Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  The Havoc was unique among the surviving 21C craft in that no ’temps sailed on her. At various times, back in her home waters, she’d hosted visitors from the contemporary Allied navies as well as the occasional politician. But when she loaded up with retrofitted handmade Mark 48 torpedoes and headed out looking for trouble, she always did so with her original crew.

  Before the Transition, Willet had prided herself on running a tight but happy outfit. Cut off from their families for six months at a time, the forty-two men and women under her command had become surrogate family members. She wouldn’t have imagined they could really be any closer, but she’d been wrong. The Transition had seemingly welded them together forever. There were times when she thought her people were more comfortable on the boat than they were back in the historical theme park of 1940s Sydney. As much as twenty-first-century culture—and a good deal of its antecedent history—had been adopted by the avant-garde crowd and almost everyone under the age of thirty, in a way that merely served to reinforce the sense of isolation they all felt. There was something terribly sad about the ’temp parties she’d attended back on shore, with everyone doing their damnedest to make her feel “at home.” You were likely to find yourself talking to a 1940s artist dressed like a 1970s disco bunny, trying with all her might to discuss post-ironic pop culture of the early new millennium. There were a few bars and restaurants owned by uptimers who’d been invalided out of service or simply finished their hitch, and they did a great job of shutting out reality. But stepping out of them at the end of the night was like falling into the wormhole all over again.

  Unlike Karen Halabi, with whom she kept in regular contact via data relay, Willet did not suffer overly much from the depredations of pigheaded buffoons. Partly that was because she still worked so closely with Kolhammer’s forces. With the immediate threat to Australia having receded, Canberra was happy to attach the submarine to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the same way that many of the Royal Australian Navy’s contemporary vessels served with U.S. forces. And partly, of course, it helped that she was white, good looking, and the end product of a military family stretching back four generations.

  She had relatives living now whom she vaguely remembered as wizened old ghosts at the family barbecues when she was a little girl. One of them, who’d died long before she was born, was a brigadier with the Sixth Division. Tom Willet. Like most of his comrades, a citizen-soldier for the duration.

  In civilian life Tom was a lawyer to and a good friend of Sir Frank Packer, the owner of a newspaper and magazine empire. He’d taken a shine to his great-grandniece and through the offices of Sir Frank had ensured that her run into the good graces of the local establishment was smooth and hassle-free. She’d like to think that all the Japs she’d killed might count for something, too. But her ghostwritten “Advice from the Future” column in the Women’s Weekly magazine probably counted for more. And saving the world hadn’t really helped Karen Halabi gain entrée to the rarefied circles of the London elite, had it?

  Her intel boss, Lieutenant Lohrey, touched her on the arm and nodded to a screen just off to the left of the monitor bank she’d been watching.

  Thanks, Amanda, she mouthed silently.

  All thoughts of the weird, contrary life she now lived fell away as she leaned forward to peer at the split screen. Willet chewed her lower lip. She heard Lohrey grunt softly beside her. It was like something out of the dark ages, or one of those 1630s films by Peter Jackson.

  “We estimate a million and a half combatants,” Lohrey informed her sotto voce.

  Willet said nothing. She could hear her own breathing. No keyboards clacked anywhere in the center. Her sysops used touch screens, and such conversation as was necessary was conducted briefly and in low tones.

  On the main display cube, above the boat’s lifeless holobloc, a CGI schematic of the threat bubble showed them surrounded by Soviet warships. Four Japanese submarines—of the eighteen they’d originally been tracking—still survived. But like her, they were lying doggo. Unlike her, they were undoubtedly waiting for the moment when they might fire off a brace of torpedoes, to do the most damage possible before dying inside of a maelstrom of depth charges and antisubmarine torpedoes and rockets.

