Designated targets aot-2

by John Bigmingham

  Mohr wandered through, hauling the dead weight of his duffel bag as if it were a side of beef. Occasionally he'd spot a uniform like his own, the coloring slightly different from the local rig, the cut a little more stylish. At least that's how some fairy from New York called it.

  His old man had read that article from the Post out loud, howling with laughter, tears streaming down his face. "Lookit this, Ethel," he'd yelled out to the kitchen. "Lughead here's standin' at d' cuttin' edge a fashion."

  Maybe that's why Mohr was rolling and twitching his shoulders so much inside the new uniform. To steady his balance. Meanwhile, he did his best to avoid catching the eye of anybody else who looked to be headed out to the Zone, to the raw, sprawling settlements and industrial "parks," as they called them. Not a one of them looked much like a fucking park to Eddie Mohr, though. Just a bunch of big sheds and warehouses with a few scraggly fucking eucalyptus trees for shade. Some of them, they didn't even seem to have workers inside. It was like the machines ran themselves.

  He scowled then, and remembered Midway. Machines running themselves-that's what had caused the whole class-A fuckup to begin with. That's why he never went out near the factories if he could avoid it.

  He'd seen that movie, the one with the muscle man in it. A kraut, and he'd been the goddamned governor of California, if you could believe it! In the movie, the machines had tried to take over the world. He felt like it was about two minutes from happening whenever he set foot in some of them factories out in the Valley.

  Somebody bumped into him then, knocking the duffel bag off his shoulders. "Sorry, mac," the guy called out as he hurried away, not even bothering to turn around.

  Some long-haired gimp. Mohr snorted in disgust. Probably wearing an earring, too.

  He found himself standing in front of the station's Harvey House restaurant. It was full of officers and their dates. Freshly minted war brides some of them, to judge by the painfully happy smiles and that just-been-fucked glow about the cheeks. And a fair swag of gold diggers, too, if his suspicions played true. They were probably dizzy with the prospect of the ten-grand GI's insurance they'd pocket if their "dearly beloved" got himself shot to pieces along with old Dugout Doug.

  Mohr's whole body ached with fatigue, and his fractured skull-or at least the cracks they'd fixed up with some sort of plastic cement-throbbed in a dull, far-off kind of way.

  His train had left Chicago early, and he'd rested only fitfully on the long haul across the continent. He thought about grabbing a sit-down sandwich or a burger at Harvey's. He could see they ran a desegregated joint-a lot of places in California seemed to these days. There were a couple of uniformed Negroes and some Chinese-looking fellas eating in there. Even had some white folk with them. But he thought he could still detect a sort of no-go area around them. The place was packed, but a few empty chairs seemed to be scattered around their table. Still, they were being served, and left in peace.

  That wouldn't have happened six months ago.

  He propped himself on the arm of a big leather chair for a moment. If he weren't so tired, he would have marveled at the thing. It was a much flashier piece of furniture than had ever graced the Mohr family home, and here it was stuck in a goddamn train station. Somebody had left behind a crumpled copy of the L.A. Times, and he flicked through it idly while he waited for the bus out to Fifty-one.

  Bad move.

  Right there on the second fucking page was a picture of that fucking idiot Slim Jim Davidson, grinning up a storm!

  He had some poor kid tucked under one arm and some flint-eyed dame who just had to be twenty-first lurking at his shoulder. In his other hand, he was waving around a giant cardboard check written out for twenty thousand dollars.

  Mohr felt a wave of acid rise in his gut, and he hadn't even gone for the burger yet. He tried not to read the story, but he couldn't help himself. Davidson had bought himself another singer, name a' Presley, and a whole bunch of this kid's tunes were gonna be released over the next six months. Mohr snorted when he read that a "significant" percentage of the profits was being channeled straight into a war-bond drive. It'd be one tenth of 1 percent of fuck all compared with the bribes that little weasel had paid out to get himself taken off active duty and assigned to "special services" with the USO. Mohr bitterly regretted not hammering Davidson flat when he'd had the chance back on their ship.

