Weapons of choice

"We're to engage the enemy, sir."

"Captain True's been injured sir," reported another seaman. "Lieutenant Earls is on his way."

Wish he'd get here, thought Arma

The deck began to tilt again as the destroyer came around on her new heading, plunging into a hectic, crosshatched swell. Arma

"Guns ready, sir."

Arma

"Fire!"

All four of the ship's five-inch mounts roared as one. Good work, thought Arma

Three blooms of dirty fire blossomed on the sheer steel wall of the target. One dud, Arma

The men around him cheered as another brace of five-inch shells screamed across the short distance between them. All four exploded this time. Arma

How the hell did she get here?

Doesn't matter, he told himself. They'd snuck up on them again. Just like at Pearl. But this time they'd been stupid enough to get into a street brawl with Veni Arma

"Pour it, boys!" he yelled into the speaker tube co

Arma

"Lookit that fuggin' thing would you," yelled a voice thickened by years of smoking.

Arma

The Japs weren't firing at all, at least not that he could make out.

"What the hell is this?" Arma

"Lieutenant, we're coming up on range for the torpedo launch."

"Okay," he said, dragging his attention back to the mammoth carrier, which was still blotting out half the sky. It was weird, the way the Japs just weren't fighting back. Not a single round came from anywhere along its flank.

Maybe they haven't seen us, he told himself. Just as well.

"Arm the portside tubes," he called.

"Arm the portside tubes!"

"Torpedoes armed!"

"Torpedoes armed, Lieutenant."

Arma

"Fire!" he called out, at last.

3

Captain Karen Halabi, commander of HMS Trident, had never seen anything like it before. It was like looking into a doll's house. For a few short moments, before the seas rushed in, the vessel's internal spaces were completely exposed, as though a vengeful deity had sliced off the bow with a knife, had made it vanish, like a profane magic trick.

She was certain that she was dreaming, and yet sure that she couldn't be. She had spilled a mug of hot coffee on her leg, and the pain had jolted her to her senses much faster than those around her. Her senses, however, had presented her with a nightmare.

She was slumped in her command chair, a giant burn blister already rising on her thigh. Around her the bridge crew were dead or unconscious. The bright light of the tropical day was gone, swallowed by an oily blackness. And four or five hundred meters away, on a collision course off her starboard bow, she could see the helicopter carrier HMS Fearless. It had been-well, lopped seemed the right word, almost. She was paralyzed, staring at a cutaway diagram as if from a children's book.

Except that the "diagram" was three-dimensional, and it was moving toward her. And the burn on her leg was real, and the feeling in her body was returning with a painful surge of pins and needles, the worst she had ever known. She realized, in the methodical part of her mind, that if she didn't put pedal to the metal they'd all be dead in less than a minute, when the carrier ran right over them.

She bit down on a gasp and willed her hand toward the touch screen. Halabi drew a deep breath and pushed through the exquisitely painful tingling, a sensation akin to a blast of white noise tearing at raw synapses. Not trusting her fingers, she struck repeatedly at the screen with the heel of her palm. The ship's Combat Intelligence, intuiting that its user had suffered some drastic battle wound, adjusted accordingly. The buttons on the screen grew larger, the choices more constrained, which was fine by her. All she wanted was another twenty knots.

A series of awkward blows to specific points on the screen drew more power off the fusion stacks and dumped it straight into the Trident's three Rolls-Royce aqua jets. The acceleration threw Halabi back into her chair. The ship's CI, alerted to the possibility of disaster, independently powered up a suite of sensors. On the screen before Halabi's eyes, Nemesis arrays began a full-power survey of the threat bubble, cataloging and prioritizing a list of potential menaces. It was a long list, but right at the top was the Fearless, closing from the northeast quarter.

The CI reviewed Halabi's actions and found them to be appropriate, but decided to fatten the margin for error. It released the codes for the trimaran's supercavitating system.

Below and just above the waterline thousands of pores opened in the radar-absorbent skin of the ship, releasing a bath of small bubbles, a foam of water vapor and air that surrounded the Trident's three hulls so perfectly that very little liquid water remained in contact with the ship. The effect was to reduce the viscous drag on her keels by 97 percent. The Trident surged forward again, carving through mist now rather than water. Her speed climbed quickly to 105 knots as three giant fantails of spray leapt from her stern.