Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  Brasch finished the drink in one long pull and eased himself out of the bunk. His vision was too blurred to read his watch, so he asked Steckel for the time.

  “Zero four thirty-eight, Herr Major, as usual.”

  Is that a hint of peevishness I detect in his voice? Brasch wondered idly. Well, damn him anyway. Brasch pointed to the chair where his pants and yesterday’s shirt hung. The attaché fetched them without uttering a word.

  “Find me some breakfast, Steckel. Some real breakfast, with sausages, and none of their damn rice. I’m sick of it. We might as well get working on this puzzle box again, eh?”

  “Yes, Herr Major, right away, I have already seen to it.”

  “And coffee?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  Brasch gratefully accepted the mug. Perhaps Steckel wasn’t such an odious fellow after all.

  “Is Captain Kruger with us yet, Steckel?”

  “Still asleep, Herr Major. He turned in only three hours ago.”

  Brasch thought he detected a trace of censure in the man’s voice. He seemed to think Brasch should be working twenty-five hours a day. He had no idea what it cost the engineer to get out of bed at all.

  “What about Commander Hidaka?” he asked. “I’ll bet he’s awake.”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t believe I have seen him off-duty yet. But then, I’m not here as much as you.”

  “That right,” said Brasch. “You’re not. Come on. Let us join the other master race, shall we?”

  Steckel, who was uncomfortable with Brasch’s less-than-reverent tone when discussing matters of genetic purity, covered his disquiet by retreating into form.

  “But you have not shaved, Herr Major!”

  Brasch stopped exactly where he stood, with one foot half in his boot. He stared at Steckel for some time before breaking out in a loud, raucous laugh.

  “Herr Major?”

  Brasch shook his head.

  “It does not matter, Herr Steckel. Believe me.”

  The Sutanto lay at anchor in a secluded section of the moorage off Hashirajima Island, blocked from view by a screen of light cruisers and surrounded by three lines of torpedo nets. A squadron of Zero fighters circled perpetually high above. Admiral Yamamoto had decreed there was never to be a second when the precious ship lacked air cover.

  There would be no Doolittle Raids over Hashirajima.

  No deck lights burned on the Indonesian vessel, and blackout curtains had been draped across all her openings, allowing work to continue twenty-four hours a day. Contrary to rumor, Commander Jisaku Hidaka was not awake for every one of those hours, but he did drive himself for as long as humanly possible each day. Like Steckel, he made it clear he found Brasch’s apparent lack of commitment perplexing, and occasionally disturbing.

  “Good morning, Commander,” Brasch said in nearly flawless Japanese.

  Hidaka looked up from the computer screen and returned Brasch’s greeting in his own faltering German. “Guten Morgen,” was about all he could muster. Brasch’s English was also better than Hidaka’s, but there were occasions when they used it to confer, nonetheless. Neither man really trusted Steckel. When he was within earshot, they spoke in the enemy’s tongue, of which he had no knowledge.

  “And what do you have for us today, Commander Hidaka?”

  The Japanese, he found, tended toward a scattergun approach, skipping from one fantastic discovery to the next as they swarmed over the ship. Brasch, on the other hand, spent most of his time patiently arguing in favor of a more systematic method: choose a category of investigation—such as the offensive missile system—draw up a template to guide the research, and move methodically through each stage of the study.

  He had also prevailed upon them to exploit the Indonesians, Lieutenant Moertopo and his men. Yamamoto had been detaining them in heavily guarded luxury on the island. But the admiral was disinclined to let them anywhere near their controls again—especially since the vessel now lay at the very heart of Japan’s naval power. Word was that Yamamoto lay awake at night, fearful lest half his fleet might be disintegrated beneath a brace of doomsday rockets. Even the cavalier Hidaka had to agree with that.

  Still Brasch had argued, finally appealing directly to the admiral himself.

  “Those men are cowed,” he insisted. “They are as pliable as sheep. They feel abandoned by the Americans, and remain unbalanced by their presence here.”

  “So you would have unbalanced men sit in the midst of my fleet, controlling weapons of a power we can hardly imagine?” asked Yamamoto.

  “Yes,” asserted Brasch, “if you would have me come to understand those weapons. We could stumble along for years trying to figure out how even the simplest devices work. Or we could just ask them. If they cooperate, we reward them. If not, we force them.”

  Yamamoto finally relented when Brasch explained that the sensors on the Sutanto gave him reason to suspect they could not keep the Indonesian vessels a secret for much longer. Moertopo had already explained that the other ships in this Kolhammer’s task force were larger and even more capable. Their devices would surely sniff out the truth before long.

  “And then, Admiral Yamamoto, you can expect to lose a great many ships just outside your window, to their doomsday rockets.”