  On the Astoria, he'd had the little crook under his thumb; now he was just like everyone else-reduced to following the adventures of Slim Jim in the papers and the newsreels. Mostly that involved watching him getting richer and richer. But Davidson was a sneaky little shit, and it seemed every time he fell ass-backwards into a pile of someone else's money, he made sure to donate a big whack of it to some war widow or an orphaned kid, or some dogface with his dick shot off. So now everybody loved Slim Jim Davidson. Walter fucking Winchell wouldn't shut up about the jerk.

  Mohr felt a twinge of sympathy for the Presley kid, though. He looked like some poor dumb rube who'd gone to bed on a dirt floor and woken up in the Ritz. He wanted to warn the boy not to hold on to that check too tightly, or one day he'd find Davidson had chewed his arm down to a bloody stump trying to get the thing back.

  He angrily reefed the page over and tried to lose himself in some other, less aggravating news. He half read some piece about a delegation from the NAACP and the Congress of Industrial Organizations visiting Kolhammer. His old man would have been interested in that. He still kept up with the union news. Next, Mohr skimmed a report out of London about all the invasion fears, and he was actually getting interested in a bit on some guy called McCarthy who would've been some kind of heavy-hitting senator one day, 'cept that he got himself killed by the Japs down in Australia.

  Then he heard the police whistle.

  The roar of the crowd died away to a buzz, and he could suddenly hear music coming from somewhere nearby. A twenty-first number, for sure-a duet about this dame called Candy. It sounded like it was being sung by some drunk on laudanum and a Texas bar whore.

  Then everyone turned, the way a crowd will. Mohr turned with them and heard the whistle again. He got a quick flash of a dark-skinned figure in a uniform like his-

  Ah, shit.

  — being tackled by two guys who looked like LAPD, until he moved a little closer to discover they worked for the Union Pacific line. They were older than your average beat cop. And fatter. But by God, they could swing a nightstick just as quickly.

  Mohr cursed under his breath at the sound of polished hickory smacking into flesh. He'd once stood on a picket line with his old man when it had been broken up by private muscle using ax handles and brass knucks. The sound of the nightsticks took him back there, and he started to trot. Nobody else within thirty yards of the assault was moving. A few women gasped and turned their faces away-they wouldn't have been from the Task Force, then. A few of the men looked on meekly. Some green kids in army uniforms, who'd been so full of themselves just a minute earlier, looked queasy now. A couple of sailors snickered and pointed.

  Mohr glared at them as he picked up speed.

  "What the fuck is going on here?" he roared in his fiercest gun-deck voice.

  The guy they were hitting, a young kid, a greaser of some sort by the look of him, actually flinched as much under the lash of the chief's voice as he had under the rain of blows. He was a Mexican, in what had been a new Auxilliary Forces uniform, until it got all torn up and bloodied.

  "None of your business, salty," snarled one of the railroad cops. He had his billy club raised for another blow, and he suddenly seemed to become aware of it hanging up there. Mohr could tell that for a split second he thought about whipping it down one last time, but a cold, fixed stare stayed his hand. The man lowered the weapon uncertainly.

  A spell was broken. The tableau on the station concourse began to move again as a furious buzz of conversation started up and spiraled out and away from the confrontation. The kid, a newly minted private, still lay where he'd been take
n down. Violent shudders ran through his body as he struggled to choke off sobs and whimpers that wanted to turn into full-blown howling. Mohr willed the kid to keep it together as he bent down under the hostile eyes of the UP cops and gripped him by the arm.

  "Suck it up, kid," he whispered fiercely. "Get on your feet, and cut out the sniveling."

  "What do you think you're doing? He's coming with us."

  Mohr turned to confront the guy. His partner hadn't spoken, and to judge by how he was shrinking away, Mohr didn't think he would now. "What makes you think he's going anywhere with you?"

  "He's a thief," came the retort. "We got a report that he stole a pair of sunglasses."

  The tendons all along Mohr's jawline stood out as he ground his teeth together. "You-got-a report?"

  He freighted the question with about as much contempt as it could carry, which was a fair fucking load. When he'd transferred into the Auxiliaries, he'd expected to take a lot of shit from his old buddies-and he did. But it was basically good-natured. Some of the guys he'd served with on the Astoria were even thinking about making the jump, too. They'd seen the time travelers' weapons up close, and that was a powerful enticement to swap uniforms. In the end, though, most didn't. They couldn't come at learning a whole new set of rules in the Zone.

