Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Read online

“Probably to beat off,” somebody added unnecessarily.

  Evans heard another burst of gunfire over the clamor of the crowded bunkroom.

  “You said we’ve found a way through, Chief. Where is it?” Evans asked, deciding for the moment to ignore the bizarre tableau.

  “Just over here. If you wanna follow me, Commander.”

  They left the ghoulish circle of onlookers to ponder the riddle of Hogan’s boot. A little farther on, just past a hammock containing the lower half of a naked torso, projecting from the same steel wall, the smooth regularity of the obstacle failed and gave way to a section of buckled and torn armor plating. A fissure some three to four feet wide had been opened by the titanic stresses generated when two objects of such great mass had fused together and tried to plow on, regardless of their new and decidedly inefficient design.

  The steel groaned and screamed in protest. Evans fancied he saw it moving, like the edges of flesh around a sucking chest wound. It was even darker in there, the blackness relieved only by a faint red shift that called forth childlike fears of the Beyond. As Lieutenant Commander Evans stepped toward the rift between two worlds, he shivered like a small boy stepping into the forbidden forest.

  6

  USS ENTERPRISE, 2255 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Lieutenant Commander Black ran from the flag radio room back past flag plot and hammered up the stairwell onto the bridge. Captain Murray, the Enterprise CO, had joined Spruance and was directing air operations—which is to say, he was sending a lot of good men to their deaths.

  Bombing six, under Lieutenant Dick Best, consisted of nineteen Dauntless dive-bombers, none of whom had ever launched from a carrier at night. Nine of the old barges had already gone into the drink at takeoff. Six more were destroyed in flight by misdirected friendly fire. And four were awaiting clearance to take off.

  Lieutenant Commander Black, two years out of flight ops, could only watch mutely, wondering what those remaining pilots felt as they sat in their cockpits, waiting to open the throttles and accelerate down the darkened flight deck. If, by some miracle, they got away to make a run on the enemy, none of them could realistically expect to survive a return trip and landing under these conditions.

  The bridge was preternaturally quiet, in contrast with the scene on the waters around them.

  Black moved up beside Spruance. The tension in the small, hard space demanded that he, too, speak in a taut whisper.

  “Commander Jolley on the New Orleans is trying to establish gunnery control across the task force, sir. I tried to reach Admiral Smith on the Astoria, but they’re out of action.”

  “They’ve been hit?”

  “Rammed, it seems.”

  Spruance’s jaw tightened.

  “Well, they’ll have to look after themselves. I need all the firepower I can get turned on the Japs. We can’t spare anyone to go help them out.”

  Staring out into the night, Black was momentarily transfixed by a bath of flat, white light. Two nearby cruisers had unleashed a coordinated broadside at the spectral figure of the Japanese ship, the Siranui. As the thunder of the guns hit them, he felt the detonation inside his chest, profound and imponderable.

  Spruance quickly brought a pair of spyglasses up to his eyes to check the results. Black, like most of the others in the room, had to peer unaided into the fractured darkness. The target seemed trapped within a volcanic eruption of white water and fire as dozens of high-explosive shells raked at the waves around her. A coarse, unforgiving cheer rose from a dozen men at the evidence of a single explosion, a distant bud of fire quite different in texture from those shots that had fallen harmlessly into the sea.

  “Looks like a hit on the bridge,” Spruance said without feeling.

  An ensign reported in. “Admiral, VB-six just got their last two away, and the Hornet says she has three Devastators up.”

  The cruisers fired in tandem again, with the same flashbulb effect, followed by the same, tremendous sonic boom. That must be what it sounds like in front of an avalanche, just before you die, thought Black.

  “Holy shit!” someone shouted.

  A fantastic cascade of violent light and fire instantly obliterated a great crescent of the night. It was as though a vast arc of space had ignited and set off every shell fired by the two warships. Eighteen armor-piercing eight-inch shells, and nearly as many high-explosive five-inch rounds, detonated simultaneously just a few hundered yards from the muzzles of the guns that had fired them. To the men looking on from the bridge of the Enterprise, it seemed as though the barrage had struck an invisible wall.

