Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Jones could see that neither Curtis nor Black really understood what he was talking about.

  “Put them on, Ensign,” he said.

  When Curtis had the goggles snug over his eyes, Jones made another series of fingertip adjustments on his flexipad. Wally’s head moved from side to side as he was instantly overwhelmed by the mass of data. Inside the goggles he could “see” five movie screens. Each seemed to contain a different view of the same scene—a squad of soldiers attacking a building. Curtis couldn’t tell if it was for real or made up. After a few seconds Jones shut down the goggles and asked him to hand them over to Dan Black.

  The second time around Black did better at hiding his surprise, but the look on his face still gave him away. He watched the film through to the end before lifting the goggles.

  “I’m no foot soldier,” he said, “but how in hell is anyone supposed to fight with that five-ring circus to distract him?”

  Jones grinned like a hungry wolverine. “Thousands of hours of training.”

  Black nodded. It was just a small movement. “Admiral Kolhammer?” he said, with a slight shift in his voice indicating that he was approaching a personal Rubicon. “How’d you really get here? Assuming you are here and we’re not there, wherever it is you came from.”

  Kolhammer sighed. “Truth be known, I can’t tell you that, Commander. Not because it’s restricted information, but because I don’t really know. When I was last in Pearl, I attended a briefing with the captain and executive officer of the Clinton. A bunch of no-name spooks and pinheads gave us a soft sell about this research project we were to ride shotgun on. They said it was for a new weapons system, gave us a lot of bullshit about a gun that wouldn’t so much fire a bullet or a missile as take it directly to the target. One of them, a Japanese man actually, talked about ‘collapsing the distance’ to impact. It sounded like a bunch of crap to us, but ours is not to question why.”

  “Some things really don’t change then,” Black smiled, a small gesture of genuine warmth for the first time.

  “No, they don’t,” admitted Jones.

  “Anyway,” Kolhammer continued, “I don’t expect you to understand the science. Even I only have a Popular Mechanics notion of how it all works. But these guys were generating enormous levels of energy, enough I guess to actually warp the structure of space itself. And one of the things we’ve learned is that, on a certain level, space and time are the same thing. I guess they just got their figures wrong. I promise you, as we know more, we’ll fill you in.”

  “That’s pretty fucking wacky, if you ask me,” said Black.

  “Any wackier than this?” said Kolhammer, holding up the goggles and then swinging them around to take in the entire chopper.

  “Or me?” said Colonel Jones.

  “Yeah, quite a bit, since you ask.”

  Lieutenant Commander Black cracked his big broken knuckles. “You know, I might look like a real palooka, but I have a master’s in civil engineering. It’s only from Dakota State, but I had to sit down for five years of book learning like everyone else. Just because I used to break rocks for a living doesn’t make me a fuckin’ rockhead. I understand progress. The way I worked a mine was a hell of a lot different from the way my granddaddy did.

  “I look at this bird and it seems mighty queer to me, but Ensign Curtis, he tells me these things are already on the drawing board. You got a woman flying this thing? Fine. I’ll bet Amelia Earhart could fly rings around her. And as for you, Colonel Jones, my great-great-granddaddy on my mama’s side was a lieutenant with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a black regiment with white officers. He died with his men, charging the Confederate guns at Fort Wagner. The grapeshot cut them up so bad, you couldn’t tell who was who, or who was what, if you get my drift. So the home I grew up in, you ever spoke the word nigger, you got your ass whupped good and proper. Maybe you want to bear that in mind, Colonel Jones, before you go judging the content of a man’s character by the color of his skin.”

  Jones gave Dan Black the benefit of his hardest glare, until a sly smile cracked open his granite features.

  “Well put, Commander. Touché.”

  “Admiral Kolhammer?”

  “Yes, Ensign?”

  “How can you be sure you went back in time, and we didn’t come forward?”