  The latter two weapons were among the many unpleasant surprises they’d logged since taking up station to secretly observe the battle. The Communist sub killers were primitive by her standards, but far in advance of anything they’d seen the Japanese deploy. It was impossible to tell without actually retrieving one for examination, but as best they could discern through sensor readings, the Soviets had produced large numbers of something like their old SET-53 passive homing torpedoes and a small number of the much more lethal SET-65 active/passive analogs. Even more disturbing than the weapons, however, were the platforms they’d been launched from: dedicated ASW helicopters.

  So troubled was she by that development, Willet had ordered Lohrey to devote a primary channel of the Big Eye feed to covering any appearance by the Soviet choppers. One of the main displays carried the continual surveillance, as instructed, and seven split screens were occupied by LLAMPS and infrared vision of hovering, swooping helicopters that looked like the bastard offspring of a Sea King and the old Khrushchev-era Ka-25. Twin-bladed coaxial rotors; a nose-mounted radome structure; towed arrays; a centerline torpedo system; and depth charges fixed to stubby winglets about halfway down the fuselage.

  “She’s no fuckin’ oil painting,” her boat chief, Roy Flemming, commented when he saw them for the first time.

  “Aye, Chief, but they do the job,” Willet replied.

  They more than did the job. Most of the Japanese subs never got a shot off.

  They were located and destroyed long before the lead elements of the Soviet fleet arrived. The few that survived looked to have done so by lying on the shallow bottom close to shore, surrounded by the wreckage of their sunken comrades. With her Nemesis arrays, Willet knew exactly where they were, even amid the fearsome background noise of the battle overhead. The Soviets, on the other hand, just seemed to be going through the motions of searching for them now. Having killed the others so quickly in the opening moments, the Russian commanders had probably been lulled into a false sense of security by the clearly demonstrated superiority of their equipment.

  The Havoc’s captain wondered idly when the remaining Japanese boats would come to life and charge to the surface looking for a quick kill before the inevitable counterstrike took them out of the game. Unlike her, they didn’t enjoy the luxuries of remote sensor feeds, or the quantum processing power of an advanced Combat Intelligence. They’d be lashing out in the dark. Literally.

  She checked the time hack on the nearest screen. It was twenty minutes after midnight.

  The boat’s processors were fully engaged filtering the immense intelligence take from the Battle of Okhotsk as it raged through the darkness hours. The Soviets weren’t big on emission control, so in addition to the audiovisual coverage coming in from the Big Eye drone, the Havoc was also scooping up vast quantities of electronic and signals intelligence. Designed to stalk and strike at the infinitely more capable Chinese navy nearly eight decades hence, the submarine had little trouble accumulating data on her current targets. But with such a small crew, and none of them very well versed in post-Transition Soviet naval technology or tactics, Captain Jane Willet had orders to watch, and nothing more. The Sovs had done so much in secret, there were almost no patches or upgrades to the Nemesis files on them. Willet’s people were writing the first ones.

  Every two hours Lieutenant Lohrey zapped another compressed, encrypted burst up to the drone, which relayed the package back to an AWACS bird loitering fifteen hundred kilometers to the southeast. From there it went back to the Clinton, where Kolhammer and Spruance had dozens of specialists working on the take and joining the very rough dots her Intel Section had mapped out. Even more analysts were on their way from Hawaii.

  Willet grimaced as Master Chief Flemming pointed ou
t an especially gruesome scene in one of the smaller windows. A Japanese artillery position was being overrun. The drone gave them a view of the carnage from a virtual height of one hundred meters. What was that line from Shakespeare, she thought. There’s none die well that die in battle… The Englishman had been writing about Agincourt, half a millennium ago, but he could just as well have been observing the fight for that gun battery.

  From the comparative safety of her hiding place, Jane Willet gave thanks that her life paths had led her to the cool and quiet space of her bridge on the Havoc, and not into the middle of the insensate slaughter taking place just over the horizon.

  D-DAY + 36. 9 JUNE 1944. 0020 HOURS.

