USS Savo Island Wakkanai Bay, Japan
THE enemy missiles kept coming, rapidly emptying Savo’s defensive magazines. Until at last the fatal zeros glowed on the ordnance tally readouts. Yet the cuing note bonged on and on, while Chief Terranova screamed at her from her console. And the missiles climbed. Pitched over. Headed straight for America …
Captain Cheryl Staurulakis, USN, came awake unwillingly, heart pounding and with a splitting headache. She rolled out of the bunk, hands thrust out as if to ward off a knife. Stood swaying in a darkened stateroom, panting.
The snug little sea cabin seemed suddenly immense. Then it shrank, and dwindled again, until it barely held space for air. Sudden apprehension palpitated her chest and turned her muscles to stone. Why were they not moving? Why did the knotmeter remote on her cabin bulkhead register zero? Were they dead in the water again, without power, without defenses—
Then she remembered, and reality flooded back in a reassuring tide. Her ship was safe. Not on fire. In port, not adrift and under attack.
But she was still guilty. Of sending American sailors to their deaths.
She scratched viciously at her neck, at her crotch, at her calves, until the warm blood trickled. It would stain her sheets. Her uniform. The fucking itching, that would only let her sleep in snatches.
She’d ordered Sioux City to shield Savo’s stern off Korea. The wake-homing torpedoes had mangled the smaller ship, wrecking it so badly she had to be towed to Sasebo. With thirty-two dead, and dozens more injured or burned.
And still she’d failed to intercept the Chinese missiles aimed at the homeland.
Millions dead. Because Cheryl Morehead Staurulakis hadn’t measured up.
The relief ebbed. She staggered into the little attached head. Pulled down her panties and squatted, squeezing her eyes shut as urine hissed into the stainless steel bowl.
Got to get a grip, Cheryl.
You did your best. There were just too many enemy ICBMs. Too many decoys along with the live warheads, and not enough of your own weapons to take them all out.
You’re in port now. The war’s over, and your crew’s safe. You brought them back.
Most of them, at least.
Hands over her face, she told herself this over and over and at last her lungs stopped heaving and the dancing glowing specks of broken light at the edges of her vision dimmed. She slumped, breathing deep, eyes closed. Then forced herself up, wiped, flushed, and snapped the light on.
She turned from the mirror, shuddering. Unable to meet the dead gaze that stared back from that haggard visage. The bleached-pale cheeks, the reddened, scabbed lids, the thinning, washed-out hair.
She dry-gulped an antihistamine, and rubbed cortisone cream into her hands. The doc had said that once she wasn’t under so much stress, the itching and eruptions should back off. But they seemed just as bad as ever, if not worse. Red oozing pustules from which the skin peeled. Unsightly. Maddening. Like she was under some kind of sorcerous curse.
Maybe it was for the best that Eddie was dead. That he’d been shot down, and would never see her again.
Would never see her like this.
SAVO ISLAND was the third ship named to commemorate a deadly battle fought north of Guadalcanal. The first had been an escort carrier commissioned in 1944. The second, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, had fought in the opening phases of the war just ended. Cheryl had been her operations officer, then exec, and finally skipper. After action in the Taiwan Strait, the Battle of the Central Pacific, and the East China Sea, that second Savo had been sunk in the nuclear attack on Honolulu.
Some of the crew manning this third namesake had served aboard her as well.
The current Savo’s primary mission was antimissile defense. Its Alliance interceptors were AI-enabled to discriminate between the decoys and warheads of heavy ICBMs. Displacing close to twenty thousand tons on a modified Zumwalt hull, it carried railguns and beam weapons to defend the task forces it had accompanied to war. The cruiser was armored, compartmented, and sealed from the outside air. A dynamic access network provided high-bandwidth exchange among air-, surface-, subsurface-, and ground-based tactical data systems. Instead of shafts and reduction gears, it was propelled by podded Tesla truck motors, powered by gas turbines looted from commercial airliners.
