Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Read online

Damage reports scrolled down another screen, too quickly to read, as the Fearless plunged on toward her doom, millions of liters of cold seawater roaring in through the gigantic sucking wound, destabilizing the vessel and generating a range of forces that her engineers had never contemplated. Halabi watched in horror as immense tonnages of water began to back up against the densely filled spaces of the lower decks, putting a brake on the ship’s forward impetus.

  Two Mercedes express boilers, delivering 320,000 horsepower to four shafts, pushed hard against the phenomenal resistance. Fearless began to slew around and tilt, causing the water already inside to shift sideways. It burst through aviation and ordnance stores on the third deck and into the airframe workshop. Under pressure, water even began to rise to the main deck, coursing into officers’ quarters and the forward elevator pit. Roaring along both port and starboard passageways on the second deck, the torrent flooded electrical and radio stores, more officers’ quarters and washrooms, and the crew’s mess.

  Halabi winced as millions of tonnes of icy-cold brine reached the boiler rooms and sluiced over and into the red-hot furnaces and a cataclysm ensued. The resulting explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to destroy the ship, or what remained of it, but it triggered an escalating series of secondary blasts, beginning in the armory on the third deck starboard side, ripping down into a missile store just forward of the drone control room, and from there into the giant avgas tanks.

  HMS Fearless disintegrated in one titanic blast. Three-quarters of her mass disappeared in the blinding white flash, which could be seen ten kilometers away.

  The Royal Navy trimaran Trident rode out the shock wave with little more than a rude jolting. She sat very low in the water, resting on three hulls and boasting of no superstructure other than a relatively small teardrop bridge, so the blast swept over the destroyer like a flood surge over a smooth pebble. The ship’s CI made some course and speed changes, but mostly the Trident relied on her inherent design strengths to ride out the storm.

  While her ship may have been little bothered by the spectacle, Halabi was stunned. There couldn’t possibly be any survivors. Every man and woman aboard the Fearless had surely perished, atomized by the blast. Her mind reeled as it tried to find some semblance of reason for the disaster. What could do that to a ship? And who would do it? She had no immediate answer. But she did have her duty, and that was to fight back.

  As her bridge crew began to recover, she repositioned herself in the command chair and reached out to the nearest touch screen. The Promatil dose had eased her illness, or the worst of it anyway, and she tapped out a few orders on the screen, resuming full control of the Trident. She left the Nemesis arrays collecting data at full power and delegated acute crisis management to the Intelligence.

  “Permission to unsafe weapons, Captain Halabi?” the system’s voice purred in her ear.

  “Permission granted, Posh,” she answered, placing her palm on the DNA reader in the chair’s armrest. “Verification code Osprey Three Niner Lima Xray Tango Four.”

  “Code verified, Captain Halabi. Weapons hot.”

  The CI’s voice was a flawless imitation of Lady Beckham’s, a remnant of the previous ship’s captain, who was—in Halabi’s opinion—an emotionally arrested Yorkshireman with an unhealthy fixation on pre-Millennial pop culture. On taking command she had determined to reset the speech software to RN Standard. However, she had been made aware, subtly but swiftly, that the former pop princess was considered a much-loved member of the crew, and her deletion in favor of the bland, mid-Atlantic voice to which the CI defaulted would be considered akin to a death in the family. So Lady Beckham had stayed on as the voice of the Trident, and after eighteen months Halabi had secretly grown quite fond of her, too.

  “Mr. McTeale,” she said, addressing her XO, “are you in any shape to take the conn?”

  The ropey Scotsman bit down on the bile that was threatening to rise past his gorge. “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Fine, then. I’m on my way to CIC. While in transit, I’ll be online via shipnet. When I’ve resumed control from down there, shut up shop and join me. All hands below. The Fearless is gone. I think our holiday cruise is over. Guns are hot and the CI has Level One Autonomy. Any of the ship’s crew who remain without Promatil inserts will need to be treated as quickly as possible. Please see to it that the surgeon is informed. Posh has the requisite dosages. IV, not dermal patches.

