Slouched gracelessly at her command station, Captain Halabi felt the soothing warmth of a drug flush as it crawled up her spine. The unpleasant full-body burning sensation subsided, along with the associated dizziness and nausea.

Her officers and junior ranks began to stir and groan around her, but she was transfixed by the ghastly spectacle just outside her bridge window. It was definitely the Fearless. She was simply unable to imagine how it could have been damaged in such a catastrophic fashion.

The metal outline of the ship’s cross section glowed as though white hot. Halabi could see the cavernous hangars high above, with aircraft and equipment already sliding toward the abyss as the ship tilted forward, scooping up water. To either side of the hangars small offices and wardrooms were visible, again reminding her of a doll’s house with the front wall removed.

Halabi could clearly see human beings in some of those rooms, moving frantically, trying in vain to escape. She dimly recognized a painful hammering sensation as her heartbeat, but it seemed far away. She had friends on that ship, and any of them could be the anonymous stick figures desperately throwing themselves off the leading edge, plunging to their deaths. The terrible scene recalled images from her childhood of office workers falling through the air in New York, and later in London and Tokyo.

As her own ship passed squarely in front of the Fearless it seemed to lean toward her, as if trying to reach out and take her down, too. Her lips worked soundlessly, searching for words, but none came in the face of such horror. She could see a virtual tsunami already rolling down into the belly of the carrier.

At the Naval War College she had studied the sinking of an oceangoing ferry that had inexplicably left its bow doors open on a cross-channel run. A mountainous wall of water had poured in and surged toward the stern. The weight had actually lifted the bows out of the sea for a brief moment, but fluid dynamics demanded that the wave travel back when it hit the obstruction of the ferry’s rear end, and so the pendulum had swung back and dug the bow even deeper into the ocean. Halabi imagined for a split second that this mammoth vessel might rear out of the waves and smash down on her in a similar fashion, but she quickly dismissed the speculation. The densely packed lower decks of such a ship would not permit the same free flow of water.

Darkness threatened to rush in on her again as the Trident cleared the impact zone and passed safely through to the far side, but with a deep breath she fought it off.

“Posh, can you link me to the CI on Fearless?” asked Halabi. “I need damage reports and vision.”