35°17′02″ N, 130°34′55″ E: The Sea of Japan
THE sea was a black, heaving dark, and the wind was a blustery twenty-five to thirty knots. A summer night, but it didn’t look like anyone’s idea of summer out here.
High on Savo Island’s bridge, Captain Cheryl Staurulakis winced at a clatter of wind-driven spray on the windshield. She studied a glowing screen, wishing they had a moon at least. Commander Mills, her exec, was down in his bunk, snatching a well-deserved hour off. The underway watch was set, but compared to the ships she’d served on earlier in her career, there were all too few people up here.
Off in a corner of the pilothouse, the mumble of low voices: Lieutenant Max Mytsalo, relieving Noah Pardees as officer of the deck. Mytsalo had been an ensign when the war started. He still looked young, but the strain of wartime watches had engraved lines around his eyes and sagged those once-peach-fuzzed cheeks. The others, enlisted and officer alike, tottered about the bridge like robots supplied with insufficient voltage. Chief Van Gogh was nodding over the nav screen. There was no helmsman anymore, just a remote console the OOD maneuvered the ship from.
Lieutenant Commander Pardees was a lanky shadow, his tones almost lost in the hiss of circuits and the hum of fans and the renewed rattle of spray as the cruiser burrowed her bow into the trough of an obsidian sea. “Ma’am, um, properly relieved by Lieutenant Mytsalo.”
She returned his salute in the dark, though neither could see the other. “Very well.”
A younger tenor: “This is Lieutenant Mytsalo. I have the deck and the conn. Course is zero three zero, speed one five. Savo is the guide. All ships in formation sectors for night steaming. Ma’am.”
“Very well,” she said again, and nodded. “We’ve got half an hour to COMEX. Let’s make sure we’re ready.”
Silence returned to the darkened bridge. She chewed a lip, matching the pips on the faintly glowing night-adapted screen to the formation she’d hastily set up.
Exercise Trident Junction hadn’t been planned through the normal process, staffed and coordinated and deconflicted to support a mission-focused joint training program. Fleet had stapled it together overnight from old exercise op orders, with coordinates hastily rejiggered for a sea the US Navy had seldom cruised, let alone conducted fleet ops in. Except for Operation Chromite, the takedown of North Korea. That now-ravaged country lay to the northwest. To the south, behind her, lay Tsushima Island and Tsushima Strait, where the Russian fleet had come to grief back in 1905.
Yeah … Tsushima. She’d read about that battle, which bore a ghostly, unsettling resemblance to what might be taking shape now.
Early in the preceding century, Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky had steamed his coal-burning battleships eighteen thousand miles, nearly around the globe, to link up with tsarist forces blockaded in Port Arthur, and crush the Japanese. Instead, Admiral Togo Heihachiro had obliterated the Russians in an afternoon. Winning the war, and planting the seeds of the Russian Revolution and the eventual death of the Romanov dynasty and the tsar’s whole family.
Now a new fleet was gathering, this time to the north, to retake that same chunk of China. Dalian had once been Port Arthur, a Russian enclave. Once Moscow reoccupied it, Russia would surround and dominate the mineral riches of Manchuria. Augmented and reequipped with the profits the Russian Federation had reaped from the runup in oil prices during America’s war with China, the fleet now headed toward her was far more powerful than either Rozhestvensky or Togo could have imagined.
Which was no surprise to her, of course. But what concerned her most was that it had recently been joined by Peter the Great. Intel said that massive nuclear-powered battle cruiser had just been updated with the Zircon-C hypersonic antiship missile. Meanwhile, US forces had begun their drawdown after the end of the war, headed back to Pearl and the West Coast for refit, or mothball, or scrapping.
Which meant that, in many ways, the oncoming forces both outnumbered and outranged those she could bring to bear. And Higher had already said the Air Force strikes she’d requested on the advancing ships would not take place, in order to avoid what they called “premature escalation.”
“Fuck,” she muttered. A fierce itch triggered just under one armpit. Mustering all her will not to claw at it, she scowled down again at the screen.
