As they tried to hurry to the bridge, Jones stopped to encourage those marines and sailors who were rebounding the fastest. He noted that this seemed to be a random process. He saw Aub Harrison, a gunnery sergeant, a thirty-year man and just about the toughest son-of-a-bitch Jones had ever met, flaked out, a dark stain spreading down his pants as his bladder emptied itself. Just beyond Harrison, he found his principal combat surgeon, a slight red-headed woman, and she seemed reasonably unaffected. She was moving from one person to the next, jabbing them with one-use syringes. Jones grabbed a trembling Chen by the arm and muscled him over in her direction.

“Hey, Doc, what do we have here?” asked Jones. “Transsonics? What d’you think?”

Captain Margie Francois left the marine she was tending and moved over to Jones and Chen with remarkable agility. There was just a flicker of dread in her gray eyes. “Fucked if I know, Colonel,” she said. “But I got Promatil and Stemazine, antinausea drugs. Seems to help.”

She took up a syringe from a kit at her hip.

Another blast, very close this time. They all turned their heads in that direction.

“Terrific,” said Jones. “Gimme a shot. And the lieutenant here, too. Can’t you do an implant dump? I want a couple of Harriers up as soon as possible. But I’m guessing we got nobody fit to fly them yet.”

“Sir. I’ve already zapped the implants. That’s about forty percent of our personnel. I’ll check on the fliers right away.”

Jones detailed Chen to hustle her up some assistants as another explosion sounded. He was surprised to hear a personal weapon open up on full auto, somewhere nearby, and decided to take a detour from his path to the bridge. A few turns later he emerged onto a small weather deck.

A marine had leaned himself against the safety rail and was letting rip at something on the water. Huge fingers of white fire strobed at the muzzle of his weapon, and a long line of tracer rounds reached out over the darkened waters.

Jones shook his head in disbelief, first at the trooper, and then at the antiquated warship he was shooting at. She revealed herself with the flash of her guns.

“Safe that weapon now, son!” he yelled. And for the first time since he’d come to, raising his voice didn’t drive an ice pick straight into his head. That was good. He liked to raise his voice.

The marine, a giant bovine-looking character, seemed genuinely shocked to have been busted by his CO, and actually began to argue.

“But the enemy, they’s shooting at us, Colonel.”