Devil's Due Read online

  THE DESTROYERMEN SERIES

  Into the Storm

  Crusade

  Maelstrom

  Distant Thunders

  Rising Tides

  Firestorm

  Iron Gray Sea

  Storm Surge

  Deadly Shores

  Straits of Hell

  Blood in the Water

  Devil’s Due

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Taylor Anderson

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Anderson, Taylor, 1963– author.

  Title: Devil’s due / Taylor Anderson.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2017. |

  Series: Destroyermen; 12

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016046115 (print) | LCCN 2016054059 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780451470652 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698162983 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. | Destroyers

  (Warships)—Fiction. | Naval battles—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science

  Fiction / Military. | FICTION / Alternative History. | FICTION / War &

  Military. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.N5475 D49 2017 (print) | LCC PS3601.N5475 (ebook)

  | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046115

  First Edition: June 2017

  Jacket art by 3DI Studio

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  TO SILVIA, FOR . . . EVERYTHING.

  AND IN CASE I LEFT SOMETHING OUT,

  THANKS FOR EVERYTHING ELSE.

  Contents

  The Destroyermen Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Maps

  Author’s Note

  Our History Here

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  Epilogue

  Cast Of Characters

  Specifications

  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.”

  I now believe that, faced with only one of these enemies, we could’ve prevailed rather quickly, despite the odds. Burdened by both, we could never concentrate our forces, and the war lingered on. To make matters worse, the Grik were aided by the madman Kurokawa, who, after losing his Amagi at the Battle of Baalkpan, pursued a warped agenda all his own. And just as we came to the monumental conclusion that not all historical human timelines we encountered exactly mirrored ours, we began to feel the malevolent presence of yet another power centered in the Mediterranean. This League of Tripoli was composed of fascist French, Italian, Spanish, and German factions from a different 1939 than we remembered, and hadn’t merely “crossed over” with a pair of battle-damaged destroyers but possessed a powerful task force originally intended to wrest Egypt—and the Suez Canal—from Great Britain.

  We had few open conflicts with the League at first, though they seemed inexplicably intent on subversion. Eventually we discovered their ultimate aim was to aid Kurokawa, the Grik, even the Dominion, just enough to ensure our mutual annihilation, removing at one time multiple future threats to the hegemony they craved. But their schemes never reckoned on the valor of our allies or the resolve of Captain Matthew Reddy. Therefore, when the League Contre-Amiral Laborde, humiliated by a confrontation, not only sank what was essentially a hospital ship with his monstrous dreadnought Savoie but took some of our people hostage—including Captain Reddy’s pregnant wife—and turned them AND Savoie over to Kurokawa . . .

  Excerpt from the foreword to Courtney Bradford’s

  The Worlds I’ve Wondered

  University of New Glasgow Press, 1956

  PROLOGUE

  ////// Sovereign Nest of Jaaph Hunters

  Zanzibar

  October 18, 1944

  Sandra Tucker Reddy had been inwardly terrified when that fascist French weasel, Victor Gravois, handed her and her companions to the Japanese after the League of Tripoli battleship Savoie sank SMS Amerika and brought them here. She’d seen what the Japanese on her old world were doing to prisoners of war when Mizuki Maru and Hidoiame . . . arrived, so she’d known how bad it might be. Instead, for now, it certainly could’ve been worse. She and her young companion, Diania, had been separated from Chairman Adar, Kapitan Leutnant Becher Lange, Gunnery Sergeant Arnold Horn, and the three Lemurian sailors she’d never even come to know, and locked in a small wooden shed, taller than it was wide. It was obvious by the streaked droppings that the structure was built as a nesting coop for lizardbirds to lay their eggs for human harvest. The vicious, duck-size flying reptiles were like the akka on Borno and could apparently tolerate one another long enough to jumble their eggs together in enclosed, shady places before abandoning them to hatch. The first to do so feasted on the others until large enough to fly—and reenter the food chain outside. Attrition was horrendous, of course, but lizardbirds had no mating season and there was a constant flow of careless mothers. Even now, they often darted through gaps high in the walls beneath the thatched roof and fluttered around inside. Finding the nesting shelves removed, they usually painted the place—and Sandra and Diania—with more foul-smelling excrement before flitting somewhere else to dump their eggs.

  At least the gap allowed daylight, and a slight breeze to stir the stifling heat, lizardbird-shit stench, and sour sweat reek pervading their prison. Sandra and Diania were both small women, and even standing on each other’s shoulders they couldn’t reach high enough to peer outside, let alone escape. And if they did, where would they go? Sandra knew they were on an island—probably Zanzibar—completely controlled by the Japanese and their Grik allies. She couldn’t imagine how they’d get away. Meals came twice a day, delivered by a young Japanese sailor flanked by two fearsome Grik carrying wickedly barbed spears. The young man never met their eyes, wouldn’t speak, and acted almost ashamed. He also seemed resentful, even terrified, of the reptilian Grik accompanying him. That surprised Sandra, since she thought the Grik here served the Japanese. But the sailor was just a kid, and Grik were very frightening. It was probably as simple as that.