To the north, the Sea of Japan narrowed nearly to nothing. A four-mile-wide pinch point there separated it from the Sea of Okhotsk. No guarantee the Russians would thread that choke point, though. More likely they’d skirt the northern tip of Sakhalin, the same route she herself had taken to her anti-ICBM station a few months before.
Entering the Sea of Japan via one of two international straits, the Peter the Great group could join up with a Russian task force already moored in Vladivostok. It was even possible, though Intel judged it unlikely, that they might round the southernmost tip of Japan, Kyushu, and enter the Sea of Japan from the south.
Resulting in a battle cruiser–centered task force nearly twice the size and fighting capability of her own …
She pushed that thought away irritably as Pardees, still on the bridge, centered his tablet in front of her. “We’re about to COMEX, Skipper. Here’s the message, if you want to review Phase I.”
“Any word from Chokai? Ashigara? Commodore Ota?” The Japanese Aegis destroyers would double the capability of her force. They’d operated with her during the war. She’d requested submarine and air support from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force as well. But Pardees simply shook his head.
She sighed and accepted the tablet. Yeah, she’d have to review it. But the close-set paragraphs read like so much naval prose did, dense with acronyms and larded with clichés. After the usual boilerplate about “honing interoperability skills” and “demonstrating close operational relationships” it set up the overall exercise scenario. All in all, she reflected sourly, it was a terrific tasking. Whipped up overnight, the order outlined an ambiguous commander’s intent, inserting full deniability for Higher, but pushing the risk down to her.
She sighed and buckled down to reading.
The order specified no dedicated opposing force—OPFOR, in joint terminology—for the events. Only a scripted enemy. The “Federation of Phosphora” was threatening a seaborne landing in eastern China. Blue naval and air units would constitute a blocking force in a constructive battlespace whose dimensions just happened to match the real Sea of Japan. They would intercept and warn the Phosphorian forces, but it was possible the scenario could degenerate into a limited conventional engagement. Phosphora’s objective lay to the west, in the middle of the operating area.
“Fuck,” she muttered again, kneading her brow. The opposing force’s strength factors included a two-to-one advantage in surface forces, three-to-one in submarines, two-to-one in available aircraft, and three-to-one in missiles. Blue’s strength factors included a slight technical superiority in antimissile defense and support from shore-based air to the east.
Phosphora also had the initiative: the freedom to choose the timing and method of their opposed transit of the strait. They were operating from comparatively short lines of supply, and had missile and aircraft replacements available within hours. Both forces were rated as equally acclimated to the operating area and at roughly equivalent levels of training.
“You read this?” she asked Pardees. “All of it?”
“Yes’m. Not too encouraging, on the face of it. The balance of forces.”
“No shit,” she muttered, wincing as a new lash of spray hit the glass two feet from her face like a fusillade. She grew heavy on her feet, then light, as Savo dipped and reeled in the near-utter darkness. “But if we have to engage … We need to see if the Marines can redeploy a couple of NEMESIS batteries from Taiwan. And if the Japanese will commit some from the Ryukyus. Get those land-based antiship missiles redeployed where they can help us out.”
He nodded. “The Russians—sorry, the Phosphorians—are going to be handicapped too. They’ll have to escort the amphibs for the landing. All we have to do is goalie. Keep them from landing in Dalian, and we succeed.”
“Right, they have to come punch us,” Cheryl agreed. Dalian lay to the west of the Korean Peninsula, past the strait she guarded now. “But whoever wrote this about levels of training being equal, that’s bullshit. We’ve just come through a war. While they haven’t fought a fleet action since, since—when?”
“1905?” Pardees ventured.
She grinned. “I was thinking the same thing, Noah.”
The 21MC lit, someone calling from far below in the armored and sealed citadel. “CO, Combat.”
Pardees leaned forward to depress the lever. “She’s listening.”
“Ma’am, chat message on the TF side. Chokai and Ashigara do not anticipate joining.”
Cheryl took a quick breath; she and Pardees traded glances. “Uh, that’s not good news. Reason given?”
“No reason, ma’am. Just a personal from their COs.”
