More disturbing still were the dozen or more phantom vessels hopelessly mixed in among them. None of these registered any ID signal, and Posh hadn’t been able to tag them with any designator hack other than Unidentified Vessel 01 through . . . Karen checked the readout on the data cube that was suspended above the hologram . . . UIV 24.

“My word, Commander. A cock-up indeed.”

“Aye, Captain. Three carriers of some sort. Four heavy gun platforms. A couple of replenishment ships. And a swarm of littleuns. Destroyers or frigates, I suppose, but like nothing I’ve ever seen outside a museum. And we seem to have come up short a few friendlies. Besides Fearless, Vanguard is off the bloc. Dessaix is missing, the nukes and the Amanda Garrett, and those Indonesian tubs.”

“Destroyed?”

“No way to tell. Just missing, ma’am. Without trace.”

“Find them.” Halabi pursed her lips for a second before casting an inquiry over her shoulder to a young lieutenant situated at a nearby station. “Elint, what are we getting from these Unidentified Vessels?”

The young sysop, a Jamaican Welsh woman of unusual beauty, was burning holes in the screen with her intense stare. “Not a lot of emcon, Captain. But then, there’s not a lot of emission to control, by the look of it. We’ve been painted by radar once or twice, and it just slipped off the ram skin, but we collected a sample for analysis. It’s primitive stuff. Almost Stone Age. A pirate barge can buy better off the shelf in Bangkok.

“Sigint are gathering a lot of uncoded, unscrambled, basic radio transmissions . . . English language . . . but uhm . . . pretty weird.”

“Pretty weird is not good enough, Lieutenant. We’re dying here. What exactly do you mean?”

The woman hid her chagrin well. “I mean weird, Captain. Unusual, unexplained. Beyond standard parameters. I can give you a raw sample if you wish.”

“Do so.”

The lieutenant’s dark, slender fingers danced over a giant touch screen to her left, and the data cube’s Bang & Olufsen speakers began to emit a harsh burst of static. It flared and faded as the signal intercept was washed clean of interference. Voices came through. Confused, loud, angry, scared. Most of the CIC crew were too deeply involved in their own stations to bother with the broadcast, but the intel sysops turned to listen, even though they could have taken the sound channel through individual headphones. They heard American voices, educated, military, and . . . something else.

Halabi focused on the audio stream, which seemed to have been acquired from the fire control facility of an unidentified vessel. The speaker was demanding to know what the hell he was shooting at, where they had come from. And he wanted to know if they were Japs. Halabi twirled an index finger and the lieutenant, Waverton, flipped into another channel.

A ship-to-ship transmission this time. The same burst of static subsided into quantum clear audio.

“Hamman, Hughes, and Morris to pick up survivors . . .”