Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  A man-sized opening had been blown through the iron curtain.

  “How’d they do that?” asked Nix.

  McAllister answered in a hoarse whisper.

  “A shaped charge.”

  “Nice work. The captain in there?”

  “You should be able to pick up her locator chip once you’re inside. Head right for two minutes. It’s a fucking mess like you wouldn’t believe in there, but they’re trailing tape. You should pick them up. Point-to-point’s scratchy once you get in, so let them know you’re coming up. They’ve been hit from behind twice already. Chris Gregory got wasted like that. Clancy blew him away when he popped up without warning.”

  “Got it.”

  Nix patted the shoulder of McAllister’s old Kevlar vest and leapt the overturned table in one bound.

  That’s five now, she thought.

  She’d lost five of her crew since stepping into this twisted nightmare, one of them to friendly fire.

  “You okay?” she asked Clancy.

  “Fine for now,” he replied. “Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t mine, either.”

  “That’s right.”

  Captain Daytona Anderson knew the tremors and the nausea would come later for Clancy. Along with the guilt.

  Couldn’t be helped.

  She repeated that mantra to herself, like a Zen koan meant to exhaust the intellect and prepare the mind for an intuitive response.

  Because Christ knows, there’s nothing for the rational mind to hold on to in here.

  She was wedged into a crawl space created by the intersection of the Gulf’s rail gun control room with what looked like an old galley of some sort. Her features creased as she contemplated the sight of two members of her own crew and five strangers who had . . . What, materialized? . . . inside each other, and within a Gordian knot of metal, plastic, and wooden fixtures.

  The shooting, which had slackened off for a few minutes, picked up again. A few rounds ricocheted by her head, off a butcher block that had been fused with a flatscreen workstation, showering Anderson with splinters of wood and plastic. Clancy fired without hesitation. She had no idea what he was shooting at, but somebody screamed. Whoever it was almost cried out loud enough to cover the sick, ripping thud that was the signature note of a ceramic bullet striking unprotected flesh. Then another voice called out, but it was controlled and steady.

  “Specialist Nix, coming through, Captain!”

  Anderson checked her flexipad. It was working again. The screen displayed icons for the locator chips implanted in the necks of her crew within a twenty-meter radius.

  Nix, Spec 3–010162820 was slowly picking his way forward.

  Three hollow booms crashed painfully close to her ears. Clancy fired again, for the same result—a strangled scream and the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor.

  “You might want to hold your fire,” Nix called out. “We’ve got a big problem.”

  No shit? Anderson thought bitterly.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Nix. “I mean another problem.”

  USS ASTORIA, 2314 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  The niggers and the broads were the least of their problems. And, really, not the most fucked-up thing he’d seen this morning. But for the life of him, Able Seaman Moose Molloy Jr. couldn’t figure out what a bunch of niggers and broads were doing on board a Japanese warship.

  They’d killed four of them now, two apiece. And lost a lot of their own in return. And yes, it was pretty weird that they’d only got one Jap that he knew of. But his daddy, the senior Moose, who’d walked a beat for thirty years with the Chicago PD, had taught him that your niggers and your wops and your Asiatic races simply couldn’t be trusted. There wasn’t a damn one of them you’d cross the street to piss on if their heart caught fire. And the broads were most likely sex slaves, he guessed. His buddy Slim Jim Davidson had read him a story from the newspaper about that—how the Japs were capturing white women in the Far East and turning them into camp whores. Made a man’s blood boil just to think about those nasty little fuckers poking their weenies into God-fearing white women.

  The newspaper, which had specialized in horse-racing tips and murder mysteries before the war, had been red hot on that topic—the so-called Japanese fighting man’s anatomical shortcomings. Still, Moose thought, pencil dicks or not, they’d pay a heavy fucking price for sticking them into any woman who spoke English and knew enough to cross herself when she walked into a church.