  “What the hell was that?” Spruance demanded.

  “It’s like they hit something,” said Black. “No way could the whole salvo misfire. It just . . . It couldn’t happen.”

  The staccato flickering of massed naval gunfire was suddenly overwhelmed by a burst of light. Twin lines of white fire and smoke rose vertically from the source of that flare on the deck of the Siranui.

  Unknown fires, Black thought to himself.

  The strange eruption, which held every man there in its thrall, sent those two slender pyres arcing so high into space that Black wondered for a second if they might just keep going until they left the atmosphere on their way into the cold vacuum of heaven.

  A nervous, insistent voice piped up and broke the spell.

  “Admiral Spruance, sir? Please? They’re rockets, sir! You have to get those ships moving. They’re going to get hit for sure!”

  “What’s that?” Spruance turned sharply toward the source of the comment, finding there a young pencil-necked ensign with thick black-framed reading glasses, the same one who had just run in with the message from the radio room.

  “Ensign Curtis, sir. They’re rockets. I’m sure of it and they’re aimed at the cruisers, Admiral.”

  “You seem damn sure of yourself, Ensign,” Spruance said.

  Dan Black recognized the dangerous tone in the old man’s voice. Another officer, Commander Beanland, stepped around a map table and shouted at Curtis.

  “That’ll be enough of your nonsense, Ensign. Get the hell off the bridge and back to your post. We’re trying to fight a battle up here.”

  The boy reacted as though Beanland had jammed an electric wire into his neck. He went rigid and turned white. “Sir!” he barked out, snapping a salute and making to turn on his heel. Black thought Spruance was about to stop him, ask him to explain further—the kid had seemed righteous in his certainty. But before the admiral could properly open his mouth to speak, before Curtis could even complete his about-face, the blinding white light of a newborn sun spilled out with a roar for the end of the world.

  JDS SIRANUI, 2301 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Maseo remembered the agony of stonefish poison, how his arm had burned as though held in a pot of boiling water, after he’d brushed against the spines of one on the outer reefs off Cairns. The sense memory punched away at him while he lay unconscious, battering at his submerged mind, until something gave way at last and let the real pain flood in. In a confused and sickening split second of vertigo, Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki dropped out of his dream and onto the metal stairwell circling up into the Siranui’s fin bridge.

  He screamed without shame or restraint as burned meat and nerve endings shrieked at him to get moving. Miyazaki had blacked out on the stairwell and had lived while the bridge crew died. But he had been badly burned by the explosion that killed his shipmates, and as he lay in the shallow coma of transition shock, a computer screen melted in the fires above him and dripped molten plastic onto his already scorched flesh.

  Shock robbed the young man of his senses for a few long seconds until his training asserted itself and he awkwardly thumbed his flexipad, activating the trauma beacon. Panic flared briefly, when he thought the pad may have been ruined in the missile strike, but a warm bath of analgesics and stabilizers soon flushed through his system, spreading out from his spine, up his neck, and down into each of his injured limbs.

  Than
ks to the drugs, Miyazaki was quickly able to consider the small, sharpened spike of bone that was jutting through the torn skin on his right ankle. He wouldn’t be able to walk on that, he knew. So he would have to drag himself up into the bridge by the strength of his good arm. He had just gripped the uncomfortably hot metallic gridwork of the step above his head when his flexipad began to vibrate and screech in a way he couldn’t ignore.

  Pausing and catching his breath, Miyazaki turned to examine the screen, expecting to find a senior officer there, bellowing orders. Instead the screen displayed kanji script, identifying the caller as the ship’s Combat Intelligence and addressing him as Acting Commander Miyazaki. A character voice he recognized from many wasted hours watching anime serials spoke from the pad.

  “The ship has been attacked and all senior command elements have been killed, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. You are the surviving senior officer. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response.”

