While she was racing through her options, Howard relayed a series of orders through his headset, and a row of systems operators who had been relatively quiet suddenly leaned into their stations. Six pairs of hands flew over touch screens and virtual keyboards. Laser nodes embedded in the skin of the Trident pulsed, and thousands of meters away smart-skin arrays on two Australian ships, the troop cat Moreton Bay and the littoral assault ship Ipswich, picked up the photon storm of microburst infrared laser transmissions.

The first data set was an encoded authenticator, which convinced the ships’ innately suspicious CIs to accept that their companion vessel was legitimately opening a Cooperative Battle Link. It authorized the Intelligences to power up all defensive systems and to deploy in protection of task force assets. The next photon shower advised of a possible bio-weapon attack, and gave the recommended response. The last packet of data contained a synopsis of the evolving situation, as it was understood by the Trident. Unfortunately, this transmission was quite thin.

Half a second later the destroyer repeated the process with a tone link to the Australian submarine HMAS Havoc. It returned a surprising acknowledgment from a human operator. Havoc was standing to, targets plotted, awaiting authority to release weapons.

“Captain Willet on Fleetnet for you,” Lieutenant Waverton announced.

“At last,” said Halabi.

A screen above the holobloc winked on. The commander of the Australian sub, looking thin-lipped and grim, nodded a curt hello.

“Captain Willet.”

“Captain Halabi. My apologies for the delay in responding. My comm operator was having some sort of seizure, and he wasn’t alone. We’ve got a terrible mess down here. Some sort of neural attack. The CI took over the initial response. Do we have hostile contact?”

“We have contacts, as you can see, we have to assume hostile,” replied Halabi. “Fearless has been destroyed, but God only knows by what. I’ve never seen anything like it. Can you put your intel people onto the data package we just sent? I’m afraid it makes no sense and we have very little time. It’s getting quite ugly up here.”

Willet’s eyes registered the shock of losing the helicopter carrier, but she said nothing about it, nodding brusquely and signing off. “Done. We’ll get back to you ASAP.”

The two captains broke their link.

Relieved to have Willet sharing the burden, Halabi resumed her inspection of the holobloc while the crew took care of business. One of the first things they teach you in captains’ school, she reminded herself, is never to look like circumstances have the better of you. But she couldn’t help quietly blowing out her cheeks in exasperation. Truly, there was nothing about their situation that made sense. Nothing at all.