Fire demons chased him through his dreams, massive slump-shouldered ape creatures, covered all over in flames, except for two small black pools for their eyes.

The former Japanese governor of the Hawaiian Islands awoke with a shudder on the fold-up cot. It was nighttime and pitch black. He fumbled beside his bed for one of the last of the light sticks. Finding the little plastic tube, he bent it until something inside it snapped and flooded the sleeping chamber with soft green light. An old army blanket hanging across the cave at a natural choke point prevented the light from leaking out and giving him away, although any observer would have to be right inside the valley to see it anyway.

Hidaka shook his head to clear the memory of the nightmare. He’d suffered from vivid dreams ever since the Americans had returned. Their initial assault was so powerful, so paralyzing in its violence, that he sometimes feared it had unhinged him. He was never meant to fight on land. He would surely have done better on the bridge of a cruiser or a battleship.

He swung his legs over the side of the cot and felt around with his toes for the sandals he had been wearing. It was chilly and damp in the cave and he started to cough, as he always did on waking up. He wheezed almost constantly, but for some reason it was worse when he slept on his left side. Perhaps that lung was infected.

He slipped his feet into the wooden sandals and pulled a blanket around himself as he stood up. He checked his watch: three in the morning.

The nightmares often woke him at this time. It was when the first rockets had struck, destroying the encampment at Pearl Harbor and killing thousands of his men in the opening moments of the battle. Try as he might, it was impossible to rid himself of the memories. The fire demons of his fevered sleep were incarnations of the men he’d seen burned alive by some kind of incendiary bombs. If he lived to be a hundred, which was unlikely, he would never forget the horror of seeing one man, completely wreathed in liquid flames, melting away like candle wax.

The area he’d blocked off as living quarters was quite roomy, if Spartan. He had intended to run an insurgency campaign from here, so it had been fitted out accordingly. Ten empty bunks, for other officers who never made it, lay beyond his. He had maps of the islands, radio equipment, and food and weapons stores to spare. If only a few more had reached this hidden fortress. If only his protection detail had survived. They were all good men and even with just a handful of them, he could have caused havoc for the Americans. Instead he was reduced to hiding out, waiting for the moment when he might contribute something other than infamy to the emperor’s cause.

Hidaka fired up a small gas oven and put a pot of water on to boil. He would have some green tea and noodles and ponder his dilemma some more. Perhaps he might even be able to get back to sleep before the dawn.

While the water was heating he played around with his flexipad, flipping through the radio stations in a desultory manner. Those few still on the air at this hour were mostly broadcasting slow dance tunes. At least there was no music from the future. He always found that harsh and unsettling.

He consoled himself with memories of the short time he’d been the absolute ruler of Hawaii, the way he had smashed all resistance, the luxury of playing God with vanquished foes who had thought themselves so very superior to the “little yellow men.” He stirred the water and poured off a cup to make his tea, then added a packet of dried noodles and powdered pork flavoring to the pot. He treasured the memory of Nimitz being led to his execution, and lingered over the details of the many comfort women he had taken in the officers’ facility at Diamond Head. It had been a wonderful thing, to crush the spirit of the enemy as thoroughly as that, to have his way with some gaijin slut while her man was forced to look on. He grew hard just remembering.

He was about to pleasure himself with the memory when he jumped at a whispered sound.

Phhhht!

Two silver prongs projected from his chest, and thin wires led from them back to…

He tried to leap to his feet, but a terrible shock surged through his body, robbing him of the ability to stand. As he fell into blackness he caught sight of his assassins, three black-clad men.

Ninjas, perhaps?

They advanced on him, weapons raised, faces obscured behind glasses that made them look like giant insects. Hidaka was vaguely aware that his penis was erect and pointing at them as he slid into darkness.

The meeting took place in the main conference room of the Clinton. Although it was Spruance’s briefing and should have been held on the Enterprise, he had agreed that it made more sense to bring everyone together on the much larger and better-equipped vessel.

Kolhammer stopped counting the number of officers sitting around the huge table after twenty-five. He hadn’t been to an O Group of a comparable size in this room since the first emergency sessions after the Transition. It was a very different crew who’d gathered today, though, to work through the Marianas campaign. Jones, now a general, was still sitting next to him, and Mike Judge was acting as chairman. But the Brits, the Aussies, the French, the Japanese, and many of the U.S. commanders of his original task force were gone. Some dead. Some captured. Most just scattered to the four corners of the globe. In a perfect world Captain Willet of the Australian submarine Havoc should have been here, as she would be joining the task force later, but without satellite conferencing that was impossible. HMAS Havoc was stalking the Japanese fleet in the western Pacific.

The dark ages really did get him down sometimes.

A Marine Corps full-bird colonel-a ’temp, not one of Jones’s men-was describing a Force Recon mission to plant position fixers around the Marianas, so that the fleet’s gunnery officers would have solid coordinates to lay down their computer-controlled barrages.

Kolhammer could feel the tension radiating from the man sitting beside him. Jones had his own special-ops-capable marines who were not only trained for that sort of work, but had years of experience in it to boot. But the ’temps had gone with their own people again, as they did so often when the Eighty-second was involved.

Looking around the room, he could identify two distinct groups: Spruance’s people and the AF personnel. The latter weren’t all 21C. Most of the men and women he and Jones now commanded were ’temps, but they had volunteered for service in the Auxiliary Forces, putting paid to the caricature of the ’temps being nothing more than a bunch of boneheaded rednecks.

On the other hand, there were a lot of boneheaded rednecks around, some of them in this very room.

Another briefing officer, an Old Navy commander by the name of Chalmers, replaced the marine colonel at the lecturn to detail the Japanese order of battle as it was currently understood. It was another frustrating experience. Kolhammer knew Stuart Chalmers quite well. He’d acted in Dan Black’s liaison role for a while, and he was a good man. But it was exasperating having to sit and listen to him guesstimate the size and strength of Yamamoto’s forces. That was the sort of information he could have dialed up on the web in a public library back home.

“We have good intelligence on enemy land forces,” Chalmers said. “Apart from some minor technological enhancements such as claymore-type mines, better radios, and an M-Seventy-nine-style grenade launcher, the Japanese army remains largely unaffected by post-Transition technical developments.”