"Jesus Christ. She killed them."

Rachel Nguyen's stuffy little room had become unbearably hot and close. They'd watched the relayed vision of the pickup with mounting concern as more and more survivors crowded around the PT boat. As they formed a thick carpet of thrashing limbs and bobbing heads, the men around her murmured that it was all going wrong, that they couldn't possibly get away before the planes turned up and spotted them. MacArthur himself had just told everyone to pipe down when the female officer from Willet's submarine grabbed a gun off a sailor, walked over to the edge, and opened up on the densely packed mass of floating men.

On the screen, the 101 was now moving again, motoring slowly through the disbursed survivors, but nobody said anything until MacArthur spoke up.

"What the hell just happened, Commander?" he asked, turning away from the screen to offer Rachel his full, glowering visage.

She looked at him quizzically. "From what I could see, the mission was in danger of failing, General," she said. "Lieutenant Lohrey acted to regain the initiative."

MacArthur's face was a dead mask. He gave away nothing of what he was thinking. But the men around him weren't so well controlled. Rachel caught some of them staring at her like she had suddenly grown a second head.

"I can see," she said quietly, "that you disapprove."

The old girl was a ghost ship, or she felt that way to her new skipper.

Captain Mike Judge squinted against the glare of the midday sun and tried to feel the heartbeat of the USS Hillary Clinton. Dozens of screens functioned around him, constantly updating the reports on the state of the great warship. But Judge had spent nigh on six years of his life aboard this vessel, in one role or another, and he fancied that he could still feel something that the circuits and plasma screens couldn't tell him.

His darlin' was lonesome.

She'd lost a quarter of her complement to the tragedy at Midway. Another two thousand had transferred Stateside, into the research and training facilities that Kolhammer was building in the Zone and at Fleet in San Diego. Pilots without planes to fly now found that their engineering studies were a national asset of such value that they were banned from frontline combat. Systems operators and engineers, programmers and flight technicians had ceased to perform any duties at the sharp end of conflict. They, too, had been reclassified out of harm's way and into hundreds of lecture rooms and laboratories.

The Clinton echoed to their absence.

She ran on a skeleton crew now. Her fuel-air explosive catapults were beyond patching up again. With no spare parts left, and no prospect of manufacturing them in the near future, she couldn't hurl her few surviving warplanes into battle. A pickup squadron of eleven SeaRaptors constituted her entire strike arm, and half of those had been rebuilt from parts scavenged off fighters wrecked beyond all hope of repair. Most of her AWACS wing had been attached to the Eighty-second MEU in the South Pacific. The rest were stationed on shore with the F-22s and a couple of in-flight refuelers. The heavy lift choppers, the search-and-rescue birds, the Seahawk troop transport, and Apache ground-attack squadrons had been split up and repositioned all across this part of the globe. Some were here in Hawaii; others were in California, being reverse-engineered as part of a hundred or more programs to accelerate contemporary weapons systems and technology. The bulk had gone to MacArthur down in Australia. It said a lot about the weakened state of the Clinton that she was effectively running away from that fight, which was the main game in the Pacific theater for the moment.

"Let's get you home, Hillary," Judge said to himself. The much-reduced bridge crew didn't hear him. Maybe a quarter of the number of men and women who normally staffed this station were posted at the remaining consoles today. So many screens and panels had been removed from the bridge that it felt like a half-completed house.

A mile away, the diminutive form of a couple of contemporary cruisers rode proudly at anchor by the Siranui, a dozen tenders fussing around them as they prepared to escort the Clinton back to the U.S. mainland.

And hadn't he taken some bullshit over that-not all of it good-natured, either. Here she was, the most powerful warship in the world, trailing along on the apron strings of a couple of old tin cans. There'd been more than one barroom brawl over it down in Honolulu, although nothing as bad as the riot that had burned down half of Hotel Street just after they'd first arrived at Pearl.

An ASW Seahawk was fueling down on the flight deck, one of the few aircraft they'd be ferrying home. Even with her teeth pulled, the Clinton remained the highest priority target for Axis forces in the Pacific theater. She still represented the single greatest collection of twenty-first-century technology, and there would inevitably be Japanese submarines willing to risk it all just for a shot at her. British Intelligence was even warning that the Germans had uncrated a prototype long-range U-boat specifically to go hunting for her. It was said to be heading their way via the south Atlantic and southern circumpolar latitudes. Not that Judge was likely to lose much sleep over it.

Now, if they'd grabbed a 21C Chinese Warbow submarine through Manning Pope's wormhole, then sure, that'd be worth staying up late for. But if the Nazis had just dusted off the old Walther blueprints, then there were going to be a bunch of German submariners dying a long way from home sometime soon.

A female lieutenant appeared on a screen to his left. "Captain Judge. We'll have the vidlink to Admiral Kolhammer established in five minutes, if you're ready, sir?"

"Thank you, Brooks. I'll take it in my ready room."

He stood up and prepared to hand the ship over to his Exec, Commander Takeshi Morgan, as a flight of Hellcats buzzed overhead. They'd be just out of the plant in L.A. As he left the bridge, he tried to imagine the Clinton with F-86 Sabres, or even a squadron of supercharged Corsairs spotted on her decks after the upcoming refit, but it was just too weird. Even four months after the Transition.

Kolhammer was always glad to see Mike Judge. They were able to vidlink only once every couple of weeks, when a relay became possible via a series of AWACS planes or Multinational vessels or both.

Jeez, what I wouldn't give for just one lousy fucking satellite.

Sometimes he thought it was like waiting for the stars to align, a concept that would have amused his wife, an enthusiastic consumer of astrological forecasts and a self-proclaimed skeptic. He never understood how she managed to be both. It's a chick thing, he supposed.

"Happy trails, Admiral? I don't believe I've seen you smile since we got here." The stars had, indeed, aligned, and Mike Judge was on-screen, speaking from the ready room next to the Clinton's flag bridge, where Kolhammer himself had once worked.

The admiral sent another, slightly sadder look down the encrypted link to Hawaii. More a gesture of resignation than a smile. "You caught me out, Mike. I was thinking about Marie."

"You meet her folks like you were planning to, sir?"

Kolhammer admitted that he had. "It was good, too, Mike. They were wonderful people. Marie used to speak so fondly of her grandpa and her nana, I figured it was because her own parents were away so much with work, and she spent so much more time with them. But they were good people, Mike. The best, like she always said."