Ensign Wally Curtis wasn’t having any of it. That was a Hiller-Copter, or maybe even a Higgins. As it loomed out of the night and flared for setdown, he decided it looked more like the painting he’d seen of a Higgins, in Aviator Monthly. The painting was a mock-up, of course, an artist’s semi-informed hunch of what the finished aircraft might look like.
But they weren’t far off the mark, were they? He marveled at the contraption.
It looked to have a single rotor, instead of the Hiller’s two counter-rotating blades. And there at the rear was a vertical torque rotor, which the Hx-44 didn’t have.
Gritting his teeth, and squinting against the stinging lash of the rotor wash, he was uncertain whether the pounding in his chest was a response to the controlled violence of the aircraft’s descent or simple excitement at its appearance. He decided it was the latter when his heart skipped even faster at the sight of the second whirlybird. Where the first one had looked sort of fat and heavy, the machine behind it was rapierlike. Unlike its mate, it seemed to have less storage area in the fuselage—for carrying men or cargo, he supposed. Its brutish, hunched, insectile form reminded him of a giant wasp or a hornet.
Wally knew without being told that the stubby little wings weren’t designed to provide lift. No, they were made to carry weapons. He could only shake his head in wonder at thought of what sort of havoc a thing like that could unleash. The long protruding barrel at its nose was obviously some sort of advanced cannon. Perhaps even a machine-gun cannon.
He reeled off all these thoughts as they occurred to him, not really caring whether or not anybody was paying attention. But they were. The hard-bitten copper miner, the well-traveled padre, the professional warriors and draftee sailors who had gathered on the walkway turned to his boyish certainty as a salve for their own fears and doubts. Where they suffered future shock, Ensign Curtis experienced only rapture.
“Where’d they come from, Wally?” shouted Lieutenant Commander Black.
“Well, Higgins is based in New Orleans, sir,” he cried back. “And Hiller Industries work out of Berkeley in California. But I don’t know, looking at those aircraft, they’re just way too advanced. I can’t really tell you where they came from, Commander. Maybe off a Hughes program out in the desert. Maybe a Landgraf or a Piasecki PV plant. I couldn’t say, sir.”
The choppers doused their spotlights and set down just aft of the island, atop the main elevator. No landing officer waved them in because nobody knew how. Hundreds of men had crammed onto different vantage points to watch the arrival, either high up along Vulture’s Row or scattered throughout the small superstructure, crowding around the AA mounts, crouched down low on the flight deck itself, despite being warned to keep that area clear. Some noted the USN markings and Royal Navy roundel on the strange machines. Others just gaped at their sheer freakishness.
A murmur went up when a woman emerged from the smaller aircraft. No one missed the Negro who hopped down from the other one. Dressed in some sort of camouflage battle dress, he dropped to the wet wooden flight deck with the grace of a panther. The smaller man who alighted behind him wasn’t nearly so lithe, but he carried about him the same sense of self-assurance.
It was all an act.
Both Kolhammer and Jones were reeling inside. They had briefly discussed the Transition, as it had come to be called, on the flight over. Kolhammer had filled his colleague in on what he remembered of the briefing by DARPA. Neither man had any expertise in quantum foam physics but they had agreed that, given their total inability to access any satellite links or detect any kind of digital or quantum signals whatsoever, the odds favored the theory that they were the strangers here, rather than Spruance’s task force.
Still, it was a hell of a thing to ask a man to accept, that he’d been ripped right out of time itself.
As hard as they found it to come to such a preposterous conclusion, however, they at least lived in a world where such things were theoretically possible. Kolhammer clutched a document case containing about two hundred pages of printed material on Multiverse Theory, culled from Scientific American, Popular Quantum Mechanics, Esquire, GQ, and the broadsheet press. If the locals didn’t want to believe him, perhaps the New York Times might convince them. He had been surprised to discover that one of the half a dozen Times features had been written by Julia Duffy. But it had taken Kolhammer less than half a second to dismiss any thought of bringing her across to do some of the explaining—even if her article had been one of the better ones.
After reading it twice, he now guessed that until an hour ago he’d been riding shotgun over a research team that was developing a military application for Multiverse Theory. But the angry, horror-struck men on whom they were calling knew no such thing. Indeed, there was nothing in their world that might prepare them for such a fantastic concept. For them, the most primitive form of radar was still a marvel. Television was an obscure and probably useless invention; jet engines and helicopters were only found in the pages of adventure magazines. And high-steppin’ niggers with uppity dames in tow did not waltz aboard the USS Enterprise like they owned the joint. Not after admitting they were responsible for the deaths of so many good men in the hour just gone.
Suddenly a squad of armed marines double-timed toward the Seahawk, nearly bringing the truce to a premature end. Jones was forced to scramble forward, waving them down so that they wouldn’t be decapitated by an unfortunate dip of the still-turning rotors. Seeing him charge, three men shouldered their arms and drew a bead.
