Battle

Boom!

Flames burst from 815A's hull. When they faded, several irregular holes about 20 cm across had appeared in the side. High-temperature gases from the explosions poured into the ship, starting fires inside 815A.

Thick smoke spread through the compartments, and piercing alarms sounded, warning of damage to the hull.

"Move! Move! Move!"

Led by an officer, the damage-control crew, clad in heat-resistant suits and carrying portable extinguishers, charged without hesitation into the burning compartment. They opened their extinguishers and sprayed fire-suppressant liquid over the burning equipment, forcing back the flames. Smoke filled the compartment, quickly swallowing their figures.

"Report the damage!" the captain shouted over the alarms.

"Fire on the port side. The blaze is currently under control! No flooding detected!"

Hearing that the fire had been contained, the captain breathed a slight sigh of relief. Modern warships had many watertight compartments and excellent survivability, but fire was what they feared most. 815A was packed with precision equipment, and those delicate systems could not withstand an inferno.

The damage was manageable for the moment. The captain hurriedly looked skyward and saw that the three unidentified aircraft that had just attacked them had pulled out of their dives. They executed impossibly strange, tight-radius turns in midair, then split apart and pointed their noses at 815A once more, preparing to attack from multiple directions.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The shipboard weapons continued firing at the aircraft, but none of the shells or bullets they sprayed into the sky struck the unidentified targets. The barrels of the 12.7 mm and 14.5 mm heavy machine guns glowed faintly red, forcing the soldiers to reduce their rate of fire to prevent the weapons from bursting.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

As the infrared seeker signaled that it had locked onto a target, a soldier who had risked his life to set up a man-portable air-defense missile on the helipad pulled the trigger. The missile launched and chased after an unidentified aircraft, but just as it was about to enter proximity-fuse range, the short-range air-to-air missile inexplicably exploded near the aircraft.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

A succession of explosions erupted across 815A's deck. A single-barrel 30 mm gun was hit, leaving a crater in its surface and damaging its drive mechanism.

Ignoring the explosions around them, several soldiers approached the damaged main gun under the lead of a technical NCO. At a glance, they saw that a large hole had been blasted into the gun mount. Melted material around it had practically "welded" the mount to the drive mechanism. Fortunately, the ammunition drum had already been emptied. Otherwise, an ammunition cook-off might have blown the entire turret into the sky.

"The gears are warped. The drive mechanism is jammed!"

After inspecting the turret base, the technical NCO immediately concluded that the main gun could not restore its firepower anytime soon. It made the already inadequate self-defense firepower of 815A even worse.

With a crashing roar, howling airflow slammed into 815A. Several soldiers were blown down by the fierce wind and struggled to rise from the deck. Watching the unidentified aircraft climb again, they cursed angrily.

"Fuck!"

It was suffocatingly frustrating—far too frustrating! If they had a Type 1130, they would have shot those things down long ago!

"What do we do?" a young soldier asked.

"Fix it!"

The technical NCO shouted. In this situation, even if they knew it was impossible, they still had to try!

"Captain! The port-side main gun is damaged beyond repair!"

The captain glanced at the soldiers who had been knocked to the deck by the wind stirred up by the unidentified aircraft. One struggled to his feet and wiped blood from a wound on his forehead before they ran back to the damaged gun, trying to repair it again.

"Where are our reinforcements?"

"Fifteen minutes ago, four Flying Sharks took off carrying live ordnance."

The captain looked at the damage on the deck. Like the holes in the hull, they were all roughly 20 cm wide. Damage of this extent was basically incapable of sinking 815A, but the ship's electronic equipment had suffered badly. Several holes had been punched through the four spherical radar domes overhead, damaging the gallium nitride modules and severely affecting radar performance.

This feeling of being carved apart by a dull knife was unbearable. They were being beaten without any way to strike back, and could only wait for naval aviation's air-superiority fighters to arrive.

"How is the Carl Vinson doing?"

Since 815A could not be sunk anytime soon, the captain finally relaxed a little and had the presence of mind to consider the Carl Vinson. Compared with 815A, it had been under siege by these unidentified aircraft.

Still, its anti-air firepower was formidable, and it had carrier-based aircraft assisting in the fight. It should have been in better shape... right? But a towering column of black smoke rose from the distant sea. Only a carrier fire could produce smoke that thick.

Soon, satellite remote-sensing images retrieved through laser communications clearly showed a major fire burning on the Carl Vinson's deck. However, the ship showed no signs of listing, and the exact extent of the damage remained unclear.

"Electromagnetic interference around the Carl Vinson is severe. We cannot establish communications with it. Our electro-optical systems have detected multiple aerial targets being shot down—all of them are F/A-18s."

These unidentified aircraft could be endured by warships, but they were deadly against fighter jets. A single hit might not blow a plane apart in midair, but aerodynamic damage alone would make it unable to continue flying.

"Only F/A-18s?"

The captain was surprised. The USA carrier strike group was no paper tiger. Its surrounding escort ships had been firing continuously—how could they possibly have failed to shoot down any enemy aircraft?

At that moment, above the Carl Vinson, more than eighty glamorous-looking unidentified aircraft took turns diving on the Nimitz-class carrier and opening fire.

Explosions continuously erupted across its flight deck, hull, and Island. Yet like bee stings, the attacks were not fatal, but they inflicted severe damage on the flight deck. Holes around 15 cm wide were blasted through the thick deck.

The Hornets that had not yet taken off were blown apart, igniting the entire deck. The flight deck became a sea of fire as damage-control personnel desperately sprayed streams of water, trying to extinguish the blaze. The water washed fragments of Hornets from the deck into the ocean.

Boom!

Suddenly, a massive fireball erupted from the deck. It was sheer bad luck: an ammunition elevator had brought missiles up, and they had been stacked on the deck when an attack hit them, causing them to cook off! Every serviceman within a hundred meters was thrown away by the blast wave, and some unlucky ones were flung straight into the sea.

After the ammunition cook-off, the fire that had been partially contained spiraled out of control again, and raging flames once more engulfed the deck.

Yet the battle was not over. ESSM short-range surface-to-air missiles launched into the sky one after another, while the Phalanx close-in weapon systems' rotary cannons sprayed ammunition skyward without restraint.

The servicemen also grabbed 12.7 mm Lao Gan Mas and fired desperately into the sky.

Strangely, the rounds fired by the Phalanx struck the unidentified aircraft but passed straight through them. Meanwhile, the Standard 2 missiles fired earlier had their seekers disrupted by the complex electromagnetic environment. Like drunken men, they either lost their targets and switched to inertial guidance, or plunged headfirst into the sea.