Admiral Spruance watched, mesmerized, as the missiles dived down on their prey like steel hawks. The rate of descent was so great, it actually made him feel a little giddy seeing the Japanese carrier rise up to fill the entire wallscreen so quickly. He marveled at the idea of putting a movie camera inside the nose of a bomb, and just had time to make out the aircraft spotted on the flight deck before they filled all three panels and the image cut back to recorded footage from the Havoc’s spy drone. The switch, managed by a young woman in the Clinton’s CIC, was so slick that the admiral was able to see how the mass of the Japanese carrier actually shuddered under the impact, just before a brilliant white starburst blossomed from deep within the body of the vessel.

It seemed almost peaceful, if that were possible. The brilliant globe of silent white light bloomed out to consume most of the ship, then disappeared just as quickly. For half a second he was left with a ghostly vision of what appeared to be the Ryujo, or what remained of her, resting serenely at anchor—an astounding sight, because three-quarters of the ship was gone, everything vaporized between the first forward gun mount and the rear elevator. For that brief moment, it appeared as though the two sections, fore and aft, might just sit there indefinitely—and then they toppled into the waves and were ripped apart by secondary explosions.

“Holy shit,” said Commander Black.

They were standing in the otherwise empty section of the supercarrier’s Combat Information Center that had once been devoted to antisatellite warfare. It afforded Spruance and his men a ringside view of the way Kolhammer’s people made war. What they saw was chilling.

The big screen that dominated one whole wall of the center briefly divided again, presenting coverage of the other Jap ships dying in the exactly same fashion as the Ryujo. Then a single-field view pulled back to show the entire anchorage. Small bursts of light suddenly twinkled along the flanks of one vessel, a cruiser. The effect spread throughout the body of the fleet.

“Flak,” explained Judge.

Looking at the faces of the men and women, sitting quietly at their banks of little movie screens and instruments in front the giant wallscreen, Spruance felt the power gathered in this room in a new way. At Midway he’d been hammered into a near state of shock by their weapons. Now, afforded the luxury of watching the onslaught from a distance, he was struck forcefully by the singular and passionless way they went about their killing. Their damn thinking machines had taken it upon themselves to slaughter his men while they slept. But seeing the indifferent response to the deaths they had just witnessed—deaths they had caused—he wondered whether these people were any more capable of feeling genuine emotion than their machines.