But it did not kill the Clinton. The voided double hull and monobonded deck plating absorbed and then shed 60 percent of the blast. That still left force enough, however, to trash dozens of aircraft chained down outboard of catapults one and two, and to sweep the flight decks clear of any personnel who had not been instantly vaporized.

As large and well built as the supercarrier was, the Clinton shook violently through every inch of her structure. Men and women tending the fusion stacks thirty meters below the waterline were thrown to the floor.

On the flag bridge, Kolhammer had one brief idiot moment, where his mind whispered it was just the destroyer going up. Years of training and experience told him the little ship had been taken out by a Type 92 torpedo, probably launched from the Havoc, which was packing that sort of heat and loitering with intent, according to the bloc.

But even as those thoughts spooled through his mind, his senses betrayed the truth, though he was only dimly aware that something had cleared his impaired vision. In a strange, elongated fragment of time, he watched the screen as a supernova consumed the stern of his own ship. A deep, disordered vibration seized the Clinton's bulk, throwing some of the watch to their knees. He groaned as the blast wave picked up the bodies of every human being on the flight deck and tossed them through the air like leaves before a gust front.

His heart thudded faster in his chest as a deep, unthinkably loud wall of thunder shook the bridge, and it seemed to him as though Hell's furnace had exploded. He was minutely aware of every detail his bulging eyes took in. The faces of his brother and sister officers, their mouths wide open, forming perfect Os; a thread dangling from the arm of an ensign as he raised his hand to point at something; the impression his own backside had made in the chair where he'd been sitting. The first flicker of color in the blast window, all wrong, a burnt black-and-orange blossom amid a field of gray sea and metal at the very edge of his vision. The petal of fire growing, unfurling, expanding. Consuming the space where the Clinton had been.

It was wrong. It was impossible. An outrage to the senses. But there it was, before his very eyes.

This confused tumble of thought and emotion seemed to take much longer than was really the case. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer was fifty-three years old. Old enough to have served in the First Gulf War, which made him a figure of mythology to the young men and women in this battle group. He had been at war for most of his adult life. He hadn't been born into conflict, like his young sailors and pilots. But he had grown into it.

A buddy from his first tour of Afghanistan had given him a memento, a piece of shrapnel from the battleground at Shah-i-Kot. It had been mounted on a polished cedar base and inscribed with J. Robert Oppenheimer's famously mawkish sentiment: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. It was really just a piece of bullshit bravado, the sort of thing young pilots loved and old men indulged with some regret, because they understood the worth and the cost of such things. But Kolhammer had kept the piece in his private quarters where he alone could see it. His friend was long gone, shot down over Indonesia in 2009, and hacked to death by Javanese peasant militia. So it was a keepsake, but also a personal talisman, because he had become death. He was a warrior before all else, now, and it was his warrior spirit-a reflexive, unthinking turn toward battle-that saved them all.

"Lieutenant Brooks," he barked at the flatscreen by his right hand. "Have you linked the fleet into our battlenet?"

"We've gained hotlinks to everyone who's available, sir, but we seem to have lost contact with Garrett, Vanguard, Fearless, Dessaix, Leyte Gulf, Sutanto, and Nuku. The Leyte Gulf we can locate, but she's not responding. Her systems are fried. She's seven thousand meters away, bearing one-eight-niner. Possibly rammed. The others are missing, possibly sunk. As is the Nagoya."

"Is Leyte Gulf burning?"

"Negative, sir. And we can't get a GPS fix on the datum point, either. I've tried interrogating GPS six ways from Sunday, but it seems to be down, Admiral."

"Down?"

"Nonresponsive, sir. The channels are clear, but it's as though the satellites themselves have been taken out."

Marvelous, thought Kolhammer, just marvelous. Under attack from God-knows-who, and their position fix goes south for the winter. He stifled an exasperated grunt.

"Thank you, Lieutenant. Find out what happened to those other ships. I want to know yesterday. Link all surviving task force assets for collective engagement. Unsafe laser packs and Metal Storm. Slave combat maces to the Clinton. Hammerheads only, no sunburn. Chapter Seven rules of engagement. Launch on my mark."

"Aye, sir," Brooks replied as her fingers blurred over a touch screen. A secondary explosion jolted her and knocked a few flag bridge crewmembers from their stations. "Solutions confirmed, Admiral. Locked and tracking."

"Engage," said Kolhammer. At the same instant, four torpedoes speared into the Clinton.

"Say again!" yelled Captain Daytona Anderson. The intercom was working fine, but the voice at the other end was muted by small-arms fire, screams, and a brace of explosions, which she felt quite clearly through the soles of her shoes.

"Boarders, ma'am. I say again, we have boarders. Armed and hos-"

A single massive explosion shook the entire ship, cutting off the transmission. A recorded voice boomed out of nearby PA speakers.

"Intruder alert. Intruder alert. Intruder alert."

Anderson already regretted her decision to direct the fight from the CIC. Ninety-five percent of her systems were down. Alarms screamed, beeped, and pinged all around her. Warning lights flashed, and the few screens with any lighted display at all were showing nonsensical data. Examining them closely was like looking into an Escher print. The Leyte Gulf appeared to have been rammed.

But it hadn't. The reality was more incomprehensible.

When the 250 men and women aboard the thirty-five-tonne Nemesis stealth cruiser had awakened from, well, whatever it was that had hit them, they found themselves occupying the same space as a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser, the USS Astoria. Luckily for the thousand or more men of the Astoria and the crew of the Leyte Gulf, they hadn't merged hand-in-glove, which would have killed most of the complements of both vessels immediately as their molecular structure was instantly compromised by having to share space with metal, wood, plastic, and the bodies of other human beings. Instead, the two ships had transected each other, appearing from above like an open pair of scissors.

Even so, many sailors from both ships had perished in such a fashion; some instantaneously, unknowingly, as they materialized squarely inside structures such as a bulkhead or six-inch gun mount. Others hadn't been so lucky. They had only partially merged with various objects or, in the worst cases, people. Their deaths had been slower, more agonizing, and, for them, totally inexplicable. A pharmacist's mate from the Astoria who gasped out his last breaths clawing at a PlayStation console half buried in his chest was typical of their number.

Some even died at each other's hands. Ensign Tommy Hideo from the Leyte Gulf and Leading Seaman Milton Coburn of the Astoria beat each other to death in a dark, constricted space where the control room for the Leyte Gulf's eight-inch autocannon intersected the three-tiered bunk upon which Seaman Coburn had been sleeping. The men themselves had been fused at the thigh. The blinding pain and shock of that violation was enough to send them instantly over the edge, past any hope for rational behavior. Even if they had cooperated and sought out medical attention, the surgery would have needed to be swift and radical. Their blood types did not match, and they were quickly poisoning each other.