Weapons of choice

As chief combat surgeon of the Eighty-second MEU, her first priority had been to get her own medical staff back online, then the Kandahar's defensive sysops, then the ship's most critical naval personnel and the 3 Batt staff officers.

Then the casualties began to arrive, some caused by the Transition, like the kitchen hand suffering third-degree burns from collapsing onto a gas oven, and a marine who'd gone headfirst down a hatch between decks, breaking his spine. Shortly after that, the first shells had hit the ship, and her real work had begun, patching up torn and broken bodies.

There was no real lull between that and the arrival of the first survivors from Spruance's task force. The newcomers had filled all one hundred beds in the Kandahar's hospital, and still they came; burns, amputations, compound fractures, split skulls, crushed limbs, ripped torsos. Hundreds of men had swallowed oil, some had lungs half full of contaminated seawater. Many screamed, some moaned quietly. The hospital smelled of charred flesh, blood, shit, and fear. When an orderly handed her a tube of chilled fruit pulp the contrast between the sweet, fresh taste and the charnel house atmosphere of the ward came as a smack in the face.

A brief sense of dislocation took hold, and she stopped for a few seconds to observe the scene.

So, she thought without allowing herself any real feeling, this is what it looks like for the other guy.

"Captain? Captain Francois, ma'am?"

The voice dragged her back into the world.

"We're starting to run low on burn gel, ma'am. It's not critical yet. But it will be soon enough, if we keep running through it at this rate."

Francois looked at the intern. "Thanks for the snack. It helped."

"Ma'am?"

"Yeah, I know, the goddamn burn gel. Can't be helped, Ensign. It's there to be used. You know the principles of triage. That's all you need to worry about for now."

"Yes, ma'am."

The young man saluted and hurried away.

"Captain?"

Francois turned toward the deep bass of Colonel Jones's voice, acknowledging him with a tired salute.

"You need anything down here, Doc?" he asked.

"Some answers would be good," she said a touch bitterly. "Failing that, more burn gel and vat tissue. We're going to need plenty of both."

Jones rubbed his shaved head in frustration. "How many of our people are down?" he asked, meaning the battalion.

"Sixty-two dead," she replied without hesitating. "Another fifty-three wounded. Mostly from blast effects, but a few were just unlucky. Happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"At the Transition point?"

"If that's what we're calling it, yeah."

A man lying in a bed nearby suddenly howled like a wounded animal. Francois hurried over, reaching him before anyone else. His uniform had been stripped so there was no way of telling to whom he belonged by just looking at him. A quick scan with a sensor wand told her he had no inserts, which meant he almost certainly came off an old ship. A transmitter node on the bed beamed his data to her flexipad: Leading Seaman Murray Belknap, one broken hip, seven broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and second-degree burns to 15 percent of his body. A trauma team arrived as she finished reading his slate.

"We got him, Captain," one of them shouted.

Jones took Francois by the arm and steered her away.

"Let them work, Margie. You've trained them well. Give them some room. You can't lay hands on everybody who comes in. You got the bigger picture to keep you up nights."

"I know," she admitted. "You just get into the groove, that's all."

"I understand. How many of the locals do you have with you here?"

"Nearly three hundred here, just a shade under two thousand spread out through the rest of the fleet. We're at capacity now. We've starting taking over the sleeping quarters."

Jones nodded. "And how many are we going to lose? For certain?"

Francois took a few seconds to think it over. She consulted her flexipad for a minute after that before answering. "My best guess at this stage, we'll lose about eight percent."

"Okay, better than I'd expected."

Jones didn't insult her with any platitudes about trying harder. He knew her well. She'd give it everything she had.

Francois just hoped it would be enough.

14

HIJMS YAMATO, 0146 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was incandescent with rage. A lesser man might have howled like a dog and hammered at the bare bulkhead until his fists were mashed into a bloody pulp. He had not wanted this war! He had not wanted the glorious baubles and empty honors that had poured on his head after the victory at Pearl Harbor. He had not wanted them, because he suspected they would lead to utter ruin.

The United States of America was a colossus that he had little chance of besting in a fair fight. He knew in his heart that the only hope was one decisive engagement, the Kessen Kantai, which would leave the Americans so stunned, naked, and bleeding that they would have to sue for peace.