Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Read online

  “Did somebody kill the satellites, or just the links?” she asked, compartmentalizing the flicker of real fear that Howard’s report sparked. It was far more likely that something had severed the Trident’s links, rather than taking out approximately twenty-three thousand separate satellites.

  The CIC boss rechecked the Trident’s own systems, then had Lieutenant Waverton cross-check his findings. Marc Howard wasn’t prone to histrionics, but when he finally replied, Halabi easily picked up the anxiety that was present in his voice and the set of his features.

  “Ship links are fine, Captain. Posh also interrogated the other CIs, for the same results. They can’t access any satellite feeds. Weather birds, comms, media, they’re all offline.”

  Halabi threw a glance at the two monitors that normally pumped out CNN and BBC World News. The screens were blue, with only two words displayed in plain white type.

  NO SIGNAL.

  “I suppose GPS is gone, too, then,” she said, without emotion.

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  “Captain Halabi,” an ensign called out. “We’ve acquired significant and increasing volumes of naval gunfire. Some of it incoming. Basic munitions, nothing augmented. It hardly seems directed at all. Laser packs are cycling through the priority targets, but there’s a lot of it, ma’am. They just neutralized a very large volley from two platforms. Posh determines that Siranui was the target. Metal Storm will be coming online soon.”

  As if to punctuate this statement, they heard the first clip from the Trident’s secondary Close-In Weapons System tear into the night. Even though the CIC was sheltered deep in the central hull, there was a quick metallic ripping noise as 734 projectiles were vomited from two concentric, counter-rotating muzzle rings. This was caseless ammunition, fired electronically rather than by percussion, using a square-shaped combustible propellant wrapped around a fifty-grain bullet. The propellant burned bright yellow so that the effect, when viewed with the naked eye, suggested a small comet leaving the stubby gun mount and streaking away on a thin stream of light, to explode upon contact with its designated target.

  After the first clip, further loads were triggered every five to fifteen seconds. Halabi and Howard exchanged a look. Metal Storm was meant to deal with missile swarms, which very rarely consisted of more than twenty or thirty targets. There seemed to be hundreds of warheads assaulting their protective cocoon at that moment. If they allowed this to continue, they would quickly deplete their defensive stocks.

  Halabi nodded at the holobloc.

  “I want you to pull in close on that ship, Commander, the one that seems to have tangled with Leyte Gulf. Best we know what we’re dealing with before we deal with it.”

  Howard quickly adjusted the magnification, zooming in to a virtual height of only sixty meters above the heavily damaged bridge of the vessel before panning down her length to the stern, where the drones’ low-light amplification lenses had no trouble rendering a crisp, clear monochrome view of the Stars and Stripes.

  As more than a dozen pairs of eyes focused on the scene, Captain Halabi drew in her breath with a hiss. The Leyte Gulf had, indeed, become entangled with a vintage warship of some sort, and as they watched the rear turret of the old-time cruiser tracked around to bear on the stern of the Gulf.

  “Weapons!” Halabi barked out.

  “Aye, Captain,” replied a brusque Glaswegian voice.

  “Can we get a laser pod to lock on that rear gun turret?”

  The chief weapons sysop, Lieutenant Guy Wodrow, frantically worked his laser station, but the grim set of his mouth gave the answer away.

  “Sorry, Captain, but we’re directly blocked by the Leyte Gulf herself. The Moreton Bay, too. Ipswich has a clear shot, but her laser packs are fully engaged for the next five to six seconds.”

  At that moment, weapons fire erupted in the holobloc image. Halabi spoke in a flat, monotone. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  She watched without registering any emotion as the smoke cleared from the rear deck of the Leyte Gulf. Or what was left of it.

  HMAS HAVOC, 2245 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  He found Captain Willet hovering over the holobloc, chewing on her bottom lip, which Harry recognized as a definite warning sign. In fact, the submarine captain looked ill. Her features were taut. Dark smudges stood out under her eyes, and her face had an unhealthy, malarial, tint. He knew he didn’t look much better. Nobody he’d passed on his way up from the mess did.

