Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  Evans listened to the Negro woman’s speech with mounting distress. He couldn’t believe she was just writing off the Astoria like that. After all, there were some decent holes punched in her own ship, courtesy of the old girl’s eight-inch batteries. He could feel his anger building, but it never came to a head. He suspected the drugs they’d given him for his injuries might have been damping down his temper, as well. He had a strange feeling, like a fine head of fury was trying to build somewhere inside him, but every time it threatened to break, the anger slipped away.

  He rubbed at his eyes with his good hand. They felt gritty and hot. The bruises on his face ached painfully, despite the drugs.

  “I’ll have to confer with Admiral Spruance,” he said flatly. “He’s already lost a few cruisers tonight. He won’t be happy about scratching another one.”

  Anderson opened her mouth, ready to argue, but she held her peace.

  “I’m sorry, Commander. Please excuse my poor manners. I don’t mean to make it sound as if your ship or her crew are unimportant. I’m just playing the numbers. The equipment on the Leyte Gulf will be of tremendous value to your war effort. I don’t want to give up on her, either. She’s my baby. But she’s been run through the heart. We can’t make any headway without tearing each other apart, and we’re already sinking. I’ll have to confer with Admiral Kolhammer and the engineers, but I think they’ll agree. The Leyte Gulf is finished, and so is the Astoria.”

  Chief Mohr had been suspicious when Davidson put himself forward for the cleanup crew in the confused snarl at the intersection of the two ships. Davidson was one of the laziest, shiftiest sons-of-bitches you’d never hope to meet. Mohr knew he’d only joined the navy to avoid a prison term for passing bad checks in Baltimore. The judge had given him the option of military service or the big house and Davidson, true to form, had joined the navy because he heard it had the best chow and the least exercise. He was also scared of flying.

  It was almost reassuring, in a way, when Mohr crawled back into the Astoria to discover that Slim Jim was inexplicably absent. Moose Molloy had done his best to cover for the lazy bum, but that didn’t necessarily work in Davidson’s favor. Mohr waved away Molloy’s excuses and determined to deal with the slacker later.

  For now he had other problems. He’d just bruised his knuckles on the thick skull of some moron who’d grabbed a piece of ass over on the other ship. Personally, the chief couldn’t see the problem. If you put a bunch of broads on a ship, they’re gonna get their fucking asses grabbed. That was only natural.

  But that Captain Anderson, who didn’t look like anyone had grabbed her ass in a long while, had gone bitching to Commander Evans, who was over on the Leyte Gulf having his injuries tended to by their supermedics. Evans had gone to Mohr, and Mohr had gone to the source of the trouble, some dumbass gunner by the name of Finch.

  “You grab her ass, Finch?” he demanded to know.

  Finch had sort of smirked and shrugged, so Mohr had hauled off and slugged him one, right between the eyes. At that point, Captain Anderson had gasped. But what the hell had she expected him to do? A guy grabs some ass ain’t his to grab, you put Chief Eddie Mohr on the job, the guy gets knuckled good and proper. Case closed. You woulda thought from her reaction that the knuckling was nearly as bad as the original ass grabbing.

  “The fucking saints preserve me,” Mohr grumbled as he hauled himself back into clear space aboard the Astoria. He was gonna get himself a corned beef sandwich and a coffee, and then he was gonna find that lazy fucking Slim Jim asshole and maybe he was gonna knuckle him some, too.

  Lieutenant Commander Helen Wassman taped off the IV line and stood up to stretch her back. She’d been crouched over for nearly four hours, attending casualties from both ships. Her back ached and the muscles in her legs burned with fatigue. It had been nearly thirty hours since she’d rolled out of her bunk, and she wondered whether the time might be coming when she’d have to dial up a little stim flush from her implants.

  “Doctor! Doctor, over here!”

  The Leyte Gulf’s medical officer had trouble focusing on the direction of the voice. The mess hall was full of wounded men and women. The worst cases had first call on the Gulf’s relatively small hospital, where they were stabilized before being choppered across to the Clinton or the Kandahar—a process that had been complicated by the destruction of the helicopter bays. The patients had to be carried up onto the deck through the bridge structure, a long and winding route.

