Weapons of choice aot-1

by John Birmingham

  Shock robbed the young man of his senses for a few long seconds until his training asserted itself and he awkwardly thumbed his flexipad, activating the trauma beacon. Panic flared briefly, when he thought the pad may have been ruined in the missile strike, but a warm bath of analgesics and stabilizers soon flushed through his system, spreading out from his spine, up his neck, and down into each of his injured limbs.

  Thanks to the drugs, Miyazaki was quickly able to consider the small, sharpened spike of bone that was jutting through the torn skin on his right ankle. He wouldn't be able to walk on that, he knew. So he would have to drag himself up into the bridge by the strength of his good arm. He had just gripped the uncomfortably hot metallic gridwork of the step above his head when his flexipad began to vibrate and screech in a way he couldn't ignore.

  Pausing and catching his breath, Miyazaki turned to examine the screen, expecting to find a senior officer there, bellowing orders. Instead the screen displayed kanji script, identifying the caller as the ship's Combat Intelligence and addressing him as Acting Commander Miyazaki. A character voice he recognized from many wasted hours watching anime serials spoke from the pad.

  "The ship has been attacked and all senior command elements have been killed, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. You are the surviving senior officer. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response."

  "Ship," croaked Miyazaki, before losing his voice for a second. He swallowed with difficulty, tasting for the first time the foul miasma of burning chemicals and human remains coating his mouth and throat. "Ship, what is the fleet status?"

  "All fleet elements are under attack, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. Some are missing, presumed destroyed. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response."

  "Siranui crew status?"

  "The crew is incapable of performing any duties, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response."

  The Siranui's CI spoke without urgency. It didn't need any. Given the shrill disharmony of competing alarms, the thick smoke and crackling fire, the thumping impact of shot falling nearby, and the evidence of his own wounds, Miyazaki knew something was terribly wrong. It wasn't enough, however. Before he would authorize the release of the ship's weaponry, he had to be completely certain it was necessary.

  "Ship," he said. "I must inspect the bridge for myself. I authorize Level Two Autonomy for response. Please confirm."

  "Ship confirms Level Two Autonomous Defensive Response, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. Arming Metal Storm and laser pods… Targets acquired."

  "On my authority, engage."

  It seemed to Miyazaki that the last word hadn't even formed in his mind before the entire ship trembled under the awesome tenor of twelve Metal Storm turrets spewing thousands of hypervelocity caseless rounds into the air. The sound was less martial than industrial, the furious crescendo of heavy-metal war drums.

  The ship heaved to port, steering herself now, and Miyazaki rolled clumsily to one side, catching the bone stub that was protruding from his shattered ankle. Even with the drugs that had been released by his spinal syrettes, he grayed out with pain. When he came to a few seconds later, it was all he could do not to vomit. The Siranui's CI, which was monitoring him like a fretful mother, dumped another blend of anesthetic and antinausea solution onto his spinal receptors. Miyazaki experienced the flush as a threshold experience, akin to flipping from flat black-and-white to three-dimensional color with the twirl of a dial. He drew a quick breath and began again, hauling himself up the metal steps using his hand and knees.

  He smelled fire-retardant gas as he hauled himself through the torn blackout curtain and onto the ruined bridge. He gagged on the burned-chemical stench and the obscene stink of seared meat. It would have been much worse were it not for the ragged hole that had been punched through the blast windows by the missile impact. Fresh air gusted through, plucking at his bloodstained uniform and matted hair. Smoke obscured the surviving blast windows, but he could see enough through the opening, where growing swarms of primitive, unguided missiles filled the night sky.

  Night sky? But how…

  Miyazaki pushed the thought aside. What mattered now was what lay out there in the punctuated darkness. It looked like something off a history vid, like a battle from the forties Pacific War. Dozens of ships weaved through dense and tangled arcs of high-explosive ordnance. Long streaks of tracer fire-barely directed, if at all-twisted about sinuously.

