None of them could be trusted. Hidaka was as sure of that as he was of anything.
The helmsman was probably the most reliable. He seemed a brute, and had become fast friends with some of the Nazis on board. The boy, Danton, looked like he would piss himself to death at the first fall of shot in the water. And Le Roux…
Hidaka sighed quietly. It was a difficult thing to accept, that the fate of the empire should rest in the greasy hands of such an ill-bred cretin.
As the magnificent warship known as the Dessaix sliced through the long, rolling swell of the Pacific, Hidaka did his best to contain the resentment that was burning in his gut as the slovenly chief petty officer lounged in the commander's chair and held forth about the glories of France.
Hidaka had come across a phrase in an English language journal that he thought better encapsulated the current position of France. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
"Do you find something funny, Commander?"
"I was just thinking of the look that will appear on Kolhammer's face in about half an hour," he lied.
"Uh-huh," grunted Le Roux, before barking something at Sublieutenant Danton in their native tongue. The boy flinched under the lash of harsh words.
Hidaka was long past being shocked by the lack of respect this oaf showed for his superior. Even though Le Roux was older and vastly more experienced than Danton, Hidaka thought him foolish for taunting the boy in such a fashion. The young man was far and away the most proficient officer on board.
Indeed, he had wondered what had motivated Danton to throw in his lot with Le Roux and the Germans, especially after hearing about the other crewmembers who had offered false allegiances, only to attempt to scuttle the ship at the first opportunity. But Le Roux had vouched for the boy, saying that he had a personal motivation of unquestioned validity. Two American marines had raped and murdered his sister.
The ship burst through the crest of a roller that was significantly bigger than the general run of the swell. Hidaka felt the floor tilt forward as they tipped over the summit and raced down the other side. The blue trough between the waves rushed up to fill the bridge's strip of blast windows. The Dessaix handled beautifully in these heavy conditions, steered by her Combat Intelligence, cryptically referred to as Melanie by the Frenchmen. Hidaka still remembered the embarrassment he had felt the first time he heard the ship "speak." He had nearly jumped out of his shoes, unleashing great mirth amongst the Europeans, and even some of the Indonesian sailors.
Danton said something, and Le Roux nodded.
"It is time to get below," he said to Hidaka.
The Sutanto had not been run by a Combat Information Center. It had been piloted by men on a bridge, like the ships Hidaka was familiar with.
But he knew the path of life had taken him somewhere very special the first time he'd set foot in the stealth destroyer's CIC. It seemed as if you could control the whole world from in here. There were more glowing screens, of greater size, and computers of infinitely greater complexity in this one room than they'd been able to salvage from both of the Indonesian vessels put together. Even after the Germans had stripped the Dessaix to her bare bones for this mission, she remained a wonder.
Again, Hidaka could only mourn the opportunity that had been lost. If this ship had remained undamaged, fully armed, and properly crewed, they would have wielded enough power to lay waste to Hawaii, and then to Los Angeles, and all of Australia and the southern Pacific. Such a great pity.
The Germans and a few Indonesians sat at those workstations that had been left behind. Hidaka had almost no idea of what they were doing, although Le Roux had indicated that their role was ancillary. Melanie, the Combat Intelligence, would launch and control the attack, with Sublieutenant Danton designating the targets. Because they had no satellite cover, or technicians qualified to control a surveillance drone, the CI had been programmed with targeting sequences referenced from her own holomap inventory.
"The Honolulu harbor, she does not move around, no? The airfields of my day, they exist in yours, yes?" Le Roux explained. "So we program the missiles to strike at them as Melanie knows them. It's not perfect, but it does not matter. The targets will be destroyed."
Hidaka and a few of the Kriegsmarine officers had watched as Sub-Lieutenant Danton brought up amazing, almost three-dimensional images of a Pearl Harbor and Honolulu that would never exist, the island as it would have been.
The young man's fingers danced across a keyboard. He used a light pen to move strange icons and data tags around the massive panel display. After twenty minutes, it was done. He spoke to Le Roux, who translated for Hidaka. The Germans all spoke French.
"We have designated the Fleet Base at Pearl as a wide-area target box," said Le Roux. "The missiles will travel there, then seek out targets using their own sensors. They will be drawn to dense concentrations of metal. Others will home in on the signature of the Americans' radar installations. Still others will deliver area-denial munitions to the airfields. It will be very messy, I'm afraid. If we had the satellite cover and a few nukes, it would be much easier."