  “Doctor! Please!”

  Wassman urgently cast around for the source of the cries. There had to be sixty people laid up in the mess. Most of them were in pretty bad shape. The walking wounded were all helping with salvage operations. The room presented a tableau from one of Goya’s nightmares, bloodied bandages, burned limbs, chaos, and horror. She’d treated deep tissue lacerations, compound fractures, crushed vertebrae, shrapnel and bullet wounds, and, of course, some terrible injuries caused by ceramic flechette rounds.

  “Doctor!”

  Wassman sourced the cries to a reedy-looking officer, off the Astoria, judging by his uniform. He didn’t look too badly hurt. He had a good long scrape on his forearm and a bruise on his forehead. But that was it.

  This better be good, she thought.

  The lieutenant fidgeted impatiently as she approached him. As she did so, his eyes roamed up and down. She was running into that a lot, and she was struggling not to react badly to it.

  “Yes . . . Lieutenant?” she said, drawing up in front of him. “Is one of your men in need of treatment?”

  “No, Commander . . . uhm, Wassman. But I’ve been waiting here for a blood tranfusion for nearly an hour.”

  Wassman was genuinely confused. Her eyes flicked from the small bandage on his forehead to the one around his arm.

  “I’m sorry, a tranfusion?”

  “I’ve lost some blood,” he explained. “I may need a transfusion, but nobody has spoken to me about the type of blood I would need.”

  She shook her head, wrestling with her irritation. Then she leaned over and somewhat peremptorily plucked his dog tags out to examine them.

  “O positive,” she read out. “There you go, Lieutenant . . . Charles, is it? Done deal.”

  A strange look flickered across the lieutenant’s face. Levering himself up, delicately, he motioned for her to follow him a few feet away, into the corridor. Wassman was disinclined to follow at first, but was forced to comply when Charles carried on regardless, stepping over a black woman who was leaned up against a bulkhead, nursing a hand with some nasty-looking burns.

  “Lieutenant!” barked Wassman. “I really don’t have time for this.”

  Charles stopped, sighed heavily, and rolled his eyes before turning to face her.

  “What is your problem?” Wassman demanded.

  People were beginning to stare. Most of the men and women in the room were too lost in their private struggles to notice the scene by the door, but those who were nearby, such as the woman with the burned hand, were turning to watch.

  Lieutenant Charles sighed with exasperation. He tried to lean in as if to talk discreetly. “You misunderstand me, Doctor. I didn’t mean blood type. I meant type of blood.”

  Wassman scrunched her eyes shut, then blinked twice, rapidly.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Type of blood?” She gestured with her hands—which were sticky with gore—to emphasize her lack of comprehension.

  He grimaced with distaste and rolled his eyes toward the black woman on the floor.

  “Type of blood,” he murmured. “Don’t you see?”

  What little concern she had felt for the man abruptly disappeared, and she just gave him a cold stare. Before he could say anything else, she turned away.

  Charles reached out to grab her elbow and was stunned when she spun around and slapped him across the face. It was a hard, stinging blow. He gasped and, without thinking, slapped her back. His blow wasn’t particularly firm, but th
e slap galvanized everyone who saw it.

  Someone grabbed a handful of his shirt. It was a Chinese American sailor.

  “Get your hands off me, you damn coolie,” Charles shouted. He made a fist and drove a fierce uppercut into the man’s chin, angling the blow to drive the jaw sideways.

  Before the man had even hit the deck, though, another of Wassman’s shipmates came at him. A white man this time, with a padded sleeve covering one arm. His other arm was fine, though. Wassman watched as it drew back and the hand formed a fist. Charles flinched as the blow came in.

  The office housed the ship’s Training Department. It was packed with VR gear, computers, screens, and office equipment. They had to break it down and get it all off the ship in less than forty minutes.

  Seaman Davidson wasn’t really helping with his endless stream of questions.

  What’s that?

  What does it do?

  How’s it work?

