Weapons of choice aot-1
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"I'm sorry Commander. But you've killed an unknown number of my people, as well."
"Just fucking niggers and…," Seaman Molloy muttered, before a backhanded slap from Chief Mohr silenced him. Captain Anderson let that one slide, too.
"Who are you people?" Evans asked, his voice nearly cracking.
"I told you. We're Americans," Anderson replied. "Just like you."
8
USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2312 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942
"This is Spruance! Who the hell are you? What's the idea of breaking in on my transmission. By God, you'd better have a good explanation, or you'll hang for this."
The voice filled the flag bridge of the USS Hillary Clinton, of a man long dead when Phillip Kolhammer had finished the last brush stroke on his model dive-bomber. Kolhammer listened in dread and wonder. In a way, that voice was more awful than the firestorm raging down on the flight deck.
He took a long breath before speaking.
"This is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer, United States Navy. Acting commander of the USS Hillary Clinton and task force commander of UNPROFLEET, operating under the mandate of United Nations Security Council Resolution Three Three One Two. I request that you cease fire, Admiral Spruance. There's been a terrible mistake. You are engaged with friendly forces. I say again, cease fire. We are American and Allied ships."
A stream of invective poured out of the bridge speakers. Kolhammer waited until it abated and repeated himself as calmly as he could. The forward laser pods destroyed another five-inch shell as he spoke, emphasizing his lack of success in getting through to Spruance. He watched a medic pull someone from the sea of flames that covered almost a third of the flight deck behind the ops tower. A dark, oily smear marked the passage of the body.
"Admiral Spruance," he repeated, "you are firing on an American-led force. We have ceased offensive fire. I request you do the same."
USS ENTERPRISE, 2314 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942
In the cramped, fetid flag radio room of the Enterprise, Ray Spruance clamped his hand over the mike and spoke to the operator.
"Have you had any luck raising Pearl yet, sailor?"
"Sorry, sir. This Kolhammer guy is all over us. He's blocked out every frequency. We can't even talk ship-to-ship. All anyone is getting is this transmission."
"How is that possible?" Spruance asked angrily. "No, forget it. That's not important. The fact is, he's doing it.
"Who is he?" he continued, scanning the room. "Does anyone here know of an Admiral Kolhammer? And that ship, what the hell is he talking about? Hillary Clinton my ass!"
The four staff officers who had crammed into the shack with Spruance exchanged blank looks and shook their heads.
"Admiral," said Lieutenant Commander Black. "These sons-a-bitches have destroyed the Yorktown and the Hornet. They've sunk our cruisers and most of the destroyer screen. Even making the worst kind of mistake, no American force would do that. It's gotta be a load of horseshit."
Spruance went quiet for a few seconds, a pause that seemed interminable. Finally, he brought the mike back to his lips.
"This is Spruance. There is no ship or admiral by the names you have given us, anywhere in the U.S. Navy. Identify yourself truthfully and cease firing on us. I've only got to walk a few paces and stick my head out a hatch to know you're lying about that. I can see your goddamn fire all over the sky."
Kolhammer's voice crackled out of the speakers. "That fire is not directed at you. I know it sounds ludicrous… but it's directed at the shells you've been firing on us."
Curtis allowed himself a satisfied, if fleeting glance at Beanland, whose furious glare wiped any trace of satisfaction from the ensign's face. Spruance and Black exchanged a look that revealed their doubts about this Kolhammer's sanity, but before either could speak, he continued. As the words spilled out, Spruance's expression turned from shock to dark, impacted rage.
"Admiral," said Kolhammer, "we know you're heading for Midway to intercept a Japanese fleet under the control of Admiral Yamamoto. We also know that you are ignoring as a diversion a Japanese thrust toward the Aleutians by the Second Carrier Striking Force under Rear Admiral Kakuta. We know that your Pacific Fleet Combat Intelligence Unit, under Commanders Rochefort and Safford, have broken the Japanese naval code JN-two-five, and so you have advance warning of the plan to seize Midway, including the entire Japanese order of battle. I know you won't be happy that I'm announcing all of this over the air, but I can assure you it is irrelevant now.
