Departure Day

At least he won’t be getting scurvy, sir.

Main Bridge, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

Puget Sound, WA

Commander Mason Robertson, USN

Commander, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

0959 Local JUNE 4, 2042

Maso Robertson looked on at a sight he could barely watch, let alone comprehend. His eyes bulged, and the edges of his mouth curled ever so slightly. He felt his form gradually immersing into a viscous pool of horror. He had been the skipper of USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)—the Fightin’ Teletubby—for almost two years. He had previously been her XO when the previous skipper, Captain Simmerton, caught a neck full of frag off Taipei on the very last day of Second Sino. Mason had seen men and women braver than him die, but he had never seen something like this.

The tearing of flesh echoed over the quieted bridge. Every eye was affixed to the show plain before them. No one dared to whisper a word. They were frozen.

“Wha—” The skipper broke the silence before his voice faltered. He could not find the words, certainly not ones that befitted his post.

Maso’s new executive officer stopped eating and turned around, “What, sir?” The lieutenant commander removed the lemon from his mouth—the second lemon—leaving a full-size bite missing from the fruit, skin and all. He was eating them like an apple.

What kind of fuckin’ sicko eats lemons like that?

The skipper shot the newbie a half-glazed glare. “Miyake, do you normally start your morning with a… uh lemon?”

“Oh no, sir.” Lieutenant Commander Lane Miyake scoffed with a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed smile. Maso took a breath in relief and let his entire body relax, but it was a moment too soon. “I normally eat three.” The skipper deflated like a two-piece blue-coverall-wearing balloon as the XO produced a third lemon from his working uniform like a pocket egg.

Robertson looked away and slapped himself on the forehead. A “fuck me” escaped his lips with a defeated murmur.

“At least he won’t be getting scurvy, sir.” The ship’s master chief chimed from across the bridge. What was even more unsettling is that for the first time in the three years that Maso had worked with the chief, the SNCO was just as dumbstruck as everyone else. You’re not helping, Benny.

“Oh yeah, I definitely won’t be getting that again. No, sir,” Lane replied cheerily.

Robertson heard the necks snap toward Miyake as everyone on the compartment, and two more sailors in the passageway, shouted one word in unison: “WHAT?”

The skipper shook his head and looked out the bridge windows, trying to get past all of that. The sky was a smokey dove grey. The water was a dark blue, almost black. A bank of heavy, low clouds was rolling over the Olympic Peninsula. Trinidad was in the dead center—in the uncomfortably cloistered heart—of a great column of steel. His eyes panned across the Sound and saw ship after ship after ship, their flags fluttering in the cool morning breeze. The United States First Fleet had assembled under the mantle of Task Force 11 /Composite Testing Force and was sortieing for the largest naval exercise since the end of the Second Sino-American War.

It was already a glorious exercise—in utter clusterfuckery. Roberston had a laundry list of complaints as long as his arm and as bitter as his coffee (they had run out of creamer, and he was having to drink it black). What had really got a bee in his bonnet was the sea-traffic controller back in Everett managing the procession. That fucker had separated Trinidad from the rest of DESRON 23. Why? Robertson had no idea. Maybe it was some long-standing beef he was hitherto unaware of. This would not be without precedence but hadn’t been an issue since the last time, when an older man had tried to stab him after a Bears-Packers game over an alleged ten-year grudge. The geriatric gentleman had been heaven-banned on the shattered remains of Facebook and mistook Maso for a replyguy bot who had spurned him. Regardless, the traffic on the water was a nightmare. They were loaded in like sardines. Task Force 11 could probably do a UNREP-congo line from one edge of the Sound to the other if they wanted. To make matters even worse, Trinidad was currently amongst the ships of Surface Action Group SEVEN. That made Mason uneasy. You could never trust Jed MacGregor’s cowboys to be even-handed; their tendency to pull Some Bullshit™ was legendary.

There was one image that was chewing at the cables in the back of his mind. The one that haunted any UNREP… collision. Except accidentally starting a game of bumper cars with a carrier battle group steaming right up your ass was a j-curve straight to a court martial and a new, interesting version of the Honda Point disaster. And Hell if Robertson was gonna put his ship back in drydock after he had just gotten her out of it. Fuckers just gave us a new goddamn bow. Don’t anyone be a mook and Clarke and Dawe us. The Teletubby hadn’t gotten eighteen battle stars without getting her hair mussed, and the post-war refit/repair had taken longer than expected. At least we aren’t missing the Fleet Problem.

