"Chen," he barked. "Can Hannon walk yet?"
"I don't think so, Colonel. He's still sort of spasming."
"Check his air passage for any more crap and leave him. We'll send someone through to look after him, but we have to get to work. Come on now, son. Let's hustle before someone catches us with our nuts in the breeze."
Again, he added to himself.
Chen arranged his friend to rest as comfortably as possible and pushed himself up toward his CO. The steward who had served them appeared from the galley on his hands and knees, a long string of blood falling from his lips.
"You there!" yelled Jones, cutting through the man's misery and doubling the intensity of his own headache. "You well enough to attend to the lieutenant there?"
The man groaned, but nodded.
"Make sure he doesn't choke, then. And see to anybody you got back there. Shut everything down. No flames or boiling water. Understand?"
"Yes, sir, Colonel," the steward croaked as Jones and Chen tottered out of the mess.
There were men and women in various states of collapse all along the corridor. Some were far gone in what looked like the extremes of an epileptic seizure. Others simply appeared to be sleeping. A few were gathering their wits and none, to Jones's surprise, seemed to have been gripped by the Fear yet.
Probably too fucked up.
As they tried to hurry to the bridge, Jones stopped to encourage those marines and sailors who were rebounding the fastest. He noted that this seemed to be a random process. He saw Aub Harrison, a gunnery sergeant, a thirty-year man and just about the toughest son-of-a-bitch Jones had ever met, flaked out, a dark stain spreading down his pants as his bladder emptied itself. Just beyond Harrison, he found his principal combat surgeon, a slight red-headed woman, and she seemed reasonably unaffected. She was moving from one person to the next, jabbing them with one-use syringes. Jones grabbed a trembling Chen by the arm and muscled him over in her direction.
"Hey, Doc, what do we have here?" asked Jones. "Transsonics? What d'you think?"
Captain Margie Francois left the marine she was tending and moved over to Jones and Chen with remarkable agility. There was just a flicker of dread in her gray eyes. "Fucked if I know, Colonel," she said. "But I got Promatil and Stemazine, antinausea drugs. Seems to help."
She took up a syringe from a kit at her hip.
Another blast, very close this time. They all turned their heads in that direction.
"Terrific," said Jones. "Gimme a shot. And the lieutenant here, too. Can't you do an implant dump? I want a couple of Harriers up as soon as possible. But I'm guessing we got nobody fit to fly them yet."
"Sir. I've already zapped the implants. That's about forty percent of our personnel. I'll check on the fliers right away."
Jones detailed Chen to hustle her up some assistants as another explosion sounded. He was surprised to hear a personal weapon open up on full auto, somewhere nearby, and decided to take a detour from his path to the bridge. A few turns later he emerged onto a small weather deck.
A marine had leaned himself against the safety rail and was letting rip at something on the water. Huge fingers of white fire strobed at the muzzle of his weapon, and a long line of tracer rounds reached out over the darkened waters.
Jones shook his head in disbelief, first at the trooper, and then at the antiquated warship he was shooting at. She revealed herself with the flash of her guns.
"Safe that weapon now, son!" he yelled. And for the first time since he'd come to, raising his voice didn't drive an ice pick straight into his head. That was good. He liked to raise his voice.
The marine, a giant bovine-looking character, seemed genuinely shocked to have been busted by his CO, and actually began to argue.
"But the enemy, they's shooting at us, Colonel."
Jones stared again at the rogue vessel. A real dinosaur by the look of her. A destroyer maybe? The Indonesians had bought a bunch of them from the East Germans ages ago, back when there were still Indonesians and East Germans. But what the fuck was it doing here, attacking a clearly superior battle group? He was just starting along that chain of thought when his attention ballooned out to the bigger picture. Jones hustled a pair of powered combat goggles from the trooper, Bukowski, and set the light amplifiers to maximum gain.
"Sir. Y'all right?" asked Private Bukowksi.
