Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  There wasn’t much chatter as they ate up the distance. Everybody seemed caught in a weird headspace, not so much frightened as unbalanced by the morning’s events.

  “Nintendo piece of shit!” cursed his SO, Flight Lieutenant Hayes, as she gave the dead GPS unit another swat. Chris sometimes suspected that, despite five years in service as a systems operator, Amanda still thought that any piece of equipment could be fixed with a solid whack upside the head, like an old TV set.

  He brought the big gray helicopter to a hover above the rough center of the debris field. Amanda peered down into the flotsam that was dispersing under the fantastic downblast from the Seahawk. Scraps of cloth floated everywhere. Body parts. Broken, smashed-up pieces of wood floating on an oil slick that was burning, here and there, degrading their infrared NVS. Amanda thumbed her ear bud to open a channel to the crewman in back of the chopper. “Tobes, you see anything worth bagging?”

  Airman Toby La Salle came back at her, all growling South Bronx, but quantum smooth, as though he were right there in her ear. “Not much, Lieutenant. Burning oil’s messing with my vision. Somebody knew what they doing really opened a big can of whupp-ass down there . . . wait, hang on, think I see a coupla dudes. Two o’clock, two hundred out. Swimming away from us, so they’re in one piece . . . prob’ly.”

  Harford tilted the stick a fraction and sent them roaring toward the survivors.

  “Dudes’re swimming faster!” La Salle cried out. “Like they’re trying to get away from us.”

  “Maybe they think we’re gonna be mad at ’em,” said Hayes. “Think we flew all the way over here to finish the job.”

  Harford cut in over the top of them. “Drop the line.” He held the Seahawk directly over the men, who were desperately thrashing away in the rotor wash. La Salle winched down a padded rescue collar, which flapped around madly, but the men only whirled their arms faster.

  “Time for a swim, Tobes,” said Hayes. She heard La Salle’s “Gotcha” in her ear bud. Harford eased the chopper away from their reluctant targets while La Salle, who was wearing a thin spring wet suit, wrestled into a pair of flippers and goggles. A few seconds later, he jumped.

  La Salle covered the short distance to the first sailor in less than a minute, carving through a mat of wreckage as he went. The sailor, a much smaller man and a comparatively poor swimmer, had no chance of escaping. But he tried. As La Salle pulled level with him the man turned about, hooking burned fingers into claws and swiping at the rescue jumper’s face while letting go a series of terrified, guttural cries.

  Both men bobbed on the chaotic swell and cross-chop, flattened some by the rotor wash, but not completely. Stinging spray lashed their faces and made it very difficult to breathe. La Salle had a little trouble keeping his head above water and the burned sailor went under a few times, vomiting as he resurfaced. La Salle finally abandoned the soft approach, wrestled him into the harness, and signaled for a winch-up. He rode with him for a moment, then dropped straight back down to search for the second survivor.

  But it was too late. The sailor’s companion was floating facedown, dead in the water.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0029 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  The Clinton’s Media Center was a mess, in a very civilian way. Jackets lay over computer screens. Food sat atop flexipads. Discarded coffee cups had multiplied like rabbits. And most days, there was more hubbub than Lieutenant Thieu could bear.

  For once, however, it was quiet. As a group the reporters were older, fatter, whiter, and infinitely more prone to whining and mischief than the military personnel on whom they reported. None of them had mil-grade spinal inserts, and the illness that had come with the wormhole transition hit them hard. Most were still unconscious, laid out on canvas cots hastily set up in the corner of the center, where a single orderly watched over them. Most, but not all.

  Lieutenant Edgar “The Egg” Thieu, the Clinton’s media supervisor, tried putting on his best stone face for the only two journalists who remained awake. But stone faces only work on those who have something to fear from the person behind them, and neither Julia Duffy nor Rosanna Natoli had any reason to fear the worst that The Egg might dish up.

