Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  As his mind adjusted to the outrage, he began to take in more detail. The forward decks seemed to be pockmarked with the outlines of elevators, but they were ridiculously small, each no more than a few yards across. There was one small gun emplacement, a ludicrous-looking little cannon, with the same strange, raked contours as the bridge. As the angle of divergence increased and the warship pulled away from them, Spruance pointed to the outline of what had to be an aircraft elevator down toward the stern. But it made no sense. Any plane attempting to take off there would crash into the bizarre-looking island on the vessel’s centerline.

  “Oh, Lord,” muttered Spruance, as the ship peeled away at nearly thirty degrees now, exposing her stern to their gaze. A Japanese ensign flew there. Not a Rising Sun, to be sure, but a red circle on a field of white.

  The name printed beneath read SIRANUI, Japanese for “unknown fires,” if Black recalled correctly. He was aware of a Kagero-class destroyer just so named, which had been launched in June 1938. This thing, however, which was easily more than half the length of the Enterprise, was no Kagero-class bucket. It looked like something out of Buck Rogers.

  “What the hell is that thing?” asked Black, in the tone of voice he might have used if he’d seen a large, two-headed dog.

  “I’m not sure what it is,” Spruance replied, regaining his composure, “but I know who it is. Better put on your Sunday best, Commander. I think our guests have arrived early.”

  As the mystery ship quietly slipped into the night, a Klaxon aboard the Enterprise sounded the alarm.

  And then, the horizon exploded.

  Suddenly they were beset by madness on all sides. To starboard, the eerie Nipponese ghost ship receded into darkness. To port, there was a volcanic eruption about ten miles distant. It was a few seconds before the thunder reached their ears, but they could see clearly enough what was happening as the light of the explosion was trapped between a heaving sea and the thick, scudding clouds that pressed down from above.

  Black shook his head, determined to remain calm. But as his eyes darted to and fro across the surface of the ocean, his mind was insulted by the monstrous visions they encountered there.

  In the flat, guttering light of the distant inferno Black could see more enemy vessels, none that he recognized, most of them freakish cousins to the thing that had just peeled away from the Enterprise. There was one ship—maybe a thousand yards distant—well, he simply refused to believe his own eyes. As it crested a long rolling line of swell he could have sworn the thing had two, maybe even three hulls. It was difficult to be sure under these conditions, but he simply could not shake the afterimage. It was either a ship with three hulls, or three ships somehow joined and operating in perfect harmony.

  And randomly scattered on the crucible of the seas all around them were more products of the same Stygian foundry. Over there, he was certain, there was another double-hulled monstrosity, bursting through a black wall of water. To the north lay more ships like the beast that had sidled up to them before. And there, way off the port bow, were two flattops, both of them large enough to be fleet carriers. One was a real behemoth.

  “Commander!”

  Black was shocked out of his reverie by the harsh call.

  “We’ve got work to do, Commander,” Spruance barked. “A hell of a job, too, unless you want your grandchildren eating raw fish and rice balls.”

  Bells rang and Klaxons blared. Thousands of feet hammered on steel plating as men rushed to their stations on nearly two dozen warships.

  The first gun to fire was a 20mm Oerlikon on the Portland. It pumped a snaking line of tracer in exactly the wrong direction. Forty-millimeter Bofors, pom-poms, and dozens of five-inch batteries soon joined it, until a whole quadrant of the sky seethed with gunfire.

  Spruance and Black raced up to the bridge, tugging on helmets and vests, as the big guns of the Midway Task Force began to boom. Huge muzzle flashes from eight-inch batteries lit up the night with a chaotic, strobe effect. The bridge was in an uproar with a dozen different voices calling out reports, barking questions, and demanding answers where—as yet—there were none.

  “Get the bombers away, as quickly as possible,” Spruance ordered.

  “VB-six is ready to roll, sir.”

  “Coming around to two-two-three.”