  Kolhammer shifted his weight as they banked for approach. “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” he answered. “But we can’t access any of our satellites. Our radar, which is a hell of a lot more powerful than yours, isn’t giving us the returns that it should. We were just off the coast of East Timor, down the bottom of the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia in our day. But it’s not coming up anymore. We can’t find anything, TV, radio, GPS, nothing. Our equipment is fine. It’s just like there’s nothing out there.”

  The two Enterprise officers only understood about half of what he said, but the admiral’s demeanor left no doubt as to what he was getting at.

  “And what about this ship, the Nagoya? Where’d it get to?” asked Black.

  “That’s one I really can’t answer.” Kolhammer shrugged. “We’ve been looking for it, believe me. I’m hoping to God it hasn’t come through and landed in Tokyo Bay. But I doubt it. We’re missing a couple of other ships, but they were all some distance from the center of the group, and the simplest explanation is that they just didn’t get sucked up with the rest of us. We lost a couple of nuclear submarines and some Indonesian destroyers like that. Although the destroyers weren’t such a great loss. Another ship got cut in half by the event horizon.

  “The Nagoya was tucked away between the Clinton and a couple of cruisers. It would have been at the epicenter of whatever went wrong. It was probably destroyed, but we’ll have to invest significant assets confirming that.”

  “Because that’s your only way home, right?” said Curtis.

  “Got it in one, son,” said Kolhammer. “But for now, if you’d care to look outside, you can see what the Enterprise will grow into, given eighty years or so.”

  They two visitors leaned over. Black swore softly. Ensign Curtis didn’t bother to hide his surprise.

  “Good gosh! It’s as big as a city.”

  USS ENTERPRISE, 0005 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Captain Halabi couldn’t remember ever being at such an uncomfortable gathering. There were only three of them standing in Spruance’s cabin as the admiral methodically leafed through her copy of Fuchida and Okumiya’s Midway. The other officer present, a Commander Beanland from his planning staff, had attempted to engage her in polite chitchat, but the conversation curled up and died on the deck after he had blundered into a morass of nonsensical questions about the hygiene difficulties of “women’s troubles” on board a warship. Halabi had snapped back at him that menstruation proved itself to be much less of a problem than the standard array of sucking chest wounds, compound fractures, and deep tissue burns with which one had to deal after a missile strike.

  “Fascinating,” Spruance murmured, closing the book with a snap. “If it’s true.”

  “Well, it won’t be now of course,” Halabi ventured. “The collision between our two forces has seen to that.”

  “Indeed . . . Captain. And so, what now? If you are what you claim to be, what do you do now? Throw the lever on the magic box that brought you here? Leaving us in the lurch? You might very well find when you get home that everyone speaks German and Japanese.”

  Halabi rubbed her tired eyes. “Well, to begin with, we seem to have lost our magic box. And even if we could throw it into reverse, all the currently accepted theories of time distortion posit an infinitely variform multiverse rather than a single linear universe . . .”

  She lost them with that, and so decided to try a different tack.

  “There’s a field of physics called quantum mechanics. It’s not specific to my own time. A chap called Max Planck kicked it off in nineteen hundred with something he called the quantum theory of light, and Albert Einstein moved it along in nineteen oh five w
ith his work on the photoelectric effect. Basically, he theorized that light can be observed as either particles or waves, but never both at once. It’s all about uncertainty, gentlemen, what we call quantum uncertainty. Long story short? It’s most likely that there are an infinite number of universes, all existing alongside each other, all of them different, some subtly, some radically. I guess the fact that we’re here is the first real proof of that theory.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Spruance, “but that sounds utterly ridiculous. You’re saying there’s a place where, for instance, America lost the War of Independence, or the South won the Civil War?”

  “And infinite variations on that.” She nodded. “A universe where there was no War of Independence because British colonial policy was more enlightened. An American Civil War after which Lincoln wasn’t assassinated. A Second World War in which Hitler was. Or where the whole planet was invaded by, I don’t know, space lizards or something. A universe in which Coke tastes like Pepsi. And another in which I’m standing over there drinking tea, rather than here drinking this . . . uhm . . . coffee. You get the picture?”