Following commissioning, and weeks of exhausting training, they’d transited to the western Pacific to stand guard as Allied forces landed in Korea. Then moved north to block a possible Chinese strike over the Sea of Okhotsk, Siberia, and the Arctic. When the war had ended with a nuclear exchange, Cheryl had fought to intercept the enemy’s heaviest missiles.
And mostly, she had. But a few had gotten through, sending megaton-range nukes plunging down on the western and central United States.
With the news of the armistice, her task group had been recalled to port. She was still technically in tactical command, but her units were scattered about the northwestern Pacific: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, a few in China itself, providing humanitarian aid, electrical power, potable water, and medical care. The frantic tempo of wartime operations had abruptly dropped to a sluggish crawl.
Of course, that didn’t mean she had nothing to do.
In its inimitable wisdom, the Navy had protected them all against that hideous fate.
THE wardroom. The homely smells of coffee and eggs and grits and ham. Matt Mills, her executive officer, was elbows down at the table. Even frowning and rubbing his forehead, he was easy on the eyes, blond and chiseled as any romantic lead on a Netflix series. “Morning, Skipper,” he said, starting to get up. The others rose as well.
She waved them back down and drew herself a cup from the urn, black. “Take it easy, everyone. Any progress?”
“A little.” Her second-in-command glanced at his phone. “But it’s more like death from a thousand paper cuts. We’re going to reconvene here shortly, and hit it again.”
In any sane organization, training would have started from a blank sheet with war’s end. Or even—though no one aboard was naive enough to expect this—with a month off to recover, catch up on sleep, and do planned maintenance instead of voyage repairs.
But with the abeyance of hostilities, a flood of pent-up demands had poured in. Fleet had promulgated a new and rigorous certification instruction. It increased requirements for training on Information Assurance, Antiharassment, Antidiscrimination, Sexual Assault Prevention, Cyber Awareness, Counterintelligence Awareness and Reporting, and Suicide Prevention. Personnel with less than three years of time in service had to complete Antiterrorism Level 1 training, with mandatory triennial periodicity for all others. Cheryl could exercise command discretion on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Awareness, Combating Trafficking in Persons, Domestic Violence Prevention and Reporting, Electromagnetic Warfare, Equal Opportunity, Hazing Policy, Operational Risk Management, Operations Security, Personal Financial Management, Records Management, Sexual Health and Responsibility, Stress Management, Traumatic Brain Injury Awareness, and a dozen more programs that had been suspended for the duration, but that now required backdated reports covering the period of suspension.
So for the last three days, she, Mills, and her operations officer, Dave Branscombe, along with the division officers and senior enlisted, had been locked in a massive paperwork drill. They were trying to document certifiable training events from wartime logs while at the same time building a training regimen for the next quarter from scratch.
Piecing together the past was an opportunity for creativity. But also a chance to shoot herself in the foot. If they got too fast and loose, some staff lieutenant back in Hawaii would be sure to drop a dime on them. So she was torn between encouraging her people to fudge, which would save the crew time and work that could be spent instead on actual maintenance, and reining them in, which would eat more work hours but protect her own heinie.
The choice here was clear, since that very heinie had been put at risk quite a lot lately, and theirs too along with it, all too literally. They all deserved whatever slack she could cut them.
A tap at the door, and the chiefs filed in. She pointed a chin at the urn. “Help yourself,” she said. “Chief Zotcher. Chief Terranova. Chief Van Gogh.
“Okay, to say it once more: we’re going to stretch those guidelines to the limit,” she told them when everyone was finally settled around the table with tablets and binders. “Don’t make anything up. But count every action, every actual operation we participated in, as a training opportunity. And we put in a shitlot of hours at Condition One ABM. Don’t lie, but use your imagination.”
“Copy all. Where will you be, Captain?” Zotcher asked. The sonar chief, she suddenly noticed, had gone completely bald during the war. “In case we have any questions?”
“Any gray areas, Commander Mills will decide.”
Her exec said mildly, “I have a zone inspection today, Captain. I’ll need to break for that.”
