Weapons of choice

A Seabee went at the intruders on their own terms. He flipped the bottle of Royal Beer he'd been drinking, smashed it on the edge of the bar, and advanced on the trio with murder in his eyes. The ground in front of his intended victims was strewn with the fallen bodies of men who screamed and thrashed while clutching at broken elbow joints and kneecaps. They impeded the engineer's progress sufficiently that he changed his target to the black marine, who parried the strike with compact hand block. Using the momentum of the weapon's thrust, he turned his hip slightly and swept the engineer's hand up level with his chin. He took control of the bottle and jerked, breaking the man's wrist. As the unnerved attacker cried out in pain, the marine shifted minimally at the hip again, driving his elbow into the engineer's own. The pressure shattered the joint and the man blacked out before he could scream again.

It appeared to Mohr as if the three of them were constructing a berm of their victims. They were obviously much fitter than anyone else in the bar, and they expended a minimum of energy in the way they fought. Mohr thought they looked like they could wipe out the entire joint, but they weren't there for the entertainment value. They were methodically edging toward the exit like they wanted nothing more than to get safely away. The fury of their attackers made that difficult.

Dan Black was out running with Julia when they noticed smoke pouring into the sky over Honolulu-or rather, he was getting his ass kicked by Julia after foolishly taking her up on the challenge of a race. Rosanna had tried to warn him. Duffy had made the top one thousand finishers of three New York Marathons, she said. But Dan simply hadn't believed a woman could get the better of him, and so they agreed on a race and a swim afterward. The loser was to buy drinks that night for all four of them at the Moana. Dan hadn't felt bad about the prospect of taking Julia's dough. She said she was carrying about four hundred bucks around in her wallet and the local businesses had been ordered to honor the strange plastic banknotes at their face value.

He knew he was in trouble after the first mile, however, as she maintained a steady flow of chitchat while he labored to draw breath and match her pace. After three miles she'd even spurted ahead a few yards, spun around, and run backward, all while lecturing him on the necessity for universal birth control and an Equal Rights Amendment. He was set to give in and admit defeat when he noticed that the expression on her face had changed.

She slowed down, came to a full stop, and as he drew level with her again she pointed back toward Honolulu.

"Come on," she said.

He saw the smoke as soon as he turned around. His first thought was of an air raid, but surely they would have heard that.

"Must be trouble," he panted as they started back into town at an even quicker pace.

"No shit, Sherlock."

By the time they made the edge of town Dan was in serious pain. A deep, burning stitch ran down the left side of his body, and he could feel the muscles in his legs starting to cramp. Julia was sweating, but otherwise looked comfortable.

The thunder of a riot was only slightly muted by distance. They had entered town away from the worst of the disturbance. Flickers of madness had drifted over, however, like the embers of a forest fire carried far ahead of the main blaze. As they swung onto the main strip a crazy man came at them with a club. Dan barely had time to notice that the club seemed to be a chair leg and that the guy was white and dressed in torn civilian clothes, when Julia suddenly pivoted on one foot and drove her other leg out like a steam piston.

Their would-be attacker jackknifed over as she rammed the heel of her running shoe into his groin with an elegant, sweeping back kick. She continued the pivot to bring her other leg to bear, grabbing the man's lank, sweaty hair in her bunched fists and using it to guide his head down toward her knee, which she smashed into his face three times. She turned ninety degrees, imparting a sharp twist to the guy's head that spun him to the ground. When he fell she seemed to step back, only to sail in and snap two more kicks into his ribs.

She bent at one knee, plucked the club from his hand, and placed one running shoe on his throat.

"We'll be going now," she said. "Don't bother to get up. I'd just have to split your fucking skull open. Okay?"

The man groaned and coughed blood before nodding weakly.

Dan was stunned. He could tell she was about to head into the trouble.

"Julia! Wait on!"

"No. Come on!" she snapped. "We've got to get down there."

Dan shook his head.

"No we don't."

In the opinion of Detective Sergeant Lou "Buster" Cherry it wasn't an entirely bad thing, that nigger and her toy Jap getting themselves killed. From what he'd seen and heard of these time travelers, they needed putting in their place.