Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  A single massive explosion shook the entire ship, cutting off the transmission. A recorded voice boomed out of nearby PA speakers.

  “Intruder alert. Intruder alert. Intruder alert.”

  Anderson already regretted her decision to direct the fight from the CIC. Ninety-five percent of her systems were down. Alarms screamed, beeped, and pinged all around her. Warning lights flashed, and the few screens with any lighted display at all were showing nonsensical data. Examining them closely was like looking into an Escher print. The Leyte Gulf appeared to have been rammed.

  But it hadn’t. The reality was more incomprehensible.

  When the 250 men and women aboard the thirty-five-tonne Nemesis stealth cruiser had awakened from, well, whatever it was that had hit them, they found themselves occupying the same space as a New Orleans–class heavy cruiser, the USS Astoria. Luckily for the thousand or more men of the Astoria and the crew of the Leyte Gulf, they hadn’t merged hand-in-glove, which would have killed most of the complements of both vessels immediately as their molecular structure was instantly compromised by having to share space with metal, wood, plastic, and the bodies of other human beings. Instead, the two ships had transected each other, appearing from above like an open pair of scissors.

  Even so, many sailors from both ships had perished in such a fashion; some instantaneously, unknowingly, as they materialized squarely inside structures such as a bulkhead or six-inch gun mount. Others hadn’t been so lucky. They had only partially merged with various objects or, in the worst cases, people. Their deaths had been slower, more agonizing, and, for them, totally inexplicable. A pharmacist’s mate from the Astoria who gasped out his last breaths clawing at a PlayStation console half buried in his chest was typical of their number.

  Some even died at each other’s hands. Ensign Tommy Hideo from the Leyte Gulf and Leading Seaman Milton Coburn of the Astoria beat each other to death in a dark, constricted space where the control room for the Leyte Gulf’s eight-inch autocannon intersected the three-tiered bunk upon which Seaman Coburn had been sleeping. The men themselves had been fused at the thigh. The blinding pain and shock of that violation was enough to send them instantly over the edge, past any hope for rational behavior. Even if they had cooperated and sought out medical attention, the surgery would have needed to be swift and radical. Their blood types did not match, and they were quickly poisoning each other.

  For the moment, though, Captain Anderson was unaware of these horrors. The Combat Information Center was still relatively calm, despite the shrill symphony of the alarms. The sailors there looked to her for guidance now. Most of them had nothing to do, since their battle stations had gone offline when the merging of the two ships had severed the kilometers of fiber-optic cables and wiring that formed the Gulf’s nervous system.

  The CIC was always a dark blue cave, but it seemed more so now, with the dozens of screens blacked out. It was warm, too, which was wrong. The center was supposed to be uncomfortably chilly, allowing the quantum systems to run at white heat.

  At least Anderson was in better shape than her ailing vessel; she’d recovered quickly from the transition through the wormhole thanks to a subcutaneous antinausea insert she received every six months during routine checkups.

  She had been quick to note that her crewmembers with Promatil inserts or dermal patches were less drastically affected by whatever had happened. When it became obvious that the shipnet was in disarray, she immediately dispatched runners to the nearest casualty stations with instructions to gather supplies of the drug and distribute them as widely and as swiftly as possible. That was how she’d learned about the violation of the forward decks. But she didn’t have to look at the expanse of dead electronics all around them to know her ship was gravely hurt. She could feel it down in her meat.

  The Gulf was dying.

  Anderson straightened herself at the console, squared her shoulders, and traversed her gaze over every man and woman in the room. She was twenty-two years in the United States Navy and wore a uniform heavily burdened with decorations won the hard way. In her two decades at sea she had exercised for, and performed, almost every kind of operation it was possible to conceive of in modern naval combat. It had never occurred to her that she would have to issue the orders she now spoke. Keying a button to power up the ship’s PA, without really knowing how far the broadcast would carry, she drove any trace of fear or doubt from her voice.

  “Attention all hands. Attention all hands. This is the captain. Arm yourselves, and prepare to repel boarders.”