  The plating beneath their feet began to pitch as the big carrier swung into the wind. Black could only hope that none of their destroyer escorts would be run down by the unexpected course correction. This is insane, he thought, dogfighting with twenty-thousand-ton ships. He braced himself against a chart table in a corner of the bridge, and tried to make sense of the chaos around them. There were hundreds of guns firing without any sort of coordination. They were going to start destroying their own ships very quickly if that went on.

  As soon as the thought occurred to him, it happened. The cruiser New Orleans attempted a ragged broadside at that spectral Japanese ship that had just “appeared” to starboard, a few minutes earlier. The volley completely missed its target, but at least two shells slammed into an American destroyer a few hundred yards beyond. Black cursed as the little ship exploded in flames.

  “We’re going to need better gunnery control,” he yelled at Spruance. “I’ll get on it.”

  The admiral turned away from the sailor he had been addressing and nodded brusquely. Black charged back out of the bridge, heading for the radio room.

  USS HAMMAN, TASK FORCE SEVENTEEN, 2243 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  The Sims-class destroyer Hamman was nearly swamped by the wave that surged out from the giant ship that suddenly appeared eighty yards away, as if from nowhere. The men on the bridge, who had all gasped at her arrival, now groaned like passengers on a roller coaster as their vessel yawed over and threatened to roll down the face of the wave. As the Hamman finally swung back through the pendulum to right herself, the officer of the watch, Lieutenant (junior grade) Veni Armanno, was tossed bodily through the air and into the solid casing that housed the ship’s compass, dislocating his shoulder. He swore through the tornado of pain that blew through his upper body, and wrestled himself back to his feet with his one good hand.

  “You all right, sir?” someone asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Sound to general quarters. Get the captain up here now. Radio the Yorktown and find out what’s happening.”

  “Lieutenant,” called out a petty officer from the radio shack. “We’ve just had a message from the Enterprise, sir. It’s the Japs . . .”

  Armanno couldn’t make out the next words. They were lost in the volly of curses from the bridge crew.

  “Put a sock in it!” he said loudly.

  Gesturing insistently, the petty officer announced an order that had come from task force command.

  “We’re to engage the enemy, sir.”

  “Captain True’s been injured sir,” reported another seaman. “Lieutenant Earls is on his way.”

  Wish he’d get here, thought Armanno. “Get me the gunnery officer,” he ordered. “We haven’t got much, but let’s give her everything we do have. Helm, put another four hundred yards between that thing and us. We’ll stick some torpedoes into her, see how she likes that.”

  The deck began to tilt again as the destroyer came around on her new heading, plunging into a hectic, crosshatched swell. Armanno felt dizzy with the pain in his shoulder. He desperately wanted to crawl outside and prop himself up against a bulkhead until the ship’s surgeon could tend to him, but the vast, iron mountain of the enemy ship—Where in hell did it come from—nailed him in place.

  “Guns ready, sir.”

  Armanno didn’t hesitate.

  “Fire!”

  All four of the ship’s five-inch mounts roared as one. Good work, thought Armanno in a distant, abstract way.

  Three blooms of dirty fire blossomed on the sheer steel wall of the target. One dud, Armanno thought as he heard the front and rear 20mm cannon open up, painting the walls of that towering fortress with wh
ipping lines of tracer. A dazzling shower of sparks fell to the sea like fireflies, marking the impact of the tracers.

  The men around him cheered as another brace of five-inch shells screamed across the short distance between them. All four exploded this time. Armanno was certain he could hear the steel rain of shrapnel on the Hamman’s plating. He could feel his muscles tensing as he urged the ship’s boilers to give them more steam. He needed to get far enough away to use the torpedo tubes. Their target had to be a Jap carrier, probably the Akagi, she was so damn big.

  How the hell did she get here?

  Doesn’t matter, he told himself. They’d snuck up on them again. Just like at Pearl. But this time they’d been stupid enough to get into a street brawl with Veni Armanno. He might have grown up on an olive grove outside Santa Monica, but his blood was still Sicilian, and it boiled as quickly as anyone’s from the old country.

