Weapons of choice

It seemed almost peaceful, if that were possible. The brilliant globe of silent white light bloomed out to consume most of the ship, then disappeared just as quickly. For half a second he was left with a ghostly vision of what appeared to be the Ryujo, or what remained of her, resting serenely at anchor-an astounding sight, because three-quarters of the ship was gone, everything vaporized between the first forward gun mount and the rear elevator. For that brief moment, it appeared as though the two sections, fore and aft, might just sit there indefinitely-and then they toppled into the waves and were ripped apart by secondary explosions.

"Holy shit," said Commander Black.

They were standing in the otherwise empty section of the supercarrier's Combat Information Center that had once been devoted to antisatellite warfare. It afforded Spruance and his men a ringside view of the way Kolhammer's people made war. What they saw was chilling.

The big screen that dominated one whole wall of the center briefly divided again, presenting coverage of the other Jap ships dying in the exactly same fashion as the Ryujo. Then a single-field view pulled back to show the entire anchorage. Small bursts of light suddenly twinkled along the flanks of one vessel, a cruiser. The effect spread throughout the body of the fleet.

"Flak," explained Judge.

Looking at the faces of the men and women, sitting quietly at their banks of little movie screens and instruments in front the giant wallscreen, Spruance felt the power gathered in this room in a new way. At Midway he'd been hammered into a near state of shock by their weapons. Now, afforded the luxury of watching the onslaught from a distance, he was struck forcefully by the singular and passionless way they went about their killing. Their damn thinking machines had taken it upon themselves to slaughter his men while they slept. But seeing the indifferent response to the deaths they had just witnessed-deaths they had caused-he wondered whether these people were any more capable of feeling genuine emotion than their machines.

He could see they were satisfied with the result, but only his men seemed to have responded like true combatants.

Even young Curtis, who'd probably never seen blood spilled outside a shaving nick, reacted with greater emotion than the woman whose submarine had just unleashed such destruction. The ensign was babbling on to Dan Black, pointing at the screen and asking the same question over and over. "Did you see that, Commander? Did you?"

Captain Willet, by way of contrast, appeared at the start of her little war movie to explain the events that had transpired. Spruance saw no sense of triumph or vindication, or even mild regret at having cut so many lives short on her say-so. For the second time in a week he found himself wondering what sort of a world produced women like that.

And then-how long before they'd try to remake this one in their own image?

He shook his head. This was ridiculous. These people had been at war for nearly two decades. It was only natural that they would be completely inured to its savageries by now, just as his countrymen would surely grow coarse and insensitive to the horrors that lay before them. And he couldn't forget, either, that this wasn't their war. It belonged to their history, and the men who had died since they arrived were to them already long dead anyway. Perhaps that explained it.

Spruance heard somebody behind him, a woman. "Well, that's the end of that."

But he understood it was just the beginning.

"Singapore strike is inbound," another voice announced.

He turned back to the big screen. He wanted to see what happened next.

39

HMAS MORETON BAY, 2132 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

A long swell, generated by a storm in the Bay of Bengal, rolled under the twin hulls of the Moreton Bay as Lieutenant Nguyen methodically checked and rechecked Metal Storm and her laser pods. She was glad to be back in her old seat on the fast troop carrier-converted to an evacuation ship for the raid on Singapore. They'd drawn supplies for the Close-In Weapons Systems from stocks salvaged off the Leyte Gulf.

She calibrated her senor arrays and tested the Cooperative Battle Link to HMS Trident, three nautical miles off the port bow. The Bay didn't run to a full CIC, and her workstation was tucked away in a corner of the bridge. Most of the 2 Cav troopers who'd sailed for Timor with them had moved across to the littoral assault ship HMAS Ipswich, which was trailing two nautical miles to stern, although one company remained to provide security for the medical staff on board.