"How will they know where to go?" asked Hidaka. "The Allies always position their spy drones above their targets."
Le Roux rolled his eyes. "Over there, Commander, look. That Boche officer is working at the navigation console. We have no GPS fix, but we still know where we are, partly because he is a trained navigator and can tell us, but also because the Americans have placed locator beacons at fixed positions such as Midway, to help them navigate. Those beacons emit their signal, so we can receive them without using an active array to seek the position fix. You understand? Melanie knows where she is in relation to the targets, so she can give them directions? Yes?"
Hidaka was glad that most of the men in the center didn't speak English. He had never been treated in such a dismissive fashion. Le Roux spoke to him as if he were a slow child, and took a cruel and obvious pleasure in doing so.
A slow, dull, throbbing pain built up behind Hidaka's eyeballs, as he resisted the urge to cut this brute down. Even so, it was a lucky thing his sword was not close at hand. "Chief Petty Officer Le Roux," he said, slowly and quietly, "you forget yourself. You can no more captain this ship than I. You are a simple mechanic."
Hidaka loaded the word with as much contempt as he could muster, and he leaned forward.
"I hope your confidence in your own abilities does not prove to be misplaced. You would not want to disappoint your new masters, I think. They are no more forgiving of failure than I."
Le Roux couldn't help flicking a quick glance at the Germans. The tip of his tongue darted out to lick at dry, cracked lips. A nervous laugh slipped the leash, and escaped from within him. "We won't fuck it up," he promised. But all of a sudden, he didn't sound so sure.
Sub-Lieutenant Philippe Danton hoped that nobody would see how much his hands were shaking. But then, even if they did, they would presume that it was because he was a coward. Half a man.
While that pig Le Roux argued with Hidaka, Danton found himself praying that they would come to blows and kill each other. A serious confrontation had been brewing between them from the moment the Japanese had come aboard, in the Southern Ocean.
As they snapped at each other, he told Kruger, one of the Germans, that the CI was asking him to recheck and reenter some of the data.
"Why?"
"She has checked her holomaps and thinks the coordinates should be refined," he said. "See, the airfields at Hickham and Wheeler are much smaller in nineteen forty-two than they will be in twenty twenty-one. Melanie thinks the missiles are likely to land outside of the new target box."
Kruger watched a computer illustration that showed six Laval missiles slamming into empty cane fields. "Ah, I see, yes. Best we correct then. Good work, Lieutenant. I shall tell Le Roux."
Danton snorted in amusement. "Good luck. He doesn't like to be told he is wrong."
Kruger took in the scene of the Japanese commander and the French premier maitre, arguing over by the weather station.
"No, he doesn't," Kruger agreed. "You had best see to it, then."
"Yes, sir," Danton replied, calling up a window he'd opened earlier, and immediately shuffled to the back of the desktop.
He typed quickly now, trying to appear calm and relaxed, even though he felt like passing out from terror. He shot a quick glance in Le Roux's direction. Hidaka had leaned in close and appeared to be threatening him.
Please, let them keep fighting.
He reprogrammed the weapons in the forward bays. Another window opened up. He reprogrammed the bays amidships.
Hidaka and Le Roux became ominously silent. He tried to catch sight of them in the reflection on his monitor, but the CIC was too dark for that. He forced himself to look bored, like a process worker on the production line at the end of the day. He made a show of stretching his neck to work out a cramp.
Hidaka was stalking away, and Le Roux was about to return.
Damn.
He was out of time. Two key clicks shut down the targeting windows. He'd reset half the missile bays, but the rest were still programmed as Le Roux had wanted them. Except for the last two bays. Those missiles had already been taken off the ship. That still left plenty of punch, though. Twelve subfusion plasma-yield Laval cruise missiles.
He had failed.
He took out the photograph of his sister that he kept in a breast pocket. "I'm sorry, Monique," he whispered.
Le Roux's coarse bark sounded right behind him, making him jump. "Don't cry for her now, boy. She'll have her revenge soon enough, eh?"
"I hope so," said Philippe Danton. He wanted more than anything to kill Le Roux at that moment.
A marine had not raped his sister. In fact, she had married a marine she met in Lebanon, when she had been working there for Medecins Sans Frontieres. She had loved him, but she had lost him forever.
