Designated Targets

Eddie Mohr didn’t relax his grip, but he swung around fractionally to take in the speaker. When he saw the commander’s uniform and the man wearing it, he did let go. But he didn’t back down. “One of our men just took a licking from these goons, sir,” he said, standing straight.

“Did he deserve it?” asked the officer. Two other figures Mohr recalled seeing at the table in the Harvey House restaurant came jogging over at a fast clip.

“No, sir. Not that I can see,” answered Mohr, triggering a brief but muted demonstration of outrage by the two cops.

“Good enough, then,” Commander Dan Black said with a tone that drew a line under the issue. “Marine, you need to clean yourself up. You carrying a spare uniform with you?”

Private José Diaz, who looked like he’d just witnessed a vision of the Blessed Virgin materialize in a pool of his own blood, nodded quickly. “Yes, sir. In a locker, sir.”

“Chief, you want to make sure Private Diaz gets changed without further incident? If you’re waiting for the trolley out to Fifty-one, perhaps he should wait with you. It’s a big city. I wouldn’t want him to get into any more trouble.”

Black smiled at the crestfallen railroad officers, but his eyes remained cold.

“The marine appears to have suffered some damage to his personal effects. I’m sure Union Pacific will have a procedure for making good the losses. Is that right, Officer?”

“There’s probably a form to fill in,” the man agreed unhappily.

“There always is,” said Black, “and I’ll be following up personally, to make sure it gets done.”

SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE, CALIFORNIA

The twenty-three-inch flatscreen looked incongruous sitting on the old wooden desk. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wondered if he’d ever get used to the collision of past and present that now surrounded him. Mil-grade flexipads and crank-handle telephones. Quantum processors and slide rules. Holoporn and Norman Rockwell.

Probably not. He was a good deal older than most of the men and women in his command, more than twice the age of many of them, and he was way past going with the flow. When the pressure of his work abated for a short time at the end of each day, he still ached for his wife and his home and even, surprisingly, for his own war—as savage and stupid as it had been.

He had no real home to retire to at day’s end. There was a bungalow he’d rented in Oak Knoll, but he rarely made it back there. Most nights he just bunked down “on campus,” the hastily erected complex of low-rise plywood-and-particle-board offices just off the 405, where Panorama City would have been laid out in 1947. It was pleasant enough at this time of year, a mild autumn without anything like the smog of his era to suffocate the entire basin. But he found driving through the baking farmland and emerging gridiron of future suburbs to be depressing. It wasn’t how an admiral should spend his days.

The big screen beeped discreetly as his PA ushered out the labor delegates. Multiple tones, telling him that the message-holding command had been removed and dozens of urgent new e-mails had arrived. One vidmail had come in, too. That was less common. They just didn’t have the bandwidth to support it anymore.

He knew he’d never get used to that. In his day, California had been bathed in an invisible electronic mist, 24-7. Nobody even thought about bandwidth. It just wasn’t an issue. Now, the ramshackle comm system they’d clipped together from scavenged Fleetnet equipment just about did a half-assed job of nearly meeting their needs in the greater Los Angeles area. But that was all. There was no such thing as full-spectrum access to the National Command Authority in Washington, and there wouldn’t be until the cable came online, God only knew when. Maybe 1952.

He didn’t get anything like the vidmail traffic he’d once had to wade through, which was a blessing in some ways. So the distinctive ping of a new message arriving caught his attention. He had a few minutes before the engineers from Douglas Aircraft turned up, and the small avatar of his liaison chief, the newly promoted Commander Black, floated in virtual 3-D right in front of him, demanding attention. Kolhammer clicked on the icon, and Black’s image came to life. It was a recorded message, captured by the small lens in the officer’s flexipad. There was enough depth of vision for the admiral to recognize Union Station in the background.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” said Black, “but we’ve had another incident downtown, between a Latino guy called Diaz and a couple of railway bulls at Union. I saw it myself. That’s over two dozen so far this week for the wider city. We may want to pull our guys back to Fifty-one and talk to the locals again. I just got a feeling things are about to light up here. Thought you’d want to know ASAP.

“Over and out.”