In Lieutenant Commander Black's opinion, something traveling that fast-if it was built solid, it'd punch right through a battleship.

And sure enough, he'd have sworn the New Orleans actually rocked on her axis when the thing struck her. All ten thousand tons of her. Just before that globe of silent white light ballooned outward from the impact point and swallowed up the whole ship.

That was when he knew they were all going to die.

Kolhammer ran his eyes over the screens in front of him and the firestorm lighting the darkness outside. They were in battle. He had no idea with whom and over what. But men and women were dying by the thousands if the flatscreen reports and the evidence of the night outside were to be believed. The deck of the Clinton was aflame, reminding him of the oil fires he'd witnessed in all of the Gulf Wars.

"Any word on Captain Chandler?" Kolhammer asked Commander Judge, knowing the answer before the ship's executive officer spoke.

Judge checked both his flexipad and a workstation, with his mouth fixed in a grim line. He confirmed what the admiral had feared.

"He's gone, sir, along with everybody on the flight deck and another six hundred here and there. It's your ship, Admiral."

None of the men or women on the bridge turned from their stations, but Kolhammer felt the weight of their expectations fall on him. Their lives were now in his hands.

"Lieutenant Brooks." He addressed the CIC boss, who was looking much less bilious, thanks to the Promatil flush. "Give it to me quick and dirty. Force status and enemy disposition. Mike, give me ship status when the lieutenant's finished."

Judge began to gather damage reports from the carrier's various departments while Kolhammer watched Brooks's hands flying over her touch screen. The young woman's face was impassive, although Kolhammer guessed her mind and heart would be racing.

"We're still out of contact with our subs, Admiral. Sensors can't find Chicago or Denver anywhere. Garrett, Vanguard, Dessaix, Sutanto, Nuku, and Nagoya are also still missing. There's no available datum point indicating those ships have been sunk. They're just missing. The Leyte Gulf isn't responding. Drone surveillance indicates counterboarding operations are under way. Fearless has been destroyed."

Brooks allowed herself a quick, rueful expression at that before continuing.

"The Kandahar has taken some fire and reports a torpedo strike. The damage is serious but contained. Eighty-six confirmed KIA. Moreton Bay reports multiple hits. The Siranui has suffered a major impact on her bridge. Captain Okada is dead, along with his exec and five other officers. Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki has assumed control and authorized the CI to respond at Level One. The Havoc is undetected and has launched one Type Ninety-two heavy torpedo, killing the boat that torpedoed us."

Kolhammer nodded. He'd been certain the Havoc had sunk that ship. At least he'd gotten that right, he thought dolefully, as Brooks spoke again.

"Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we're running through our defensive stocks at an unsustainable rate. There's just too much incoming. We're taking it out, but if it keeps up at this pace we'll have exhausted Metal Storm within another seven minutes. The laser pods will be okay for another ten, but they'll need to power down pretty shortly after that. All other force elements are reporting the same. The Moreton Bay has already run through her stock of MS munitions. Trident has taken up a position shepherding her, but they're getting hungry, too."

"Thank you, Lieutenant. I'll take it under consideration," he said. "What can you tell me about who we're fighting?"

Brooks's air of detachment faltered at that.

"I can't with any certainty, sir. They're not returning any signatures from our combatant database. Their signals and electronic profiles don't match anything Chinese or Indian or even Islamic Republic. Weapons suites are… well, Stone Age. That was a dumb iron bomb we got hit with topside before."

"Delivery system?"

"I'm streaming video from the topside cams and drones. It's a museum piece."

Three windows opened up on screen. Each carried low-light-amplified footage from various angles showing an old propeller-driven monoplane nosing down a few thousand feet over the Clinton's flight deck. The acid level in Kolhammer's stomach rose painfully, leaving a sour taste at the back of his throat. He understood Brooks's reluctance to make a call on the attacker's ID. But he recognized it immediately.

As a twelve-year-old boy he'd built a plastic model of a Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber. It had taken young Phillip Kolhammer three months to save the money needed to buy that kit. It took him weeks of work, getting every detail right, the flush-riveted stretched-skin wing covering; the Wright R-1820-52 nine-cylinder radial air-cooled engine; the painting inside the cutaway aluminum alloy fuel tanks. Two center-section seventy-five-gallon tanks, as he recalled, and another two fifty-five-gallon outer wing tanks. He'd done such a good job on it, taken such serious, professional care, that his father, a career coastguardsman, bought him another model kit as a reward.

He sat, staring at the screen as the vision looped back on itself. A Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber.

"Admiral?" Commander Judge laid a hand on his shoulder, just lightly. "Admiral. Captain Halabi's on laser link. I think you'd better take the call. They've been running analysis a few minutes longer than us."

"Thanks, Mike," he croaked, dragging his eyes away from the replay. Outside, the battle continued. As he turned to Karen Halabi's attractive face, which occupied almost all of a single monitor on his left, three violent blooms of light and fire marked the destruction of a volley of incoming shells just a few hundred meters from the carrier's bow. A shower of hot shrapnel pattered onto the flight deck, but it didn't matter. All human life had ended out there a few minutes earlier.

"Captain. Please report."

"Thank you, Admiral." The British officer looked unhappy. "They're Americans, Admiral. We've been killing American sailors. And they've been trying to kill us."

"How?" he asked, finding himself increasingly exasperated, but not disbelieving her. The plane in the looped video. He couldn't shake the image.

"I don't know how. I really have no idea. But we've had six minutes more than you to get over the neural effect-" Kolhammer noted that she didn't call it an attack. "-We shared data with the Havoc, and we can't get past the fact. They're American. Old Americans."

"What do you mean, Captain?"

Captain Halabi wasn't known for her delicacy. She didn't soften the blow now.

"We've positively identified eight major combatants, cross-matched drone footage with archival data, and cataloged enough signals intelligence to confirm the theory. We're firing on Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen, out of Pearl Harbor, bound for Midway Atoll, originally under the command of Admiral Frank Fletcher, now led by Admiral Ray Spruance. Fletcher was on the USS Yorktown. It's been destroyed."

Halabi was neither belligerent nor challenging. She could have been war-gaming at Staff College for all the emotion she invested in her delivery. Kolhammer couldn't help but sneak a quick peek at the cam coverage of the dive-bomber again.

"Any proof?" he said.

It was as if she had been waiting for the question. The screen carrying her face split into four windows. She occupied the top right corner. The other three cycled through a selection of images, real-time video of World War II-vintage cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, churning up a maelstrom of foam at their sterns as they maneuvered frantically-and all too frequently in vain-while attempting to outrun a supercavitating torpedo or combat mace. Kolhammer's nausea returned as he watched a destroyer die inside a small cyclone of ballistic munitions. The image rewound and the ship reintegrated itself as torrents of white fire were sucked back into the decks and superstructure. The vision froze, and the other two windows cycled through a series of still photographs of the same vessel.