"I am instructing all the ships under my command to switch on their running lights, and any abovedeck illumination, in thirty seconds."
Kolhammer signaled to Judge, who set the order in motion throughout the Multinational Force.
"I know you'll have trouble trusting me," he continued, "but I can only ask for that trust. We will not fire on you again. We will reveal our positions. I would request permission to come aboard the Enterprise to explain what has happened. I can guarantee both your safety and that of Midway."
As Kolhammer spoke, trying for the sort of reassuring tone he recalled from interminable post-trauma briefings he'd been forced to undergo as an active fighter pilot, Mike Judge passed him a handwritten note. The exec had taken the initiative and asked the acting commander of the Siranui to lower his ensign and park himself behind the Kandahar, out of the line of sight for the Enterprise. Kolhammer gave him a silent thumbs-up as he continued.
"I understand you've taken heavy casualties, but so have we. It was a terrible mistake. We will do everything we can to make good your losses, and we will stand down any threat to American or Allied interests in this theater, but I implore you to cease fire immediately, so we can sort out this mess."
Lights came on all across Kolhammer's fleet. Blazing like carnival rides, their sleek, radical lines occasioned almost as much surprise among the men of Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen as had their initial arrival. A sailor thrust his head into the radio shack.
"Admiral Spruance, sir? I think you'd better come and see this."
Spruance handed the heavy microphone back to the radio operator without bothering to sign off. He and his staff threaded through to flag plot and out onto a walkway. The sea around them was alight with dying ships, their own, but also with visions of craft from another world. Somebody handed Spruance a large pair of binoculars, which he raised to his eyes with a slight tremor of the hands. The carrier's plunging progress made it difficult to get a steady look, but the first ship that came into view stole his breath. The triple-hulled warship was flying her largest ensign from a telescoping staff atop the bridge. The flag was British. No other structure ruined the smooth surface of her deck.
Spruance dropped the glasses, fixed another alien vessel in his sight, and raised the binoculars again. It boasted an equally exotic appearance, but this was a monohulled ship. The Stars and Stripes fluttered from a telescopic mast at the top of the raked-back fin that spoiled her otherwise empty decks.
The admiral shifted his focus again and again, taking in a slab-sided carrier that at least resembled the Enterprise in form and size, and then Kolhammer's own ship, the Clinton, still burning from the bomb strike. Even at a distance Spruance could tell she was a monster, certainly dwarfing the Lexington. The ships were all heading away from him, seemingly toward the burning giant on the horizon. The volume of fire had dropped away, and no more of those garish rocket flares were rising from the decks of any foreign vessel.
It was almost peaceful.
Spruance sighed and turned to Dan Black. He was calmer, but his hands still trembled.
"I think we'd better talk to this Kolhammer again."
PART TWO
DETENTE
9
USS ENTERPRISE, 2322 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942
"What the hell is that?" muttered Lieutenant Commander Black.
"Search me," someone replied from behind him.
"You know," said the chaplain, "it reminds me of something I saw in Rome, before the war. I was on sabbatical
and was lucky enough to be given a tour of the da Vinci archives. I believe he once drew a machine a bit like that, with a propeller on top. He invented the parachute, too, you know."
"It's a Hiller-Copter," said Ensign Curtis. Curtis was known as a bit of an aircraft nut. Less-than-perfect eyesight had barred him from flight school, crimping off a lifelong dream and shunting him into the entirely unglamorous position of assistant bookkeeper in the ship's pay office. His enormous, black-rimmed glasses might have been standard issue, so well did they suit him in his job. Most often, however, he had them buried in a copy of Janes Fighting Aircraft, or Aviator Monthly.
As Curtis spoke, the strange craft drew closer, riding atop radiant shafts of light.
