"Okay, then, we don't assume anything. What about Spruance's group? How badly are they hurting?"

Mike Judge flicked a glance at Dan Black and sucked in through his teeth with a hiss. "We fucked them three ways from Sunday, Admiral, if you'll pardon my French. Three cruisers are gone, the Yorktown, and the Hornet. That's more than seven, eight thousand dead, right there. They got maybe another thousand dead on the destroyers, five sunk, two going down right now. We can't rightly say anything about final casualty figures yet. They don't have any implants here."

Judge sounded morose. There was nothing Kolhammer could say in mitigation. He felt as awful as the executive officer looked and sounded. Curtis and Black were even more subdued. Although they stood near the center of the room, nobody looked directly at them.

"Okay, Mike," said Kolhammer. "For now we can only take the first steps. Search and rescue. Care for the wounded. How's that going?"

Judge stared out the blast windows as he answered. "Doc Francois over on the Kandahar is in charge of that, Admiral. We lost Preston when the liquid oxygen went up. She's the senior surgeon now. She's organized triage for both forces. We're taking the worst on our ships because we have the best facilities. The locals are doing what they can. They've got some of our medics on their ships now."

"And how's that working out?"

"No problems yet, but it's early. There is one other issue, of course."

Kolhammer rubbed his neck. "Midway," he sighed.

Black and Curtis stiffened.

"You told us you'd stand down any threat," Black reminded him.

"Admiral Spruance does want to know what we're going to do about it," said Judge, "since we pretty much crippled his ability to act."

"Do we know where the Japs should be at this point?" asked Kolhammer.

Judge leaned over a touch screen and danced his fingers across the surface. The lines and creases in his weathered face seemed unnaturally deep in dim red light of the flag bridge. Ensign Curtis shook his head in wonder as dozens of icons moved around the screen under the officer's fingers, sometimes opening out into windows full of scrolling text and numbers, sometimes expanding into pictures of men and women in various uniforms.

"I scanned the crew records," said Judge, as he pulled the files. "I took a couple of history majors off other duties, set them to work on the archives tracking the progress of the Japanese according to the books."

A screen next to Judge filled up with a map of the Pacific. The relative positions of the Japanese and American fleets were recorded from June 1 through June 7, 1942.

"The Nemesis arrays already have a good lock on a large body closing from the west, exactly where Admiral Nagumo should be at this time."

"When's the first strike due?"

Judge checked the flexipad. "At zero eight hundred hours on June third-that's today-the Second Carrier Striking Group under Admiral Kakuta will launch a diversionary attack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. At zero five fifty-three on June fourth, the radar station at Midway will pick up the first wave of attacking planes, which will be over the island from zero six thirty to zero six forty-three."

Kolhammer nodded, satisfied with small mercies. "Okay then. We have a day and a half until the main attack. Let's work up a plan for a strike on the carriers heading for Midway. If we can't get any planes off, we'll take them out with missiles.

"We'll need to discuss all this at fleet command level first. Schedule a conference for the soonest possible time, invite Spruance and whoever he needs to bring along. We can chopper them over here. But let's get the search and rescue finished first. And I'd best have a talk with the acting CO of the Siranui well before the general conference."

"That'd be Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. You want to laser-link to him or talk face-to-face?"

"I think we'd best meet in my quarters, man-to-man. Show some respect."

"I think he'd appreciate that, Admiral," said Mike Judge. "He's likely to find it scarce around these parts for a long time."

Lieutenant Commander Black said nothing.

Captain Margie Francois paused for the first time in two and a half hours. It was just a moment's break.

As chief combat surgeon of the Eighty-second MEU, her first priority had been to get her own medical staff back online, then the Kandahar's defensive sysops, then the ship's most critical naval personnel and the 3 Batt staff officers.

Then the casualties began to arrive, some caused by the Transition, like the kitchen hand suffering third-degree burns from collapsing onto a gas oven, and a marine who'd gone headfirst down a hatch between decks, breaking his spine. Shortly after that, the first shells had hit the ship, and her real work had begun, patching up torn and broken bodies.

There was no real lull between that and the arrival of the first survivors from Spruance's task force. The newcomers had filled all one hundred beds in the Kandahar's hospital, and still they came; burns, amputations, compound fractures, split skulls, crushed limbs, ripped torsos. Hundreds of men had swallowed oil, some had lungs half full of contaminated seawater. Many screamed, some moaned quietly. The hospital smelled of charred flesh, blood, shit, and fear. When an orderly handed her a tube of chilled fruit pulp the contrast between the sweet, fresh taste and the charnel house atmosphere of the ward came as a smack in the face.

A brief sense of dislocation took hold, and she stopped for a few seconds to observe the scene.

So, she thought without allowing herself any real feeling, this is what it looks like for the other guy.

"Captain? Captain Francois, ma'am?"

The voice dragged her back into the world.

"We're starting to run low on burn gel, ma'am. It's not critical yet. But it will be soon enough, if we keep running through it at this rate."

Francois looked at the intern. "Thanks for the snack. It helped."

"Ma'am?"

"Yeah, I know, the goddamn burn gel. Can't be helped, Ensign. It's there to be used. You know the principles of triage. That's all you need to worry about for now."

"Yes, ma'am."

The young man saluted and hurried away.

"Captain?"

Francois turned toward the deep bass of Colonel Jones's voice, acknowledging him with a tired salute.

"You need anything down here, Doc?" he asked.

"Some answers would be good," she said a touch bitterly. "Failing that, more burn gel and vat tissue. We're going to need plenty of both."

Jones rubbed his shaved head in frustration. "How many of our people are down?" he asked, meaning the battalion.

"Sixty-two dead," she replied without hesitating. "Another fifty-three wounded. Mostly from blast effects, but a few were just unlucky. Happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"At the Transition point?"

"If that's what we're calling it, yeah."

A man lying in a bed nearby suddenly howled like a wounded animal. Francois hurried over, reaching him before anyone else. His uniform had been stripped so there was no way of telling to whom he belonged by just looking at him. A quick scan with a sensor wand told her he had no inserts, which meant he almost certainly came off an old ship. A transmitter node on the bed beamed his data to her flexipad: Leading Seaman Murray Belknap, one broken hip, seven broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and second-degree burns to 15 percent of his body. A trauma team arrived as she finished reading his slate.

"We got him, Captain," one of them shouted.

Jones took Francois by the arm and steered her away.

"Let them work, Margie. You've trained them well. Give them some room. You can't lay hands on everybody who comes in. You got the bigger picture to keep you up nights."