  If her crew within the cocoon of the CIC were surprised, none dared show it. A few obviously braced themselves for what was coming but only one, Chief Conroy, said anything.

  “Captain, if I may? We should get to the gun lockers, gather crew as we go. They may not have heard the announcement. We’ll need to establish a perimeter on all decks and push forward from there.”

  Conroy checked the flexipad that was Velcroed to his sleeve. “Short-range point-to-point links seem workable, at least here, ma’am. We might be able to coordinate through that.”

  Anderson agreed but she was haunted, wondering whether she was about to set some calamity in motion. Still, the near-total failure of the ship’s quantum systems left her no choice. She couldn’t use the weapons systems aboard the Gulf, couldn’t even scuttle her at the moment. She had crew engaging in close-quarter combat on the forward decks, there were no communications with task force command, and they had absolutely no idea how this mess had come to be. For the moment, then, her choice seemed clear. If the Leyte Gulf had been boarded by pirates or commandos or some kind of jihadi suicide squad, she would find the enemy, and destroy them.

  Anderson chose a group to accompany her, then ordered six crewmembers to stay and seal the CIC behind her.

  Hurrying down the starboard corridor to the armory, she was immediately struck by how wrong it all felt. Even in the restricted spaces belowdecks, the geometry of the vessel seemed to have been wrenched or twisted out of shape. And it was obvious that they were no longer making any headway. If anything, the ship was being pushed sideways. They began to hear blasts of gunfire and the frequent explosions of handheld artillery. But beneath that, her trained and sensitive ear could detect the awful screams of metal plate and bulkheads straining against enormous destructive forces, as the structural integrity of the Nemesis cruiser was tested.

  Emergency lighting had come on, leaving the corridors dim but navigable. Glowing flexipad screens, activated and secured on each man’s or woman’s preferred arm, bobbed up and down through the gloom, adding their own soft luminescence and throwing off a menagerie of tortured, writhing shadows. As they passed ladders and hatchways between decks, Chief Conroy detailed small groups to split off and make their way to A, C, and D decks, with instructions to gather other crew and await orders from the captain when she made the B deck armory.

  The Leyte Gulf had sailed with a full complement, eighteen officers and 235 enlisted personnel. The ship’s biosensors were offline, so Anderson had no idea of casualties, or of how many were actively engaged with the boarders, or trapped forward of the impact point with the hostile vessel, or simply missing, or dead. Conservatively, she figured on rounding up seventy or eighty warm bodies for her counterattack. As she and Conroy hurried along B, past the berthing spaces, they swelled their numbers with another two dozen sailors, including three specialists trained in hostile boarding ops.

  Anderson heard one of her junior officers, Ensign Rebecca Sparrow, mutter that some Navy SEALs would have been nice. The captain dropped her pace marginally to fall in beside Sparrow, delivering a hearty slap on the shoulder. “Damn right, Ensign. A SEAL team would have been a thing of beauty! But this morning we’re going to work with what the good Lord provided. And I have faith in Specialists Clancy, Cobb, and Brown here. Don’t you?”

  Sparrow seemed more unsettled by her commanding officer’s unexpected appearance and exuberance than by the King Hell madness of the day.
Her eyes widened in surprise as they thundered down the passageway, but she recovered her composure quickly. “Hell yes, ma’am.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Anderson smiled, her gleaming white teeth shining out of her coal-black face. “Specialist Clancy!” she called over her shoulder. “You think you can justify Ensign Sparrow’s confidence in you?”

  Clancy, nine years in service and a veteran of more than seventy forced vessel entries, smiled at his commanding officer and called back, “Anything for a lady, Captain.”

  They trotted past the brig and came to a halt in front of the armory. Chief Conroy yelled over the buzz of voices and the harsh, industrial sounds of battle, ordering them to form up in two lines and stand at ease. The boarding specialists hurried forward into the armory to suit up and arm themselves, along with two seamen ordered to grab weapons and stand guard back down the passage through which they had just run. The two men took body armor and helmets, a couple of pump-action shotguns, and hustled back past the lines of their shipmates to establish a hasty defense.

