She paused, arranging the problem in her mind. Each national component of the Multinational Task Force was fitted for Cooperative Battle Management. Their Combat Intelligences could be laser-linked, allowing the entire group to fight as a single entity.

It sounded fine in principle, but politics and human nature couldn't hope to approximate such elegance. Mission programming denied her the ability to take control of any vessels other than the small Australian contingent, her sister ships, HMS Vanguard, which was missing in action, possibly sunk, and Fearless, which was definitely gone. It was stupid, in her view, but the Americans and French in particular were quite touchy about that sort of thing. They didn't like taking directions from anyone but their own. She feared it was going to cost a good number of them their lives in the next few minutes.

On the other hand you could build a snowman in Hell the day the Royal Navy agreed to let an Indonesian captain have the run of its warships. So perhaps the Americans and the French had a point. It was just a little insulting to be cast in that sort of company.

While she was racing through her options, Howard relayed a series of orders through his headset, and a row of systems operators who had been relatively quiet suddenly leaned into their stations. Six pairs of hands flew over touch screens and virtual keyboards. Laser nodes embedded in the skin of the Trident pulsed, and thousands of meters away smart-skin arrays on two Australian ships, the troop cat Moreton Bay and the littoral assault ship Ipswich, picked up the photon storm of microburst infrared laser transmissions.

The first data set was an encoded authenticator, which convinced the ships' innately suspicious CIs to accept that their companion vessel was legitimately opening a Cooperative Battle Link. It authorized the Intelligences to power up all defensive systems and to deploy in protection of task force assets. The next photon shower advised of a possible bio-weapon attack, and gave the recommended response. The last packet of data contained a synopsis of the evolving situation, as it was understood by the Trident. Unfortunately, this transmission was quite thin.

Half a second later the destroyer repeated the process with a tone link to the Australian submarine HMAS Havoc. It returned a surprising acknowledgment from a human operator. Havoc was standing to, targets plotted, awaiting authority to release weapons.

"Captain Willet on Fleetnet for you," Lieutenant Waverton announced.

"At last," said Halabi.

A screen above the holobloc winked on. The commander of the Australian sub, looking thin-lipped and grim, nodded a curt hello.

"Captain Willet."

"Captain Halabi. My apologies for the delay in responding. My comm operator was having some sort of seizure, and he wasn't alone. We've got a terrible mess down here. Some sort of neural attack. The CI took over the initial response. Do we have hostile contact?"

"We have contacts, as you can see, we have to assume hostile," replied Halabi. "Fearless has been destroyed, but God only knows by what. I've never seen anything like it. Can you put your intel people onto the data package we just sent? I'm afraid it makes no sense and we have very little time. It's getting quite ugly up here."

Willet's eyes registered the shock of losing the helicopter carrier, but she said nothing about it, nodding brusquely and signing off. "Done. We'll get back to you ASAP."

The two captains broke their link.

Relieved to have Willet sharing the burden, Halabi resumed her inspection of the holobloc while the crew took care of business. One of the first things they teach you in captains' school, she reminded herself, is never to look like circumstances have the better of you. But she couldn't help quietly blowing out her cheeks in exasperation. Truly, there was nothing about their situation that made sense. Nothing at all.

The surviving task force ships may have been scattered, but none was making any apparent efforts to rectify that. They cut through the swell, which had mysteriously picked up from nothing to three meters in a few minutes flat. Each ship, whichever direction it was headed, was maintaining ten knots, as they had been before being struck down.

The three exceptions were the Trident, which was circling the flaming hulk of her dying sister ship; Willet's sub, the Havoc, which had dialed back to two knots and was lying stealthed near the center of the unidentified fleet; and finally, she noted, the American Nemesis cruiser Leyte Gulf, which seemed to be in serious trouble.

"Marc, pull in close on the Leyte Gulf. One thousand meters virtual."

The hologram shimmered momentarily, then reformatted. The image well filled with the shape of the American cruiser and another vessel, which appeared to have rammed… No, that isn't right, she thought. It's been… what, superimposed?

"Is this a clean feed?"

The commander consulted the data cube, interrogating a series of screens before nodding the affirmative.

"Systems are five by five, Captain. Boards green. No overlapping, no ghosting or echo effects."

Halabi felt as if something spiky had lodged in her mind. The two ships were fused, presenting an impression of scissor blades opened at nearly forty-five degrees. This would account for the voice intercepts, the panicky radio calls about a ramming.

But this was no collision. The blade of the Leyte Gulf's bow projected clean and sharp beyond the flanks of the other ship. There was no crushed or broken metal, no crumpled deck composite. Nothing to indicate that two objects of considerable mass had made any sort of violent, forcible contact.

"Something else, ma'am. The feeds from the drones and skin systems are clean, but that's the only intel we're taking. I can't access any satellite links. They all appear to be down. Military and civilian."

"Did somebody kill the satellites, or just the links?" she asked, compartmentalizing the flicker of real fear that Howard's report sparked. It was far more likely that something had severed the Trident's links, rather than taking out approximately twenty-three thousand separate satellites.

The CIC boss rechecked the Trident's own systems, then had Lieutenant Waverton cross-check his findings. Marc Howard wasn't prone to histrionics, but when he finally replied, Halabi easily picked up the anxiety that was present in his voice and the set of his features.

"Ship links are fine, Captain. Posh also interrogated the other CIs, for the same results. They can't access any satellite feeds. Weather birds, comms, media, they're all offline."

Halabi threw a glance at the two monitors that normally pumped out CNN and BBC World News. The screens were blue, with only two words displayed in plain white type.

"I suppose GPS is gone, too, then," she said, without emotion.

"That's correct, ma'am."

"Captain Halabi," an ensign called out. "We've acquired significant and increasing volumes of naval gunfire. Some of it incoming. Basic munitions, nothing augmented. It hardly seems directed at all. Laser packs are cycling through the priority targets, but there's a lot of it, ma'am. They just neutralized a very large volley from two platforms. Posh determines that Siranui was the target. Metal Storm will be coming online soon."

As if to punctuate this statement, they heard the first clip from the Trident's secondary Close-In Weapons System tear into the night. Even though the CIC was sheltered deep in the central hull, there was a quick metallic ripping noise as 734 projectiles were vomited from two concentric, counter-rotating muzzle rings. This was caseless ammunition, fired electronically rather than by percussion, using a square-shaped combustible propellant wrapped around a fifty-grain bullet. The propellant burned bright yellow so that the effect, when viewed with the naked eye, suggested a small comet leaving the stubby gun mount and streaking away on a thin stream of light, to explode upon contact with its designated target.