"Yes, sir, Colonel," the steward croaked as Jones and Chen tottered out of the mess.

There were men and women in various states of collapse all along the corridor. Some were far gone in what looked like the extremes of an epileptic seizure. Others simply appeared to be sleeping. A few were gathering their wits and none, to Jones's surprise, seemed to have been gripped by the Fear yet.

Probably too fucked up.

As they tried to hurry to the bridge, Jones stopped to encourage those marines and sailors who were rebounding the fastest. He noted that this seemed to be a random process. He saw Aub Harrison, a gunnery sergeant, a thirty-year man and just about the toughest son-of-a-bitch Jones had ever met, flaked out, a dark stain spreading down his pants as his bladder emptied itself. Just beyond Harrison, he found his principal combat surgeon, a slight red-headed woman, and she seemed reasonably unaffected. She was moving from one person to the next, jabbing them with one-use syringes. Jones grabbed a trembling Chen by the arm and muscled him over in her direction.

"Hey, Doc, what do we have here?" asked Jones. "Transsonics? What d'you think?"

Captain Margie Francois left the marine she was tending and moved over to Jones and Chen with remarkable agility. There was just a flicker of dread in her gray eyes. "Fucked if I know, Colonel," she said. "But I got Promatil and Stemazine, antinausea drugs. Seems to help."

She took up a syringe from a kit at her hip.

Another blast, very close this time. They all turned their heads in that direction.

"Terrific," said Jones. "Gimme a shot. And the lieutenant here, too. Can't you do an implant dump? I want a couple of Harriers up as soon as possible. But I'm guessing we got nobody fit to fly them yet."

"Sir. I've already zapped the implants. That's about forty percent of our personnel. I'll check on the fliers right away."

Jones detailed Chen to hustle her up some assistants as another explosion sounded. He was surprised to hear a personal weapon open up on full auto, somewhere nearby, and decided to take a detour from his path to the bridge. A few turns later he emerged onto a small weather deck.

A marine had leaned himself against the safety rail and was letting rip at something on the water. Huge fingers of white fire strobed at the muzzle of his weapon, and a long line of tracer rounds reached out over the darkened waters.

Jones shook his head in disbelief, first at the trooper, and then at the antiquated warship he was shooting at. She revealed herself with the flash of her guns.

"Safe that weapon now, son!" he yelled. And for the first time since he'd come to, raising his voice didn't drive an ice pick straight into his head. That was good. He liked to raise his voice.

The marine, a giant bovine-looking character, seemed genuinely shocked to have been busted by his CO, and actually began to argue.

"But the enemy, they's shooting at us, Colonel."

Jones stared again at the rogue vessel. A real dinosaur by the look of her. A destroyer maybe? The Indonesians had bought a bunch of them from the East Germans ages ago, back when there were still Indonesians and East Germans. But what the fuck was it doing here, attacking a clearly superior battle group? He was just starting along that chain of thought when his attention ballooned out to the bigger picture. Jones hustled a pair of powered combat goggles from the trooper, Bukowski, and set the light amplifiers to maximum gain.

"Sir. Y'all right?" asked Private Bukowksi.

"Be cool, Private," Jones said, quietly but sternly, as he tried to process what he was seeing. A hostile fleet seemed to have materialized in the middle of the task force. Carriers, old battleships or cruisers maybe, a real junkyard collection, but it had snuck in right under their noses and now that small, angry destroyer was lining up for a broadside on the Clinton. Well, she had a cast-iron pair of nuts on her, you had to give her that.

"Oh, shit," he spat as his peripheral vision picked up an even greater threat to the aircraft carrier. A small plane, obsolete, incredibly slow, was diving straight for the deck of the Big Hill, pulling out slowly, tortuously at just a hundred or so meters. A small black pearl detached from its belly and followed a fatal, parabolic arc. Jones couldn't tell if the flight path of the bomb would intersect with the deck of the supercarrier, but a heavy, leaden feeling in his guts told him it just might. He reached out and placed a hand on Private Bukowski's shoulder.

"You got the general principle right, son," he said quietly. "But you ain't gonna hit jack shit from here."

The destroyer exploded about five seconds before the bomb tore into the Clinton's deck between the number three and four catapults.

A few people on the Clinton's flag bridge ignored the plasma screens and peered through the armor glass windows of the bridge, to watch the destroyer die in real time. The better view was on screen.

The hostile was nine hundred meters away when something took it amidships. Something big and ugly. A ball of fire and steam erupted and consumed most of the vessel's length. It broke her back, ripped her in half, lifting the separated sections twenty meters out of a boiling cauldron of sea beneath her keel. Kolhammer watched a gun turret pop off like a champagne cork and go skimming across the surface of the ocean. A murmur ran through the crew, those on their feet at least, as the bow knifed into the water and sank instantly. The burning stern remained afloat for just a few seconds before a secondary explosion atomized it.

Metal rain clattered into the carrier's superstructure as shrapnel from the blast whickered through the air to strike them. One twisted iron rivet that must have been traveling at the speed of sound smashed into the armor glass with a giant thud, to leave a delicate star pattern at the point of impact.

Two heartbeats later a five-hundred-kilogram bomb speared into the flight deck of the USS Hillary Clinton, two hundred meters aft of the flag bridge. The dumb iron bomb detonated a few feet from the Clinton's captain, Guy Chandler, and the group of unconscious technicians who had been carrying out routine maintenance checks on the aft catapults when the floor of the universe dropped out beneath them all. They all died without ever knowing they had journeyed between worlds.

The deck of the Clinton was armored against mace munitions. The number three catapult, however, was not. Indeed, like all of the ship's catapults it was a terribly vulnerable, high-maintenance bitch of a thing, which demanded constant loving care and attention lest it decide to malfunction with a fully laden Raptor hooked up and ready to roll. It was similar in form to the last generation of steam-driven catapults, consisting of a pair of very long tubes, topped by an open slot, sealed with rubber flanges. But rather than drawing pressurized steam from the ship's propulsion plant, the fuel-air explosive, or FAX, catapults used a binary fuel mix that was theoretically easier and safer to handle.

The theory, however, did not account for a bomb strike taking place in the middle of a launch simulation. The technical crew who died at catapult three had been running her through a series of prelaunch tests in preparation for the day's exercises. When the bomb struck, the seventy-five-meter-long catapult tubes were full of the highly volatile fuel-air mix; enough, when it detonated, to rip a huge furrow out of the angled portside flight deck.

Enough, as well, to trigger a much more powerful and catastrophic explosion in a liquid oxygen tank recessed in a nominally secure area just below the lip of the flight deck, behind the Optical Landing System. It blew with a blinding white light and a head-cracking roar that approximated the effect of a subnuclear plasma-yield warhead. Most of that blast wave traveled up and outward, raking the flight deck of all human life and obliterating the frail dive-bomber that had launched the attack.