She acknowledged with a double click. Then sighed, blinking out into the seething chaos of night, and fog so thick it blotted out the stars. No, not good news at all. The Japanese would have brought more than two destroyers to the battle. Their modern submarines alone might well have tilted the balance in her favor, in these narrow, shallow seas.
“We might have to fight this one alone,” Pardees muttered. “In which case…”
“Yeah.” In a way, she couldn’t blame Tokyo. The naval commanders, she was sure, would have joined her, given half a chance. But the Japanese government had played it cagey throughout the war. Hung back during its first months, until it looked like the US would really strike back at China. Then joined in full bore. They’d contributed mightily to the victory. But now, apparently, they weren’t eager to make any new enemies.
Pardees cleared his throat. “Uh, Captain … this may be a little outside the box. But have we considered seeing if there are any Chinese capabilities left? That could collaborate, maybe join us in a show of force at least?”
She scratched her ribs absently as she pondered it. “Huh … It’s not a bad idea, Noah, but I doubt they’ve got much left. We pretty much cleared everything out with the autonomous torpedoes, the air strikes, and so forth. And then the nuclear laydown. Even if there was, they wouldn’t be interoperable with us in any meaningful way. But … I guess it’s worth a try. Get a message off to, uh…”
She stalled out. To whom? There was no Beijing government anymore, as far as she knew. “Uh, maybe shoot it up to PACOM, okay? Ask if they can make the request via whatever channels they have, staff to staff. And expedite it.”
He nodded, head down, making notes.
She said reluctantly, raising her voice to the inchoate shadows around her, “This is the CO. Let’s shift the conn to CIC.” And headed aft to take the elevator down.
COMBAT was icy cold and so nearly dark that even after being on the bridge, she had to wait a few seconds while her pupils dilated before she could make out the rows of consoles, the big vertical displays near the front. She paused at the coffee mess and poured herself a shot, black. Studied the displays again as she carried the cup to her seat at the command desk.
The screen showed Korea off to the west. Newly reunified, but by all accounts still in turmoil as accounts from the war got settled and the interim president, Jun Min Jung, tried to assert control over renegade generals in the North. To the east lay the angular, tortured coastline of Japan.
And behind her, the strait itself. Seventy-five miles across, with Tsushima Island stuck in the middle like a bone in the throat. A natural choke point, the kind anyone with the most basic strategic sense would choose for an ambush. Which Togo obviously had decided too.
The problem was, her own enemy had already pinpointed her location, and probably her dispositions as well. The Russians had improved their overhead observation all through the war, augmented with nanosatellites nearly as advanced as the Allied MICE network.
“They’ve got to pretty much know exactly where we are,” she muttered to Chief Terranova.
The round childlike face of her lead sensor chief was unworried. “That’s gotta be good, Skipper. Right? When they see us parked smack in their way.” When Cheryl didn’t answer, Terranova added, “We going to the helmets? I gotta know, ta run the displays.”
She said reluctantly, “Uh, sure. I mean, yes.”
“You don’t much like that helmet, do you, Skipper? Wait’ll you see the new upgrade. Uploaded it yesterday. You’ll wanta live in there now.”
Cheryl half smiled but didn’t rise to the bait. She pulled the headgear down off the rack, adjusted her faded, threadbare olive-and-black shemagh for padding—it was about the only thing she had left from the old Savo, since most of her clothes and gear had gone down with the ship—and settled the heavy VR helmet down on her shoulders.
A moment of pinched dark, swimming with phosphenes. Then the world lit.
The screens swam before her eyes as she struggled to refocus. A stream of cool air caressed the back of her neck. The ship status readout glowed on. She could toggle through it to check every space, every system, and count the remaining weapons in her magazines.
She clicked past it to the battlespace display, and gasped. The Flight 8 software was so far past visual quality it seemed more vivid, more convincing, than reality itself.
She floated a hundred thousand feet up, looking down and across and around on 360 degrees of blue-green sea. Latitude and longitude lines crossed it, and the display instantly populated with altitude readouts when she blinked.