  And here on the bridge, all around him, lay further evidence of bloody contention. Outwardly, Miyazaki was still. But inside he reeled from the images, finding it impossible to draw any connection between the first officer and that dismembered torso, between Captain Okada and the charred, severed arm that was still lying on the armrest of the command chair.

  A flickering to his left drew his attention. He was grateful for the distraction. The damage seemed less severe over there. A few touch screens still functioned.

  Bone-shaking thunder rolled over the bridge, and Miyazaki lost his balance as the CI veered the ship away from a cluster of shell impacts. He managed to fall on his good side this time. Sea spray drenched him, spotting the screen with droplets of salt water, each acting like a small convex lens, magnifying the pixel lattice that shone beneath them. Focusing on the screen, he could see that the Clinton was ablaze and the Kandahar was listing as though taking on water.

  The voice of the Siranui spoke through an intact speaker somewhere behind him.

  "Sensors indicate that the extreme threats continue, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response."

  Miyazaki did not hesitate this time. He had seen enough.

  "On my authority, Level One Autonomy is sanctioned."

  The Siranui's Combat Intelligence cross-matched the speaker's voiceprint with a DNA profile sampled through the smart-skin casing of his flexipad. Verifying that all higher command elements were dead or incapacitated, it confirmed command authority in the person of Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki, and then instantly assumed operational authority for itself.

  The ship's Nemesis arrays had already traced and logged the flight path of the shells that had struck the bridge, tracing it back to their points of origin. The CI corrected for changes since impact, and identified the enemy vessels. It then activated two Tenix Defense Industries combat maces in retaliation.

  Hexagonal silo caps flipped open on the forward deck. The stealth cruiser's Intelligence released the launch codes and attack vectors for an offensive run, and the maces, which on a cursory examination resembled old-fashioned cruise missiles, rose straight up out of the silo on towers of white flame. The boost-phase rockets cut out at six thousand feet, so there was no visual warning of the missiles' approach. Their scramjets burned without a perceptible exhaust.

  Miyazaki followed the mace run on the screen in front of him. A time hack counted down to zero in the lower left corner. Two decks below, the same image was reproduced dozens of times on screens distributed around the Combat Information Center. A small pop-up window on a cracked screen hanging by a thick tangle of wires near Miyazaki's resting place carried a feed from the CIC. It presented an eerie picture of twenty-two men, slumped in their seats or sprawled on the nonslip deck, oblivious to the destruction their own vessel had just unleashed.

  As the missiles curved downward toward their targets, dipping and swerving to avoid a wandering tracer stream, they maintained a furious laser-linked dialogue with the Combat Intelligence on the Siranui, demanding and receiving a constant stream of updated targeting data. Flaps on their stubby wings purred to and fro. On the Siranui's two-dimensional displays Miyazaki watched as the hammerheads lined up on the enemy cruisers executing course corrections with an economy of movement. Three hundred meters from the stern the leading missile dipped, then leveled off, racing about three hundred meters above the highest point of the vessel.

  As the first missile reached a specific point above its target, a very small, controlled fusion reaction superheated two hundred tungs
ten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle. The entire load punched through the deck of the cruiser. The kinetic and thermal shock instantly vaporized a significant percentage of the target mass.

  The expanding gas, a molecule mix of human tissue, steel, wood, fabric, and superheated air manifested itself as a conventional explosion that blew the rest of the ship to Hell and beyond.

  Ammunition bunkers exploded. Boilers and the crew who attended them were atomized. Those slugs that drove all the way down into the keel flash-boiled thousands of liters of water that rushed back in through the ruptured hull. Miyazaki watched the death of the enemy ship in two acts. A rippling torrent of white fire raced down the length of the topside decks and superstructure, followed almost instantaneously by a sudden, violent eruption that seemed to detonate beneath the waterline before bursting the thick steel hull like a balloon. In a flash, the ship that had been there suddenly wasn't. A few moments later the second mace destroyed another ship in identical fashion.

