Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “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.”

  Spruance’s thin, haunted face grew even darker while Kolhammer delivered his speech. When he had finished, the hero of Midway stared at him intently. Indeed, Kolhammer had the distinctly unpleasant feeling that Spruance was staring into him, decoding him, reading his deepest, pass-protected files and weighing up whether to hold or fold. His jawline flexed as he glowered fixedly and angrily at the invaders who freely admitted to having brought so much ruin with them.

  And then, as if a switch had been thrown, much of the tension ran out of his posture. His whole frame, which had been so taut the whole time, sagged fractionally.

  “Right,” he grunted. “Commander Black, you and the ensign will return to the . . . uh, Hillary Clinton. Report back with all dispatch if you think we can gain anything from the assistance offered by these people. But before you go, Commander, a word in private if you please?”

  Black and Spruance walked away from Kolhammer’s group until they were far enough removed that they could no longer be heard. Spruance turned his back on the two men and their odd female companion. He and Black were both facing out over the bow of the Enterprise, which methodically rose and sank on the long ocean swell. It was cold, and they were dressed lightly. They shivered as hundreds of pairs of eyes bored into their backs.

  “You’ll need a signal. In case you’re coerced,” Spruance said. “Something simple that they won’t notice.”

  “Well, my sainted mother raised me never to cuss at an admiral, sir. Not even a lousy rear admiral from the Cruiser Division. I could slip in a fucking profanity, begging your pardon, sir. That’s not like me at all. Then you’d know we were in trouble.”

  “Fine,” Spruance said, smiling weakly despite himself. “That youngster you’re taking with you. Keep a close eye on him. His mother would probably like to see him again, too.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir. It was his idea by the way. It’s more like Ensign Curtis is taking me. If this comes off, that should be acknowledged. Otherwise, well, I’ll take responsibility.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “Do you believe any of this malarkey?”

  Stillness came over Ray Spruance. But this time his pause was short.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s just so crazy. But I’ll tell you this. I hope they’re not lying. Because otherwise the Japs are going to roll right over us, maybe even win this war. They’ll certainly take Hawaii, and probably Australia and New Zealand if they really feel like stretching themselves. They could even drive through Burma and into India. The Germans could push through Persia to link up with them. That’d be an ungodly mess. But maybe with some of the rockets these bastards turned on us tonight, we might stand a chance.”

  “What about the Negro and the half-breed dame? You think they’re for real?”

  Spruance turned back.

  “The wonders never cease,” he said.

  10

  IN FLIGHT, 0005 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Despite his appearance, it didn’t pay to underestimate Ensign Wally Curtis. He was no rube. He had grown up in Chicago. Since enlisting he’d met sailors from pissant little backwoods burgs in places like Kentucky and Georgia who could count on one hand the number of times they’d seen a motor vehicle. Assuming they could count, of course. And assuming they had the regulation five fingers per hand. There were times he had his doubts.

  Right now, however, Curtis felt like just about the dumbest, most unsophisticated backwoods cracker on God’s green earth. Not that he cared. A bright ribbon of joy blew through him. The older men had often teased him about the promise he’d made to his strict Presbyterian parents, that he wouldn’t lie with a woman until she wore his wedding ring. But he knew as a moral certainty that the thrill of riding in this helicopter surpassed anything any of them had ever known while riding some low-rent floozie.

  It was all beyond him, gloriously, unreachably beyond his experience and understanding. He’d been right when he told Lieutenant Commander Black that the truth of the night would prove to be something they couldn’t even imagine. He was young and unscarred, and the raw shock of the future folding back in on itself was enough to set his spirits soaring.

  Braced across the cabin from him, Colonel Jones smiled at Curtis’s obvious delight. Beside him, Lieutenant Commander Black was doing a fair job of concealing his discomfort, but his white-knuckle grip on the grab bars gave him away. By way of contrast, Jones had to keep pushing the ensign back in his seat as he leaned forward, craning this way and that to take in as much detail as possible.

  The lights and displays of the flight controls kept drawing his attention. He seemed even more fascinated by them than he had been by shaking hands with his first black man—and a full-bird colonel of the marines at that—and only his second lady pilot. His daddy had taken him to see Amelia Earhart once. If it was possible,
Flight Lieutenant Hayes seemed even more exotic and beautiful.

