Weapons of choice

Spruance quickly brought a pair of spyglasses up to his eyes to check the results. Black, like most of the others in the room, had to peer unaided into the fractured darkness. The target seemed trapped within a volcanic eruption of white water and fire as dozens of high-explosive shells raked at the waves around her. A coarse, unforgiving cheer rose from a dozen men at the evidence of a single explosion, a distant bud of fire quite different in texture from those shots that had fallen harmlessly into the sea.

"Looks like a hit on the bridge," Spruance said without feeling.

An ensign reported in. "Admiral, VB-six just got their last two away, and the Hornet says she has three Devastators up."

The cruisers fired in tandem again, with the same flashbulb effect, followed by the same, tremendous sonic boom. That must be what it sounds like in front of an avalanche, just before you die, thought Black.

"Holy shit!" someone shouted.

A fantastic cascade of violent light and fire instantly obliterated a great crescent of the night. It was as though a vast arc of space had ignited and set off every shell fired by the two warships. Eighteen armor-piercing eight-inch shells, and nearly as many high-explosive five-inch rounds, detonated simultaneously just a few hundered yards from the muzzles of the guns that had fired them. To the men looking on from the bridge of the Enterprise, it seemed as though the barrage had struck an invisible wall.

"What the hell was that?" Spruance demanded.

"It's like they hit something," said Black. "No way could the whole salvo misfire. It just… It couldn't happen."

The staccato flickering of massed naval gunfire was suddenly overwhelmed by a burst of light. Twin lines of white fire and smoke rose vertically from the source of that flare on the deck of the Siranui.

Unknown fires, Black thought to himself.

The strange eruption, which held every man there in its thrall, sent those two slender pyres arcing so high into space that Black wondered for a second if they might just keep going until they left the atmosphere on their way into the cold vacuum of heaven.

A nervous, insistent voice piped up and broke the spell.

"Admiral Spruance, sir? Please? They're rockets, sir! You have to get those ships moving. They're going to get hit for sure!"

"What's that?" Spruance turned sharply toward the source of the comment, finding there a young pencil-necked ensign with thick black-framed reading glasses, the same one who had just run in with the message from the radio room.

"Ensign Curtis, sir. They're rockets. I'm sure of it and they're aimed at the cruisers, Admiral."

"You seem damn sure of yourself, Ensign," Spruance said.

Dan Black recognized the dangerous tone in the old man's voice. Another officer, Commander Beanland, stepped around a map table and shouted at Curtis.

"That'll be enough of your nonsense, Ensign. Get the hell off the bridge and back to your post. We're trying to fight a battle up here."

The boy reacted as though Beanland had jammed an electric wire into his neck. He went rigid and turned white. "Sir!" he barked out, snapping a salute and making to turn on his heel. Black thought Spruance was about to stop him, ask him to explain further-the kid had seemed righteous in his certainty. But before the admiral could properly open his mouth to speak, before Curtis could even complete his about-face, the blinding white light of a newborn sun spilled out with a roar for the end of the world.

JDS SIRANUI, 2301 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

Maseo remembered the agony of stonefish poison, how his arm had burned as though held in a pot of boiling water, after he'd brushed against the spines of one on the outer reefs off Cairns. The sense memory punched away at him while he lay unconscious, battering at his submerged mind, until something gave way at last and let the real pain flood in. In a confused and sickening split second of vertigo, Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki dropped out of his dream and onto the metal stairwell circling up into the Siranui's fin bridge.

He screamed without shame or restraint as burned meat and nerve endings shrieked at him to get moving. Miyazaki had blacked out on the stairwell and had lived while the bridge crew died. But he had been badly burned by the explosion that killed his shipmates, and as he lay in the shallow coma of transition shock, a computer screen melted in the fires above him and dripped molten plastic onto his already scorched flesh.

Shock robbed the young man of his senses for a few long seconds until his training asserted itself and he awkwardly thumbed his flexipad, activating the trauma beacon. Panic flared briefly, when he thought the pad may have been ruined in the missile strike, but a warm bath of analgesics and stabilizers soon flushed through his system, spreading out from his spine, up his neck, and down into each of his injured limbs.