That’s when the computer started squawking. Roberston glanced down at the nearest screen as the officer of the deck and the lookouts started barking back and forth. It seemed like someone was breaking the speed limit, and the sea traffic controller had pinged them and nearby ships with a warning. Mason didn’t even need to say a word. His crew were all old hands. They could run Trini through a hurricane in their sleep, and bad traffic was far from the most daunting challenge they’d faced.

The lanky skipper slowly rolled his head the the left, catching sight of the dark grey painted hull charging past, lunging through the water—halfway between a drunken dolphin and an Olympic swimmer. He saw the hull number, FFG-75. “Oh, of course, it’s fuckin’ him,” Maso snarled. “Goddamn battle-cat douche.” He strode across the bridge and out onto the port wing. Just barely outside, Mason bellowed, “FUCK YOU, HOP!”

The lookouts standing next to him jumped clear out of their skins, while the lookouts across the way on USS Monitor (FFG-75) went bug-eyed and darted inside the bridge. A moment later, Commander Derryl “Hop” McIver—the master and commander of the Moni—came striding out on the wing, a pipe hanging from his lip. McIver didn’t say anything back; he just flipped Robertson the bird. Maso replied two-fold. Hop laughed, and Mason smiled. That’s when Mason remembered that Hop owed him a hundred bucks from their last card game on Ulithi, a debt almost two years old.

“Tin-can bastards,” Mason groused. Fucker loves to cut a line.

Monitor was a Flight II Constellation-class Guided Missile Frigate. Though “Flight II” undersold things. She was a new breed—the new breed. She’d been redesigned around nanocomposite steel, non-polymer composites, and printer-fabricators. She was built with electrothermal chemical guns and direct energy weapons from the get. Trinidad had most of that kit now, too—after three refits. Monitor could be built faster and for less than her predecessor, with great firepower and increased survivability. What still blew Maso’s mind was that Monitor was the second rung from the bottom of the crewed surface fleet. They were the little guys of Fleet Architecture 2040—they had nothing on the monsters like the Long Beach or Saratoga cruisers. The Slate Navy Babies rolled deep and rolled heavy. It had only taken more than a decade of brutal Navy infighting, half a trillion dollars or so, and a couple of wars to get there, too.

Mason grumbled to himself one last time before he stuck his hands in his puffy jacket and walked back inside. He somewhat resented that he was aboard one of the handful of pre-FAX 2040 combatants in this clown show but really resented everything that had led up to it. FleetPro 36 had been put together in six weeks. It should’ve taken at least six months. It had been all chaos all the time. Trinidad’s refit had been sped up and pushed out of the dock with near wartime urgency, which OPNAV had described as an “added benefit” to “ensure retention of damage control and repair capabilities demonstrated under the CNO’s Demobilization and Retention Strategy.” Well, it was not a war, and it had caused enough headaches to collectively split a skull open like a watermelon. In fact, repair and refit schedules up and down the Pacific Coast had been mauled and would take at least a year to get back into something resembling order. It almost felt like an impromptu first strike, but surely no one in the Ocasio-Cortez Administration would be dumb enough to start a war, least of all one in the mold of Putin’s Tell-No-One-Thunder-Run.

Regardless, One Fleet had pulled it off. More than eighty ships were sailing from Puget Sound to regroup with another forty or so off Hawaii. This was probably the most melodramatic dick-wagging since the Allied Powers and the People’s Republic of China had signed the Malmö Accords in October ‘40. And there was just about the only person in the Navy patient and stubborn enough to pull off this circus. She was three miles ahead of Trinidad aboard USS Harriet Tubman (CVCN-84). She earned her name as a hot-headed tin-can driver in First Sino and Gulf IV. She was the Hero of Second Paracel—the up-jumped XO who had taken a squadron of ex-LCS Canberra-class light frigates into a gun duel with a PLAN surface action group after they’d both run out of missiles—and won. She was up there with Zumwalt and Rickover—even after the Anzio Incident. It was said she played dirty to get the Naval Act of 2030 through Congress as the Director of the Office of Critical Procurement. Not like Senator Cruz is around to deny the rumors. Not least of all, she had been COMBATPAC-ALFLT—Commander, Battle Force, Allied Fleet—for almost the entirety of Second Sino, nabbing US First Fleet and her third star after the war ended. Vice Admiral Kimberly Scott was not called “Kill Something” for nothing.

By the time Roberston returned to his chair, Miyake was on his third lemon. A shiver went down his spine. Christ, I forgot that Corpos are weirder than us. He looked at his watch. 1009. Should be out of Puget Sound in ten. Thank fuck. Can’t wait to get out of here.

