Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Willet took up a position behind the intel boss. Lieutenant Lohrey danced her fingertips across a touch screen so quickly that they covered the brightly glowing surface in afterimages. Extra windows opened up, putting on view more cruisers and battleships, but refusing to display any carriers beyond the two flattips they’d already tagged.

  At least two-thirds of the Combined Fleet was missing.

  “Bugger,” muttered Willet. “Okay. Comms. Burst transmission to Kolhammer, maximum compression. The fleet has either scattered or sortied. Havoc to engage remaining targets on schedule. Be advised there is a risk of encountering significant enemy surface units.”

  The warning sent, Willet returned to her tasking.

  Hashirajima still presented an attractive target. At least a dozen very large warships and twice as many destroyers lay at anchor beneath the unblinking eyes of the drone.

  “Weapons, designate the flattops.”

  “Targets assigned, ma’am,” replied the dour Scot, Lieutenant Yates.

  A signal pulsed out, and seventy-five hundred meters above Hashirajima a multifaceted laser node winked on beneath the Big Eye drone. Two thin beams of coherent light from outside the visible spectrum locked onto the flight decks of the two carriers.

  Back in the Havoc’s CIC, Willet chewed her lip and quietly contemplated the flatscreen that was carrying real-time video from the target area. Picking up a light wand, she drew boxes around the four largest gunships.

  “That looks like Kakuta’s Aleutian force,” she said. “That’d make those big bastards the Hyuga, Ise, Fuso, and Yamashiro. Weapons, put a White Dwarf into each of them.”

  Yates acknowledged her order as she drew another box around a slightly smaller vessel. It looked like a heavy cruiser rather than a battleship. She magnified the image on screen, closing to a virtual distance of six hundred meters. Wisps of smoke drifted from the stacks in the low-light display. Blooms of rose-colored radiance leaked from the funnels on the infrared view. Willet compared the image with archival shots running on an adjacent screen.

  “And that looks the Kitikami,” she said. “Mr. Yates, you’ll probably kill yourself a couple of admirals if you take her out.”

  “Nice work if you can get it, ma’am.”

  The captain leaned over and touched the screen with her wand, confirming her targets, as crewmembers seated up and down the command center began to report.

  “Targets acquired. Strobing and designated.”

  “Payload online, Captain. No countermeasures. Nothing on the threat boards.”

  “All links feeding, Captain. Clean vision to weapons.”

  “VLS ready and missiles hot, ma’am.”

  Willet checked the time. Three minutes to go. Silence settled on the small group of men and women. Those members of the crew not directly concerned with the attack or with attending to the boat’s own defensive systems watched on screens throughout the vessel. In the corner of each monitor a red time hack counted down.

  Willet felt a presence beside her. It was the Havoc’s exec, Commander Grey.

  “Do you mind, Captain?” he asked quietly.

  “No, of course not,” she answered, her own voice just as subdued.

  Grey spoke softly, almost to himself. “Vengeance, deep brooding over the slain, had blocked the source of softer woe; And burning pride and high disdain, Forbade the rising tear to flow.”

  Chief Flemming threw the young officer a glance, his own rough-hewn features giving nothing away as the time hack counted down to zero.

  00.03

  00.02

  00.01

  00.00

  Nobody pressed any buttons. The sequence was already programmed. The boat shuddered as it absorbed the energy of the missile salvo lifting off.

  The defensive sysops redoubled their watchfulness, lest the launch give them away. But the radar screens remained empty, and the threat boards glowed green.

  Captain Willet worked the screen, pointing, clicking, and defining a small box that took in the bridge of the largest battleship. The green-tinted image expanded to fill the whole display, resolving itself quickly from pixelated ambiguity into a picture as sharp as the original image. She repeated the process. The control center remained still and silent as the screen filled with a slightly fuzzier but still-detailed image of two men on a gantry outside the bridge itself. The figures were smoking and chatting. Willet wondered if she would see their reactions as the missiles approached. She’d had that experience before, but after two minutes they disappeared into a hatchway. When they failed to show themselves again, she returned to a standard top-down perspective from six hundred meters virtual.

