Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Danton snorted in amusement. “Good luck. He doesn’t like to be told he is wrong.”

  Kruger took in the scene of the Japanese commander and the French premier maître, arguing over by the weather station.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Kruger agreed. “You had best see to it, then.”

  “Yes, sir,” Danton replied, calling up a window he’d opened earlier, and immediately shuffled to the back of the desktop.

  He typed quickly now, trying to appear calm and relaxed, even though he felt like passing out from terror. He shot a quick glance in Le Roux’s direction. Hidaka had leaned in close and appeared to be threatening him.

  Please, let them keep fighting.

  He reprogrammed the weapons in the forward bays. Another window opened up. He reprogrammed the bays amidships.

  Hidaka and Le Roux became ominously silent. He tried to catch sight of them in the reflection on his monitor, but the CIC was too dark for that. He forced himself to look bored, like a process worker on the production line at the end of the day. He made a show of stretching his neck to work out a cramp.

  Hidaka was stalking away, and Le Roux was about to return.

  Damn.

  He was out of time. Two key clicks shut down the targeting windows. He’d reset half the missile bays, but the rest were still programmed as Le Roux had wanted them. Except for the last two bays. Those missiles had already been taken off the ship. That still left plenty of punch, though. Twelve subfusion plasma-yield Laval cruise missiles.

  He had failed.

  He took out the photograph of his sister that he kept in a breast pocket. “I’m sorry, Monique,” he whispered.

  Le Roux’s coarse bark sounded right behind him, making him jump. “Don’t cry for her now, boy. She’ll have her revenge soon enough, eh?”

  “I hope so,” said Philippe Danton. He wanted more than anything to kill Le Roux at that moment.

  A marine had not raped his sister. In fact, she had married a marine she met in Lebanon, when she had been working there for Médecins Sans Frontiéres. She had loved him, but she had lost him forever.

  His name was J. “Lonesome” Jones.

  It would be good to get home. They were running low on frozen brioche.

  Still, he wouldn’t want to miss this for the world. Le Roux wished they had satellite cover, or even a drone. The vision they took from the small cams in the nose of the Lavals was nowhere near adequate. Even with the CI cleaning up the image, it still shook so much that watching for too long was liable to make you feel ill.

  He occupied Capitaine Goscinny’s old chair, and from there he could survey the entire Combat Information Center. The trained apes Hidaka had brought along were proving themselves fast learners. They couldn’t match the original crew, of course, but they could be trusted to keep the ship running at a basic level. And the Germans were quite impressive. He couldn’t rely on them in combat, but the navigator was good, and the others had adapted to their various roles with great enthusiasm. Within a year, they might just make decent replacements for those idiots rotting in the cells back in Lyon.

  Melanie began the ten-second countdown. Even Hidaka, who spoke no French, could tell immediately what was going on. He stood as still as the pitch and yaw of the vessel allowed, and watched the main panel display, which carried vision of the silos on the forward decks.

  “Quatre, trois, deux, un . . .”

  Le Roux’s balls climbed up inside his body as the first salvos soared free. The whole vessel shuddered as the brand-new, French-designed multipurpose missiles scorched away, their scram jets engaging after a less than a minute. Sonic booms reached them through the hull as the atmosphere was ruptured by the passage of the Lavals.

  “Sacre merde.”

  It was done. There was no calling them back now. He wasn’t even sure Danton could destroy them in flight, if he had to. Suddenly a flash of blind panic seized him, before subsiding just as quickly. “These will destroy the American’s radar stations and, I think, Hickham air base,” he said loudly, for the benefit of the others. “Is that correct, Danton?”

  “Oui,” the surly young man replied.

  “Can we see the movies from the missiles themselves?” asked Hidaka.

  “Danton?” Le Roux called out.

  The sysop blushed and began to fiddle with his station settings. Le Roux rolled his eyes. Hidaka and the Germans waited impatiently. After a minute, the krauts began to mutter among themselves, when the boy was unable to bring up any vision.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said the chief petty officer. “Let me do it.”

