Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 1: The End of the Beginning

Part 2: Judgment Day

Chapter 1: I Left My Heart in San Francisco

8:45 p.m. PDT, July 16 (11:45 p.m. EDT July 16; 3:45 a.m. GMT, July 17), 2022, Hunter’s Point
Naval Shipyards, San Francisco Bay, CA:

§ 1.5: Fire on the Waters

As always, naval vessels were tied up at the drydocks and piers around Hunter’s Point. More, herded
along by busily fussy tugs, were either just heading in to the wharfs there or weighing anchor in preparation
for depature. Elsewhere, still more vessels, mostly merchant marine or other civilian ships and boats,
packed San Francisco Bay from the Richmond- San Rafael Bridge and extending north and east from there,
into San Pablo and Suisun Bays, clear down south and east past Palo Alto, to Calaveras Point in Santa
Clara County. A normal, busy day, a normal evening at the height of Summer in the San Francisco Bay,
much busier than it ever had been before 2011, when the federal government finally reopened the Hunter’s
Point naval shipyards, which had been closed for decades, for refurbishing and refitting deteriorating naval
vessels to help bolster the American fleet “in case of need,” thanks to the suddenly renewed and escalating
tensions between the USA and the ChiComs and the Soviet Union. As two administrations had now
worked hard to reassure the American public, of course those born-again, refurbished ships and their
gestating and newborn sisters now being readied in the drydocks for their first maiden voyages at sea would
never be needed, the world had given up the idea of global wars, and everyone knew only madmen would
try to start one. But there were the ongoing brushfire conflicts between the USA and various rebel and
insurgent groups in Central and South America, not to mention problems in the Middle East, and it would
be prudent to build the Navy back up to something close to the strength it once had, just in case. And there
were all those new jobs that the federal ship-building and ship-refurbishment programs had created, and the
American economy had never looked so good. And . . . yadda-yadda-yadda blah-blah.
It was such a lovely evening, hardly any smog at all marring the cerulean blue of the middle heavens.
The smoke from the fires that had swept San Francisco in the wake of the earthquake that had convulsed
the area that morning had been carried to the southeast by a steady wind that had blown all day, leaving
most of the sky unstained by it. In the east, that glorious blue had surrendered the stage to navy blue and
indigo and the first stars; in the west, one of those spectacular California sunsets, enhanced by the day’s
faint traces of smog and smoke, had taken command, making that part of the sky riotous with color,
creating the sort of scene art photographers would sell their souls to capture on disk. Altair was just rising,
and Fomalhaut would follow in a couple of hours; Vega was about 15° above the eastern horizon, its
sapphire light not yet apparent through the darkening blue there at the edge of night. In the west, those
with keen eyesight might just make out pale ultramarine Regulus, which would set in a couple of hours,
followed shortly by Denebola. Unfortunately no planets were yet visible, though come just before dawn
tomorrow morning, all save the Sun and Mercury, which had just passed superior conjunction with the Sun,
would herald the coming day, bright Venus well above the eastern horizon, with Jupiter almost due south
and within four degrees of conjoining the Midheaven, Mars and Uranus orient Jupiter and Neptune, the
gibbous Moon, and Saturn west of the big planet. Now, though the Sun had dropped below the western
horizon, it was still within a few degrees of its setting, its light still charging the skies there with power and
spectral glory. Below, that glory reflected off the waters of the Bay, bejeweling the edges of the wavelets
churned up by passing ships and the flow of the tide like the hems of Amphitrite’s gowns, the ones She
wears for the delight of Her husband Poseidon.
Seabees swarmed around the drydocks as one shift went off-duty and another came on. Sailors on
shore leave strolled along the docks, arm-in-arm with their ladies or discussing things with their buddies or
stopping to light up Turkish or Mexican cigarettes (forbidden, but the feds needed the good will of the
military and God help anyone who tried to bug the enlisted men about their bad habits, as long as they
weren’t glaringly bad).
Yeah, sure, something had happened on the East Coast early this morning, a catastrophe, the
Commander had said, and according to KUSA, the only radio and TV stations legally allowed on anywhere
near military bases for the duration of the temporary emergency, Seattle had just taken it up the ass from
one of those Cascade volcanoes, but as everyone knew –

ORANGE

YELLOW

WHITE

DAZZLING COBALT BLUE

 INCONCEIVABLE STARBURST SPLENDOR

INDESCRIBABLE INEFFABILITY
Passage . . . of . . . an . . . eternity . . . of . . . several . . . nanoseconds –
 {{ Deep violet }}


Electric blue 

Lowering emerald green . . .

Traces of solar yellow fading to

yellow-orange,

orange, then

maroon . . .
Black

Clearing . . .

And then everything was burning, everyone was burning, fire on the waters, fire on the docks, fire
leaping everywhere along the rim of the Bay, everything burning, destroyers, cruisers, tankers, the one
great refurbished battlewagon, the USS New America almost ready to leave drydock for her first
assignment, everything, the hulls of the ships red hot, incandescent, tugboats burning, heat so great that
even the very smoke glowed crimson, a harbor packed with burning modern, steel-hulled ships. Close to
the drydocks there was a tin can, an American destroyer, its identity clear from its silhouette, broadside on
to the docks (it had just been nudged out into the Bay by tugs, for all the world like a swan being harassed
and harried by so many baby ducklings; its steel hull and superstructure were at red heat, close to its
melting point, flames leaping from the steel itself – the steel was burning, its temperature great enough to
enable oxygen to combine rapidly with the steel. Spark-filled, heavy, dark smoke – or which would have
been dark, except that in many places the unspeakable thermal pulse filling the northern half of the Bay
heating the particles making up the smoke to red, yellow, even white heat, so that great patches of them
glowed incandescently – obscured a great deal of what was behind the destroyer, but if there had been an
observer still alive then (as there was not) it would have been clear to him or her that the Bay was packed
with ships – and the pulverized remains of ships and boats – all of them burning fiercely, the very steel of
their hulls and superstructures blazing with inconceivable heat.
There was no sound, other than that of the burning, no sign of life at all. Something had set that entire
harbor and everything in it afire, causing steel to catch fire, hulls glowing red and yellow and white in
places, droplets and worms of melting steel beginning to fall from them, into the waters below. Those
waters were likewise ablaze; apparently fuel from some of those ships had fallen into it as hulls finally
failed and burst and munitions below cooked off from the terrible heat that had stricken them. That the ship
in the foreground still had an intact hull in spite of its incandescence could only mean that the heat initially
came from outside it, and was not due to a localized explosion, say, of one of its sister ships in the harbor.
Some titanic event had pulverized the entire northern Bay with an inconceivable thermal pulse and
shockwave blast of the sort that could only have originated in the heart of a nuclear or thermonuclear
explosion.
And it had happened and was over with within a second.
San Francisco and its environs were no more. Where they had been were only gigantic mounds of
blazing rubble interspersed with abysses reaching down and down into sewers and water-mains cracked
open, their contents instantly dried to powder by the ghastly energies released by a 25-megaton MIRVed
thermonuclear airburst, down still farther into sub-sub-sub-basements of restaurants and hotels and
condominiums built on deep landfills whose loosely-packed contents could not possibly stand up to such
punishment, down farther still into ancient, laminated strata rotted with age and the action of the salt waters
of the Pacific, into the realms of Hades and Persephone Themselves. And the burning went on and on and
on until only calcined ash and basalt rock and spines of rebar and concrete poking up out of the devastated
region remained to hint there had ever been a mighty city here, the Jewel of the Eastern Pacific, the haunt
of Twain and Bierce and London and his Inperial Majesty the Emperor Joshua Norton I.