Anderson agreed but she was haunted, wondering whether she was about to set some calamity in motion. Still, the near-total failure of the ship’s quantum systems left her no choice. She couldn’t use the weapons systems aboard the Gulf, couldn’t even scuttle her at the moment. She had crew engaging in close-quarter combat on the forward decks, there were no communications with task force command, and they had absolutely no idea how this mess had come to be. For the moment, then, her choice seemed clear. If the Leyte Gulf had been boarded by pirates or commandos or some kind of jihadi suicide squad, she would find the enemy, and destroy them.

Anderson chose a group to accompany her, then ordered six crewmembers to stay and seal the CIC behind her.

Hurrying down the starboard corridor to the armory, she was immediately struck by how wrong it all felt. Even in the restricted spaces belowdecks, the geometry of the vessel seemed to have been wrenched or twisted out of shape. And it was obvious that they were no longer making any headway. If anything, the ship was being pushed sideways. They began to hear blasts of gunfire and the frequent explosions of handheld artillery. But beneath that, her trained and sensitive ear could detect the awful screams of metal plate and bulkheads straining against enormous destructive forces, as the structural integrity of the Nemesis cruiser was tested.

Emergency lighting had come on, leaving the corridors dim but navigable. Glowing flexipad screens, activated and secured on each man’s or woman’s preferred arm, bobbed up and down through the gloom, adding their own soft luminescence and throwing off a menagerie of tortured, writhing shadows. As they passed ladders and hatchways between decks, Chief Conroy detailed small groups to split off and make their way to A, C, and D decks, with instructions to gather other crew and await orders from the captain when she made the B deck armory.

The Leyte Gulf had sailed with a full complement, eighteen officers and 235 enlisted personnel. The ship’s biosensors were offline, so Anderson had no idea of casualties, or of how many were actively engaged with the boarders, or trapped forward of the impact point with the hostile vessel, or simply missing, or dead. Conservatively, she figured on rounding up seventy or eighty warm bodies for her counterattack. As she and Conroy hurried along B, past the berthing spaces, they swelled their numbers with another two dozen sailors, including three specialists trained in hostile boarding ops.