  USS ARMANNO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  For the first time since he’d taken command of the USS Armanno, Captain John F. Kennedy wished he could trade it for his old PT boat. The Armanno, a new Halsey-class guided missile destroyer, was a magnificent fighting ship. Unlike his old boat, though, he didn’t think she was really meant for this sort of work. He would have felt a lot more comfortable slipping in and out of Japanese-held waters on the much smaller, less conspicuous PT boat. He knew he could have accommodated the six-strong Force Recon team. Even with all their equipment and the rigid-hulled inflatable, he still could have squeezed them in.

  But then again, if the nips tumbled them, it’d be a lot easier fighting their way out in the Armanno. And of course, Spruance’s armada didn’t include any torpedo boats.

  “Coming up on the release point, skipper.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hubbard. XO, give our guests a five-minute warning.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  His executive officer passed on the command via the ship’s intercom. Kennedy continued to sweep the sea with his Starlite goggles. He was past marveling at the opalescent view. He knew that down in the ship’s CIC, two dozen systems operators were scanning the threat bubble with infinitely more powerful sensors, but his days flitting around behind Japanese lines died hard, and he had lookouts posted all over the ship, just in case some gremlin decided to chew through a golden wire holding all his magical AT gear together. Sonar, radar, active, passive, phased array. It was all good, and he’d never be dumb enough to argue that a Mark 1 Eyeball was better. But as his father used to say, an extra set of peepers on a problem never hurt, did it?

  A small meteor shower to the northwest caught his attention, the falling stars appearing as streaks of emerald brilliance in his Starlites. The last time he’d seen anything so beautiful had been up at the family place in Hyannisport back at the end of fall. A cool, crisp night, with the northern stars out in abundance. His father had thrown a party on the last night of his leave, a little going-away soirée. Or that was how they’d sold it to him anyway. When he’d arrived with his date Natalia from upstate New York, the dozens of cars parked along Marchant Avenue spoke of an entirely different purpose. The summer house was full of political types and businessmen. His heart sank as soon as the whole circus caravan swung into view.

  He’d tried to convince Ali, as she liked to be called, that they should split before anyone saw them. Head back to the cabin and spend the rest of his leave together there. But she was a sweet girl, and coming from LA she loved a party. They could hear the music drifting down across the lawns as soon as he cut the car engine.

  “That sounds like Frank Sinatra,” she squealed. “Oh, come on, Jack. We simply must!”

  Against his better judgment he gave in to her, and spent the next six hours regretting it as his dad forced him to glad-hand every sweating, drunken idiot in a suit on the East Coast. He died inside every time someone insisted on calling him Mr. President, which was more or less every time anyone spoke to him. He caught sight of Ali’s honey-blond hair just once, on the other side of a crowded room, where she was deep in conversation with Sinatra and a rough-headed character who had to be the famous Slim Jim Davidson. He hardly got to speak to his brothers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing, as his dad seemed intent on playing each off against the other. He’d have thought reading the future histories might have dampened the old man’s enthusiasm for pushing his sons into public life, but no. Far from it.

  Foresight seemed to have fueled a deep, almost unnatural desire in Joe Kennedy to take a stranglehold on fate and choke the living shit out of it. He hadn’t been able to rest till he got that Oswald kid away from his mother and into that boarding school in Canada. And poor Joe Jr. still blamed him for getting yanked off the flight line over in England. Man, he’d heard the yelling and the hollering over that one all the way out in Hawaii.

  “Hell of thing, ain’t it, buddy, having your past come back and bite you on the ass before you even have a chance to fuck it up the first time around?”

  “Huh?”

  He’d been woolgathering out on the patio, and the man had snuck up on him. The man and the woman, now that he looked.

  “Don’t worry, Mack, I’m not gonna Mr. President you, you poor bastard.”

  Kennedy found himself feeling genuine relief. He couldn’t help being amused by the cheeky, knowing grin on this guy’s face, either.

  “Well, if you promise you won’t whistle ‘Hail to the Chief ’ while you’re blowing smoke up my ass,” he said, “I won’t call for the cops after I check to see if my wallet’s still here, Mr. Davidson.”

