Weapons of choice

"We need everybody vertical ASAP. Sound to general quarters."

"Aye aye."

As the ship's alarms began to call her company to battle, Halabi limped out of the bridge through the light curtain and headed for the stairwell that led down into the Trident's central hull. Beneath her feet she could feel the vessel reach a standard cruising speed of thirty-five knots. The seas were running at one and a half meters on a three-meter swell, enough to impart a significant roll, even with the trimaran's inherent stability and wave-piercing form. It slowed Halabi's progress, but not drastically.

The hexagonal space of the Combat Center was bathed in a quiet blue light. It was unexpectedly soothing after the neural shock of the last few minutes. McTeale had proven himself as efficient as ever. Medics were shooting up a sysop with Promatil as Halabi entered. One approached her with that disapproving expression physicians have been perfecting for thousands of years.

"Begging your pardon, ma'am," he said. "But Commander McTeale informs me you have a serious burn on your leg-"

"I don't have time for gel, Andrews," she warned.

"Pain relief, then." The medic tapped the screen of his flexipad a few times, effectively ignoring the captain's objections. "Surgeon's orders, ma'am. He's authorized a local effect anesthetic pip."

Before Halabi could speak again, she felt the mild tingle of a spinal syrette spitting its dose, followed by the delicious warmth of an analgesic balm washing over the affected area.

It was only the second time in her career she'd experienced palliative intervention via spinal insert, but it confirmed the wisdom of prohibiting self-administration. Even with the greatest will in the world, if you had the option to hit yourself up with this stuff every morning, the temptation would be to never get out of bed.

"Thank you, Andrews," she said. "But that will be all. Please proceed with the treatment schedule. We're going to need all hands on station in the next few minutes."

"Aye, ma'am."

Halabi quickly surveyed the CIC. Twenty-two specialists were strapped into large, comfortable airline-style seats. Massive touch screen workstations hovered in front of them. The Trident's commander made her way directly to the supervising officer, Lieutenant Commander Howard, who was examining the holobloc with a fiercely censorious air.

"Well, Commander, what sort of a hellish mess have we got ourselves in now?"

"A right cock-up by the look of it, ma'am. Makes no sense at all. None. Have a gander for yourself. The Fearless is gone. We've detected just three survivors in the water. And the rest of the task force is scattered to buggery."

Floating inside was a three dimensional, positional hologram, a scaled-down real-time feed of the battlespace around the destroyer for a sixty-nautical-mile radius. The rest of the task force was represented by eerily realistic but oversized spectral miniatures that cut across a blue sea surface. A few centimeters below the rest floated the submarine HMAS Havoc. The Multinational Task Force, which should have been arrayed in an orderly fashion around the flattops Clinton and Kandahar, was instead scattered to hell and back.

She shook her head in frank amazement. Task force ships were making for all points of the compass. That, in its own way, was more unsettling than the sight of the doomed helicopter carrier had been.

More disturbing still were the dozen or more phantom vessels hopelessly mixed in among them. None of these registered any ID signal, and Posh hadn't been able to tag them with any designator hack other than Unidentified Vessel 01 through… Karen checked the readout on the data cube that was suspended above the hologram… UIV 24.

"My word, Commander. A cock-up indeed."

"Aye, Captain. Three carriers of some sort. Four heavy gun platforms. A couple of replenishment ships. And a swarm of littleuns. Destroyers or frigates, I suppose, but like nothing I've ever seen outside a museum. And we seem to have come up short a few friendlies. Besides Fearless, Vanguard is off the bloc. Dessaix is missing, the nukes and the Amanda Garrett, and those Indonesian tubs."

"Destroyed?"

"No way to tell. Just missing, ma'am. Without trace."

"Find them." Halabi pursed her lips for a second before casting an inquiry over her shoulder to a young lieutenant situated at a nearby station. "Elint, what are we getting from these Unidentified Vessels?"

The young sysop, a Jamaican Welsh woman of unusual beauty, was burning holes in the screen with her intense stare. "Not a lot of emcon, Captain. But then, there's not a lot of emission to control, by the look of it. We've been painted by radar once or twice, and it just slipped off the ram skin, but we collected a sample for analysis. It's primitive stuff. Almost Stone Age. A pirate barge can buy better off the shelf in Bangkok.

"Sigint are gathering a lot of uncoded, unscrambled, basic radio transmissions… English language… but uhm… pretty weird."