Spruance rode in over Kolhammer. "Absolutely not. No secret parleys tonight, my friend. You were trying to kill these men a short while ago."

He took in the hundreds of onlookers with a sweep of the hand.

"You can make your apologies and explanations to them."

Kolhammer's fuse was beginning a long, slow burn. He'd known this wouldn't be easy, but he had his own casualties, and he'd be damned if they'd be treated as less valuable in some wretched body count. A line of Shakespeare occurred to him. We are enough to do our country loss. If his suspicions held true, every man and woman under his command was going to be counted as lost before too long.

The satchel of printouts and photocopied magazine articles felt heavy and useless in his hands. He could hardly lay them out on the wet flight deck and take a couple of hundred overtly hostile onlookers through a primer on quantum mechanics and Multiverse Theory, even if he knew what the hell he was talking about.

He turned to Jones and Halabi, his eyes asking them if there was any point in sugarcoating it. Both looked back at him, clearly relieved that they weren't the ones in the rumble seat.

"Bad medicine is best swallowed in one gulp, Admiral," said Jones.

"It can hardly sound more ridiculous than it did to us," Halabi added.

Spruance clearly didn't feel he had time for double talk. "Well?"

Kolhammer drew in his breath. He took some time to look around him. Just a second or so to convince himself it was all real: the wet wooden planking beneath his feet, the cumbersome equipment for the antique gun mounts, the unchanging sea of white male faces peering out from behind the textbook image of Raymond A. Spruance. All of this under a lowering sky in the deep of night, with the chilled air tasting of brine beneath the synthetic smells of oil and steel.

They were a long way from the tropics.

"My name is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer," he said directly to Spruance, but loud enough to carry to the listening crowd. "I was born in the year nineteen sixty-nine. The same year, incidentally, in which you passed away, Admiral. I command a Multinational Force comprising American and Allied units, which was tasked with forcing a passage through the Indonesian Archipelago, what you would know as the Dutch East Indies, and putting an end to the mass murder of ethnic Chinese Indonesian citizens. Until an hour ago we were readying for that deployment in January twenty twenty-one. In transiting from Pearl Harbor, American elements of the Multinational Force were also providing security for a research vessel, the Nagoya, which was undertaking sea trials of a new weapons system. I can't confirm it yet, but I suspect something has gone wrong with those trials… and that we are here as the result of some malfunction of that system."

With that, he stopped speaking. Spruance stared at him, as he had expected, blinking only once, slowly. The color had drained from his face, leaving a waxy sheen and two points of high color on his temples.

"Do you really expect me to believe that?" he asked very quietly.

"No sir, I do not," Kolhammer replied. "In your position, I wouldn't either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all I can offer you is our presence. Here we are. Myself. The colonel. Captain Halabi. Our flight crew and helicopters. You ever seen a helicopter before, Admiral? No? I didn't think so. The ships of our task force are some twelve thousand meters to the southwest-that's about six nautical miles. As alien as the helicopters might appear to you, those ships will be even stranger. You're free to inspect any of them. To ask any questions you might care to ask. But every minute you waste doing that, more of your men die in the water. You can see with your own two eyes, right now, that we don't belong here, this is not our place-"

"You're damn right about that," Spruance said. "Go on."

"I'd suggest that you come back with us. The Seahawk ride, and a few minutes aboard the Clinton, and you'll…"

Spruance actually laughed at him, a short flat bark that left no doubt what he thought of that suggestion.

"All right," Kolhammer persisted. "You could send someone in your place. Someone you trust, but can afford to lose, to put it bluntly."

Spruance worked his jaw, staring past the strange interlopers at the even stranger aircraft in which they had arrived. Before he could respond, a deep voice spoke up from behind him.

"We'll go, sir," said a Lieutenant Commander Black.

In fact the man seemed less than happy about the idea, but beside him, a much smaller and greener-looking ensign was doing a fair impersonation of a young man who might just shatter into a thousand pieces if denied a chance to fly one of those "Hiller-Copters."

"You sure about that, Dan?" asked Spruance.

"Hell, the only thing I'm sure of is that we haven't seen a copper mine worth a damn anywhere around here. So I guess you can do without me, if you have to. And Ensign Curtis here, well, I don't think I'd care to leave him behind, sir. The crying would keep us up nights until the end of the war. Besides, he's the only man on this ship seems to know what those things are."

Black indicated the two choppers with a tilt of his head.

While Spruance was weighing their offer, Karen Halabi stepped forward.

"If I may, Admiral?"

Both Kolhammer and Spruance answered. "Yes?"

Halabi smiled, trying to arrange her handsome Eurasian features as innocently as possible. "My exec has things well in hand back on the Trident. I am more than happy to remain here while these two officers cross deck to the Clinton. And I've brought some materials that might help us sort all this out."

She offered Spruance the two books she had carried over. As he examined them like unexploded bombs, she fished a flexipad out of her jacket.

"I also downloaded some files from Fleetnet that the admiral might care to examine. Some history vids. Victory at Sea and The World at War. And a V-three-D colorized rendering of Casablanca."

"Excellent," said Kolhammer. He'd heard that this young woman had advanced quickly through the ranks of her service, and he was beginning to understand why. She was proving herself more adaptable than many other officers he had met over the years. That was the left-handed gift of ceaseless war, he supposed. It was a savagely effective form of natural selection.

"What do you say, Admiral?" asked Kolhammer, turning back to Spruance. "Time is short."

"You don't need to remind me!" his opposite number snapped. "We'll have the Japanese navy knocking on the door at Midway any minute now. And when they find out what's happened tonight, I imagine it'll be the Devil's own job keeping them from Pearl, too."

"As I said before," Kolhammer assured him, "we understand our responsibilities, and will do whatever is necessary. But right now, we have a hell of a mess to clean up right here. Men are still dying."

"And will your friends on the Siranui do whatever is necessary to defend American soil from their ancestors?" Spruance asked frostily.

Well, that was progress of a sort, thought Kolhammer, who chose to ignore the bitterly sarcastic tone. He knew now that Spruance must have caught a close-up view of the Japanese stealth cruiser to know her name.

"The Siranui," he replied in as level a fashion as he could, "suffered a direct hit on her bridge. The captain and many of his senior officers were killed there, while they lay unconscious, suffering from the effects of the trip here. The cruiser is now under the command of Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki, and he has slaved her combat functions to the… computing machine that helps run the Clinton. That is to say, the Siranui is under American control. They can't warm up a coffeepot without my say-so. I didn't ask them to do that. Lieutenant Miyazaki suggested it, and I agreed, in the interests of reducing tensions between our two forces."