Midway, though, is most famous for the sea battle that took place in its vicinity in June 1942. The remnants of the United States fleet that had survived the disaster at Pearl Harbor just six months previously had sallied forth to meet another Japanese onslaught. Three American carriers — the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown—waited near the island for an invasion fleet using intelligence gathered by American code breakers.
A much stronger Japanese fleet approached the atoll, led by four aircraft carriers and numerous other ships. In a desperate series of strikes and counterstrikes the Americans delivered a stunning defeat on the Japanese, sending all four carriers to the bottom of the Pacific while losing the Yorktown. The Battle of Midway shifted the tide of war in the Pacific and marked the beginning of the setting of the Rising Sun of Japanese imperialism. Perhaps it was memories of that battle that had caused Admiral Kenzie to make Midway the destination for his fleet, even though the naval base there had been abandoned in 1997 and the entire area turned into a national wildlife refuge.
Kenzie positioned his fleet to the northwest of Midway, escort ships surrounding his lone surviving carrier, the Kennedy. Linked back to the mainland by satellite communication, he remained up-to-date on the burgeoning world war. He’d already received contradictory orders from Washington — one set from the Pentagon directing him to sail west and support American forces in South Korea, another order from the National Security Advisor directing him to sail east to San Francisco to defend the West Coast.
He ignored both sets of orders and maintained radio silence, listening to the satellite communications but sending nothing. All of his ships were powered down, running on the minimum required energy. Kenzie was more tuned in to the mood of his sailors than to the information coming in from the satellites. Many had left family behind in Hawaii. Fear, anger, despair, confusion — all floated through the fleet like a dense fog.
Captain Lockhart was to receive her first command. Despite being corrupted by the nanovirus and even knowing deep inside that she was aiding and abetting the enemy, a small part of her was thrilled. Especially this command.
She was on Ford Island, in the center of Pearl Harbor, surrounded by a cluster of similarly infected sailors. Waiting. Behind them were two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, forgotten in a storage area in the rush of the fleet departing. Several dozen compressors were pumping air into hoses that ran from the island into the water.
Just offshore, the white memorial building was gone, the material stripped and used by the nanotechs. The dark water was boiling as if some great beast were stirring below. Lockhart took an involuntary step backward as a metal mast appeared, poking up through the surface and rising.
Slowly, as air filled sealed chambers, the reconstructed USS Arizona saw the light of day for the first time in well over half a century. As the ship’s main deck became awash, Lockhart supervised the sailors in transferring over the cruise missiles as the nanovirus began construction of launchers for them in place of the guns that had once graced the ship’s decks.
Where oil-burning conventional engines had once been, the nanotechs were changing rusted metal into a modified version of the engines that had been developed on the Springfield and its clones. Lockhart had her orders via the nanovirus from the guardian — as soon as the Arizona was seaworthy she was to put to sea and join the Alien Fleet that was now off to the south of Oahu. The mission: search for and assimilate the remains of the American fleet.
“What the hell is that?” Lisa Duncan asked as Garlin opened a door to a room she hadn’t been in before. A long, coffinlike object was in the center, next to a control console with what appeared to be numerous computers stacked around it.
“That’s how we’re going to try to break through this programming in your brain,” Garlin said.
“And I’m supposed to trust you?”
“We don’t care if you trust us or not,” Garlin said as he walked over to the control console and hit a button. The lid of the tube slowly swung open, revealing a contoured interior, roughly the size of a person, but someone much taller than Duncan.
Duncan didn’t move from the door. “That looks very similar to what Mike Turcotte told me was being used in the lab in Dulce.” “Very good,” Garlin said. “It is.”
“Where did it come from?”
“We recovered it from the ruins at Dulce. Where else?” “That thing caused people to go crazy.”
“It can be used for that,” Garlin acknowledged. He turned from the machine toward Duncan, who still had not moved. “You have good reason to be afraid of it. We think it’s what was used to give you your false memories.”
“That makes no sense,” Duncan said. “Why would Majestic have done that to me? I ended up investigating them.”
Garlin shrugged. “Remember that Von Seeckt was a renegade from Majestic. We think it might be possible he used you as the key to get the government to prevent the mothership from flying. Or there may be a similar but different machine like the one at Dulce that was used on you.”
“You don’t know much, do you?”
Garlin took a step closer to her and shook his head, a strange smile on his lips. “For someone who has false memories, you’re very sure of yourself. You don’t know who you are. And let me tell you something else you don’t know. You don’t know who Turcotte is either.”
“What do you mean?”
“After we discovered you weren’t who you appeared to be, we checked everyone else. Turcotte’s past — it’s all fake too. He was never in a classified antiterrorist unit in Germany. That charming story he tells about trying to save the pregnant woman… never happened. He’s as false as you are.”
Duncan didn’t believe him. Why that thought came to her with absolute certainty, she wasn’t sure. Turcotte was who he appeared to be. But accompanying the thought was an almost overwhelming sense of guilt, which confused her. What about Turcotte did she have to feel guilty about? That she had involved him in this? But the feeling was much stronger than that.
As Garlin came forward, his hands up to grab her, Duncan stepped back and felt a pinprick of a needle in the back of her neck. She didn’t even manage to turn her head to see whoever had done it before she passed out.
Brutality was being met with brutality. The mainland forces, realizing they were going to be slowed anyway by the defense tactics of the Taiwanese, now resorted to lining up artillery hub to hub along their main axis of advance. They fired a barrage just inside the forward edge of the shield wall, devastating the terrain and killing many of the dug-in Taiwanese soldiers and destroying everything in their path.
But as armies had learned ever since the invention of gunpowder, despite this tremendous effort, many of the defenders still survived. The mainland infantry still had to follow behind the artillery and dig out the survivors. As their commanders pressed them forward so relentlessly, they lost significant numbers to friendly fire, but if there was one thing the mainland didn’t lack it was bodies.
So the slaughter went on. But to Chang Tek-Chong and the others in the Taiwanese high command, the result began to appear inevitable. They could only trade so much terrain before they were pushed into the ocean.
Artad cared little how many humans were dying in Taiwan or South Korea. The two assaults were just the beginning. From intercepted satellite traffic he knew the United Nations, the closest thing these humans had to a planetary government, was considering Aspasia’s Shadow’s ultimatum. It was time for a counteroffer.