  While Conroy saw to the arming of the specialists, Anderson tried to raise the other decks on shipnet via her flexipad. Two windows on screen responded to her page. Lieutenant Matt Reilly on A deck had gathered twenty-three personnel in the chopper bay. They had already armed themselves from the air division’s own arsenal and were awaiting orders.

  “Good work, Lieutenant. Stand by,” said Anderson. She shifted her eyes to the other functioning pull-down window, where she found CPO Borghino’s phlegmatic features. A thin film of static obscured his face, but otherwise the connection seemed fine. The third window, the link to D deck, was a small square of white noise.

  “Chief, I can’t raise D deck on shipnet or P-to-P,” said Anderson. “How about you?”

  Anderson watched as Borghino’s eye line shifted within the window. He was obviously manipulating his pad, trying for some sort of alternate link to D. After a few long seconds, he turned his eyes back to the microlens mounted in his pad’s shockproof rubber casing, rather than looking at Anderson’s own image on screen. This created the impression that he was staring directly at her.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I’ll have to send a runner down. They’ll have formed up in engineering. We can get access from here.”

  “Fine, Chief. I’ll send down a security team. Lieutenant Carey was in charge on D. Have him secure engineering. He’ll be staying put. I don’t want anyone fooling around near those fusion stacks.”

  Borghino nodded brusquely. “Eminently sensible, ma’am. With your permission, we’ll seal the section as soon as the security team gets down there.”

  “Make it happen, Chief.”

  Anderson looked up from her pad. The illuminated screen had cast a soft, lambent glow over her features, smoothing out deep-worn stress lines and giving her, just briefly, the appearance of a mother fretting over a sick child. As she turned her gaze onto Chief Conroy, the illusion vanished.

  “Status, Chief?”

  “Clancy’s team is nearly geared up, Captain. We got eight suits of full body armor, reactive matrix and tac sets, and twelve sets of standard-issue Kevlar and ballistic plate . . . correction, ten. We just sent two sets forward with Ntini and McAllister. Eight G-fours to go with the suits and ten compact shotguns for the rest of the flak jackets. Ten sidearms, standard-issue Glocks. We have a dozen stun rods, too, for what that’s worth. And a couple of guys with meat cleavers and boning knives from the officers’ mess.”

  He smiled grimly.

  The ship gave a great lurch to port, a dire screeching protest arising deep within her metal innards. Both the captain and her senior NCO, long accustomed to the sea’s arbitrary moods, reacted without conscious thought, adjusting their balance. A few younger sailors were caught off-guard and thrown into the men and women standing around them. The emergency lighting flickered for a few seconds, and the sounds of battle hung suspended before ramping up again with seemingly increased ferocity. Anderson glanced at the group in the armory. “Recommendations?” she asked.

  Conroy pursed his lips for the shortest moment before speaking. “We’re fighting blind. We have no idea where these guys came from, what they’re bringing to the game, what sort of reserve they have. Be good to get someone topside to take a look, since the sensors are kaput. Got to figure it’s going to be pretty fucking nasty up there, though, probably nonviable without a suit. Even then, I’d send two.

  “We got five sets of reactive left. I’d put them on Snellgrove, Palfreyman, Paterson, Sessions, and Nix. The first three have completed the basic boarding course, so they’ve been trained. Nix ran with a pretty rough crew in LA, before the judge made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. And Sessions did three years with the Wyoming National Guard, tour of Malaysia, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts.”

  Anderson smiled wearily. “I remember. I spoke to him when he first came on board. Said he’d had his fill of crazy ragheads getting in his face. Okay. We’ll take Clancy’s team. Get Sessions and Nix topside for a quick look, then straight back to me with a report. They can link up with Reilly in the chopper bay and take point for them on A deck. Send the other suits down to C with half a dozen standard kits, flaks, shotguns, helmets. Chief Borghino will decide on distribution from his available personnel.

