Overthrow: The War with China and North Korea

by David Poyer

  Four decks down, Cheryl paused to check a freshly painted warning at the base of a door. Then undogged it, slipped through, and slid into the central seat at a command table.

  The air was cold here. The overhead dead black, the lighting muted. Officers and chiefs sat to her left and right, and console operators within speaking distance. Seven large-screen displays surrounded them, with a video wall of three directly ahead, one to each side, and two behind. When linked to topside cameras, they gave a 360-degree view around the ship, in both visible and infrared. At the moment, though, the forward screens were oriented toward the threat. Voices murmured. Air-conditioning hissed. Cooling fans hummed.

  She nodded to the tall young man seated to her right and settled a helmet on her shoulders. Matt Mills had been the operations officer on the old Savo. Now he was her exec, second in command.

  “Standing by for automatic, Captain,” he muttered.

  “Alice, this is the CO,” Cheryl voice-identified herself to the combat system. Formerly ALIS, the missile defense subprogram of the older Aegis combat system, the enhanced tactical AI was now AALIS. Advanced ALIS, and all but another crew member now. It could fight the ship on its own, make tactical decisions, select and deploy sensors and weapons faster than human thought. One more generation, Cheryl often thought, and human beings would be warriors no more.

  Only prey …

  “Good morning, Skipper.” A neutral tone, the pitch and intonation neither male nor female.

  “Hello, Alice. Threat axis three five five. Scan and report.”

  The images on the left and central screens tilted backward, deepening into a 3-D display, and populated with symbols. Surface contacts. Aircraft. Missiles. Subsurface contacts. Only a few were from the ship’s own radar. Most were from the JTIDS network. Encrypted, jam-resistant, and nodeless, it aggregated data from MOUSE nanosatellites, drones orbiting high above the sea, and autonomous gliders cruising beneath the thermoclines. Yet another layer of extra-ionospheric imagery came from the Missile Defense Agency sea-based X-band radar, riding in a heavily guarded patch of sea north of Hawaii.

  Beside her Mills bent to a touchpad. He hooked and tapped. The symbols began flashing. He touched his boom mike. “Alice, TAO: Fire control key inserted. Prepare for auto control.”

  “Alice aye. Data collection complete. Ready for auto control. Request batteries released.”

  Cheryl reexamined the screens inside her helmet, then clicked on an exterior camera. Deep into the war, the eastern Pacific was devoid of commercial shipping, and no one in his right mind ventured out in a pleasure craft. But she checked anyway before leaning forward. “Alice, CO: Initiate auto control mode. Batteries tight.”

  A keyboard clicked, and the screens transformed. One displayed live video from the mast-mounted camera. Another, moving steadily over the waves far below as dawn glittered over their crests, was a live feed from a drone five thousand feet up and fifty miles north. Its view was momentarily obscured by cloud, then cleared.

  Five streaks of fire were traveling so close above the waves that the shock waves from their passage ripped the crests apart into mist. As if the sea itself was unzipping, revealing white lacy underthings. They traveled not in straight lines, but in a complex interweaving pavane, as if handing off the lead one to another. But second by second they were closing on Savo, and the higher-value units behind her.

  Voices in her earbuds, a drill-worn litany from checklists and photocopied ponies taped to consoles. “Lock on, tracks 2031 through 2036.”

  “Warning bell forward deck. Visual confirm, forward deck clear. Nulka active decoys to auto ready.”

  “ECM reports: Consistent with YJ-25.”

  Developed from the YJ-18 during the war, the Chinese YJ-25 “Salvage” was a submarine-launched antiship missile. It carried a two-hundred-kilo warhead, but the real threat lay in its speed. A final ramjet stage sprinted in at over Mach 5, making it impossible to take down with the weapons most Allied ships carried: medium-range Standard missiles, the short-range Stingers mounted as last-ditch defense two years before, even the 20mm Gatlings that were the last resort.

  She wasn’t looking at real YJ-25s, of course. These were targets, look-alikes for test purposes. But if they couldn’t be stopped, neither could the real thing.

  The symbols drew nearer, still accelerating. The video juddered, trying to continue tracking them, but it jerked back and forth crazily. Then suddenly they were gone, blotted out by the gray murk of a squall.