  “If that’s so,” mused Spruance, “it might seem as if you’ve dropped into your past, but in truth you haven’t.”

  “Quite so.” Halabi nodded, encouraged by the man’s grasp of the theory. “This may be a subtly different nineteen forty-two. Or maybe a radically different one. Perhaps Hitler doesn’t make the mistake of invading the Soviet Union . . .”

  “He has,” Beanland put in.

  “Oh. Well, that’s good then. But you’re right, Admiral. Maybe things are slightly different here. Maybe nothing we’ll ever notice, like the typeface of a small county newspaper being altered, but everything else appears exactly the same. Or maybe our trip here was a straight H. G. Wells deal. From twenty twenty-one to our very own nineteen forty-two. I don’t know. We may never know. Theories are one thing, but actually cracking open the fabric of spacetime and manipulating it without dire consequences, well, that’s a whole other sort of something.”

  “As you may have discovered to our cost,” said Spruance.

  “Yes,” Halabi admitted. “I am sorry. You were unfortunate enough to tangle with our CIs while there was minimal human oversight.”

  “CIs?”

  “Combat Intelligences. Computers. Machines that think. They help us run our ships, our whole society actually. And when they detected the threat you posed to the task force with your cannon fire, they responded.”

  “Well, that response may have cost us the war,” Spruance observed bitterly.

  “It won’t,” Halabi insisted. “The strategic imbalance between the Axis powers and the Allies is so great that it would take a lot more than the destruction of your task force and the loss of Midway, Hawaii, or even Australia to tip that balance in their favor.”

  “Oh, God, don’t let MacArthur hear that,” Spruance muttered, practically to himself.

  “With all due respect,” Beanland protested, “you’ve done your damnedest to help them on their way.”

  “I am well aware of what happened tonight, Commander. I lost a good many friends myself on the Fearless. We haven’t had a chance to formally discuss it at a command level yet. But I can assure you we won’t leave you swinging. If necessary, almost any one of the ships in our task force could sink the Japanese carriers and capital ships closing on Midway at the moment.”

  “Yes, but would they?” Spruance asked. “Do you seriously believe your Japanese comrades would happily send their forefathers to the bottom?”

  She answered honestly. “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to them. And since most of the Siranui’s senior officers have been killed anyway, their views are no longer entirely relevant.”

  “Yeah, but the views of the survivors will be!” Beanland insisted. “Maybe you got yourself some real tame, friendly Japs where you come from, but we got just about the worst bunch of bastards in the world right here. And I don’t fancy them getting their hands on any of those rockets or thinking machines you hammered us with.

  “Admiral,” he said, ignoring Halabi now, “whatever turns out to be the case with these people”—he indicated the British captain with a jerk of his thumb—“we have to insist on those Japs that came along with them being disarmed and interned. They’re just too much of a threat.”

  “That may well be, Lieutenant,” Spruance said, nodding, “but let’s just stay calm for the moment, shall we. Captain Halabi, how do you think your boss would take to that suggestion?”

  “Frankly, not very well. I don’t think any of us would.”

  Spruance seemed quite taken aback by the defiant note in the woman’s voice.

  “And why not, might I ask?”

  “Because they’re our allies,” she said, as though explaining something to a child. “This wouldn’t have been the Siranui’s first tour with Admiral Kolhammer’s group . . . sorry, that means nothing to you. Look, I’ve served in coalition with that ship before. I know that Admiral Kolhammer has, too. They’ve taken the same risks we have, watched our backs, taken fire when we did. We have no reason to doubt to their loyalty or their honor.”

  “Yes, but their loyalty and honor might just demand that they lay in a course for the homeland. I take it from the title of this book that Japan didn’t have a good time of it, by the end of the war.”