"Be cool, Private," Jones said, quietly but sternly, as he tried to process what he was seeing. A hostile fleet seemed to have materialized in the middle of the task force. Carriers, old battleships or cruisers maybe, a real junkyard collection, but it had snuck in right under their noses and now that small, angry destroyer was lining up for a broadside on the Clinton. Well, she had a cast-iron pair of nuts on her, you had to give her that.
"Oh, shit," he spat as his peripheral vision picked up an even greater threat to the aircraft carrier. A small plane, obsolete, incredibly slow, was diving straight for the deck of the Big Hill, pulling out slowly, tortuously at just a hundred or so meters. A small black pearl detached from its belly and followed a fatal, parabolic arc. Jones couldn't tell if the flight path of the bomb would intersect with the deck of the supercarrier, but a heavy, leaden feeling in his guts told him it just might. He reached out and placed a hand on Private Bukowski's shoulder.
"You got the general principle right, son," he said quietly. "But you ain't gonna hit jack shit from here."
The destroyer exploded about five seconds before the bomb tore into the Clinton's deck between the number three and four catapults.
USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2252 HOURS, JUNE 2, 1942
A few people on the Clinton's flag bridge ignored the plasma screens and peered through the armor glass windows of the bridge, to watch the destroyer die in real time. The better view was on screen.
The hostile was nine hundred meters away when something took it amidships. Something big and ugly. A ball of fire and steam erupted and consumed most of the vessel's length. It broke her back, ripped her in half, lifting the separated sections twenty meters out of a boiling cauldron of sea beneath her keel. Kolhammer watched a gun turret pop off like a champagne cork and go skimming across the surface of the ocean. A murmur ran through the crew, those on their feet at least, as the bow knifed into the water and sank instantly. The burning stern remained afloat for just a few seconds before a secondary explosion atomized it.
Metal rain clattered into the carrier's superstructure as shrapnel from the blast whickered through the air to strike them. One twisted iron rivet that must have been traveling at the speed of sound smashed into the armor glass with a giant thud, to leave a delicate star pattern at the point of impact.
Two heartbeats later a five-hundred-kilogram bomb speared into the flight deck of the USS Hillary Clinton, two hundred meters aft of the flag bridge. The dumb iron bomb detonated a few feet from the Clinton's captain, Guy Chandler, and the group of unconscious technicians who had been carrying out routine maintenance checks on the aft catapults when the floor of the universe dropped out beneath them all. They all died without ever knowing they had journeyed between worlds.
The deck of the Clinton was armored against mace munitions. The number three catapult, however, was not. Indeed, like all of the ship's catapults it was a terribly vulnerable, high-maintenance bitch of a thing, which demanded constant loving care and attention lest it decide to malfunction with a fully laden Raptor hooked up and ready to roll. It was similar in form to the last generation of steam-driven catapults, consisting of a pair of very long tubes, topped by an open slot, sealed with rubber flanges. But rather than drawing pressurized steam from the ship's propulsion plant, the fuel-air explosive, or FAX, catapults used a binary fuel mix that was theoretically easier and safer to handle.
The theory, however, did not account for a bomb strike taking place in the middle of a launch simulation. The technical crew who died at catapult three had been running her through a series of prelaunch tests in preparation for the day's exercises. When the bomb struck,
the seventy-five-meter-long catapult tubes were full of the highly volatile fuel-air mix; enough, when it detonated, to rip a huge furrow out of the angled portside flight deck.
Enough, as well, to trigger a much more powerful and catastrophic explosion in a liquid oxygen tank recessed in a nominally secure area just below the lip of the flight deck, behind the Optical Landing System. It blew with a blinding white light and a head-cracking roar that approximated the effect of a subnuclear plasma-yield warhead. Most of that blast wave traveled up and outward, raking the flight deck of all human life and obliterating the frail dive-bomber that had launched the attack.
But it did not kill the Clinton. The voided double hull and monobonded deck plating absorbed and then shed 60 percent of the blast. That still left force enough, however, to trash dozens of aircraft chained down outboard of catapults one and two, and to sweep the flight decks clear of any personnel who had not been instantly vaporized.
As large and well built as the supercarrier was, the Clinton shook violently through every inch of her structure. Men and women tending the fusion stacks thirty meters below the waterline were thrown to the floor.