  As he pushed himself up out of the commander’s chair, Danton blanched visibly. He was probably expecting another thrashing, but Le Roux merely pulled him out of his chair as the ship pitched down a large wave. Danton fell heavily into the met station.

  Le Roux chuckled at the sight of the young officer’s distress. “Fucking four years at the Sorbonne,” he said to Hidaka, “And he still can’t use a fucking mouse.”

  As Air Division maintenance chief, Le Roux was intimately familiar with the cam systems on the ship’s Eurotigers. The same software controlled the cams in the nose of the Laval missiles. A few clicks, a bit of typing, and the feed was live.

  Four windows displayed a blur of indigo as the weapons ripped across the ocean at Mach 5.

  “How long?” asked Hidaka.

  “Not long at all,” said Le Roux.

  He hadn’t counted on this. He’d hoped he could stall them on the cam feed, perhaps even fob them off altogether. But of course, Le Roux would be able to operate that subsystem. He worked with it all the time on the Tigers.

  Danton cursed himself as the ship quaked with the second launch. Le Roux was boasting that this salvo would destroy all the major army air bases on the island. But Danton wasn’t so sure of that. He’d got to at least half those missiles. He hadn’t had enough time to render them completely safe, though. They were going to land somewhere, and do a huge amount of damage. But at least it wouldn’t be where the fascists wanted them.

  Not all of them, anyway.

  As he struggled to his feet in the deepening swell, he found that he was no longer scared. He had made his decision, and knew he was going to die in the next couple of minutes. There was no changing that now. All that mattered was how he went out.

  He hadn’t been able to hide proof of his interference. When the Lavals began to drop into clear sea and empty fields, they would know what he had done. There was nothing for it. He would have to try destroying the missiles in flight.

  The third and final launch roared away as he calmly took in the scene. A couple of Indonesians were watching the cam footage rather than tending to the met station. Hidaka looked as if he might be about to levitate, he was so excited. The Germans were babbling. And Le Roux was bullshitting to anyone who would listen.

  It would be only a few minutes until he was discovered. So he made the sign of the cross and said one Hail Mary—apologizing to God for having to whisper—for the lives he could not save, for those he was about to take, and most of all for a steady hand and a good aim. If he wanted to destroy those missiles, he would have to kill everyone in this room first.

  “. . . Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death. Amen.”

  “What’s that boy? What the—”

  Danton smiled at Le Roux over the sight of a Metal Storm VLe 24 he’d smuggled in. Operating on exactly the same principle as the Close-In Weapons System that protected the Dessaix from missile swarms, the pistol had no moving parts. The ceramic rounds were stacked in-line in three barrels, hence the three muzzles into which Le Roux’s horrified eyes now stared. An electronically fired propellant separated each bullet. The gun could discharge the entire load in one simultaneous burst. Or it could be set to fire single shots. Or three round volleys, as it was now.

  “—hell?” said the chief petty officer, beginning to drop to his knees, to beg for his life.

 
; Danton squeezed the trigger.

  Le Roux’s descent meant that the burst took off the top half of his head, rather than all of it. But the end result was the same. The multiple shots sounded like a single discharge. The impact of three ceramic bullets on the traitor’s skull was dramatic. It popped open like a rotten piece fruit, the kinetic energy knocking the pig off his feet with enough power to spin the bloated body through the air. Blood, bone chips, and brain frappé splashed across the ceiling.

  He flicked the selector to single-shot and began to work the room. Kruger took a round just below the ear. The compressed nanoshards unfurled inside his brainpan and blew out the other side of his head. Danton hadn’t minded Kruger, and wanted to spare him any sense of violation and betrayal.

  The others were just Nazis, and he calmly put a round into each as they scrambled for their own weapons. The bullets were advertised as one-shot/one-kill, and they worked mostly as advertised. A German lieutenant lost an arm at the shoulder, but the shock wave traveled into his body and killed him a few seconds later. The flat, hollow, painfully loud report of the 24 boomed out again and again.