  “Pour it, boys!” he yelled into the speaker tube connecting the bridge to gunnery control. “Give ’em hell. Just a little bit longer and we’ll be able to stick a few fish up Tojo’s ass.”

  Armanno turned back to the fantastic scene that lay outside the blast windows, just as another salvo ripped into the side of the enemy carrier. It was like riding out a hurricane, minus the wind and rain. The whole of the ocean was lit with lightning flashes as hundreds of guns hammered at the Japs. Thunder rolled over them constantly, and the sea was thick with erupting geysers of foam and water, illuminated from within by the explosions that raised them.

  “Lookit that fuggin’ thing would you,” yelled a voice thickened by years of smoking.

  Armanno grabbed a pair of binoculars and followed the seaman’s pointing finger. The world was even more confused and unstable when viewed through the glasses. They emphasized every movement of the violently pitching destroyer. Still, he managed to catch a few short glimpses of a ship that reminded him of a giant manta ray slipping across the surface of the ocean. It was hard to tell, being thrown about so much, but there didn’t appear to be any guns on the deck. He wedged in tighter against the corner of the bridge and tried to keep the sleek, alien shape steady within the field of the glasses. The twinned lens circles shuddered as the Hamman’s two forward turrets coughed long spears of flame and smoke into the night again.

  The Japs weren’t firing at all, at least not that he could make out.

  “What the hell is this?” Armanno asked himself.

  “Lieutenant, we’re coming up on range for the torpedo launch.”

  “Okay,” he said, dragging his attention back to the mammoth carrier, which was still blotting out half the sky. It was weird, the way the Japs just weren’t fighting back. Not a single round came from anywhere along its flank.

  Maybe they haven’t seen us, he told himself. Just as well.

  “Arm the portside tubes,” he called.

  “Arm the portside tubes!”

  “Torpedoes armed!”

  “Torpedoes armed, Lieutenant.”

  Armanno waited half a second, expecting the executive officer or even the captain to appear. It seemed like a very long half second.

  “Fire!” he called out, at last.

  3

  HMS TRIDENT, 2241 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Captain Karen Halabi, commander of HMS Trident, had never seen anything like it before. It was like looking into a doll’s house. For a few short moments, before the seas rushed in, the vessel’s internal spaces were completely exposed, as though a vengeful deity had sliced off the bow with a knife, had made it vanish, like a profane magic trick.

  She was certain that she was dreaming, and yet sure that she couldn’t be. She had spilled a mug of hot coffee on her leg, and the pain had jolted her to her senses much faster than those around her. Her senses, however, had presented her with a nightmare.

  She was slumped in her command chair, a giant burn blister already rising on her thigh. Around her the bridge crew were dead or unconscious. The bright light of the tropical day was gone, swallowed by an oily blackness. And four or five hundred meters away, on a collision course off her starboard bow, she could see the helicopter carrier HMS Fearless. It had been—well, lopped seemed the right word, almost. She was paralyzed, staring at a cutaway diagram as if from a children’s book.

  Except that the “diagram” was three-dimensional, and it was moving toward her. And the burn on her leg was real, and the feeling in her body was returning with a painful surge of pins and needles, the worst she had ever known. She realized, in the methodical part of her mind, that if she didn’t put pedal to the metal they’d all be dead in less than a minute, when the carrier ran right over them.

  She bit down on a gasp and willed her hand toward the touch screen. Halabi drew a deep breath and pushed through the exquisitely painful tingling, a sensation akin to a blast of white noise tearing at raw synapses. Not trusting her fingers, she struck repeatedly at the screen with the heel of her palm. The ship’s Combat Intelligence, intuiting that its user had suffered some drastic battle wound, adjusted accordingly. The buttons on the screen grew larger, the choices more constrained, which was fine by her. All she wanted was another twenty knots.

