Weapons of choice

Very little landmass occupies that belt of water. With almost nothing to impede them, the great storms can pile up incredible amounts of water at their leading edge. The surges gather power as they travel around the world. Sailors who have witnessed such things say that nothing bears comparison with them: fast-moving, hundred-foot-high walls of black water. Even larger rogue waves can be caused by a combination of factors-a storm surge, a pressure convergence line, a subsurface feature such as the edge of a continental shelf, or the meshing of two or three single waves into one behemoth. Such monster waves rarely survive for long, and are even more rarely reported.

Almost nobody who encounters them lives to tell the tale.

So it was with the air-warfare destroyer USS Garrett. Thanks to the unstable, anomalous field generated by Pope's experiment, she emerged a great distance from the originating event.

The crew of the Garrett was only 120 strong. None awoke immediately from the temporary coma of Transition Sickness. A small number, however, did perish quickly. Nine men and four women, who had been on deck when the wormhole inflated, were swept away by the enormous seas into which they emerged. A few more broke their necks and backs as their limp bodies were flung about belowdecks. Many suffered broken limbs and concussion.

Eventually, after three hours, a handful of sailors did regain consciousness, but they were in no condition to control the ship. One, a petty officer, managed to crawl into the bridge, hoping to cede autonomy to the CI. But an eighteen-meter wave had smashed the blast windows and poured in, shorting out the equipment. Before she could exit the ruined post, the destroyer slipped over the ridge of a colossal wave and speared down the reverse side. The wave behind it rolled over the vessel. Thousands of liters of freezing seawater poured in and sucked the screaming woman back out again.

The Garrett succumbed at 0435 hours when she ran headfirst into one of those massive, unstable, mountain ranges of water that stalk the wastes of the Southern Ocean. The warship climbed gamely up the face of the cliff, but it was simply too big to surmount. In her final moments she slewed around on the nearly vertical surface and rolled.

The flickering echo of a distress call from her CI, which bounced off the troposphere and spattered weakly against the Nemesis arrays of the Siranui a few minutes later, was the last anyone heard of her.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0488 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Spruance couldn't help but be impressed. The size of the Hillary Clinton was imposing to begin with. He imagined you could fit the Enterprise into her three times over, by volume.

The flight deck was a wreck, littered with piles of scrap and ripped open like an old tin can down aft of the second finlike structure, which he assumed had to play the same role as the island on the Big E. Even wounded as badly as she was, however, the ship hummed with power. The admiral found himself deeply conflicted: proud that his men could dish out so much punishment to a vastly superior adversary; and deeply sorry that they had done so. He might have been able to win the war in a day with this floating brute.

He'd heard his name whispered repeatedly as Commander Judge led him through the vessel. It was so very strange, these men and women, many of them looking like foreigners but speaking in accents he recognized from the corridors of his own ship; they seemed to look upon him as if he were some sort of movie star. As some pointed and others stared, he saw real awe and respect in their eyes. It wasn't altogether pleasing. He must have returned over a hundred salutes, all of them ripped out with parade-ground perfection as he made his way through the vessel. Dan Black had rejoined him, with that young ensign trailing along in their rear beside half a dozen officers from the Enterprise.

They turned into a room dominated by the biggest movie screen Spruance had ever seen outside a theater. Kolhammer and a number of his officers, looking like a delegation from the League of Nations, were waiting. Spruance didn't waste any time.

"So, the Japs are running are they? How do you know? They might be making a flanking maneuver for Pearl. They could pull it off if they wanted to."

Kolhammer pointed a smooth black stick at the big movie screen. It filled up with some kind of radar image. But it looked like… Spruance searched for a metaphor, but all that came to mind were the cartoons you sometimes saw before a Saturday matinee. The images looked drawn. They most certainly weren't the fuzzy lights and blurred, sweeping arcs he associated with radar. He could see Nagumo's force neatly illustrated with little boats and name tags. Dozens of vessels surrounded four carriers. Most of them were identified, too.

"What the hell is that?" asked Spruance, unsure whether to be impressed or pissed off.