Then, something outside the ship caught his eye. Fog.

He turned his head as one of the lookouts shouted on the radio something about the sea boiling. “The fuck is goin’ on over there?” Robertson muttered under his breath. It took him a moment to process what he was seeing. Great palls of fog were lifting off from the water like an art-house impression of a Halloween smoke machine.

BAYRUM? His mind started to race, thinking of MOPP suits and decon. The officer of the deck made the call and pulled in the lookouts. This can’t be natural. The skipper watched the fog lift over the bow and wash over the deck like a silent wave of grey-white smoke. It kept growing and growing, clawing up the ship. He saw something in the obscurant. A bubble of shimmering glass drifted through the air. The light warped through it. He could not believe his eyes. He was sure he was hallucinating. When the bubble collided with the off-center barrel of the deck gun, the sound of sheering metal on metal had the OOD shouting for the collision alarm as the fog grew ever higher. They were sinking into mirk and mire. But Roberston saw the 26-foot-long 5-inch steel barrel twist into a cavatappi-curl before his eyes with a bloodcurdling screech that made him wince. Then, there was nothing but greyness out the window, an impermeable pea-soup. He felt the claustrophobia he had trained out himself, drag itself upwards from gut into his thumping heart. He felt his pulse in his ears.

Mason took a deep breath, his mind filled with images of a ten-ship collision in a chemical attack. “Sniffers?” Requesting an update from the ship’s nuclear, biological, and chemical detection system.

“We’re green. No foreign agents in the air, sir,” one of the bridge crew replied. All eyes were locked on the solid wall of murk. The collision alarm howled, but then it grew discordant. The sounds stretched and whined. It was out of tune. Both in his ear and so, so distant. It was all wrong. Everything was wrong. He felt like he was going to puke. He watched one of the bridge crew actually do so. His eyes began to water. He noticed that there wasn’t just fog outside. Countless spheres drifted amidst a sea of shimmering shards like broken, impossible glass warping everything around them. They flowed through the bridge windows like they weren’t there. He recoiled in his seat. Those around him started to notice the anomalies, too; Mason looked up and saw a wall of impossibility right in front of his eyes. He raised his hands to cover his face on pure impulse. He watched and felt the hair on his wrists—all over his body—stand up as if someone had yanked each strand individually.

Robertson opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He saw another wall of glass ahead of them. It felt like a minute passed, or maybe it was ten. He blinked his eyes, and he was lying on the floor of the bridge, his face pressed to the ground. He blinked again, and he was flung back in his seat. He felt like he was being pressed down into the faux-leather cushion. He was sinking. He looked to the chief; his face was pallid, he was wobbling, barely managing to steady himself by holding onto a console, and his eyes glazed. Roberston blinked again.

The sun almost blinded him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. For a moment, he was not sure who he was, let alone where or when he was. He looked around at a cheering crowd surrounding the baseball diamond. It was Bon John Field on Majuro. He saw the faces of men and women who had been dead for years. He saw Captain Simmerton howling at him with a face the deep red of a cherry. He was surrounded by corpses. Maso remembered when he was. He remembered what happened at this ball game. “Didn’t I get hit in the fa—” The fastball smacked him in the jaw. The pain was real. He winced, and he was back in his chair, restrained and sliding backward in a void of endless void filled with the sounds of screaming metal and howling alarms. It stopped, and he was flung out of his chair and smacked his head straight into the ship’s phones. The last thing he heard before it went black was an explosion that vibrated the windows as his face fast approached them.

Roberston forced his eyes open as two young enlisted kneeled over him. He grabbed the first one by their shirt and tried to speak, his voice came out hoarse and wrong, “The ship… are we?” He noticed god rays cutting down through the windows. It was pure gold hanging in the air as the general quarters alarm screamed. “Help me up!” Maso barked.

“Sir, you should stay down until the doc has—” one of the ratings started.

“HELP ME UP,” Mason barked, already trying to bring himself to his feet. The sailors did as he bid. His head was ringing, and his vision was blurry. He felt the welt on his forehead pulsing, burning with enough heat to boil a 30-quart pot of water.

The ship was still there, and the fog was burning away. Rays of light were cutting through the greyness, varying in size from pinpricks to train-sized. His stomach curdled as he looked beyond the fog and saw clear blue skies. Clear. Blue Skies.

