply melted away, though, haven’t they?” she asked.

  “Well, if that proves to be the case, they won’t bear worrying about, will they, Ms. Duffy?” Kolhammer said as he pointedly looked at his watch.

  “Just one last question, sir?”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, Ms. Duffy.”

  “Marvelous. Thank you, sir. Now about the civilian vessel you have with you . . .”

  “The Nagoya.”

  “Yes. Can you tell me anything about its role in this operation?”