  HASHIRAJIMA ANCHORAGE, 2036 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  Lieutenant Moertopo gazed out over the oily, black waters of the Seto Inland Sea from his vantage point in a small cabin on Hashirajima Island. He couldn’t see the famous city of Hiroshima. It was some thirty-two kilometers away, hidden behind Edajima Island, but he still didn’t like being so close to site of the first atomic strike in history. It made him nervous. Irrationally so. He knew it would be years before the Americans dropped the bomb, but still. He was very, very keen to get away from here.

  He wondered where the Sutanto was now. The dock where she had tied up was empty and had been for three days. He was certain he would never see his ship again.

  “I would have thought a man like you could sleep on a hot night.”

  Moertopo recognized the German’s voice and smiled. He’d warmed to Brasch. The engineer was levelheaded and even a little cynical. It was actually refreshing when fanatics like Hidaka surrounded you every day.

  “Does the heat bother you, Major?” he asked.

  Brasch had walked up the narrow cobblestone path to the wooden lookout in nothing more than shorts and an undershirt. Moertopo could see by the moonlight that he was sweating.

  “No,” said Brasch. “The heat doesn’t bother me. Not after Russia. But it does keep me awake at night.”

  “The heat, and other things,” said Moertopo.

  The German didn’t reply, but his silence was heavy. Moertopo lit a clove cigarette and offered it to him.

  “No, thank you, Lieutenant. Those things smell like fragrant dog turds.”

  A half-moon hung over the Inland Sea. From their vantage point, on a small platform a hundred or so meters above the water, they could see a flotilla of ships that remained at anchor off the island. Ripples and wavelets caught the moon’s reflection and turned it into a net of spun silver on the surface of the Seto-naikai. The hint of a breeze carried the perfume of half a dozen local wildflowers to mask the salt-laced sea air. It was an arcadian scene, but they would not be staying much longer to enjoy it.

  Brasch was scheduled to return to the Fatherland with Skorzeny before long, there to personally address the führer. Moertopo would be joining his men in the city of Hakodate, far to the north in Hokkaido, where the research effort had been transferred. He was surprised to find he would miss the jasmine-scented gardens and the old stone cottage that had been his gilded cage since they’d arrived.

  “You know they’ll kill you, one day.”

  The Indonesian officer nearly choked on an inhale, coughing violently and painfully as the kretek smoke burned his air passages.

  “I’m sorry?” he gasped.

  Brasch clapped him on the back a few times. Starlight softened the severe lines of his face, and he seemed to be smiling. Something approaching warmth lit his eyes.

  “They’ll kill you, Moertopo. Your value to them declines each day as they become more familiar with your technology. One day you will be of no use to them at all. And then . . .”

  The German shrugged.

  A cold ball of acid seemed to burn at the Indonesian’s gut.

  “Why are you saying these things?” he asked, his voice nearly squeaking with indignation and fright.

  “Because they’re true,” smiled Brasch.

  Moertopo’s hand shook as he tried to take ano
ther puff on the cigarette. Twice he opened his mouth to argue, but nothing came. He knew that what Brasch had said was true. There were days he wondered why he was even alive now. The night, which had seemed so pleasant and tranquil, now seemed darker and more malevolent. Shadows pooled under bushes, hiding assassins. He shuddered.

  “Don’t worry,” Brasch said. “We’re all dead men anyway.”

  His face seemed to freeze in the flash of a photographer’s globe, but the blaze of white light did not fade. It grew stronger. And the thunder of the apocalypse shook the ground underfoot. Moertopo threw himself at Brasch.

  “Hiroshima,” he screamed.

  “Wha—”

  They crashed to the wooden deck and Moertopo flinched, expecting to see his skin blacken and begin to smoke, just before a blast wave pulverized them against the rock wall to their rear. Giant explosions hammered at the island again and again. And when he found that he was still alive after a few seconds, he realized how foolish he’d been.