He looked around the bridge and saw the rest of those present in various states of distress. The Chief was clutching his right eye and folded over. One rating was folded over in his seat, with two others trying to wake him. The OOD seemed completely fine but horrified and overwhelmed. She was doing her level best. The sunlight grew brighter and brighter. It was sickening. It was a joke. It must be. It had to be.

“Miyake…” Roberstons croaked. He stopped as the chipmunk O-4. Turned toward him, blood was running from Miyake’s nose like someone had left a faucet running. There was more blood running down from his tear ducks, and Maso had never seen eyes so bloodshot.

“Sir,” the Lieutenant Commander spoke, unnervingly unperturbed. He did not appear to be in pain. He was unfazed. He pointed out the bridge windows. But then his voice changed; it rattled with the fear that Maso would hear from children when there was a monster in the closet or something awful on the news. “Where’s Canada?”

The horizon was empty. Only royal blue water, baby-blue sky, and slate grey ships filled the view. It was a panorama fit for a postcard; everything thing sparkled under a resplendent morning sun. Robertson felt something wet and warm creeping down his face. He touched just above his lips, and he looked down to see his fingertips painted in dark red blood. He had never been so afraid. “Well, shit,” the skipper murmured, the sound of his voice returning to normal mid-syllable.

---

Wardroom, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

Puget Sound, WA

Lieutenant Commander L.N. Miyake, USN

Executive Officer, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

1053 Local JUNE 4, 2042

Lieutenant Commander Miyake pressed a bag of frozen peas to his forehead. He had the headache of all headaches. He could feel his pulse in his eyeballs. He had made two more squeamish ratings faint when he walked into sickbay, and the ship’s doctor had been sure he was a goner. Apparently not so. He didn’t feel too great, but it wasn’t too much worse than that time he got hit by a bus. He was seated in the wardroom along with the department heads, the command master chief, and the skipper. A lasflash from Tubman had pulled them off general quarters, but they had no more information than that.

No one was in particularly good shape. Miyake probably looked the worst off, but he had felt worse. Commander Robertson looked like a walrus, with two wads of cotton shoved up his nose and a welt the size of a goofball about an inch above his right eyebrow. Most of everyone else had awful headaches; CHENG said it was like the worst hangovers for the best party they had ever attended. Chief Benny had some blood vessels pop in his eye.

Miyake had been on the Trinidad for a week. He didn’t know everything, but he knew these people were professionals, almost all stone-cold Slate Navy axe-draggers—and they were scared. Frazzled in a way that Lane recognized. He’d been a flag aide at PACFLT when Second Sino had popped off in March of 2037; he had seen a similar muted mix of panic, fear, and determination at Makalapa that awful day when the sky fell and people were running for the Civil Defense Complex.

“So, folks what’s the damage?” Robertson sighed as he looked out the window, out to the disquieting paradise outside. It had been about twenty minutes, but he already looked twenty years older.

The ship’s doctor went first, “Lots of scrapes, headaches, and bloody noses. Five broken limbs, and a couple of dislocated shoulder, sir. Plus, some lacerations from the computer explosion in CIC. Worst is Miyake, you, and Valley. We are definitely going to need CT scans for everyone on board because I am not sure what might be lurking underneath.”

“Well, as things go, that isn’t too bad, Doc.” Robertson paused for a second. He squinted, “How the hell did Valley stab herself?”

“She didn’t, sir.” Doc groused, a non-alcoholic Natty Light pressed to his skull, “The entire tray scalpel went all Betelgeuse and flew across the G-damn compartment and pinned hand to the cabinet when she was getting the Icy-Hots out.”

Robertson just sighed into the table, “The fuck did you do to Shaq, Doc?”

“Think he might have done more than just that, sir.” Chimed in the ship’s CHENG. “I saw a wrench levitate for like thirty seconds.” She shook her head and scoffed. “This is fucked. I’ve never seen an RMA module implode. They we—they were like a crushed beer can. I didn’t even know they could do that! I didn’t sign up for Criss Angel Mindfreak, sir.” She took a deep breath, “But besides some wiring damage. The only significant is the port-side SPY-6 panel—and the deck gun. We can fix them aboard Ronnie, give or take about 48-hours. However—”

“We’re going to need to manually inspect every single weapon aboard,” started Weaps, dabbing his sweat-streaked, shiny-bald head with a napkin. “We are extremely lucky that nothing like whatever crushed the RMAs crushed the warhead on a TLAM or a Standard.”

“—Or a turbine,” interjected CHENG.

Mason rubbed his temples, his face contorting, trying to process everything, “Was the fog laced with LSD? Are we tripping balls?”