  A lapsed Buddhist, he considered their furious glares and wondered what crime he had committed in a past life. This was a karmic backlash of bin Laden proportions. What a pair of fuckin’ raptors, he thought. They were working him into a corner and blindsiding him, all razor teeth and slashing claws. He’d nearly wet himself watching Jurassic Park as a little kid, and he had the same feeling of free-floating horror now, eighteen years later, facing this pair of shrews.

  “Ladies . . . ,” he said, offering them his open palms.

  “Jesus, Nat!” cried Duffy. “Now it’s not just patronizing bullshit, it’s patronizing sexist bullshit!”

  “Uh . . . I’m sorry ladi . . . uh . . .”

  “Look, Edgar,” said Natoli, a petite brunette with axes in her impossibly deep brown eyes. “You got caught with your pants down. You lied to us, which means you lied to the American people. But now you can make it up to them.”

  “Yeah, just let us out of here to do our job,” Duffy finished for her.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Under no circumstances. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Oh, come on, Edgar!” Natoli protested. “Why not? This is the fucking story of the century. You can’t Roswell it. It’s just too big. You got ten thousand witnesses, two dozen or more of them journalists. You probably got your satellite links being hacked by CNN right now.”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Natoli, but CNN won’t be hacking any of our communications for a very long time. I can assure you of that.”

  Both women snorted in amusement.

  “You think so?” asked Natoli, who worked for the Atlanta-based broadcaster.

  The Egg smiled kindly, which put both reporters on alert. “Oh, no. Your sources seem to have misled you. You see, the Enterprise is exactly where it’s supposed to be. They’re not the one’s who’ve gone missing.”

  He let the implications of that hang in the air.

  “Holy shit,” Duffy said after a brief pause.

  “Yep,” nodded The Egg sympathetically. “So you see. You could interview those guys we brought over; lock them down for an exclusive if you want. But who you gonna call? I don’t think they’ve even invented the television here yet.”

  “Oh,” said Rosanna Natoli. Then, “Oh shit.”

  She slumped into a chair. Her eyes seemed to lose focus.

  Duffy rummaged around in a pocket and came up with a small bottle of pills. She dry swallowed one and handed the rest to her friend. Thieu wondered what the medication was. It might explain why they were still conscious.

  Whatever. At least I shut ’em up, he thought.

  And for a few seconds at least, Lieutenant Edgar Thieu got to enjoy the feeling of being in control.

  Dan Black was out of his depth. A few seconds after they had jumped out of the Seahawk, he’d received word that his mission was redundant. Spruance had authorized the Multinational Force to carry out search and rescue. The helicopter had lifted off almost immediately, taking Colonel Jones and leaving the two Enterprise men stranded on the Clinton. Kolhammer apologized to the pair, shouting over the sound of the rotor blades. He said it was critical they get SAR away as fast as possible.

  A Negro woman appeared, wearing camouflaged pants, a heavy blue, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a bulky yellow crash helmet. She hustled them all off the flight deck, which was swarming with emergency and damage control teams. Fires burned everywhere amid the wreckage of smashed aircraft and equipment.

  Black noticed that there seemed to be two island structures on the deck, separated by hundreds of yards. They hurried into the first one, and the change of atmosphere struck him immediately. The smell of burning chemicals was completely masked.

  “Overpressure,” said Curtis. “Wow.”

  The corridors, which were much wider, well lit, and better ventilated than the
narrow passages of their own ship, were nonetheless crowded with personnel charging from one crisis to another. Corpsmen carrying stretchers busted past every few minutes. Firefighters in silver space suits straight out of Flash Gordon came and went. Sirens sounded, the PA blared. Ensign Curtis snapped his head left and right, trying to take it all in at once. Black was more controlled, but the mayhem conspired to knock his feet out from under him, nonetheless.

  Kolhammer put a hand on his arm and tugged gently.

  “You might as well come with me, Commander. I’m heading back to the bridge.”