  Danton thought of nothing as he went about his killing. At night, in his cabin, he had always imagined that if it had come to this, he would think of himself as an avenging angel, meting out justice on behalf of his crewmates back in Lyon. Especially on behalf of his best friend, Dominic, who had been caught erasing files and was strangled to death in front of them all.

  But now that the moment had arrived, he felt nothing. The carnage around him slowed down, as though he had thumbed the half-speed function on a video stick. His head was light and strange. Everything appeared slightly flat to him.

  Someone was firing back at him. A monitor exploded by the side of this head, but it might just as well have been a mile away. A German rushed at him with a chair raised like an unwieldy shield, though he seemed less real than a character in a V3D game like Halo VII.

  He fired twice into the backrest, knocking the man to the floor, where the laser designator found him and marked a spot in the center of his body mass. But there was no need. The rounds had begun to unfurl as soon as they hit the chair, but they passed through with enough integrity and velocity to turn his chest into a sucking crater. He was already dead.

  As the odds improved, he began to wonder if he might somehow survive. Kill them all, destroy the missiles, and become a hero. He died with that happy thought on his mind.

  Hidaka emptied the entire clip of the Luger into the prostrate form of Sub-Lieutenant Danton. The body jumped with each impact, blood already leaking from the first shots he’d pumped into the treacherous dog.

  He was speechless with rage that the Germans could have let yet another conspirator slip past their guard. After all of the trouble they’d had with saboteurs and turncoats among the original crew. They should not have been blinded by the familiar extremism of Le Roux. These people weren’t to be trusted.

  He stumbled against the body of the corpulent chief petty officer. Everything above his nose was gone, as though a shark had clamped its jaws around the top of his head and ripped it away.

  Hidaka noticed that he was shaking. Shrugging it off, he kicked Danton’s body, but there was no life in there. Only two others had survived in the room, both of them Indonesians who had dived under their consoles. He felt like shooting them, as well, but controlled the urge.

  Sparks and flames crackled around him from damaged equipment. In just a few seconds the boy had—

  Hidaka cursed and spun around, almost slipping in the fluids that were pooling beneath his boots.

  He rushed back to the station where Danton had been working, but the dense mosaic of windows and boxes on the screen meant nothing to him. He yelled at the Indonesians, ordering them to help him, but they were both in shock, too terrified to be of any help.

  His heart pounding, he turned instead to the massive flat panel display. Sixteen windows displayed a feed from the nose-cams of the Laval cruise missiles as they screamed in toward Hawaii. The cobalt blur of open sea was the only image in twelve of the windows. But four showed land, buildings, aircraft, and vehicles all rushing to fill the screen.

  Hidaka wanted to beat the display with his fists.

  He couldn’t tell what was happening. It was all too quick.

  24

  OAHU, HAWAII

  Rosanna Natoli had decided that it just wasn’t going to work out with Lieutenant Wally Curtis.

  He was sweet and all. Just about the sweetest boy she’d ever met, in fact. But that’s exactly what he was—a boy, not a man. He didn’t excite, or intrigue, or even annoy her. He didn’t even try to seduce her. He’d moved firmly into the friend zone.

  But he wasn’t very likely to understand that. They didn’t seem to have much of a friend zone here in 1942. Meeting somebody for a drink or a bite to eat seemed to imply you were going steady, or keeping company, or something. Her mother would have approved. She, however, wasn’t so sure.

  She swirled the dregs of her beer and let the pang of homesickness slide on past. She desperately missed her mom, but she was never going to see her again, and unlike so many of the uptimers, she had a large established family she could run to, even if her great-aunts and -uncles and great-grandparents were younger than her now. And of course, there were her earlier forebears, most of whom she had known only through family legend. Here they were in their prime.

