"Goddamn, Stolz, I'm trying to kill me some nip niggers up here."
"It's an officer, Moose!"
"What the fuck? I thought they was all dead."
"It's okay, sailor," grunted Commander Evans, who looked about a thousand miles from okay.
The snaking, tortured course through the labyrinth had been hard on Evans's injured ankle and arm. More than once he'd relied on Chief Mohr to push him through a cavity or cleft in the nearly impenetrable snarl of fused flesh and steel. They had made it through to the farthest point of advance, though, a relatively clear space formed by the confluence of an officer's washroom on the Astoria and some sort of science lab or something on the other ship. There was a light source somewhere in there, soft white light coming from within a toilet cubicle, the direct source of illumination blocked by a half-opened door occupying the same space as a desk. Evans didn't see how a desk lamp could still be lit; where would it be drawing power? But there were so many other questions arising out of the last fifteen minutes that he was learning to put the small stuff away in the chickenshit file.
"They through here?" he asked the sailor, a large fellow named Molloy.
He was about to peer through the small slit Molloy was guarding when a giant forearm slammed into his chest and drove him back against a washbasin. His broken arm flared in hot pain, and he started to gray out as Eddie Mohr grabbed him.
"Sorry, sir," said Molloy, "but those Japs can see in the dark, sir. You put your face up there and you're going to get it shot off, Commander."
Gunfire crashed in their ears every few seconds. Mostly single-shot rifle and pistol fire, but occasionally someone let rip with a tommy gun on full auto. You could hear the rounds striking dozens of different surfaces as they flew around within the disordered geometry of the combined shipspaces. Brass casings fell to the deck, ringing like a jar full of coins tipped onto a concrete floor. Fire came back at them, too. It sounded weird. Really loud, but there was never any ricochet. Just a peculiar sort of thudding pff when the bullets struck metal, or a sodden whack, like a baseball hitting a wet catcher's mitt, if they hit flesh. Seaman Molloy dipped his chin to point out the headless corpse of CPO Kelly, lying where the force of those odd bullets had thrown it.
"He took one with him, though," said Molloy respectfully. "You see him coming in, Commander? That Jap got one right through the heart? That was Chief Kelly did that, sir. Woulda put them army sharpshooters to shame, sir."
"Okay, sailor," grunted Evans, still reeling from Molloy's heavy blow. "Better give me a report."
Molloy gave him a look that said he'd never had to report to anyone more important than Chief Kelly, but then he straightened his shoulders and gathered his thoughts. Clearly there weren't that many of them, but his bovine features grew even more ruminative than usual.
"Well, Commander, we come in through the hole in the bunkroom. We had a lot of trouble finding our way around. We shot a few Japs, turned out to be niggers, and I'm sorry but I think we shot a few ladies they had as sex slaves, too… Probably better for them that way, though."
As Moose was talking, the volume of incoming fire grew alarmingly, forcing him to raise his voice. Evans was going to ask him about the black men and the women, whether anyone had thought to search them for ID, when Seaman Stolz screamed. A very large chunk of his chest disintegrated in a hot red shower that splashed over his shipmates.
He was dead before what was left of him slumped to the deck.
"Damn. I told you!" yelled Molloy. "Didn't I, Commander? They shot him through that little crack there."
He jammed his rifle into the space, loosed off a round in reply, then wrestled it out with some difficulty just before the response came in. Three rounds passed through and smacked into a solid-steel bulkhead just over the spot where Evans had crouched down and curled as tightly as possible. He was totally mystified by what he saw. The bullets impacted the metal surface with dry puffs of powder, leaving no dent and almost no residue. You had to wonder how they'd killed Stolz. Evans resisted the urge to lean over and scrape away some of dust that clung to the point of impact. But he'd already decided it wouldn't be worth his life.
It was hard enough to hear anyone talk, let alone to think this situation through calmly and rationally with the harsh thunder of battle going on all around him. Mohr had told him nearly a hundred men were fetched up against dozens of barricades or blockages like Molloy's, pouring as much lead into the enemy as they could, given the Japs nearly supernatural ability to pick them off with those fucking shotgun blasts. Between the fearful roar of that battle and the agony building from his own wounds, Evans feared the situation was entirely beyond him.