  “Send two shotguns down to engineering, but load them with jelly bags and pull everyone else out. Seal that section. Everybody outside of engineering packs ceramic rounds, powder puffs. We’ve got real problems in the missile bays. I don’t know why we’re not all pleading our case with Saint Peter right now. So let’s not push our luck.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Conroy said before turning his head slightly to shout into the armory. “You heard the woman. Ammo check now. Ceramics only. No penetrator or flechette rounds. We’ve got sick missiles on the forward decks.”

  “One step ahead of you, Chief,” Clancy called in reply. The three specialists made the last adjustments to their body armor, each turning slowly as his buddies tightened a Velcro strap here or snugged down a ballistic pad there. The suits, which looked like padded SWAT coveralls, came out of their lockers a dark charcoal color, but after a few minutes they began to change, taking on a slightly reddish hue, as they reacted to the ship’s emergency lighting. While the three men worked quickly to prepare themselves, the suits drank up the kinetic energy of their sharp body movements, and the adaptive camouflage reaction accelerated.

  Within two minutes the superdense intelligent matrix of monobonded carbon nanotubes that gave the coveralls their padded look was fully powered up. The team’s Remington G4s were each loaded with sixty rounds of 33mm caseless ceramic, and each man was carrying another three hundred rounds in strip form. Being specialist boarders, they were all neck-chipped, and as they strapped into their powered combat goggles and helmet, a micronet was activated, biolinking Clancy, Cobb, and Brown to their suit systems, and to each other.

  They then supervised the “B team” gear-up, hurrying Sessions, Nix, and the others through their preparations.

  Captain Anderson, tightening an old Kevlar vest and checking the load on a Glock, struggled against a small spasm of rodentlike panic that had begun twisting inside her chest. Too long. They were taking way too long, and her people were dying because of it. The terrible sound of human combat was drawing closer.

  “Okay,” she said, forcefully but not too loudly, when the last of the weapons had been handed out and all the armed sailors had their instructions. On the other decks, in the chopper bay, and down below in the main mess on C deck, men and women peered into flexipads, their own or a shipmate’s. Anderson spoke mostly to the crew around her, but occasionally she also looked directly into the minicam on her own flexipad.

  “I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on,” she said, “because I have no goddamn idea. But we’re going to find out who’s been messing with us, and then there’ll be a reckoning. I can promise you that.”

  “Damn right,” growled Chief Conroy.

  “Some
thing hit us a short time ago. We’ve lost power to the CIC and most of the sensors and combat systems. We’ve had no communication with the rest of the task force, but we have to assume they’re fighting their own battles. We’re calling for assistance. Maybe it gets here, maybe not. The best we can do to help is to regain control of this ship. We have hostile forces on board. I don’t know how they got here or what they have planned, but our plans are simple. We’re gonna kill them before they kill us.”

  USS ASTORIA, 2301 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  You go down to the sea for your living and you’ll see some god-awful strange things.

  It seemed only weeks ago that Evans had watched the Rising Sun snapping from the staff at the fore of the USS Astoria as she steamed into Yokohama Harbor, escorted by the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyers Sagiri, Hibiki, and Akatsuki. Those very same ships were now committed to sinking her.

  The mission to Japan had been a diplomatic one, the Astoria serving as a seaborne hearse, ferrying home the ashes of Japan’s former ambassador to the United States, the late Hirosi Saito. She had even exchanged a twenty-one-gun salute with the Japanese light cruiser Kiso, the opening movement of an interminable train of ceremony and extravagant hospitality. None of that had had the slightest effect, though, on their hosts’ intense preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Still, he thought, you don’t often see something as fantastic as that. The senior officer on the USS Astoria—the surviving senior officer, he corrected himself—stared through the shattered glass of the bridge and tried to force himself to accept what he found there. His mind, however, was as numb as his left arm, which hung limp and useless, dripping blood, contributing marginally to the killing-floor ambience of the ruined bridge.

  Lieutenant Commander Peter Evans, using his good hand to brace himself, stared fixedly forward, to where the sinister-looking bow of the enemy ship neatly sliced through his own vessel. Perhaps if he focused more intently, really, really bored in, the mirage would vanish and the Astoria’s two forward gun mounts would reappear. And the slurry of warm human gore lapping at his ankles would . . .