The tanks throttled their engines again and regained Sanders’s attention. He raised his right hand in the universal sign to stop.

“Halt! You are entering private property. I need you to stop that vehicle immediately.”

The lead tank slowed and then stopped at the bottom of the ramp, just ten feet away. Sanders looked down and raised his voice, more confident now that he had established who was in charge.

“Good. Now, I don’t know what’s going on but you need to turn that vehicle around and get back on the ship… immediately.”

The engine belched smoke, and the tank suddenly bounded forward.

Seen on the screen of his phone, it looked like a symbolic act of bravery. In actuality, all Jakob could think about was running, running as fast as he could, to get out of the sixty-ton beast’s path. But his feet just wouldn’t move.

Captain Charles Carlisle was losing patience with his crew chief. In other words, it was just another day in paradise with a jet more finicky than his fiancée.

The 25 mm gun pod on his F-35B Lightning II fighter kept jamming after each helicopter-like vertical landing he performed. This was the fourth time this week, but no one could figure out why. The plane’s autonomic maintenance computers were supposed to point fingers at any gremlins, but adding more to the twenty-four million lines of software code already in there just proved Murphy’s Law beat Moore’s Law every time.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Worm,” said Miller, the civilian crew chief, using the call sign Carlisle had earned after losing his rations and living off worms during the survival-and-evasion phase of his pilot training. “I didn’t design these planes; I just fix ’em.”

Worm shook his head. He’d never gotten why the Marine Corps put the world’s best pilots in the cockpits of the world’s most expensive weapons system only to turn maintenance over to the lowest bidder.

Worm was about to offer another round of profane observations about what $1.5 trillion ought to buy — like, for instance, a working gun — but then he held his breath and listened. Weird. A series of bass-like thumps. Then he heard the buzzing of rotors. It came from the direction of Pearl and moved toward the air station located on the Mokapu Peninsula. The blood drained from the aviator’s face when he saw the flight of choppers and tiny quadcopter drones.

“Get the fuel hose off, now!” Worm shouted.

The crew chief was about to argue when he tracked the pilot’s gaze and saw the formation of incoming choppers. Miller looked old, but he was down on the ground before the first wave of rockets hit the hangar complex on the other side of the 7,800-foot runway.

“Miller, up! Get up!” shouted Worm.

Lying prone, Miller watched four of the quadcopters dive and attack a communications tower at the end of the runway. Just before the V1000s launched a volley of micro-rockets, they flared back into formation, which made them look like Xs on a fiery tic-tac-toe board.

“I’m on it!” said Miller. You could question his competence, but you couldn’t fault the man’s bravery, thought Worm.

As the two men worked to pull the fuel line from the F-35, Miller spoke between panting breaths.

“Chinese?” he said.

“Does it matter?” said Worm. “Get me up there, and I’ll send a few down here for you to pick through and find out.”

They could see the drone helicopters methodically working their way across the base’s hangar buildings, hitting one aircraft after the other. That they remained in an X formation the whole time made the attack seem all the more menacing. A few Marines shot rifles at them, only to be taken out by rocket fire from above. Fortunately, Worm’s F-35B, like its predecessor the Harrier jump jet, didn’t need to approach the killing field of the runway. The aircraft had a shaft-driven fan in the middle of its fuselage that could lift the plane into the air like a helicopter, after which the plane’s main jet engine would push it forward with over forty thousand pounds of thrust.

The tradeoff of packing a second engine in the middle of the plane was that the Marine version of the F-35 couldn’t carry as much payload, but Worm’s jet would be flying with a light load anyway. The good news was that the training exercise they had been prepping for was a live-fire drill. The bad news was it was for close air support, so he was loaded with only dummy air-to-air missiles and a gun pod he couldn’t trust.

Worm clambered into the cockpit and looked down at Miller, the top half of his head encased in a heads-up-display visor-and-helmet combination that looked like a bug’s carapace. He shouted and pointed at the jet’s fuselage: “The gun? The gun?”

Miller scrambled up the ladder to the cockpit and leaned in close enough to Worm that he could smell the sharp stink of sweat mixed with jet fuel. “Maybe a hundred rounds before it jams,” he shouted. Shit. At the machine cannon’s rate of fire, that was possibly three seconds’ worth of shooting.

Worm gave a quick look at the plane’s cockpit screens to make sure the aircraft was running the preflight checks. At least something was working as it should.

For a second, maybe two, Worm allowed himself to think of his fiancée. She’d be out surfing about now, working off some of the dark energy her dreams often left her with. They were supposed to meet at the Moana Surfrider hotel that night for a drink. She hadn’t told him which of the bars she’d be in, though; she never did. He would have to find her, and then they would sip mai tais and fantasize about what it would be like to get married there. He had promised her a fairy-tale ending to her story.

The image was dashed as the canopy closed down. Worm flashed a thumbs-up to the crew chief below and mouthed a word.

Payback.

An antitank rocket fired from a nearby freighter hit the USS Gabrielle Giffords, moored nearby. It was unnecessary; the Giffords was already taking on water from an explosion below the water line, as were most of the U.S. Navy warships in the harbor.

“Is ATHENA online yet?” shouted Captain Riley. The Automated Threat Enhanced Network Awareness program was like the ship’s nervous system, tying together sensors and network nodes with software that was as close to artificial intelligence as the Navy would permit aboard a warship. The ship’s autonomous battle-management system allowed a shorthanded ship like the Coronado to track targets and coordinate with other forces faster than a human crew could manage.

“Almost ready,” said one of the crew. “It’s still booting up.”

“Wake the bitch up! I want targets. And I want this ship protected,” said Captain Riley.

“Sir, even when it’s online, ATHENA’s going to have trouble in port,” said Simmons.

“We’re already in trouble,” said Captain Riley.

“The data flow might overwhelm it. If ATHENA crashes, it’ll drag down the rest of the ship’s systems, or we might get some blue-on-blue, given the range we’re dealing with,” said Simmons. “Let the crew fight the ship. Trust them.”

Captain Riley squinted the way he did when he knew someone else was right. “Good call, XO,” he said. “When ATHENA comes up, keep it in watch mode.”

This gave Captain Riley the chance to deliver the order he’d yearned to give all his life. “Main gun, batteries release! Engage enemy ship, the fucker that fired at us,” he shouted.

The Coronado’s 57 mm main gun came to life; the turret pivoted, pointed an accusing finger off the port side, and then fired across the harbor at the Directorate freighter from which the rocket’s smoke trail still extended.

After seven rounds, the main gun’s firing paused. And then the realization sank in among the bridge crew. The tiny cannon’s five-pound shells were far too small to do any real damage to a hundred-thousand-ton freighter twice the size of a World War II battleship. The LCS had a main gun fit for chasing away pirates, but not much more.