He was only Navy Reserve, after all. In civilian life, where he'd been blissfully and ignorantly employed until recently, he was a math teacher at small school in upstate New York. He'd joined the reserve in the early thirties, when work was hard to come by. He'd made some fine friends out of it, and the young ladies of Cherrybrooke village did like a man in uniform. But this… this was getting out of hand.
He was tempted to give in to the creeping grayness, to just fall unconscious and let someone else figure it all out, when the strangest thing happened. The storm of fire coming in at them abruptly ceased.
And then there came a loud crackling sound, like static over a ship's speaker. And an amplified voice boomed out. A female voice, with a clearly recognizable American accent, but unfamiliar in its pitch and tone.
"This is Captain Daytona Anderson of the United States Navy Ship Leyte Gulf. Cease fire and identify yourselves immediately."
Evans looked over at Eddie Mohr, who seemed just as stunned as he was. The chief petty officer shrugged and shook his head.
"It's one of their camp whores," hissed Molloy. "You can't trust her, sir. She's been brainwashed."
"Shut up, Moose," growled Mohr, before turning back to Evans. "Well, sir?"
Evans shook his head at this new turn of events. He drew a deep breath and tried to shout a reply, but his dry, cracked throat failed him. Chief Mohr took out his hip flask again and thrust it at the officer. Evans took a quick swill and tried once more. He was surprised at how weak his voice sounded.
"This is Lieutenant Commander Peter Evans of the USS Astoria. Identify yourself properly, and explain what the hell is going on here."
He could hear other members of the Astoria's crew whispering to each other in the brief silence that followed.
Then the woman's angry voice drowned them out. "I say again, this is Captain Daytona Anderson of the USS Leyte Gulf. You have boarded our ship and killed U.S. naval personnel. That enough explanation for you, asshole?"
Evans got Mohr to help him over to the crack through which Willie Stolz had been shot. He yelled into the gap. "Listen, lady. If the Japs are putting you up to this, just forget it. I'm sorry for your situation, but we're not laying down for anyone."
Muted cheers drifted into their bunker from somewhere off to starboard. Or what he thought was starboard.
"Listen, you macho jerk, you're going to get yourself and the rest of your crew killed for no good reason. We're not Japanese. We're Americans. You hear me? Americans."
Chief Mohr leaned over and said quietly, "That sounds like a black woman to me, Commander."
He was right, Evans realized. That was what threw him about the voice. It was black, like one of those Harlem jazz singers.
"What're you trying to pull, lady," he called back. "There's no such ship as the Leyte Gulf, and if there was, the captain wouldn't be a dame. You just put Tojo on the loudspeaker, if he knows any English. I'll take a surrender from him."
The cheers of his crewmates were punctuated by a good deal of laughter this time. Anderson didn't reply, and he wondered if she'd been hustled away by her captors.
Clancy and Nix crouched on either side of the aperture giving on to Evans and his men. Both men had set their night vision to the soft emerald of low-light amplification. Infrared was useless. There were simply too many heat source
s bleeding into the fused mayhem of junk metal. Sparks cascaded from shorted-out wiring. Steam vented from ruptured pipes in brilliant ruby-red geysers, and small spot fires burned all around them, adding a hot smoke haze to the saturated air.
Clancy hand-signed to Anderson. Did she want them to work around though the maze of scrap and attempt to subdue the targets?
The captain shook her head. She cut power to the small bullhorn in her left hand.
"The way you guys look," she subvocalized, "they'd take you for a couple of Nazis."
A chip implanted just below her jawline picked up the vibrations and converted them into a narrowcast quantum signal. Nix and Clancy heard their commanding officer's words in their helmets as clearly as if she'd spoken at normal volume in a quiet room. Nobody else heard anything.
"Just keep it tight and try not to waste anyone" she continued. "I'll try again."
That amplified voice boomed out again.
"All right, Commander Evans. I'm coming forward with my CPO and Specialist Nix. Are you in the head that intersected our weather station?"