  Hell of a way to fight them, though. Moose Jr. was a big man, and these crawl spaces he was forced to squirm through were complicated enough to confuse a bona fide genius, which the Molloy family genes had conspicuously failed to produce so far. It was worse than any carnival maze he’d snuck into as a kid. Things just seemed to grow out of other things all around him. He could recognize pieces of the Astoria, but they were all tangled up with the bulkheads and deck plating and fixtures of this weird Jap ship. Not all smashed in together, like you’d get in the car wrecks his daddy had told him about, all crumpled metal and blood and torn-up bits of drivers and passengers. But flowing in and out of each other, smooth and easy as you please.

  Or not so easy. If you were Hogan or Paddy White, or one of those other poor bastards had a big piece of armor plating, or a chair, or something suddenly pop out of their heads or ass.

  Oftentimes he’d get himself bruised and half crushed worming his way around some obstacle, only to find he’d come to a dead end, trapped in a cranny created by the intersection of two impassable walls. Sometimes you could see good clear space, but it lay just beyond a gap too narrow for anyone but a stick figure to squeeze through. It was infuriating, was what it was. And dangerous, too. Old Chief Kelly got the back of his head blown out lingering too long at one such break in the maze. Moose Jr. didn’t have no fancy education, but there were some things you picked up quick anyway. With Chief Kelly’s brains splattered all over his graying sweat-stained T-shirt, Moose Jr. didn’t mess around with no recon at places like that. He just stuck his rifle into the gap and let go a few rounds.

  It was an old Springfield bolt action, which was a pain. He’d have given a month’s pay for one of them new M1 Garands. Semiautomatic, gas-operated. Fired a .30-caliber round as quick as man could pull the trigger, according to Slim Jim. But a Springfield still made an agreeably large hole in a fellow, and Moose Jr. was almost certain he’d accounted for at least one of them untrustworthy Jap niggers with his.

  A group of shots hammered at the far side of the bulkhead just in front of him. A Jap bulkhead, he was pretty sure. He’d been planning on darting around there in just a second, but the volley forced him back behind cover. He tasted that strange orange dust that floated away from the impact point whenever the nip rounds hit metal instead of flesh. Nips then, for sure. Goddamn if he wouldn’t like to get a look at the guns they were using. Had to be some kind of secret weapon, the way they didn’t seem to damage anything but human flesh. Apart from the smear of orange dust, they didn’t leave no trace at all. Unless they got you in the arm or chest or full in the face like poor old Kelly. God-a-mighty they’d leave a hell of a mess then. Like nothing he’d ever seen—and the old man had let him sneak a peak at some crime scene photos once. Pictures of a freelance bootlegger machine-gunned by some of Al Capone’s boys. A terrible sight, but nothing like the unholy meat salad laying where Chief Kelly’s bald noggin had once sat.

  “Moose! Moose! They Japs up there?”

  “What d’you think, you moron?” he spat back at Willie Stolz, who wasn’t worth a cup of cold spit in Moose Jr.’s considered opinion. It was a fair question, though. They’d shot some of their own by mistake in the dark tangle of groaning metal, spark showers, and venting steam.

  “Moose! Moose!”

  “Goddamn, Stolz, I’m trying to kill me some nip niggers up here.”

  “It’s an officer, Moose!”

  “What the fuck? I thought they was all dead.”

  “It’s okay, sailor,” grunted Comman
der Evans, who looked about a thousand miles from okay.

  The snaking, tortured course through the labyrinth had been hard on Evans’s injured ankle and arm. More than once he’d relied on Chief Mohr to push him through a cavity or cleft in the nearly impenetrable snarl of fused flesh and steel. They had made it through to the farthest point of advance, though, a relatively clear space formed by the confluence of an officer’s washroom on the Astoria and some sort of science lab or something on the other ship. There was a light source somewhere in there, soft white light coming from within a toilet cubicle, the direct source of illumination blocked by a half-opened door occupying the same space as a desk. Evans didn’t see how a desk lamp could still be lit; where would it be drawing power? But there were so many other questions arising out of the last fifteen minutes that he was learning to put the small stuff away in the chickenshit file.

  “They through here?” he asked the sailor, a large fellow named Molloy.

