"I thought Pearl Harbor was the remake of that," said Rosanna.

"Pearl Harbor was full of Ben Affleck making kissy face," said Julia. "There's no kissy face in Tora Tora Tora, just lots of ass-whupping."

"Pearl Harbor was a cautionary tale about the impossibility of making a chick flick that guys would go see," said Rosanna.

"But Pearl Harbor Two was all right," said Julia. "It had that great butt shot of Dylan McDermott."

"Highlight of the sorriest damn movie ever made," said Rosanna.

As they reached their table, Spruance made to pull out a chair for Rosanna but found his arm stayed by a light touch from Dan Black. The junior officer shook his head sadly as if to say don't bother, and sure enough, the young woman simply plucked the seat out by herself and plopped down on it without any ceremony, never once interrupting a lively monologue on the best comparative butt shot from her favorite Oscar nominees.

"I'm beginning to regret broaching this topic," Ray Spruance confessed to Black.

"Don't worry, sir, the night's still young. There'll be plenty of other things to regret."

After that, the table quickly divided in two. Spruance talked business with Halabi and Black for the first hour, while the reporters engaged in a champagne-fueled quest to tease out of Ensign Curtis the meager and possibly nonexistent details of his dating history.

Spruance was struck by the contrast between the two civilian women, who were obviously intelligent but seemed wantonly dizzy, and Captain Halabi, who was unnaturally grave. She wouldn't allow herself to be drawn into polite chitchat until she had worked through the riot, the ongoing murder investigation, and arrangements for moving more casualties off the Clinton and Kandahar and into shore-based facilities.

The reporters, who promised not to divulge anything they heard at the table, hung on Halabi's every word while she hammered him about applying more pressure to the local police, but otherwise they seemed content to tease poor Ensign Curtis.

Spruance wasn't so naive as to think them rude. He assumed they weren't behaving out of the ordinary at all, and he was fascinated by their lack of… what? Refinement? They both seemed well traveled and sophisticated. Manners? Both obviously knew how to deal with a silver service place setting and had a relaxed way of relating to the dining room staff that he associated with the idle rich. Was it their lack of gravity, perhaps?

At one point he listened while the two women discussed another outrage yet to pass, some sort of germ bomb attack on LA, which he gathered they'd both covered as journalists. They seemed inured to the horrors they described, as though it was all passe.

Spruance stirred his coffee. What sort of a world have they come from? he wondered.

"You look pensive, Admiral."

It was the British officer. She'd caught him gathering wool.

"I'm sorry, Captain. I was just wondering about your world. About how different it is from ours."

Halabi leaned back to give the question its due.

"I guess you look at us," she said, "you look at me and people like Julia and Rosanna and Colonel Jones, and you can see some hard changes coming. All I can do is remind you that change was ordained, whether we came or not."

Spruance and Black said nothing. The conversation at the other end of the table fell away, too, as the reporters picked up the sound of the names. Spruance was aware of how quickly the other two women shifted gear, from flighty to sober.

"In some ways, no matter what your views, or how broad-minded you might consider yourself," Halabi continued, directing her remarks at Black now, as well, "you would look on our world and shudder. But if the time since your day has taught us anything, it's that you can't pick and choose your freedoms. You take freedom's curses along with its blessings."

Halabi stared into the middle distance as though examining her own world from a new vantage point. "In some ways, our world is no different from yours," she said. "It's violent. I'd hesitate to say it's more violent, seeing as you're engaged in a world war. But so are we, of a sort. And ours has gone on for years longer than yours."

"Why haven't you won?" asked Curtis. "You're so powerful."

"Weapons are one thing, Ensign. You can kill a man; reduce him to nothing, literally. But the ideas that made him your enemy, those survive. Ideas are much harder to kill than men. They outlive us all."

"Could you avoid it, your war, knowing what you do now?" asked Spruance.

"I don't know," she replied honestly. "Why do you ask? It's a way off yet. It won't be yours to worry about."

"It just seems to me," said Spruance, "that you'd want to avoid it by all means. The things I've heard, a whole city destroyed by a bomb in a bag, millions killed by germ war, planes flying into high-rise buildings and football stadiums. It makes me wonder what we're doing here, if that's the only future."

"It's not the only future," said Halabi. "Little girls still go to ballet practice. Little boys want to be firemen. Families get together at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Life goes on. Just like here. If you have children or grandkids, you're willing to die for them. And to kill for them, too. Well, we are your children. We appreciate what you did. It's just too bad that our turn came around, too."

"You agree with that?" Black asked Duffy and Natoli.

"Pretty much so." Duffy shrugged.

"It's so bleak," said Dan Black.

"It's fine. We'd still all rather be there. It's home."

"You'd rather live in a place where your whole city could be blown up by one madman."

"It's home," she repeated. "It's really no worse than here."

"It's better, in some ways," said Natoli.

Spruance looked across the table to Karen Halabi. She just held his gaze and nodded.

The Ambassador Hotel was set within nearly twenty-five acres of manicured lawns. After lunch, Kolhammer and Einstein sat on a bench under a palm tree in the gardens while Agent Flint lurked nearby. Kolhammer was impressed. He'd experienced more than his fair share of close personal protection, having served once as the deputy UN military commander in Chechnya. Flint's technique could use some updating, but he was still pretty good.

"I suppose such things are routine in your world, Admiral," Einstein mused.

Kolhammer was intrigued by the insight.

"That's true. But why do you say so, Professor?"

Einstein crossed his legs and leaned back to feel the sun on his face.

"You seem to come from a militarized society, Admiral; the ease with which your men and women in uniform mix together. The way you don't appear to heed the race or creed of your comrades. Some might see that as enlightened, and I suppose it is. But you could also see it as the defensive response of a society that has been fighting for so long it has shed itself of all trappings save those needed to wage war. You can see the same thing happening here and now, to a lesser extent."

The reasoning was sound, even though the particulars weren't exactly as Einstein put them. Kolhammer took a moment to study their surroundings, the affluence and luxury, the monocultural certainty of forties America. LA was starting to fill up with minorities, drawn to the war industries, but you wouldn't know it here on the grounds of the Ambassador Hotel.

"You're partly right," he told Einstein. "Things have changed a lot in the last twenty years-my last twenty years, I mean. But the things you noticed, they were well on the way before the jihad."

"Your holy war?"

"I wouldn't call it that."

"Do you mind?" asked Einstein as he fetched his pipe and pouch from a trouser pocket. "None of you seems to smoke much, either."