Mike Judge was staring at him as though he’d lost his mind. Kolhammer reopened his channel to Halabi, and thanked her grimly. She signed off to attend to her own problems.

“Damage reports,” said Kolhammer. “The lite version.”

“Seven hundred and thirty dead, three hundred wounded, about half of them critically. We’ve lost all the catapults, with heavy damage to the aircraft tied down outboard of number one. Eighteen Raptors totally trashed, and another two can only be salvaged for parts. Four torpedo strikes, but only one detonated. The inner hull retained its integrity but there’s a big fucking mess needs cleaning up down there. Little Bill has lost two nodes, but he’s reformatted. We’ve lost two aft laser pods and one Metal Storm mount. We’re down to forty percent of war stocks on the remaining guns.”

“Jesus,” muttered Kolhammer. “Busy day.”

“They’re greedy little boys, sir.”

Kolhammer could see Judge was about to ask him about the instructions he’d given Lieutenant Glover.

“I think something went wrong on the Nagoya, Mike,” he said, cutting off the inquiry. “Were you running any of those sneaky little blinkscans on them before we blacked out?”

Judge nodded briefly, excusing himself to interrogate a nearby workstation.

“Damn,” he said softly a moment later. “You’re right, sir. About twenty minutes ago, just before we passed out I guess, all the passive sensors monitoring EM shifts on the Nagoya went psycho.”

“Christ knows what they were messing with,” said Kolhammer, “but that briefing from Pearl . . . you were there. What’d you think?”

Judge shrugged and pursed his lips. Two deep lines ran down from the corners of his mouth. “Honestly, Admiral, I don’t know. All that stuff about wormholes and space warps. I figured we were being bullshitted three ways from Sunday.”

“Better check the Fleetnet personnel files, Commander. See who we’ve got with any postgraduate specialization in . . . uhm . . .”

“Warp drives and time travel?” scoffed the Texan.

“Well, let’s just start with standard physics grads from the better universities. You and I will have to fill them in.”

The communications officer reappeared on screen, the dark smudges under his eyes standing out even more starkly against a face drained of all color.

“As requested, sir. I have an Admiral Spruance on audio channel three.”

Kolhammer nodded his thanks as static flared over a loudspeaker. “Good work, Lieutenant. Push it out over Fleetnet and to all the vessels in Admiral Spruance’s group.”

Kolhammer didn’t talk into a microphone. A small biochip implanted at the base of his neck, and powered by the electrical charge of his body’s own cells, picked up the bone vibrations of his speech and transformed them into a quantum signal, captured by the same sensors that constantly kept Little Bill aware of his exact location and physiological condition.

All that marvelous technology was no help at all.

Admiral Phillip Kolhammer’s mind was blank.