"Sorry, ma'am. I'll have to send a runner down. They'll have formed up in engineering. We can get access from here."

"Fine, Chief. I'll send down a security team. Lieutenant Carey was in charge on D. Have him secure engineering. He'll be staying put. I don't want anyone fooling around near those fusion stacks."

Borghino nodded brusquely. "Eminently sensible, ma'am. With your permission, we'll seal the section as soon as the security team gets down there."

"Make it happen, Chief."

Anderson looked up from her pad. The illuminated screen had cast a soft, lambent glow over her features, smoothing out deep-worn stress lines and giving her, just briefly, the appearance of a mother fretting over a sick child. As she turned her gaze onto Chief Conroy, the illusion vanished.

"Status, Chief?"

"Clancy's team is nearly geared up, Captain. We got eight suits of full body armor, reactive matrix and tac sets, and twelve sets of standard-issue Kevlar and ballistic plate… correction, ten. We just sent two sets forward with Ntini and McAllister. Eight G-fours to go with the suits and ten compact shotguns for the rest of the flak jackets. Ten sidearms, standard-issue Glocks. We have a dozen stun rods, too, for what that's worth. And a couple of guys with meat cleavers and boning knives from the officers' mess."

He smiled grimly.

The ship gave a great lurch to port, a dire screeching protest arising deep within her metal innards. Both the captain and her senior NCO, long accustomed to the sea's arbitrary moods, reacted without conscious thought, adjusting their balance. A few younger sailors were caught off-guard and thrown into the men and women standing around them. The emergency lighting flickered for a few seconds, and the sounds of battle hung suspended before ramping up again with seemingly increased ferocity. Anderson glanced at the group in the armory. "Recommendations?" she asked.

Conroy pursed his lips for the shortest moment before speaking. "We're fighting blind. We have no idea where these guys came from, what they're bringing to the game, what sort of reserve they have. Be good to get someone topside to take a look, since the sensors are kaput. Got to figure it's going to be pretty fucking nasty up there, though, probably nonviable without a suit. Even then, I'd send two.

"We got five sets of reactive left. I'd put them on Snellgrove, Palfreyman, Paterson, Sessions, and Nix. The first three have completed the basic boarding course, so they've been trained. Nix ran with a pretty rough crew in LA, before the judge made him an offer he couldn't refuse. And Sessions did three years with the Wyoming National Guard, tour of Malaysia, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts."

Anderson smiled wearily. "I remember. I spoke to him when he first came on board. Said he'd had his fill of crazy ragheads getting in his face. Okay. We'll take Clancy's team. Get Sessions and Nix topside for a quick look, then straight back to me with a report. They can link up with Reilly in the chopper bay and take point for them on A deck. Send the other suits down to C with half a dozen standard kits, flaks, shotguns, helmets. Chief Borghino will decide on distribution from his available personnel.

"Send two shotguns down to engineering, but load them with jelly bags and pull everyone else out. Seal that section. Everybody outside of engineering packs ceramic rounds, powder puffs. We've got real problems in the missile bays. I don't know why we're not all pleading our case with Saint Peter right now. So let's not push our luck."

"Aye, Captain," Conroy said before turning his head slightly to shout into the armory. "You heard the woman. Ammo check now. Ceramics only. No penetrator or flechette rounds. We've got sick missiles on the forward decks."

"One step ahead of you, Chief," Clancy called in reply. The three specialists made the last adjustments to their body armor, each turning slowly as his buddies tightened a Velcro strap here or snugged down a ballistic pad there. The suits, which looked like padded SWAT coveralls, came out of their lockers a dark charcoal color, but after a few minutes they began to change, taking on a slightly reddish hue, as they reacted to the ship's emergency lighting. While the three men worked quickly to prepare themselves, the suits drank up the kinetic energy of their sharp body movements, and the adaptive camouflage reaction accelerated.

Within two minutes the superdense intelligent matrix of monobonded carbon nanotubes that gave the coveralls their padded look was fully powered up. The team's Remington G4s were each loaded with sixty rounds of 33mm caseless ceramic, and each man was carrying another three hundred rounds in strip form. Being specialist boarders, they were all neck-chipped, and as they strapped into their powered combat goggles and helmet, a micronet was activated, biolinking Clancy, Cobb, and Brown to their suit systems, and to each other.

They then supervised the "B team" gear-up, hurrying Sessions, Nix, and the others through their preparations.

Captain Anderson, tightening an old Kevlar vest and checking the load on a Glock, struggled against a small spasm of rodentlike panic that had begun twisting inside her chest. Too long. They were taking way too long, and her people were dying because of it. The terrible sound of human combat was drawing closer.

"Okay," she said, forcefully but not too loudly, when the last of the weapons had been handed out and all the armed sailors had their instructions. On the other decks, in the chopper bay, and down below in the main mess on C deck, men and women peered into flexipads, their own or a shipmate's. Anderson spoke mostly to the crew around her, but occasionally she also looked directly into the minicam on her own flexipad.

"I can't tell you exactly what's going on," she said, "because I have no goddamn idea. But we're going to find out who's been messing with us, and then there'll be a reckoning. I can promise you that."

"Damn right," growled Chief Conroy.

"Something hit us a short time ago. We've lost power to the CIC and most of the sensors and combat systems. We've had no communication with the rest of the task force, but we have to assume they're fighting their own battles. We're calling for assistance. Maybe it gets here, maybe not. The best we can do to help is to regain control of this ship. We have hostile forces on board. I don't know how they got here or what they have planned, but our plans are simple. We're gonna kill them before they kill us."

You go down to the sea for your living and you'll see some god-awful strange things.

It seemed only weeks ago that Evans had watched the Rising Sun snapping from the staff at the fore of the USS Astoria as she steamed into Yokohama Harbor, escorted by the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyers Sagiri, Hibiki, and Akatsuki. Those very same ships were now committed to sinking her.

The mission to Japan had been a diplomatic one, the Astoria serving as a seaborne hearse, ferrying home the ashes of Japan's former ambassador to the United States, the late Hirosi Saito. She had even exchanged a twenty-one-gun salute with the Japanese light cruiser Kiso, the opening movement of an interminable train of ceremony and extravagant hospitality. None of that had had the slightest effect, though, on their hosts' intense preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Still, he thought, you don't often see something as fantastic as that. The senior officer on the USS Astoria-the surviving senior officer, he corrected himself-stared through the shattered glass of the bridge and tried to force himself to accept what he found there. His mind, however, was as numb as his left arm, which hung limp and useless, dripping blood, contributing marginally to the killing-floor ambience of the ruined bridge.