The CI also began monitoring the data stream from the crewmembers' biochip implants, since it was likely that a percentage of them would have been injured by falls during the unannounced acceleration. It quickly drew the conclusion that the entire ship's complement had been struck down by a malady of unknown origin, and dispatched an instruction via shipnet. Based on the closest analog that could be found, the order was given to immediately dump.05ml of Promatil from the crewmembers' spinal inserts directly into their bloodstreams.

Slouched gracelessly at her command station, Captain Halabi felt the soothing warmth of a drug flush as it crawled up her spine. The unpleasant full-body burning sensation subsided, along with the associated dizziness and nausea.

Her officers and junior ranks began to stir and groan around her, but she was transfixed by the ghastly spectacle just outside her bridge window. It was definitely the Fearless. She was simply unable to imagine how it could have been damaged in such a catastrophic fashion.

The metal outline of the ship's cross section glowed as though white hot. Halabi could see the cavernous hangars high above, with aircraft and equipment already sliding toward the abyss as the ship tilted forward, scooping up water. To either side of the hangars small offices and wardrooms were visible, again reminding her of a doll's house with the front wall removed.

Halabi could clearly see human beings in some of those rooms, moving frantically, trying in vain to escape. She dimly recognized a painful hammering sensation as her heartbeat, but it seemed far away. She had friends on that ship, and any of them could be the anonymous stick figures desperately throwing themselves off the leading edge, plunging to their deaths. The terrible scene recalled images from her childhood of office workers falling through the air in New York, and later in London and Tokyo.

As her own ship passed squarely in front of the Fearless it seemed to lean toward her, as if trying to reach out and take her down, too. Her lips worked soundlessly, searching for words, but none came in the face of such horror. She could see a virtual tsunami already rolling down into the belly of the carrier.

At the Naval War College she had studied the sinking of an oceangoing ferry that had inexplicably left its bow doors open on a cross-channel run. A mountainous wall of water had poured in and surged toward the stern. The weight had actually lifted the bows out of the sea for a brief moment, but fluid dynamics demanded that the wave travel back when it hit the obstruction of the ferry's rear end, and so the pendulum had swung back and dug the bow even deeper into the ocean. Halabi imagined for a split second that this mammoth vessel might rear out of the waves and smash down on her in a similar fashion, but she quickly dismissed the speculation. The densely packed lower decks of such a ship would not permit the same free flow of water.

Darkness threatened to rush in on her again as the Trident cleared the impact zone and passed safely through to the far side, but with a deep breath she fought it off.

"Posh, can you link me to the CI on Fearless?" asked Halabi. "I need damage reports and vision."

The Trident's Combat Intelligence affirmed the request and four screens in front of Halabi winked into life, carrying video from the carrier. Halabi grimaced at the scenes of screaming casualties and blind panic.

Damage reports scrolled down another screen, too quickly to read, as the Fearless plunged on toward her doom, millions of liters of cold seawater roaring in through the gigantic sucking wound, destabilizing the vessel and generating a range of forces that her engineers had never contemplated. Halabi watched in horror as immense tonnages of water began to back up against the densely filled spaces of the lower decks, putting a brake on the ship's forward impetus.

Two Mercedes express boilers, delivering 320,000 horsepower to four shafts, pushed hard against the phenomenal resistance. Fearless began to slew around and tilt, causing the water already inside to shift sideways. It burst through aviation and ordnance stores on the third deck and into the airframe workshop. Under pressure, water even began to rise to the main deck, coursing into officers' quarters and the forward elevator pit. Roaring along both port and starboard passageways on the second deck, the torrent flooded electrical and radio stores, more officers' quarters and washrooms, and the crew's mess.

Halabi winced as millions of tonnes of icy-cold brine reached the boiler rooms and sluiced over and into the red-hot furnaces and a cataclysm ensued. The resulting explosion itself wasn't powerful enough to destroy the ship, or what remained of it, but it triggered an escalating series of secondary blasts, beginning in the armory on the third deck starboard side, ripping down into a missile store just forward of the drone control room, and from there into the giant avgas tanks.

HMS Fearless disintegrated in one titanic blast. Three-quarters of her mass disappeared in the blinding white flash, which could be seen ten kilometers away.

The Royal Navy trimaran Trident rode out the shock wave with little more than a rude jolting. She sat very low in the water, resting on three hulls and boasting of no superstructure other than a relatively small teardrop bridge, so the blast swept over the destroyer like a flood surge over a smooth pebble. The ship's CI made some course and speed changes, but mostly the Trident relied on her inherent design strengths to ride out the storm.

While her ship may have been little bothered by the spectacle, Halabi was stunned. There couldn't possibly be any survivors. Every man and woman aboard the Fearless had surely perished, atomized by the blast. Her mind reeled as it tried to find some semblance of reason for the disaster. What could do that to a ship? And who would do it? She had no immediate answer. But she did have her duty, and that was to fight back.

As her bridge crew began to recover, she repositioned herself in the command chair and reached out to the nearest touch screen. The Promatil dose had eased her illness, or the worst of it anyway, and she tapped out a few orders on the screen, resuming full control of the Trident. She left the Nemesis arrays collecting data at full power and delegated acute crisis management to the Intelligence.

"Permission to unsafe weapons, Captain Halabi?" the system's voice purred in her ear.

"Permission granted, Posh," she answered, placing her palm on the DNA reader in the chair's armrest. "Verification code Osprey Three Niner Lima Xray Tango Four."

"Code verified, Captain Halabi. Weapons hot."

The CI's voice was a flawless imitation of Lady Beckham's, a remnant of the previous ship's captain, who was-in Halabi's opinion-an emotionally arrested Yorkshireman with an unhealthy fixation on pre-Millennial pop culture. On taking command she had determined to reset the speech software to RN Standard. However, she had been made aware, subtly but swiftly, that the former pop princess was considered a much-loved member of the crew, and her deletion in favor of the bland, mid-Atlantic voice to which the CI defaulted would be considered akin to a death in the family. So Lady Beckham had stayed on as the voice of the Trident, and after eighteen months Halabi had secretly grown quite fond of her, too.

"Mr. McTeale," she said, addressing her XO, "are you in any shape to take the conn?"

The ropey Scotsman bit down on the bile that was threatening to rise past his gorge. "Aye, ma'am."

"Fine, then. I'm on my way to CIC. While in transit, I'll be online via shipnet. When I've resumed control from down there, shut up shop and join me. All hands below. The Fearless is gone. I think our holiday cruise is over. Guns are hot and the CI has Level One Autonomy. Any of the ship's crew who remain without Promatil inserts will need to be treated as quickly as possible. Please see to it that the surgeon is informed. Posh has the requisite dosages. IV, not dermal patches.