  “We need everybody vertical ASAP. Sound to general quarters.”

  “Aye aye.”

  As the ship’s alarms began to call her company to battle, Halabi limped out of the bridge through the light curtain and headed for the stairwell that led down into the Trident’s central hull. Beneath her feet she could feel the vessel reach a standard cruising speed of thirty-five knots. The seas were running at one and a half meters on a three-meter swell, enough to impart a significant roll, even with the trimaran’s inherent stability and wave-piercing form. It slowed Halabi’s progress, but not drastically.

  The hexagonal space of the Combat Center was bathed in a quiet blue light. It was unexpectedly soothing after the neural shock of the last few minutes. McTeale had proven himself as efficient as ever. Medics were shooting up a sysop with Promatil as Halabi entered. One approached her with that disapproving expression physicians have been perfecting for thousands of years.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said. “But Commander McTeale informs me you have a serious burn on your leg—”

  “I don’t have time for gel, Andrews,” she warned.

  “Pain relief, then.” The medic tapped the screen of his flexipad a few times, effectively ignoring the captain’s objections. “Surgeon’s orders, ma’am. He’s authorized a local effect anesthetic pip.”

  Before Halabi could speak again, she felt the mild tingle of a spinal syrette spitting its dose, followed by the delicious warmth of an analgesic balm washing over the affected area.

  It was only the second time in her career she’d experienced palliative intervention via spinal insert, but it confirmed the wisdom of prohibiting self-administration. Even with the greatest will in the world, if you had the option to hit yourself up with this stuff every morning, the temptation would be to never get out of bed.

  “Thank you, Andrews,” she said. “But that will be all. Please proceed with the treatment schedule. We’re going to need all hands on station in the next few minutes.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  Halabi quickly surveyed the CIC. Twenty-two specialists were strapped into large, comfortable airline-style seats. Massive touch screen workstations hovered in front of them. The Trident’s commander made her way directly to the supervising officer, Lieutenant Commander Howard, who was examining the holobloc with a fiercely censorious air.

  “Well, Commander, what sort of a hellish mess have we got ourselves in now?”

  “A right cock-up by the look of it, ma’am. Makes no sense at all. None. Have a gander for yourself. The Fearless is gone. We’ve detected just three survivors in the water. And the rest of the task force is scattered to buggery.”

  Floating inside was a three dimensional, positional hologram, a scaled-down real-time feed of the battlespace around the destroyer for a sixty-nautical-mile radius. The rest of the task force was represented by eerily realistic but oversized spectral miniatures that cut across a blue sea surface. A few centimeters below the rest floated the submarine HMAS Havoc. The Multinational Task Force, which should have been arrayed in an orderly fashion around the flattops Clinton and Kandahar, was instead scattered to hell and back.

  She shook her head in frank amazement. Task force ships were making for all points of the compass. That, in its own way, was more unsettling than the sight of the doomed helicopter carrier had been.

  More disturbing still were the dozen or more phantom vessels hopelessly mixed in among them. None of these registered any ID signal, and Posh hadn’t been able to tag them with any designator hack other than Unidentified Vessel 01 t
hrough . . . Karen checked the readout on the data cube that was suspended above the hologram . . . UIV 24.

  “My word, Commander. A cock-up indeed.”

  “Aye, Captain. Three carriers of some sort. Four heavy gun platforms. A couple of replenishment ships. And a swarm of littleuns. Destroyers or frigates, I suppose, but like nothing I’ve ever seen outside a museum. And we seem to have come up short a few friendlies. Besides Fearless, Vanguard is off the bloc. Dessaix is missing, the nukes and the Amanda Garrett, and those Indonesian tubs.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “No way to tell. Just missing, ma’am. Without trace.”

  “Find them.” Halabi pursed her lips for a second before casting an inquiry over her shoulder to a young lieutenant situated at a nearby station. “Elint, what are we getting from these Unidentified Vessels?”