  Mohr regarded the UP cops with cold scorn. It seemed they weren't so keen on learning the new rules either. It was becoming a real problem all over the city.

  "Some asshole loses his fucking sunglasses," said Mohr, "sees this kid nearby, so you figure to beat him to death in front of a thousand people. Is that what you're telling me?"

  Mohr was this close to hauling off and decking the big ape when a new voice shorted out the dark current that was building up between the two men.

  "My brother Lino, he bought these glasses for me when I joined up."

  It was the kid-PRIVATE DIAZ, Mohr now saw from the name tag on his shirt. Diaz smiled anxiously. His teeth were stained fire-engine red with his own blood, and when he spoke, it was in a stuttering, apologetic voice. The sunglasses, which had been damaged beyond repair, dangled from one shaking hand.

  "H-he is working with m-my family out on the Williams ranch. He could t-tell you."

  The railway cop dismissed the suggestion with a look that just verged on becoming a sneer. "You assholes couldn't lie straight in bed. Why would-?"

  Whatever he intended to say was cut off when Eddie Mohr's hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of shirt. Several onlookers gasped and backed away. Mohr leaned in close and ground out his next words through gritted teeth. "Check out the kid's story, or pay him for the shades and let him go."

  As the cop squirmed in Mohr's grip, his partner moved toward them, but a murderous look from the navy chief stopped him dead.

  "I mean it," growled Mohr. "A pair of glasses like that, a farmhand'd work two weeks picking fruit just to buy 'em. You fucked up. You broke 'em. You bought 'em."

  Diaz was about to speak again when someone else rode in over him.

  "Chief. Do we have a problem here?"

  Eddie Mohr didn't relax his grip, but he swung around fractionally to take in the speaker. When he saw the commander's uniform and the man wearing it, he did let go. But he didn't back down. "One of our men just took a licking from these goons, sir," he said, standing straight.

  "Did he deserve it?" asked the officer. Two other figures Mohr recalled seeing at the table in the Harvey House restaurant came jogging over at a fast clip.

  "No, sir. Not that I can see," answered Mohr, triggering a brief but muted demonstration of outrage by the two cops.

  "Good enough, then," Commander Dan Black said with a tone that drew a line under the issue. "Marine, you need to clean yourself up. You carrying a spare uniform with you?"

  Private Jose Diaz, who looked like he'd just witnessed a vision of the Blessed Virgin materialize in a pool of his own blood, nodded quickly. "Yes, sir. In a locker, sir."

  "Chief, you want to make sure Private Diaz gets changed without further incident? If you're waiting for the trolley out to Fifty-one, perhaps he should wait with you. It's a big city. I wouldn't want him to get into any more trouble."

  Black smiled at the crestfallen railroad officers, but his eyes remained cold.

  "The marine appears to have suffered some damage to his personal effects. I'm sure Union Pacific will have a procedure for making good the losses. Is that right, Officer?"

  "There's probably a form to fill in," the man agreed unhappily.

  "There always is," said Black, "and I'll be following up personally, to make sure it gets done."

  SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE, CALIFORNIA

  The twenty-three-inch flatscreen looked incongruous sitting on the old wooden desk. Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wondered if he'd ever get used to the collision of past and present that now surrounded him. Mil-grade flexipads and crank-handle telephones. Quantum processors and slide rules. Holoporn and Norman Rockwell.

  Probably not. He was a good deal older than most of the men and women in his command, more than twice the age of many of them, and he was way past going with the flow. When the pressure of his work abated for a short time at the end of each day, he still ached for his wife and his home and even, surprisingly, for his own war-as savage and stupid as it had been.

  He had no real home to retire to at day's end. There was a bungalow he'd rented in Oak Knoll, but he rarely made it back there. Most nights he just bunked down "on campus," the hastily erected complex of low-rise plywood-and-particle-board offices just off the 405, where Panorama City would have been laid out in 1947. It was pleasant enough at this time of year, a mild autumn without anything like the smog of his era to suffocate the entire basin. But he found driving through the baking farmland and emerging gridiron of future suburbs to be depressing. It wasn't how an admiral should spend his days.