  Maseo Miyazaki had not wanted to be a warrior. He had dropped out of college to surf in Hawaii, then Indonesia, and finally in Australia (where he had met that ugly damn stonefish). He had only returned to Japan and presented himself to the draft board in his home prefecture after a suicide bomber in Malaysia had killed his father, a Sanyo executive. After serving six months in a punishment detail for skipping out on the draft in the first place, he had distinguished himself with his application to duty and his easy familiarity with the ways of their gaijin Allies.

  He had never before felt the thrill and weight of bushido. But now, surrounded by dead friends and comrades, he knew the blood-simple joy of vengeance on one's enemy.

  One thing bothered him, however.

  The ship he had just killed looked nothing like the pirate dhows or baggala routinely used by jihadi terrorists within the Indonesian archipelago.

  USS ENTERPRISE, 2307 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  "Sweet Jesus," breathed Admiral Ray Spruance.

  The death of the Portland bathed the pilothouse in a harsh, flat light. For a few seconds he had an almost perfect view of the cauldron in which the two enemies tore at each other with such blind fury. The Japanese guns poured out eerie needles of light, flash-burning hundreds of shells in midflight, creating a sensational fireworks show. Ribbons of green and gold tracer fire sprayed high into the stars or weaved and twisted low across the wave tops. It seemed as if every minute brought another apocalyptic blast like that which had silenced the Portland forever.

  On the flight deck, men still threw their lumbering torpedo planes down the heavy wooden planking, desperate to get aloft and into the enemy. So many of them failed. Those devilish glimmering needles of light struck down most who survived before they could orient themselves.

  It was a slaughter.

  In a matter of minutes contemporary American naval power in the Pacific had been crippled. More than half of the destroyers from Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen were destroyed outright. The carriers Hornet and Yorktown were obliterated by one rocket each.

  Just one, God help us, thought Spruance.

  The cruisers New Orleans and Minneapolis joined their sister ship Portland on her dive to the floor of the ocean, the latter sunk by the second rocket that had launched from that damn Japanese ghost ship. The starburst of white light that bloomed amidships and consumed the entire ship still stung his eyes. Dan Black had cursed and said it was "like looking right into the sun."

  Suddenly the bridge windows blew in with a hollow bang as a long, sharklike blur whipped past the pilothouse at phenomenal speed. Two sailors who had been standing close to the glass spun away, crying out and trying too late to shield their faces. A massive boom sounded almost simultaneously. Spruance felt it as a quake deep inside his chest, and as knitting needles jammed painfully into his ears. It was two or three seconds before he could hear the profane language of the men around him.

  He realized the young ensign, the one who'd warned them about the rockets, was tugging at his arm, pointing out through the nearest shattered pane. He was shouting something but it came through as faint, far-off murmur.

  Spruance frowned and tried to read the boy's lips. But he was certain the ensign was saying something like "death rays."

  Spruance feared he was losing his mind.

  Death rays indeed!

  Holy Toledo, yes, they were death rays!

  Ensign Wally Curtis couldn't understand why nobody else could see it. But then, nobody else on the Enterprise-probably nobody else in the fleet-had invested as many hours as he had immersed in the pages of Astounding and Amazing Stories.

  As soon as he'd seen those brilliant flares lift off out of the Japanese ship, he'd known they were rockets.

  And I was right!

  And as soon as the blackness of night on the deep ocean became stitched and crisscrossed with those shimmering arrows of light, he'd known they were death rays. Not flak or machine-gun bullets, but honest-to-God lasers! And the sky was full of them.

  Oh, the Japs were gonna win this war for sure.

  He knew that really big bang, the one that lit up that giant carrier away on the horizon-the Akagi they reckoned-he knew that was a lucky strike, or maybe just a dive-bomber tumbling into the deck.

  Just about every single plane they'd managed to put up had quickly disappeared in a dirty ball of orange flame and oily smoke. He could tell that the enormous volumes of fire they were putting out were trailing off as their sister ships disappeared, one after the other, inside dazzling white-hot dwarf stars. He'd seen the Phelps go up just a few yards away like a giant magnesium flare.

