Weapons of choice

"No. Dan, I've seen more combat than you. End of story. I'm touched that you feel strongly enough to be an asshole about it, but if you and I are to have any sort of future, you'll have to accept that it's me you're with. Not your idea of me, and what I should be. I don't know what's coming, but I know my job. Ninety minutes from now I clock on again, so drink up. We'll split a ride back to Pearl. They're sending a couple of Humvees. They'll be downstairs in half an hour."

Dan Black was in free fall. He had never been spoken to like that, had never even heard of a woman speaking like that. Julia stood there in the dawn an intruder, raking at the secret places in his heart.

"Will you marry me?" he asked.

She didn't even give him the benefit of a slight hesitation.

"No, Dan, not yet anyway. I'd like us to live together for a while first. See how we go with the daily grind when we don't have all this bullshit to keep us entertained. If we're still fucking like rabbits at the end of that, ask me again."

"You want to live in sin?"

"Yeah. It sounds really sexy when you put it like that, doesn't it."

He was completely unbalanced by her. Women weren't supposed to bat away a proposal of marriage. That's not how it worked in the movies. They were supposed to collapse into your chest and burst into tears. Julia was stuffing her running shoes into a gym bag and Dan wondered if he might actually get teary. Up to now he'd always suspected there was nobody special for him-and then she'd stepped through a rupture in space and time.

"I think I'm falling in love with you, Julia."

She stopped stuffing the bag and came over to sit down next to him, placing a hand on his thigh.

"Dan, you think that because we've shared an intense period of excitement, where we found ourselves physically attracted, and then intrigued by the strangeness that sits just under our similarities. We're sexually compatible. I suspect we're emotionally and intellectually well matched, too. And before your face gets any longer, it's a two-way street, I think I'm falling in love with you, too."

They nearly missed the ride back to Pearl.

38

HMAS HAVOC, 2003 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

The control room of the Havoc was unnaturally quiet as the navigator, Lieutenant Malcolm Knox, manipulated a dozen icons on the meter-wide touch screen at his workstation. Without GPS satellites, the task of position fixing was much more difficult. The sub's inertial navigation processors could place them with reasonable accuracy about three hundred nautical miles south of the Japanese home island of Shikoku, but Captain Willet wasn't a reasonable woman. She'd often said that without GPS coverage the modern military couldn't find its own arse with both hands in a small, well-lit room. The joke had come back to bite her.

"How's that fix coming?" she asked the navigator.

"Just scanning for the last beacon, ma'am."

They'd placed three position transmitters on the way over, on small rocky islets for which they knew the exact holomap reference points. Willet practiced a breathing exercise while she waited for the Havoc's quantum arrays to calibrate and align the incoming signals. She watched a small blue bar crawl across a window in the navigator's flatscreen. When the bar was filled, a series of faint chimes sounded and Knox gave her the thumbs-up.

"We have a firm position fix, ma'am. CI is plotting firing solutions for the drone launch."

"Thank you, Mr. Knox. Weapons?"

"VLS Three is armed, Captain. Boards green. And we have the solution."

A soft, familiar tone sounded once as the submarine's Combat Intelligence downloaded flight data to a Tenix Defense Industries surveillance mace.

"Take her down to one hundred meters and launch," Willet ordered.

The voice of the CI, a factory default mid-Pacific accent, warned the crew to prepare for a dive. The conning tower was sealed. Nobody had gone topside when they surfaced, so there were no hatches to shut. Procedure had to be followed, however, and the officer of the watch cycled through all the CCTV cams, calling each one clear as he checked for personnel who couldn't possibly be on deck.

Captain Willet felt the nonslip flooring tilt beneath her feet and reached for a grab bar with practiced grace. Strapped into their chairs, the Combat Center sysops continued to work at their stations, leaning against the angle of the sub's descent.

"One hundred meters, ma'am."

"Launch the Big Eye," said Willet.

"VLS Three launching, Captain, in five, four, three, two, one, launch."

She heard and felt the discarding sabot spit out of the vertical launch tube in the forward missile bay. Her intel controller, Lieutenant Lohrey, counted off the seconds until the cruise missile discarded its casing.

"Big Eye has fired, Captain," she announced. "Tracking for Hashirajima. On station in seventeen minutes."