She blinked again, and the electromagnetic presentation appeared. Radar, radio, and microwave laser and data transmissions wavered, sheer slowly fluttering curtains of violet, cornflower, jade, indigo. Neutral, friendly, and hostile contacts were displayed as NATO symbols, though she could switch to video from drones, or even direct view when they were in line-of-sight range. The mirrors of Savo’s lasers doubled as powerful telescopes. When she glanced down, she looked through the hull, to a rugged, corrugated sea-bottom that wavered many fathoms down.
She cocked her head and her avatar rotated in the air. There was Savo, a blue JTDS symbol. She blinked and it transformed into real-time video. The cruiser was rolling, plowing through heavy, cream-topped seas the hard gray of wet steel. A wave rolled up her down-slanted bow, smashing apart as it hit a V-shaped shield, and Savo shuddered despite her massive size. White spray blew back over the laser mounts like gauzy veils as she slowly rolled upright again, plowing on.
Cheryl was viewing it through the lenses of a recon drone far above. And somewhere below, nestled within meters of steel and Kevlar armor, crouched a small, soft larva that was … herself?
And yet, not. Her old human self was no longer bound by its old senses. She’d left it miles behind, sitting motionless in a foam-contoured chair, hands lying lightly on the armrests.
Only the maddening itch below her armpits, both of them now, reminded her she was still mortal.
A voice in her ears murmured. Though not a human one. AALIS, her ship, was fused and integrated now with Sea Eagle, the tactical AI that would direct the battle once it started. “COMEX. COMEX,” it pronounced in tranquil, sexless tones.
And the exercise began.
THE fleets of 1905 had converged in line ahead, battleships and cruisers steaming like articulated trains. Togo had won by “crossing the T,” maneuvering to concentrate the whole weight of fire of his broadside-on line against one Russian ship at a time, as they charged toward him.
But since World War II, American task forces had transited and fought in concentric formations. The highest-value units—carriers and tankers—were nestled in the center. Cruisers and destroyers were stationed farther out, for antiaircraft defense. Beyond them, radar pickets reached out with electronic feelers to detect threats and localize targets. Aircraft had the job of searching even farther out, while beneath the waves submarines sanitized the line of advance, to guard against ambush.
That formation had had its advantages, when information was scarce and the outermost units served primarily as sensors, feeding information to a central decision maker. But now data could exist everywhere simultaneously. Each ship and plane was a node that shared information instantly with all other nodes. In other words, distributed operations.
Her formation now was anything but circular. And, really, nothing that would even have been recognizable as a formation to a commander from the twentieth century.
Cheryl hadn’t come up with this disposition herself. DEVGRUWEST served as the fleet’s capability development hub. AALIS had communicated with Sea Eagle, the Navy’s cloud-based AI there, which had in turn consulted with Battle Eagle, the overarching Allied strategic artificial intelligence.
After the mysterious demise of the Chinese AI, Jade Emperor, Battle Eagle had planned operations, fought back cyberattacks, and conducted its own crippling offensives in cyberspace. It had largely been responsible for winning the war, in the view of some pundits. Now, the op plan it had developed for Trident Junction included a tactical grid to connect the various nodes, plus backup data storage uplinked to satellites and downlinked to a surface-based comm chain. A way to connect the various ship and land-based AIs, to render tactical advice to the commander in real time.
The artificial intelligences had recommended a steaming formation unlike any she’d ever seen. Gliding effortlessly across the sky, her avatar looked down on a seemingly random mix of units large and small. Scattered across hundreds of square miles of sea, it hardly seemed organized at all. If anything, it was more like a random scattering, a crushable foam filled with far too much empty space.
Since the Japanese wouldn’t be joining, her task force would consist of Savo Island and one single modern Korean unit, Jeonnam, currently en route from Pusan. She had four submarines, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah, and John Warner. Sea Eagle had placed three subs north of Savo, with Utah behind Cheryl, in the approach from the East China Sea. Which made sense, to guard against any attacks from behind. Her surface escorts consisted of two wartime-construction Improved Burke–class destroyers, Dixie Kiefer and Christos Katsetos, and three Wartime Flight 3 missile frigates. Goodrich, Montesano, and Patrick Hart had operated with her before; she knew and trusted their captains to fight smart and persevere until the end.