  He was about to peer through the small slit Molloy was guarding when a giant forearm slammed into his chest and drove him back against a washbasin. His broken arm flared in hot pain, and he started to gray out as Eddie Mohr grabbed him.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Molloy, “but those Japs can see in the dark, sir. You put your face up there and you’re going to get it shot off, Commander.”

  Gunfire crashed in their ears every few seconds. Mostly single-shot rifle and pistol fire, but occasionally someone let rip with a tommy gun on full auto. You could hear the rounds striking dozens of different surfaces as they flew around within the disordered geometry of the combined shipspaces. Brass casings fell to the deck, ringing like a jar full of coins tipped onto a concrete floor. Fire came back at them, too. It sounded weird. Really loud, but there was never any ricochet. Just a peculiar sort of thudding pff when the bullets struck metal, or a sodden whack, like a baseball hitting a wet catcher’s mitt, if they hit flesh. Seaman Molloy dipped his chin to point out the headless corpse of CPO Kelly, lying where the force of those odd bullets had thrown it.

  “He took one with him, though,” said Molloy respectfully. “You see him coming in, Commander? That Jap got one right through the heart? That was Chief Kelly did that, sir. Woulda put them army sharpshooters to shame, sir.”

  “Okay, sailor,” grunted Evans, still reeling from Molloy’s heavy blow. “Better give me a report.”

  Molloy gave him a look that said he’d never had to report to anyone more important than Chief Kelly, but then he straightened his shoulders and gathered his thoughts. Clearly there weren’t that many of them, but his bovine features grew even more ruminative than usual.

  “Well, Commander, we come in through the hole in the bunkroom. We had a lot of trouble finding our way around. We shot a few Japs, turned out to be niggers, and I’m sorry but I think we shot a few ladies they had as sex slaves, too . . . Probably better for them that way, though.”

  As Moose was talking, the volume of incoming fire grew alarmingly, forcing him to raise his voice. Evans was going to ask him about the black men and the women, whether anyone had thought to search them for ID, when Seaman Stolz screamed. A very large chunk of his chest disintegrated in a hot red shower that splashed over his shipmates.

  He was dead before what was left of him slumped to the deck.

  “Damn. I told you!” yelled Molloy. “Didn’t I, Commander? They shot him through that little crack there.”

  He jammed his rifle into the space, loosed off a round in reply, then wrestled it out with some difficulty just before the response came in. Three rounds passed through and smacked into a solid-steel bulkhead just over the spot where Evans had crouched down and curled as tightly as possible. He was totally mystified by what he saw. The bullets impacted the metal surface with dry puffs of powder, leaving no dent and almost no residue. You had to wonder how they’d killed Stolz. Evans resisted the urge to lean over and scrape away some of dust that clung to the point of impact. But he’d already decided it wouldn’t be worth his life.

  It was hard enough to hear anyone talk, let alone to think this situation through calmly and rationally with the harsh thunder of battle going on all around him. Mohr had told him nearly a hundred men were fetched up against dozens of barricades or blockages like Molloy’s, pouring as much lead into the enemy as they could, given the Japs nearly supernatural ability to pick them off with those fucking shotgun blasts. Between the fearful roar of that battle and the agony building from his own wounds, Evans feared the situation was entirely beyond him.

  He was only Navy Reserve, after all. In civilian life, where he’d been blissfully and ignorantly employed until recently, he was a math teacher at small school in upstate New York. He’d joined the reserve in the early thirties, when work was hard to come by. He’d made some fine friends out of it, and the young ladies of Cherrybrooke village did like a man in uniform. But this . . . this was getting out of hand.

  He was tempted to give in to the creeping grayness, to just fall unconscious and let someone else figure it all out, when the strangest thing happened. The storm of fire coming in at them abruptly ceased.

  And then there came a loud crackling sound, like static over a ship’s speaker. And an amplified voice boomed out. A female voice, with a clearly recognizable American accent, but unfamiliar in its pitch and tone.

  “This is Captain Daytona Anderson of the United States Navy Ship Leyte Gulf. Cease fire and identify yourselves immediately.”

  Evans looked over at Eddie Mohr, who seemed just as stunned as he was. The chief petty officer shrugged and shook his head.

