Battleship

by Peter David

  Alex Hopper knew for a fact that the combat information center, typically abbreviated as CIC, was where it all went down. Engines, bridges, those were all fine for what they were, but a fishing trawler had a bridge and an AMC Gremlin had an engine. The John Paul Jones was a destroyer, designed for combat on the high seas. Without weapons, nothing else mattered, and the CIC was packed with a billion dollars’ worth of Aegis-class weapons technology. Any battle that the John Paul Jones found itself in was going to be fought from this room, and Alex Hopper was making damned sure that everyone in his command knew that. As long as he was weapons officer, nothing was going to stop the John Paul Jones from being the best damned destroyer ever to have sailed the Pacific Rim.

  There were nearly two dozen people populating the CIC. Most of them were manning an assortment of very sophisticated computers, capable of providing every single reading that could possibly be desired.

  “I want this understood: we are not in this weapons room to learn, we are here to crush the other ships. Is that clear?”

  Raikes was the gunnery officer. As Hopper spoke, she could actually be seen to caress the controls, as if Hopper’s words amounted to foreplay and she was being turned on by them. It was entirely possible that was the case. Aside from Hopper, there was no one in the CIC who got more jazzed from blowing things up than Raikes.

  He moved through the CIC, checking each system, one by one. “Let’s remember,” he reminded them, “all this technology was manufactured for the U.S. Navy by the lowest bidder, because that’s the American way. So we stay on top of things now to make sure nothing fails us when we need it. Clear?”

  “Yes sir,” they chorused.

  There was a hand-scrawled sign above the radar station. It was against ship’s regs; the commander disliked people putting their own personal touches on the equipment. Hopper read the sign: “In God We Trust. All Others, We Track.” He grinned and left it there. It was odd; there was something strangely liberating about being slated for court-martial. When they were going to put you on trial for punching out a Japanese officer, it seemed pretty unlikely they’d tack onto the list of your offenses “Left a personalized sign above the radar station.” Nothing like a captain’s mast to put things in perspective.

  He passed the close-in weapon system, or CIWS, nodding in approval as a check was made on it to ascertain that it was functional. “Let me remind you,” said Hopper, “this is a combat vessel and we will excel in our command and control, our communications capacity, our tactics, our fire control, navigation, our weapons capabilities. Clear?”

  “Yes sir,” said the team once more in unison.

  “If we return to Pearl without having outperformed every other ship on this ocean then I will personally hold every man and woman in this room accountable.”

  Then he heard Raikes muttering in that way that she had, the way she liked to pretend wasn’t going to be heard by anyone else, except she knew perfectly well she was audible. It was her passive-aggressive way of saying exactly what she wanted to say while maintaining at least a façade of respect for her superior officers.

  “What was that, Raikes?” he said sharply.

  She looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. “Nothing, sir.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it was something.”

  “Nothing.”

  In point of fact he’d heard every word and they were etched in his mind: We’ve ended up in a department run by some kind of Donald Trump–Mike Tyson mutant combo package. Imagine if they ever gave this lunatic command…

  “Sounded like…” He pretended to be having difficulty remembering the name. “ ‘Donald Trump.’”

  “Only in that you are both great motivators, Lieutenant Hopper,” she said.

  “Did I hear ‘Mike Tyson’?”

  “If you did, it was only in reference to the fact that you both project great physical intensity, and—”

  That was enough of the game as far as Hopper was concerned. He leaned in toward her and said sternly, “Watch yourself, Raikes.”

  “Watching myself, sir.” A smile played across her lips but she resolutely focused on her weapons systems.

  Raikes was a good officer. Scratch that: as a gunnery officer, she was the best. That being the case, Hopper was inclined to give her more latitude than he otherwise would, and probably somewhat more than he should.

  Still… no harm in laying down the law.

  “Teamwork is all of you doing what I say,” said Hopper. “Trust no one. Respect is taken.” He turned toward a young officer. “Lieutenant Cruz: make enemies or make friends?”

  “Enemies, sir,” said Cruz.

  “Why?”

  “An enemy’s desire to prove his worth to you is stronger than a friend’s desire to prove gratitude.”

  As Cruz spoke, Hopper mouthed the words along with him. Cruz had learned well. “Cultivate…?”

  “Enemies, sir.”

  Hopper nodded approvingly and then turned to the rest of his crew. “Victory through victory. Demolishing competition. Protecting what is ours.”

  Raikes started to open her mouth.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  She closed it again.

  There was a loud clearing of a throat, and Hopper turned to see Mullenaro standing in the doorway. He’d been giving Hopper the stink eye ever since the meeting in the wardroom. Well, he’ll be rid of me soon enough; he’s probably happy about that. “Get to the helo deck. Sampson wants you on the pronto. In person.”

  They want me over on the Sampson? Why would they—?

  Then he realized. It was pretty self-evident, really. Stone hadn’t seen him since the entire fiasco on the Big Mo, mostly because Hopper had taken great pains to avoid him. Obviously Stone was going to take advantage of his last opportunity to boss Hopper around in an official capacity. For a moment, Hopper considered telling Mullenaro that he couldn’t make it. That he wasn’t leaving the John Paul Jones and if the Sampson didn’t like it, that was too damned bad. If Stone wanted to take the time to bitch out his younger brother, he could bloody well come over here and do it.