  He didn't know how they could defend themselves.

  But he did know that Admiral Spruance had to be told what he was up against.

  If he could just tell the admiral, he'd know what to do.

  When he saw the New Orleans go up, Dan Black knew they were all going to die. He watched that long, wingless plane-that thing that looked like a flying hammerhead shark-as it flashed over the flight deck of the Enterprise. His thigh muscles bunched and he distinctly felt his ass pucker as he waited for the firestorm to spit out of its belly. He'd seen that happen twice now to other ships. But the Enterprise was spared. Christ only knew why. And the rocket-if Curtis was right-passed over them with such speed you could practically see the wall of compressed air that attended its passage. It knocked men off their feet down on the flight deck, swept a few of them over the side, and even seemed to flatten the waves beneath it.

  In Lieutenant Commander Black's opinion, something traveling that fast-if it was built solid, it'd punch right through a battleship.

  And sure enough, he'd have sworn the New Orleans actually rocked on her axis when the thing struck her. All ten thousand tons of her. Just before that globe of silent white light ballooned outward from the impact point and swallowed up the whole ship.

  That was when he knew they were all going to die.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2307 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Kolhammer ran his eyes over the screens in front of him and the firestorm lighting the darkness outside. They were in battle. He had no idea with whom and over what. But men and women were dying by the thousands if the flatscreen reports and the evidence of the night outside were to be believed. The deck of the Clinton was aflame, reminding him of the oil fires he'd witnessed in all of the Gulf Wars.

  "Any word on Captain Chandler?" Kolhammer asked Commander Judge, knowing the answer before the ship's executive officer spoke.

  Judge checked both his flexipad and a workstation, with his mouth fixed in a grim line. He confirmed what the admiral had feared.

  "He's gone, sir, along with everybody on the flight deck and another six hundred here and there. It's your ship, Admiral."

  None of the men or women on the bridge turned from their stations, but Kolhammer felt the weight of their expectations fall on him. Their lives were now in his hands.

&
nbsp; "Lieutenant Brooks." He addressed the CIC boss, who was looking much less bilious, thanks to the Promatil flush. "Give it to me quick and dirty. Force status and enemy disposition. Mike, give me ship status when the lieutenant's finished."

  Judge began to gather damage reports from the carrier's various departments while Kolhammer watched Brooks's hands flying over her touch screen. The young woman's face was impassive, although Kolhammer guessed her mind and heart would be racing.

  "We're still out of contact with our subs, Admiral. Sensors can't find Chicago or Denver anywhere. Garrett, Vanguard, Dessaix, Sutanto, Nuku, and Nagoya are also still missing. There's no available datum point indicating those ships have been sunk. They're just missing. The Leyte Gulf isn't responding. Drone surveillance indicates counterboarding operations are under way. Fearless has been destroyed."

  Brooks allowed herself a quick, rueful expression at that before continuing.

  "The Kandahar has taken some fire and reports a torpedo strike. The damage is serious but contained. Eighty-six confirmed KIA. Moreton Bay reports multiple hits. The Siranui has suffered a major impact on her bridge. Captain Okada is dead, along with his exec and five other officers. Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki has assumed control and authorized the CI to respond at Level One. The Havoc is undetected and has launched one Type Ninety-two heavy torpedo, killing the boat that torpedoed us."

  Kolhammer nodded. He'd been certain the Havoc had sunk that ship. At least he'd gotten that right, he thought dolefully, as Brooks spoke again.

  "Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we're running through our defensive stocks at an unsustainable rate. There's just too much incoming. We're taking it out, but if it keeps up at this pace we'll have exhausted Metal Storm within another seven minutes. The laser pods will be okay for another ten, but they'll need to power down pretty shortly after that. All other force elements are reporting the same. The Moreton Bay has already run through her stock of MS munitions. Trident has taken up a position shepherding her, but they're getting hungry, too."