Far ahead, halfway up the Sea of Japan, the unmanned hunters scouted: USV-34, -20, -7, and -16. Most of the data streaming to her about the oncoming Russians were from them, and from the drones whose inputs they and the nanosatellites were forwarding. Her two Orca Flight 1 autonomous submarines, USS-4 and -13, were far out in front, covering Sakhalin and the Soya Strait. They were controlled from Idaho.
She toggled to the antisubmarine presentation. Savo herself was operating in fairly shallow waters, but to the northwest the depths dropped to over two thousand meters. Perfect operating depths for enemy submarines. AALIS highlighted five unidentified contacts strung along the coast, with three vibrating patches that denoted possible threats as well, though not yet localized enough for targeting purposes.
Five to eight possible subsea threats. Again, not a good force ratio.
She toggled to the air picture, but—aside from a few contacts over Japan and Korea, the latter probably humanitarian missions to serve rescue and reconstruction—the battlespace stretched empty. Thus far, at least. Her request to Higher for carrier air support hadn’t been answered. But with three modern Aegis-equipped ships, she should be able to fight off a modest air attack.
A coordinated, well-timed barrage of hypersonic missiles, though … She was pretty confident her ABM defenses would take out a Zircon-C. The hypersonic traveled at Mach 9, and reports claimed it was shielded from radar with plasma stealth. But after discussing its parameters with Terranova, Cheryl felt Savo was up to the job. The chief felt she could tune above or below whatever electron plasma frequency the incoming warhead displayed.
But a ship’s magazines carried only so many rounds, and those she’d expended at the end of the war hadn’t been replaced. She still had lasers, but the forward mount tended to overheat and she wasn’t sure she wanted to trust the ship’s survival to the after one.
Bottom line: depending on how many missiles the oncoming fleet might fire in salvo, she could be overwhelmed. If the Japanese provided land-based support, that would help. But expending their remaining Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis Ashore missiles to save her would leave their homeland undefended, if Moscow decided on horizontal escalation.
She wondered when they would ever be satisfied with what they had. The Russians, that is. Hadn’t everyone suffered enough?
Then she remembered.
The Russians hadn’t suffered at all. Mainly, they’d just profited, cheering from the sidelines as the other superpowers clawed at each other’s eyes and ripped each other’s guts out.
Now, like some lurking scavenger shark, they were moving in, intent on tearing bloody chunks off the loser.
Okay, keep Higher informed at all times … She cut her eyes to bring up high side nanochat. Her fingers flexed, and some circuit she didn’t see spelled out letters. Her message went out Flash priority, reporting her task force on station, and once more requesting air and tanker support. Requesting high-level intervention as well, to beg for Japanese missile support and any available forces from the remnants of China’s navy and air force.
Requesting reinforcements, from anywhere they could be found.
It wasn’t just to cover her ass. But if worse came to worst, no one would be able to say she hadn’t sounded the alarm.
At last she hit Send, and sagged back in her chair. Her palms itched. She glanced down at her avatar’s hands. They were smooth. Unsullied. The skin didn’t itch, or erupt, or bleed. Her virtual hands looked perfect. Even the nails were neatly done, and squared off with French tips. “Nice,” she muttered, envious.
Now all she had to do was wait.
The sea spread out below, calm, unfurrowed. Except … far below her, on the sea bottom, something was creeping into the field of view.
At first she couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe just a disturbance, an anomaly, or a jutting rock marring the smooth sediments of the bottom. Gradually her brain assembled it into something recognizable, though. Lying on its side, half buried.
The crumpled, broken wreck of a ship sprawled far beneath, half digested by the muck of the abyss. She couldn’t tell what kind, but it contained iron. The magnetic readouts told her that. Imperial Russian? One of Rozhestvensky’s doomed battleships, from so many years before? Or a casualty of World War II, a Japanese maru blasted apart by American torpedoes?
She couldn’t tell, and didn’t really want to know.
She just didn’t want Savo Island, or any of her other ships, to join it.