Weapons of choice

Kolhammer shifted his weight as they banked for approach. "I'm not a hundred percent sure," he answered. "But we can't access any of our satellites. Our radar, which is a hell of a lot more powerful than yours, isn't giving us the returns that it should. We were just off the coast of East Timor, down the bottom of the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia in our day. But it's not coming up anymore. We can't find anything, TV, radio, GPS, nothing. Our equipment is fine. It's just like there's nothing out there."

The two Enterprise officers only understood about half of what he said, but the admiral's demeanor left no doubt as to what he was getting at.

"And what about this ship, the Nagoya? Where'd it get to?" asked Black.

"That's one I really can't answer." Kolhammer shrugged. "We've been looking for it, believe me. I'm hoping to God it hasn't come through and landed in Tokyo Bay. But I doubt it. We're missing a couple of other ships, but they were all some distance from the center of the group, and the simplest explanation is that they just didn't get sucked up with the rest of us. We lost a couple of nuclear submarines and some Indonesian destroyers like that. Although the destroyers weren't such a great loss. Another ship got cut in half by the event horizon.

"The Nagoya was tucked away between the Clinton and a couple of cruisers. It would have been at the epicenter of whatever went wrong. It was probably destroyed, but we'll have to invest significant assets confirming that."

"Because that's your only way home, right?" said Curtis.

"Got it in one, son," said Kolhammer. "But for now, if you'd care to look outside, you can see what the Enterprise will grow into, given eighty years or so."

They two visitors leaned over. Black swore softly. Ensign Curtis didn't bother to hide his surprise.

"Good gosh! It's as big as a city."

USS ENTERPRISE, 0005 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Captain Halabi couldn't remember ever being at such an uncomfortable gathering. There were only three of them standing in Spruance's cabin as the admiral methodically leafed through her copy of Fuchida and Okumiya's Midway. The other officer present, a Commander Beanland from his planning staff, had attempted to engage her in polite chitchat, but the conversation curled up and died on the deck after he had blundered into a morass of nonsensical questions about the hygiene difficulties of "women's troubles" on board a warship. Halabi had snapped back at him that menstruation proved itself to be much less of a problem than the standard array of sucking chest wounds, compound fractures, and deep tissue burns with which one had to deal after a missile strike.

"Fascinating," Spruance murmured, closing the book with a snap. "If it's true."

"Well, it won't be now of course," Halabi ventured. "The collision between our two forces has seen to that."

"Indeed… Captain. And so, what now? If you are what you claim to be, what do you do now? Throw the lever on the magic box that brought you here? Leaving us in the lurch? You might very well find when you get home that everyone speaks German and Japanese."

Halabi rubbed her tired eyes. "Well, to begin with, we seem to have lost our magic box. And even if we could throw it into reverse, all the currently accepted theories of time distortion posit an infinitely variform multiverse rather than a single linear universe…"

She lost them with that, and so decided to try a different tack.

"There's a field of physics called quantum mechanics. It's not specific to my own time. A chap called Max Planck kicked it off in nineteen hundred with something he called the quantum theory of light, and Albert Einstein moved it along in nineteen oh five with his work on the photoelectric effect. Basically, he theorized that light can be observed as either particles or waves, but never both at once. It's all about uncertainty, gentlemen, what we call quantum uncertainty. Long story short? It's most likely that there are an infinite number of universes, all existing alongside each other, all of them different, some subtly, some radically. I guess the fact that we're here is the first real proof of that theory."

"I'm sorry," said Spruance, "but that sounds utterly ridiculous. You're saying there's a place where, for instance, America lost the War of Independence, or the South won the Civil War?"

"And infinite variations on that." She nodded. "A universe where there was no War of Independence because British colonial policy was more enlightened. An American Civil War after which Lincoln wasn't assassinated. A Second World War in which Hitler was. Or where the whole planet was invaded by, I don't know, space lizards or something. A universe in which Coke tastes like Pepsi. And another in which I'm standing over there drinking tea, rather than here drinking this… uhm… coffee. You get the picture?"

"If that's so," mused Spruance, "it might seem as if you've dropped into your past, but in truth you haven't."