  “What part of Chicago did you say you were from, Ensign?” asked Jones.

  Both Curtis and Black wore astonishingly small headsets, allowing them to communicate over the noise of the Seahawk. But no one else seemed to need them. Jones had tried to explain the devices—he’d called them “chips”—that enabled each of the other passengers to communicate without the help of an external rig, but he’d been reduced to saying it was like having a radio inside your head. It sounded like something a drunk or a madman might say, and Lieutenant Commander Black regarded him in just such a fashion. Curtis, on other hand, simply marveled at the crystal-clear sound of Jones’s soft conversational tones purring in his ear. The man wasn’t speaking any louder than you might in your maiden aunt’s drawing room, yet they heard every word he said, even over the thundering rotors.

  “I’m from Oak Brooke, sir,” said Curtis. “My father has a hardware store over in North Lake.”

  “I know that part of town well,” said Jones.

  “Colonel Jones, sir?”

  Curtis had no trouble recognizing and respecting Jones’s authority, something that earned him respect in return; a hard task, as many junior officers of the Eighty-second could testify. “I don’t mean any offense, sir, but where you come from, are there are a lot of Negroes in the service?”

  Airman La Salle smiled to himself as Jones replied.

  “No offense taken, Ensign. But we don’t use the word Negro anymore. Most folks consider it offensive. You’ll want to bear that in mind when you get aboard the Clinton. Both of you,” he added for the benefit of Black. “I believe the correct term nowadays is American of color.” Jones snorted to show how little regard he had for such things before continuing. “But the corps is color-blind, Ensign. All of the armed forces are, and have been for a long time. When Admiral Kolhammer here was fresh out of college he served under a chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a sort of supreme commander of all the services, whose family came out of Jamaica. He’d have been called a Negro, or worse, in your day.”

  “That man went on to become the secretary of state,” Kolhammer added. “Could have been president, too, if it hadn’t been for Ms. Clinton.”

  “The lady your ship is named after?” asked Curtis.

  “The president my ship is named after. Best president the navy had, since Ronald Reagan.”

  “The cowboy actor!”

  “The one and only,” smiled Jones.

  “Excuse me,” Black interjected. “No offense, Colonel. But a colored president? A lady president? A B-grade cowboy in the White House? What are you, using the funny pages for your history books? You gotta be yanking my chain. I’m looking around your whirligig here and I’ll admit I can see a lot of change, a lot of advances. But some things, they just don’t change.”

  Instead of replying, Jones pulled a satchel out from under his seat and then a pair of powered combat goggles from within the bag.

  “Pilot?” he asked, over the chopper’s comm channel. “Can you raise Fleetnet for me? I need to access my personal archive.

  “Put these on,” he ordered Black.

  The former copper miner eyed the goggles suspiciously. He gave Jones a hard, inquiring look, but the marine simply shrugged in reply. After a moment’s consideration, Black reached across and took the device. It reminded him a little of antique flying goggles from the Great War. But only a little. These things were lightweight and sleek, with a curious feeling of density to them. Like they were packed tight with impossibly small machinery or wiring.

  He needed no help settling them over his eyes. Indeed, they seemed to mold themselves to his face. The sensation wasn’t entirely pleasant.

  The first thing he noticed was the night vision. It was startling.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s a good trick. But what have they got to . . . whoa!”

  Without warning his entire range of view turned black for a split second, before it was slammed by countless shimmering filaments of light. Sometimes they seemed as delicate as a single thread of spider’s web. In other places energy poured through this strange negative space in torrents and floods. As Jones worked a flexipad, Black rocked in his seat, overwhelmed by the visual effect of flying through this self-contained cosmos of fire and light. He found that he could catch a glimmer of something every now and then, a glimmer of recognition as something vaguely familiar flashed by; the Globe and Anchor of the USMC, the roaring lion from the beginning of an MGM movie. The images flickered in and out of range so quickly that he could never quite identify any one impression.

