Lieutenant Commander Peter Evans, using his good hand to brace himself, stared fixedly forward, to where the sinister-looking bow of the enemy ship neatly sliced through his own vessel. Perhaps if he focused more intently, really, really bored in, the mirage would vanish and the Astoria's two forward gun mounts would reappear. And the slurry of warm human gore lapping at his ankles would…

Fuck it.

Evans had been spared by his legendary clumsiness, tripping and painfully turning his ankle as he leapt from his bunk when the attack began. The delay in reaching the bridge had saved his life. Everyone in there had died, shredded from the waist up by a firestorm from some kind of hellish machine gun that occasionally popped out of the enemy vessel like an evil jack-in-the-box. Evans had tripped a second time when he charged into the ruined bridge and slipped on the bloody mess. A random stray round had shattered his forearm as he struggled to his feet, gagging in disgust.

As if watching himself from outside, he balled up a fist and drove a short, sharp punch into his wounded arm. Again. And again. By the third blow he had battered through the anesthesia of shock, replacing it with a terrible shooting pain, which had the utility, if nothing else, of jolting him out of numbness and inaction.

His first response was combative. He raised fire control for the rear gun turrets and had the barrels depressed as far as possible. Then he gave the order that would unload three shells at point-blank range into the stern of the ship that had attacked his own.

He watched from a lookout platform, which was freckled with thousands of thumb-sized holes. The barrels swung about with excruciating slowness, and he couldn't even be sure they would come to bear, given the angle at which the two ships were locked together. When the turret would turn no farther, Evans limped back inside as quickly as he could, snatched up the interphone, and snapped out the order to fire.

The roar of the great cannon filled the whole world, the bark of Satan's own hellhound. Gouts of flame leapt out into the churning V-shaped gap between the ships. A shock wave flattened the waters there. In a microsecond the three high-explosive shells covered the distance between the mouth of the guns and their target. A geyser of green flame vented out of a huge fissure in the stern of the enemy ship.

But as Lieutenant Commander Evans yelled into the interphone, demanding a full broadside by everything that could be brought to bear-the eight-inch turrets, a battery of five-inch mounts, and all of the portside machine guns and AA stations-a curious thing happened. His voice trailed off as he saw two German storm troopers emerge through a hatch on the small finlike bridge of the enemy ship.

He shook his head to clear it. After all, they weren't the weirdest thing he'd seen tonight.

"Fire!" he ordered.

Lieutenant Reilly, the Leyte Gulf's met boss, was a good officer because he understood his own limits. He was a weatherman, a really excellent weatherman, if you wanted to know. Captain Anderson had learned that his forecasts often ran two or three days ahead of the bulletins coming out of Fleet, back in Pearl. On occasion, he was seemingly so prescient it was spooky. His small staff on the Leyte Gulf used to joke that he could make a butterfly flap its wings, and start a hurricane on the other side of the world.

But Lieutenant Reilly was lost when it came to small-unit counterboarding operations. It just wasn't his gig, and he was quietly very relieved when Seamen Sessions and Nix checked in on his flexipad to report that they were going topside for a quick look, after which they would report to him to commence clearing A deck forward of the chopper bays.

Reilly planned to give them very general orders when they arrived, basically reiterating anything the captain had said. After that, the two specialists would have a free hand to deploy the available forces as they saw fit. Reilly had no intention of micromanaging close-quarter combat.

Until Sessions and Nix turned up, however, there was plenty to be done. He'd collected nearly two dozen sailors on his way to the hangar, sorted them into four teams according to specialty. They were gathered in front of the Gulf's pair of Sea Comanche helicopters, spectral figures looming in the faint wine-darkness of emergency lighting. Reilly had ordered the men to switch off their flexipads, lest the glowing screens make them better targets outside the safety of the hangar. Only his still shone, and he had dulled the screen to minimum brightness. Even so, he moved about within a small pearl of dim radiance as he inspected his men and women.

They were all fitted out from the air division arsenal. Most had basic body armor, and each team could boast at least one cross-trained medic. Reilly didn't bother trying to whip them into a blood frenzy. It wasn't his style and everyone knew it. Instead he passed quietly from one sailor to the next, checking weapons loads, tightening straps, providing a little encouragement where it seemed needed. It was hard for them, sealed up in the rear of the ship, with no idea what was happening. They could all tell from the Gulf's strange motion that something more than just a firefight was under way.

"We going to be getting busy soon, won't we, sir?" a young woman asked him as he handed her another magazine of 5.56mm from the canvas pouch he had slung around his neck.

"Busy enough for government work," said Reilly. An instant later the world wrenched itself inside out with a cataclysmic eruption of white light and thunder.

The hull of the Leyte Gulf was composed of a relatively thin, radar-absorbent, foamed-composite skin. Her designers hadn't engineered her to withstand point-blank volleys of large-bore, high-explosive gunfire. Such things just didn't happen in their world. Unfortunately for the sailors in the hangar of the Leyte Gulf, they had left that world behind.

One of the shells fired from the Astoria skimmed just over the plasteel safety rail at the very rear of the Gulf's largely flat, featureless deck. Another shell clipped that rail and exploded, most of its destructive force washing harmlessly across armored carbon plate. But the third struck the trailing edge of the stern itself, detonating squarely against the foamsteel sheeting.

The blast tore through the Leyte Gulf's thin sheath of armor and into the hangar. The helicopter sitting nearest to the impact exploded, setting off fuel and ammunition all over the bay. At least half of Reilly's small command died at that moment. A few, including the meteorologist himself, were saved by the chaotic swirls of the blast wave as it traveled through the complex geometry of the crowded space. But the second volley killed them all.

A savage din deafened the two counterboarding specialists before they had even made the open deck of the Leyte Gulf. The roar of the big guns, the detonation on the ship's stern, the eruption of fuel and munitions in the chopper bay all followed so quickly as to form one enormous avalanche of sound. It blocked out, for just a moment, the constant wail and shriek of alarms and sirens, the intermittent crash of small-arms fire, and the confused shouts and screams from the forward decks.

Sessions and Nix braced themselves against the bulkhead on either side of the hatchway that led to the deck. As they were about to push out, a stream of fifty-caliber tracers struck the carbon-composite armor outside, sounding like a jackhammer. The men exchanged a glance, waited for a second, shrugged and dived through the exit.

Another burst of tracer fire slammed into Sessions's chest, throwing him back through the hatch as if he had been punched by a giant fist. Had he not been wearing body armor he would have died instantly. But the three rounds struck ballistic plate, stopping them dead-and beneath that pliable ceramic shield a thick, reactive matrix of nanotubes and buckyball gel pulsed and shed most of the kinetic energy. Enough remained, however, to throw the seaman through the air, and he thumped into the metal bulkhead inside the hatch before sliding to the ground, unconscious but alive.