  Willet was deeply engaged in a conversation with the boat’s chief petty officer, an Old Navy man with faded tattoos covering most of his forearms and the backs of both hands. The Havoc’s CO waved the English warrior prince over to the impromptu O Group. Harry caught the last part of a question Willet had directed to her intel boss, Lieutenant Amanda Lohrey.

  “What have we got then, Amanda? Lost Chinese. Javanese pirates?”

  But there was only an embarrassed silence to answer her. Nobody seemed able to find the words to explain what the holobloc—and their own eyes—were telling them.

  “Well?” pressed the Havoc’s captain, who could see the display as well as anyone. She looked from one person to the next.

  Her chief petty officer coughed, almost apologetically, but still said nothing.

  “C’mon, Chief,” she coaxed. “Give it up for your old lady.”

  CPO Roy Flemming blew out his cheeks and showed Willet his open palms. “Well, skipper, I’m only saying what I see, is all, and that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what I see, okay. But that? That looks like a New Orleans–class heavy cruiser, U.S. Navy, vintage nineteen thirty-four. Three eight-inch turrets, two up front, or there would be, and one at the rear, two funnels, eight boilers—very environmentally unfriendly by the way, Greenpeace would have a fucking cow. Just under six hundred feet in length. Thirteen thousand tons in the old scale. Carried a crew of between eleven and twelve hundred . . . I only know because of my models.”

  Willet returned the chief’s slightly belligerent look with a level gaze. Everybody knew of Flemming’s unfortunate obsession with model building. Of the thirty-nine souls on board, only the newest arrivals and the fleetest of foot had avoided becoming trapped in a long and involved lecture on the subject. Even sitting third in line to the throne had provided no protection, as Harry had discovered at great length. Willet, however, who could and would pull rank to avoid such an entanglement, smiled, just a little, and nodded at the strange image of the conjoined ships. “Thanks, Chief. That’s what I see, too. Right off a history stick. Except for that Nemesis cruiser poking out of it.”

  Harry, still tingling from a Promatil flush, kept his own counsel, and the other submariners who had gathered in front of the bloc remained silent as well. Willet seemed inordinately calm, poised there in her gray coveralls. Lieutenant Lohrey, her intel chief, was swallowing frequently. And the boat’s XO, Commander Conrad Grey, seemed unable to blink while he stared fixedly at the display. Aside from Willet, only the chief, the oldest, saltiest member of the crew, seemed less than completely bewildered. He just looked pissed off. And he always looked pissed off, in Harry’s opinion, so what was to notice?

  “Is that the Leyte Gulf?” asked Harry, for want of anything better to say.

  “Aye,” said Flemming. “And she’s been well mounted.”

  A seaman spoke up from a bank of workstations that lay beyond the periscope. “Flash traffic on Fleetnet, Captain Willet. Trident’s CI with another data burst.”

  “About fucking time,” muttered Flemming.

  “Language, Chief,” Willet scolded gently. “We have royalty present.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Harry said, rolling his eyes.

  “Opinions, suggestions?” Willet asked, throwing the floor open to her officers and guest. “Clock’s ticking. Chief Flemming, you care to guess why a museum piece would suddenly sail off a memory stick and do something as perverse as that?” She nodded toward the ethereal copy of the Leyte Gulf and the old cruiser.
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  “No, ma’am,” he answered. “I would not.”

  “You figure it has anything to do with the mace strike, or whatever it was, a few minutes ago?”

  “Seems likely.”

  “You think the Chinese pulled something tricky?”

  “No idea, Captain. Can’t think of anyone else to blame, though.”

  “You think we’re in the shit?”

  “There’s every chance in the world of that, ma’am.”

  “I think so, too, Chief.” She sighed.

  Everybody stared endlessly at the hologram as though they were trying to decipher a challenging puzzle. While they were thus engaged, Willet pulled her personal flexipad out of a breast pocket in her coveralls and tapped out a command. A panel of the data cube switched from a scrolling text readout to an old black-and-white two-dimensional photograph.

  “That looks just like the ship in the bloc,” said Harry.