"A what?" shouted Black, over the growing roar.
The ferocious downblast of the rotors forced the spectators to turn away, toward Curtis, who had screwed up his eyes, determined not to miss a moment.
"It's a Hiller-Copter, or something like it," he shouted, his normally anxious nature gone for now. He sounded completely sure of himself, an unheard-of phenomenon. They were all clustered outside the pilothouse for a view of the approaching aircraft. Rumors were already flying around the big ship: that these were experimental planes, or maybe motorized blimps, pulled out of the lab and rushed forward to Midway for the showdown with the Japs. Some said it was Yamamoto himself, come to negotiate a surrender. There was even wild talk, coming from the Astoria's radio operators, of space coons and women from Mars.
Ensign Wally Curtis wasn't having any of it. That was a Hiller-Copter, or maybe even a Higgins. As it loomed out of the night and flared for setdown, he decided it looked more like the painting he'd seen of a Higgins, in Aviator Monthly. The painting was a mock-up, of course, an artist's semi-informed hunch of what the finished aircraft might look like.
But they weren't far off the mark, were they? He marveled at the contraption.
It looked to have a single rotor, instead of the Hiller's two counter-rotating blades. And there at the rear was a vertical torque rotor, which the Hx-44 didn't have.
Gritting his teeth, and squinting against the stinging lash of the rotor wash, he was uncertain whether the pounding in his chest was a response to the controlled violence of the aircraft's descent or simple excitement at its appearance. He decided it was the latter when his heart skipped even faster at the sight of the second whirlybird. Where the first one had looked sort of fat and heavy, the machine behind it was rapierlike. Unlike its mate, it seemed to have less storage area in the fuselage-for carrying men or cargo, he supposed. Its brutish, hunched, insectile form reminded him of a giant wasp or a hornet.
Wally knew without being told that the stubby little wings weren't designed to provide lift. No, they were made to carry weapons. He could only shake his head in wonder at thought of what sort of havoc a thing like that could unleash. The long protruding barrel at its nose was obviously some sort of advanced cannon. Perhaps even a machine-gun cannon.
He reeled off all these thoughts as they occurred to him, not really caring whether or not anybody was paying attention. But they were. The hard-bitten copper miner, the well-traveled padre, the professional warriors and draftee sailors who had gathered on the walkway turned to his boyish certainty as a salve for their own fears and doubts. Where they suffered future shock, Ensign Curtis experienced only rapture.
"Where'd they come from, Wally?" shouted Lieutenant Commander Black.
"Well, Higgins is based in New Orleans, sir," he cried back. "And Hiller Industries work out of Berkeley in California. But I don't know, looking at those aircraft, they're just way too advanced. I can't really tell you where they came from, Commander. Maybe off a Hughes program out in the desert. Maybe a Landgraf or a Piasecki PV plant. I couldn't say, sir."
The choppers doused their spotlights and set down just aft of the island, atop the main elevator. No landing officer waved them in because nobody knew how. Hundreds of men had crammed onto different vantage points to watch the arrival, either high up along Vulture's Row or scattered throughout the small superstructure, crowding around the AA mounts, crouched down low on the flight deck itself, despite being warned to keep that area clear. Some noted the USN markings and Royal Navy roundel on the strange machines. Others just gaped at their sheer freakishness.
A murmur went up when a woman emerged from the smaller aircraft. No one missed the Negro who hopped down from the other one. Dressed in some sort of camouflage battle dress, he dropped to the wet wooden flight deck with the grace of a panther. The smaller man who alighted behind him wasn't nearly so lithe, but he carried about him the same sense of self-assurance.
It was all an act.
Both Kolhammer and Jones were reeling inside. They had briefly discussed the Transition, as it had come to be called, on the flight over. Kolhammer had filled his colleague in on what he remembered of the briefing by DARPA. Neither man had any expertise in quantum foam physics but they had agreed that, given their total inability to access any satellite links or detect any kind of digital or quantum signals whatsoever, the odds favored the theory that they were the strangers here, rather than Spruance's task force.