  Yamamoto had surrendered to the argument.

  For his part, Brasch alternated between sincere fascination at the wonder of the ships and the blank flatness that had come upon him in Russia. In his most lucid moments he understood that he was sick, afflicted by a paralysis of both mind and soul. Depending on his mood, he might be reduced to tears by a letter from his wife and son, or so unmoved that he couldn’t be bothered opening the envelope.

  He occasionally wondered why the army had sent him here. A mix of reasons, he presumed. His Japanese was fluent, thanks to many childhood years spent traveling the Orient with his parents. Father was a diplomat, just like Steckel. Or maybe not so much like Steckel. His father’s career had eventually stalled under the Nazis.

  And Brasch’s engineering skills, as even Hidaka acknowledged, were exceptional. But he knew there was more to it. They had tried to make him a hero after Belgorod. His insanity in standing atop the pile of Russian dead, to calmly empty his pistol into a Soviet horde, was an exact fit with the führer’s “stand fast” principle. He had even met Göbbels when they brought him home to show off this fine example of Aryan manhood.

  Unfortunately his shattered nerves hadn’t equipped him for the public role of superman, and after two instances of ill temper and a breakdown in a radio recording studio, his schedule of appearances had been canceled.

  A small article in the Völkischer Beobachter announced that he had been dispatched overseas on an important mission for the führer, but that was before the mystery ships had even arrived. The bizarre communiqués from Tokyo had simply provided an excuse to be rid of him for even longer. He suspected the high command thought this whole adventure was an absurdity dreamed up by the Japanese to explain the abortive end to their Midway invasion.

  The reality had reduced him to helpless laughter more than once, further convincing Herr Steckel of his mental frailty.

  He rarely worried about the report he would have to make, and soon. He knew Steckel already had been sending inflammatory messages. For Brasch, who had walked in the land of the dead for so long, the Sutanto presented an intriguing puzzle that diverted him from the unbearable burden of living.

  HIJMS YAMAMOTO, HASHIRAJIMA ANCHORAGE, 0824 HOURS, 6 JUNE 1942

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto flexed his injured left hand. He had lost two fingers many years ago in the battle at Tsushima, and he was troubled every now and then by phantom pain in the missing digits. The discomfort was so much a part of him that he did not attend to it with his conscious mind. That was beset by a multitude of problems arising from the events of June 3.

  A cursed miracle was the only way to describe it, an inexplicable event that smashed the American fleet at the same time as it delivered
untold power into their hands. It still felt to him as if the whole world had been tipped off its axis and now wobbled precariously, threatening to spin completely out of control.

  As for the Indonesian vessel, the technical aspects of their amazing find were in some ways the least challenging. Given enough time, engineers like Brasch would unlock every secret contained within that ship. No, it was the historical ramifications that would prove the most challenging, the most dangerous. Who was to tell the emperor how this conflict was destined to end? And who would tell Hitler of his ordained fate, dead by his own hand three years from now, his body burned beyond recognition to keep it from the Communists who would enslave half the Reich?

  Well, Brasch would have that unhappy task, he supposed. Yamamoto did not envy him. It was undoubtedly a death sentence.

  Yamamoto peered out the porthole at the farms that climbed the sides of nearly every hilly little island dotted throughout this part of the Inland Sea. Atop each hill sat batteries of antiaircraft guns hidden beneath thick camouflage netting. Anchored all about lay nearly 150 ships of the imperial fleet.

  The admiral quickly abandoned the small glimpse of the outside world, returning to his desk, which was buried under thousands of pages of paper—reports from the team examining the Sutanto. Most were technical updates, the latest explanations of some astounding new technology. Set to one side however, was a pile of documents Yamamoto found even more disturbing than the report about the superbombs. This smaller set of papers represented the findings of his intelligence officers who had been assigned to trawl the ship’s so-called “electronic files” for historical information.

  Therein lay a description of his own death, shot down by American fighter planes over New Guinea. That was a macabre curiosity, but in fact of no great concern to the admiral. Not when measured against the larger picture that had emerged of the course this conflict was supposed to take, and still would, in his opinion. Every misgiving he had ever expressed—about the folly of warring with both the United States and the British Empire—had come to pass.

  Or would come to pass.

  From the top of the pile he plucked the time line he had ordered drawn up. He could see that in a less than a fortnight Tobruk would fall to Rommel, but his advance would peter out at Alamein within a month, and vast tonnages of American firepower would begin to crush the life out of the Afrika Korps. On the Fourth of July, the very first U.S. Army Air Force operations over Europe would commence with attacks on Dutch airfields being used by the Luftwaffe. Soon enough the skies over Europe would be full of Yankee bombers and fighters.

  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 eight
y 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.”