Weapons of choice

Damiri rolled his eyes and smiled at his comrades on the bridge. They all turned binoculars on the remaining Japanese ships, which were performing beautifully. Their guns fired ceaselessly, raising geysers of water all around the Indonesian vessel.

Damiri felt compelled to wish them all the best in Hell.

But he didn't pick up the radio. There would have been no point.

The explosion that tore up the nearest destroyer was so violent that he shivered in the face of it. He'd watched the dark, hypersonic bolt as it skimmed across the waves and speared into the Karukaya. But he hadn't been ready for the titanic eruption that followed. Even in bright sunshine the flash of the blast dazzled and partly blinded him. Somebody cried out.

"Allahu akbar!"

The other Japanese destroyer perished in identical fashion, ripped apart about three thousand meters off the port side. A few seconds later Damiri distinctly heard the tinkle and clatter of metal rain on the steel cladding of the Sutanto.

He gestured for the others to shut up and composed himself before keying the radio mike.

"Thank you Clinton. Thank you."

The dark, predatory blur of a F-22 streaked past about six hundred meters away.

"Buy me a beer back in Pearl, Sutanto. We've got some tall tales for you."

The fighter rolled over and accelerated away. Apart from two thick clouds of dark oil smoke, almost nothing remained of the Japanese ships.

The speakers crackled into life again.

"Sutanto, this is the Clinton. Please advise us of your status."

Damiri grinned.

"We're alive, Clinton! But we don't know what's happened. Our communications are down, our GPS is gone, we can't raise anyone. And these pirates!"

A new voice, masculine, broke in over his chatter.

"Sutanto, this is Admiral Kolhammer. Please advise us of casualties at your end."

Damiri raised his eyebrows. The infidel leader himself. Any anxiety he had felt before was gone now. He gazed contently out over the long swell of the western Pacific.

"Admiral Kolhammer, sir. I am Sub-Lieutenant Damiri, acting commander of the Sutanto. Captain Djuanda is dead. Many of the officers are dead or injured. We have eighteen killed and twelve badly wounded. Over."

Kolhammer's voice growled out of the speakers.

"Can you care for your own casualties, Ensign? I'm afraid we have a situation here, too. There's little point sending medevac out to you. Our own facilities are already swamped. Over."

Damiri didn't want to press too hard. The last thing he wanted was to have Americans coming aboard now. But he had to play for real, too.

"We'll probably lose two or three men in the next few hours, sir. Over."

"I'm sorry about that, Damiri, but you have to try to hold on. We just don't have the facilities."

Damiri rolled his eyes. That was so like them.

"Acknowledged," he said, not needing to fake the hint of bitterness in his voice.

"We'll be with you in five hours, Sutanto. And you'll have air cover for all of that time."

"Thank you, Clinton," said Damiri. It was an effort to squeeze the words out.

Was there a waking hour in the last month when she hadn't been confronted by legions of the doomed? Captain Francois couldn't recall one. From the moment she'd regained consciousness after the Transition she'd seemed to be running from one casualty to the next, an endless line of them stretching out to a vanishing point somewhere in her future.

Her fingers twitched as she half considered dialing up another shot of stimulant from her thoracic implants. But she stayed her hand. The ward was full of patients, and most of them were not combat casualties. The liberated prisoners needed treatment for starvation, suppurating jungle ulcers, malaria, fungal infections, and a hundred minor aftereffects of captivity. But unlike the rocket rush of madness that had blown through this place after Midway, these patients died more slowly and, she supposed, more comfortably. Dozens of medical staffers moved among the beds. They adjusted drips, changed dressings and bedpans, administered medicine and vitamin shots.

She was losing patients every day, seventy-six of them since she'd come on shift eighteen hours ago. But by the dismal math of her profession, that wasn't bad. She knew that were it not for the facilities available throughout the modern ships of the task force, hundreds more would succumb every day. She examined her heart and found it to be scabbed over with scar tissue and barely pushing blood through her veins.

She needed some rest.

Francois dragged her flexipad out of a coat pocket with fingers that felt numb except for a small tingling at their tips and found Commander Wassman on shipnet.

"I'm taking four hours, Helen," she said. "You have the floor."

Her new deputy nodded brusquely in the small screen. Wassman's locator chip placed her down in the burns unit.

"Got it, ma'am. If I might, Captain? You need more than four hours. I can catch an extra shift. I had a whole half night's sleep."

The chief surgeon didn't bother arguing.