  Black shrugged, and fell into step with the admiral. They passed rooms that seemed to be full of nothing but movie screens, and a mess hall that looked more like a swish restaurant and smelled of things he vaguely recalled from port visits in the Far East and the Mediterranean. It was impossible to ignore the cosmopolitan nature of the carrier’s crew. Men and women of all races seemed to work in close proximity without any apparent difficulty. He saw white men take orders from what looked to be a Mexican woman, and watched as the men obeyed without question.

  The same Tower of Babel effect was repeated on the flag bridge when they arrived. Black was as bemused by the way different sexes and races were all mixed in among the bridge crew, as he was by the staggering display of technology. The cockpit of the helicopter had looked like something on a space rocket. This room, with its banks of glowing movie screens and flashing lights, was even more bewildering. How on earth did anyone know how to operate this stuff? And what sort of a world was it where women barked orders at men and colored folk were placed in charge of whites? Dan Black preferred not to think of himself as a prejudiced man, but his mind locked up. This was simply beyond his comprehension.

  He missed Kolhammer’s introduction of some officer named Judge.

  “Got the butcher’s bill sir,” the man said. “Damage and casualties across both forces.”

  He’s from Texas, thought Black.

  “Thanks, Mike,” said Kolhammer.

  A Seahawk flew past the blast window. They shuttled constantly between those ships with working flight decks and an ever-widening search and rescue zone. Kolhammer waited as Judge consulted his flexipad, unvarnished distaste creasing the exec’s features in the light of the screen. He noted that while Curtis had his face glued to the armor glass, watching the flight operations, Lieutenant Commander Black had settled into a quiet corner to watch the Clinton’s executive officer.

  “Every one of our ships has taken significant damage,” said Judge. “The Close-In Systems harvested a shitload of incoming, but another two shitloads arrived right behind the first. So far we have six hundred and thirty-seven confirmed dead on the Clinton. One thousand and fifty-three KIA on the Fearless. Another eight hundred and ninety-two throughout the task force. We have more than fifteen hundred injured. Half of them from the Clinton again. We’ve definitely lost contact with our two boomers, and with the Vanguard, the Dessaix, the Garrett, and the Indonesians. We’re not leaping to conclusions, but it could be they just didn’t come through.”

  “That’s not the case with the Nagoya, though,” said Kolhammer.

  “No, sir, it’s not. We’re pretty sure now the Nagoya was the source of the event and was destroyed by it. Makes sense, given what they were messing with. We’ve got some video on screen three.”

  The flatscreen came to life, quartering into four windows displaying mast-mounted cam coverage of the Nagoya. The video ran at normal speed for a few seconds then seemed to stop. Both Black and Curtis moved around to watch the video. The ensign whistled softly, but the older man scowled at the screen as if he didn’t trust it.

  “We had to dial back the replay speed,” said Judge. “Even then it’s hard to say what happened, it was so quick.”

  Kolhammer watched as the giant research vessel suddenly seemed to contract to a single point before a lens of swirling light bloomed out from the same spot. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “It looked like they got sucked down a drain or something.”

  “Yeah, it did, didn’t it? Lieutenant Dietz from the working group trying to nut this out called it spaghettification. He says it’s what happens when matter is drawn down into a singularity. Like a black hole. He doesn’t rate it as an enjoyable trip.”

  “Fatal?”

  “And then some.”

  Curtis leaned over to his superior officer and whispered, “What’s a black hole, sir?”

  “Dunno,” said Black.

  “We’ll explain later,” said Kolhammer, as an idea struck him.

  “Excuse me, Commander Black. Mike, that reporter we have on board from the Times, Duffy, she wrote a piece about this stuff a few years back. It was in the briefing pack I took across to the Enterprise. We should get her to write us up a briefing note. Something clear and concise we can use for our own people and for the locals. Lord knows, we’re going to need something. She still with us?”

  “I believe Lieutenant Thieu is rattling her cage even as we speak, sir.”

  “Make a note, I’ll want to speak to her later. She can start earning her room and board. Okay.” He nodded, drawing a mental line under the topic. “Our missing ships, we sure they didn’t come through and get turned into noodles?”