On the flag bridge, Kolhammer had one brief idiot moment, where his mind whispered it was just the destroyer going up. Years of training and experience told him the little ship had been taken out by a Type 92 torpedo, probably launched from the Havoc, which was packing that sort of heat and loitering with intent, according to the bloc.
But even as those thoughts spooled through his mind, his senses betrayed the truth, though he was only dimly aware that something had cleared his impaired vision. In a strange, elongated fragment of time, he watched the screen as a supernova consumed the stern of his own ship. A deep, disordered vibration seized the Clinton's bulk, throwing some of the watch to their knees. He groaned as the blast wave picked up the bodies of every human being on the flight deck and tossed them through the air like leaves before a gust front.
His heart thudded faster in his chest as a deep, unthinkably loud wall of thunder shook the bridge, and it seemed to him as though Hell's furnace had exploded. He was minutely aware of every detail his bulging eyes took in. The faces of his brother and sister officers, their mouths wide open, forming perfect Os; a thread dangling from the arm of an ensign as he raised his hand to point at something; the impression his own backside had made in the chair where he'd been sitting. The first flicker of color in the blast window, all wrong, a burnt black-and-orange blossom amid a field of gray sea and metal at the very edge of his vision. The petal of fire growing, unfurling, expanding. Consuming the space where the Clinton had been.
It was wrong. It was impossible. An outrage to the senses. But there it was, before his very eyes.
This confused tumble of thought and emotion seemed to take much longer than was really the case. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer was fifty-three years old. Old enough to have served in the First Gulf War, which made him a figure of mythology to the young men and women in this battle group. He had been at war for most of his adult life. He hadn't been born into conflict, like his young sailors and pilots. But he had grown into it.
A buddy from his first tour of Afghanistan had given him a memento, a piece of shrapnel from the battleground at Shah-i-Kot. It had been mounted on a polished cedar base and inscribed with J. Robert Oppenheimer's famously mawkish sentiment: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. It was really just a piece of bullshit bravado, the sort of thing young pilots loved and old men indulged with some regret, because they understood the worth and the cost of such things. But Kolhammer had kept the piece in his private quarters where he alone could see it. His friend was long gone, shot down over Indonesia in 2009, and hacked to death by Javanese peasant militia. So it was a keepsake, but also a personal talisman, because he had become death. He was a warrior before all else, now, and it was his warrior spirit-a reflexive, unthinking turn toward battle-that saved them all.
"Lieutenant Brooks," he barked at the flatscreen by his right hand. "Have you linked the fleet into our battlenet?"
"We've gained hotlinks to everyone who's available, sir, but we seem to have lost contact with Garrett, Vanguard, Fearless, Dessaix, Leyte Gulf, Sutanto, and Nuku. The Leyte Gulf we can locate, but she's not responding. Her systems are fried. She's seven thousand meters away, bearing one-eight-niner. Possibly rammed. The others are missing, possibly sunk. As is the Nagoya."
"Is Leyte Gulf burning?"
"Negative, sir. And we can't get a GPS fix on the datum point, either. I've tried interrogating GPS six ways from Sunday, but it seems to be down, Admiral."
"Down?"
"Nonresponsive, sir. The channels are clear, but it's as though the satellites themselves have been taken out."
Marvelous, thought Kolhammer, just marvelous. Under attack from God-knows-who, and their position fix goes south for the winter. He stifled an exasperated grunt.
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Find out what happened to those other ships. I want to know yesterday. Link all surviving task force assets for collective engagement. Unsafe laser packs and Metal Storm. Slave combat maces to the Clinton. Hammerheads only, no sunburn. Chapter Seven rules of engagement. Launch on my mark."
"Aye, sir," Brooks replied as her fingers blurred over a touch screen. A secondary explosion jolted her and knocked a few flag bridge crewmembers from their stations. "Solutions confirmed, Admiral. Locked and tracking."
"Engage," said Kolhammer. At the same instant, four torpedoes speared into the Clinton.
