Weapons of choice

His body armor afforded more protection than their barricade, but he crouched down to their level anyway. Twenty meters farther on a wall of wet, gray steel blocked the corridor. Three of his shipmates were sprawled promiscuously over each other just in front of it. Their blood had pooled beneath them, prevented from running down toward McAllister and Ntini by the slight dip of the ship's bow.

A man-sized opening had been blown through the iron curtain.

"How'd they do that?" asked Nix.

McAllister answered in a hoarse whisper.

"A shaped charge."

"Nice work. The captain in there?"

"You should be able to pick up her locator chip once you're inside. Head right for two minutes. It's a fucking mess like you wouldn't believe in there, but they're trailing tape. You should pick them up. Point-to-point's scratchy once you get in, so let them know you're coming up. They've been hit from behind twice already. Chris Gregory got wasted like that. Clancy blew him away when he popped up without warning."

"Got it."

Nix patted the shoulder of McAllister's old Kevlar vest and leapt the overturned table in one bound.

That's five now, she thought.

She'd lost five of her crew since stepping into this twisted nightmare, one of them to friendly fire.

"You okay?" she asked Clancy.

"Fine for now," he replied. "Wasn't his fault. Wasn't mine, either."

"That's right."

Captain Daytona Anderson knew the tremors and the nausea would come later for Clancy. Along with the guilt.

Couldn't be helped.

She repeated that mantra to herself, like a Zen koan meant to exhaust the intellect and prepare the mind for an intuitive response.

Because Christ knows, there's nothing for the rational mind to hold on to in here.

She was wedged into a crawl space created by the intersection of the Gulf's rail gun control room with what looked like an old galley of some sort. Her features creased as she contemplated the sight of two members of her own crew and five strangers who had… What, materialized?… inside each other, and within a Gordian knot of metal, plastic, and wooden fixtures.

The shooting, which had slackened off for a few minutes, picked up again. A few rounds ricocheted by her head, off a butcher block that had been fused with a flatscreen workstation, showering Anderson with splinters of wood and plastic. Clancy fired without hesitation. She had no idea what he was shooting at, but somebody screamed. Whoever it was almost cried out loud enough to cover the sick, ripping thud that was the signature note of a ceramic bullet striking unprotected flesh. Then another voice called out, but it was controlled and steady.

"Specialist Nix, coming through, Captain!"

Anderson checked her flexipad. It was working again. The screen displayed icons for the locator chips implanted in the necks of her crew within a twenty-meter radius.

Nix, Spec 3-010162820 was slowly picking his way forward.

Three hollow booms crashed painfully close to her ears. Clancy fired again, for the same result-a strangled scream and the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor.

"You might want to hold your fire," Nix called out. "We've got a big problem."

No shit? Anderson thought bitterly.

"Yeah, I know," said Nix. "I mean another problem."

USS ASTORIA, 2314 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

The niggers and the broads were the least of their problems. And, really, not the most fucked-up thing he'd seen this morning. But for the life of him, Able Seaman Moose Molloy Jr. couldn't figure out what a bunch of niggers and broads were doing on board a Japanese warship.

They'd killed four of them now, two apiece. And lost a lot of their own in return. And yes, it was pretty weird that they'd only got one Jap that he knew of. But his daddy, the senior Moose, who'd walked a beat for thirty years with the Chicago PD, had taught him that your niggers and your wops and your Asiatic races simply couldn't be trusted. There wasn't a damn one of them you'd cross the street to piss on if their heart caught fire. And the broads were most likely sex slaves, he guessed. His buddy Slim Jim Davidson had read him a story from the newspaper about that-how the Japs were capturing white women in the Far East and turning them into camp whores. Made a man's blood boil just to think about those nasty little fuckers poking their weenies into God-fearing white women.

The newspaper, which had specialized in horse-racing tips and murder mysteries before the war, had been red hot on that topic-the so-called Japanese fighting man's anatomical shortcomings. Still, Moose thought, pencil dicks or not, they'd pay a heavy fucking price for sticking them into any woman who spoke English and knew enough to cross herself when she walked into a church.