  “It is the ship in the bloc,” replied a somber Flemming. “The USS Astoria. CA-Thirty-four. I’ve got her mounted at home in the billiards room. My Savo Island display. Along with the Vincennes, the Quincy, Chicago, and Canberra. That last one was ours,” he added, looking straight at Harry. “HMAS Canberra. Sunk in Iron Bottom Sound at the Battle of Savo Island, ninth of August, nineteen forty-two.”

  Nobody said anything in reply. Harry simply stared at the holobloc as though it might be booby-trapped. The naval personnel looked by turns confused, intrigued, and sick.

  “All right then,” Willet said, sharply enough to snap everyone out of their daze. “Weapons!”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  “Give me firing solutions for the forward tubes focused on all non-task-force vessels. Do not, I repeat, do not arm the torpedoes. But full countermeasures are authorized.

  “Comms?”

  “Aye, Captain?”

  “Reopen a link to the Trident. When they have a spare second, I need to confer with Captain Halabi. Keep hailing our own ships and fleet command. Intel?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Assets?”

  “We have links intact fleetwide, Captain,” said Lieutenant Lohrey. “We’re streaming from the drones, mast mounts, and topside Nemesis arrays. We’ve lost some airborne feed, and all the satellites.”

  “Start farming it out, Amanda. When you have a clue, get back to me.”

  The intel boss raised a finger, just like a child in class. “Captain? The Nagoya is missing, as well. There’s no floating datum point, no debris of any kind. But fleetwide arrays logged signal deviance similar to the brownout incident, just prior to the neural event that seems to have taken out the surface elements.”

  Willet clamped down on a flash of anger, “Well, that’s just excellent,” she said quie

  4

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2249 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  “They’re firing at us?” snorted Kolhammer.

  Before anyone could answer, the sound of distant sledgehammer blows rang through the bridge.

  “Jesus! They are shooting at us!” said Kolhammer. He started to shake his head, but a jag of pain stopped him cold. An ugly stain was settling into his shirt where he’d vomited a few moments earlier, but he paid it no heed. Commander Judge was doubled over and dry retching. Half the flag bridge crew was covered in their own bile and one or two had lost control of their bowels—if his sense of smell hadn’t failed him.

  So much else had—even daylight, it seemed. A deep void had enveloped the task force, and something had sailed out of it to attack them. Arrhythmic flickers of fire and lightning lit the darkened sea surface in stuttering monochrome.

  His bridge was a disaster area. It hadn’t taken a hit, but sailors lay everywhere. Some were passed out with their eyes open, putting out REMs like victims of a psy-war experiment. Others stood by their stations, their stiff, unnatural stance and glassy stares giving away how much effort that took. One man convulsed repeatedly in front of a large Silicon Graphics display until Commander Judge, composing himself for a moment, grabbed him by the shoulders and lowered him to the floor.

  The Zone Time readout seemed to have skipped forward ten minutes. Or they’d been unconscious for that amount of time. And how did night fall? If that’s what happened. Another far-off hammer blow belled through the structure of the giant carrier.

  “Suffering Christ, is anyone still alive down in CIC?” Kolhammer shouted. Gray space bloomed in his vision, and he pressed both hands to his eyes. He had a terrible migraine, so that if he wanted to see someone clearly he had to tilt his head at an uncomfortable angle just to move them into the small part of his sight that wasn’t affected. He wanted to curl into a ball, but instead he slowly rubbed his eyes.

  “If we can’t raise them on shipnet, would someone who can walk a reasonably straight line care to go find out what’s happening down there?” he asked more calmly. “And let’s get someone in here to police up this mess. Commander, do we have a location on Captain Chandler?”

  “Making it happen,” Judge croaked. He’d managed to stop heaving his guts out. “Last we knew, the captain was still on the flight deck, Admiral, with the catapult crew at number three.”

  Judge interrogated a touch screen, his hands still shaking. “Biosensors place him topside, but unconscious, sir. He’s still down there.”

  “Send somebody to wake him up. He’ll be really pissed off if he sleeps through an attack on his ship. What the hell is that anyway?” asked Kolhammer. “One of those Caliphate tubs. Those pieces of crap the Indonesians bought off the East Germans?”