  “Are you all right,” he shouted at Brasch.

  The engineer was already climbing to his feet. His eyes bulged as he took in the sight before them. The idyllic panorama had been utterly transformed. The sleeping fleet, the silver moonlight, they were gone. The anchorage was now a cauldron in which half a dozen ships blazed like Roman torches.

  “It’s started,” said Moertopo.

  Shouts and cries reached them as the Japanese soldiers guarding their quarters realized they were under attack. A siren began its mournful wail, and the first lines of trace fire weaved up from the deck of a destroyer about three kilometers away.

  A sergeant of the guard appeared at a run, panting and gesturing for them to follow him to a shelter.

  “There’s no need,” said Moertopo.

  Brasch regarded him with a strange expression. It took the Indonesian a second or two to recognize the look. It was respect.

  He smiled.

  “There’s no need to run or hide because they don’t miss, Major. If we were meant to die, it already would be so.”

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2141 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  Admiral Spruance watched, mesmerized, as the missiles dived down on their prey like steel hawks. The rate of descent was so great, it actually made him feel a little giddy seeing the Japanese carrier rise up to fill the entire wallscreen so quickly. He marveled at the idea of putting a movie camera inside the nose of a bomb, and just had time to make out the aircraft spotted on the flight deck before they filled all three panels and the image cut back to recorded footage from the Havoc’s spy drone. The switch, managed by a young woman in the Clinton’s CIC, was so slick that the admiral was able to see how the mass of the Japanese carrier actually shuddered under the impact, just before a brilliant white starburst blossomed from deep within the body of the vessel.

  It seemed almost peaceful, if that were possible. The brilliant globe of silent white light bloomed out to consume most of the ship, then disappeared just as quickly. For half a second he was left with a ghostly vision of what appeared to be the Ryujo, or what remained of her, resting serenely at anchor—an astounding sight, because three-quarters of the ship was gone, everything vaporized between the first forward gun mount and the rear elevator. For that brief moment, it appeared as though the two sections, fore and aft, might just sit there indefinitely—and then they toppled into the waves and were ripped apart by secondary explosions.

  “Holy shit,” said Commander Black.

  They were standing in the otherwise empty section of the supercarrier’s Combat Information Center that had once been devoted to antisatellite warfare. It afforded Spruance and his men a ringside view of the way Kolhammer’s people made war. What they saw was chilling.

  The big screen that dominated one whole wall of the center briefly divided again, presenting coverage of the other Jap ships dying in the exactly same fashion as the Ryujo. Then a single-field view pulled back to show the entire anchorage. Small bursts of light suddenly twinkled along the flanks of one vessel, a cruiser. The effect spread throughout the body of the fleet.

  “Flak,” explained Judge.

  Looking at the faces of the men and women, sitting quietly at their banks of little movie screens and instruments in front the giant wallscreen, Spruance felt the power gathered in this room in a new way. At Midway he’d been hammered into a near state of shock by their weapons. Now, afforded the luxury of watching the onslaught from a distance, he was struck forcefully by the singular and passionless way they went about their killing. Their damn thinking machines had taken it upon themselves to slaughter his men while they slept. But seeing the indifferent response to the deaths they had just witnessed—deaths they had caused—he wondered whether these people were any more capable of feeling genuine emotion than their machines.

  He could see they were satisfied with the result, but only his men seemed to have responded like true combatants.

  Even young Curtis, who’d probably never seen blood spilled outside a shaving nick, reacted with greater emotion than the woman whose submarine had just unleashed such destruction. The ensign was babbling on to Dan Black, pointing at the screen and asking the same question over and over. “Did you see that, Commander? Did you?”

  Captain Willet, by way of contrast, appeared at the start of her little war movie to explain the events that had transpired. Spruance saw no sense of triumph or vindication, or even mild regret at having cut so many lives short on her say-so. For the second time in a week he found himself wondering what sort of a world produced women like that.

  And then—how long before they’d try to remake this one in their own image?