His name was J. "Lonesome" Jones.
It would be good to get home. They were running low on frozen brioche.
Still, he wouldn't want to miss this for the world. Le Roux wished they had satellite cover, or even a drone. The vision they took from the small cams in the nose of the Lavals was nowhere near adequate. Even with the CI cleaning up the image, it still shook so much that watching for too long was liable to make you feel ill.
He occupied Capitaine Goscinny's old chair, and from there he could survey the entire Combat Information Center. The trained apes Hidaka had brought along were proving themselves fast learners. They couldn't match the original crew, of course, but they could be trusted to keep the ship running at a basic level. And the Germans were quite impressive. He couldn't rely on them in combat, but the navigator was good, and the others had adapted to their various roles with great enthusiasm. Within a year, they might just make decent replacements for those idiots rotting in the cells back in Lyon.
Melanie began the ten-second countdown. Even Hidaka, who spoke no French, could tell immediately what was going on. He stood as still as the pitch and yaw of the vessel allowed, and watched the main panel display, which carried vision of the silos on the forward decks.
"Quatre, trois, deux, un…"
Le Roux's balls climbed up inside his body as the first salvos soared free. The whole vessel shuddered as the brand-new, French-designed multipurpose missiles scorched away, their scram jets engaging after a less than a minute. Sonic booms reached them through the hull as the atmosphere was ruptured by the passage of the Lavals.
"Sacre merde."
It was done. There was no calling them back now. He wasn't even sure Danton could destroy them in flight, if he had to. Suddenly a flash of blind panic seized him, before subsiding just as quickly. "These will destroy the American's radar stations and, I think, Hickham air base," he said loudly, for the benefit of the others. "Is that correct, Danton?"
"Oui," the surly young man replied.
"Can we see the movies from the missiles themselves?" asked Hidaka.
"Danton?" Le Roux called out.
The sysop blushed and began to fiddle with his station settings. Le Roux rolled his eyes. Hidaka and the Germans waited impatiently. After a minute, the krauts began to mutter among themselves, when the boy was unable to bring up any vision.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," said the chief petty officer. "Let me do it."
As he pushed himself up out of the commander's chair, Danton blanched visibly. He was probably expecting another thrashing, but Le Roux merely pulled him out of his chair as the ship pitched down a large wave. Danton fell heavily into the met station.
Le Roux chuckled at the sight of the young officer's distress. "Fucking four years at the Sorbonne," he said to Hidaka, "And he still can't use a fucking mouse."
As Air Division maintenance chief, Le Roux was intimately familiar with the cam systems on the ship's Eurotigers. The same software controlled the cams in the nose of the Laval missiles. A few clicks, a bit of typing, and the feed was live.
Four windows displayed a blur of indigo as the weapons ripped across the ocean at Mach 5.
"How long?" asked Hidaka.
"Not long at all," said Le Roux.
He hadn't counted on this. He'd hoped he could stall them on the cam feed, perhaps even fob them off altogether. But of course, Le Roux would be able to operate that subsystem. He worked with it all the time on the Tigers.
Danton cursed himself as the ship quaked with the second launch. Le Roux was boasting that this salvo would destroy all the major army air bases on the island. But Danton wasn't so sure of that. He'd got to at least half those missiles. He hadn't had enough time to render them completely safe, though. They were going to land somewhere, and do a huge amount of damage. But at least it wouldn't be where the fascists wanted them.
Not all of them, anyway.
As he struggled to his feet in the deepening swell, he found that he was no longer scared. He had made his decision, and knew he was going to die in the next couple of minutes. There was no changing that now. All that mattered was how he went out.
He hadn't been able to hide proof of his interference. When the Lavals began to drop into clear sea and empty fields, they would know what he had done. There was nothing for it. He would have to try destroying the missiles in flight.
The third and final launch roared away as he calmly took in the scene. A couple of Indonesians were watching the cam footage rather than tending to the met station. Hidaka looked as if he might be about to levitate, he was so excited. The Germans were babbling. And Le Roux was bullshitting to anyone who would listen.
It would be only a few minutes until he was discovered. So he made the sign of the cross and said one Hail Mary-apologizing to God for having to whisper-for the lives he could not save, for those he was about to take, and most of all for a steady hand and a good aim. If he wanted to destroy those missiles, he would have to kill everyone in this room first.
"… Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death. Amen."
"What's that boy? What the-"
Danton smiled at Le Roux over the sight of a Metal Storm VLe 24 he'd smuggled in. Operating on exactly the same principle as the Close-In Weapons System that protected the Dessaix from missile swarms, the pistol had no moving parts. The ceramic rounds were stacked in-line in three barrels, hence the three muzzles into which Le Roux's horrified eyes now stared. An electronically fired propellant separated each bullet. The gun could discharge the entire load in one simultaneous burst. Or it could be set to fire single shots. Or three round volleys, as it was now.
"-hell?" said the chief petty officer, beginning to drop to his knees, to beg for his life.
Danton squeezed the trigger.
Le Roux's descent meant that the burst took off the top half of his head, rather than all of it. But the end result was the same. The multiple shots sounded like a single discharge. The impact of three ceramic bullets on the traitor's skull was dramatic. It popped open like a rotten piece fruit, the kinetic energy knocking the pig off his feet with enough power to spin the bloated body through the air. Blood, bone chips, and brain frappe splashed across the ceiling.
He flicked the selector to single-shot and began to work the room. Kruger took a round just below the ear. The compressed nanoshards unfurled inside his brainpan and blew out the other side of his head. Danton hadn't minded Kruger, and wanted to spare him any sense of violation and betrayal.
The others were just Nazis, and he calmly put a round into each as they scrambled for their own weapons. The bullets were advertised as one-shot/one-kill, and they worked mostly as advertised. A German lieutenant lost an arm at the shoulder, but the shock wave traveled into his body and killed him a few seconds later. The flat, hollow, painfully loud report of the 24 boomed out again and again.
Danton thought of nothing as he went about his killing. At night, in his cabin, he had always imagined that if it had come to this, he would think of himself as an avenging angel, meting out justice on behalf of his crewmates back in Lyon. Especially on behalf of his best friend, Dominic, who had been caught erasing files and was strangled to death in front of them all.
But now that the moment had arrived, he felt nothing. The carnage around him slowed down, as though he had thumbed the half-speed function on a video stick. His head was light and strange. Everything appeared slightly flat to him.
Someone was firing back at him. A monitor exploded by the side of this head, but it might just as well have been a mile away. A German rushed at him with a chair raised like an unwieldy shield, though he seemed less real than a character in a V3D game like Halo VII.
He fired twice into the backrest, knocking the man to the floor, where the laser designator found him and marked a spot in the center of his body mass. But there was no need. The rounds had begun to unfurl as soon as they hit the chair, but they passed through with enough integrity and velocity to turn his chest into a sucking crater. He was already dead.
As the odds improved, he began to wonder if he might somehow survive. Kill them all, destroy the missiles, and become a hero. He died with that happy thought on his mind.
Hidaka emptied the entire clip of the Luger into the prostrate form of Sub-Lieutenant Danton. The body jumped with each impact, blood already leaking from the first shots he'd pumped into the treacherous dog.
He was speechless with rage that the Germans could have let yet another conspirator slip past their guard. After all of the trouble they'd had with saboteurs and turncoats among the original crew. They should not have been blinded by the familiar extremism of Le Roux. These people weren't to be trusted.
He stumbled against the body of the corpulent chief petty officer. Everything above his nose was gone, as though a shark had clamped its jaws around the top of his head and ripped it away.
Hidaka noticed that he was shaking. Shrugging it off, he kicked Danton's body, but there was no life in there. Only two others had survived in the room, both of them Indonesians who had dived under their consoles. He felt like shooting them, as well, but controlled the urge.
Sparks and flames crackled around him from damaged equipment. In just a few seconds the boy had-
Hidaka cursed and spun around, almost slipping in the fluids that were pooling beneath his boots.
He rushed back to the station where Danton had been working, but the dense mosaic of windows and boxes on the screen meant nothing to him. He yelled at the Indonesians, ordering them to help him, but they were both in shock, too terrified to be of any help.
His heart pounding, he turned instead to the massive flat panel display. Sixteen windows displayed a feed from the nose-cams of the Laval cruise missiles as they screamed in toward Hawaii. The cobalt blur of open sea was the only image in twelve of the windows. But four showed land, buildings, aircraft, and vehicles all rushing to fill the screen.
Hidaka wanted to beat the display with his fists.
He couldn't tell what was happening. It was all too quick.