  “Ship,” croaked Miyazaki, before losing his voice for a second. He swallowed with difficulty, tasting for the first time the foul miasma of burning chemicals and human remains coating his mouth and throat. “Ship, what is the fleet status?”

  “All fleet elements are under attack, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. Some are missing, presumed destroyed. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response.”

  “Siranui crew status?”

  “The crew is incapable of performing any duties, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response.”

  The Siranui’s CI spoke without urgency. It didn’t need any. Given the shrill disharmony of competing alarms, the thick smoke and crackling fire, the thumping impact of shot falling nearby, and the evidence of his own wounds, Miyazaki knew something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t enough, however. Before he would authorize the release of the ship’s weaponry, he had to be completely certain it was necessary.

  “Ship,” he said. “I must inspect the bridge for myself. I authorize Level Two Autonomy for response. Please confirm.”

  “Ship confirms Level Two Autonomous Defensive Response, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. Arming Metal Storm and laser pods . . . Targets acquired.”

  “On my authority, engage.”

  It seemed to Miyazaki that the last word hadn’t even formed in his mind before the entire ship trembled under the awesome tenor of twelve Metal Storm turrets spewing thousands of hypervelocity caseless rounds into the air. The sound was less martial than industrial, the furious crescendo of heavy-metal war drums.

  The ship heaved to port, steering herself now, and Miyazaki rolled clumsily to one side, catching the bone stub that was protruding from his shattered ankle. Even with the drugs that had been released by his spinal syrettes, he grayed out with pain. When he came to a few seconds later, it was all he could do not to vomit. The Siranui’s CI, which was monitoring him like a fretful mother, dumped another blend of anesthetic and antinausea solution onto his spinal receptors. Miyazaki experienced the flush as a threshold experience, akin to flipping from flat black-and-white to three-dimensional color with the twirl of a dial. He drew a quick breath and began again, hauling himself up the metal steps using his hand and knees.

  He smelled fire-retardant gas as he hauled himself through the torn blackout curtain and onto the ruined bridge. He gagged on the burned-chemical stench and the obscene stink of seared meat. It would have been much worse were it not for the ragged hole that had been punched through the blast windows by the missile impact. Fresh air gusted through, plucking at his bloodstained uniform and matted hair. Smoke obscured the surviving blast windows, but he could see enough through the opening, where growing swarms of primitive, unguided missiles filled the night sky.

  Night sky? But how . . .

  Miyazaki pushed the thought aside. What mattered now was what lay out there in the punctuated darkness. It looked like something off a history vid, like a battle from the forties Pacific War. Dozens of ships weaved through dense and tangled arcs of high-explosive ordnance. Long streaks of tracer fire—barely directed, if at all—twisted about sinuously.

  And here on the bridge, all around him, lay further evidence of bloody contention. Outwardly, Miyazaki was still. But inside he reeled from the images, finding it impossible to draw any connection between the first officer and that dismembered torso, between Captain Okada and the charred, severed arm that was still lying on the armrest of the command chair.

  A flickering to his left drew his attention. He was grateful for the distraction. The damage seemed less severe over there. A few touch screens still functioned.

  Bone-shaking thunder rolled over the bridge, and Miyazaki lost his balance as the CI veered the ship away from a cluster of shell impacts. He managed to fall on his good side this time. Sea spray drenched him, spotting the screen with droplets of salt water, each acting like a small convex lens, magnifying the pixel lattice that shone beneath them. Focusing on the screen, he could see that the Clinton was ablaze and the Kandahar was listing as though taking on water.

  The voice of the Siranui spoke through an intact speaker somewhere behind him.

  “Sensors indicate that the extreme threats continue, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response.”

  Miyazaki did not hesitate this time. He had seen enough.

  “On my authority, Level One Autonomy is sanctioned.”

  The Siranui’s Combat Intelligence cross-matched the speaker’s voiceprint with a DNA profile sampled through the smart-skin casing of his flexipad. Verifying that all higher command elements were dead or incapacitated, it confirmed command authority in the person of Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki, and then instantly assumed operational authority for itself.

