“I’ve got a way to get a map of Fredericksburg, maybe, sir.”
“How?”
“Off the Internet. I’ve got a laptop in my locker. I can hook into the Internet and get it.”
“Shit,” said the S-2, “good idea, why didn’t I think of it? Or maybe put in a priority call to the Defense Mapping Agency?” He caught the eye of the communications officer and gestured him over.
“I think Expedia would be faster, sir,” said the tech, diffidently.
“Can we still get Internet access?” asked the gunnery officer.
“The Posleen have destroyed all the standard systems in the area around us,” said the communications officer, “but we might be able to punch through a short-wave transmission. What’s this all about?”
“We desperately need a map,” said the gunnery officer. “Your tech here thinks she can get it off the Internet if she can get her laptop and connect to Milnet.”
“Okay, girl, good work. Go get your laptop. If the Marines stop you, tell them to call me.”
“Yes, sir,” said the tech and jogged out the door.
“How are you going to get through?”
“Patch a line to Norfolk. I’ll get one of my techs on it.”
“Okay.”
“You know, we’re going to have company before too long,” commented the S-2, poring over the updates to the dispositions map. He noted the red marks showing Posleen in close proximity. The Peregrines had come within five miles of the ship on their way out. “That should get interesting.”
Like everyone else in the ship, he was becoming bored with the continuous main gun fire. After cheering the first few rounds it just got damn loud and monotonous. He could hardly imagine what it was like for the gunners.
“Briefly,” laughed the fire control chief.
“Yeah,” noted the gunnery officer, “if only they’d all come down to the water and get baptized.”
“You wish,” said the S-2 with a grim chuckle. The Posleen were not going to like their reception from the North Carolina.
It was by far the most monotonous job on the ship. The Electrician Class Two was one of the close-approach lookouts, the eyes and ears of the ship. Since the environment the ship had been refitted for was projected to be extremely hostile, a duty that traditionally involved exposure to salt spray and fresh sea air was now performed in a crowded, air-conditioned compartment.
And instead of hefting a pair of heavy binoculars and spotting the occasional leaping porpoise or diving bird, the technician ceaselessly scanned a bank of twenty monitors hooked to low-light cameras. Five across, four down, numbered sixty through seventy-nine, back and forth, top to bottom, bottom to top, every odd monitor, every even monitor, back and forth, top to bottom, for eight long hours.
Then, after a rest period that seemed shorter and shorter all the time, it was back to scanning monitors, each of which now showed the same monotonous scene of a nighttime Potomac riverbank.
When they first sailed up the river, civilians had poured out of the woods. Some had their own boats, but many just lined the bank hoping to be rescued. They had been picked up by boat parties or the Marines and now huddled in the forecastle awaiting a return to port. But since that first flurry of activity, the shoreline had been undisturbed.
The tech had just picked up a Pepsi and taken a sip when a centaur appeared from the trees lining Marlboro Point Road and immediately opened fire with its shotgun.
The light shot did not even reach the ship — which was moored nearly a mile out in the broad river — and was unnoticed in the next crash of the main guns, but the lookout lurched forward in his station chair and keyed a mike.
“Posleen report, monitor sixty-eight, starboard abeam.”
“Posleen report, monitor ninety, port forequarter,” sang the soprano of a seawoman handling the portside monitors. The hull rang as the first hypervelocity missile struck the case-hardened steel of the bridge.
“PosRep monitor seventy-three, seventy-five, sixty-nine… PosRep all monitors.”
“CIC, this is Lookout Control,” the chief petty officer managing the compartment called over the intercom, “we have a full court press.”
“Go to full auto on all Thermopylaes and Mark 49s, engage the zone defense system,” ordered the captain, panning his monitor along the shoreline suddenly packed with Posleen.
The defensive systems officer flipped a cover up and inserted a key in a slot. With a twist of the wrist, the close-in defenses went to fully automatic mode.
The original Close-in Weapons System, codename Phalanx, was developed in the 1970s as a defense against antiship missiles and other close air threats. A sophisticated radar guidance system was coupled with a rapid-firing Gatling gun. The guidance system was mounted atop the gun and the single housing looked for all the world like a little robot. The conical white weapons sprouting up on the decks of Navy ships all over were immediately dubbed “R2D2s.” With the transition from a stance of the Navy fighting humans to the Navy fighting Posleen, the weapons appeared, like most of the Navy, to have become obsolete.
However, the same bright boys at Naval Sea Systems Command who pointed out the relative invulnerability of World War II battleships to Posleen ground weapons noted one other point about fighting the Posleen swarms. While the swarms might be difficult for weapons systems to distinguish when they were just moving or standing, once they fired it was a different story entirely. The conical white radome then disappeared, replaced by a heavy-action turret borrowed from the Abrams tank and a turret targeting system borrowed from the Hummer-25. Atop the turret was an infrared spike detector.
As the Posleen God Kings in their saucer-shaped craft came down to the river, they immediately opened fire with their pintle-mounted heavy weapons. The lasers, hypervelocity missiles and plasma rifles scored deep ridges in the battleship’s plate, occasionally penetrating to the surface magazines of the vessel’s secondary weapons. When they did, thundering explosions would rupture forth from the embattled dreadnought. But with the turn of a key, the tides of war changed sides.
The Thermopylae turrets — so christened for a famous defense in ancient Greece — swiveled outboard and the infrared spike detectors immediately found targets. It was the most robotic of actions, as each weapon noted spikes in their area of responsibility, double checked their safe systems, swiveled in two axes and fired.
Every fifth tungsten ten-millimeter penetrator was a tracer, and the shells were so close together that the tracers seemed one continuous beam, a curved orange laser searching out the impudent fools who had dared to challenge the Navy’s battlewagon. The plasma cannons and lasers caused huge thermal blooms each time they fired and the signature was distinctive against the cold night background. Six CIWS on each side locked on to the targets in their area of responsibility and serviced them with the greatest of efficiency.
Each thermal spike was fed back from the CIWS and noted by the onboard defensive computer. It, in turn, swiveled the five-inch secondary cannons outboard and loaded them with canister ammunition. Its algorithm called for a certain number of spikes over a certain vector. At that point there was a seventy-five percent certainty of hitting significant numbers of Posleen normals.
The certainty levels reading was displayed on the defensive systems officer’s monitor while the captain was cross-feeding. Each waited for the heavy guns to engage, but the certainty level first rose, then started to fall as the heavy weapons of the God Kings were silenced one by one.
“Turn the certainty to sixty-six percent,” said the captain, swinging back and forth in his command chair, arms crossed. He had never agreed with the standard setting on the defensive systems.