  Cheryl shifted in her chair and zoomed the forward camera in on the tubular assemblage on the foredeck. It still gave that queer impression of mechanical intentness, tracking slightly up and down as the deck rose and fell, like a cat intent on the random hoppings of a bird.

  “Tracking,” the laser console operator called from behind them.

  “Request batteries released,” AALIS said again.

  She nodded. “Released.”

  The screen froze. The lights dimmed, flickered. The fans in the consoles around her dropped an octave.

  “Pulsing,” AALIS said in Cheryl’s earbuds.

  A faint beam appeared in front of the assemblage’s muzzle. It wasn’t colored, or solid. It was only really visible when a burst of spray came over the bow and flashed suddenly into steam. It wasn’t continuous. It stuttered, the massive capacitor banks below the forward deck charging and discharging ten times a second. Brief pulses didn’t overload the thick sea-level atmosphere and break it down into plasma, which would spread and diffuse the beam. But so long as the laser was focused properly, if the pulses could dwell on the same spot for a quarter second they would burn through an inch of tungsten steel.

  “Dwelling,” the console operator called. “Dwelling … stand by—”

  A flash lit the gray cloud in the overhead imagery. “Splash Track 2035,” AALIS said. On the left-hand screen the scarlet symbol winked out.

  But a buzzer sounded. The soft voice of the operator came on the circuit. “Beam tube overheat, forward mount.”

  “Beam overheat forward. Standing by to shift to aft projector,” AALIS murmured.

  Cheryl bit her lip as plumes blasted from the white barrel. Liquid nitrogen, piped into the cooling jacket at four hundred pounds per square inch. They’d had problems before with that mount. Given a few seconds to chill, usually the LAWS came back on the line, but the technicians from Naval Surface Warfare Center had warned that if they were supercooled too often, the fragile laser elements would crack. She shifted to the aft camera. Noting, as she did so, that the squall clouds had closed in. Were nearly, in fact, on the ship.

  The broad, flat afterdeck began with ranks of flush-mounted hatches just aft of the deckhouse. They sealed vertical launching tubes for Standard and the new Alliance missiles, for improved cruise weapons, and close-in Sparrows in six-round packs. Aft of that was a second laser mount. And aft of that again, another gray turret.

  “Shifting to after laser … correction … possible beam degrade due to rain. Assigning tracks 2031 and 2033 to railgun,” AALIS said in her ear.

  That aftermost turret came alive and swung to face north. Unlike the thick-barreled white pods of the LAWS, railguns more nearly resembled conventional cannon. But their long tapered barrels were square, not round. Instead of explosive shells propelled by hot gas, they “fired” electrically driven hardened steel projectiles at two miles a second. AALIS’s gun control subroutines tracked the projectiles and separated them into submunitions four hundred yards from the target, increasing the hit probability sixteenfold.

  Mills said into his throat mike, “Designate to railgun. Auto engage.”

  “Batteries released when in range,” Cheryl confirmed.

  She’d barely finished speaking when the first slug cracked out in a dancing blaze of sparks and a shaft of white fire. The blaze was actually burning steel, half from the projectile, the rest stripped off the conducting rails by voltage and velocity. The barrels recoiled, aimed again, fired once more. The
slugs were inexpensive, the electricity about a dollar a shot, but the barrels were only good for about four hundred rounds before the conducting core eroded and velocity fell off a cliff. The railgun fired three times with twenty seconds between rounds, bam … bam … bam, then swung briskly back centerline and lowered its barrel, as if satisfied with a job well done.

  AALIS spoke in her ear. “Track 2031 splashed. Track 2033 splashed. Ceasing fire, railgun. Ceasing fire, LAWS. Nulka returned to standby. Archer localized. Designate Archer Alfa. Range one hundred and ten miles. Tracking outbound. ID as hostile.”

  Cheryl hesitated, frowning. “Archer” was shorthand for the launching platform for hostile missiles. But the incoming threats hadn’t been launched from a hostile ship.

  Which meant … what? “Uh, Alice, CO. Identify archer.”

  “Archer Alfa squawks IFF emulating US Navy P-8 IFF.”

  The P-8 Poseidon was a patrol and antisubmarine aircraft, modified, in this instance, to support live fire training. Cheryl lifted her eyebrows, smiled at Mills, and shook her head. “Uh, Alice, recheck. That’s a valid IFF.”