  But the ensign from the Leyte Gulf, who was supervising the salvage detail in this part of the ship, tried to answer as many as he could because Davidson was one of the few men off the Astoria who’d shown any inclination to be friendly. And his buddy, Molloy, he could carry a goddamn Xerox all on his own. Ensign Carver was glad to have them. They’d been no trouble at all, really, and had mixed in well with the rest of the work detail. He’d just made a mental note to talk to their Chief Mohr, and tell him what a good job they’d done, when shouting and the sound of something like a brawl reached them.

  “What the hell is that?” said Carver.

  “Sounds like a brawl,” said Davidson.

  The officer swore and told his team to keep working. Then he headed for the door.

  Slim Jim resisted the urge to pocket another handful of the small, pencil-like objects they called data sticks. He was here to learn, and to establish his bona fides as a stand-up guy.

  “Come on,” he said, swatting Moose on the back. “He’s gonna need some help.”

  “But he told us to stay here,” a young female sailor protested. Quite a cutie, too, thought Davidson. These guys really knew how to fit out a ship.

  “Yeah, well he won’t be telling nobody nothing when he gets his fucking teeth kicked in. Listen up, would you? That’s a real fucking fight out there, toots. Come on, Moose.”

  The sound of bedlam seemed to swell. There could be no doubt that a pitched brawl was under way. Slim Jim grabbed a small crowbar and dived out through the door, with Moose close behind on his heels. The three remaining sailors, all of them from the Leyte Gulf, hesitated for just a moment before following.

  Slim Jim and Moose joined a general rush toward the mess where the fight had broken out.

  “Watch my back,” said Davidson. “But keep an eye out for that officer, too. We don’t want him getting hurt.”

  “Why not?” Moose asked.

  “Just fucking do it, okay.”

  They had to step on it. The melee had spilled into the passageway, and Carver was already at the edge of the fighting. Davidson could see that he didn’t have the first idea about mixing it up in a real street brawl. He was actually trying to haul a couple of guys off someone.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” muttered Slim Jim.

  The confined space roared with a tribal savagery. Men and women from both ships were mixed in together, punching, biting, kicking, swinging wildly. Slim Jim saw a guy he recognized from the Astoria, one of the apes from the boiler room, turn and swing at Ensign Carver. The much smaller officer was knocked right off his feet, and slammed into a bulkhead. His attacker, a brute with arms like tree trunks, grinned and pushed him back into the wall.

  Maloney, that’s his name, thought Slim Jim. Stupid fucking mick.

  Stoker Maloney grabbed hold of Carver’s throat and pinned the ensign down. He cocked one giant fist back behind his ear, ready to drive it right through the man’s head, just as Slim Jim reached him.

  “Hey, asshole,” Davidson called out.

  Maloney smiled at Slim Jim, who raised the crowbar and whipped it down on the arm that restrained Carver. The smile disappeared as the man’s bones broke with a sick, wet crack. His dark features turned gray, then white. A look of terrible confusion came into his eyes just before Slim Jim lashed him across the forehead with the heavy iron bar. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he started to slump to the floor. Moose grabbed hold of him and heaved the deadweight down the corridor. The three sailors who’d followed Davidson and Molloy out of the office nearly tripped over the body.

  “You all right, sir?” asked Slim Jim.

  Carver coughed twice and struggled to draw breath, finally settling on a quick nod.

  “Let’s break ’em down, Moose,” Davidson yelled, as he swung the crowbar at yet another of his own shipmates.

  Moose commenced laying in to the heaving mob with great, looping swings of his fists.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  Slim Jim flinched and turned quickly at the sound of Chief Eddie Mohr’s bellow.

  “I might have fucking known,” he growled, as Slim Jim caught his eye.

  Mohr had arrived with Captain Anderson, her own chief—Conroy or Condon, or something—and a couple of those scary-looking bastards in SS outfits. They weren’t toting those weird guns of theirs, but they had something just as worrying—long black sticks with a small metal prong at the end. Slim Jim’s eyes bulged a little when he realized that there were sparks jumping between the prongs.

