"We need everybody vertical ASAP. Sound to general quarters."

"Aye aye."

As the ship's alarms began to call her company to battle, Halabi limped out of the bridge through the light curtain and headed for the stairwell that led down into the Trident's central hull. Beneath her feet she could feel the vessel reach a standard cruising speed of thirty-five knots. The seas were running at one and a half meters on a three-meter swell, enough to impart a significant roll, even with the trimaran's inherent stability and wave-piercing form. It slowed Halabi's progress, but not drastically.

The hexagonal space of the Combat Center was bathed in a quiet blue light. It was unexpectedly soothing after the neural shock of the last few minutes. McTeale had proven himself as efficient as ever. Medics were shooting up a sysop with Promatil as Halabi entered. One approached her with that disapproving expression physicians have been perfecting for thousands of years.

"Begging your pardon, ma'am," he said. "But Commander McTeale informs me you have a serious burn on your leg-"

"I don't have time for gel, Andrews," she warned.

"Pain relief, then." The medic tapped the screen of his flexipad a few times, effectively ignoring the captain's objections. "Surgeon's orders, ma'am. He's authorized a local effect anesthetic pip."

Before Halabi could speak again, she felt the mild tingle of a spinal syrette spitting its dose, followed by the delicious warmth of an analgesic balm washing over the affected area.

It was only the second time in her career she'd experienced palliative intervention via spinal insert, but it confirmed the wisdom of prohibiting self-administration. Even with the greatest will in the world, if you had the option to hit yourself up with this stuff every morning, the temptation would be to never get out of bed.

"Thank you, Andrews," she said. "But that will be all. Please proceed with the treatment schedule. We're going to need all hands on station in the next few minutes."

"Aye, ma'am."

Halabi quickly surveyed the CIC. Twenty-two specialists were strapped into large, comfortable airline-style seats. Massive touch screen workstations hovered in front of them. The Trident's commander made her way directly to the supervising officer, Lieutenant Commander Howard, who was examining the holobloc with a fiercely censorious air.

"Well, Commander, what sort of a hellish mess have we got ourselves in now?"

"A right cock-up by the look of it, ma'am. Makes no sense at all. None. Have a gander for yourself. The Fearless is gone. We've detected just three survivors in the water. And the rest of the task force is scattered to buggery."

Floating inside was a three dimensional, positional hologram, a scaled-down real-time feed of the battlespace around the destroyer for a sixty-nautical-mile radius. The rest of the task force was represented by eerily realistic but oversized spectral miniatures that cut across a blue sea surface. A few centimeters below the rest floated the submarine HMAS Havoc. The Multinational Task Force, which should have been arrayed in an orderly fashion around the flattops Clinton and Kandahar, was instead scattered to hell and back.

She shook her head in frank amazement. Task force ships were making for all points of the compass. That, in its own way, was more unsettling than the sight of the doomed helicopter carrier had been.

More disturbing still were the dozen or more phantom vessels hopelessly mixed in among them. None of these registered any ID signal, and Posh hadn't been able to tag them with any designator hack other than Unidentified Vessel 01 through… Karen checked the readout on the data cube that was suspended above the hologram… UIV 24.

"My word, Commander. A cock-up indeed."

"Aye, Captain. Three carriers of some sort. Four heavy gun platforms. A couple of replenishment ships. And a swarm of littleuns. Destroyers or frigates, I suppose, but like nothing I've ever seen outside a museum. And we seem to have come up short a few friendlies. Besides Fearless, Vanguard is off the bloc. Dessaix is missing, the nukes and the Amanda Garrett, and those Indonesian tubs."

"Destroyed?"

"No way to tell. Just missing, ma'am. Without trace."

"Find them." Halabi pursed her lips for a second before casting an inquiry over her shoulder to a young lieutenant situated at a nearby station. "Elint, what are we getting from these Unidentified Vessels?"

The young sysop, a Jamaican Welsh woman of unusual beauty, was burning holes in the screen with her intense stare. "Not a lot of emcon, Captain. But then, there's not a lot of emission to control, by the look of it. We've been painted by radar once or twice, and it just slipped off the ram skin, but we collected a sample for analysis. It's primitive stuff. Almost Stone Age. A pirate barge can buy better off the shelf in Bangkok.

"Sigint are gathering a lot of uncoded, unscrambled, basic radio transmissions… English language… but uhm… pretty weird."

"Pretty weird is not good enough, Lieutenant. We're dying here. What exactly do you mean?"

The woman hid her chagrin well. "I mean weird, Captain. Unusual, unexplained. Beyond standard parameters. I can give you a raw sample if you wish."

"Do so."

The lieutenant's dark, slender fingers danced over a giant touch screen to her left, and the data cube's Bang amp; Olufsen speakers began to emit a harsh burst of static. It flared and faded as the signal intercept was washed clean of interference. Voices came through. Confused, loud, angry, scared. Most of the CIC crew were too deeply involved in their own stations to bother with the broadcast, but the intel sysops turned to listen, even though they could have taken the sound channel through individual headphones. They heard American voices, educated, military, and… something else.

Halabi focused on the audio stream, which seemed to have been acquired from the fire control facility of an unidentified vessel. The speaker was demanding to know what the hell he was shooting at, where they had come from. And he wanted to know if they were Japs. Halabi twirled an index finger and the lieutenant, Waverton, flipped into another channel.

A ship-to-ship transmission this time. The same burst of static subsided into quantum clear audio.

"Hamman, Hughes, and Morris to pick up survivors…"

"Hamman's engaged a Jap carrier… she's right on top of her. They could put a few fish in…"

"Russel or Gwin then…"

Halabi twirled her fingers again. Lieutenant Waverton ripped out a new line of instructions and another channel came up.

"… ayday, mayday. This is the Astoria. We have been rammed. We have been rammed…"

She snapped a finger now, apologizing at the same time. "You were right, Lieutenant. Weird is the best word for it.

"Where's the hologram feed coming from, Commander?" she went on, motioning for Waverton to cut the audio and turning back to the holobloc.

"We've lost a few of our task force resources, Captain. This is feeding from three drones at six thousand meters. Deep in the cloud cover. Posh is drawing on form memory to project some of the task force assets, and skin-sensors for the rest. The audio we're stealing ourselves, through the mast-mounted system and bridge skin."

Halabi was becoming acutely aware of how quickly things were unraveling around her.

"Mr. Howard, can we raise task force command?"

"No, ma'am. Channels are open and secure. CIs are in contact. But no human operators respond to hail. We've tried independent hails to each task force ship, all with the same result. We're on our own for the moment."

"They're out, just like we were," Halabi concluded. "Have Posh talk to the other CIs, send all the data we have about the illness, the bio-attack, or whatever it was, and details on the Promatil treatment. Boot up the Cooperative Battle Link with any surviving compatible assets."