  “It’s one of their camp whores,” hissed Molloy. “You can’t trust her, sir. She’s been brainwashed.”

  “Shut up, Moose,” growled Mohr, before turning back to Evans. “Well, sir?”

  Evans shook his head at this new turn of events. He drew a deep breath and tried to shout a reply, but his dry, cracked throat failed him. Chief Mohr took out his hip flask again and thrust it at the officer. Evans took a quick swill and tried once more. He was surprised at how weak his voice sounded.

  “This is Lieutenant Commander Peter Evans of the USS Astoria. Identify yourself properly, and explain what the hell is going on here.”

  He could hear other members of the Astoria’s crew whispering to each other in the brief silence that followed.

  Then the woman’s angry voice drowned them out. “I say again, this is Captain Daytona Anderson of the USS Leyte Gulf. You have boarded our ship and killed U.S. naval personnel. That enough explanation for you, asshole?”

  Evans got Mohr to help him over to the crack through which Willie Stolz had been shot. He yelled into the gap. “Listen, lady. If the Japs are putting you up to this, just forget it. I’m sorry for your situation, but we’re not laying down for anyone.”

  Muted cheers drifted into their bunker from somewhere off to starboard. Or what he thought was starboard.

  “Listen, you macho jerk, you’re going to get yourself and the rest of your crew killed for no good reason. We’re not Japanese. We’re Americans. You hear me? Americans.”

  Chief Mohr leaned over and said quietly, “That sounds like a black woman to me, Commander.”

  He was right, Evans realized. That was what threw him about the voice. It was black, like one of those Harlem jazz singers.

  “What’re you trying to pull, lady,” he called back. “There’s no such ship as the Leyte Gulf, and if there was, the captain wouldn’t be a dame. You just put Tojo on the loudspeaker, if he knows any English. I’ll take a surrender from him.”

  The cheers of his crewmates were punctuated by a good deal of laughter this time. Anderson didn’t reply, and he wondered if she’d been hustled away by her captors.

  Clancy and Nix crouched on either side of the aperture giving on to Evans and his men. Both men had set their night vision to the soft emerald of low-light amplification. Infrared was useless. There were simply too many heat sources bleeding into the fused mayhem of junk metal. Sparks cascaded fr
om shorted-out wiring. Steam vented from ruptured pipes in brilliant ruby-red geysers, and small spot fires burned all around them, adding a hot smoke haze to the saturated air.

  Clancy hand-signed to Anderson. Did she want them to work around though the maze of scrap and attempt to subdue the targets?

  The captain shook her head. She cut power to the small bullhorn in her left hand.

  “The way you guys look,” she subvocalized, “they’d take you for a couple of Nazis.”

  A chip implanted just below her jawline picked up the vibrations and converted them into a narrowcast quantum signal. Nix and Clancy heard their commanding officer’s words in their helmets as clearly as if she’d spoken at normal volume in a quiet room. Nobody else heard anything.

  “Just keep it tight and try not to waste anyone” she continued. “I’ll try again.”

  That amplified voice boomed out again.

  “All right, Commander Evans. I’m coming forward with my CPO and Specialist Nix. Are you in the head that intersected our weather station?”

  Evans’s eyes went wide at that. They were definitely hunkered down in a john and he figured that yes, maybe the science lab stuff could be weather equipment of some sort.

  Mohr just looked at him as if to say What next?

  “Yeah. I guess so,” replied the Astoria’s acting CO.

  “We’re coming armed. You fire on us and Clancy will pop a frag through that crack as easy as the round that killed your other guy a minute ago. Be nice if he didn’t have to do that again.”

  Crouching low, Moose Molloy tried to muscle into the gap with his Springfield, but Mohr placed a size twelve boot on his shoulder and stopped him cold. Evans thumbed back the hammer on his pistol, but kept it pointing down at the floor. A moment later he could just make out movement in the gloom and clutter of shadows on the other side of the gap. Three figures slowly resolved out of the darkness. A thin, weak shaft of diffused white light, thrown out by the source somewhere behind the toilet door, barely picked them out.