  The young sysop, a Jamaican Welsh woman of unusual beauty, was burning holes in the screen with her intense stare. “Not a lot of emcon, Captain. But then, there’s not a lot of emission to control, by the look of it. We’ve been painted by radar once or twice, and it just slipped off the ram skin, but we collected a sample for analysis. It’s primitive stuff. Almost Stone Age. A pirate barge can buy better off the shelf in Bangkok.

  “Sigint are gathering a lot of uncoded, unscrambled, basic radio transmissions . . . English language . . . but uhm . . . pretty weird.”

  “Pretty weird is not good enough, Lieutenant. We’re dying here. What exactly do you mean?”

  The woman hid her chagrin well. “I mean weird, Captain. Unusual, unexplained. Beyond standard parameters. I can give you a raw sample if you wish.”

  “Do so.”

  The lieutenant’s dark, slender fingers danced over a giant touch screen to her left, and the data cube’s Bang & Olufsen speakers began to emit a harsh burst of static. It flared and faded as the signal intercept was washed clean of interference. Voices came through. Confused, loud, angry, scared. Most of the CIC crew were too deeply involved in their own stations to bother with the broadcast, but the intel sysops turned to listen, even though they could have taken the sound channel through individual headphones. They heard American voices, educated, military, and . . . something else.

  Halabi focused on the audio stream, which seemed to have been acquired from the fire control facility of an unidentified vessel. The speaker was demanding to know what the hell he was shooting at, where they had come from. And he wanted to know if they were Japs. Halabi twirled an index finger and the lieutenant, Waverton, flipped into another channel.

  A ship-to-ship transmission this time. The same burst of static subsided into quantum clear audio.

  “Hamman, Hughes, and Morris to pick up survivors . . .”

  “Hamman’s engaged a Jap carrier . . . she’s right on top of her. They could put a few fish in . . .”

  “Russel or Gwin then . . .”

  Halabi twirled her fingers again. Lieutenant Waverton ripped out a new line of instructions and another channel came up.

  “. . . ayday, mayday. This is the Astoria. We have been rammed. We have been rammed . . .”

  She snapped a finger now, apologizing at the same time. “You were right, Lieutenant. Weird is the best word for it.

  “Where’s the hologram feed coming from, Commander?” she went on, motioning for Waverton to cut the audio and turning back to the holobloc.

  “We’ve lost a few of our task force resources, Captain. This is feeding from three drones at six thousand meters. Deep in the cloud cover. Posh is drawing on form memory to project some of the task force assets, and skin-sensors for the rest. The audio we’re stealing ourselves, through the mast-mounted system and bridge skin.”

  Halabi was becoming acutely aware of how quickly things were unraveling around her.

  “Mr. Howard, can we raise task force command?”

  “No, ma’am. Channels are open and secure. CIs are in contact. But no human operators respond to hail. We’ve tried independent hails to each task force ship, all with the same result. We’re on our own for the moment.”

  “They’re out, just like we were,” Halabi concluded. “Have Posh talk to the other CIs, send all the data we have about the illness, the bio-attack, or whatever it was, and details on the Promatil treatment. Boot up the Cooperative Battle Link with any surviving compatible assets.”

  She paused, arranging the problem in her mind. Each national component of the Multinational Task Force was fitted for Cooperative Battle Management. Their Combat Intelligences could be laser-linked, allowing the entire group to fight as a single entity.

  It sounded fine in principle, but politics and human nature couldn’t hope to approximate such elegance. Mission programming denied her the ability to take control of any vessels other than the small Australian contingent, her sister ships, HMS Vanguard, which was missing in action, possibly sunk, and Fearless, which was definitely gone. It was stupid, in her view, but the Americans and French in particular were quite touchy about that sort of thing. They didn’t like taking directions from anyone but their own. She feared it was going to cost a good number of them their lives in the next few minutes.

  On the other hand you could build a snowman in Hell the day the Royal Navy agreed to let an Indonesian captain have the run of its warships. So perhaps the Americans and the French had a point. It was just a little insulting to be cast in that sort of company.