  He shook his head. This was ridiculous. These people had been at war for nearly two decades. It was only natural that they would be completely inured to its savageries by now, just as his countrymen would surely grow coarse and insensitive to the horrors that lay before them. And he couldn’t forget, either, that this wasn’t their war. It belonged to their history, and the men who had died since they arrived were to them already long dead anyway. Perhaps that explained it.

  Spruance heard somebody behind him, a woman. “Well, that’s the end of that.”

  But he understood it was just the beginning.

  “Singapore strike is inbound,” another voice announced.

  He turned back to the big screen. He wanted to see what happened next.

  39

  HMAS MORETON BAY, 2132 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  A long swell, generated by a storm in the Bay of Bengal, rolled under the twin hulls of the Moreton Bay as Lieutenant Nguyen methodically checked and rechecked Metal Storm and her laser pods. She was glad to be back in her old seat on the fast troop carrier—converted to an evacuation ship for the raid on Singapore. They’d drawn supplies for the Close-In Weapons Systems from stocks salvaged off the Leyte Gulf.

  She calibrated her senor arrays and tested the Cooperative Battle Link to HMS Trident, three nautical miles off the port bow. The Bay didn’t run to a full CIC, and her workstation was tucked away in a corner of the bridge. Most of the 2 Cav troopers who’d sailed for Timor with them had moved across to the littoral assault ship HMAS Ipswich, which was trailing two nautical miles to stern, although one company remained to provide security for the medical staff on board.

  Sixty medics, three-quarters of them ’temps, had embarked at New Caledonia, when they’d rendezvoused with the convoy of troop transports and converted passenger liners for the long run to the South China Sea. They plowed along between two antique Royal Navy destroyers and the three modern ships, of which only the Trident was really a fighter. Their course took them through some of the same waters they’d crossed on their way to Timor in the twenty-first century. Like many of her colleagues she was past being bothered by a fractured sense of déjà vu. It was there all the time now, like your heartbeat.

  Nobody had spoken on the bridge for a while. The tension was building as they rounded the northern tip of Sumatra and laid on steam for the objective. Ev
en so, they were restricted to the speed of the slowest ship in their group, a Dutch liner, the Princess Beatrix. She made twenty-one knots, which wasn’t bad, Nguyen supposed. But even the Ipswich could break thirty at a gallop, and she was a sea pig, loaded down with 2 Cav’s armor and attack choppers.

  A half-moon illuminated the ships and their phosphorescent wakes.

  “Won’t be long now,” said Captain Sheehan.

  Nguyen checked her threat boards out of habit. She needn’t have bothered. They weren’t about to be swarmed by Chinese sea skimmers. A screen at her station, one of three, displayed the threat bubble out to a thousand kilometers, courtesy of the battle link with the Nemesis arrays of HMS Trident. Seven aircraft were being tracked and three surface contacts, further down the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore. The stealth destroyer’s sensor and weapons suites were infinitely more powerful than anything she had to play with. When the shit hit the fan, there’d actually be very little for her to do. The Trident’s Combat Intelligence would take control of all of Nguyen’s defensive systems and wield them as one with its own.

  She wondered what the crews on the old ships made of it all. She didn’t even know what they’d been told of the mission. Perhaps nothing. No sane man from this time would willingly steam into the heart of the Japanese empire. Rachel used a trackball to train a mast-mounted cam on the nearest vessel, a New Zealand hospital ship, HMZNS Christchurch. She smiled at the image of three sailors lined up against a railing on the forecastle. She could see them quite clearly through her night vision lens. They were swapping a single pair of binoculars, pointed first to the Trident, then to the Australian catamaran. They seemed less interested in HMAS Ipswich. It was a more conventional-looking ship.

  Captain Sheehan appeared at her shoulder.

  “You have to wonder what they make of this.”

  A tone in Nguyen’s earpiece told her that Trident had locked onto a possible hostile aircraft.

  “Message from Captain Halabi, sir,” the communications officer announced. “Two potentially hostile aircraft have changed course, and are moving in our direction.”