Weapons of choice

"Pretty weird is not good enough, Lieutenant. We're dying here. What exactly do you mean?"

The woman hid her chagrin well. "I mean weird, Captain. Unusual, unexplained. Beyond standard parameters. I can give you a raw sample if you wish."

"Do so."

The lieutenant's dark, slender fingers danced over a giant touch screen to her left, and the data cube's Bang amp; Olufsen speakers began to emit a harsh burst of static. It flared and faded as the signal intercept was washed clean of interference. Voices came through. Confused, loud, angry, scared. Most of the CIC crew were too deeply involved in their own stations to bother with the broadcast, but the intel sysops turned to listen, even though they could have taken the sound channel through individual headphones. They heard American voices, educated, military, and… something else.

Halabi focused on the audio stream, which seemed to have been acquired from the fire control facility of an unidentified vessel. The speaker was demanding to know what the hell he was shooting at, where they had come from. And he wanted to know if they were Japs. Halabi twirled an index finger and the lieutenant, Waverton, flipped into another channel.

A ship-to-ship transmission this time. The same burst of static subsided into quantum clear audio.

"Hamman, Hughes, and Morris to pick up survivors…"

"Hamman's engaged a Jap carrier… she's right on top of her. They could put a few fish in…"

"Russel or Gwin then…"

Halabi twirled her fingers again. Lieutenant Waverton ripped out a new line of instructions and another channel came up.

"… ayday, mayday. This is the Astoria. We have been rammed. We have been rammed…"

She snapped a finger now, apologizing at the same time. "You were right, Lieutenant. Weird is the best word for it.

"Where's the hologram feed coming from, Commander?" she went on, motioning for Waverton to cut the audio and turning back to the holobloc.

"We've lost a few of our task force resources, Captain. This is feeding from three drones at six thousand meters. Deep in the cloud cover. Posh is drawing on form memory to project some of the task force assets, and skin-sensors for the rest. The audio we're stealing ourselves, through the mast-mounted system and bridge skin."

Halabi was becoming acutely aware of how quickly things were unraveling around her.

"Mr. Howard, can we raise task force command?"

"No, ma'am. Channels are open and secure. CIs are in contact. But no human operators respond to hail. We've tried independent hails to each task force ship, all with the same result. We're on our own for the moment."

"They're out, just like we were," Halabi concluded. "Have Posh talk to the other CIs, send all the data we have about the illness, the bio-attack, or whatever it was, and details on the Promatil treatment. Boot up the Cooperative Battle Link with any surviving compatible assets."

She paused, arranging the problem in her mind. Each national component of the Multinational Task Force was fitted for Cooperative Battle Management. Their Combat Intelligences could be laser-linked, allowing the entire group to fight as a single entity.

It sounded fine in principle, but politics and human nature couldn't hope to approximate such elegance. Mission programming denied her the ability to take control of any vessels other than the small Australian contingent, her sister ships, HMS Vanguard, which was missing in action, possibly sunk, and Fearless, which was definitely gone. It was stupid, in her view, but the Americans and French in particular were quite touchy about that sort of thing. They didn't like taking directions from anyone but their own. She feared it was going to cost a good number of them their lives in the next few minutes.

On the other hand you could build a snowman in Hell the day the Royal Navy agreed to let an Indonesian captain have the run of its warships. So perhaps the Americans and the French had a point. It was just a little insulting to be cast in that sort of company.

While she was racing through her options, Howard relayed a series of orders through his headset, and a row of systems operators who had been relatively quiet suddenly leaned into their stations. Six pairs of hands flew over touch screens and virtual keyboards. Laser nodes embedded in the skin of the Trident pulsed, and thousands of meters away smart-skin arrays on two Australian ships, the troop cat Moreton Bay and the littoral assault ship Ipswich, picked up the photon storm of microburst infrared laser transmissions.