It had heralded a new world.

He feared that this next battle against the Russians would do exactly the same, but with infinitely darker consequences for his countrymen.

“Captain? You’d best come see this.”

Jane Willet tried to blink the crust of sleep from her eyes, but it was too thick, forcing her to rub away the residue that had accumulated in just a few hours. Not surprising really. She’d been so tired when she turned in that her eyes had been stinging and watery even as she lay her head on the pillow. And stim supplements were just a happy memory.

“S’up,” she croaked at her intelligence boss, Lieutenant Lohrey. “Trouble?”

“As usual.”

Willet hadn’t changed for bed. She’d known she was only ever going to get her head down for a short time, anyway. Shrugging her gray coveralls back on over her shoulders, she accepted a cup of tea from Lohrey.

“Cheers,” she said as she sipped at the steaming mug. “So don’t let me die wondering, Amanda.”

“Looks like the Marianas gig is off,” Lohrey said. “We’ve got a major Japanese force at the edge of the threat bubble, heading toward the Sovs at full clip.”

That got her attention.

Everyone had been wondering what the Japanese would do, faced with a two-front attack. There’d been little evidence of any ground units being moved from the Marianas, but until now the question of the imperial fleet had remained open. Willet sucked down a mouthful of the painfully hot black tea. It completed the job of waking her up.

“Okay. Bring me up to speed.”

The two women squeezed out of her cabin, heading for the Combat Center a short distance away as Lohrey filled her in on the latest.

“All organized resistance on Kunashir and Shikotan appears to be finished. We’re picking up evidence of isolated small-unit clashes there, but nothing of greater significance. Red Army engineers have already begun extending airstrips and repairing the port facilities at Yuzhno-Kurilsk.

“The Hokkaido landings are a bloody mess, but the Japanese just don’t have the forces in depth to hold out. The mass kamikaze raids are really fucking with the Sovs, though, focusing on their landing ships, which are banged up pretty badly. Admiral Yumashev is gonna have some explaining to do.”

They entered the sub’s control center and Willet nodded to her executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Grey. A quick glance at a nav screen told her they hadn’t moved from their new station, thirty miles to the southwest of Kunashir, the southernmost island in the Kuril chain. The Sea of Okhotsk had grown too crowded for comfort, and Willet had ordered the boat back out into the northern Pacific. Now, it seemed, they were lying directly in the path of what was left of Yamamoto’s fleet.

“I hear we have company,” she said to her XO. Having removed themselves from right under the keels of the Soviet armada, it was no longer necessary to maintain silent running. In fact, they probably hadn’t really needed to earlier, but Willet had insisted anyway. Better safe than sorry.

Conrad Grey nodded. “We’ve got a Big Eye moving south to cover them, ma’am. No visual yet, but the bird’s arrays have locked on and they’re showing a task force of forty-nine ships, including at least eleven major surface combatants. We’re also picking up indications of some comparatively advanced radar equipment, probably of German origin. The new Siemens sets, if I had to take a punt.”

Willet handed the empty mug to a sailor as she reached the battlespace display at the center of her bridge. Three of the sub’s four drones were airborne and feeding data back to the Havoc. At a safe remove from the hostilities, she was able to lurk just beneath the surface to take the signals live. One large screen ran a vision of the Soviet fleet in the waters off Hokkaido-the northernmost of Japan’s main islands-and the southern Kurils. Another featured low-light-amplified pictures of the ground fighting on Hokkaido. But it was a third that claimed her attention, a flatscreen full of computer-generated imagery, representing the approach of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet.

“How long before we get a visual?”

“Twenty minutes, max,” Grey responded. “That Big Eye is running down. We can’t move her much farther south or we won’t get her back.”

“Okay,” said Willet. “Here’s a Pepsi Challenge. Do we sink them or not?”

Lieutenant Lohrey remained poker-faced.

Her XO smiled mischievously. “That’s why you make the big bucks, Captain. Those calls are way beyond my pay grade.”

“Amanda?”

The intelligence boss shrugged. “You really want my opinion, Captain-let ’em at each other. I think we all know where this bullshit with the Sovs is leading. Yamamoto kills a bunch of these clowns now, just means we won’t have to fight them a few weeks down the road.”

“You’re such a cynic, Amanda.”

“Generational ennui, ma’am. Comes from cleaning up after the boomers and those lazy Gen-X fuckers.”

“Don’t look at me like that, Lieutenant. They ran out of letters for my generation. And for what it’s worth, I think you’re right.

“So here’s my plan. We’re going to sit on our arses and do precisely nothing, Generation-X-style. We’ll just watch this movie nice and quietly. We’ll rip and burn all the data we can get. And in the unlikely event that any of the Japanese survive and turn around to head for Kolhammer and Spruance, then we’ll kick the shitter out of them. Concur?”

“Sounds groovy,” Lohrey said.

“XO?”

“As I said, skipper, that’s why you get the big bucks.”

“Actually, it’s pounds nowadays. And not that many of them. All-righty, then, let’s get ready. Prep the last drone. I want full-spectrum coverage of this toga party.”

“The tokkotai are ready, Admiral. They await your orders.”

Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood at the blast windows, hands clasped behind his back, as immovable as Mount Fuji. He could see the outline of the Nagano against the faintest hint of approaching dawn. She stood out from the other two surviving flattops because of the radical tilt of her flight deck, designed to fling the Type 44 Ohkas up into the sky at a twenty-degree angle. The piloted rocket bombs were a marvelous engineering feat, yet also an indictment of the Japanese science and industry and, beyond that, of Japanese society. While this iteration of the original powered rocket bomb was a vast improvement on the primitive efforts mustered by the navy at the end of the original war, it was still a crude attempt to compete with much more advanced technologies now pouring out of factories in America.

He sighed quietly.

No American fliers would be asked to turn themselves into living warheads. Their country was already producing missiles that relied on inanimate circuitry to guide them to their targets. Nothing as wondrous as the rockets and death rays-lasers, he corrected himself-that had arrived with Kolhammer. But still a great leap beyond what he had to call upon.

“Admiral?”

Yamamoto half turned toward the timid voice. “Tell them to launch,” he muttered.

The junior officer snapped to and barked out an acknowledgment. Behind Yamamoto a small surge of activity swept over the men on the bridge as they moved to play their part in the next act of this long, strange war. Orders spread outward, bringing the crew of the Yamato to general quarters, and from there out to the Combined Fleet, where they had the same effect.