“Very good, ma’am.”

Halabi left the bridge and headed across into the starboard hull of the trimaran. The ship was quiet, but not exactly calm. The storms of the last few days had whipped the North Sea into a bit of a washing machine, and her passage through the companionways of the stealth destroyer was a matter of lurching from one handhold to the next. She passed only a few crewmembers, however. Many of her sailors were asleep in their bunks, although the Combat Information Center was fully staffed around the clock, the sysops keeping a constant watch on the feed from the Nemesis arrays. A third of them were monitoring the Eastern Front, and the ship was full of ’temps again, as “experts” in the Soviet military had come aboard to make sense of the data stream pouring in from Poland.

She always felt as if she had unwanted houseguests when the number of ’temps passed a certain point. This lot wasn’t too bad. They tended to be of a more academic bent than the usual run of buffoons, and she hadn’t been dragged into a pissing contest with any of them so far.

Still, she felt uncomfortable, which was ridiculous, wasn’t it, really? It was her ship. The crew respected her, and she was doing a great job. In her cabin she had personal letters of thanks from both the king and the prime minister. Her dress uniform was heavy with medals, and the BBC had even had her in as a guest on Desert Island Discs. She’d chosen Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a Dvorбk setting of Te Deum, and a couple of grrrl-power standards like the Donnas’ “Fall Behind Me” and Anna B’s “Mister Tubbs,” before finishing with Jurassic 5 kicking it on “What’s Golden.” The host, Roy Plomley, was a charming man who was more than chuffed that his little radio program would play on well into the next century-all things being equal. But of course, they weren’t.

As pleasant as the interlude with Plomley had been, it was one of the few really enjoyable moments she’d had since coming home. Some days it was hard even to think of England as her home anymore. She had some family here, on her mother’s side, but one meeting with them had been more than enough. They’d been horrified at the idea of a “darkie” in the family. Her father’s family was somewhere in Pakistan, which wasn’t even Pakistan yet, and perhaps never would be. They’d disowned her back up in twenty-one, when she’d left home to join the navy. They thought her a traitor to the faith, and a couple of the nuttier ones had even written to tell her that her life had been forfeited the moment she’d turned her back on Allah.

Dickheads.

They were a large part of the reason she had no faith in anyone but herself, her crew, and her ship. Once she might have added the navy to that list, but although she’d made one or two friends among her contemporary colleagues, they mostly remained aloof and she often had the impression they were just waiting for the immediate crisis of the war to pass, after which they would deal with her, somehow. It was why she’d resolved to leave the service at the end of hostilities, and move to California to join Mike.

She harbored no illusions about the reception she’d find in parts of the United States-in his hometown in the South, for instance. But then again, neither did Mike, and they’d decided to settle in the San Fernando after the war. She’d had a marvelous time there during the all-too-short week of their honeymoon, dining out in twenty-first restaurants, dancing in clubs with proper music, getting some time to themselves up at Kolhammer’s place on the lake. She’d loved “slumming it” in downtown LA, which was like stepping into the History Channel, even with the obvious influence of the Zone having wrenched so much of the old city’s culture into such weird and wondrous shapes. Even now she often lulled herself to sleep at night with memories of Mike playing his saxophone in a small Latin jazz club in East LA. She felt more at home there, in some low-rent dive on the edge of the barrio, surrounded by zoot-suiters and beats, than she did in London. Frankly, she couldn’t wait for the war to end so she’d be done with the place.

The Zone would eventually revert to contemporary control, but that wouldn’t be for a few years yet. And by then, they were both sure, the culture of the Valley, of LA and, even of California itself would have changed sufficiently that a woman of mixed parentage married to a white man need not fear the sort of social chill she often felt in London. Mike also hinted in his e-mails that so many companies had now settled in the San Fernando, and were making so much money out of the Special Administrative Zone, that there was a powerful lobby emerging to retain the arrangement as it now stood. It wasn’t something they could discuss openly on official channels, but both of them were very hopeful that with such powerful businesses having an interest in maintaining the Zone as a stand-alone entity, there was a very good chance that Congress would fall in line.

The ship climbed up an especially steep wave before pitching over the top and sliding down the reverse slope. Halabi felt the destroyer slam into the trough at the bottom of the abyss and from long experience surmised that they’d just passed through a wave front about 40 percent larger than the chaotic ten-meter seas they had been fighting for a few days. She pitched forward with the momentum.

“Not to worry, ma’am. I’m sure you’ll find your sea legs soon enough.”

She looked up to find her master chief, Dave Waddington, smiling at her as he hauled himself up the passage by swinging from one grab bar to the next.

“Cheeky fucker,” she said, smiling. “How are the kiddies, Dave?”

“Sleeping soundly, for the most part, Captain. Nothing on the threat boards. I’m about to turn in myself. And you?”

Halabi shook her head. She was very fond of Waddington. A better strong right arm she couldn’t have hoped for. She also knew, even though he’d never spoken of it, that he’d picked up the fresh pink scar on his jaw in a bar brawl on shore. Defending her honor, according to McTeale. She was going to miss him. She was going to miss them all.

“I’ve got a few naughty tigers to tuck into bed before I get my head down, Chief. Night-night.”

“Cheers, ma’am,” he said, nodding as he dragged himself off toward the chiefs’ mess.

She’d made it to the infirmary and pushed aside the curtain to haul herself inside. Three of the six beds were taken, their occupants secured against the movement of the vessel. She recognized Julia Duffy in the nearest cot. She was on a drip and had a couple of sensors clamped onto her fingers, but otherwise she just looked tired. Very tired. She’d lost weight, too. Halabi assumed her chest would be heavily strapped under the light blue gown she wore. Julia turned her head slowly when the Trident’s captain entered, and a smile broke slowly over her face, lighting it up like a sunrise.

“Long time, skipper.”

“A very long time. Honolulu, if I recall. That dinner with Spruance just after we arrived.”

Duffy held out a hand and Halabi shook it gently, taking care not to dislodge any of the sensors. The reporter looked as though she might have been crying earlier.

“My XO tells me you’ve been upsetting my sailors with your potty language, Julia.”

The reporter snorted weakly. “As if.”

“So how are you doing? I hear you got caught up in some unpleasantness.”

Duffy shrugged. When she spoke it was in a disconnected monotone. “I was working with a Ranger squad on deep recon up near the Ardennes. We got tumbled, got the shit shot out of us. Then we got captured. They took all my equipment. Cuffed us. Put us into a truck. Next thing, we’re hopping out in some field full of SS guys, and I’ve got a bad fucking feeling. Sure enough, there’s about a platoon’s worth of American prisoners there. Long story short, they line us up and cut us down.”