The cruisers New Orleans and Minneapolis joined their sister ship Portland on her dive to the floor of the ocean, the latter sunk by the second rocket that had launched from that damn Japanese ghost ship. The starburst of white light that bloomed amidships and consumed the entire ship still stung his eyes. Dan Black had cursed and said it was “like looking right into the sun.”

Suddenly the bridge windows blew in with a hollow bang as a long, sharklike blur whipped past the pilothouse at phenomenal speed. Two sailors who had been standing close to the glass spun away, crying out and trying too late to shield their faces. A massive boom sounded almost simultaneously. Spruance felt it as a quake deep inside his chest, and as knitting needles jammed painfully into his ears. It was two or three seconds before he could hear the profane language of the men around him.

He realized the young ensign, the one who’d warned them about the rockets, was tugging at his arm, pointing out through the nearest shattered pane. He was shouting something but it came through as faint, far-off murmur.

Spruance frowned and tried to read the boy’s lips. But he was certain the ensign was saying something like “death rays.”

Spruance feared he was losing his mind.

Death rays indeed!

Holy Toledo, yes, they were death rays!

Ensign Wally Curtis couldn’t understand why nobody else could see it. But then, nobody else on the Enterprise—probably nobody else in the fleet—had invested as many hours as he had immersed in the pages of Astounding and Amazing Stories.

As soon as he’d seen those brilliant flares lift off out of the Japanese ship, he’d known they were rockets.

And I was right!

And as soon as the blackness of night on the deep ocean became stitched and crisscrossed with those shimmering arrows of light, he’d known they were death rays. Not flak or machine-gun bullets, but honest-to-God lasers! And the sky was full of them.

Oh, the Japs were gonna win this war for sure.

He knew that really big bang, the one that lit up that giant carrier away on the horizon—the Akagi they reckoned—he knew that was a lucky strike, or maybe just a dive-bomber tumbling into the deck.

Just about every single plane they’d managed to put up had quickly disappeared in a dirty ball of orange flame and oily smoke. He could tell that the enormous volumes of fire they were putting out were trailing off as their sister ships disappeared, one after the other, inside dazzling white-hot dwarf stars. He’d seen the Phelps go up just a few yards away like a giant magnesium flare.

He didn’t know how they could defend themselves.

But he did know that Admiral Spruance had to be told what he was up against.

If he could just tell the admiral, he’d know what to do.