Weapons of choice

It was crowded. And dark. The electrical system must have failed. A few handheld lamps, hung from the top tier of hammocks, provided the only light. They swayed back and forth, sending macabre pools of shadow spilling over and through the heaving crowd of men in time to the swinging torches. This added to the atmosphere created by the tear in reality that stood across the room.

That's how Evans thought of it, a tear in the fabric of the real world. There was a gray steel wall running through the center of the bunkroom, in a place where it simply couldn't be. He could see that it was composed of the same material he'd seen so briefly out in the corridor. Perhaps it was even part of the same structure. It divided the room at an odd angle, and the more carefully he inspected the scene, the more unthinkable it became.

Off to one side, three hammocks emerged from the wall like solid ghosts. There was nothing holding them to the blank metal face. It was as if they had been extruded, somehow. Nearby, a circle of men was gathered around, pointing at something down at floor level. Evans and Mohr wrestled their way over to discover a boot and most of a leg below the knee, which looked as if it were disappearing into the barrier, like a man who had been frozen while stepping through a stage curtain.

"It was Hogan, sir," said one of the sailors, poking at the oddity with a screwdriver. "He was going to the john."

"Probably to beat off," somebody added unnecessarily.

Evans heard another burst of gunfire over the clamor of the crowded bunkroom.

"You said we've found a way through, Chief. Where is it?" Evans asked, deciding for the moment to ignore the bizarre tableau.

"Just over here. If you wanna follow me, Commander."

They left the ghoulish circle of onlookers to ponder the riddle of Hogan's boot. A little farther on, just past a hammock containing the lower half of a naked torso, projecting from the same steel wall, the smooth regularity of the obstacle failed and gave way to a section of buckled and torn armor plating. A fissure some three to four feet wide had been opened by the titanic stresses generated when two objects of such great mass had fused together and tried to plow on, regardless of their new and decidedly inefficient design.

The steel groaned and screamed in protest. Evans fancied he saw it moving, like the edges of flesh around a sucking chest wound. It was even darker in there, the blackness relieved only by a faint red shift that called forth childlike fears of the Beyond. As Lieutenant Commander Evans stepped toward the rift between two worlds, he shivered like a small boy stepping into the forbidden forest.

6

USS ENTERPRISE, 2255 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

Lieutenant Commander Black ran from the flag radio room back past flag plot and hammered up the stairwell onto the bridge. Captain Murray, the Enterprise CO, had joined Spruance and was directing air operations-which is to say, he was sending a lot of good men to their deaths.

Bombing six, under Lieutenant Dick Best, consisted of nineteen Dauntless dive-bombers, none of whom had ever launched from a carrier at night. Nine of the old barges had already gone into the drink at takeoff. Six more were destroyed in flight by misdirected friendly fire. And four were awaiting clearance to take off.

Lieutenant Commander Black, two years out of flight ops, could only watch mutely, wondering what those remaining pilots felt as they sat in their cockpits, waiting to open the throttles and accelerate down the darkened flight deck. If, by some miracle, they got away to make a run on the enemy, none of them could realistically expect to survive a return trip and landing under these conditions.

The bridge was preternaturally quiet, in contrast with the scene on the waters around them.

Black moved up beside Spruance. The tension in the small, hard space demanded that he, too, speak in a taut whisper.

"Commander Jolley on the New Orleans is trying to establish gunnery control across the task force, sir. I tried to reach Admiral Smith on the Astoria, but they're out of action."

"They've been hit?"

"Rammed, it seems."

Spruance's jaw tightened.

"Well, they'll have to look after themselves. I need all the firepower I can get turned on the Japs. We can't spare anyone to go help them out."

Staring out into the night, Black was momentarily transfixed by a bath of flat, white light. Two nearby cruisers had unleashed a coordinated broadside at the spectral figure of the Japanese ship, the Siranui. As the thunder of the guns hit them, he felt the detonation inside his chest, profound and imponderable.