She heard and felt the discarding sabot spit out of the vertical launch tube in the forward missile bay. Her intel controller, Lieutenant Lohrey, counted off the seconds until the cruise missile discarded its casing.

“Big Eye has fired, Captain,” she announced. “Tracking for Hashirajima. On station in seventeen minutes.”

A quarter of an hour later and hundreds of miles away the nose of the surveillance mace split open and ejected an object that looked very much like a Frisbee. Its mission done, the missile continued on across the home island of Honshu before diving down into the Sea of Japan and destroying itself.

The small whirring drone, a doughnut of superlight plasteel wrapped around a high-speed turbofan, deployed a series of antennae. Tiny doors swung open on the underside and long spools of microlight fiber dropped down from the ring.

A thousand kilometers to the south, the command center of the submarine HMAS Havoc was quiet as she lurked just below the waves with a high-gain antenna deployed. The boat’s active and passive arrays were all operating at maximum return. The men and women on board were still and tense as the Havoc waited, like a predator. Signals from her telescoping mast pulsed across the sky, unheeded until they brushed past the tendrils of monobonded filament dangling beneath the drone.

The feed from Hashirajima came online at 2021.

“We have contact and control,” said Lohrey as two screens lit up in front of her with a live feed from the Big Eye surveillance module. One screen carried multiple windows, showing a cascading series of numbers and letters. The other displayed three video windows. Infrared, low light, and a blank rectangle for full color.

Willet immediately recognized the outline of Hiroshima Bay and the Kure Naval District, but she waited while the CI cross-matched the incoming vision with its holomap banks.

“Target confirmed,” said Lohrey. “I’m moving Big Eye south, Captain. We’re about eighteen thousand meters north of the anchorage. We have a tailwind of one hundred fifteen knots. Should be there inside six minutes.”

The scene relayed back from the drone was eerily beautiful. Six separate drone-cams panned wide to take in as much of the world below as possible. Willet could see the old castle city of Iwakuni sitting astride the Nishiki River with its back to the Renka and Rakan mountain ranges. Iwakuni was a major industrial center, but the wide-angle infrared cams transformed it into something ghostly and medieval, reminding her of the fantasy novels she’d read as a teenager.

The Seto-naikai, as the Japanese called the five water basins lying between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, were home to hundreds of islands. Willet silently wondered how many of them were populated at this time. Quite a few, she guessed, if only by antiaircraft gun crews, watching the skies over the home waters of the Japanese fleet. Dozens of them drifted across a large window displaying light-amplified video. They looked like small, irregular emeralds.