For the moment, though, Captain Anderson was unaware of these horrors. The Combat Information Center was still relatively calm, despite the shrill symphony of the alarms. The sailors there looked to her for guidance now. Most of them had nothing to do, since their battle stations had gone offline when the merging of the two ships had severed the kilometers of fiber-optic cables and wiring that formed the Gulf's nervous system.

The CIC was always a dark blue cave, but it seemed more so now, with the dozens of screens blacked out. It was warm, too, which was wrong. The center was supposed to be uncomfortably chilly, allowing the quantum systems to run at white heat.

At least Anderson was in better shape than her ailing vessel; she'd recovered quickly from the transition through the wormhole thanks to a subcutaneous antinausea insert she received every six months during routine checkups.

She had been quick to note that her crewmembers with Promatil inserts or dermal patches were less drastically affected by whatever had happened. When it became obvious that the shipnet was in disarray, she immediately dispatched runners to the nearest casualty stations with instructions to gather supplies of the drug and distribute them as widely and as swiftly as possible. That was how she'd learned about the violation of the forward decks. But she didn't have to look at the expanse of dead electronics all around them to know her ship was gravely hurt. She could feel it down in her meat.

The Gulf was dying.

Anderson straightened herself at the console, squared her shoulders, and traversed her gaze over every man and woman in the room. She was twenty-two years in the United States Navy and wore a uniform heavily burdened with decorations won the hard way. In her two decades at sea she had exercised for, and performed, almost every kind of operation it was possible to conceive of in modern naval combat. It had never occurred to her that she would have to issue the orders she now spoke. Keying a button to power up the ship's PA, without really knowing how far the broadcast would carry, she drove any trace of fear or doubt from her voice.

"Attention all hands. Attention all hands. This is the captain. Arm yourselves, and prepare to repel boarders."

If her crew within the cocoon of the CIC were surprised, none dared show it. A few obviously braced themselves for what was coming but only one, Chief Conroy, said anything.

"Captain, if I may? We should get to the gun lockers, gather crew as we go. They may not have heard the announcement. We'll need to establish a perimeter on all decks and push forward from there."

Conroy checked the flexipad that was Velcroed to his sleeve. "Short-range point-to-point links seem workable, at least here, ma'am. We might be able to coordinate through that."

Anderson agreed but she was haunted, wondering whether she was about to set some calamity in motion. Still, the near-total failure of the ship's quantum systems left her no choice. She couldn't use the weapons systems aboard the Gulf, couldn't even scuttle her at the moment. She had crew engaging in close-quarter combat on the forward decks, there were no communications with task force command, and they had absolutely no idea how this mess had come to be. For the moment, then, her choice seemed clear. If the Leyte Gulf had been boarded by pirates or commandos or some kind of jihadi suicide squad, she would find the enemy, and destroy them.

Anderson chose a group to accompany her, then ordered six crewmembers to stay and seal the CIC behind her.

Hurrying down the starboard corridor to the armory, she was immediately struck by how wrong it all felt. Even in the restricted spaces belowdecks, the geometry of the vessel seemed to have been wrenched or twisted out of shape. And it was obvious that they were no longer making any headway. If anything, the ship was being pushed sideways. They began to hear blasts of gunfire and the frequent explosions of handheld artillery. But beneath that, her trained and sensitive ear could detect the awful screams of metal plate and bulkheads straining against enormous destructive forces, as the structural integrity of the Nemesis cruiser was tested.

Emergency lighting had come on, leaving the corridors dim but navigable. Glowing flexipad screens, activated and secured on each man's or woman's preferred arm, bobbed up and down through the gloom, adding their own soft luminescence and throwing off a menagerie of tortured, writhing shadows. As they passed ladders and hatchways between decks, Chief Conroy detailed small groups to split off and make their way to A, C, and D decks, with instructions to gather other crew and await orders from the captain when she made the B deck armory.

The Leyte Gulf had sailed with a full complement, eighteen officers and 235 enlisted personnel. The ship's biosensors were offline, so Anderson had no idea of casualties, or of how many were actively engaged with the boarders, or trapped forward of the impact point with the hostile vessel, or simply missing, or dead. Conservatively, she figured on rounding up seventy or eighty warm bodies for her counterattack. As she and Conroy hurried along B, past the berthing spaces, they swelled their numbers with another two dozen sailors, including three specialists trained in hostile boarding ops.

Anderson heard one of her junior officers, Ensign Rebecca Sparrow, mutter that some Navy SEALs would have been nice. The captain dropped her pace marginally to fall in beside Sparrow, delivering a hearty slap on the shoulder. "Damn right, Ensign. A SEAL team would have been a thing of beauty! But this morning we're going to work with what the good Lord provided. And I have faith in Specialists Clancy, Cobb, and Brown here. Don't you?"

Sparrow seemed more unsettled by her commanding officer's unexpected appearance and exuberance than by the King Hell madness of the day. Her eyes widened in surprise as they thundered down the passageway, but she recovered her composure quickly. "Hell yes, ma'am."

"Glad to hear it." Anderson smiled, her gleaming white teeth shining out of her coal-black face. "Specialist Clancy!" she called over her shoulder. "You think you can justify Ensign Sparrow's confidence in you?"

Clancy, nine years in service and a veteran of more than seventy forced vessel entries, smiled at his commanding officer and called back, "Anything for a lady, Captain."

They trotted past the brig and came to a halt in front of the armory. Chief Conroy yelled over the buzz of voices and the harsh, industrial sounds of battle, ordering them to form up in two lines and stand at ease. The boarding specialists hurried forward into the armory to suit up and arm themselves, along with two seamen ordered to grab weapons and stand guard back down the passage through which they had just run. The two men took body armor and helmets, a couple of pump-action shotguns, and hustled back past the lines of their shipmates to establish a hasty defense.

While Conroy saw to the arming of the specialists, Anderson tried to raise the other decks on shipnet via her flexipad. Two windows on screen responded to her page. Lieutenant Matt Reilly on A deck had gathered twenty-three personnel in the chopper bay. They had already armed themselves from the air division's own arsenal and were awaiting orders.

"Good work, Lieutenant. Stand by," said Anderson. She shifted her eyes to the other functioning pull-down window, where she found CPO Borghino's phlegmatic features. A thin film of static obscured his face, but otherwise the connection seemed fine. The third window, the link to D deck, was a small square of white noise.

"Chief, I can't raise D deck on shipnet or P-to-P," said Anderson. "How about you?"

Anderson watched as Borghino's eye line shifted within the window. He was obviously manipulating his pad, trying for some sort of alternate link to D. After a few long seconds, he turned his eyes back to the microlens mounted in his pad's shockproof rubber casing, rather than looking at Anderson's own image on screen. This created the impression that he was staring directly at her.