  While she was racing through her options, Howard relayed a series of orders through his headset, and a row of systems operators who had been relatively quiet suddenly leaned into their stations. Six pairs of hands flew over touch screens and virtual keyboards. Laser nodes embedded in the skin of the Trident pulsed, and thousands of meters away smart-skin arrays on two Australian ships, the troop cat Moreton Bay and the littoral assault ship Ipswich, picked up the photon storm of microburst infrared laser transmissions.

  The first data set was an encoded authenticator, which convinced the ships’ innately suspicious CIs to accept that their companion vessel was legitimately opening a Cooperative Battle Link. It authorized the Intelligences to power up all defensive systems and to deploy in protection of task force assets. The next photon shower advised of a possible bio-weapon attack, and gave the recommended response. The last packet of data contained a synopsis of the evolving situation, as it was understood by the Trident. Unfortunately, this transmission was quite thin.

  Half a second later the destroyer repeated the process with a tone link to the Australian submarine HMAS Havoc. It returned a surprising acknowledgment from a human operator. Havoc was standing to, targets plotted, awaiting authority to release weapons.

  “Captain Willet on Fleetnet for you,” Lieutenant Waverton announced.

  “At last,” said Halabi.

  A screen above the holobloc winked on. The commander of the Australian sub, looking thin-lipped and grim, nodded a curt hello.

  “Captain Willet.”

  “Captain Halabi. My apologies for the delay in responding. My comm operator was having some sort of seizure, and he wasn’t alone. We’ve got a terrible mess down here. Some sort of neural attack. The CI took over the initial response. Do we have hostile contact?”

  “We have contacts, as you can see, we have to assume hostile,” replied Halabi. “Fearless has been destroyed, but God only knows by what. I’ve never seen anything like it. Can you put your intel people onto the data package we just sent? I’m afraid it makes no sense and we have very little time. It’s getting quite ugly up here.”

  Willet’s eyes registered the shock of losing the helicopter carrier, but she said nothing about it, nodding brusquely and signing off. “Done. We’ll get back to you ASAP.”

  The two captains broke their link.

  Relieved to have Willet sharing the burden, Halabi resumed her inspection of the holobloc while the crew took care of business. One of the first things they teach you in captains’ school, she reminded herself, is never to look like circumstances have the better of you. But she could
n’t help quietly blowing out her cheeks in exasperation. Truly, there was nothing about their situation that made sense. Nothing at all.

  The surviving task force ships may have been scattered, but none was making any apparent efforts to rectify that. They cut through the swell, which had mysteriously picked up from nothing to three meters in a few minutes flat. Each ship, whichever direction it was headed, was maintaining ten knots, as they had been before being struck down.

  The three exceptions were the Trident, which was circling the flaming hulk of her dying sister ship; Willet’s sub, the Havoc, which had dialed back to two knots and was lying stealthed near the center of the unidentified fleet; and finally, she noted, the American Nemesis cruiser Leyte Gulf, which seemed to be in serious trouble.

  “Marc, pull in close on the Leyte Gulf. One thousand meters virtual.”

  The hologram shimmered momentarily, then reformatted. The image well filled with the shape of the American cruiser and another vessel, which appeared to have rammed . . . No, that isn’t right, she thought. It’s been . . . what, superimposed?

  “Is this a clean feed?”

  The commander consulted the data cube, interrogating a series of screens before nodding the affirmative.

  “Systems are five by five, Captain. Boards green. No overlapping, no ghosting or echo effects.”

  Halabi felt as if something spiky had lodged in her mind. The two ships were fused, presenting an impression of scissor blades opened at nearly forty-five degrees. This would account for the voice intercepts, the panicky radio calls about a ramming.

  But this was no collision. The blade of the Leyte Gulf’s bow projected clean and sharp beyond the flanks of the other ship. There was no crushed or broken metal, no crumpled deck composite. Nothing to indicate that two objects of considerable mass had made any sort of violent, forcible contact.

  “Something else, ma’am. The feeds from the drones and skin systems are clean, but that’s the only intel we’re taking. I can’t access any satellite links. They all appear to be down. Military and civilian.”