“Sniffers would have picked that up, sir,” Lane replied. “Our CBRN suite got upgraded after those Tanzanian rebels used aerosolized fent during the attack on the Perc naval station on Zanzibar in ‘35.”

The commander shot Lane a pained glare, “I was being rhetorical, XO.” He gutturally exhaled, “Fuck.” He turned toward the ship’s communications chief, “Comms, we heard anything since the lasflash from Moses?”

“N-no. No, sir.” The lieutenant was green, and he was really rattled. “Only Tubman and Redwood are radiating, and no one is squawking. Satcom is still toast. Astro-Nav and Mag-Nav are out of alignment and that’s crashing all kinds of stuff, the computers are crying at us. Never seen such a major systems fault, even in a cyberattack. We’re not sure what’s wrong. We’re in the dark, sir.”

Robertson shifted his body in Lane’s direction. “Miyake, you spent time under the Old Lady on Majuro, right?” Lane nodded, “How many times did she call a council of war with all her squadron commanders?”

Lane thought for a moment and was flooded with memories. He started his career as a real Corpo Navy type—proper Annapolis stock. That had changed after he was sent to work on the operations staff of Battle Force, Allied Fleet on Majuro in April of 2037. The atoll had been the forward-most main operating base in the Combined Pacific Command and was dominated by Slate Navy types after Scott was brought out of OCP in the wake of the worst defeat in US Navy history. It was a liminal space—a paradise with perpetual intermediate-range-ballistic precipitation—an ever-shifting sea of faces, ships, and units.

“Twice,” Miyake paused, “when she first arrived in theatre, and the night before Second Trench. Otherwise, it wasn’t her style. She usually preferred to—Oh—” He paused again. He gathered what Robertson was intimating. “It means it’s really bad.”

Robertson sighed, “That’s what I thought. I don’t even know what worse than…” He indicated out the porthole, “…could possibly even entail. But we’re in the suck now, so just keep lookouts ready and keep our ears and eyes open. And let me know if astro-nav or mag-nav starts working,” He sighed again as he looked up at Lane, “What a week, huh?”

Lane returned a blank stare, “Sir, it’s Wednesday.”  

---

Hangar, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

Puget Sound, WA

Commander Mason Robertson, USN

Commander, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

1214 Local JUNE 4, 2042

Commander Robertson looked on as the HV-29N Albatross made its final approach to Trinidad. The heavyweight tiltrotor was chugging along, its massive pair of engines hinged upward and whipping up a small hurricane. The Albie was generally reserve for intra-fleet COD and search and rescue, it just barely fit on the ass end of a Burke. This middle brother of the V-280 Valor family, was bringing to Trinidad DESRON 23’s commodore. That made Maso’s skin crawl. An in-person briefing was never a good thing. Even worse, Maso looked past the VTOL, at a horizon that was growing a dark, stormy grey. The weather was only getting worse. It was bad vibes all around.

A moment after the ghost-grey tiltrotor came to rest and was fastened to the ship, two figures clambered out from its forward hatch. The first was whom Robertson was expecting—the lanky figure, aged caramel skin, curled school-board-chalk hair, and class-A RBF of Commodore Milton “WR” Wójcik-Robinson. But following the Tallest Little Beaver was someone who caused Mason’s eyebrow to go crooked—the bald, squat form of a demon hidden in man-flesh. The fuck is Carly Jeung doing here?

Before Mason could salute, WR had extended his hand, forcing the skipper into a rapid, awkward salute-to-shake. “Maso,” WR had never before called Mason by his nickname, “We need to have a conversation with your wardroom. All of them.” Mason suppressed the urge to go bug-eyed. Oh, so it’s even worse than I thought.

“Of course, Dubber, sir,” Mason replied. Wójcik-Robinson grinned at his old nom de guerre. “And, uhhhh, Commodore Jeung—wasn’t expecting you, sir.”

Charles Entertainment Jeung was the ur-battle cat. The diminutive, bald, and rotund Korean-American Olympian sharpshooter made quite the odd pair with the spindly, grouchy Tallest Little Beaver. Carl Jeung was the definitive Slate Navy bomb-throwing partisan, perhaps Kill Something Scott’s most infamous protégé, and the como of the Long Beach SAG’s ESCRON. That combination would have killed most officers by now—but Jeung was not most officers.

“Neither was I, Robbo.” Of course, he got Mason's name wrong. “They put me on the wrong bird—but think of me as an independent authority.” He smirked; he was always smirking. Even when Carl Jeung frowned, his eyes were filled with mischievous smirk. He was like if someone had put the Cheshire Cat inside the skin of your joker Korean uncle.