Evans's eyes went wide at that. They were definitely hunkered down in a john and he figured that yes, maybe the science lab stuff could be weather equipment of some sort.
Mohr just looked at him as if to say What next?
"Yeah. I guess so," replied the Astoria's acting CO.
"We're coming armed. You fire on us and Clancy will pop a frag through that crack as easy as the round that killed your other guy a minute ago. Be nice if he didn't have to do that again."
Crouching low, Moose Molloy tried to muscle into the gap with his Springfield, but Mohr placed a size twelve boot on his shoulder and stopped him cold. Evans thumbed back the hammer on his pistol, but kept it pointing down at the floor. A moment later he could just make out movement in the gloom and clutter of shadows on the other side of the gap. Three figures slowly resolved out of the darkness. A thin, weak shaft of diffused white light, thrown out by the source somewhere behind the toilet door, barely picked them out.
"That you, Evans?" the woman asked, her voice at normal volume now. She seemed to be speaking directly to him. But how did she know where he was in all this blackness?
"Yeah," he croaked. "It's me."
"I'm going to break a glo-stick," she said. "You'll hear a sort of snap and a green tube will appear just in front of you. It'll glow bright enough for you to make us out a little easier."
Evans, Mohr, and Molloy heard a crunch, like someone stepping on glass. A faint green line began to glow on the far side of the gap. Within seconds it threw off enough light to illuminate the figures who had approached them. Evans was aware of Molloy, stiffening beside him and adjusting his grip on the old Springfield.
"Sailor," he said softly. "I want you to crawl over there, get behind that door, and see if you can get a hold of that lamp or whatever it is. We may need some more light in here."
Moose seemed about to question the logic of this order, but a cold glare from CPO Mohr cut him off and sent him away, muttering under his breath. Evans was too tired, too befuddled, and in way too much pain to bother with the mild insubordination. He let go a long shuddering breath as he regarded the fantastic creatures who stood just a few feet away now.
He figured the older man to be the chief petty officer. He looked the type. Stocky and assured. The woman, sure enough, was a Negro. A big one by the way she was crouched. She seemed to be wearing a life jacket of some sort and had a pair of goggles pushed up on her head. She and her chief were both toting shotguns, so perhaps it was one of them had done for Stolz. That was of marginal interest, however, next to the flood of questions raised by the third man.
Nix, was it?
Even in the strange green glow of the light stick the trooper seemed on the verge of disappearing into the visual clutter. It was almost as though he was drinking up the light, without throwing any of it back. Evans thought he was dressed in black, but he couldn't tell for sure. When Nix moved, he flowed like a ghost from one flickering shadow to the next. His eyes seemed huge and almost insectlike until Evans realized he, too, was wearing goggles. Unlike the Negro woman he hadn't removed his, and he seemed to be constantly scanning their surroundings. His weapon, some weird Buck Rogers-looking thing, seemed to float by his side, and Peter Evans had the unnerving sensation that it could swing up and target the small patch of skin between his eyes before he could even blink in surprise. He felt sure it was the same man he'd seen earlier, on the deck of the other ship.
"That's a fucking German storm trooper!" Mohr hissed in his ear. "Look at the helmet, Commander. And dressed in black like that. He's gotta be a Kraut."
"Seaman Nix hails from Fort Worth, Texas," said the black woman. "I'm not sure of his politics."
"Unreconstructed southern Democrat, ma'am," Nix said in a broad, recognizably Texan drawl.
"Well, we won't hold that against him. But I can assure you he is not an SS officer."
"Well, what the hell is he then?" snapped Evans, suddenly finding himself thoroughly exasperated by the conversational tone she maintained in the face of this relentless insanity.
Despite his outburst, the "captain"-what had she called herself? — replied calmly, "Nix is one of my boarding/counterboarding specialists, Commander Evans. I'll have him fall back if you'd prefer. Regardless, you and I need to talk. And fast. I don't know how long the structural integrity of our ships can hold out. But at the very least I'd suggest we stop trying to shoot each other and dial back our speed. We're tearing each other apart."
"What did you say your name was?" asked Evans.
