BATTLE STATION

Michael Reyes and Kevin Doyle have been in trouble together since the second grade. Now they are standing in front of a judge who is out of patience and out of options. In nine days they both turn eighteen, and the charges waiting on the other side of those birthdays are the kind a person does not walk away from. The judge offers them one last choice. Serve their time, or serve their country. They choose the Navy. What follows is eleven months of becoming something neither of them expected. Boot camp. Discipline. A chief who reads their files and sees something no teacher or cop ever bothered to look for. For the first time in their lives, two kids from a mill town find out they are good at something that will not land them back in that courtroom. Then their destroyer is ordered into a blockade against an enemy with technology nobody in the fleet can explain, and in the space of six seconds the captain is down, the bridge is gone, and half the crew with it. What is left is a skeleton watch, a ship under fire, and two young sailors who have never been given authority in their lives, stepping forward because there is nobody else standing to do it. The Navy will spend years trying to explain how they knew. They never will.