"We're to engage the enemy, sir."

"Captain True's been injured sir," reported another seaman. "Lieutenant Earls is on his way."

Wish he'd get here, thought Armanno. "Get me the gunnery officer," he ordered. "We haven't got much, but let's give her everything we do have. Helm, put another four hundred yards between that thing and us. We'll stick some torpedoes into her, see how she likes that."

The deck began to tilt again as the destroyer came around on her new heading, plunging into a hectic, crosshatched swell. Armanno felt dizzy with the pain in his shoulder. He desperately wanted to crawl outside and prop himself up against a bulkhead until the ship's surgeon could tend to him, but the vast, iron mountain of the enemy ship-Where in hell did it come from-nailed him in place.

"Guns ready, sir."

Armanno didn't hesitate.

"Fire!"

All four of the ship's five-inch mounts roared as one. Good work, thought Armanno in a distant, abstract way.

Three blooms of dirty fire blossomed on the sheer steel wall of the target. One dud, Armanno thought as he heard the front and rear 20mm cannon open up, painting the walls of that towering fortress with whipping lines of tracer. A dazzling shower of sparks fell to the sea like fireflies, marking the impact of the tracers.

The men around him cheered as another brace of five-inch shells screamed across the short distance between them. All four exploded this time. Armanno was certain he could hear the steel rain of shrapnel on the Hamman's plating. He could feel his muscles tensing as he urged the ship's boilers to give them more steam. He needed to get far enough away to use the torpedo tubes. Their target had to be a Jap carrier, probably the Akagi, she was so damn big.

How the hell did she get here?

Doesn't matter, he told himself. They'd snuck up on them again. Just like at Pearl. But this time they'd been stupid enough to get into a street brawl with Veni Armanno. He might have grown up on an olive grove outside Santa Monica, but his blood was still Sicilian, and it boiled as quickly as anyone's from the old country.

"Pour it, boys!" he yelled into the speaker tube connecting the bridge to gunnery control. "Give 'em hell. Just a little bit longer and we'll be able to stick a few fish up Tojo's ass."

Armanno turned back to the fantastic scene that lay outside the blast windows, just as another salvo ripped into the side of the enemy carrier. It was like riding out a hurricane, minus the wind and rain. The whole of the ocean was lit with lightning flashes as hundreds of guns hammered at the Japs. Thunder rolled over them constantly, and the sea was thick with erupting geysers of foam and water, illuminated from within by the explosions that raised them.

"Lookit that fuggin' thing would you," yelled a voice thickened by years of smoking.

Armanno grabbed a pair of binoculars and followed the seaman's pointing finger. The world was even more confused and unstable when viewed through the glasses. They emphasized every movement of the violently pitching destroyer. Still, he managed to catch a few short glimpses of a ship that reminded him of a giant manta ray slipping across the surface of the ocean. It was hard to tell, being thrown about so much, but there didn't appear to be any guns on the deck. He wedged in tighter against the corner of the bridge and tried to keep the sleek, alien shape steady within the field of the glasses. The twinned lens circles shuddered as the Hamman's two forward turrets coughed long spears of flame and smoke into the night again.

The Japs weren't firing at all, at least not that he could make out.

"What the hell is this?" Armanno asked himself.

"Lieutenant, we're coming up on range for the torpedo launch."

"Okay," he said, dragging his attention back to the mammoth carrier, which was still blotting out half the sky. It was weird, the way the Japs just weren't fighting back. Not a single round came from anywhere along its flank.

Maybe they haven't seen us, he told himself. Just as well.

"Arm the portside tubes," he called.

"Arm the portside tubes!"

"Torpedoes armed!"

"Torpedoes armed, Lieutenant."

Armanno waited half a second, expecting the executive officer or even the captain to appear. It seemed like a very long half second.

"Fire!" he called out, at last.

Captain Karen Halabi, commander of HMS Trident, had never seen anything like it before. It was like looking into a doll's house. For a few short moments, before the seas rushed in, the vessel's internal spaces were completely exposed, as though a vengeful deity had sliced off the bow with a knife, had made it vanish, like a profane magic trick.

She was certain that she was dreaming, and yet sure that she couldn't be. She had spilled a mug of hot coffee on her leg, and the pain had jolted her to her senses much faster than those around her. Her senses, however, had presented her with a nightmare.

She was slumped in her command chair, a giant burn blister already rising on her thigh. Around her the bridge crew were dead or unconscious. The bright light of the tropical day was gone, swallowed by an oily blackness. And four or five hundred meters away, on a collision course off her starboard bow, she could see the helicopter carrier HMS Fearless. It had been-well, lopped seemed the right word, almost. She was paralyzed, staring at a cutaway diagram as if from a children's book.

Except that the "diagram" was three-dimensional, and it was moving toward her. And the burn on her leg was real, and the feeling in her body was returning with a painful surge of pins and needles, the worst she had ever known. She realized, in the methodical part of her mind, that if she didn't put pedal to the metal they'd all be dead in less than a minute, when the carrier ran right over them.

She bit down on a gasp and willed her hand toward the touch screen. Halabi drew a deep breath and pushed through the exquisitely painful tingling, a sensation akin to a blast of white noise tearing at raw synapses. Not trusting her fingers, she struck repeatedly at the screen with the heel of her palm. The ship's Combat Intelligence, intuiting that its user had suffered some drastic battle wound, adjusted accordingly. The buttons on the screen grew larger, the choices more constrained, which was fine by her. All she wanted was another twenty knots.

A series of awkward blows to specific points on the screen drew more power off the fusion stacks and dumped it straight into the Trident's three Rolls-Royce aqua jets. The acceleration threw Halabi back into her chair. The ship's CI, alerted to the possibility of disaster, independently powered up a suite of sensors. On the screen before Halabi's eyes, Nemesis arrays began a full-power survey of the threat bubble, cataloging and prioritizing a list of potential menaces. It was a long list, but right at the top was the Fearless, closing from the northeast quarter.

The CI reviewed Halabi's actions and found them to be appropriate, but decided to fatten the margin for error. It released the codes for the trimaran's supercavitating system.

Below and just above the waterline thousands of pores opened in the radar-absorbent skin of the ship, releasing a bath of small bubbles, a foam of water vapor and air that surrounded the Trident's three hulls so perfectly that very little liquid water remained in contact with the ship. The effect was to reduce the viscous drag on her keels by 97 percent. The Trident surged forward again, carving through mist now rather than water. Her speed climbed quickly to 105 knots as three giant fantails of spray leapt from her stern.