"Specialist Nix, coming through, Captain!"

Anderson checked her flexipad. It was working again. The screen displayed icons for the locator chips implanted in the necks of her crew within a twenty-meter radius.

Nix, Spec 3-010162820 was slowly picking his way forward.

Three hollow booms crashed painfully close to her ears. Clancy fired again, for the same result-a strangled scream and the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor.

"You might want to hold your fire," Nix called out. "We've got a big problem."

No shit? Anderson thought bitterly.

"Yeah, I know," said Nix. "I mean another problem."

The niggers and the broads were the least of their problems. And, really, not the most fucked-up thing he'd seen this morning. But for the life of him, Able Seaman Moose Molloy Jr. couldn't figure out what a bunch of niggers and broads were doing on board a Japanese warship.

They'd killed four of them now, two apiece. And lost a lot of their own in return. And yes, it was pretty weird that they'd only got one Jap that he knew of. But his daddy, the senior Moose, who'd walked a beat for thirty years with the Chicago PD, had taught him that your niggers and your wops and your Asiatic races simply couldn't be trusted. There wasn't a damn one of them you'd cross the street to piss on if their heart caught fire. And the broads were most likely sex slaves, he guessed. His buddy Slim Jim Davidson had read him a story from the newspaper about that-how the Japs were capturing white women in the Far East and turning them into camp whores. Made a man's blood boil just to think about those nasty little fuckers poking their weenies into God-fearing white women.

The newspaper, which had specialized in horse-racing tips and murder mysteries before the war, had been red hot on that topic-the so-called Japanese fighting man's anatomical shortcomings. Still, Moose thought, pencil dicks or not, they'd pay a heavy fucking price for sticking them into any woman who spoke English and knew enough to cross herself when she walked into a church.

Hell of a way to fight them, though. Moose Jr. was a big man, and these crawl spaces he was forced to squirm through were complicated enough to confuse a bona fide genius, which the Molloy family genes had conspicuously failed to produce so far. It was worse than any carnival maze he'd snuck into as a kid. Things just seemed to grow out of other things all around him. He could recognize pieces of the Astoria, but they were all tangled up with the bulkheads and deck plating and fixtures of this weird Jap ship. Not all smashed in together, like you'd get in the car wrecks his daddy had told him about, all crumpled metal and blood and torn-up bits of drivers and passengers. But flowing in and out of each other, smooth and easy as you please.

Or not so easy. If you were Hogan or Paddy White, or one of those other poor bastards had a big piece of armor plating, or a chair, or something suddenly pop out of their heads or ass.

Oftentimes he'd get himself bruised and half crushed worming his way around some obstacle, only to find he'd come to a dead end, trapped in a cranny created by the intersection of two impassable walls. Sometimes you could see good clear space, but it lay just beyond a gap too narrow for anyone but a stick figure to squeeze through. It was infuriating, was what it was. And dangerous, too. Old Chief Kelly got the back of his head blown out lingering too long at one such break in the maze. Moose Jr. didn't have no fancy education, but there were some things you picked up quick anyway. With Chief Kelly's brains splattered all over his graying sweat-stained T-shirt, Moose Jr. didn't mess around with no recon at places like that. He just stuck his rifle into the gap and let go a few rounds.

It was an old Springfield bolt action, which was a pain. He'd have given a month's pay for one of them new M1 Garands. Semiautomatic, gas-operated. Fired a.30-caliber round as quick as man could pull the trigger, according to Slim Jim. But a Springfield still made an agreeably large hole in a fellow, and Moose Jr. was almost certain he'd accounted for at least one of them untrustworthy Jap niggers with his.

A group of shots hammered at the far side of the bulkhead just in front of him. A Jap bulkhead, he was pretty sure. He'd been planning on darting around there in just a second, but the volley forced him back behind cover. He tasted that strange orange dust that floated away from the impact point whenever the nip rounds hit metal instead of flesh. Nips then, for sure. Goddamn if he wouldn't like to get a look at the guns they were using. Had to be some kind of secret weapon, the way they didn't seem to damage anything but human flesh. Apart from the smear of orange dust, they didn't leave no trace at all. Unless they got you in the arm or chest or full in the face like poor old Kelly. God-a-mighty they'd leave a hell of a mess then. Like nothing he'd ever seen-and the old man had let him sneak a peak at some crime scene photos once. Pictures of a freelance bootlegger machine-gunned by some of Al Capone's boys. A terrible sight, but nothing like the unholy meat salad laying where Chief Kelly's bald noggin had once sat.

"Moose! Moose! They Japs up there?"

"What d'you think, you moron?" he spat back at Willie Stolz, who wasn't worth a cup of cold spit in Moose Jr.'s considered opinion. It was a fair question, though. They'd shot some of their own by mistake in the dark tangle of groaning metal, spark showers, and venting steam.

"Moose! Moose!"

"Goddamn, Stolz, I'm trying to kill me some nip niggers up here."

"It's an officer, Moose!"

"What the fuck? I thought they was all dead."

"It's okay, sailor," grunted Commander Evans, who looked about a thousand miles from okay.

The snaking, tortured course through the labyrinth had been hard on Evans's injured ankle and arm. More than once he'd relied on Chief Mohr to push him through a cavity or cleft in the nearly impenetrable snarl of fused flesh and steel. They had made it through to the farthest point of advance, though, a relatively clear space formed by the confluence of an officer's washroom on the Astoria and some sort of science lab or something on the other ship. There was a light source somewhere in there, soft white light coming from within a toilet cubicle, the direct source of illumination blocked by a half-opened door occupying the same space as a desk. Evans didn't see how a desk lamp could still be lit; where would it be drawing power? But there were so many other questions arising out of the last fifteen minutes that he was learning to put the small stuff away in the chickenshit file.

"They through here?" he asked the sailor, a large fellow named Molloy.

He was about to peer through the small slit Molloy was guarding when a giant forearm slammed into his chest and drove him back against a washbasin. His broken arm flared in hot pain, and he started to gray out as Eddie Mohr grabbed him.

"Sorry, sir," said Molloy, "but those Japs can see in the dark, sir. You put your face up there and you're going to get it shot off, Commander."

Gunfire crashed in their ears every few seconds. Mostly single-shot rifle and pistol fire, but occasionally someone let rip with a tommy gun on full auto. You could hear the rounds striking dozens of different surfaces as they flew around within the disordered geometry of the combined shipspaces. Brass casings fell to the deck, ringing like a jar full of coins tipped onto a concrete floor. Fire came back at them, too. It sounded weird. Really loud, but there was never any ricochet. Just a peculiar sort of thudding pff when the bullets struck metal, or a sodden whack, like a baseball hitting a wet catcher's mitt, if they hit flesh. Seaman Molloy dipped his chin to point out the headless corpse of CPO Kelly, lying where the force of those odd bullets had thrown it.