“What’s that?” Spruance turned sharply toward the source of the comment, finding there a young pencil-necked ensign with thick black-framed reading glasses, the same one who had just run in with the message from the radio room.

“Ensign Curtis, sir. They’re rockets. I’m sure of it and they’re aimed at the cruisers, Admiral.”

“You seem damn sure of yourself, Ensign,” Spruance said.

Dan Black recognized the dangerous tone in the old man’s voice. Another officer, Commander Beanland, stepped around a map table and shouted at Curtis.

“That’ll be enough of your nonsense, Ensign. Get the hell off the bridge and back to your post. We’re trying to fight a battle up here.”

The boy reacted as though Beanland had jammed an electric wire into his neck. He went rigid and turned white. “Sir!” he barked out, snapping a salute and making to turn on his heel. Black thought Spruance was about to stop him, ask him to explain further—the kid had seemed righteous in his certainty. But before the admiral could properly open his mouth to speak, before Curtis could even complete his about-face, the blinding white light of a newborn sun spilled out with a roar for the end of the world.

JDS SIRANUI, 2301 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

Maseo remembered the agony of stonefish poison, how his arm had burned as though held in a pot of boiling water, after he’d brushed against the spines of one on the outer reefs off Cairns. The sense memory punched away at him while he lay unconscious, battering at his submerged mind, until something gave way at last and let the real pain flood in. In a confused and sickening split second of vertigo, Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki dropped out of his dream and onto the metal stairwell circling up into the Siranui’s fin bridge.

He screamed without shame or restraint as burned meat and nerve endings shrieked at him to get moving. Miyazaki had blacked out on the stairwell and had lived while the bridge crew died. But he had been badly burned by the explosion that killed his shipmates, and as he lay in the shallow coma of transition shock, a computer screen melted in the fires above him and dripped molten plastic onto his already scorched flesh.

Shock robbed the young man of his senses for a few long seconds until his training asserted itself and he awkwardly thumbed his flexipad, activating the trauma beacon. Panic flared briefly, when he thought the pad may have been ruined in the missile strike, but a warm bath of analgesics and stabilizers soon flushed through his system, spreading out from his spine, up his neck, and down into each of his injured limbs.