Weapons of choice

Spruance dropped the glasses, fixed another alien vessel in his sight, and raised the binoculars again. It boasted an equally exotic appearance, but this was a monohulled ship. The Stars and Stripes fluttered from a telescopic mast at the top of the raked-back fin that spoiled her otherwise empty decks.

The admiral shifted his focus again and again, taking in a slab-sided carrier that at least resembled the Enterprise in form and size, and then Kolhammer's own ship, the Clinton, still burning from the bomb strike. Even at a distance Spruance could tell she was a monster, certainly dwarfing the Lexington. The ships were all heading away from him, seemingly toward the burning giant on the horizon. The volume of fire had dropped away, and no more of those garish rocket flares were rising from the decks of any foreign vessel.

It was almost peaceful.

Spruance sighed and turned to Dan Black. He was calmer, but his hands still trembled.

"I think we'd better talk to this Kolhammer again."

PART TWO

DETENTE

9

USS ENTERPRISE, 2322 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

"What the hell is that?" muttered Lieutenant Commander Black.

"Search me," someone replied from behind him.

"You know," said the chaplain, "it reminds me of something I saw in Rome, before the war. I was on sabbatical and was lucky enough to be given a tour of the da Vinci archives. I believe he once drew a machine a bit like that, with a propeller on top. He invented the parachute, too, you know."

"It's a Hiller-Copter," said Ensign Curtis. Curtis was known as a bit of an aircraft nut. Less-than-perfect eyesight had barred him from flight school, crimping off a lifelong dream and shunting him into the entirely unglamorous position of assistant bookkeeper in the ship's pay office. His enormous, black-rimmed glasses might have been standard issue, so well did they suit him in his job. Most often, however, he had them buried in a copy of Janes Fighting Aircraft, or Aviator Monthly.

As Curtis spoke, the strange craft drew closer, riding atop radiant shafts of light.

"A what?" shouted Black, over the growing roar.

The ferocious downblast of the rotors forced the spectators to turn away, toward Curtis, who had screwed up his eyes, determined not to miss a moment.

"It's a Hiller-Copter, or something like it," he shouted, his normally anxious nature gone for now. He sounded completely sure of himself, an unheard-of phenomenon. They were all clustered outside the pilothouse for a view of the approaching aircraft. Rumors were already flying around the big ship: that these were experimental planes, or maybe motorized blimps, pulled out of the lab and rushed forward to Midway for the showdown with the Japs. Some said it was Yamamoto himself, come to negotiate a surrender. There was even wild talk, coming from the Astoria's radio operators, of space coons and women from Mars.

Ensign Wally Curtis wasn't having any of it. That was a Hiller-Copter, or maybe even a Higgins. As it loomed out of the night and flared for setdown, he decided it looked more like the painting he'd seen of a Higgins, in Aviator Monthly. The painting was a mock-up, of course, an artist's semi-informed hunch of what the finished aircraft might look like.

But they weren't far off the mark, were they? He marveled at the contraption.

It looked to have a single rotor, instead of the Hiller's two counter-rotating blades. And there at the rear was a vertical torque rotor, which the Hx-44 didn't have.

Gritting his teeth, and squinting against the stinging lash of the rotor wash, he was uncertain whether the pounding in his chest was a response to the controlled violence of the aircraft's descent or simple excitement at its appearance. He decided it was the latter when his heart skipped even faster at the sight of the second whirlybird. Where the first one had looked sort of fat and heavy, the machine behind it was rapierlike. Unlike its mate, it seemed to have less storage area in the fuselage-for carrying men or cargo, he supposed. Its brutish, hunched, insectile form reminded him of a giant wasp or a hornet.

Wally knew without being told that the stubby little wings weren't designed to provide lift. No, they were made to carry weapons. He could only shake his head in wonder at thought of what sort of havoc a thing like that could unleash. The long protruding barrel at its nose was obviously some sort of advanced cannon. Perhaps even a machine-gun cannon.

He reeled off all these thoughts as they occurred to him, not really caring whether or not anybody was paying attention. But they were. The hard-bitten copper miner, the well-traveled padre, the professional warriors and draftee sailors who had gathered on the walkway turned to his boyish certainty as a salve for their own fears and doubts. Where they suffered future shock, Ensign Curtis experienced only rapture.

"Where'd they come from, Wally?" shouted Lieutenant Commander Black.