  In a few seconds Jones seemed to find what he wanted. Lieutenant Commander Black let his head fell back slightly, like a man in the front row of a movie theater. He was in Washington, hovering above a huge crowd, perhaps a million strong. He could see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and then he was right up close to a black man. His rounded cheeks and pencil-thin mustache filled the—what, the whole screen?—as he punched out a speech, or perhaps a sermon. It certainly rang with the powerful cadence of the fire-and-brimstone revival meetings Black’s daddy had favored.

  “I have a dream . . . ,” roared the Negro. “That one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal . . .”

  The man’s voice rang out and filled the world as the footage segued into film of men and women, black and white, under attack by police dogs and fire hoses.

  “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . .”

  Newspaper photographs of a black man who looked like he’d been shot on a motel patio faded to color images of a jungle war, of black and white soldiers so befouled with mud and gore that beneath their ruined fatigues all difference had been erased. Lieutenant Commander Black thought he recognized Marine Corps insignia on one Negro whose bandaged, bloody head lay in the lap of a white comrade. The black soldier stared sightlessly into the heavens, his face streaked with tears fallen from the eyes of his friend.

  “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character . . .”

  Snatches of color movies, and strange music, of grinning black basketball and football players cut to images of city workers, black, white, Asian, male, and female running blind and fearfully through streets turned gray by clouds of pulverized cement that rushed at them while a stupendously tall building collapsed straight into the ground behind them. And the same preacher still called out his message in Black’s ears.

  “Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York . . .”

  Bright, clear color film of U.S. Marines, obviously of many races, standing atop the rubble of some palace in a place identified as DAMASCUS faded to a shaky handheld shot of a beaming Colonel J. Lonesome Jones on the lawn of the White House, escorted by his impossibly beautiful and—for Dan Black—improbably blond and blue-eyed wife.

  The woman was teasing Jones, repeatedly stroking the decoration newly pinned to his chest, a Medal of Honor. A black woman, beaming fit to burst and identified on the screen as VICE PRESIDENT RICE, wandered over to shake his hand.

  The preacher still roared out.

  “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

  The images froze, and Black felt someone tapping on the goggles. He lifted them off. The sudden darkness of the chopper cabin was unsettling.

  “You’re right, Commander,” said Jones, leaning forward, his face dimly illuminated. “Some things don’t change. But that doesn’t mean progress is impossible. My niece made that film you just saw, by the way. She cut it all together for a school project. Even took the footage at the White House herself. It’s nicely done, don’t you think? She’s only eleven years old, a
nd I suspect she’ll be a holy terror to her mother and father.”

  Lieutenant Commander Black was at a loss for words. “Is she . . . uh . . .”

  “As white as the Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. But she loves her uncle Lonesome, and wants to follow in his footsteps, God help her.”

  “How did you win the medal?” asked Black, readjusting his headset as he handed the goggles to Ensign Curtis.

  “I don’t mind you asking, Commander. But I’m not inclined to discuss it with you just yet. That doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  “I think I understand,” Black said with a hint of chagrin.

  “No, I don’t think you do,” said Jones. “Have you ever been in combat, Commander?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Well, the admiral, myself, Airman La Salle over there, and the pilots of this helicopter, we’ve all been there. Too many times. If I could wish that away, I would, believe you me. I don’t want my niece to live my life, but that’s the world she was born into. It’s not pleasant, but it has its certainties. One of which is that I know every man and woman in this aircraft would cut their arms off to save me if they had to—and they know I would do the same for them. They’re my people, Black, no matter what. You, however, you I don’t know.”

  “That’s pretty goddamn rich, don’t you think?” Black protested. “You blowing in here the way you did, and then demanding that we earn your trust. That’s hardly fair.”

  “Fair’s got nothing to do with it.” Jones shrugged. “You’ll see that soon enough, if you have any sense.”

  “Colonel Jones?”

  Ensign Curtis interposed himself between the two men in the unfamiliar role of peacemaker.

  “Yes, son?”

  “These eyeglasses, sir. Do you actually wear them in combat, so you can see in the dark?”

  “We do. But they have other uses, too. They’ll take a shotgun blast from twenty yards out. Your face’ll get shredded, of course. But your baby blues will be A-okay.” He grinned ghoulishly. “They can display a bunch of tactical information, too. Real-time imaging from intel drones, spy-cams, and so on. So if you’re wondering what’s on the other side of a hill, say, you can see without popping your head up to get it shot off.”