  The ship’s Nemesis arrays had already traced and logged the flight path of the shells that had struck the bridge, tracing it back to their points of origin. The CI corrected for changes since impact, and identified the enemy vessels. It then activated two Tenix Defense Industries combat maces in retaliation.

  Hexagonal silo caps flipped open on the forward deck. The stealth cruiser’s Intelligence released the launch codes and attack vectors for an offensive run, and the maces, which on a cursory examination resembled old-fashioned cruise missiles, rose straight up out of the silo on towers of white flame. The boost-phase rockets cut out at six thousand feet, so there was no visual warning of the missiles’ approach. Their scramjets burned without a perceptible exhaust.

  Miyazaki followed the mace run on the screen in front of him. A time hack counted down to zero in the lower left corner. Two decks below, the same image was reproduced dozens of times on screens distributed around the Combat Information Center. A small pop-up window on a cracked screen hanging by a thick tangle of wires near Miyazaki’s resting place carried a feed from the CIC. It presented an eerie picture of twenty-two men, slumped in their seats or sprawled on the nonslip deck, oblivious to the destruction their own vessel had just unleashed.

  As the missiles curved downward toward their targets, dipping and swerving to avoid a wandering tracer stream, they maintained a furious laser-linked dialogue with the Combat Intelligence on the Siranui, demanding and receiving a constant stream of updated targeting data. Flaps on their stubby wings purred to and fro. On the Siranui’s two-dimensional displays Miyazaki watched as the hammerheads lined up on the enemy cruisers executing course corrections with an economy of movement. Three hundred meters from the stern the leading missile dipped, then leveled off, racing about three hundred meters above the highest point of the vessel.

  As the first missile reached a specific point above its target, a very small, controlled fusion reaction superheated two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle. The entire load punched through the deck of the cruiser. The kinetic and thermal shock instantly vaporized a significant percentage of the target mass.

  The expanding gas, a molecule mix of human tissue, steel, wood, fabric, an
d superheated air manifested itself as a conventional explosion that blew the rest of the ship to Hell and beyond.

  Ammunition bunkers exploded. Boilers and the crew who attended them were atomized. Those slugs that drove all the way down into the keel flash-boiled thousands of liters of water that rushed back in through the ruptured hull. Miyazaki watched the death of the enemy ship in two acts. A rippling torrent of white fire raced down the length of the topside decks and superstructure, followed almost instantaneously by a sudden, violent eruption that seemed to detonate beneath the waterline before bursting the thick steel hull like a balloon. In a flash, the ship that had been there suddenly wasn’t. A few moments later the second mace destroyed another ship in identical fashion.

  Maseo Miyazaki had not wanted to be a warrior. He had dropped out of college to surf in Hawaii, then Indonesia, and finally in Australia (where he had met that ugly damn stonefish). He had only returned to Japan and presented himself to the draft board in his home prefecture after a suicide bomber in Malaysia had killed his father, a Sanyo executive. After serving six months in a punishment detail for skipping out on the draft in the first place, he had distinguished himself with his application to duty and his easy familiarity with the ways of their gaijin Allies.

  He had never before felt the thrill and weight of bushido. But now, surrounded by dead friends and comrades, he knew the blood-simple joy of vengeance on one’s enemy.

  One thing bothered him, however.

  The ship he had just killed looked nothing like the pirate dhows or baggala routinely used by jihadi terrorists within the Indonesian archipelago.

  USS ENTERPRISE, 2307 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  “Sweet Jesus,” breathed Admiral Ray Spruance.

  The death of the Portland bathed the pilothouse in a harsh, flat light. For a few seconds he had an almost perfect view of the cauldron in which the two enemies tore at each other with such blind fury. The Japanese guns poured out eerie needles of light, flash-burning hundreds of shells in midflight, creating a sensational fireworks show. Ribbons of green and gold tracer fire sprayed high into the stars or weaved and twisted low across the wave tops. It seemed as if every minute brought another apocalyptic blast like that which had silenced the Portland forever.