  “Negative. Target is squawking false IFF.”

  She exchanged another glance with Mills. Uh-oh, he mouthed. She’s at it again.

  In previous exercises AALIS had seemed a bit too suspicious, a mite too spring-loaded to misidentify friendly aircraft as threats. Cheryl had logged the issue in her after-action report, but maybe the patch the software developers had sent wasn’t fixing the problem. She was opening her mouth again when the AI said, “Warning bell forward. Taking Archer Alfa with enhanced range Standard.”

  She hit her throat mike. “Negative. Negative! Hold fire—”

  But a magazine hatch drove open in the video from the foredeck. A burst of flame dazzled the camera, followed by a whiteout of cottony smoke.

  A raised voice from behind a blue curtain. “Sonar reports, high-speed screws. TWS reports, torpedo in the water! Single torpedo. No ping. Wake homer or passive acoustic. Bearing zero eight zero.”

  Cheryl clicked her mike again. “Alice: resuming semiauto control mode! Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledge return to semiauto mode.”

  Mills, beside her, was barking “Come left, steer two six zero” into his mike. “Activate Rimshot. Shit bubble decoys. Stand by on CAT.”

  Rimshot, installed in blisters along the hull, replaced old-style passive degaussing with an active magnetic-signature management system that could finesse the apparent location of a large ferrous body, such as a ship’s hull, to trigger magnetic exploders into premature detonation. The bubble decoys generated false sonar returns.

  And the Countermeasure, Antitorpedo, was their last line of defense: a small-diameter, very fast torpedo designed to home in on incoming weapons. Unfortunately, Savo only carried a pod of four, since the Submarine Force claimed priority on them. But the incoming practice weapons had inert warheads. They might damage the screwpods or the sonar blisters, if they struck home, but they wouldn’t sink the ship.

  But that wasn’t her main concern just now. The hundred-and-forty-pound warhead of an armed Extended Range Active Standard, just now igniting its sustainer engine on the northern horizon, could easily bring down a P-8. “Warn them,” she snapped to Mills. “Get on the coordination net and pass verbal warning. RIM-174 active Standard on their tail.” To AALIS, “Designate the SM you just fired as Vampire.”

  “Interrogative, Captain. This is own ship weapon.”

  Cheryl bared her teeth. Why was the fucking machine arguing with her? “This is the CO. Alice: I say again; designate Vampire and take for target. Confirm!”

  “Designated as Vampire Five,” AALIS said, but unwontedly slowly. What was that nuance in its tone, Cheryl wondered. Doubt? Resentment at being contradicted? No, absurd. That had to be her own fears surfacing. Her own lack of trust in the AI. Which was, after all, only responding according to programming.

  “CIC, Sonar. Screw noise. Torpedo close.”

  She had to stop the errant missile before it was out of range. But she couldn’t engage with a second Standard. They were programmed to avoid each other during multi-salvo firings. Likewise, she wasn’t sure the railgun projectile, fast as it was, could overtake the rapidly departing missile, and she really had no time to make the calculation.

  And she couldn’t help wondering, in some detached corner of her mind … was this how Eddie had died? Enemy fire, the Navy said. But a lot of ordnance had been flying around. She’d wondered then if it had been blue on blue. Which might be why no one would admit to actually seeing him go down.

  She shook that off. If she didn’t fix this, there’d be more widows, and widowers. The patrol plane was still calmly headed outbound, with apparently no inkling of what was on its way. Unfortunately, only one possible action remained to her. “Alice: Engage Vampire Five with LAWS as soon as track is established. Engage torpedoes with CAT if decoys fail.”

  The computer said, “Interrogative, Captain. Warning! Doctrine violation. You are directing me to engage own ordnance, already assigned to hostile air. Also, after LAWS mount is currently assigned to tracks 2031, 2032, 2036.”

  “Fuck me,” she muttered. “What the hell’s this bitch trying to do? You give her a direct order, and she argues with you.”

  Beside her Mills was typing furiously. “We’re not raising them, voice,” he muttered. Meaning, she supposed, the Poseidon. It was still outbound, oblivious to the doom closing in from its blind zone dead astern. And behind the exec, the antisubmarine officer seemed to be vying for her attention too.