  Yet all he said was, “Aye, sir.”

  Minutes later he was on a chopper heading toward the Sampson, chewing himself out mentally for his inability to say what was on his mind. Ultimately he decided that there simply hadn’t been any point to it. Let Stone have his say. You have it coming, and you know it.

  Stone was standing on the flight deck of the Sampson, displaying as much emotion as his name might suggest. As the chopper set down, Hopper emerged from it, holding his hat securely under his arm to make sure that the whipping blades didn’t blow it away. He came to a halt several feet from his brother and, standing at attention, saluted. Normally such a move would have prompted Stone to smile, seeing Hopper display genuine respect for the uniform and rank. Now, though, all Stone could think was, Too little, too late. He returned the salute dispassionately and indicated, with a nod of his head, that Hopper should follow him.

  They made their way down to Stone’s quarters. Stone stood to one side as Hopper entered and then he shut the door behind him. He dispensed with any niceties. They were both busy men, and besides, there seemed no point in trying to candy coat a poison pill.

  “Captain’s mast is real,” said Stone as he walked around to the far side of his desk and sat down. He gestured for Hopper to sit; Hopper remained standing, and Stone saw no reason to push the matter. “Just got off the phone with 3rd Fleet JAG. I can’t get you out of this one.”

  “When?”

  “The day we get back. Nagata is being charged, too.”

  Hopper took in this bit of news. Stone could tell from the look on his face that he was relieved. If he was going down, at least Nagata was going down with him. Then he realized his priorities were out of whack. He brought himself back to his own concerns. “What do I do?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you this time, Hopps. It’s three strikes.” Stone shook his head. “I don’t get it. You have e
verything. You’ve got the skills. More talent than me. You’ve got a great girl. And you just keep shooting yourself in the foot. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Stone said impatiently. “You’re not that oblivious to whatever’s going on in your head. But you try to avoid it, and if someone really presses it, you make a joke about it. It isn’t a joke anymore, Hopper. This time it’s very real. So tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  “I’m just not you,” said Hopper. “You got the character and quality. I got the other stuff.”

  “Yeah. Except you’re on the verge of losing all the other stuff, including Sam. Is that what you want?”

  Hopper stared at him. “Honestly?”

  “That’d be nice.”

  He sighed heavily. “I don’t know what the hell I want.”

  It sounded trite, but Stone could feel his brother’s pain. Hopper had been so lost for so long, and Stone had done everything he could to get him back on track. Instead they were here, in this situation, and Hopper’s career—which had seemed so promising—might well have hit a dead end.

  “I hope you find it, Hopps,” Stone said with sincere concern for his brother. “And I hope you find it before you’ve completely sunk yourself.”

  DEEP SPACE

  They have been moving at a steady velocity as they plummet through the emptiness of space, but now that emptiness is coming to an end. A solar system is hanging in front of them. Nine worlds, or eight if one doesn’t count the planetoid in the outer rim. In any event, it does not matter, for the incoming vessels have no interest in any of the worlds save one.

  They move toward the object of their attention.

  They are fully aware that their target will know they are coming. There are likely to be some manner of early warning systems available to them.

  Let them know. Let them be fully aware. It’s not as if there is anything they’ll be able to do about it.

  THE HIMALAYAS

  It had been six years for the scientists of the Beacon International Project. Six long years of watching space, of monitoring the equipment, of waiting and seeing whether their messages-in-a-bottle would ever garner some manner of response.

  Yet even after all that time, once the moment that they had been waiting for finally arrived, at first they had no clue what it was they were looking at.

  One of the main monitor screens was tuned to CNN, as it typically was, since that had become the major lifeline for the scientists to the outside world. No one was paying any attention to it, however. Instead they were glued to their individual monitors, trying to make sense out of the readings they were getting.

  “Speed is consistent with meteors. Trajectory?” called out Carlson.

  Doctor Abraham Nogrady, wearing the nice sweater of local weave that he’d been given for his birthday the previous week, was standing in front of a monitor, tracking the blue line that represented the incoming object. “Oh my.” He leaned close to the monitor, typing on the keyboard. “Whatever this is, it’s tracking our message path. Bring up Hawaii. Get me Cal on the line.”

  He’d never blamed Doctor Calvin Zapata for “abandoning him,” as he had laughingly put it two years earlier. Who could blame the younger man, really? The Hawaii offer was too good for him to pass up. He would actually be in charge of the location, something that wouldn’t happen in the Himalayas, since Nogrady wasn’t planning on going anywhere. That alone had been something of a revelation to Nogrady, discovering how much he preferred the solitude of the mountains. Who knew that I didn’t actually like civilization all that much?