  A series of awkward blows to specific points on the screen drew more power off the fusion stacks and dumped it straight into the Trident’s three Rolls-Royce aqua jets. The acceleration threw Halabi back into her chair. The ship’s CI, alerted to the possibility of disaster, independently powered up a suite of sensors. On the screen before Halabi’s eyes, Nemesis arrays began a full-power survey of the threat bubble, cataloging and prioritizing a list of potential menaces. It was a long list, but right at the top was the Fearless, closing from the northeast quarter.

  The CI reviewed Halabi’s actions and found them to be appropriate, but decided to fatten the margin for error. It released the codes for the trimaran’s supercavitating system.

  Below and just above the waterline thousands of pores opened in the radar-absorbent skin of the ship, releasing a bath of small bubbles, a foam of water vapor and air that surrounded the Trident’s three hulls so perfectly that very little liquid water remained in contact with the ship. The effect was to reduce the viscous drag on her keels by 97 percent. The Trident surged forward again, carving through mist now rather than water. Her speed climbed quickly to 105 knots as three giant fantails of spray leapt from her stern.

  The CI also began monitoring the data stream from the crewmembers’ biochip implants, since it was likely that a percentage of them would have been injured by falls during the unannounced acceleration. It quickly drew the conclusion that the entire ship’s complement had been struck down by a malady of unknown origin, and dispatched an instruction via shipnet. Based on the closest analog that could be found, the order was given to immediately dump .05ml of Promatil from the crewmembers’ spinal inserts directly into their bloodstreams.

  Slouched gracelessly at her command station, Captain Halabi felt the soothing warmth of a drug flush as it crawled up her spine. The unpleasant full-body burning sensation subsided, along with the associated dizziness and nausea.

  Her officers and junior ranks began to stir and groan around her, but she was transfixed by the ghastly spectacle just outside her bridge window. It was definitely the Fearless. She was simply unable to imagine how it could have been damaged in such a catastrophic fashion.

  The metal outline of the ship’s cross section glowed as though white hot. Halabi could see the cavernous hangars high above, with aircraft and equipment already sliding toward the abyss as the ship tilted forward, scooping up water. To either side of the hangars small offices and wardrooms were visible, again reminding her of a doll’s house with the front wall removed.

  Halabi could clearly see human beings in some of those rooms, moving frantically, trying in vain to escape. She dimly recognized a painful hammering sensation as her heartbeat, but it seemed far away. She had friends on that ship, and any of them could be the anonymous stick figures desperately throwing themselves off the leading edge,
plunging to their deaths. The terrible scene recalled images from her childhood of office workers falling through the air in New York, and later in London and Tokyo.

  As her own ship passed squarely in front of the Fearless it seemed to lean toward her, as if trying to reach out and take her down, too. Her lips worked soundlessly, searching for words, but none came in the face of such horror. She could see a virtual tsunami already rolling down into the belly of the carrier.

  At the Naval War College she had studied the sinking of an oceangoing ferry that had inexplicably left its bow doors open on a cross-channel run. A mountainous wall of water had poured in and surged toward the stern. The weight had actually lifted the bows out of the sea for a brief moment, but fluid dynamics demanded that the wave travel back when it hit the obstruction of the ferry’s rear end, and so the pendulum had swung back and dug the bow even deeper into the ocean. Halabi imagined for a split second that this mammoth vessel might rear out of the waves and smash down on her in a similar fashion, but she quickly dismissed the speculation. The densely packed lower decks of such a ship would not permit the same free flow of water.

  Darkness threatened to rush in on her again as the Trident cleared the impact zone and passed safely through to the far side, but with a deep breath she fought it off.

  “Posh, can you link me to the CI on Fearless?” asked Halabi. “I need damage reports and vision.”

  The Trident’s Combat Intelligence affirmed the request and four screens in front of Halabi winked into life, carrying video from the carrier. Halabi grimaced at the scenes of screaming casualties and blind panic.