  Anderson’s CPO calmly touched his baton to a tall, muscular sailor off the Astoria. He jerked rigidly, as though he’d been electrocuted, then dropped to the deck, unconscious before he hit. Or maybe even dead.

  The two black-clad storm troopers started zapping people at the edge of the fray. The result was the same every time. They’d go stiff as a board and then fall in a heap.

  “No, don’t!” Slim Jim cried in genuine fear as Mohr advanced on him. Some idiot had given him one of those things. He was getting ready to cave in the chief’s skull with the crowbar when Ensign Carver laid a restraining hand on Mohr’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Chief. He was helping me break up the fight.”

  Mohr appeared to have real trouble overcoming his momentum. He really wanted to jab Slim Jim with that electric prod. But Captain Anderson laid another hand on his arm.

  “Knock it off, you jerks,” she yelled. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

  The combination of her voice and another two or three prods with the stun rods collapsed the brawl, which had been largely confined to an area around the doorway. Anderson pushed her way in among the rowdy combatants, roughly elbowing aside anyone who didn’t give her space. She had her own sparking baton, but she didn’t use it on anyone. The unruly squall tapered off into a bruised and sullen stillness.

  Slim Jim backed away from Mohr, who still had murder in his eyes, stepping on tiptoes so he could see Anderson.

  “Well, I’m waiting,” said the captain.

  Lieutenant Commander Helen Wassman stepped forward over a number of fallen sailors. She was bleeding from the nose and had a real shiner rising on her left eye.

  “I’m afraid it was my fault, Captain,” she said.

  “The hell it was!” cried a white man to her rear.

  “This racist asshole bitch-slapped the doc,” somebody else called out.

  Chief Mohr forced his way past Slim Jim, drawing up beside Anderson and looking down at the prostrate form of Lieutenant Charles.

  “Oh, that’d be fuckin’ right,” he said darkly.

  16

  USS ENTERPRISE, 0409 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Karen Halabi was only too aware of the outlandish presence she introduced to the small space. The men around her had so far paid due deference to the respect Spruance seemed to accord her, but she could tell from the prickling of her skin and the occasional hostile glance that she was there under his sufferance.

  Spruance stared morosely out at the burning wreckage of his task forc
e.

  Dawn was coming, and the extent of the carnage was no longer hidden by full darkness. A few hours from now, they all knew Japanese planes would be over Dutch Harbor on a diversionary strike. The American commander was fast approaching the point where he would have to contact Admiral Nimitz in Pearl and try to explain what had happened. Halabi didn’t fancy changing places with him. Down below on the flight deck, a landing signals officer from the Clinton waved in a Seahawk with four survivors just plucked from the water.

  “Michaels,” said Spruance, “have the Gwin and the Benham stand-by the Leyte Gulf for salvage and evacuation. They are to place their men under the direction of Captain Anderson on the Leyte Gulf. She’ll command the operation.”

  There wasn’t so much as a murmur of dissent, but Halabi could feel the men bristle. Spruance remained silent, watching the lights of the helicopters as they hovered and swooped against the black curtain of the Pacific night. Karen would swear that her neck was burning with the intensity of the glares being directed at her by some of the bridge crew. But she clasped her hands behind her back and tried to take what small measure of consolation she could from the experience of riding atop one of history’s greatest warships.

  She was startled out of her reverie when Spruance next spoke.

  “Your people are very professional, Captain. They’ve saved a lot of men tonight.”

  He didn’t add what a few men around him no doubt thought, that Halabi’s people had killed even more.

  “Standards haven’t slipped, Admiral.”

  “How long have you been at war, Captain?” Spruance asked in a distracted voice.

  “Myself? Twelve years, sir. But it’s a different kind of war. More complicated, I suppose.”

  “I don’t see how that could be,” Spruance said.

  “Politics, religion, history.” She shrugged. “It gets very complicated, believe me. Often we’re not even fighting other states, just a state of mind. Ideas.”

  Spruance turned completely around. Silhouetted against the glass, it was nearly impossible to see his face. “You can’t fight ideas with rockets and guns.”