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shows aircraft not our own approaching the ship from the west. It is a wee bit unlikely that those aircraft will be friendly. I know you’ll give them the warm reception they deserve.”
    “Happy days,” Sam said. The lion was trying to bite.
    “Better this news than a surprise,” Pottinger said, and Sam could only nod. The wireless ranging gear had gone into the
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just the year before. She’d made a special trip to the Boston Navy Yard for the installation. Without it, she would have been blind to the approaching menace, maybe till too late.
    Sam wondered whether the Confederates also had wireless ranging gear—Y-range, people were calling it. They’d figured out where the
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was pretty damn quick. Nobody’d said anything about their having it. But then, how much of war was finding out the hard way what the other fellow had that you didn’t know about ahead of time? Put that way, it sounded quietly philosophical. Put another way, it meant Sam was likely to get killed because some dimbulb in Philadelphia was asleep at the switch.
    “They’re going to throw up a lot of antiaircraft all around us,” said one of the sailors in the damage-control party. Maybe he’d had the same nasty thought Sam had, and was trying to reassure himself.
    And maybe whoever’d given the order for this raid hadn’t stopped to figure out the likely consequences of sending an airplane carrier within range of land-based aircraft. Hardly anybody had had to worry about land-based attacks on ships during the Great War. Sam was a rare exception. If an admiral hadn’t had a new thought since 1917, he’d figure everything would go fine. And maybe he’d turn out to be right, and maybe he wouldn’t. And the
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was going to find out which.
    If the Confederates happened to have a submarine in the neighborhood, too . . . Well, that was another reason destroyers and cruisers ringed the carrier. They were supposed to carry better antisubmersible gear than they’d had in the Great War, better even than they’d had in the Pacific War against Japan.
    Would you be able to hear the ships around the
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shooting at Confederate airplanes if you were way the hell down here? Carsten cocked his head to one side, listening intently. All he could make out were the carrier’s usual mechanical noises.
    And then, without warning, all hell broke loose. The
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’s dual-purpose five-inch guns and all her smaller quick-firing antiaircraft weapons let go at once. Sam could sure as hell hear that. The engines started working harder. The ship heeled to the left, then to the right. Captain Stein was handling her as if she were a destroyer, dodging and twisting on the open sea like a halfback faking his way past lumbering defensive linemen.
    Trouble was, airplanes didn’t lumber. By comparison, the
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was the one that was slow.
    A bomb burst in the water close by the ship. That felt almost like being inside a bell when it was rung. Two more went off in quick succession, a little farther away. Fragments would cause casualties up on deck. The blasts might spring seams, too. Nobody was screaming for damage control, though, so maybe not.
    Then, up near the starboard bow, a bomb burst on the
Remembrance.
    The ship staggered, as if she’d taken one right on the chin—and she had. Lights flickered, but they stayed on. The reassuring deep throb of the engines went on. So did the antiaircraft fire. Not a mortal wound, then—not right away, anyhow. But it could be.
    “Carsten, take a party and deal with that!” Pottinger rapped out.
    “Aye aye, sir!” Sam turned to the sailors. “Come on, boys. We’ve got work to do. Sections one and two, with me.”
    The ship was buttoned up tight. They had to open and close a slew of watertight doors to get where they were going. Carsten wished there were something to be done about that. It slowed aid. But it also helped keep the ship afloat, which counted for more.
    He’d been