The Trident’s Combat Intelligence affirmed the request and four screens in front of Halabi winked into life, carrying video from the carrier. Halabi grimaced at the scenes of screaming casualties and blind panic.

Damage reports scrolled down another screen, too quickly to read, as the Fearless plunged on toward her doom, millions of liters of cold seawater roaring in through the gigantic sucking wound, destabilizing the vessel and generating a range of forces that her engineers had never contemplated. Halabi watched in horror as immense tonnages of water began to back up against the densely filled spaces of the lower decks, putting a brake on the ship’s forward impetus.

Two Mercedes express boilers, delivering 320,000 horsepower to four shafts, pushed hard against the phenomenal resistance. Fearless began to slew around and tilt, causing the water already inside to shift sideways. It burst through aviation and ordnance stores on the third deck and into the airframe workshop. Under pressure, water even began to rise to the main deck, coursing into officers’ quarters and the forward elevator pit. Roaring along both port and starboard passageways on the second deck, the torrent flooded electrical and radio stores, more officers’ quarters and washrooms, and the crew’s mess.

Halabi winced as millions of tonnes of icy-cold brine reached the boiler rooms and sluiced over and into the red-hot furnaces and a cataclysm ensued. The resulting explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to destroy the ship, or what remained of it, but it triggered an escalating series of secondary blasts, beginning in the armory on the third deck starboard side, ripping down into a missile store just forward of the drone control room, and from there into the giant avgas tanks.

HMS Fearless disintegrated in one titanic blast. Three-quarters of her mass disappeared in the blinding white flash, which could be seen ten kilometers away.

The Royal Navy trimaran Trident rode out the shock wave with little more than a rude jolting. She sat very low in the water, resting on three hulls and boasting of no superstructure other than a relatively small teardrop bridge, so the blast swept over the destroyer like a flood surge over a smooth pebble. The ship’s CI made some course and speed changes, but mostly the Trident relied on her inherent design strengths to ride out the storm.

While her ship may have been little bothered by the spectacle, Halabi was stunned. There couldn’t possibly be any survivors. Every man and woman aboard the Fearless had surely perished, atomized by the blast. Her mind reeled as it tried to find some semblance of reason for the disaster. What could do that to a ship? And who would do it? She had no immediate answer. But she did have her duty, and that was to fight back.