Final impact

Kolhammer crossed his legs and eased back into his old command chair as he took in the scene. The Combined Task Force consisted of three carrier battle groups, two that were contemporary and his own “retrofitted” group, now rebadged as Task Group Twenty-one. The USS Hillary Clinton was the beating heart of Twenty-one, with the Nemesis cruiser JDS Siranui and the three original ships of the Eighty-second MEU-the Kandahar, Kennebunkport, and Providence-making up her twenty-first component.

Four brand-new Halsey-class multimission guided missile destroyers rode shotgun on the group, their classic lines a close match with Kolhammer’s boyhood memories of the old Charles F. Adams-class destroyers on which they were based. All four threw back fans of white water from their bows as they charged about, shepherding their flock and generally showing off.

For the moment the USS Curtis and her sisters the Garrett, the Chandler, and the Reilly were listed as Auxiliary Force vessels, which meant their crews were mixed and they operated under 21C laws and customs. Kolhammer used a pair of powered binoculars to follow the Curtis as she took up station a few hundred meters forward of the Damascus, one of Lonesome’s new littoral assault ships. He could have dialed up battle-cam vision from the ship herself, but he preferred the glasses. They felt more intimate, even though they couldn’t pull in as tightly as a camera. The great bulk of the Clinton meant that the relatively gentle swell had little effect on her, but the Curtis was already beginning to climb and plunge through the long, rolling waves. He watched as some of her crew ran through a simulated bomb strike on the ship’s stern. He could just make out that a few of the sailors were black, and perhaps a couple were women. It was hard to tell at that distance. They all seemed to be working well together, but he worried that without inserts to dampen the sex drive, and given that they were crewed almost entirely by ’temps, there would inevitably be some trouble.

Hell, he’d had trouble with his own people when their spinal syrettes all ran dry, and everyone had to go back to being on their best behavior without neurochemical support.

“Admiral,” said a young freckle-faced sailor, whose nervousness at approaching him for the first time seemed to be causing some violent gulping on her part. “A m-message from the Enterprise, sir. Admiral Mitchell sends his regards, and reminds you that owe him a…a…”

“A six-pack, yes, thank you, Petty Officer Maguire.” He smiled, trying to appear as harmless as possible. There seemed a very real chance that the young woman would pass out if he startled her. “Tell Admiral Mitchell that I’ll…” He paused as her eyes bulged with a low-grade horror at the prospect of having to tell Mark Mitchell anything other than what he wanted. “Tell you what, I’ll call him myself. You’re dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.” She gulped again before making her exit as quickly as she could.

“And Ms. Maguire?”

“Yes, Admiral?” she squeaked, turning so quickly that she almost fell into a bank of flatscreens.

“Relax, at least for now.” Kolhammer smiled. “Nobody’s shooting at you just yet.”

“Yes, sir!”

She scurried off the flag bridge.

Mike Judge grinned after her, tugging the brim of his baseball cap down over his shades as he turned back to the blast windows. “And she was never seen or heard of again,” he said.

Kolhammer suppressed a smirk, but a few of the bridge crew grinned. Judge was becoming well known as a captain who appreciated his own wit. It was a trait Kolhammer had noticed almost as soon as he’d met the Clinton’s former executive officer back in the twenty-first. That sort of thing could be very annoying, but Judge somehow managed to pull it off with a dash of Texan charm.

“I remember the first time I had to speak to an admiral,” Kolhammer said. “I was twenty years old, fresh out of Boat School. I’d been an ensign for all of three minutes, and I do believe I may have wet my pants just a little bit.”

Mike Judge’s shoulders moved as he chuckled to himself while watching the great armada form up for their trip west. “Met me a lord admiral in London when I was wooing my good lady wife,” he said. “Had a castle and everything.”

“And did you wet your pants just a little bit, Captain Judge?” Kolhammer asked with a commendably straight face.

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Good for you, son.”

A screaming roar of jet engines announced the launch of the two Skyhawks on combat air patrol. They peeled up and away from the flight deck, two AT Sidewinder missiles hanging from hard points under their delta wings.