Final impact

“You can do better,” Willet replied before addressing the crew of the sub’s Combat Center. “C’mon. Heads down and bums up, people. Every pixel, every pulse, every stray scrap of data. I want it all, and I want it yesterday. We’ve got to get this away on Fleetnet at the first opportunity.”

Normally hushed, the Havoc’s control room hummed with chatter as the first images of the titanic clash in the Sea of Okhotsk came in from the Big Eye drones lurking at twenty-five thousand meters above the Soviet host. Willet chewed a stick of peppermint gum and tried to take it all in.

The boat’s Combat Intelligence was way ahead of her, assigning individual data tags to all the Soviet combatants down to the smallest motorboat and numbering each of the Japanese attackers for after-action study. Within the quantum arrays, separate channels were established to track the history of each combatant; autonomous software agents had already begun to crawl over the data like programmed spiders, spinning intricate webs of potential meaning around the rapidly accumulating information load.

More than two hundred kilometers away from the action, resting safely deep below the surface, the Havoc plugged into the battle via a thin tendril of nanonically engineered optical fiber. It trailed up and away from her conning tower to a small receiver pod bobbing on the wavelets 180 meters above. Skin sensors probed the threat bubble directly around the submarine out to a distance of ninety klicks. Willet’s defensive sysops maintained an obsessive-compulsive watch for any potential foes.

At the moment they had nothing on the boards but one very old and noisy submarine, probably a Mitsubishi, sixty-four thousand meters to the southwest. It was completely oblivious to their presence.

Also unnoticed were the Havoc’s drones, two of them over the Soviets and one keeping station above the remnants of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet. The lightweight plasteel disks, seventy-five centimeters in diameter, were powered by phosphoric acid fuel cells and packed with hundreds of different sensors in the outer ring, which surrounded the power plant and a monobonded carbon fan. Anyone standing just beneath one of those disks would see what looked exactly like a big eye-hence the name.

Bejeweled with multiple micronic lenses, a drone was more like the segmented eye of an insect. Only 40 percent of its internal mass was given over to visual systems, however. Most of the weight-such as it was-came from the suite of arrays originally designed to vacuum up electronic intelligence from a twenty-first-century battlespace.

As panicky radio transmissions arced among Yumashev’s vessels, the combat air patrol, and the Soviet ground forces on Hokkaido, the Havoc’s Big Eye drones listened in, recording everything. When the antiaircraft cruiser Belgorod powered up fire control radar, the drone’s electromagnetic sensor suite went active, locking in on the Soviet ship’s arrays to generate a full-spectrum profile of the systems’ performance.

The column of Japanese Ohkas had completely broken down into dozens of constituent parts. As Willet and her officer looked on, the Soviet Pacific Fleet was reduced to a handful of destroyers and smaller boats. Time and again elongated white streaks punched into lumbering ironclad ships, always with devastating results. The Soviet fighters, prop-driven relics that looked like a straight clone of the old British Sea Hurricane, were left floundering.

The volume of the triple A fell away and-she glanced up to check the clock running in the top right-hand corner of the main screen-after three minutes it was done. No Japanese planes survived.

“CI has the prelims, Captain,” Lieutenant Lohrey announced. “Seventy-three percent of the attackers got through. Eighty-nine percent of those targets that were struck were destroyed, although they seem to have allotted at least four missiles to each of the larger vessels. Five, in the case of the flattops.”

“They weren’t missiles, Amanda,” Willet corrected her. “They were men.”

“Sorry, Captain. Force of habit.”

Willet moved a little farther down the control room, where Yamamoto’s task force was moving toward the tip of Hokkaido. Their progress looked quite stately, even serene, but the grand admiral probably had pedal to the metal.

“What’s happening back at the Death Star, Chewie?”

A heavily bearded sysop pointed at a window displaying one of the Japanese carriers. Touching the tip of his finger to an icon, a small magnifying glass, he pulled in to a virtual height of 150 meters above her decks. “They’re prepping for a conventional attack, Captain. Zeros. Torpedo bombers. Nothing exciting.”

“Unless you’re on the receiving end,” Chief Flemming said.

“Captain Willet,” another sysop called out. “Long-range Nemesis scan has another airborne attack forming up out of Sapporo. No visuals, but the returns look like Nakajima One-One-Fives and-Sixes.”