5
USS LEYTE GULF, 2257 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942
"Say again!" yelled Captain Daytona Anderson. The intercom was working fine, but the voice at the other end was muted by small-arms fire, screams, and a brace of explosions, which she felt quite clearly through the soles of her shoes.
"Boarders, ma'am. I say again, we have boarders. Armed and hos-"
A single massive explosion shook the entire ship, cutting off the transmission. A recorded voice boomed out of nearby PA speakers.
"Intruder alert. Intruder alert. Intruder alert."
Anderson already regretted her decision to direct the fight from the CIC. Ninety-five percent of her systems were down. Alarms screamed, beeped, and pinged all around her. Warning lights flashed, and the few screens with any lighted display at all were showing nonsensical data. Examining them closely was like looking into an Escher print. The Leyte Gulf appeared to have been rammed.
But it hadn't. The reality was more incomprehensible.
When the 250 men and women aboard the thirty-five-tonne Nemesis stealth cruiser had awakened from, well, whatever it was that had hit them, they found themselves occupying the same space as a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser, the USS Astoria. Luckily for the thousand or more men of the Astoria and the crew of the Leyte Gulf, they hadn't merged hand-in-glove, which would have killed most of the complements of both vessels immediately as their molecular structure was instantly compromised by having to share space with metal, wood, plastic, and the bodies of other human beings. Instead, the two ships had transected each other, appearing from above like an open pair of scissors.
Even so, many sailors from both ships had perished in such a fashion; some instantaneously, unknowingly, as they materialized squarely inside structures such as a bulkhead or six-inch gun mount. Others hadn't been so lucky. They had only partially merged with various objects or, in the worst cases, people. Their deaths had been slower, more agonizing, and, for them, totally inexplicable. A pharmacist's mate from the Astoria who gasped out his last breaths clawing at a PlayStation console half buried in his chest was typical of their number.
Some even died at each other's hands. Ensign Tommy Hideo from the Leyte Gulf and Leading Seaman Milton Coburn of the Astoria beat each other to death in a dark, constricted space where the control room for the Leyte Gulf's eight-inch autocannon intersected the three-tiered bunk upon which Seaman Coburn had been sleeping. The men themselves had been fused at the thigh. The blinding pain and shock of that violat
ion was enough to send them instantly over the edge, past any hope for rational behavior. Even if they had cooperated and sought out medical attention, the surgery would have needed to be swift and radical. Their blood types did not match, and they were quickly poisoning each other.
For the moment, though, Captain Anderson was unaware of these horrors. The Combat Information Center was still relatively calm, despite the shrill symphony of the alarms. The sailors there looked to her for guidance now. Most of them had nothing to do, since their battle stations had gone offline when the merging of the two ships had severed the kilometers of fiber-optic cables and wiring that formed the Gulf's nervous system.
The CIC was always a dark blue cave, but it seemed more so now, with the dozens of screens blacked out. It was warm, too, which was wrong. The center was supposed to be uncomfortably chilly, allowing the quantum systems to run at white heat.
At least Anderson was in better shape than her ailing vessel; she'd recovered quickly from the transition through the wormhole thanks to a subcutaneous antinausea insert she received every six months during routine checkups.
She had been quick to note that her crewmembers with Promatil inserts or dermal patches were less drastically affected by whatever had happened. When it became obvious that the shipnet was in disarray, she immediately dispatched runners to the nearest casualty stations with instructions to gather supplies of the drug and distribute them as widely and as swiftly as possible. That was how she'd learned about the violation of the forward decks. But she didn't have to look at the expanse of dead electronics all around them to know her ship was gravely hurt. She could feel it down in her meat.
The Gulf was dying.
Anderson straightened herself at the console, squared her shoulders, and traversed her gaze over every man and woman in the room. She was twenty-two years in the United States Navy and wore a uniform heavily burdened with decorations won the hard way. In her two decades at sea she had exercised for, and performed, almost every kind of operation it was possible to conceive of in modern naval combat. It had never occurred to her that she would have to issue the orders she now spoke. Keying a button to power up the ship's PA, without really knowing how far the broadcast would carry, she drove any trace of fear or doubt from her voice.
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