Weapons of choice

The lights and displays of the flight controls kept drawing his attention. He seemed even more fascinated by them than he had been by shaking hands with his first black man-and a full-bird colonel of the marines at that-and only his second lady pilot. His daddy had taken him to see Amelia Earhart once. If it was possible, Flight Lieutenant Hayes seemed even more exotic and beautiful.

"What part of Chicago did you say you were from, Ensign?" asked Jones.

Both Curtis and Black wore astonishingly small headsets, allowing them to communicate over the noise of the Seahawk. But no one else seemed to need them. Jones had tried to explain the devices-he'd called them "chips"-that enabled each of the other passengers to communicate without the help of an external rig, but he'd been reduced to saying it was like having a radio inside your head. It sounded like something a drunk or a madman might say, and Lieutenant Commander Black regarded him in just such a fashion. Curtis, on other hand, simply marveled at the crystal-clear sound of Jones's soft conversational tones purring in his ear. The man wasn't speaking any louder than you might in your maiden aunt's drawing room, yet they heard every word he said, even over the thundering rotors.

"I'm from Oak Brooke, sir," said Curtis. "My father has a hardware store over in North Lake."

"I know that part of town well," said Jones.

"Colonel Jones, sir?"

Curtis had no trouble recognizing and respecting Jones's authority, something that earned him respect in return; a hard task, as many junior officers of the Eighty-second could testify. "I don't mean any offense, sir, but where you come from, are there are a lot of Negroes in the service?"

Airman La Salle smiled to himself as Jones replied.

"No offense taken, Ensign. But we don't use the word Negro anymore. Most folks consider it offensive. You'll want to bear that in mind when you get aboard the Clinton. Both of you," he added for the benefit of Black. "I believe the correct term nowadays is American of color." Jones snorted to show how little regard he had for such things before continuing. "But the corps is color-blind, Ensign. All of the armed forces are, and have been for a long time. When Admiral Kolhammer here was fresh out of college he served under a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a sort of supreme commander of all the services, whose family came out of Jamaica. He'd have been called a Negro, or worse, in your day."

"That man went on to become the secretary of state," Kolhammer added. "Could have been president, too, if it hadn't been for Ms. Clinton."

"The lady your ship is named after?" asked Curtis.

"The president my ship is named after. Best president the navy had, since Ronald Reagan."

"The cowboy actor!"

"The one and only," smiled Jones.

"Excuse me," Black interjected. "No offense, Colonel. But a colored president? A lady president? A B-grade cowboy in the White House? What are you, using the funny pages for your history books? You gotta be yanking my chain. I'm looking around your whirligig here and I'll admit I can see a lot of change, a lot of advances. But some things, they just don't change."

Instead of replying, Jones pulled a satchel out from under his seat and then a pair of powered combat goggles from within the bag.

"Pilot?" he asked, over the chopper's comm channel. "Can you raise Fleetnet for me? I need to access my personal archive.

"Put these on," he ordered Black.

The former copper miner eyed the goggles suspiciously. He gave Jones a hard, inquiring look, but the marine simply shrugged in reply. After a moment's consideration, Black reached across and took the device. It reminded him a little of antique flying goggles from the Great War. But only a little. These things were lightweight and sleek, with a curious feeling of density to them. Like they were packed tight with impossibly small machinery or wiring.

He needed no help settling them over his eyes. Indeed, they seemed to mold themselves to his face. The sensation wasn't entirely pleasant.

The first thing he noticed was the night vision. It was startling.

"Okay," he said. "That's a good trick. But what have they got to… whoa!"

Without warning his entire range of view turned black for a split second, before it was slammed by countless shimmering filaments of light. Sometimes they seemed as delicate as a single thread of spider's web. In other places energy poured through this strange negative space in torrents and floods. As Jones worked a flexipad, Black rocked in his seat, overwhelmed by the visual effect of flying through this self-contained cosmos of fire and light. He found that he could catch a glimmer of something every now and then, a glimmer of recognition as something vaguely familiar flashed by; the Globe and Anchor of the USMC, the roaring lion from the beginning of an MGM movie. The images flickered in and out of range so quickly that he could never quite identify any one impression.