Weapons of choice

"Are you the only one working on this, Rachel? Do you mind us calling you Rachel?" Duffy asked during a lull in the Natoli family saga.

"No. It's my name. And there's another three of us on this project. I'm just the only one who's here right now. There's two Yanks and a Brit. We've all got doctoral qualifications in history, or were going for them when this shit went down."

"You don't look old enough," said Duffy.

"I was still going for mine. Had a thesis due in a few months. It was killing me."

"There you go!" said Natoli. "A silver lining."

"And look," said Duffy, jerking her thumb at the board as she sat down, "you can do field research for your PhD. Talk about winning the lottery."

"You guys, don't seem overly upset," said Nguyen, intrigued by their chirpiness.

"Antidepressants," Duffy said, smiling sweetly. "Come and see us when they run out. That'll be a dark fucking day."

"So why are you guys here?" asked Nguyen. "Kolhammer promised us more hands, but nobody said anything about civilians."

Duffy shrugged. "They won't let us talk to our offices. Well, I guess most of us don't have offices now…"

Natoli rolled her eyes.

"So we volunteered to help. It's that, or stay locked in our cabins. I guess they figured this is where we'd do the least amount of damage. We're supposed to be writing some puff piece for the local yokels, explaining how the hell we got here. That took all of two hours. So now we got nothing to do, and I really don't want to go back to watching Rosanna's undies dry in our cabin."

"Okay," said Nguyen. "You guys do any history at uni… sorry, in college?"

"Not a scrap," said Duffy.

"I majored in Olde Icelandic legends." Natoli grinned.

"Super," said Rachel. She cleared a pile of paper from the keyboard in front of her and brought up the Fleetnet search window.

"What we're doing," she explained, "is looking at things that are supposed to happen during the next few weeks in all the theaters of this war. We'll start with the Web cache first, because it's much quicker and we have a lot of full-text stuff stored anyway-"

"Like war histories and so on?" asked Natoli.

"Yeah, occupational hazard. When we've exhausted that, we'll get into the hard copy." She indicated a pile of cardboard boxes pushed into the far corner of the office. They were packed tightly with books. "But the net's keeping us busy for now. You get ten thousand people, they're going to build up a lot of data over time."

"You know any of the guys in the physics group?" asked Duffy. "Maybe we could speak to them to pad out our story."

Lieutenant Nguyen nodded. "A friend of mine got seconded to that. They got no hope. The basics are easy. The simultaneous existence of all possible times has been accepted, at least theoretically, since Einstein. And quantum foam engineering is mundane enough to have been written up in Popular Science. Even I've read some stuff about it."

"I wrote a weekend feature about it once," said Duffy. "But I thought all the lab work was really unsophisticated, a bit like nanotech during the eighties. I wouldn't have thought we had enough quantum muscle to push a cold fucking taco back through eight decades, let alone a carrier battle group."

"Guess you were wrong," said Natoli.

"That'll be another correction for the Times then," Duffy joked.

"But you don't think we can find or rebuild whatever sent us here?" Natoli asked. Her voice said she was searching for a glimmer of hope.

"Not a chance. Not for fifty, sixty years at best," said Nguyen.

"You know what this means, don't you?" said Duffy. "We're living in the dark ages, ladies. They haven't even heard of feminism here, let alone the female orgasm."

"You don't think we'll ever get back?" asked Natoli.

"I'd like to hope so," said Rachel. "My parents, they really worry about me."

"So you joined the navy to put their fears at ease?" Duffy asked.

"I like to surf." Rachel shrugged. "I figured if I had to join up, I might as well get some tube time in. I guess I was kind of an idiot."

"So, what you got for us, Lieutenant?" said Natoli, clapping her hands to draw a line under the maudlin atmosphere.

Rachel gathered herself together, stood up, and moved over to the whiteboard.

"Okay. Today is the ninth of June. A Czechoslovakian village by the name of Lidice will be destroyed today in reprisal for the assassination of an SS guy called Heydrich, by a couple of Czech soldiers flown out of Britain. The occupants will be massacred and thousands of other Czechs will be shipped off to concentration camps over the next few weeks."

"Jesus," breathed Natoli. "Can't we do anything about it?"

"Like what? Broadcast a warning on CNN? Fly a bunch of marines in from Germany? It's a different world here."

"Couldn't we warn off the Nazis?" asked Duffy. "Tell them we know what they're up to?"

"They'd laugh in our faces," said Nguyen. "Just forget about it. We already told the local guys. They're like, 'Too bad, it's war, get over it.' Nobody really cares about the small stuff."

"The small stuff!" cried Natoli.