Still, it was a hell of a thing to ask a man to accept, that he'd been ripped right out of time itself.
As hard as they found it to come to such a preposterous conclusion, however, they at least lived in a world where such things were theoretically possible. Kolhammer clutched a document case containing about two hundred pages of printed material on Multiverse Theory, culled from Scientific American, Popular Quantum Mechanics, Esquire, GQ, and the broadsheet press. If the locals didn't want to believe him, perhaps the New York Times might convince them. He had been surprised to discover that one of the half a dozen Times features had been written by Julia Duffy. But it had taken Kolhammer less than half a second to dismiss any thought of bringing her across to do some of the explaining-even if her article had been one of the better ones.
After reading it twice, he now guessed that until an hour ago he'd been riding shotgun over a research team that was developing a military application for Multiverse Theory. But the angry, horror-struck men on whom they were calling knew no such thing. Indeed, there was nothing in their world that might prepare them for such a fantastic concept. For them, the most primitive form of radar was still a marvel. Television was an obscure and probably useless invention; jet engines and helicopters were only found in the pages of adventure magazines. And high-steppin' niggers with uppity dames in tow did not waltz aboard the USS Enterprise like they owned the joint. Not after admitting they were responsible for the deaths of so many good men in the hour just gone.
Suddenly a squad of armed marines double-timed toward the Seahawk, nearly bringing the truce to a premature end. Jones was forced to scramble forward, waving them down so that they wouldn't be decapitated by an unfortunate dip of the still-turning rotors. Seeing him charge, three men shouldered their arms and drew a bead.
"Crazy black bastard," spat the sergeant in charge of the detail as he continued forward.
Jones sank to one knee and motioned for them to drop, too, gesturing frantically at the rotors.
"Get down! Get down, you assholes!" he yelled over the diminishing whine.
Finally the sergeant got the message, and they halted their advance. Kolhammer emerged and joined Halabi. Both bent nearly double to emphasize Jones's warnings. They joined him, and together they hastened out of the danger zone. The helos powered down and their crews exited. Kolhammer had thought it might reduce some of the tension if they were to move away from the controls.
High above them, the group of men clustered outside the pilothouse watched the performance.
"Check out the tail on that chicken," urged a navigator from the torpedo squadron.
"Yeah, but get an eyeful of the jigaboo she's travelin' with, Mack. That guy's gotta be eight foot tall."
"Hell, I could beat him fair and square…"
"You couldn't beat an egg, you palooza…"
"What's your feeling about this, Wally?" he asked as they made their way down to the flight deck.
Curtis was so worked up by the rush and excitement that he forgot to be intimidated by the older, more senior man.
"It's something big, sir. Why, I'll bet you it's something we can't even imagine yet, like something out of Amazing Stories."
"You a betting man, Ensign?" teased Black.
"Uh, no, sir. Gambling is a sin, and against regulations, Lieutenant, I just meant…"
"It's all right, son, I wouldn't take your bet anyway. I have a feeling I'd do my dough cold."
Down on the flight deck, surrounded by the hard, unfriendly faces and cocked Springfield '03s of the security detail, Jones wondered how Kolhammer's gamble would play out. They had assumed Spruance would meet them as they disembarked, but only the buzzing ranks of spectators and the anonymous belligerence of their guards awaited them. As they confronted the marine squad, the sergeant in command barked out, "Identify yourselves."
All three had grown up in the military and were unfazed by the aggressive command. People had been barking at them professionally all of their adult lives. They replied in kind.
"Admiral Phillip Kolhammer, United States Navy."
"Colonel J. L. Jones, United States Marine Corps."
"Captain Karen Halabi, Royal Navy."
"We were expected, Sergeant," Jones added, with a tightly coiled menace in the delivery that the marine couldn't help but recognize. A twenty-year man, he had been bruted by professionals, too.