Weapons of choice

"You people have killed thousands of my men tonight," he said. "You've probably lost us this war in the space of less than an hour."

"And you've killed plenty of mine," Kolhammer replied equably. "Tried to kill thousands more. We're both at war, Admiral. People die. Sometimes for the worst of reasons. I'm sorry for your losses and if you'll allow us, we'll do what we can for the survivors."

"And what about the Japs?" Spruance said in a cold, level voice. "What do you intend to do for them, since I notice you seem to be running with them?"

The Siranui. Kolhammer knew it had been spotted. It could hardly have been missed, emerging as it did so close to the Enterprise. He wondered whether Spruance had laid eyes on her himself. Probably.

"We have a Japanese Self-Defense Force ship operating as part of our task force, that's right. But they're of no threat to you here, or to Midway, or the United States of America."

"Tell it to the Portland," Spruance forced out through pursed lips. "I have a destroyer over where she went down and they haven't found a single survivor. Not one! And I watched that rocket fly up off the deck of your Japanese friend myself. So please, spare me. All I want to know is, what the hell is going on here. You say you're American, but you're obviously treating with our enemies."

"Well, if we could just sit down-"

Spruance rode in over Kolhammer. "Absolutely not. No secret parleys tonight, my friend. You were trying to kill these men a short while ago."

He took in the hundreds of onlookers with a sweep of the hand.

"You can make your apologies and explanations to them."

Kolhammer's fuse was beginning a long, slow burn. He'd known this wouldn't be easy, but he had his own casualties, and he'd be damned if they'd be treated as less valuable in some wretched body count. A line of Shakespeare occurred to him. We are enough to do our country loss. If his suspicions held true, every man and woman under his command was going to be counted as lost before too long.

The satchel of printouts and photocopied magazine articles felt heavy and useless in his hands. He could hardly lay them out on the wet flight deck and take a couple of hundred overtly hostile onlookers through a primer on quantum mechanics and Multiverse Theory, even if he knew what the hell he was talking about.

He turned to Jones and Halabi, his eyes asking them if there was any point in sugarcoating it. Both looked back at him, clearly relieved that they weren't the ones in the rumble seat.

"Bad medicine is best swallowed in one gulp, Admiral," said Jones.

"It can hardly sound more ridiculous than it did to us," Halabi added.

Spruance clearly didn't feel he had time for double talk. "Well?"

Kolhammer drew in his breath. He took some time to look around him. Just a second or so to convince himself it was all real: the wet wooden planking beneath his feet, the cumbersome equipment for the antique gun mounts, the unchanging sea of white male faces peering out from behind the textbook image of Raymond A. Spruance. All of this under a lowering sky in the deep of night, with the chilled air tasting of brine beneath the synthetic smells of oil and steel.

They were a long way from the tropics.

"My name is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer," he said directly to Spruance, but loud enough to carry to the listening crowd. "I was born in the year nineteen sixty-nine. The same year, incidentally, in which you passed away, Admiral. I command a Multinational Force comprising American and Allied units, which was tasked with forcing a passage through the Indonesian Archipelago, what you would know as the Dutch East Indies, and putting an end to the mass murder of ethnic Chinese Indonesian citizens. Until an hour ago we were readying for that deployment in January twenty twenty-one. In transiting from Pearl Harbor, American elements of the Multinational Force were also providing security for a research vessel, the Nagoya, which was undertaking sea trials of a new weapons system. I can't confirm it yet, but I suspect something has gone wrong with those trials… and that we are here as the result of some malfunction of that system."

With that, he stopped speaking. Spruance stared at him, as he had expected, blinking only once, slowly. The color had drained from his face, leaving a waxy sheen and two points of high color on his temples.

"Do you really expect me to believe that?" he asked very quietly.