The pictures, culled from files across Fleetnet, had been taken on a number of different occasions, more than eighty years earlier.

As Kolhammer sat quietly, Halabi repeated the performance with four other ships. Three destroyers and one cruiser. There was no doubt. They were sinking these very ships. But how? No, that question would have to wait.

"We have extensive intercepts," said Halabi. "Ship-to-ship. Aircraft in-flight. Internal communications."

"Okay," said Kolhammer. "Make it quick."

A sound channel opened and an avalanche of American voices spilled out. They sounded subtly different from the voices he was used to hearing around him, but regardless he listened as men begged for information, for ammunition. For God's help. The raw fear, the crash of gunfire, and the animalistic sounds of human beings contending in blood were all intimately familiar to Phillip Kolhammer. The traffic was genuine. He could feel it in his gut. Then, for the first time since the world had gone insane, he had a single, quiet thought.

The Nagoya.

"Shit," he spat quietly.

"Sir?" said Mike Judge.

"Later. Commander, get this out now, fleetwide. All offensive systems are to go offline immediately."

"Offline. Acknowledged."

"CIs to retain autonomy for point defense only. All units to maneuver for defensive fire support. Have the CIs work it out, and we'll coordinate through Little Bill. We'll need to put the Siranui at our center."

"Aye, sir."

"Captain Halabi, I'll have to get back to you. Please stand by. Lieutenant Brooks, get me the comm boss."

The freckled face of Lieutenant Stuart Glover filled the window where Karen Halabi had just been resident.

"Lieutenant, open up a line with one of the ships we've encountered. I need to talk to Admiral Ray Spruance on the USS Enterprise."

Before the young man could protest, Kolhammer held up the palm of his hand.

"I know. I know. Lieutenant Brooks will brief you. But later. I need this done yesterday. Just make it happen."

"Aye, sir," he answered unsurely.

Mike Judge was staring at him as though he'd lost his mind. Kolhammer reopened his channel to Halabi, and thanked her grimly. She signed off to attend to her own problems.

"Damage reports," said Kolhammer. "The lite version."

"Seven hundred and thirty dead, three hundred wounded, about half of them critically. We've lost all the catapults, with heavy damage to the aircraft tied down outboard of number one. Eighteen Raptors totally trashed, and another two can only be salvaged for parts. Four torpedo strikes, but only one detonated. The inner hull retained its integrity but there's a big fucking mess needs cleaning up

Halon gas and ammonium dihydrogen phosphate dust had smothered the flames in the chopper bay and asphyxiated any lingering survivors of Lieutenant Reilly's temporary command. Specialist Nix scanned the room twice, but failed to get even a phantom return from a single biochip. Everybody was dead. He estimated the gaping maw in the portside bulkhead at maybe ten feet across. The hole gave him a window on the battle outside. As Nix waved his flexipad back and forth one last time, scanning for life signs, a small supernova dawned on the horizon. His combat goggles adjusted to filter out the blinding, incandescent light of a subnuclear warhead. Fanged shadows stretched out across the charnel house floor of the hangar.

Nix spun out of the hatchway, dragging the waterproof door closed behind him. It wouldn't seal properly. The ship had been wrenched too far out of shape. He abandoned the effort and hurried up the corridor. Sessions was only slowly coming to, still lying propped up where Nix had left him. He ran a quick check on his partner, zapped a message out to send a medic, and hurried on again.

A stairwell outside the mail center led all the way down to D deck, but Nix descended only as far as B before heading forward. He thought the decks were angled down a fraction. All that extra weight up front, and they were probably breached beneath the waterline, too. Though shipnet was supposed to track his position, he didn't trust it to be working properly and forewarn the other fire teams, so he yelled out every ten steps or so.

"Nix. Counterboarding. Coming through for Captain Anderson."

He nearly tripped over a dead sailor outside the main mess. Half her face was missing. A little farther on, her attacker-he assumed it was her attacker-had been chewed over by at least half a strip of caseless 33mm.

When ceramic ammunition entered an unprotected human body, it unfurled itself inside, expanding from a small, fantastically dense lozenge into something resembling a miniature thornbush composed of hundreds of semi-rigid razor tendrils. Ceramic rounds would chew right through Kevlar. Multiple impacts would even significantly degrade monobonded carbon. The effect on human beings, who were engineered nowhere near as well, was dramatic and deeply unpleasant. Above the waistline, most of the attacker had disintegrated into a fine pulp that now painted the corridor.

Nix had seen it before. He checked his pace so as not to slip in the liquid waste, but gave it no heed beyond that. He soon came upon Ntini and McAllister, crouched down behind an upturned desk.

"Specialist Nix, coming through!" he yelled.

They risked a quick glance back, then waved him up.

His body armor afforded more protection than their barricade, but he crouched down to their level anyway. Twenty meters farther on a wall of wet, gray steel blocked the corridor. Three of his shipmates were sprawled promiscuously over each other just in front of it. Their blood had pooled beneath them, prevented from running down toward McAllister and Ntini by the slight dip of the ship's bow.

A man-sized opening had been blown through the iron curtain.

"How'd they do that?" asked Nix.

McAllister answered in a hoarse whisper.

"A shaped charge."

"Nice work. The captain in there?"

"You should be able to pick up her locator chip once you're inside. Head right for two minutes. It's a fucking mess like you wouldn't believe in there, but they're trailing tape. You should pick them up. Point-to-point's scratchy once you get in, so let them know you're coming up. They've been hit from behind twice already. Chris Gregory got wasted like that. Clancy blew him away when he popped up without warning."

"Got it."

Nix patted the shoulder of McAllister's old Kevlar vest and leapt the overturned table in one bound.

That's five now, she thought.

She'd lost five of her crew since stepping into this twisted nightmare, one of them to friendly fire.

"You okay?" she asked Clancy.

"Fine for now," he replied. "Wasn't his fault. Wasn't mine, either."

"That's right."

Captain Daytona Anderson knew the tremors and the nausea would come later for Clancy. Along with the guilt.

Couldn't be helped.

She repeated that mantra to herself, like a Zen koan meant to exhaust the intellect and prepare the mind for an intuitive response.

Because Christ knows, there's nothing for the rational mind to hold on to in here.

She was wedged into a crawl space created by the intersection of the Gulf's rail gun control room with what looked like an old galley of some sort. Her features creased as she contemplated the sight of two members of her own crew and five strangers who had… What, materialized?… inside each other, and within a Gordian knot of metal, plastic, and wooden fixtures.

The shooting, which had slackened off for a few minutes, picked up again. A few rounds ricocheted by her head, off a butcher block that had been fused with a flatscreen workstation, showering Anderson with splinters of wood and plastic. Clancy fired without hesitation. She had no idea what he was shooting at, but somebody screamed. Whoever it was almost cried out loud enough to cover the sick, ripping thud that was the signature note of a ceramic bullet striking unprotected flesh. Then another voice called out, but it was controlled and steady.