Weapons of choice

"I don't think so, Colonel. He's still sort of spasming."

"Check his air passage for any more crap and leave him. We'll send someone through to look after him, but we have to get to work. Come on now, son. Let's hustle before someone catches us with our nuts in the breeze."

Again, he added to himself.

Chen arranged his friend to rest as comfortably as possible and pushed himself up toward his CO. The steward who had served them appeared from the galley on his hands and knees, a long string of blood falling from his lips.

"You there!" yelled Jones, cutting through the man's misery and doubling the intensity of his own headache. "You well enough to attend to the lieutenant there?"

The man groaned, but nodded.

"Make sure he doesn't choke, then. And see to anybody you got back there. Shut everything down. No flames or boiling water. Understand?"

"Yes, sir, Colonel," the steward croaked as Jones and Chen tottered out of the mess.

There were men and women in various states of collapse all along the corridor. Some were far gone in what looked like the extremes of an epileptic seizure. Others simply appeared to be sleeping. A few were gathering their wits and none, to Jones's surprise, seemed to have been gripped by the Fear yet.

Probably too fucked up.

As they tried to hurry to the bridge, Jones stopped to encourage those marines and sailors who were rebounding the fastest. He noted that this seemed to be a random process. He saw Aub Harrison, a gunnery sergeant, a thirty-year man and just about the toughest son-of-a-bitch Jones had ever met, flaked out, a dark stain spreading down his pants as his bladder emptied itself. Just beyond Harrison, he found his principal combat surgeon, a slight red-headed woman, and she seemed reasonably unaffected. She was moving from one person to the next, jabbing them with one-use syringes. Jones grabbed a trembling Chen by the arm and muscled him over in her direction.

"Hey, Doc, what do we have here?" asked Jones. "Transsonics? What d'you think?"

Captain Margie Francois left the marine she was tending and moved over to Jones and Chen with remarkable agility. There was just a flicker of dread in her gray eyes. "Fucked if I know, Colonel," she said. "But I got Promatil and Stemazine, antinausea drugs. Seems to help."

She took up a syringe from a kit at her hip.

Another blast, very close this time. They all turned their heads in that direction.

"Terrific," said Jones. "Gimme a shot. And the lieutenant here, too. Can't you do an implant dump? I want a couple of Harriers up as soon as possible. But I'm guessing we got nobody fit to fly them yet."

"Sir. I've already zapped the implants. That's about forty percent of our personnel. I'll check on the fliers right away."

Jones detailed Chen to hustle her up some assistants as another explosion sounded. He was surprised to hear a personal weapon open up on full auto, somewhere nearby, and decided to take a detour from his path to the bridge. A few turns later he emerged onto a small weather deck.

A marine had leaned himself against the safety rail and was letting rip at something on the water. Huge fingers of white fire strobed at the muzzle of his weapon, and a long line of tracer rounds reached out over the darkened waters.

Jones shook his head in disbelief, first at the trooper, and then at the antiquated warship he was shooting at. She revealed herself with the flash of her guns.

"Safe that weapon now, son!" he yelled. And for the first time since he'd come to, raising his voice didn't drive an ice pick straight into his head. That was good. He liked to raise his voice.

The marine, a giant bovine-looking character, seemed genuinely shocked to have been busted by his CO, and actually began to argue.

"But the enemy, they's shooting at us, Colonel."

Jones stared again at the rogue vessel. A real dinosaur by the look of her. A destroyer maybe? The Indonesians had bought a bunch of them from the East Germans ages ago, back when there were still Indonesians and East Germans. But what the fuck was it doing here, attacking a clearly superior battle group? He was just starting along that chain of thought when his attention ballooned out to the bigger picture. Jones hustled a pair of powered combat goggles from the trooper, Bukowski, and set the light amplifiers to maximum gain.

"Sir. Y'all right?" asked Private Bukowksi.

"Be cool, Private," Jones said, quietly but sternly, as he tried to process what he was seeing. A hostile fleet seemed to have materialized in the middle of the task force. Carriers, old battleships or cruisers maybe, a real junkyard collection, but it had snuck in right under their noses and now that small, angry destroyer was lining up for a broadside on the Clinton. Well, she had a cast-iron pair of nuts on her, you had to give her that.