The fourth torpedo slid beneath Rivero’s violently maneuvering stern as if destiny had willed it there. The underwater rocket detonated, blowing a spherical hollow in the water below the destroyer’s aft keel. The screws sped up into a blur, freed from their watery prison, followed immediately by the buckling of both shafts. Thousands of tons of mass, now unsupported by the buoyant ocean, sagged down amidships and snapped the ship’s spine.
Then, even above the sound of screeching steel and screaming men, there came the roar of water rushing back into the void. Hydrodynamics coalesced the collapsing sphere of liquid into a beautiful, terrible lance of pure, incompressible force. The lance speared the already broken back of the ship and erupted upwards through deck upon deck, emerging in a fountain of destructive energy from the middle of Rivero’s hangar.
Rivero collapsed back into the water, her after third shorn away in a blast of twisted, torn, burning metal. The stern of the ship sank in less than a minute, greedily claiming everyone stationed inside. The bodies of the flight deck crew and wrecked hulk of the autonomous Firescout-II helo were launched several hundred yards. None of them survived intact.
The forward two thirds of the Rivero wallowed in relative peace. The hangar crew and the engineers who had faced the blast directly were no longer even recognizable as bodies. Water flooded into open spaces, past sprung doors and hatches and into the forward half of the ship, even as oil and sewage spilled back out into the sea. Throughout the ship, the few survivors who remained conscious set about organizing themselves to make it out to the life rafts and to evacuate everyone they could. They stopped any real attempt at damage control once they realized there was no way to stop the ship from going down, nor could they tell if it was going down in five minutes or fifty.
Unseen by any aboard, either because they were unconscious, dead, or too busy to worry about being attacked again, there was a sequence of four more explosions a couple of miles away to the north and to the west. These eruptions were followed by a pair of spreading oil slicks, some debris, and nothing more. The dark, wind tossed sea returned to a state of calm without further attacks upon the doomed destroyer.
Five minutes later, Chafee’s helicopter hovered into view to face a scene sailors had only regarded in nightmares since the end of the Second World War. Pitifully few of the Rivero’s bright orange inflatable life rafts floated around her rolling, sinking wreckage. It was another twenty minutes before USS Chafee herself arrived, with Halsey and Port Royal showing up to render aid soon thereafter.
LT Nathaniel Robert Kelley, Weapons Officer of the former USS Rivero, kept his haunted eyes upon her grave long after she slipped beneath the waves.
3: “ZINGER”
June 15, 2034; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California
Looking up at the redwood shrouded main house, Nathan Kelley realized this had to go down as the weirdest damned job interview in history. If he had known the process would be quite this … complicated, he doubted he would have ever responded to Windward Technologies’ invitation to that first meeting.
That initial interview had been almost painfully normal. The Windward representative had come out to Boston as part of a larger science and technology job fair along with a score of other companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Orbital Sciences. Nathan—like a few hundred other prospective candidates—was finishing up his Master’s degree at MIT, ready to begin the next chapter of his life. Having come from a now aborted career in the Navy, he had been older than his competition and not a perpetual student.
His Windward meet-and-greet had been utterly typical interview fodder, blending in with his dozen or so other attempts to sell himself to corporate America that day:
“What are your goals, Mr. Kelley?”
“What are your best and worst qualities, Mr. Kelley?”
“Why should Windward hire you, Mr. Kelley?”
Nathan had left the job fair less than hopeful about the possibility of Windward calling him back, so he had gone back to school and finished the final draft of his thesis. There were no nibbles from Windward Technologies, so he had moved on to other applications, other prospects, targeting résumés to every tech-firm that might remotely be hiring.
It was so different from the Navy, where your career path was often laid out in stone. That regimented military existence had proved his undoing, however, a discordant note of calm in the white noise of life following the sinking. He had simply been unable to go back to the routine of service stateside, and the war would not keep him as damaged goods. The reason they gave for medically discharging him was post traumatic stress disorder, but Nathan knew there were other reasons as well. They were the reasons that went unsaid, the reasons related to the furtive, accusatory stares of doubt other officers gave him when they thought he could not see them, stares that would continue for the rest of his career, cleared by a board of inquiry or not.
So he had given it all up, and after a brief respite in his Pennsylvania hometown, he had sought a new existence as a student and engineer, essentially rebooting his life at the not insignificant age of 30 years old. Leaving was a big change, an unanticipated change, but a welcome one. It did necessitate some adjustment. Life in the civilian sector could be so much more uncertain, precarious even.
But in the civilian world, no one shattered your whole world in a single act of cold anger and your ambiguous split-second decisions did not lead to the deaths of 103 subordinates, shipmates, and friends. In the civilian world, perhaps he would no longer wake up in a clammy sweat, shaking from half-remembered dreams of rending steel and screaming, faceless men.
Precarious. He was fine with precarious.
On the day after graduation, while packing up his small office at the university, a welcome—though unexpected—call had come, starting him upon an extremely odd journey into the world of corporate job-seeking: “Mr. Kelley, would you mind traveling to Windward’s New York office for a second interview?”
That interview, like his first, had been deceptively normal, just the corporate machine getting to know one of their potential cogs a little better. Nathan had smiled and nodded, answering their questions as best he could and trying his utmost to exude an air of professional competence. The New York office Human Resources director had smiled back, clearly impressed. “That was very good, Mr. Kelley. Would you mind taking a short written exam?”
Again, not too unusual. Nathan supposed that many companies wanted to test their candidates to find out if their degrees were more than just sheets of paper. The test had covered a gamut of topics: physics, biology, math, chemistry, systems engineering, politics, sociology, and finance. It was not terribly difficult, but it had stretched his limited academic background. He figured it might have been a great deal harder for someone else, someone whose life experience before MIT had not been so diverse.
“Excellent job, Mr. Kelley! How about flying down to our Dallas offices for another interview?” They also put up the offer of per diem compensation for all his time, so Nathan shrugged and agreed, still happy to have gotten past the first interview, the second interview, and then the test. And now another interview in another city, for what was for all intents and purposes a relatively entry-level position in Windward Technologies engineering management program. It was then that the first pangs of doubt and anxious bewilderment hit him.