Designated Targets

Outside of the marbled glass door that led to his office, he could hear phones ringing and messengers scuffing up and down the corridor. The building, always a hive of industry, was electric with excitement this morning. He had a dozen separate tasks to attend to, but most of them he’d done at home on his flexipad the previous evening. His eyes were hollow with sleeplessness and, he had to admit, with anxiety. Not so much for himself but for his family. Himmler had plowed unknowable numbers of new victims into the earth since the Emergence. A distant relationship with anyone who might be implicated in future acts of betrayal was enough to condemn whole branches of some families to the extermination camps.

Brasch let go a shuddering breath at the insanity.

He powered up the flexipad and brought an encrypted compressed file to the front of the little desktop screen. It had taken him a long time to work out how to do this, and even longer to work up the courage to go through with it.

He opened the software that he was certain would provide a link into Fleetnet, if a valid connection could be made. He keyed in the code Moertopo had given him back in Hashirajima, when they’d had made their pact by the light of the burning Japanese ships.

The result was unimpressive, but momentous. The pad chimed, making him jump. He had forgotten to mute the sound, but that was all right. He worked with the device every day.

The file disappeared from the out-tray, and security software wiped every trace of it from the lattice memory.

He couldn’t help but glance out of his window, taped to protect against bomb blasts. The sky was completely blocked by low, dark gray clouds. If he had done this correctly, somewhere up there on the edge of space, a surveillance drone was already decoding his microburst package and pulsing it back to the smart-skin arrays of the Trident.

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

It wasn’t the first time the ship had played host to royalty. King William and his new wife had toured the stealth destroyer shortly after the ship was commissioned, but that had been an occasion of state, with pomp and circumstance as the order of the day.

The monarch’s younger brother was much less disruptive, although word of his arrival still flew belowdecks with the speed of laser-linked gossip. He arrived with a Special Air Service squad and their Norwegian counterparts. Halabi, who knew the mood of her ship as well as she knew her own feelings, sensed that the excitement had more to do with having a Special Forces component on board again than it did with any celebrity aura that hung around Prince Harry.

The SAS and their commando guides pretty much kept to the Air Div hangars at the stern, where they laid out their equipment, checking and rechecking everything. Major Windsor appeared in Planning once, to request permission to load mission prep software into the Trident’s Combat Intelligence. The CI could render the mock-up of the heavy water plant with much greater detail than the field server they’d brought with them.

He was most amused to discover that the voice of the ship was a synthetic facsimile of Lady Beckham.

“I met them at the investiture,” he told Halabi, smiling broadly at the memory. “She still looked smashing, but I thought poor old David had gone to seed quite badly. He never got over it when supercoach Johnny Warde dropped him from West Brom, did he?”

Halabi was almost unique in twenty-first century Britain, having zero interest in pop music, soccer, or celebrity gossip, so it took her a moment to catch up. “I suppose not,” she conceded, without knowing exactly what he was talking about.

Harry quickly returned to the hangar to boot up the V3D mission sim, sparing her any further embarrassment, although she could tell the junior ratings thought she was a bit of a knob for not wanting to talk Posh and Becks with Harry.

When she’d first taken command of the Trident, she would probably have retreated into stiff dignity, but three years of constant action had loosened her corset strings, and she let a wry smile play over her features instead. “I’m sure His Royal Highness would like nothing more than to spend the whole day with you lot, plonking on about gormless rejects from the Hello! magazine celebrity Deathstar. But he’s busy, and so are you. So get your heads down and your arses up, where I can kick them a little more easily.”

The sailors returned to their workstations with only pro forma grumbles. They were busily plotting a course that would take them to their insertion point in the Skagerrak, when Halabi’s intel boss pinged her on shipnet.

“Better come up to the CIC, Captain. We’ve got all sorts of things going on here. The birds are picking up indications of massive troop movements on the continent, and comms has detected an encrypted burst. Unscheduled, unauthorized. Completely outside parameters for any of the deep-cover skin jobs we’re tracking.”