Weapons of choice

Bone-shaking thunder rolled over the bridge, and Miyazaki lost his balance as the CI veered the ship away from a cluster of shell impacts. He managed to fall on his good side this time. Sea spray drenched him, spotting the screen with droplets of salt water, each acting like a small convex lens, magnifying the pixel lattice that shone beneath them. Focusing on the screen, he could see that the Clinton was ablaze and the Kandahar was listing as though taking on water.

The voice of the Siranui spoke through an intact speaker somewhere behind him.

"Sensors indicate that the extreme threats continue, Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. The ship requests Autonomy Level One in response."

Miyazaki did not hesitate this time. He had seen enough.

"On my authority, Level One Autonomy is sanctioned."

The Siranui's Combat Intelligence cross-matched the speaker's voiceprint with a DNA profile sampled through the smart-skin casing of his flexipad. Verifying that all higher command elements were dead or incapacitated, it confirmed command authority in the person of Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki, and then instantly assumed operational authority for itself.

The ship's Nemesis arrays had already traced and logged the flight path of the shells that had struck the bridge, tracing it back to their points of origin. The CI corrected for changes since impact, and identified the enemy vessels. It then activated two Tenix Defense Industries combat maces in retaliation.

Hexagonal silo caps flipped open on the forward deck. The stealth cruiser's Intelligence released the launch codes and attack vectors for an offensive run, and the maces, which on a cursory examination resembled old-fashioned cruise missiles, rose straight up out of the silo on towers of white flame. The boost-phase rockets cut out at six thousand feet, so there was no visual warning of the missiles' approach. Their scramjets burned without a perceptible exhaust.

Miyazaki followed the mace run on the screen in front of him. A time hack counted down to zero in the lower left corner. Two decks below, the same image was reproduced dozens of times on screens distributed around the Combat Information Center. A small pop-up window on a cracked screen hanging by a thick tangle of wires near Miyazaki's resting place carried a feed from the CIC. It presented an eerie picture of twenty-two men, slumped in their seats or sprawled on the nonslip deck, oblivious to the destruction their own vessel had just unleashed.

As the missiles curved downward toward their targets, dipping and swerving to avoid a wandering tracer stream, they maintained a furious laser-linked dialogue with the Combat Intelligence on the Siranui, demanding and receiving a constant stream of updated targeting data. Flaps on their stubby wings purred to and fro. On the Siranui's two-dimensional displays Miyazaki watched as the hammerheads lined up on the enemy cruisers executing course corrections with an economy of movement. Three hundred meters from the stern the leading missile dipped, then leveled off, racing about three hundred meters above the highest point of the vessel.

As the first missile reached a specific point above its target, a very small, controlled fusion reaction superheated two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle. The entire load punched through the deck of the cruiser. The kinetic and thermal shock instantly vaporized a significant percentage of the target mass.

The expanding gas, a molecule mix of human tissue, steel, wood, fabric, and superheated air manifested itself as a conventional explosion that blew the rest of the ship to Hell and beyond.

Ammunition bunkers exploded. Boilers and the crew who attended them were atomized. Those slugs that drove all the way down into the keel flash-boiled thousands of liters of water that rushed back in through the ruptured hull. Miyazaki watched the death of the enemy ship in two acts. A rippling torrent of white fire raced down the length of the topside decks and superstructure, followed almost instantaneously by a sudden, violent eruption that seemed to detonate beneath the waterline before bursting the thick steel hull like a balloon. In a flash, the ship that had been there suddenly wasn't. A few moments later the second mace destroyed another ship in identical fashion.

Maseo Miyazaki had not wanted to be a warrior. He had dropped out of college to surf in Hawaii, then Indonesia, and finally in Australia (where he had met that ugly damn stonefish). He had only returned to Japan and presented himself to the draft board in his home prefecture after a suicide bomber in Malaysia had killed his father, a Sanyo executive. After serving six months in a punishment detail for skipping out on the draft in the first place, he had distinguished himself with his application to duty and his easy familiarity with the ways of their gaijin Allies.