  “No, granted, they didn’t. But the Siranui’s crew aren’t stupid. They know that what doomed Japan was the hubris of the militarists who ran the country . . .”

  “Who run the country, you mean,” said Spruance.

  “Okay,” she conceded. “Who run the country. But Japan—their Japan—has been a liberal democracy for generations. To suggest that modern Japanese would want to return to the mistakes of their distant past is as fatuous as saying modern Germans would all turn back into Nazis if given the chance.”

  “Oh my God,” Beanland pleaded. “Please don’t tell me you’ve got a bunch of German ships out there, as well.”

  Spruance was genuinely perturbed by the possibility. “Well, Captain,” he demanded. “What of it? Any other nasty little surprises you’d care to let us in on. A U-boat, for instance?”

  Halabi struggled to control her exasperation with the paranoid mind-set of the two men.

  “No,” she said firmly. “We have no German vessels operating with us. There are undoubtedly a small number of German personnel on secondment to various elements of the task force. There may well be some Italians, too. I know of a couple on the Fearless. And we had a couple of Republic of Indonesian boats with us, which might well have complicated things, since you don’t have a Republic of Indonesia . . . but then neither do we nowadays, so I guess it couldn’t be any more complicated. And anyway, they seemed to have escaped the Transition here, like the American subs and a New Zealand frigate, which were all some distance away from the event.”

  “So what on earth do you intend to do with all of these Krauts and Japs, then?” asked Spruance, who seemed to be growing agitated again. He stood and turned to face her squarely.

  “I don’t intend to do anything with them,” she replied, “until we’ve had a chance to discuss the matter at a fleetwide command level. A discussion, I can assure you, that will take into account the wishes of all of the men and women concerned.”

  “Good Lord,” Spruance cried. “You can’t suggest that you would let them be repatriated to their respective countries, if that’s what they desired.”

  “Of course not,” she responded. “Nobody’s going to hand Hitler or Tojo the plans to an atom bomb. But they’re not going into irons, either, just for being Japanese or German. I have a Russian on my own ship, by the way. I know she’d have no interest whatsoever in returning home. Stalin would have her shot on sight, as soon as he discovered what became of his bloody workers’ paradise.”

  Spruance slowly began pacing a tight circle around the cabin, rubbing the back of his neck as he turned the whole thing over in his mind. He was surprised to di
scover that his initial shock and disbelief were fading quickly now. Piled on top of that discovery came the realization that this annoying woman was mostly responsible. Standing there in her dress uniform, arms folded as arrogantly as you please, tossing off her own opinions while disregarding his as though she considered them largely worthless, she came as a small, intimate herald of change. What sort of a woman was she? The loss of her sister ship and a thousand comrades appeared not to ruffle her at all. She seemed every bit as self-assured of her own godhead as any number of Royal Navy captains he’d met over the years. It was almost as if their blasted empire had never begun to crumble to dust. The jaw-dropping perversity of meeting this odd creature who was so very obviously convinced of her own infallibility, in that recognizably and infuriatingly British way, all helped undermine the skepticism with which he had first responded to Kolhammer’s ridiculous story.

  Jesus, he thought, what if it’s true?

  He retrieved the book from where he had tossed it on his desk and flicked through it again, leaving Beanland and Halabi to their mutually hostile silence. He scanned a few pages that dealt with the rapid destruction of three Japanese carriers, caught by his dive-bombers while their decks were littered with refueling planes, high-explosive bombs, and thousands of gallons of flammable gas.

  “We were lucky, then,” he said, glancing up at Halabi again.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “The heavy bomber flights and the waves of torpedo planes that went in earlier set it up for your dive-bombers. If those pilots hadn’t sacrificed themselves—and that’s what it was for most of them, a suicide mission—you wouldn’t have caught Nagumo with his pants down around his ankles and his cock on the chopping block.”

  Spruance smirked at the profane image, even as he cringed at such language coming from a member of the fairer sex.