  Their meals were always the same tasteless glop of unidentifiable vegetable matter mixed with gobbets of meat she didn’t want to identify, but they weren’t being starved. She and Diania even had enough energy for light exercise and practicing some disabling moves that Diania’s lost love, Chief Gray, had taught her. And as bad as they smelled after weeks confined aboard Savoie, plus another week here—with lizardbird crap in their hair—they kept the cell as clean as they could. The single refinement easing their captivity was a box seat for them to do their business, with the waste dropping to the sand below. Even that was periodically removed by Grik fatigue parties, so they didn’t have to endure that rising stench as well. Diania had seen the Grik tasked with the chore through the hole in the seat, and the women had shared a rare giggle at the thought of “bombing” them.

  Fortunately, Sandra supposed, though she remembered plenty of reports of atrocities in ’forty-two, the Japanese who had them now arrived when they thought they were winning the war back home, before it degenerated to a level of savagery that could fill a Mizuki Maru with living skeletons under the “care” of men who, in their postarrival panic, actually considered eating them. Most of those men, along with Hidoiame, and even Mizuki Maru—which had been given a chance, at least, to redeem herself—were dead. And some of the “skeletons” had survived and recovered. Gunny Horn was one, Sandra remembered. Wherever the others are, he has to be in a special hell right now.

  Unfortunately, however, regardless of the prevailing circumstances when Sandra and so many she cared about aboard the old Asiatic Fleet destroyer USS Walker were hounded—and somehow followed—to this world by the massive battle cruiser Amagi and these very Japanese, the wars raging here had achieved their own unique barbarism. Walker and her people had sided with the then relatively peaceful Lemurians—Catmonkeys, some called them—who’d fought and eluded the dreadful Grik for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Voluntarily or not, Amagi’s commander, Hisashi Kurokawa, united with the Grik. What was more, he apparently blamed everything that had happened to him, from being marooned on this strange world in the first place and the loss of his Amagi, to all the ordeals he’d endured since, on USS Walker. And the greatest measure of blame was laid more specifically at the feet of her captain—Sandra’s husband—Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy.

  Sandra stirred from where she’d been sitting, just
staring at the wall, and looked at Diania. In contrast to Sandra’s tanned but fair skin and sandy brown hair, the tiny expat Impie gal’s hair was almost black, her skin dark. Most of her people had spent the past two hundred years intermarrying with subjects of the terrible Holy Dominion in Central and South America with whom the United Homes and their allies were also at war. She—and most women of the Empire of the New Britain Isles, where the Hawaiian Islands ought to be—had once been practically a slave. That system had ended, but her previous condition probably helped her cope with the situation better than Sandra had. Diania was staring back, concern and compassion in her dark brown eyes. Sandra forced a smile. “We’ll be okay,” she managed a bit hollowly.

  “Aye’m,” Diania dutifully replied. “Though I do wish we knew what they done wi’ Adar . . . an’ the lads,” she added.

  “They won’t hurt them—yet,” Sandra said, the qualification slipping out before she could stop it. “They’ll use them however they can, even if it’s just to make use of us. And they’ll wonder if Adar’s really as useless to them as he claims to be.”

  Diania looked down, and Sandra berated herself. She hadn’t been as encouraging as she’d planned. She forced a smile. “Gunny Horn likes you, I think.”

  Diania looked up, searching. “Ye do?”

  Sandra was stunned by how intensely her friend reacted. She’d wanted Diania to begin clawing out of the shell of grief she’d built around herself when Fitzhugh Gray was killed at Grik City, but hadn’t really expected it so soon. Certainly not under these circumstances. Hope is a very strange thing, she told herself, and comes at the strangest times. Here we are, helpless and surrounded by enemies, and her fondest wish is that some guy she barely knows might’ve noticed her. Maybe that’s how she copes so well? She just thinks of something—someone—else.

  “I do,” Sandra assured, her tone lighter. Then she managed a genuine smile and put her hand on the battered medical bag full of clothing and a few medicines she’d managed to keep in spite of everything. The Frenchmen on Savoie had been too rattled by other events—and her distracting performance—to search it when they took her aboard. The Japanese likely assumed the French had already done it, and passed it off as what it appeared to be: a bag full of nothing useful to them. They’ll regret that, Sandra swore to herself, considering the amazing luck that had allowed her to conceal a certain deadly object for so long. General of the Sky Muriname, despite badly disguised hungry stares, had been true to his word to protect them from hundreds of sex-starved Japanese. At least until Kurokawa returned. Sandra’s smile faded. But Kurokawa’s back now. The planes that flew in and landed and all the noise coming from the docks that morning had practically confirmed it. So, Sandra thought, maybe we’ll know something soon. She looked intently at Diania. “Horn’s a good man,” she assured her. “He didn’t have to come, but he did. And I bet that was largely because of you.”