Cheryl finished her coffee and stood. “I’ll take your inspection, XO. About time I got a good look around again.”
“Thanks, ma’am,” Mills said, but he didn’t sound especially glad to be relieved of that duty. He rubbed his forehead again, narrowing his eyes as he studied a tablet. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
SHE left them complaining and fabricating and commenced her inspection at the boatswain’s locker, in the very nook of the bow. A note taker, one of the ship’s yeomen, followed her.
It had been some months since she’d had time for a detailed reading on Savo’s material condition. Being at Condition One tended to keep a skipper glued close to CIC. This morning, as petty officer after compartment petty officer reported, “Ready for inspection, ma’am,” she snooped and pried. First, to emphasize ownership, she asked each responsible man or woman for a look at the compartment deficiency report. To emphasize responsibility, what they’d done to remedy the problems. To highlight follow-through, what the result had been. Only then did she click her flashlight on.
Working her way slowly aft through the storerooms and offices, she touched her augmented-reality glasses to match the data and documentation overlay against the ground truth of what years of experience told her at a glance. She called up compartment pressure testing reports, bent to read the tags on firefighting equipment, and pressed a finger into the rubber seals on the watertight doors. She checked fire hose discharge fittings, classification, and numbering against the records in the ship’s computers. She rattled each fuse panel looking for loose cover bolts, and inspected each individual fuse and breaker to make sure it hadn’t been replaced with one of a higher amperage rating. She uncoiled, laid out, and inspected the casualty power cables and risers for cracks, frayed insulation, and damage.
In forward berthing, she sniffed the air. Bent close to the deck, checking cleanliness in the corners with the aid of the flashlight. Then asked the presenter to turn off the overheads.
Seaman Downie bobbed his head, smirking, and went to comply. She ignored the smirk. The diminutive, eccentric Downie, long ago nicknamed “the Troll” by his shipmates, was about the only person aboard who’d gone through the entire war without a single promotion. A career seaman, as the saying went. She’d tried to transfer him out, but NavPers had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that once aboard, he would stay.
A snap, and darkness flooded the compartment. It brought back the panicky terror she’d felt waking up. She pushed it off like a too-heavy quilt and groped her way around the space, craning her neck this way and that, alert for any holes in the bulkhead or overhead or gaps in the cable penetrations. Any chink that would admit light from adjacent spaces would also compromise its watertightness, defeating the whole point of compartmentation.
But she didn’t see any. “You can turn them back on now,” she yelled.
When they came on Downie was staring into her face from four inches away. Sneaking up on her like some knife-wielding psycho in a dark alley, wearing that unsettling pixie grin. “Skipper?” he smirked. “Hey, got a question for you.”
She placed a hand on his skivvy-shirted chest, suppressing a shudder at its stiff clamminess. How long had he been wearing it? “Back off, Seaman Downie. What is it?”
“The guys are saying, I got to plan how to rig extra bunks down here. That so?”
She frowned. “First I’ve heard of it. What for?”
Downie twirled in place, a ballerina-like pirouette but without grace. “They say we’re gonna take the Army back home. Demob, they call it. Ship everybody back from the war. And we go back too.”
Scuttlebutt was amazing. And Downie, who dated from the old Savo, always seemed to have the latest and greatest. Or maybe he made it up himself. “I don’t think so,” she told him gently. “At least, not that I’ve heard. Maybe you’re just ahead of me, though. If you get any updates on that?…”
He smirked and bobbed his head. “I’ll keep you posted, Skipper.”
SHE proceeded from the office and berthing spaces to inspect the forward missile magazines. Then, to the far-belowdecks spaces where the pumps, motors, cooling equipment, pressurized gas and capacitor banks for the lasers and railgun batteries were located. Here she checked insulating matting, warning and precaution signs, deck drains, overpressure inspection and test certifications, and safety and escape gear. She made sure the alarms were live, that safety nets were rigged in the trunks, ventilation closures and controls were operational, and the emergency lighting worked.