Mason held back from rolling his eyes until he turned around and snapped his fingers at the rating nearest the intercom: “Mackenzie, call forward and get Lieutenant Commander Miyake to assemble the wardroom.” Mason turned back to Wójcik-Robinson and Jeung: “Gentlemen if you’ll please follow me.”

As the three officers darted through passageways and up and down ladders, Maso clocked a massive smile on WR. “How are you liking the refit? The Priests did a good job on her.”

“Damn right, sir. Can’t complain a lick.” Mason answered as he sprang up a ladder, “The new turbines are slick, the Super SPY-6 is a leap, and the new SEWIP V is mean as hell—and a damn sight prettier than slapping the Devil’s jowls on the ole gal. It’s a cryin’ shame we had to cut our point defense suite down, even after most of the deckhouse got replaced with Duracal, but them’s the break. Even then, we’ve got enough canned whoop-ass to hold our own against a heavy aviation brigade.”

“Dakka Doctrine don’t pull punches, Commander. What they’d leave you with?” WR inquired politely.

“Well we also have a pair of Id-Poo and Phalanxes. Plus, we kept four Mark 50 PDC—Priest Point let us keep ‘em cus Jan Murelenski—”

The commodore interrupted. “That long-haired hipster, the wanna-be hippy?”

“The one! Yeah, he owes me a favor, so technically, we don’t have any 50-mike-mikes on paper.”

WR was smiling. “You know, I thought you were always a stick in the mud; glad to see I was wrong.” The commodore loved few things more than the tactical acquisition of additional firepower. “I saw you got two Boxls and a pair of ADLs?”

“Aye, it’s a quartet of four cell Marks 145s—they wanted to downgun us to the two cell Mark 146s off a Connie, but uh—

“Jan from admin came in the clutch with ‘waivers’ from on-high?”

'“We also got the Hitman Mark 47 upfront—well, we did until it got knocked out by… whatever the Hell is going on…”

“Yeah, we saw that flying in,” Jeung interjected, “Kinda hurt my soul seeing it and the whole uh…”

“Curly-cue? Yeah…” Maso chuckled, “All this firepower… It had me feeling like the captain of Weevee in ‘44.” WR’s mouth curled in displeasure. It was barely perceptible but sent a shiver down Maso’s spine.

“You know my first command was a Flight III. Sam Nunn.” WR stopped cold for a second. She went down at First Trench.” A pained grimace bubbled up. " I lost a lot of good friends that day.”

Maso looked back at the commodore, reflecting that sorrowful look, “We all did, sir.”

“I miss passageways like these.” WR continued, “You lose something on the Slate Navy Babies, too damn clean. They feel as if Amish Spock built an Ikea.” That analogy didn’t land with Mason, but he kept chugging toward their destination.

The wardroom was filled to the brim; almost every seat was taken by a warm body, and there were plenty of people standing, including a few hanging just outside the hatch in the passageway. There was a palpable air of anxiety, and that stirred up something in Robertson. Half of these people had been on Trinidad longer than him, another quarter came aboard with him, and the rest had seen their share of combat elsewhere in the fleet. They were not unblooded, but they were not unafraid.

WR and Jeung walked into the compartment and were met with confused looks. The room fell deathly silent, like an awkward funeral. WR cleared his throat, which caused a butter bar to almost jump, “Commander Robertson, you’re going to want to sit for this one too.” Mason traded looks with Ops for a second but kept on his feet. Wójcik-Robinson took a breath and shared a look with Jeung. “Folks—I…” His voice faltered immediately, “I think we’re all used to living through history, but…” He faltered. He searched for the words to proceed. The hairs on Mason’s arms stood up like tentpoles.

“Commodore,” Mason interjected, “Permission to speak freely?”

WR looked relieved. “Of course. And that goes for all of you. Dispense with the pleasantries. I’m here for real talk.”

Mason took a breath, “Stop beating around the bush and just drop the bomb, sir.”

WR covered his mouth with the crook of his hand, making his mind up before he continued, “We just got dropkicked two thousand miles across the Pacific and a hundred years into the past.” His voice didn’t falter once in that insanity. He had said it all without a hint of irony or sarcasm. Mason looked into his eyes and saw wells of alarm and tension like he almost didn’t believe what he had said. No, he didn’t want to believe it. Mason took a gulp of air.