  Her eyes began to well up as she thought of them. When she’d gone to New York to visit, they’d practically smothered her with their crazy love. She’d always thought of her mom and dad as freakazoid ethnic wannabes, what with all of the public hugging and kissing and haranguing. Turns out, she hadn’t known the half of it.

  At the moment, she and Curtis were perched at a quiet bar on Diamond Head Road, overlooking the beach, a few miles from Pearl. It wasn’t a twenty-first joint, so it remained segregated. But the management had made a few half-assed attempts at drawing some customers from the Clinton’s battle group. The jukebox had been restocked with an MOR selection of “golden newbies,” as the hits of the future were known. Buffalo wings, satay sticks, and curly fries had crept onto the menu, but Rosanna didn’t recognize them when they appeared with her beer.

  The beer was a giveaway, too. She didn’t drink it much, preferring a dry Californian white if she could get one, but that wasn’t the sort of thing they stocked in a joint like this.

  The bar was about half-full, mostly with off-duty military types. She was one of the few women, and certainly the only civilian woman in the place. Her white cotton pants, linen shirt, and fuck-me boots weren’t endearing her to her fellow femmes, either. She could sympathize with them, having to wear those dowdy ’temp uniforms, but it was hardly her fault.

  She wouldn’t normally stray into a place like this, but Curtis was on a short leash, and had to get back to his office. He had a new job writing training manuals for ’temps who were posted to twenty-first units. It bored him witless, and he was just marking time until his request for a transfer to the Zone came through. He’d passed the prelims for flight training and was hell-bent to fly jets when they came online. In fact, it was all he could talk about. Rosanna’s eyes glazed over as he squirreled on about the new F-86.

  “. . . . and they’re building them with ejector seats and drop tanks. They even reckon they’ll have heat seekers ready by the time the first squadrons are . . .”

  Rosanna just said, “Uh-hm,” and gazed out over the sea. The best thing about this skanky bar was the view. It went on for about a thousand miles, and on a clear day you’d think you could see China if you stood on your chair and squinted. Nodding and smiling and throwing in the occasional comment—Oh wow, really? That’s amazing!—just to show that she was still actively listening. Really, though, she was just breathing in the fresh air and trying not to let the sun make her too drowsy.

  She had a couple of hours of video from Julia to edit that afternoon, for telerecording onto film. They’d cut
a deal with Movietone for a one-hour newsreel on MacArthur’s Brisbane Line. Rosanna had been worried that they’d end up having to make some tragic fucking forties period piece, complete with a patronizing voice-over and racist stereotyping. But the Movietone guys had been surprisingly cool.

  They’d—

  She was probably the first one in the bar to see it coming. Her Mambo sunblades completely nixed the glare of the day. A micron-thin layer of polychromatic film in the lens gave her sharper vision than a healthy eagle. First she saw the shock wave blasting across the calm bowl of the ocean, out near the horizon.

  “Shit!” she cried out, jumping off her stool and knocking it to the floor. “Get down! Everyone get the fuck down now! Incoming!”

  She dropped to the floor, pulling Curtis down with her, yelling at him to breathe out, close his eyes, and plug his ears.

  “But why—”

  “Just do it!”

  At Mach 5, the pressure wave generated by the Laval swarm could have demolished the palm-frond-and-bamboo-trunk structure, and killed everyone inside. But the missiles flashed on past, crossing the coast a few miles away as they headed inland. The sonic boom was still severe enough to shred the eardrums of everyone who hadn’t taken her advice, and even she could hardly hear the screams of the other patrons thanks to the ringing in her ears.

  Once she was sure the missiles were gone, she grabbed Curtis by the collar of his shirt and dragged him to his feet. “Come on!” she shouted. “We’ve got to get going.”

  Curtis was moving his jaw and slowly squeezing his eyes open and shut. He had no idea what had just happened. “Did we get bombed again? Did they come back?”

  “Not exactly, Curtis. But you’re a lucky guy. I’ll bet those missiles are heading for Pearl.”

  Then the ground shook with the force of a volcanic event. The sound rolled over them, like that of a planet cracking open.