The surviving task force ships may have been scattered, but none was making any apparent efforts to rectify that. They cut through the swell, which had mysteriously picked up from nothing to three meters in a few minutes flat. Each ship, whichever direction it was headed, was maintaining ten knots, as they had been before being struck down.

The three exceptions were the Trident, which was circling the flaming hulk of her dying sister ship; Willet’s sub, the Havoc, which had dialed back to two knots and was lying stealthed near the center of the unidentified fleet; and finally, she noted, the American Nemesis cruiser Leyte Gulf, which seemed to be in serious trouble.

“Marc, pull in close on the Leyte Gulf. One thousand meters virtual.”

The hologram shimmered momentarily, then reformatted. The image well filled with the shape of the American cruiser and another vessel, which appeared to have rammed . . . No, that isn’t right, she thought. It’s been . . . what, superimposed?

“Is this a clean feed?”

The commander consulted the data cube, interrogating a series of screens before nodding the affirmative.

“Systems are five by five, Captain. Boards green. No overlapping, no ghosting or echo effects.”

Halabi felt as if something spiky had lodged in her mind. The two ships were fused, presenting an impression of scissor blades opened at nearly forty-five degrees. This would account for the voice intercepts, the panicky radio calls about a ramming.

But this was no collision. The blade of the Leyte Gulf’s bow projected clean and sharp beyond the flanks of the other ship. There was no crushed or broken metal, no crumpled deck composite. Nothing to indicate that two objects of considerable mass had made any sort of violent, forcible contact.

“Something else, ma’am. The feeds from the drones and skin systems are clean, but that’s the only intel we’re taking. I can’t access any satellite links. They all appear to be down. Military and civilian.”

“Did somebody kill the satellites, or just the links?” she asked, compartmentalizing the flicker of real fear that Howard’s report sparked. It was far more likely that something had severed the Trident’s links, rather than taking out approximately twenty-three thousand separate satellites.

The CIC boss rechecked the Trident’s own systems, then had Lieutenant Waverton cross-check his findings. Marc Howard wasn’t prone to histrionics, but when he finally replied, Halabi easily picked up the anxiety that was present in his voice and the set of his features.

“Ship links are fine, Captain. Posh also interrogated the other CIs, for the same results. They can’t access any satellite feeds. Weather birds, comms, media, they’re all offline.”

Halabi threw a glance at the two monitors that normally pumped out CNN and BBC World News. The screens were blue, with only two words displayed in plain white type.

NO SIGNAL.

“I suppose GPS is gone, too, then,” she said, without emotion.

“That’s correct, ma’am.”