  “No, we’re not sure,” said Judge as a Seahawk lifted off from the heavily damaged deck of the carrier. “But it’s unlikely. The event had an edge. We know that because Captain Halabi saw it cut the Fearless in two. That took place eight thousand meters from the Nagoya. The subs were a long way beyond that, assuming there was a uniform shape to the phenomenon.”

  “Do we have any reason to assume that?” asked Kolhammer, a note of incredulity creeping into his voice. “This thing did throw everyone out of position, after all. It moved the Havoc about seven thousand meters closer to us.”

  Judge looked worried, but he could only shrug in agreement. “Admiral, we can’t assume anything about a process we don’t understand. The phenomenon seems to have been . . . anomalous. Our relative positions got mixed up. For instance, the Havoc was closer, but the Siranui was ten thousand meters farther from us than she should have been when we emerged. It’s possible the missing ships got scattered all over the globe. Or out into space. Or a hundred kilometers beneath the earth’s crust. We simply don’t know.”

  “Okay, then, we don’t assume anything. What about Spruance’s group? How badly are they hurting?”

  Mike Judge flicked a glance at Dan Black and sucked in through his teeth with a hiss. “We fucked them three ways from Sunday, Admiral, if you’ll pardon my French. Three cruisers are gone, the Yorktown, and the Hornet. That’s more than seven, eight thousand dead, right there. They got maybe another thousand dead on the destroyers, five sunk, two going down right now. We can’t rightly say anything about final casualty figures yet. They don’t have any implants here.”

  Judge sounded morose. There was nothing Kolhammer could say in mitigation. He felt as awful as the executive officer looked and sounded. Curtis and Black were even more subdued. Although they stood near the center of the room, nobody looked directly at them.

  “Okay, Mike,” said Kolhammer. “For now we can only take the first steps. Search and rescue. Care for the wounded. How’s that going?”

  Judge stared out the blast windows as he answered. “Doc Francois over on the Kandahar is in charge of that, Admiral. We lost Preston when the liquid oxygen went up. She’s the senior surgeon now. She’s organized triage for both forces. We’re taking the worst on our ships because we have the best facilities. The locals are doing what they can. They’ve got some of our medics on their ships now.”

  “And how’s that working out?”

  “No problems yet, but it’s early. There is one other issue, of course.”

  Kolhammer rubbed his neck. “Midway,” he sighed.

  Black and Curtis stiffened.

  “You told us you’d stand down any threat,” Black reminded him.

  “Admiral Spruance does want to know
what we’re going to do about it,” said Judge, “since we pretty much crippled his ability to act.”

  “Do we know where the Japs should be at this point?” asked Kolhammer.

  Judge leaned over a touch screen and danced his fingers across the surface. The lines and creases in his weathered face seemed unnaturally deep in dim red light of the flag bridge. Ensign Curtis shook his head in wonder as dozens of icons moved around the screen under the officer’s fingers, sometimes opening out into windows full of scrolling text and numbers, sometimes expanding into pictures of men and women in various uniforms.

  “I scanned the crew records,” said Judge, as he pulled the files. “I took a couple of history majors off other duties, set them to work on the archives tracking the progress of the Japanese according to the books.”

  A screen next to Judge filled up with a map of the Pacific. The relative positions of the Japanese and American fleets were recorded from June 1 through June 7, 1942.

  “The Nemesis arrays already have a good lock on a large body closing from the west, exactly where Admiral Nagumo should be at this time.”

  “When’s the first strike due?”

  Judge checked the flexipad. “At zero eight hundred hours on June third—that’s today—the Second Carrier Striking Group under Admiral Kakuta will launch a diversionary attack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. At zero five fifty-three on June fourth, the radar station at Midway will pick up the first wave of attacking planes, which will be over the island from zero six thirty to zero six forty-three.”

  Kolhammer nodded, satisfied with small mercies. “Okay then. We have a day and a half until the main attack. Let’s work up a plan for a strike on the carriers heading for Midway. If we can’t get any planes off, we’ll take them out with missiles.