Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Read online

  “Admiral,” said Brooks. “We have indications that that ship has torpedo capability. They may be trying to bracket us, sir.”

  The fog in Kolhammer’s mind began to clear rapidly as a cold wind blew through him.

  “Lieutenant Brooks!” he barked. “Guns free! Autonomy Level One. Initiate a fleetwide CBL.”

  But it was too late.

  HMAS MORETON BAY, 2247 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Rachel Nguyen was running from Hell. She was naked and the breeze of her passage slipped over her body—no, over a six-year-old’s body, burning the skin. Melting it. Flesh fell from her in long, sloughed-off lumps. The pain was excruciating. Searing and white. She was screaming as the road beneath her blistered feet jumped and rumbled and the air was torn by explosions. She was . . . her great-grandmother . . . in Vietnam during the war. A child fleeing an air strike called in on her village by a desperate platoon commander. Some long-dead boy from Dakota.

  She knew, in her dream, exactly what she was running from. It was all behind her, but she could still see burning huts and twisted corpses, some smoking and wrenched out of any shape you could think of as human. She could see all the dead pigs and chickens, soldiers tearing at each other, using their guns as clubs. She ran and screamed, away from a rupture in the thin membrane separating her world from Hell, away from the demons who had come through the rip and eaten her friends and family and spewed War all over the world. Demons in the bodies of Americans and Vietcong, the limbs and heads and torsos mixed and matched and sewn together by trolls.

  She ran but the road beneath her was moving, back toward the village, accelerating like a moving sidewalk of sand and gravel. She tried to run faster, but her legs were so small and thin. She tripped and the road came rushing at her face.

  There were no stones to bite into her cheeks. No sand or grit on which to choke. The road surface was smooth and cool. And sort of . . . wet.

  She gasped, pulling in a mouthful of air, as though she hadn’t breathed in a very long time. Like when she was a kid and she had those stupid competitions with her brother Michael, to see who could swim the farthest without surfacing. He was such a dick sometimes.

  And he was gone now. Lost.

  Her thoughts were disordered. Confused. Michael was home in Sydney, not lost.

  In a rush it came to her. She had passed out on the table. Probably from exhaustion. Knocked the dregs of her coffee all over her notes. Oh, just great! How long had she been out? Not long or that sergeant, the one with the huge plate of sausages, he would have rushed over.

  She had a serious headache, though. She’d been out long enough for that. And God it’s bad! Like a migraine. Worse even. Jeez, did I have an embolism or what? A stroke? And where is that guy? she thought, looking around, a little pissed off. Why didn’t he help?

  She tried to stand, and three things happened. A brutal spike jagged through her head, her legs folded up, and a wave of nausea swept over her. She clamped her hand to her mouth as she dropped toward the floor, but it was no use. Everything came out under pressure, squirting through her fingers.

  Embarrassment, shock, and fear swept over her all at once. What happened? Maybe the Chinese, or the Rising Jihad, had hit them with something. A neutron bomb? A transsonic device?

  Not the latter, anyway. Not at sea.

  Cramps shot up her legs and she began to shiver uncontrollably, curling into a ball on the deck and dry heaving for nearly two minutes. For fuck’s sake! she whimpered. What is this?

  Whatever it was, she tried to haul herself out into a passageway, where somebody might at least trip over her.

  Then, all at once, the shivering and the nausea passed. The headache remained—she was sure now it was a migraine—but the other effects, symptoms, whatever, were gone. As though someone had thrown a switch.

  Rachel lay, breathing slowly for a minute before climbing to her feet. The migraine had made her dizzy and she had to grab the table to help herself up, but it was just a screaming headache now. Nothing more. She was about to stagger off to sick bay when she heard the first shells detonating close by in the water.

  USS KANDAHAR, 2247 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Colonel Jones, sitting astride Hannon’s chest, just had the man’s arms locked down with his knees when he heard and felt the impact of a shell somewhere on the Kandahar. He would have sworn someone had hammered the decking just under his feet. He yelled at Chen to hold the lieutenant’s mouth open while he fished in there trying to hook on to the tongue. Hannon had swallowed it during the blackout. He ignored the shrieking whine in his ears and the chisel banging deep into his frontal lobes. He bit down on the bile that threatened to come bursting up out of his mouth and he somehow kept up a reassuring conversation with Chen, who was close to bugging out.

  Another shell struck the Kandahar, more of a wrecking ball this time, throwing them all off-balance just as Jones muttered, “Gotcha,” and snagged Hannon’s tongue out with a slick pop. The marine stopped bucking beneath him and began to suck in great shuddering drafts of air. Jones flipped him over just before a mother lode of chewed-up burger and fries came out.

  “God damn!” yelled Chen, who got hosed.

  “Make sure he doesn’t choke on that mess, son,” Jones said as he clawed his way onto his feet. He knew for sure now that they were under attack. No idea by whom or with what, though. You had to figure it was some kind of neural disrupter, given the effects, but those prototypes weren’t even out of the labs in the States. And the dinks were still ten years behind in development. Once you eliminated Beijing, however, what then? Ragheads didn’t have the delivery platforms, and never would.

  The ship seemed to pitch beneath his boots like they’d run into a force-niner. But he knew that was his inner ear, because Chen’s coffee rested undisturbed in its mug on the mess table. He fumbled for his flexipad, tried for a link to the bridge, and got nowhere. Same with the CIC, security detail, and the sick bay. Shipnet was unaffected—so there was no electromagnetic pulse—but nobody was answering. Probably all rolling around in their own puke.

  Another dense, metallic boom sounded somewhere nearby. The hell with this, thought Jones, gathering his composure and what he could of his balance. Somebody had to get on the stick or their families were all going to be getting a folded flag and a visit from the grief counselors.

  “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 eve
r 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 bet
rayed 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.