“Fuck you, Milly.” Mason whipped his head around to see his Master Chief not even looking up from his cup of coffee. He was old salt stuff, knew Wójcik-Robinson from back in First Sino, and obviously was having none of it today.

“Benicio, I ain’t pulling your leg,” WR replied. “I wish I was. We are through straight the goddamn looking glass. And you know, if I wanted to jerk you off—I would’ve brought sandpaper.” The chief snorted dismissively but said nothing.

Mason started blinking rapidly, “This isn’t a joke?” He scoffed defensively, “It isn’t even possible.” His words were peppered by nervous looks to either side, hoping to find supportive faces. The rest of the wardroom was still, silent—processing.

Jeung sighed, “Yeah, we’ll we’re here. No sats in the sky, even the fuckin’ stars are in the wrong place. Someone whipped up the equation for stellar and drift, and we’re in June 1942.” He took a deep breath, “We’ve been able to generate reverse SAR images from the radar returns of what we thought were Group 4 UAVs… Those were Wildcats and Zeros, the whole works.” Maso went to interrupt, but Jeung cut him off. “One of the hummers from the Tub used its AQM-205 to get PID on some surface contacts.”

“And?” Robertson gave Jeung what he was looking for.

“The god-damned fuckin’ Kido Butai, Mason.” Jeung sternly enunciated the end of his sentence; his voice vibrated the walls of the deathly silent compartment. “The Old Lady doesn’t fuck around. She isn’t fucking around now. This is real.”0

So, that’s why everything has been fucked.

A light bulb clearly went off in Miyake’s head, “Wait, sir, one hundred years back… Kido Butai… is it still the 4th? June 4th… 1942?” The entire wardroom snapped their heads toward Miyake before snapping back toward the commodores.

There was not a moment’s respite. “Yep,” Jeung answered flatly. For once in his life, he wasn’t smirking. His eyes were calm, piercing, and unflinching in their seriousness.

Fuck. Mason stumbled backward and planted his ass on a tabletop. Half of him wanted to laugh at this nonsense; the other half wanted to hurl.

One of the wardroom tried to speak up, “So does that mean—”

“Yep,” Wójcik-Robinson interrupted. He took a gulp of air and ran a hand over his hair, “We’re about one-hundred-fifty nautical miles northeast of the Battle of Midway.”

The entire wardroom had one response to that, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”

Mason’s mind raced with scattered, fragmented thoughts. Kids. Lucy. Mom. Dad. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He raised a curled fist over his mouth. He felt the shifting motion of the ship now more than ever. His eyes widened and twisted in shock. He looked up at WR, who just gave him a hollowed, somber look.

Mason’s voice exited his lips with a harshness he had not heard in years; his eyes narrowed, and his heart steadied, “So, what the fuck is the plan, sir?” He needed to stop himself from spiraling, at least for now.

Jeung spoke up. “We have Wasp in the air, and they’re already providing cover to the Yorktown group.” He took a troublingly deep breath, “We’re having some uh problems programming our stand-off weapons. JTAPS is uh crashing.” Joint Target Acquisition and Programming System was the common program that OLYMPUS (the US’s joint all-domain command & control infrastructure) used as the backend infrastructure for programming guided weapons. It was what was used to tell the missiles where they were and where to go, and it was apparently not working.

Weaps spoke up. “What exactly do you mean by crashing, sir?”

“It keeps crashing.” WR replied curtly with a shrug, “It won’t accept our positioning data. Networks thinks that…” he gestured to their surroundings, “…all this might be triggering the cyberwarfare safeguards; JTAP’s defaulting back to inertial, which has us sailing through Vancouver Island and then… boom.”

“Oh,” Maso answered. “That’s bad.”

“It’s bad.” WR echoed with a sigh, “We’re looking for workarounds, and we’re also double-checking that our aircraft haven’t suffered any damage, like what happened to your Hitman 47.” He exhaled and rotated his jaw, “We also have gotten reports of what appears to be the bends.” Doc collapsed into his hands, “So you’re gonna have to do a full medical rundown. We do have hyperbaric chambers on Parche and Argent Zephyr, but seats are limited.”

“Got it.” The ship’s medical officer answered with grim resignation through gritted teeth. “I’ll do my best, but my options are limited.”

“I’m aware; just do what you can, Doc,” Mason replied, still yet fully accepting that this was actually happening.

