Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)
Taylor Anderson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Russell Galen, as always. Simply put, I wouldn’t be doing this if not for him. (Some might curse him for that, I suppose, but I’ll always be grateful.) Thanks also to my amazing editor, Anne Sowards, who really went above and beyond on this one, to my eternal appreciation. She’s the best. As usual, I have to thank Fred Fiedler, my “alpha” reader, for helping me keep things straight. (I hope you appreciated the bugs, Fred. All for you.) And there’s still a fine bullpen of technical advisers as well, including Mark Wheeler, William Curry, “Cap’n” Patrick Moloney—to name just a few. Then there’s Matthieu, Clifton, Joe, Charles, Alexey, Brian, Lou, Justin, Don . . . Shoot, I can’t remember all the great, supportive minds that visit my Web site and help me wrangle improbable ideas, but I’m grateful for your input. If I missed you, I’ll try to catch you next time. As usual, some of my particular buddies’ antics/expressions/personalities have been “memorialized in literature,” but I won’t be specific. I’ve mentioned most of them before and there’s no sense in encouraging them.
A very special thanks goes to Ms. Kelley Ryan, a fine young man named Andrew, and to all the great people who work so hard to preserve USS Kidd, DD-661, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My wife and I just showed up there one day, and they treated us like family. Before we knew it, we were crawling through the engineering spaces and seeing whatever we wanted. I just wish we’d had more time. We’ll be back, and I urge everyone to visit her. She looks and feels ready to fight—again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A cast of characters and list of equipment specifications can be found at the end of this book.
OUR HISTORY HERE
By March 1, 1942, the war “back home” was a nightmare. Hitler was strangling Europe, and the Japanese were rampant in the Pacific. Most immediate, from my perspective as a . . . mature Australian engineer stranded in Surabaya Java, the Japanese had seized Singapore and Malaysia, destroyed the American Pacific Fleet and neutralized their forces in the Philippines, conquered most of the Dutch East Indies, and were landing on Java. The one-sided Battle of the Java Sea had shredded ABDAFLOAT, a jumble of antiquated American, British, Dutch, and Australian warships united by the vicissitudes of war. Its destruction left the few surviving ships scrambling to slip past the tightening Japanese gauntlet. For most, it was too late.
With several other refugees, I managed to board an old American destroyer, USS Walker, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy. Whether fate, providence, or mere luck intervened, Walker and her sister Mahan, their gallant destroyermen cruelly depleted by combat, were not fated for the same destruction that claimed their consorts in escape. Instead, at the height of a desperate action against the mighty Japanese battle cruiser Amagi, commanded by the relentless Hisashi Kurokawa, they were . . . engulfed by an anomalous force, manifested as a bizarre, greenish squall—and their battered, leaking, war-torn hulks were somehow swept to another world entirely.
I say “another world” because, though geographically similar, there are few additional resemblances. It’s as if whatever cataclysmic event doomed the prehistoric life on our earth many millions of years ago never occurred, and those terrifying—fascinating—creatures endured, sometimes evolving down wildly different paths. We quickly discovered “people,” however, calling themselves Mi-Anakka, who are highly intelligent, social folk, with large eyes, fur, and expressive tails. In my ignorance and excitement, I promptly dubbed them Lemurians, based on their strong, if more feline, resemblance to the giant lemurs of Madagascar. (Growing evidence may confirm they sprang from a parallel line, with only the most distant ancestor connecting them to lemurs, but “Lemurians” has stuck.) We just as swiftly learned they were engaged in an existential struggle with a somewhat reptilian species commonly called Grik. Also bipedal, Grik display bristly crests and tail plumage, dreadful teeth and claws, and are clearly descended from the dromaeosaurids in our fossil record.
Aiding the first group against the second—Captain Reddy had no choice—we made fast, true friends who needed our technical expertise as badly as we needed their support. Conversely, we now also had an implacable enemy bent on devouring all competing life. Many bloody battles ensued while we struggled to help our friends against their far more numerous foes, and it was for this reason I sometimes think—when disposed to contemplate destiny—that we survived all our previous ordeals and somehow came to this place. I don’t know everything about anything, but I do know a little about a lot. The same was true of Captain Reddy and his US Asiatic Fleet sailors. We immediately commenced trying to even the odds, but militarizing the generally peaceful Lemurians was no simple task. Still, to paraphrase, the prospect of being eaten does focus one’s efforts amazingly, and dire necessity is the mother of industry. To this day, I remain amazed by what we accomplished so quickly with so little, especially considering how rapidly and tragically our “brain trust” was consumed by battle.
In the meantime, we discovered other humans—friends and enemies—who joined our cause, required our aid, or posed new threats. Even worse than the Grik (from a moral perspective, in my opinion), was the vile Dominion in South and Central America. A perverse mix of Incan/Aztecan blood-ritual tyranny with a dash of seventeenth-century Catholicism flavoring technology brought by earlier travelers, the Dominion’s aims were similar to the Grik’s: conquest, of course, but founded on the principle of “convert or die.”