As large and well built as the supercarrier was, the Clinton shook violently through every inch of her structure. Men and women tending the fusion stacks thirty meters below the waterline were thrown to the floor.

On the flag bridge, Kolhammer had one brief idiot moment, where his mind whispered it was just the destroyer going up. Years of training and experience told him the little ship had been taken out by a Type 92 torpedo, probably launched from the Havoc, which was packing that sort of heat and loitering with intent, according to the bloc.

But even as those thoughts spooled through his mind, his senses betrayed the truth, though he was only dimly aware that something had cleared his impaired vision. In a strange, elongated fragment of time, he watched the screen as a supernova consumed the stern of his own ship. A deep, disordered vibration seized the Clinton’s bulk, throwing some of the watch to their knees. He groaned as the blast wave picked up the bodies of every human being on the flight deck and tossed them through the air like leaves before a gust front.

His heart thudded faster in his chest as a deep, unthinkably loud wall of thunder shook the bridge, and it seemed to him as though Hell’s furnace had exploded. He was minutely aware of every detail his bulging eyes took in. The faces of his brother and sister officers, their mouths wide open, forming perfect Os; a thread dangling from the arm of an ensign as he raised his hand to point at something; the impression his own backside had made in the chair where he’d been sitting. The first flicker of color in the blast window, all wrong, a burnt black-and-orange blossom amid a field of gray sea and metal at the very edge of his vision. The petal of fire growing, unfurling, expanding. Consuming the space where the Clinton had been.

It was wrong. It was impossible. An outrage to the senses. But there it was, before his very eyes.

This confused tumble of thought and emotion seemed to take much longer than was really the case. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer was fifty-three years old. Old enough to have served in the First Gulf War, which made him a figure of mythology to the young men and women in this battle group. He had been at war for most of his adult life. He hadn’t been born into conflict, like his young sailors and pilots. But he had grown into it.