It was 0900 when she reached the mess decks. Breakfast had been cleared. Here she doubled down on deck drains, cleanliness, fixtures, and firefighting readiness. But as she’d expected, word had percolated back that the skipper was on a tear. Chief Lubkeman had his men and women turned out in spotless serving aprons and paper hats. The food prep and serving areas smelled of bleach and the decks gleamed with fresh wax. She gave these areas a quick once-over, snapped the UV disinfection lights on and off, and checked the tags on the fire-extinguishing system. “Looking good, everyone,” she complimented them, and moved on.
She clattered down two decks on metal ladders to the engineering spaces. The old Savo’s engine compartments had been a howl of noise and dry heat. Gas turbines and pumps had fattened the air with sound. But pierside now, “cold iron,” this cruiser’s spaces were capacious, quiet, and cool. Here Cheryl concentrated on valve condition, labeling, and classification. She asked for gauge and tool calibration dates, checked them against the maintenance requirements, and looked behind every console and pump for flammable consumables. Master Chief McMottie accompanied her, never more than a step behind. Each time she turned to ask a question he had his tablet out and the relevant graph or checklist ready on the screen.
The third time this happened she grimaced, torn between pleasure and annoyance. “Maybe I don’t actually need to inspect down here, Master Chief?”
McMottie half grinned. “Maybe not, ma’am. But it’s always nice to see you in coveralls.”
She squinted, but his open frank smile didn’t seem to mask a double entendre. Maybe he just meant … oh, never mind. “All right,” she snapped. “How about the overheating issue on number three drive motor?”
“Sensor fault, ma’am. Easy fix. Replaced that and CASREP’d issue’s resolved.”
“Fluctuations in the low-voltage distribution system after switching to manual control?”
“Did a root-cause analysis and found it in that new software drop. Bad response logic from the SDC when it translated the manual control order. Patched it with code from the previous flight. Ran it fifteen times. No recurrence, smooth output.”
“Give it fifty more cycles before you report it fixed.”
He nodded gravely. “Aye aye, Skipper.”
“And all those spare parts back here, still in their boxes?”
Another grave nod. “You know what they say, ma’am. ‘Engineer’’s just another word for ‘hoarder.’”
Up two platforms and aft again, this time to the after mounts. She took her time and did just as thorough a job, though her legs ached now and her headache was forming up for a new assault. She inspected for proper stowage and cycled the safety interlocks. Then looked for missile hazards, fire hazards, and hygiene and safety violations.
A bustle of activity rose behind her as the divisions mustered to clean, restow, and repaint. Unfortunately the hands she could call on were all too few. Her first command had manned a ten-thousand-ton hull with nearly 380 officers and enlisted, when you included the helicopter flight crews. The new cruisers displaced nearly double that, but with half the personnel. The railguns and lasers had further strained the manning situation, since the ship retained PVLS and conventional weapons. There’d been savings in admin and engineering, but even with a wartime plus-up to complement the baseline manning, she had fewer than two hundred warm bodies.
In the aft magazine a petty officer objected mildly. “Ma’am, the war’s over. We really got to worry about handling placards for HVAP projectiles?”
“The war may be over. Right now all we have is an armistice.”
His face changed. “So we could go back out.”
She considered her answer carefully. Anything the CO said would carom around the ship like a rubber bullet. “I don’t think we will, but sure … we could. This peace might not hold. And even if it does, we still have the Russians up there looking to tear off tasty pieces wherever they can.”
“Pieces. Off of China, you mean?”
“Exactly. They’re already occupying part of Manchuria, on the basis of their last-minute declaration of war. And the trouble with feeding a bear one cookie … well, you know where I’m going with that.”
He made a wry face. “I don’t want to seem … uh, contrary, Skipper … but why should we care about what happens to the slants?”
She couldn’t help letting a quarter-smile slip. But then the itch flared. She scratched at her neck, then jerked her nails away. “Whether you or I care or not doesn’t really matter. If we get tasked, we’d better be ready.” She pointed at the placard she’d found lying on the deck behind a control console. “So let’s get that glued back on, and make sure the battle lantern’s angled to illuminate it.”
