The result had been disastrous, Toyoda thought. The intelligence message on his personal pad computer told the complete story. The Three-class computer-driven ships had triumphed in sinking the enemy surface fleets, but in the process they had been sunk, smashed to bits by the fleet-escort submarines. After spending the time and resources to build more than a dozen Three-class ships, they were now gone, not responding to their orders to transmit their locations to the Galaxy satellites. And now the defense of the Home Islands was left to the Two-class submarines, which were capable but neglected for two years by the shipyards of Japan.
There were dozens of American submarines sailing for the Home Islands, and only a limited number of torpedoes on the Destiny II-class ships deployed to guard Japan. What would happen when those torpedoes were gone? Less capable American submarines would survive to fire overwhelming numbers of torpedoes at the Two class. The American torpedoes were small and slow and relatively ineffective, but ten of them together could certainly sink a Two class, double hull or not.
If the leadership had built more of the Two class and less of the Three class. But there was no sense thinking that way.
Toyoda got up, put on his shoes and took his evening walk through the ship, going first into the control room, where his first officer Ryunosuke Kusaka presided over the modified battlestations section watch. Toyoda waved Kusaka over to the forward door of the room, where the other officers in the watch section couldn’t hear their conversation. “Any contact?”
“No, Captain. You know I would have called you if there were.”
“It just seems odd. The computer files — are they set correctly?”
“Sir, the Second Captain is scanning the sea for the known characteristics of all flights of American 688 class, with a secondary scan in action for any units of the British Royal Navy or the French Navy. There has been nothing, nothing at all.”
“Maybe our job is over, maybe the enemy will pull back.”
“I think there will be more action. Captain. I feel it.”
“I feel it too, First. They are out there and they’re coming for us.”
“Yes, sir.”
There seemed little more to say. Toyoda left and took the stairs to the middle level and the messroom. He was amazed at the officers awake in the messroom, some of them studying for the next rank, some writing haiku, some in a lively discussion that died when he came in.
Toyodo thought of the loneliness of command, that he had no one to confide his own thoughts to. He smiled at the men, wondering why these off-watch men didn’t sleep. In another six hours they would be on watch with him in the control room. Probably they were awake for the same reason he was — tension. He spoke a few words, wondering if Toshumi Tanaka — the lead commanding officer of the flotilla and a flaming maladjusted martinet — ever took time to speak to his men. Not that it mattered, Toyoda thought. He said good night to the men and returned to his stateroom.
He shut the door behind him, deciding to take a last look at the Second Captain’s sonar displays. The computer-filtered data was empty. He scanned the raw unprocessed data, realizing there was too much to examine and what there was was random. He was reminded of a time in his youth when he had been in love with the television set and his parents were gone and a thunderstorm had knocked out the cable system, but he had not accepted that, and in his desperation to watch television he went through every channel, looking for a show. He flipped through channel after channel, seeing nothing but snow, but sometimes seeing a shadow of a face, a hint of printing, a glance at people walking, but then the snow would prevail, leaving him wondering if he had just imagined it. The raw sonar data was like that, all random noise of every frequency and tone and duration.
Looking for the noise made by a machine in that mess was like looking into a rainy jungle for a camouflaged soldier. He snapped off the console and got back into bed.
Comdr, Soemu Toyoda pulled his uniform off, draped it on his chair and climbed into the bed wearing only his shorts. Back in the control room the first officer had orders to continue to patrol the waters offshore until contact was gained on the next enemy sub. Toyoda’s Eternal Spirit had already put three enemy vessels on the bottom, each of them easily detected on sonar, but since then the sea had been empty. Completely empty. Toyoda wondered why, if there were no more enemy ships, there had been no word on the radio command and control circuits about what was going on. It seemed odd, but then so had this entire mission. He turned off his reading lamp, feeling tense and nervous. There was something not right about the situation but he couldn’t put his mind on what it was.
He shut his eyes and tried to think about the woman he had met just prior to sailing. Her name was Suni Ariga and she was half his age and beautiful, vital in a way he wasn’t, mysterious and sexual. She had made it very clear from the start that she wanted him sexually, and it was strange — her generation was so different from his own, so willing to say what they wanted. The young women were entering the work force and threatened to knock on the door of the military someday. But it was the women’s sexuality that was so difficult to accept, centuries of courting rituals being washed down the sewer pipe with other Japanese customs as the television set homogenized the world, the Western influence spreading more by the hour. He returned his thoughts to Suni, seeing her face, remembering how her eyes had looked into his, how her mouth had moved on his chest. He could feel himself getting hard and tried to ignore the feeling, one welcome in the company of an aroused woman but very unwelcome alone inside a ship filled only with men at war.
Bruce Phillips came into control, his cotton poncho flying in the breeze of his passage, his boots clumping on the deckplates, coming to a halt in front of Meritson.
“Man silent battlestations!”
Meritson snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, having anticipated Phillips’ next action.
There was no circuit-one announcement. The word went out on the phone circuits to the watchstanders in the spaces, each of them wearing cordless phones that put them in touch with the control room. The forward compartment phone talkers woke up the section’s duty messengers, who went through the berthing compartments and woke up the crew. Men jumped out of their coffinlike racks, curtains sliding aside. They climbed into their coveralls, grabbed glasses, shoes, all in the tight dimly lit spaces that were a challenge just to walk through much less dress in. In twenty frantic seconds seventy men rocketed out of the berthing rooms, coverall uniforms wrinkled and stale with sweat, hair spiked from sleep, eyes puffy, all business.
Those seventy men dispersed, some heading aft, others forward or below. In the control room two dozen watchstanders came silently in. Phone talkers strapped on headsets. Plotting officers took their stations at the plot tables snapping fresh sheets of tracing paper over the flat panel displays. The row of consoles of the BSY-2 attack center filled with officers, each trained to manipulate his panel in a unique way, each dancing with the computer to a different song but on the same dance floor. The arriving helmsman waved out the watch section’s helmsman, the new arrival the ship’s best, the regular watch helmsman getting up and muttering what the ship’s course and depth were, the battlestations helmsman sliding into the control seat, the yoke of the controller slipping into his hands.
On the conn Scott Court, the navigator, took over the officer of the deck watch from Meritson. Their conversation was short as Meritson gave a rapid data dump in Court’s ear: “Target One confirmed Destiny II bearing two zero six on towed array narrowband’s 154 Hertz, bearing ambiguity resolved, own ship on one four five, depth eight hundred, speed all ahead two-thirds with turns for eight, ship rigged for ultraquiet, we’ve got a layer at 110 feet with a good sound channel between seven hundred and nine hundred. We’ve got weapons one through four up and warm, outer doors open, target solution programmed but weak. The Mark 50s are backups to the Vortex battery. We’ve got Vortex unit two coming up to speed now, gyro readback due in forty seconds.”