Jeung started speaking again, with an unsettling seriousness, “Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that the Old Lady wants a strike before this bomb cyclone can develop further.” He took a deep breath that rattled down his short frame. “That may not be possible, in which case we’re going to high tail it out of the path of this storm system. At the very least, our meteorology nerds have said that the atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature have stabilized, so it's unlikely to get worse—unlikely.” Jeung looked around with a frown on his face. Mason dislike that visage more than a smirk, a lot more. “From here on out, we are operating under the assumption there is no back, only forward. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

WR continued where Jeung left off, “We have been dealt a harsh hand by… only God knows what, but we’re going to play the best of it. We can do a lot of good, a historical amount of good. So, that’s what we’re gonna do. In good order and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Navy and Fleet Force.” There was quiet. Everyone was still processing the hammer blows. WR forced a smile, “Shit’s fucked. We’re going to do what we do best and unfuck it, just a little a bit.”

The ship’s greenest butter bar spoke up, “Sir, more of a question than a comment, but how are we really sure that this has actually happened?”

---

Main Bridge, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

Approx. 275 NMI North of Ellice Islands

Commander Mason Robertson, USN, CERFOR

Commander, USS Telesforo Trinidad (DDG-139)

0803 Local DEC 7, 1942

The skies of the South Pacific were a marbled grey, and the water was wine-dark. A strong breeze whipped up foamy white caps on all the waves. USS Telesforo Trinidad rocked with those waves but continued to charge ahead. Commander Robertson’s eyes were locked on an object off in the distance. Everyone on the bridge was staring out to sea in reverent silence.

It had been fifteen days since twenty-thousand Allied sailors had been sent to the bottom of the ocean. Twenty-thousand Japanese sailors had joined them. More than a dozen aircraft carriers had gone down within an hour, five with all hands. That blood had broken the seven seals. The ghosts of futures past had been unleashed.

A Certain Force, what the fuck kind of name is that?

Robertson was a man watching the Flying Dutchmen join his convoy. The scarred form of Enterprise (CV-6) charged through rough seas a mile to the west. It was now just one of two fleet carriers that the “General Forces” had left in the Pacific. The Big E had gotten brief repairs at Espiritu Santo, along with a new complement of aircraft and aircrews stitched together from the remnants of half a dozen carrier air groups. The ships of Composite Testing Force dwarfed the old straight-deck carrier’s swarm of escorts in this procession of vengeance.

The commander was struck by how quaint the legendary flattop was in comparison to the “Certain Force’s” supercarriers—USS Doris Miller (CVN-81), USS Harriet Tubman (CVCN-84), and USS Okinawa (LPVN-29). Big E’s teak flight deck had been repaired in a slapdash rush, and her gun line was still partially out of action. She’d had the shit beaten out of her, yet she was still in better shape than USS Franklin (CV-13) or USS Saratoga (CV-3); they were being towed to Pearl, escorted by the battered remnants of Task Force Tare and the HMS Ark Royal, a ship—in the history that Mason knew by heart—should’ve gone down over a year ago.

Robertson turned and met eyes at his XO, “Whatcha listening to Lemonade?” Mason briefly cocked his head before his XO could reply, “You know what? Hit the aux, might as well drop a beat.” He smiled and returned to gawking at the Enterprise like a schoolboy at a museum, “Your taste in music is just about the only taste of yours that isn’t fucked.”

Lieutenant Commander Lane Miyake turned on the balls of his feet, a smile wide on his face, his last lemon of the morning consumed, and a single Bluetooth headphone in his ear. “Oh, you know how I like oldies, skipper.” He hooked his phone into the 1MC, already jury-rigged with an aux cord. A moment later, the main circuit echoed over their grim surroundings, the voice of Kesha dissonantly radiating over the dark waters and grisly sky.

“I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums; Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone; So while you're here in my arms.”

A pair of F-27 Blackcats roared overhead. The huge arrowhead-shaped stealth sixth-generation air-dominance fighters shrieked. Their adaptive cycle engines glowed a soft blue-white. The wails of the jets grew distant as they cut up through the clouds like blackened spearpoints jutting into elephant flesh. Mason took a deep breath as he shook his head gently. His mind drifted back to his home, his family—all that had been lost. He silently looked over the Pacific and the force that could shatter the Hosts of Heaven that lay in front of his eyes. The slight hint of a smile creased his face, pained with sorrow.

Gibraltar of the Pacific, eh?

“Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young.”

Mason looked, and he saw a black banner with thirty-five stars. Emblazoned on the tenebrous standard were eight words in stark white that echoed across the water like a shattering seal. It whipped through the air, dancing on the harsh wind—fluttering off the island of the USS Harriet Tubman (CVCN-84).

DEATH TO THE MASTER

GLORY TO THE SLAVE