Three Kings

Morgan thought about that, then realized what MacRae might be thinking. Ensign Temple had just reported 36 ready Vipers with two cell reloads of 48 missiles each in the ship’s magazines. Four had just been fired, and the count ticked down to 32 ready, which MacRae immediately corrected.

“Miss Temple,” he said calmly. “Kindly send down an order to have the ship’s Vipers reloaded. I want that VLS system topped off to a full battery.”

“Aye sir.”

MacRae looked at Morgan now. “What day have you figured it is, Mack?”

“30th of January, 1941.”

The Captain folded his arms, saying nothing more in front of the crew. There was a tense silence on the bridge now. The men and women there were tending to their business, watching system panels and radar screens, but their thoughts were searching the world around them now with equal intensity. It was 1941! None of them really understood what had happened to the ship, or how it could possibly be here. The incident just concluded had also made them keenly aware that they were in dangerous waters. The island of Santorini up ahead was a hotbed for European tourist traffic, with nightclubs and bars generating most of the heat on the island in 2021. Yet they would never see that time again, or so Miss Fairchild had told them all. She had not really explained how they came to be here, but did make one thing very clear-they could not go back, she had said. They were here to stay.

Ensign Temple had caught the low discourse between Morgan and MacRae as the two men started away. As she keyed the system maintenance order, she suddenly realized what the Captain meant. Her system board told the tale well enough. Their Viper inventory had just rotated from a total of 132 missiles to 128. That count was also stuck on a one way journey, she realized. If all this was true, if this was really what it looked to be, and they had landed right in the middle of the Second World War, then that missile count might tick away over time… And then what? The meaning of the Captain’s statement to his intelligence master was now quite apparent.

When the two senior officers had gone, Mister Dean seated himself in the blue Captain’s chair, his face still troubled by all that had happened. Dean was a young and handsome man, and Angela Temple had always enjoyed taking her watch while he had the bridge.

“Funny, sir,” she said quietly.

“What’s funny, Miss Temple?” Dean gave her those dark eyes.

“It’s just that it looks odd now in color.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This, sir.” She waved her hand expansively. “World War Two. All I ever knew about it was in black and white.”

Dean sat with that a moment. “Well,” he said at length. “There’s one color they used with a liberal brush in this damn war, red-blood red, Miss Temple. It’s not black and white any longer. This is living color, and that wasn’t an old newsreel we were just watching as we took down those planes.”

“Aye, sir.”

“My Great Grandfather fought here. Died here in fact, right in the Mediterranean.”

Temple raised a blonde eyebrow at that. “Then he’s out there somewhere? Right now?”

“Not quite,” said Dean. “He was aboard HMS Regulus, a British submarine. Damn thing struck a mine off Taranto and went down with all hands.. December 6, 1940. So he’s gone, I suppose.”

“Lucky he got his business done with your Grandmother before that,” said Carl Hampton, the Helmsman on that watch. “He smiled with the remark, then thought twice about it. “Sorry,” he apologized.

“Never mind it,” said Dean. “I expect we all have ancestors out there somewhere, right this very moment.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said the Helmsman.

“Let’s just hope time keeps a very tight ledger on them. Gramps went down with the Regulus, but what if something slips?”

“What do you mean?” Temple didn’t follow him.

“Well,” said Dean. “I think we just made a new entry in the record books with that missile fire. Who knows how those five fellows out there were supposed to finish out this war? Well, we’ve seen to that, haven’t we? They were Great Grandfathers to somebody out there, eh? Let’s hope they got their business done too before our Vipers took them down.”

No one said anything.

Part XI

Echoes

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

Richard Wright

Chapter 31