At the end of July, Japan was supposed to advance on Port Moresby in New Guinea. He had seen the plans himself. But that would mark the farthest expansion of the empire. Australian troops would soon hand the army their first defeat on land.

On August 9, Vice Admiral Mikawa was to destroy an Allied cruiser squadron at Savo Island. But that could not happen now, because the Allies must surely know of it. And, of course, some of the American ships fated to perish there had already been destroyed.

It was confounding in the extreme to try to untangle these knotted threads of fate and circumstance. But one thing was becoming clear: the trend of events could not be allowed to proceed on their appointed course. Unless he was able to conceive of some master stroke, unless the Axis high command could be convinced to abandon their strategic follies, all was lost.

Yamamoto's stomach burned with acid as he reread the most unsettling dossier of all: an incomplete but deeply troubling account of China's rise to power under a Communist regime and the long, dark shadow that cast over a declining Nippon in the next century. Even if they laid down their arms and begged the Allies for mercy this morning, annihilation at the hands of the Mongols seemed inevitable.

No. Yamamoto could not let that come to pass.

He picked up his stateroom phone.

"Get Hidaka and Brasch, and that Moertopo creature. Bring them over here at once."

Lieutenant Moertopo was rather put out at being hauled off the geisha girl and forced into his pants. Apart from the few hours a day when Hidaka demanded his presence, to explain some worthless piece of equipment, Moertopo had spent most of his de facto captivity luxuriating atop a series of pliant Japanese whores.

At first his new friends had sent him a lot of painted ice maidens who seemed interested in little more than calligraphy and flower arrangement. It wasn't long before the Japanese realized that Moertopo's appetites ran to a less refined sort of female company. Since then he'd hardly had his pants on, which went a great way toward reconciling him to the entire situation. Most of his men felt the same way. Given a choice among fighting homicidal jihadis, being imprisoned by the Japs, and plunging into some giggling trollop, who wouldn't pick the latter?

The pleasant haze of sex and sake abruptly deserted him when his "bodyguard" reported that a personal appointment with Yamamoto was in the offing. Moertopo possessed enough rat cunning to know that any variation in routine was threatening. And no matter what angle you came at it, swapping a happy prostitute for an irritated admiral was never going to rate as the first step up the happy staircase to Paradise.

So fear rendered him quite sober as he waited outside Yamamoto's stateroom.

Hidaka soon arrived with the German, Major Brasch, in tow. Brasch didn't look like a Hollywood Nazi at all. To Moertopo he looked more like a farmer with a drinking problem. They exchanged a greeting in English, their one common language, after which an aide led them into Yamamoto's presence.

Inside Hidaka bowed deeply and Moertopo saluted as crisply as he could. Brasch saluted but without much vigor or sincerity. Yamamoto seemed to ignore the insult.

The Japanese admiral also spoke in English.

"Lieutenant Moertopo, I hope our hospitality has not strained you greatly."

Moertopo was never quite sure where he stood with these fascists, but he took the ribald grins of Yamamoto and Hidaka as a sign of good humor.

"I fear Miss Okuni's hospitality will soon put me in the hospital," he replied.

"Excellent, excellent. Now, please sit down, gentlemen. If only we had more time for such affairs, yes? But time itself weighs on my thinking. Major, how goes your work? Will you soon be finished?"

"No," said Brasch. "Even with the help of Lieutenant Moertopo's men, there is an impossible amount of information to synthesize. It's not just the workings of a particular technology I am confounded by, but the principles that gave rise to it, and the context in which it should be employed. And the production methods used to fabricate its components, and imagining the industrial base that employs those methods, and the precursor technology that evolved into that base. I'm trying to make intuitive leaps backward, if you will. It's like an archaeologist excavating the future."

If Brasch expected Yamamoto to be angered by the response, the great bull-necked warrior disappointed him by merely nodding. "And you Hidaka, what say you?"

Hidaka glanced at Brasch, with frustration written across his face. It was always like this with the German. He seemed more taken with the puzzle than the answers.

"Moertopo has been of some use in helping us understand the rocket technology," he said. "He tells me the missile batteries of his ships are not nearly so powerful as those of the Americans he came with, but still they offer great advantage if used wisely. And radar, which we had dismissed as an irrelevance, is found here developed to an unbelievable degree. Radar-controlled gunfire potentially guarantees a direct hit with every shell fired. You can imagine the implications for the side possessing supremacy in this area alone."

"But can we build radar like this?"

"No," answered Brasch, before Hidaka could reply. He held up a flexipad that he had taken as his own. "These machines they all carry, we know of their capabilities now. But even the casing on such a machine is beyond the current limits of our production facilities. You are looking at eighty years' worth of developments in materials science, just for the shell that contains this device.

"Correct me if I am wrong, Moertopo, but the strange rubbery material of this electrical information block-"

"A flexipad, Major."

"A flexipad, yes. The casing itself is integral to the unit, because it helps power the machine, correct?"

"Exactly," he said. "It's made of solarskin plastic, which draws power from the light in this room. The warmth of your hands provides a power source, too."

"Right," said Brasch, with a hint of actual enthusiasm creeping into his voice. "But to fabricate such a thing, you'd have to factor in advances across a whole range of areas." He turned back to Yamamoto. "The thinking machines used in the design of this pad, and which control most of the machinery on the Sutanto, they use what Moertopo calls 'quantum processors,' and they rest upon multiple generations of antecedent technology. Would I be right in assuming, Lieutenant, that using an abacus to design a quantum processor would prove impossible?"

"You would."

"With twenty years' work, I suppose we might just leapfrog our current industrial base up to speed, but-"

"But there are many more pressing problems," Yamamoto agreed. "These processors, Moertopo?" mused the admiral. "They're like electrical calculating machines?"

"Much more than that, sir," interrupted Hidaka. "They are almost like brains. In fact, the Americans who arrived with Moertopo call their computing machines Combat Intelligences, and allow them to make significant decisions."

"And it was they who decided to annihilate Spruance's fleet?" Yamamoto asked.

"I imagine they detected a threat and reacted, because their human controllers could not," Moertopo said before hurrying on to add, "The Sutanto is not equipped with a CI system."

"Luckily for Kakuta," said the admiral.

"And we were not fired on," said Moertopo. "Unlike Kolhammer's force."

"Tell me, Lieutenant, what sort of a man allows a machine to make his decisions for him, especially such a fundamental choice as when to flee and when to strike?"

Moertopo struggled to answer. He didn't know whether Yamamoto was speaking philosophically or demanding a hard answer. When it became evident he was out of his depth, Brasch grasped the opportunity to interpose himself.