SHE was actually enjoying herself by the time she got to CIC. Petty Officer Eastwood was running an intercept scenario, but paused it for the inspection. Cheryl moved through here quickly, since she didn’t want to hold up the drill. After nearly a year at war the space seemed worn already. The seat covers were faded. The decks were scuffed, especially beneath the consoles, where booted feet had rested 24/7. But everything seemed to have been freshly swept and free of dust. The low hum of ventilating fans crooned like a lullaby.
She’d fought her war from here. She paused at the command desk, where her ass had been planted for so many weary hours, interspersed with minutes of pure terror. Hard to believe the second Pacific war, the Third World War, whatever they were going to call it in the history books, might really be over, despite the caveats she’d given the crew.
One large screen display had the current fused picture up. She glanced at the VR helmet in its rack, and shuddered. She’d spent enough time with her head stuck in that thing, thank you.
The screen showed Russia to the west: the rugged, mountainous Asian coastline the tsars had wrested from the Manchu emperors two centuries before. Sparsely populated, and economically nearly worthless, but somehow that never stopped the Russians from wanting more. To the south stretched Hokkaido, northernmost of the main islands of Japan.
Again, staring at the screen and scratching absently at her neck, she pondered what Downie, the compartment cleaner, had said. A daydream, probably, made up from the crew’s homesick longings. But sometimes scuttlebutt was more like foresight than fantasy.
If this really did turn out to be a lasting peace …
Then a massive demobilization was certainly in the cards. Back home, Congress was debating the future. Of the Pacific, and thus, the future of the Navy. With Europe’s revitalization, the country now maintained only a token presence in the Atlantic and Med, except for the battle groups maintaining the chokehold on Iran, the sole remaining holdout of the Opposed Powers.
Fleet had sounded her out about participating in a congressionally mandated force-structure study. Someone had to decide what fleet units would be kept on, and which would be returned to mothballs or even scrapped. Getting the Navy’s views on record, at least, before Congress tied on a blindfold and started wielding a blunt machete.
Postwar cuts tended to be murderous. The reactivated units, Spruances, Perrys, Los Angeleses, and Ticonderogas pulled from mothballs to pad out numbers at the low end of the warfighting spectrum, would go first, scrapped or sold off to allies. Ditto the converted merchantmen that had served as jeep carriers and missile barges. They’d either be sold or returned to their peacetime roles. Savo and the others of her class would probably survive. But the Early Bird had reported a proposal to shrink the fleet from wartime’s 670 active units down to fewer than 200, not counting the autonomous Hunters. And there were already questions about whether the carriers had paid their way in this war.
But you couldn’t design a fleet in a strategic or budgetary vacuum. They’d have to examine cost, tactical doctrine, forward-presence models, and national strategy to see what the Navy would look like going forward.
“Resume the drill, Captain?” Eastwood murmured, at her side.
Cheryl masked a yawn with a gloved hand, and nodded.
SHE ended her inspection on the bridge. Here, so many decks up she’d taken an elevator to reach it, the untenanted air lay quiet. These days a warship was conned from a citadel far belowdecks. The remaining humans were sealed from the outside air, cocooned like fragile Delftware in armor and shock mounting. The pilothouse was only manned up leaving or returning to port.
The next class of ships might not have a bridge at all. The space was becoming a vestigial appendage, like the cockpit on a submarine sail. Eventually it might pass out of physical existence entirely. Like the “quarterdeck,” which had been a real location in the age of sail, but now existed only as a ceremonial fiction, floating wherever the officer of the deck was stationed.
All was change. Everything remained in flux. And never more so than in the afterlight of a disastrous war.
Musing on that, she let herself out onto the little balconylike wing. Opened her arms wide and stretched, welcoming the cool of the open air after a whole morning spent inside. Far below, four Hunter autonomous drones were rafted alongside. Two autonomous Orca submarines were moored outboard of them. A few technicians in blue coveralls clambered about them, and umbilicals snaked down, feeding them shoreside power and updating their artificial brains.