  The big screen beeped discreetly as his PA ushered out the labor delegates. Multiple tones, telling him that the message-holding command had been removed and dozens of urgent new e-mails had arrived. One vidmail had come in, too. That was less common. They just didn't have the bandwidth to support it anymore.

  He knew he'd never get used to that. In his day, California had been bathed in an invisible electronic mist, 24-7. Nobody even thought about bandwidth. It just wasn't an issue. Now, the ramshackle comm system they'd clipped together from scavenged Fleetnet equipment just about did a half-assed job of nearly meeting their needs in the greater Los Angeles area. But that was all. There was no such thing as full-spectrum access to the National Command Authority in Washington, and there wouldn't be until the cable came online, God only knew when. Maybe 1952.

  He didn't get anything like the vidmail traffic he'd once had to wade through, which was a blessing in some ways. So the distinctive ping of a new message arriving caught his attention. He had a few minutes before the engineers from Douglas Aircraft turned up, and the small avatar of his liaison chief, the newly promoted Commander Black, floated in virtual 3-D right in front of him, demanding attention. Kolhammer clicked on the icon, and Black's image came to life. It was a recorded message, captured by the small lens in the officer's flexipad. There was enough depth of vision for the admiral to recognize Union Station in the background.

  "I'm sorry to bother you, sir," said Black, "but we've had another incident downtown, between a Latino guy called Diaz and a couple of railway bulls at Union. I saw it myself. That's over two dozen so far this week for the wider city. We may want to pull our guys back to Fifty-one and talk to the locals again. I just got a feeling things are about to light up here. Thought you'd want to know ASAP.

  "Over and out."

  Kolhammer indulged himself in a smile at the arcane terminology. Dan Black tried hard, but he still seemed to have as much trouble dragging himself uptime as Kolhammer did shifting down. The smile faded, though, as he thought about the message. This was a hell of a business, messing with history the way they had. He knew there was no such thing as a grandfather paradox,
but Einstein had spoken to him about something he called "deep echoes." At first it sounded a lot like the CIA's idea of blowback, the law of unintended consequences. But the Nobel winner had waved that away with a flourish of his pipe stem. It was more like history trying to right itself, having been knocked off its axis by the Transition, if that made sense. It was sociology, not physics.

  Kolhammer sighed deeply. None of it made sense. Not the accident that had brought them here, or the seemingly infinite number of consequences that had since flowed on. None of it. It was barely four months since they'd arrived, and far from kicking fascist butt, the Multinational Force seemed to have fucked everything six ways from Sunday. There was a whole Japanese Army Group fighting in Australia now, three German Army Groups massing in France to attempt an invasion of England, and old Joe Stalin had proved himself to be a worse ally than the fucking Malays that Kolhammer had escaped back up in twenty-one. The old bastard had signed a cease-fire with Hitler and withdrawn from any hostilities against the Axis powers, suddenly freeing up the Nazi war machine to have another try at Great Britain. Christ only knew what was going through his mind. He may well have doomed the whole world.

  Kolhammer shook his head clear. Other people were getting paid to worry about Stalin. He had more than enough to keep him up nights right here. He made a brief note to do something about Black's vidmail, and brushed the flatscreen with a fingertip, touching an icon that told Lieutenant Liao that he was ready for his next visitors, the design team from Douglas. Without having to be asked, the young officer sent him a set of schematics for the Skyraider ground-attack aircraft, which wouldn't have been built in this time line for another four years.

  In the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, another window, surrounded by a flashing red border, outlined his schedule for the rest of the day. With a few keystrokes, he flick-passed about a dozen minor tasks, sending them to his production chief, Lieutenant Colonel Viviani. She could deal with the usual FAQs on steerable parachutes, body armor, MREs, penicillin, grenade launchers, claymores, and the rest. He was due to have a serious talk with General George Patton about the wonders of reactive armor and the need to make some drastic changes to the thirty-one-ton mobile crematorium known hereabouts as the Sherman tank.