  Slim Jim Davidson grinned broadly. “I ain’t like that no more, Captain Kennedy. These days I got me a whole bunch of minions to do my pickpocketing for me, and on a much grander scale.”

  “And is this one of them?” Jack asked, nodding to the woman who stood, smiling enigmatically, just behind the famous businessman.

  “No,” she answered for herself, “Slim Jim and I have had professional dealings in the past, but not like that. I’m a reporter. Julia—”

  “Ms. Julia Duffy,” he finished for her. “And you’re hardly just a reporter, ma’am. You’d probably be as famous as Mr. Davidson here, at a guess. Almost as rich, too.”

  “Hardly,” she snorted.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty fucking wealthy,” Davidson said with a twinkle in his eye. Kennedy couldn’t miss the fact that he was joking and being very, very serious at the same time.

  “Well, you wouldn’t be here if my dad didn’t think much of your money,” Kennedy smiled.

  “But your father couldn’t care less about my breeding, right?”

  “Not much, no. And you, Ms. Duffy, I’ve seen a couple of newspaper owners here tonight, but no reporters, other than you. Are you working, or is this just a bit of sightseeing for you?”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, one of the most sexually suggestive gestures he’d ever seen. He suddenly felt a little guilty, although for what reason, he had no idea. He threw a furtive glance over her bare shoulders, looking for Ali.

  “Well, I haven’t pumped you about your plans for the future, so I guess I must be here for the pleasure of the company,” she said.

  Kennedy surveyed the other party guests: a close-packed collection of overweight, gin-fueled bores.

  “Yeah,” he deadpanned. “I can see that’d be it.”

  Off on the horizon, shooting stars zipped across the sky.

  “Cap’n, boat’s away, sir.”

  “Thanks, Chief. Let’s hold our position for now.”

  “Aye.”

  Kennedy dropped the goggles from his eyes, and with them went the illusion of privacy he’d enjoyed for just a moment or two.

  The deck hardly moved beneath his feet, so calm was the sea that night. He could hear the muted putter of the marines’ little boat as it carried them away from the bulk of the Armanno. They were headed to an island just below the horizon. It had seemed deserted on the first couple of surveillance sweeps a month ago. But as the fleet drew closer to the Marianas, islands that had been beyond the range of Kolhammer’s remaining drones came under observation by them for the first time.

  And this particular piece of real estate needed checking out.

 
The water jets were so incredibly quiet compared with an old-fashioned outboard motor that less disciplined troops might have been tempted to ride them much closer in to shore. But Gunnery Sergeant Adam Denny cut the engines at precisely the point his mission specs demanded. All six men in the small, rigid-hulled inflatable slipped lightweight paddles into the warm water and began to stroke for shore. They might well be rowing toward a deserted island, but they proceeded as though they were infiltrating Hirohito’s Imperial Palace. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say at this point. They’d rehearsed this scenario dozens of times back at the Littoral Warfare Training Camp in New Guinea.

  The island bobbed very gently up and down in their night vision goggles as they drew closer.

  Denny held a three-dimensional model of the atoll in his head. He’d known this was a special case as soon as he’d been authorized to attend one week of pre-mission prep in the Zone. Traffic between the “old” Marine Corps and its twenty-first offspring in the San Fernando Valley was surprisingly rare. It was strange, too, until you looked into the politics of it.

  Jones’s people had some great toys in the Zone. Better even than the AT stuff his Force Recon company had been issued at the start of the year. And their stuff was way better than the new gear the rest of the corps was packing nowadays. You’d think everyone would be able to just get along, rather than wasting time and energy that could be more profitably spent killing Japs, but no. Being a simple noncom, Denny wasn’t privy to all the back-room bullshit that went on, but he had a good set of eyes in his head, and he could see that of all the services, the corps seemed to be the one resisting hardest any talk of integration with its uptime colleagues. Happy to take the toys and whizbangs like the beautiful M4 carbine he had strapped to his back. Not so happy to play nice with the new guys who’d brought all those things in the first place.