  And Christ, how much do we miss those clowns, he thought to himself. Great days. Not like this clusterfuck.

  “Can’t say yet, Admiral,” said Judge, his head lolling a little as he caressed a touch screen. “Link’s up to CIC, Admiral. And I’ve got a couple of medics heading for Captain Chandler now. Damage control reports we’re taking hits, but the armor sheath is holding up well. Some penetration on C deck. We have casualties there.”

  Kolhammer glanced out the window, worried about Chandler, although he had no chance of seeing the ship’s captain a couple of hundred meters aft. The flight deck was littered with crew in different-colored vests, most of them laid out cold. The task force commander could just make out aircraft directors in blue and yellow, mixed in with handling officers wearing yellow on yellow. Some were completely motionless, others were stirring, and a few were even managing to rise to their knees. A landing signals officer in white lay prone in the center of the main runway.

  Through the effects of his migraine he could see a burning vessel some kilometers distant. Searching for a clearer view, he turned to face a big flatscreen that was displaying four feeds, all from low-light TV mast-cams distributed throughout the fleet. One window was devoted to a Frisbee-cam that remained in a static hover six thousand meters above the flag bridge. That screen offered the broadest view of the situation.

  By closing one eye and tilting his head, Kolhammer could see that the ships were moving erratically, none of them keeping station, their wakes carving and crossing through the warm tropical waters with no design or purpose that he could discern. The wreckage of a burning ship, a big one, was close to sinking. One of the British trimarans was circling the kill with obvious intent. And there, much closer, was their own would-be executioner. A squat, blocky-looking gray ship. Small, a destroyer, or maybe a frigate. And old, judging by the black smoke that was spewing from the funnel amidships. She was steaming erratically, too, but there seemed to be more design behind her movement. As much as a fifteen- or sixteen-hundred-tonne ship could move like a rat in a trap, that’s exactly what she looked like. Jinking hard to port for a minute, laying on speed for the Clinton, heaving to then veering away. Fire jetted constantly from her three gun turrets, two fore and one aft.

  The Clinton’s CI was screaming for attention, demanding autonomy and a Cooperative Battle Link with the other fleet Intelligences. But despite its insistence, very few human operators were filing damage re
ports or raising alarms. The ship seemed to be half asleep.

  Kolhammer turned to the screen that was carrying video from the Combat Information Center. Lieutenant Kirsty Brooks was weaving about in front of the cam, looking as if she’d been poleaxed. Feeling a small measure of control returning to his rebellious nerves, Kolhammer stood slowly and looked from Brooks to the scene outside his bridge. Despite his restricted vision he could tell—even without the aid of sophisticated electronics—that a battle was beginning. Guns hammered in the dark, speaking to each other with angry flashes of light. Goose bumps crawled up his forearms and neck.

  “What’s going on, Lieutenant?” he asked as calmly as possible.

  Brooks shook her head, blanched, and vomited discreetly to one side. “We . . . uh . . . have the hostile on screen now, sir.”

  Another window opened up. A hard, clear image filled it, of an old fossil-fuel-powered warship. As they watched, the ship’s forward gun mount spoke, and a second later the same hammer blow sounded through the hull of the carrier.

  “Admiral,” said Lieutenant Brooks from the screen in front of him. “Sir, we have multiple contacts throughout the body of the task force. Presumed hostile. Sensors indicate gunfire and some torpedo launches. Buggy readings, sir, we can’t get a fix on weapon types, but these are hostile forces. Kandahar, Providence, and the Siranui have all taken fire. Leyte Gulf is critical. I’m afraid the Fearless is gone, sir. Destroyed. Trident’s CI has sent a data burst, which we’re breaking down now.” She examined a screen off to her right for a moment. “Definitely hostile, sir. We’re getting a significant volume of fire. Little Bill wants you to release the codes for a mace run and to engage Metal Storm and the laser packs.”

  In his peripheral vision Kolhammer noticed a few men and women on the bridge quietly cursing and turning to each other. Some turned to the strip window, although the image on screen was far superior to anything the naked eye could make out. The little gray ship heaved over to present a broadside to the Clinton.