"Anderson. Captain Daytona Anderson of the USS Leyte Gulf."
"And I'm supposed to believe that, am I? You must think I came down in that last shower, lady."
"Look, Commander. I don't expect you to believe anything I say. I don't know how much of what I've seen the last few minutes I can believe, but I'm playing the cards I've been dealt. You said your ship is the Astoria? Would you by any chance be sailing on Midway, to confront a Japanese invasion fleet?"
Evans almost laughed.
"You gotta be kidding me. Do you really think I'm going to tell you anything?"
"No," she sighed, "not if you're any good at your job. Okay. Let me try this. If you are heading for Midway, you're part of Task Group Seventeen-Two with the cruiser Portland, under the command of Rear Admiral William Smith, which in turn is part of Task Force Seventeen under Frank Fletcher on the Yorktown. Task Force Sixteen, built around the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, is steaming with you, and was supposed to be under Bull Halsey, but he's got a case of the hives and is stuck back in Pearl. So Ray Spruance, a cruiser driver like you, has taken over. You think the Japs would know that? The Japanese think Yorktown was sunk in the Coral Sea. They have no idea she was repaired in three days at Pearl. They wouldn't believe it possible.
"And do you think, even if they knew any of this, they'd be dumb enough to send me, a black woman, to claim to be a U.S. Navy captain, and to negotiate with you? You think they'd have the ability to screw around with your ship like this?"
Evans felt as though his stomach was going to do a full forward roll. He and Mohr stared at each other, exhausted, incredulous. His mind seemed to have locked up completely, refusing to process any more information.
"Commander Evans?" she prompted.
Moose Molloy interrupted before he could reply.
"Commander. This is pretty wacky, sir. I think you'd better see this."
At that a light, even stronger than the green rod in Anderson's hand, pushed back the gloom. Molloy was struggling around the door wedged into the desktop, and he was carrying another glowing object. It was the size of a small book, but it threw out a powerful light, reminding him of the moment in a movie theater when the dark screen suddenly lit up.
"What the hell is that?" asked Eddie Mohr.
"It's a flexipad," the Anderson woman answered from the far side of the gap.
A single shot rang out,
somewhere in the distance. Before Evans could shout Mohr had cut him off, yelling at a full roar, "Knock it off, you blockheads! Cease fire! I'll personally clobber the first man who does that again."
"Thank you, Chief," said Captain Anderson.
Mohr said nothing in return, just glared. Moose finally popped out of the constricted space and tumbled to the deck. He carried the "flexipad" over to Evans like it was a live shell. His CO took the object, smearing sticky half-dried blood over the screen.
The rubberized casing felt odd, like nothing he'd ever touched before. The thing seemed light, but solid and kind of dense, too. He and Mohr stared at the screen, which showed something that looked like a weather map. But it was in motion, like a short movie, repeating again and again. As strange as it was, Evans could tell that it covered a thousand square miles of the Wetar Strait off Timor.
It was every bit as baffling as anything else they'd seen so far.
He couldn't shake the idea that he was staring through a small window hundreds of miles high, directly down onto the earth's surface. Overlaying the picture was a mass of thin red lines. The image shifted rapidly, like a movie spooling too quickly through a projector, allowing Evans to watch clouds moving through the strait.
Anderson's voice broke the spell.
"You need medical attention, Commander Evans. I can see that from here. We have a sixteen-bed hospital on the Leyte Gulf. It hasn't been compromised. The sort of injuries some of your men are carrying, it'd go a hell of a lot better for them to get treatment from us."
"You inflicted those injuries, Captain."
It was the first time Evans had addressed her properly.
"Yes, we did, Commander Evans. We've probably killed more than thirty of your men by direct fire belowdecks. I don't know how many have died elsewhere. Our defensive systems went offline, but Nix tells me some of them functioned independently anyway. Your casualties will be heavy, I'm afraid."
"You killed everybody on the bridge," he said, unwilling to mask his bitterness. "Shot the hell out of them. They were friends of mine."
Anderson let it pass. She ripped open a flap holding her vest in place and lay down her shotgun before stepping right up to the thin sliver of clear space through which they were forced to communicate.
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