  Unfortunately she didn’t have time for either. Cheryl sucked in a deep breath and tried to keep her tone level, her pronunciation clear. Too-marked inflections tended to confuse the voice recognition software. “Alice: I confirm that order. Ignore doctrine violation. Designate own-ship Standard as Vampire Five. Drop previous targets. Engage with LAWS!”

  “Engaging track 2038 with LAWS—”

  A glance at the screen told her 2038 was the bomber. She shouted, “Negative, negative! Engage outgoing own-ship Standard with LAWS!”

  Beside her Mills murmured, “You’re confusing her, Skipper. Go to manual mode?”

  Cheryl twisted, to meet the gaze of the laser console operator. The petty officer had the outgoing missile centered on her screen, the Playstation-like controller cradled on her lap. The range was clear. The squall had moved on. Cheryl nodded to the operator. “Aft LAWS to manual mode,” she told her boom mike. A second later, AALIS rogered.

  “Tracking,” the console operator said, slumped in her chair, intent on her screen. Her thumbs tightened on her controller. “Pulsing.”

  In the aft camera, the barrel-like mount steadied. The lights flickered again. Once again the cooling fans whirred downward as the laser sucked energy first from its own capacitor banks, then from the ship’s generators.

  A second passed. Then another. Plumes of white vapor burst from the laser. The beam, stuttering ten times a second, seethed the humid air in front of the muzzle. No one spoke.

  Why wasn’t it working? Cheryl half rose from her seat, intending to supervise over the console operator’s shoulder, but Mills brought up the video from her sight in the CO’s helmet.

  The outgoing missile was a black cruciform, its exhaust a bright dot centered between the fins. It was so dazzling that the usually intense dot of the outgoing beam, focused to burn through metal and detonate anything flammable, was invisible. The crosshairs of the dual reticle showed it as properly centered. The beam readout showed it as properly focused.

  But nothing was happening.

  She tensed, realizing suddenly and with a sinking heart what was wrong. Centered in the superheated plume of the sustainer exhaust, the beam couldn’t focus. Diffused by the engine’s shock wave, the burning dot of the laser, nearly as hot as the surface of the sun, might heat the gas plume behind the engine, but it wouldn’t stop the missile. If anything, the added energy might boost its velocity.

&nbs
p; But before she could react the operator’s voice came over the circuit. “Shifting to manual aiming,” she said in the same detached tone. The laser-spot slid out of the engine-glow and refocused, to the side, between the rim of the engine nozzle and the port fin.

  It held there, dwelling unwavering as the tail-root turned red, then white-hot.

  With a burst of flame, the fin disintegrated. Fire burst from one side of the missile. Then it lurched, rotated, and exploded in a soundless, detonative violence. A moment later all that remained was flaming debris, gyrating and tumbling as it soared downward toward the sea far below.

  “Splash Vampire Five,” the operator said.

  “Splash Vampire Five,” AALIS confirmed.

  Cheryl was taking off the helmet, exhaling at last, when a red LED ignited on the console. “Aft LAWS overheat fail,” the operator muttered. At the same moment the old-style 21MC box in front of her clicked on. “CIC, After Steering. Just heard a heavy impact back here.”

  She twisted to face the ASW officer, at his own console. “Didn’t we get the CAT off?”

  “Never left the tubes, Skipper. Somehow the firing code got disabled. Was trying to tell you, but you waved me off.”

  “CIC, Main.” Lieutenant Jiminiz’s voice. Another hand from the old Savo, Jiminiz was fleeted up to chief engineering officer now. “Dispatching damage control team to check out impact aft of frame 260.”

  She hit the lever. “Very well, CHENG. Report damage. Any hull penetrations.”

  “DC aye.”

  The overhead speaker beeped. “All stations this net, this is Pyramid. OTC passes: Finex. Finex. All stations report.”

  “Shit,” Mills muttered, beside her. “That was so fucked up, Skipper. We didn’t look good at all, on that one.”

  “Unfortunately … I’ve got to agree.” She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her face and thinking Fuck Fuck Fuck real hard so she wouldn’t say it out loud in front of the crew. Or worse yet, snap at them. Relieved that at least they hadn’t shot down their own range services.