Weapons of choice

A single massive explosion shook the entire ship, cutting off the transmission. A recorded voice boomed out of nearby PA speakers.

"Intruder alert. Intruder alert. Intruder alert."

Anderson already regretted her decision to direct the fight from the CIC. Ninety-five percent of her systems were down. Alarms screamed, beeped, and pinged all around her. Warning lights flashed, and the few screens with any lighted display at all were showing nonsensical data. Examining them closely was like looking into an Escher print. The Leyte Gulf appeared to have been rammed.

But it hadn't. The reality was more incomprehensible.

When the 250 men and women aboard the thirty-five-tonne Nemesis stealth cruiser had awakened from, well, whatever it was that had hit them, they found themselves occupying the same space as a New Orleans-class heavy cruiser, the USS Astoria. Luckily for the thousand or more men of the Astoria and the crew of the Leyte Gulf, they hadn't merged hand-in-glove, which would have killed most of the complements of both vessels immediately as their molecular structure was instantly compromised by having to share space with metal, wood, plastic, and the bodies of other human beings. Instead, the two ships had transected each other, appearing from above like an open pair of scissors.

Even so, many sailors from both ships had perished in such a fashion; some instantaneously, unknowingly, as they materialized squarely inside structures such as a bulkhead or six-inch gun mount. Others hadn't been so lucky. They had only partially merged with various objects or, in the worst cases, people. Their deaths had been slower, more agonizing, and, for them, totally inexplicable. A pharmacist's mate from the Astoria who gasped out his last breaths clawing at a PlayStation console half buried in his chest was typical of their number.

Some even died at each other's hands. Ensign Tommy Hideo from the Leyte Gulf and Leading Seaman Milton Coburn of the Astoria beat each other to death in a dark, constricted space where the control room for the Leyte Gulf's eight-inch autocannon intersected the three-tiered bunk upon which Seaman Coburn had been sleeping. The men themselves had been fused at the thigh. The blinding pain and shock of that violation was enough to send them instantly over the edge, past any hope for rational behavior. Even if they had cooperated and sought out medical attention, the surgery would have needed to be swift and radical. Their blood types did not match, and they were quickly poisoning each other.

For the moment, though, Captain Anderson was unaware of these horrors. The Combat Information Center was still relatively calm, despite the shrill symphony of the alarms. The sailors there looked to her for guidance now. Most of them had nothing to do, since their battle stations had gone offline when the merging of the two ships had severed the kilometers of fiber-optic cables and wiring that formed the Gulf's nervous system.

The CIC was always a dark blue cave, but it seemed more so now, with the dozens of screens blacked out. It was warm, too, which was wrong. The center was supposed to be uncomfortably chilly, allowing the quantum systems to run at white heat.

At least Anderson was in better shape than her ailing vessel; she'd recovered quickly from the transition through the wormhole thanks to a subcutaneous antinausea insert she received every six months during routine checkups.

She had been quick to note that her crewmembers with Promatil inserts or dermal patches were less drastically affected by whatever had happened. When it became obvious that the shipnet was in disarray, she immediately dispatched runners to the nearest casualty stations with instructions to gather supplies of the drug and distribute them as widely and as swiftly as possible. That was how she'd learned about the violation of the forward decks. But she didn't have to look at the expanse of dead electronics all around them to know her ship was gravely hurt. She could feel it down in her meat.

The Gulf was dying.

Anderson straightened herself at the console, squared her shoulders, and traversed her gaze over every man and woman in the room. She was twenty-two years in the United States Navy and wore a uniform heavily burdened with decorations won the hard way. In her two decades at sea she had exercised for, and performed, almost every kind of operation it was possible to conceive of in modern naval combat. It had never occurred to her that she would have to issue the orders she now spoke. Keying a button to power up the ship's PA, without really knowing how far the broadcast would carry, she drove any trace of fear or doubt from her voice.

"Attention all hands. Attention all hands. This is the captain. Arm yourselves, and prepare to repel boarders."

If her crew within the cocoon of the CIC were surprised, none dared show it. A few obviously braced themselves for what was coming but only one, Chief Conroy, said anything.