  It took long moments to raise the Hawaii location. A junior technician whose name Nogrady couldn’t recall came on the communications screen. The reception wasn’t the greatest. The general feeling was that for all the money that had been poured into the high-tech system that linked them visually with the other Beacon stations, they’d have done just as well with a couple of PCs and Skype. Still, for all the static on the screen, at least Nogrady could make out the technician on the other end and hear what he was saying. “Doctor Zapata’s in the computer room!” the technician told him. “He’s busy trying to recycle some parts from previous models because the money’s not there for upgrading…”

  “Yes, yes, I get that, uhm…” He took a stab at the name. “Rice.”

  “Royce, sir.”

  Dammit. “Yes, I meant to say ‘Royce.’ Royce, are you seeing what we’re seeing…?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s massive activity on all the screens. I was just about to get Doctor Zapata.”

  “I suggest you do so sooner rather than later, son. Tell him I have a moon trail for him.”

  “I’m on it. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Nogrady exchanged amused looks with the other technicians at Royce’s parting comment. Where the hell was he going to go?

  Minutes later Zapata’s face appeared on the screen. He had a bit less hair up top than the last time Nogrady had seen him, but had apparently decided to compensate for it by growing a rather scraggly beard. He was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, festooned with a print of yellow and green flowers. He looked like Royce had just dragged him from a luau. But he was holding some microtools that he’d obviously forgotten were in his hands when he’d come from the computer room. He was slightly out of breath, indicating he’d been running. “Cal. You’re looking well,” said Nogrady.

  “You look terrible,” Zapata replied. “You’re all grainy and flickering… wait, that’s the reception. Or is that actually you?”

  “A little of both.” Nogrady had never really “gotten” Zapata’s sense of humor, but at least he was able to tell when the man was joking and had developed the knack of smiling tolerantly. He did so now, but then got down to business. “Cal, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Zapata nodded. “The incoming tracks.”

  “I’ve either been at this too long, or our outgoing message path—”

  “I have the same thing, Doctor Nogrady. This could be a hoax, a meteor with a jet pack… or…” He paused, licking his lips, which had obviously become quite dry, “… some kind of answer to the beacon.”

  The fact that Cal was addressing him as “Doctor Nogrady” was more than sufficient to convey the gravity of the moment, considering that the younger man had typically called him “Abe” or even “Abie,” usually just to annoy him.

  The two men shared a moment of pure astonishment. It wasn’t as if they’d ever stopped believing in the possibilities of their endeavor, but somehow neither of them had ever been quite prepared for the actuality of it reaching fruition.

  An answer to the beacon. Someone found our bottle, read the message and is responding. Nogrady could scarcely process it. He felt as if his brain was on the verge of being overloaded. We are standing on the cusp of what may be the most important day in the history of mankind since the first of our ancestors hauled himself out of the primordial ooze.

  Then Carlson, sitting practically at Nogrady’s elbow, said, “We’ve got something splitting off from the main.”

  Nogrady looked down and saw that Carlson was right. A new track had peeled off from the one they were already recording. Best guess was that it was heading toward Asia.

  Zapata was tracking the same thing. “Looks like entry problems in the LEO debris belt. It hit something.”

  Immediately Nogrady was seized with a sense of helpless frustration. He’d written entire papers on the hazards of just this: the massive amounts of debris that were hanging in low Earth orbit (LEO) that nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in doing a damned thing about. Bad enough that it posed a threat to people residing on the earth below. Now all that space junk might well have crippled someone trying to make contact. What an ignominious, not to mention tragic, beginning to what should have been a new and golden age in Earth’s history.

  “It’s splintering,” Carlson confirmed Zapata’s readings.

  “At least three pieces of this thing are g
oing to rain down. And at the current velocity, I’d say they’re going to hit in less than ninety seconds.”

  Less than ninety seconds…

  It was only at that point that Nogrady started considering the possible human element of what he was witnessing. Debris had routinely fallen from the LEO belt, and yet never in the history of the space program had any of it ever struck a human being. There were zero fatalities from man-made space debris.

  There were not, however, any statistics related to debris manufactured by something other than man. As Nogrady stood there helplessly watching the trajectory—knowing that there was no time to warn anyone about anything—he prayed to a God that he didn’t quite believe in that the odds continued to hold in their favor.

  AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY SECONDS

  They know they are being tracked. They do not care. The arrival is simply the opening salvo and the creatures that crawl around on the dirt below have no concept of it.

  The crew of a fishing boat were the first ones to lay eyes upon it, although they didn’t know what they were seeing.

  The high-speed projectile descended with unimaginable force and velocity from on high, blazing red, the air exploding around it, giving off a deafening crack like thunder. It slammed into the water miles away, and yet did so with such force that seconds later the water was surging around the fishing boat, threatening to swamp it. It was all the crew could do to keep the boat righted and they watched in astonishment as a massive blast of steam roared up from the entry point, as if a volcano had detonated deep below the surface.

  “What the hell was that?” screamed one of the younger sailors.

  The boat’s captain, a grizzled veteran of many a storm, had been chewing tobacco when the object had struck. He spat some out while holding firmly on to the wheel and said, “Y’ask me… looks like God just hocked a loogie.”

  Kowloon City in Hong Kong had a population of nearly half a million. It was overlooked by Lion Rock, a hill named for the rock formations that resembled a crouched lion prepared to leap upon its prey.