Jackson. Berkowitz. Kojima. The names rose unbidden in Pablo’s mind. Again, they might have blown in on a chilly breeze from another world. Stupid square must not be right where it oughta go. That thought also came out of nowhere. And it went right back to nowhere a moment later, for he was fighting for his life.
The dwarves might be little. They might be ugly. But they were fast and mean and brave. If they could have chopped his companion and him into cat’s-meat, they would have done it.
But they couldn’t. Gushing gore splashed the snow. Butchered body parts bounced. Pablo took a nasty cut on the forearm. He felt that as he felt everything else—it was all Real, of course. Still, it troubled him less than it might have, for battle fury filled him.
He and his comrade-in-arms worked a fearful, fearsome slaughter on the dwarves. At last, their foes had had more than flesh and blood could bear. They fled, shrieking in terror and throwing away swords and spears so they could run faster.
“Pretty good, friend,” the big man panted. His axehead was all over blood. He had a gash on one cheek; a dark wet patch on his trouser leg marked another. Both wounds would be annoying. Neither was anything worse.
“You ain’t bad, neither,” Pablo said.
They plunged into the fir forest. Who could say what kind of treasures the dwarves held? Who could guess how many women they’d stolen from human lands to serve their lusts and, later, to serve as the main course in their foul feasts? Who could imagined how overjoyed those women would be at rescue?
The treasures were splendid. Some of the women were better, much better, than splendid. Overjoyed didn’t begin to describe how glad they were. Furs and fires meant the snow all around didn’t matter one bit. And every single thing Pablo did felt Real.
Jamming and spoofing gear filled the USS Rumsfeld. The hovercraft was designed to do one thing and one thing only: get in quick, tear the holy hell out of the target, and then get out again. One of Hillary Griffith’s shipmates said, “Fat lot of good jamming and spoofing did the real Rumsfeld.”
“Who was he?” Hillary asked. She’d been born not long before the turn of the century. The ship was way older than she was. It was probably older than the grizzled CPO doing the talking, too. As far as Hillary was concerned, that made it ancient.
“He was the clown who sucked us into Iraq,” the chief answered.
“Oh. Which time?” she asked—anything that had happened before she was born was as one with Nineveh and Tyre, as far as she was concerned.
“Um, the second one ... I think.” That the CPO wasn’t sure made her feel better. He waved to the bank of sensors she monitored. “You sing out like Timberlake if anything looks even a little bit weird. Even a little, hear?”
“Will do, Chief,” Hillary promised. And she would, too. Her one and only personal, irreplaceable ass was on the line, same as everybody else’s.
Goosed hard, the Rumsfeld could make sixty-three knots. The captain was goosing the hovercraft extra hard. Shoot and scoot. That was what she had to do. If she didn’t, she’d never see Long Beach again.
Hillary’s gaze flicked from one dial to another, restless and random as a hummingbird buzzing a blooming hibiscus. Most of the sensors were passive: they warned if somebody else’s search beams went by. Chances were the skipper would turn on the active sensors only after he knew the enemy had already detected the Rumsfeld. Yes, they could see farther and in more detail than their passive counterparts. But they also shouted Here I am! Here I am! at the top of their electronic lungs.
She just hoped the passive detectors could pick up everything the Chinese would throw at them. People said they used electronic and acoustic bands American gear couldn’t find. People said some of the bands they used weren’t electronic or acoustic at all. Then again, people came out with all kinds of bullshit. If you had any sense, you bozo-filtered most of it.
But she did worry about why neither the military nor the media said more about the American air strikes against the Channel Islands. There’d been all that hot video of the Strike Peregrines taking off. Anybody could see they were loaded for bear. All those bombs and missiles hanging down ... And they would have had Wild Weasels flying cover missions for them, to make sure the enemy couldn’t detect them till too late.
Much fanfare about the takeoffs. Not word one about what the F-27s had done. Hillary might be young, but she hadn’t come to town on a turnip truck. She could see what the likely answer there was. She didn’t like it, not for beans, but she could see it.
Well, if the planes hadn’t done the job, the Rumsfeld would just have to. Hillary reached out and patted the displays in front of her. A ship could carry a much more comprehensive electronics suite than an airplane. They had the most up-to-date gadgets the USA could manufacture or buy. Of course they’d get through.
Not getting through was too grim to be worth thinking about.
None of the displays had so much as hiccuped when the 105mm gun in the forward turret started banging away. “The fuck—?” Hillary said. They weren’t close to Catalina yet. As far as she could tell, they were alone on the Pacific. So why was that 105 firing, for Chrissake? Had somebody flipped out? That would be just what they needed!
“Battle stations!” the intercom shouted. The horn call that went with the words started—but then cut out. But the displays still had power. What a weird glitch, Hillary thought.
She didn’t have to move. Her battle station was right here. That was the good news. The bad news was, she was stuck monitoring display screens and she couldn’t see one goddamn thing besides them. If it hit the fan, she wouldn’t know till it all landed on her.
The engines slowed. By the way they sounded, they went into full emergency stop. Something had hit the fan, damned if it hadn’t.
“Anything on the threat displays?” The skipper’s voice came out of a brass speaking tube, not the intercom. You needed backups, but....
“No, sir.” Hillary shouted her answer up the tube. “Uh, sir—what’s going on?”
“We’re about to run into a giant brick wall that just sprang up out of nowhere,” the skipper answered.
“That’s impossible, sir,” Hillary said.
“Yeah. I know,” the captain said bleakly. The Rumsfeld smashed into the wall a split second later.
Hillary was wearing a seat belt. When you went into combat, you never could tell what would happen. She ended up on the deck anyway. She didn’t go face-first into the screens. That was something, but not enough, not when she ended up clutching one wrist with the other hand. Was it broken? If it wasn’t, it might as well have been—it sure hurt enough.
She heard running feet in the corridor. “Did we get the abandon-ship order?” she called.
“We’re sinking,” the other sailor answered. “If you want to hang around, be my guest.”
Deciding they wouldn’t court-martial her or keelhaul her or whatever the hell, Hillary went up to the main deck. The Rumsfeld was built light—she was made for boogying. The bow looked exactly as if it had run into a brick wall at high speed. It was all smashed in, in other words.
But where was the wall? Yeah, it was night out there, but Hillary thought she would have seen a brick wall big enough to smash in a warship’s bow. All she saw were a whale of a lot of ocean and a million stars overhead.
“Boy, are we gonna have fun explaining this one,” a sailor said gloomily.