"It was Hogan, sir," said one of the sailors, poking at the oddity with a screwdriver. "He was going to the john."

"Probably to beat off," somebody added unnecessarily.

Evans heard another burst of gunfire over the clamor of the crowded bunkroom.

"You said we've found a way through, Chief. Where is it?" Evans asked, deciding for the moment to ignore the bizarre tableau.

"Just over here. If you wanna follow me, Commander."

They left the ghoulish circle of onlookers to ponder the riddle of Hogan's boot. A little farther on, just past a hammock containing the lower half of a naked torso, projecting from the same steel wall, the smooth regularity of the obstacle failed and gave way to a section of buckled and torn armor plating. A fissure some three to four feet wide had been opened by the titanic stresses generated when two objects of such great mass had fused together and tried to plow on, regardless of their new and decidedly inefficient design.

The steel groaned and screamed in protest. Evans fancied he saw it moving, like the edges of flesh around a sucking chest wound. It was even darker in there, the blackness relieved only by a faint red shift that called forth childlike fears of the Beyond. As Lieutenant Commander Evans stepped toward the rift between two worlds, he shivered like a small boy stepping into the forbidden forest.

Lieutenant Commander Black ran from the flag radio room back past flag plot and hammered up the stairwell onto the bridge. Captain Murray, the Enterprise CO, had joined Spruance and was directing air operations-which is to say, he was sending a lot of good men to their deaths.

Bombing six, under Lieutenant Dick Best, consisted of nineteen Dauntless dive-bombers, none of whom had ever launched from a carrier at night. Nine of the old barges had already gone into the drink at takeoff. Six more were destroyed in flight by misdirected friendly fire. And four were awaiting clearance to take off.

Lieutenant Commander Black, two years out of flight ops, could only watch mutely, wondering what those remaining pilots felt as they sat in their cockpits, waiting to open the throttles and accelerate down the darkened flight deck. If, by some miracle, they got away to make a run on the enemy, none of them could realistically expect to survive a return trip and landing under these conditions.

The bridge was preternaturally quiet, in contrast with the scene on the waters around them.

Black moved up beside Spruance. The tension in the small, hard space demanded that he, too, speak in a taut whisper.

"Commander Jolley on the New Orleans is trying to establish gunnery control across the task force, sir. I tried to reach Admiral Smith on the Astoria, but they're out of action."

"They've been hit?"

"Rammed, it seems."

Spruance's jaw tightened.

"Well, they'll have to look after themselves. I need all the firepower I can get turned on the Japs. We can't spare anyone to go help them out."

Staring out into the night, Black was momentarily transfixed by a bath of flat, white light. Two nearby cruisers had unleashed a coordinated broadside at the spectral figure of the Japanese ship, the Siranui. As the thunder of the guns hit them, he felt the detonation inside his chest, profound and imponderable.

Spruance quickly brought a pair of spyglasses up to his eyes to check the results. Black, like most of the others in the room, had to peer unaided into the fractured darkness. The target seemed trapped within a volcanic eruption of white water and fire as dozens of high-explosive shells raked at the waves around her. A coarse, unforgiving cheer rose from a dozen men at the evidence of a single explosion, a distant bud of fire quite different in texture from those shots that had fallen harmlessly into the sea.

"Looks like a hit on the bridge," Spruance said without feeling.

An ensign reported in. "Admiral, VB-six just got their last two away, and the Hornet says she has three Devastators up."

The cruisers fired in tandem again, with the same flashbulb effect, followed by the same, tremendous sonic boom. That must be what it sounds like in front of an avalanche, just before you die, thought Black.

"Holy shit!" someone shouted.

A fantastic cascade of violent light and fire instantly obliterated a great crescent of the night. It was as though a vast arc of space had ignited and set off every shell fired by the two warships. Eighteen armor-piercing eight-inch shells, and nearly as many high-explosive five-inch rounds, detonated simultaneously just a few hundered yards from the muzzles of the guns that had fired them. To the men looking on from the bridge of the Enterprise, it seemed as though the barrage had struck an invisible wall.

"What the hell was that?" Spruance demanded.

"It's like they hit something," said Black. "No way could the whole salvo misfire. It just… It couldn't happen."

The staccato flickering of massed naval gunfire was suddenly overwhelmed by a burst of light. Twin lines of white fire and smoke rose vertically from the source of that flare on the deck of the Siranui.

Unknown fires, Black thought to himself.

The strange eruption, which held every man there in its thrall, sent those two slender pyres arcing so high into space that Black wondered for a second if they might just keep going until they left the atmosphere on their way into the cold vacuum of heaven.

A nervous, insistent voice piped up and broke the spell.

"Admiral Spruance, sir? Please? They're rockets, sir! You have to get those ships moving. They're going to get hit for sure!"

"What's that?" Spruance turned sharply toward the source of the comment, finding there a young pencil-necked ensign with thick black-framed reading glasses, the same one who had just run in with the message from the radio room.

"Ensign Curtis, sir. They're rockets. I'm sure of it and they're aimed at the cruisers, Admiral."

"You seem damn sure of yourself, Ensign," Spruance said.

Dan Black recognized the dangerous tone in the old man's voice. Another officer, Commander Beanland, stepped around a map table and shouted at Curtis.

"That'll be enough of your nonsense, Ensign. Get the hell off the bridge and back to your post. We're trying to fight a battle up here."

The boy reacted as though Beanland had jammed an electric wire into his neck. He went rigid and turned white. "Sir!" he barked out, snapping a salute and making to turn on his heel. Black thought Spruance was about to stop him, ask him to explain further-the kid had seemed righteous in his certainty. But before the admiral could properly open his mouth to speak, before Curtis could even complete his about-face, the blinding white light of a newborn sun spilled out with a roar for the end of the world.