Yeah, that might be the future.
The next generation of warships might go to sea without berthing areas, mess decks, crew’s lounges, barbershops, ship’s stores, laundries, sick bays … Without any humans aboard at all, fighting units could be a lot smaller. Probably cheaper, too. And if the worst happened, no one would need to explain things to grieving families …
Past the black whalelike Orcas, Soya Bay opened out, blue and wind-ruffled, barriered only by a breakwater. A saucer-shaped security drone skated slowly along the horizon, scanning down to the seabed with magnetic sensors and radar. A low sun glittered to the east. Past that lay thirty miles of dark sapphire sea, then Sakhalin … Russian territory.
During the war the Japanese had hastily built and dredged Wakkanai, originally a small commercial port, into a modest naval base and logistics hub. Right now it mainly supported her own task force, plus the Japanese northern squadron. The base was strategically located, though requiring a difficult sea detail, and there wasn’t really enough pier space to accommodate more than two cruiser/destroyer-size units at a time. A military airstrip ten miles to the south accommodated fifteen JSDF fighters and a Patriot battery.
She wandered back into what was still called the chartroom, though there were no longer paper charts. Well, only a few as final backup, rolled tightly and stowed in a rack in the overhead. As she filched one down and unscrolled it, smoothing it out on the table, a few dust motes sprang free, sparkling in the sunlight. The chart they’d used for Operation Chromite, the decapitation strike on North Korea.
Her note taker cleared his throat behind her. Cheryl flinched; she’d forgotten he was still following her. “Yeoman. What is it?”
“Are we done, ma’am? Want me to clean up these notes, put ’em up on the LAN?”
“Sure. Yes, thank you. We’re done.”
He started to turn away, but lingered. “So … what happens next, Skipper?”
Apparently she and Downie weren’t the only ones pondering possible futures. “Next? We transition to peacetime steaming, I guess.”
“Um, well, I heard we’re headed back. To Guam, then San Diego. Ma’am.”
“I heard that too. But it’s just a rumor, Yeoman. I haven’t gotten anything official.”
He looked quickly away, as if he knew better, and she felt a flash of annoyance. No; anger. Did they think she was hiding things from them? “I have the same questions as everyone else, believe me,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, casual, workaday. “As soon as I know something concrete, I’ll pass it to everyone over the 1MC.”
Trying not to show what she felt … as she so often had to do. Smiling when she didn’t want to smile. Feigning confidence when she was scared shitless. Acting as if she knew what she was doing, when she was really making it all up as she went along half the time. Finding a secluded corner to scratch furiously at her butt crack, when the spreading itch threatened to drive her crazy.
Well, now that the war was over, maybe there’d be less of all of that. If the fucking itching, “psychogenic pruritus,” as one shore- side doctor had called it, really was her body’s response to sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, terror—
The 1MC snapped on. “Commanding officer, please contact the XO in the wardroom,” it stated.
Her hand went to her belt, for her radio. But no. Maybe it would be better to … She crossed with swift strides to her command chair. Hit the 21MC. “This is the captain. XO there?”
“Wait one, ma’am … Here he is.”
“Commander?”
“Skipper? Where are you?” Mills’s voice.
“Bridge. Finishing the inspection. What’s going on?”
“Flash message. I’ll send a runner, but can you log on up there, come up on high side nanochat, Fleet command?”
“On it.” She told her terminal, “This is Captain Staurulakis. Alice, log me on.”
“Logging on, Skipper,” said AALIS, the ship’s command computer.
Task Force satellite chat unscrolled on the screen. She found the latest message. From Fleet.
Bootstrap: To Tangler
FLASH FLASH FLASH
Forces from Russian Federation EMD preparing to occupy portions of eastern Heilongjiang and possibly port of Dalian. Russian Pacific Fleet at enhanced readiness for sortie en route Sea of Japan. Commence reconstitute Sea of Okhotsk task force 73.3 rdvu ASAP PIM as per TG Cdr directs. Prepare to intercept. Dirlauth. Enders
A chill harrowed her spine. “Bootstrap,” the message initiator, was Seventh Fleet. Dick Enders was its J-3, the operations deputy. Shorn of its acronyms, and supplied with what she could infer, the message directed her to reassemble her scattered task force and prepare for battle forthwith. So much for a lasting peace … She dictated a quick acknowledgment, then signed off.
