A twenty-first-century cruiser’s main mission was to knock down all the incoming weapons possible, until her magazines were empty. Then, position herself between the carrier and the threat, and soak up the final weapons with her own steel. Take the hit, protect the higher-value target…
“Hey, Dan. Good to see you back.”
He turned to Donnie Wenck’s blond cowlick and slightly mad blue eyes. The chief held up a green wool sub-style sweater. “Wanna borrow? Cold as the ass end of Pluto in here.”
“It’s ‘Captain,’ Donnie, or ‘Skipper.’ Not ‘Dan.’”
“Sorry, sir, keep forgetting. Wait a minute, I heard something on the 1MC. Racker’s gone, yeah? I didn’t like that guy. Too fucking friendly.”
“I don’t need your opinions on the outgoing CO, Chief. How’s the system?” Wenck, who’d come to the ship from the Tactical Analysis Group along with Dan, was the “SPY chief,” in charge of maintenance and operation of the massive radars that guided her weapons.
Wenck turned back to the Aegis console, and a chubby-faced girl blinked vaguely up at Dan. “Hey, Petty Officer Terranova,” he said.
His lead radar systems controller turned a dial, and the familiar five-pops-a-second audio of the outgoing beam echoed like a query from some extragalactic civilization. She tapped her keyboard, and the raw video came up on the rightmost screen. An orange, slowly fading beam, clicking, not sweeping, in a clockwise march across the face of East Africa. There was the Rift Valley, where the first human had made the first weapon.… She muttered, “Hinky CFA, and I’m gonna have ta replace one of the switch tubes.”
Wenck said, “ALIS is being a hooker, as usual. Otherwise, you got about 98 percent. You know that Aegis math — one plus one equals four.”
“Chill water system still tight?” The chief nodded, and Dan lowered his voice. “And has Lieutenant Singhe throttled back on pissing off the goat locker?”
Wenck shrugged, as if talking about human beings bored him. Dan lingered for a while, then undogged the door and climbed two flights of metal ladders up to the bridge level.
Brightness and heat. Scarlet dust fine as mercury oxide coated the chart table, the top of the steering console, the objectives of the binoculars. Outside the windows, the green sea, flat and calm today, and the purple land far off. Not a single cloud. Two ships in sight, a tanker, low in the water, and a high-piled containership farther off, both blurred by the invisible dust hanging in the air, the shimmer of heat boiling off the water. Both stern to, which agreed with the radar picture.
Matt Mills and Noah Pardees turned to salute. Mills, the tall lieutenant, had joined them from Jenn Roald’s staff. Pardees, languid and almost too thin to be seen sideways, was the first lieutenant, in charge of the deck division. A golf fanatic, he’d practiced his putting on the pier every evening in Crete. “Welcome back, Captain. Glad to see you again,” Mills said.
“Good to be here, guys.” Dan looked past them, inspecting the horizon. “Keep your lookouts alert. Some of these little dhows are just about transparent to radar, and a lot of containerships go through here. We don’t want to hit anything that fell overboard.”
Pardees murmured an aye aye, and Dan wandered the bridge, greeting the helmsman, the quartermaster, the boatswain, the junior officer of the deck, and the gunner’s mates on the remote operating consoles for the chain guns. “Good to have you back, sir,” they murmured, though none seemed terrifically enthusiastic about it.
He understood why. He went out on the bridge wing and checked aft. Then gazed down into green water churned to white froth, listening to the steady roar of the bow wave as Savo’s stem ripped through it at twenty knots. Only then did he hoist himself into the leather command chair, grinning. With the drill schedule he’d directed, hardly anyone would get enough sleep in the next few days. They all knew by now; the word flew around a ship like telepathy. But a busy crew, even if they bitched, were happier than one with time on their hands. And far better a trained and tired crew on the screens and damage-control parties, than a rested, sloppy one.
A message he’d gotten loud and clear watching his own COs in the past, both those who’d driven hard and those who’d let the reins dangle.
“Coffee, Captain?” The gangling, pimply-faced Longley, holding a tray as if tempted to throw it overboard. Skippers no longer had stewards, per se, but they did usually have a culinary specialist to look after them if operations drove hard. He’d seen some men abuse the relationship, using the seaman as a personal servant. The essential thing was that he never show Longley any favoritism. So far it seemed to be working, but not because of any excessive effort on the kid’s part. The steward looked as rumpled and sloppy as usual in a stained white mess coat. “Chili dogs today. You gonna want lunch up here?”
“Let’s say yes for now. Especially if traffic picks up.”
“I set your shit, I mean your stuff, up in the at-sea cabin. And your computer.”
“That’s good. How you been, Longley? Pull any liberty in Crete?”
“Went to the zoo. That be all, sir?”
“Yeah. I mean, no. Is the shower still—”
“It’s unfucked, sir. Just let the hot run for a minute or so.”
Bart Danenhower stepped up next. The chief engineer was big and bulky, with shaggy Hagrid eyebrows. Fittingly, he was a fan of the Potter books, leaving them in the engine spaces and offices. The CHENG wasn’t brilliant, but he worked hard and told the truth. They had a long conversation about the controllable reversible pitch propellers, which had some kind of leak or condensation no one had ever been able to locate the source of. “We change the filters, though, it goes away,” Danenhower finished. Dan glanced behind him to see who was next. The ship’s medic, HMC Grissett. “Oh yeah,” Danenhower added. “We still got that bug going around. I’ll let Doc Grissy bring you up to speed on that.”
The chief corpsman said that the sickness among the crew, which had gone away during their time in Crete, had surfaced again. “Got three at sick call just this morning, same symptoms. Dry cough. Chills and fever, spikes to a hundred and four. Muscle pain, lethargy, malaise; diarrhea. Even the people who recover, they feel like shit. Mopey. Slow. There’s some kind of ongoing syndrome here.”
“What the hell? We replaced the filters. Scrubbed down all the ductwork. Bart?”
Danenhower spread his hands. “We did it thorough, Cap’n. If it was in there, it’s dead.”
“But it’s not just up forward anymore,” Grissett added.
Dan rubbed his face. “The anthrax inoculations?”
“Bethesda says they’re safe. Anyway, a reaction to that wouldn’t surface weeks, months later like this.”
Was his ship itself somehow infected? Case after case, fever, chills, lassitude… one man had even died, in forward berthing, without a mark on him. “Okay, we’re not sitting still any longer. Draft another message for Bethesda. Info our chain of command. Outline the problem and the corrective action we took, and ask for immediate assistance on scene. Hand-carry that up through the XO. Clear?”
“Yessir.”
Mast was scheduled for 1330. Longley brought chili dogs and cold fries up on a tray and Dan ate looking out over the sea, observing a white sail far off. Savo, the tanker, and the containership were maintaining nearly identical speeds, churning along down the coast. Sudan was coming up to starboard, and he checked on the security teams, 25mms, and port and starboard machine guns. No boarder threat had been predicted, but it was wise to be ready. Saudi Arabia slid past to port, tan and violet as the sun glared down and the very sea glowed and shimmered with heat.