“Heilongjiang,” she muttered. “Alice, where’s that? Heilongjiang? And where and what is Dalian?”
The map the AI brought up on the screen outlined an awkwardly shaped tongue of China stuck out tauntingly into Russian territory north of Vladivostok. When she toggled to overhead imagery, the terrain looked mountainous and barren in the west, flatter and probably more productive toward the coast. But Russia cupped it, and had stationed heavy forces in eastern Siberia throughout the war, despite Moscow’s role supplying Zhang’s regime with weaponry, energy, and diplomatic cover.
The information that came up on the other name froze her to ice where she stood. Dalian was a port city with an excellent harbor. It lay at the north end of the Yellow Sea, west of the Korean Peninsula. The city had been Russia’s before, as Port Arthur, the eastern terminus of the Manchurian Railway. The Russians had administered it again, briefly, after World War II.
As a forward base in north China once again, and as an ice-free port on the Pacific, it would be strategically located to put naval pressure on Japan and a reunified Korea.
Already Moscow was moving its chess pieces forward. Probing the board for weakness.
Just as they’d taken advantage of China every time in history it had suffered.
She touched a knuckle to her lips, considering. Her task force had been built around Savo Island, two Japanese Aegis destroyers, Chokai and Ashigara, and one modern Korean unit, Jeonnam. She had four submarines, Arkansas, Idaho, Guam, and John Warner and Utah, replacing the lost Guam.
Antisubmarine defense … Her surface escorts were two missile frigates, Goodrich and Montesano. The unmanned Hunters moored alongside, USV-34, -20, -7, and -16, and Flight One Orcas USS-4 and -13, would serve for early warning. As would her manned attack subs, which she would post farther north.
As for air defense … She had helicopters and onboard drones, but no carrier air on call. Four Aegis units should be able to fight off an air attack, though, and the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force should be standing by.
If, that is, Japan felt like confronting the Russians on behalf of the Chinese. Which might not seem in their national interest, considering their recent losses in the battles to recover the Ryukyus. Japan had so few young people, and robots couldn’t do all the fighting.
No. She’d have to have carrier support. Something to ask for, urgently, right now, before getting under way.
She scratched under her arms, staring sightlessly down on the forecastle, where her undermanned First Division people were overhauling the lifelines. And what about her crew? They expected to go home. How would they take going to sea again? Possibly, going into battle, against a new enemy?
The 21MC lit again. Mills’s voice again. “Captain? We went to GQ down here on a sailing plan. Contacted Chokai and Ashigara. Jeonnam, we can’t reach. Goodrich and Montesano will get under way from Sasebo. Arkansas and Utah are pierside in Pusan; they can be under way in four hours. Permission to get them to sea?”
“Granted. What do you suggest as a rendezvous point?”
“Chief Van Gogh advises we head everybody to join up east of Tsushima. In the Korea Strait. That way if the Pacific Fleet comes down the Sea of Japan, we’ll be in a blocking position.”
She debated the pros and cons, but only briefly. Higher would send more specific orders. “Make it so. But set the rendezvous for farther north—around latitude forty. Give us more sea room. Present a less concentrated target.”
The exec rogered and signed off.
She let herself out on the wing, and leaned on the splinter shield again. Below, on the decks of the Hunters, the indolent movements of the maintainers were already giving way to bustle and shouts. The itching flamed like maddening fire, at her armpits, neck, scalp. She closed her eyes, sagging into the steel. Suddenly wishing all she had to worry about was paperwork and inspections and training schedules. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuck it to hell … they had to. They just had to do it.”
Maybe it wasn’t peace after all.
But she wasn’t really sure she could stand doing war all over again.