“Crazy black bastard,” spat the sergeant in charge of the detail as he continued forward.
Jones sank to one knee and motioned for them to drop, too, gesturing frantically at the rotors.
“Get down! Get down, you assholes!” he yelled over the diminishing whine.
Finally the sergeant got the message, and they halted their advance. Kolhammer emerged and joined Halabi. Both bent nearly double to emphasize Jones’s warnings. They joined him, and together they hastened out of the danger zone. The helos powered down and their crews exited. Kolhammer had thought it might reduce some of the tension if they were to move away from the controls.
High above them, the group of men clustered outside the pilothouse watched the performance.
“Check out the tail on that chicken,” urged a navigator from the torpedo squadron.
“Yeah, but get an eyeful of the jigaboo she’s travelin’ with, Mack. That guy’s gotta be eight foot tall.”
“Hell, I could beat him fair and square . . .”
“You couldn’t beat an egg, you palooza . . .”
“I’m going down,” said Ensign Curtis, more to himself than anyone else. He was ignored by everyone except Lieutenant Commander Black, who pushed off the rail and followed him back inside.
“What’s your feeling about this, Wally?” he asked as they made their way down to the flight deck.
Curtis was so worked up by the rush and excitement that he forgot to be intimidated by the older, more senior man.
“It’s something big, sir. Why, I’ll bet you it’s something we can’t even imagine yet, like something out of Amazing Stories.”
“You a betting man, Ensign?” teased Black.
“Uh, no, sir. Gambling is a sin, and against regulations, Lieutenant, I just meant . . .”
“It’s all right, son, I wouldn’t take your bet anyway. I have a feeling I’d do my dough cold.”
Down on the flight deck, surrounded by the hard, unfriendly faces and cocked Springfield ’03s of the security detail, Jones wondered how Kolhammer’s gamble would play out. They had assumed Spruance would meet them as they disembarked, but only the buzzing ranks of spectators and the anonymous belligerence of their guards awaited them. As they confronted the marine squad, the sergeant in command barked out, “Identify yourselves.”
All three had grown up in the military and were unfazed by the aggressive command. People had been barking at them professionally all of their adult lives. They replied in
kind.
“Admiral Phillip Kolhammer, United States Navy.”
“Colonel J. L. Jones, United States Marine Corps.”
“Captain Karen Halabi, Royal Navy.”
“We were expected, Sergeant,” Jones added, with a tightly coiled menace in the delivery that the marine couldn’t help but recognize. A twenty-year man, he had been bruted by professionals, too.
“Not like this you weren’t, asshole,” the noncom muttered under his breath.
When Jones stepped one pace forward and spoke, it sounded like the engine of an Abrams turning over. Slowly. “You don’t know me yet, Sergeant. So I’ll let your personal disrespect pass. But you know these, don’t you, boy?” He fingered the silver eagles and Marine Corps insignia on his collar. “And by God, you’ll respect the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, or I’ll beat that respect into you, right here in front of your men.”
Jones’s eyes never left the sergeant’s as he spoke. They stayed locked together for two heartbeats after he had finished. The man’s jawline bunched and knotted as he struggled to contain himself, while Jones just gave him the stone face. He could see the guy’s entire life in that twisting mask, all of his prejudices and petty resentments, warring against the disciplines of the corps. There were no black marines in 1942, and of all the services the corps would fight hardest against integration. But Jones’s warrior spirit was so powerful, his command presence so finely honed, that it could not be resisted. In the end, the Sergeant deflated, crushed by a superior will.
“We’ll see,” he said, a deep flush of embarrassment discoloring his whole head. He looked as if he’d stepped in something foul.
Kolhammer observed the interchange in silence. He knew Jones well enough, he thought. The Eighty-second had been attached to the Clinton’s battle group for two years. The colonel’s reputation had preceded him, but Kolhammer was experienced enough to know that the few minutes of a man’s life wherein he earned a Medal of Honor didn’t necessarily tell you anything about his soul. Or even his character—the everyday manifestation of that deeper, immaterial essence. Awards for uncommon valor are, by definition, won under extreme circumstances, which might call forth behavior completely out of character for the individual concerned. The exchange with the belligerent noncom, however, confirmed what Kolhammer had always suspected.
Nobody fucks with J. Lonesome Jones.
Standing next to him, Captain Halabi couldn’t help but be affected, as well, a wave of gooseflesh running up her arms. Curiously, the magic seemed to fade with distance. Over beside the Seahawk pilot Chris Harford, Flight Lieutenant Amanda Hayes affected a faux southern accent: “Mah word, Jasper, we seem to have stumbled into a teste fest.”
Harford flashed a small but genuine smile for the first time that day. It froze on his face when he recognized the man approaching from the carrier’s island structure. Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance.
Halabi thought he looked more like a banker than an admiral, perhaps a Rothschild or Rockefeller, with short, straight hair, graying over the ears, a rather Roman nose, and deep lines at the corner of his mouth emphasizing the funereal set of his jaw. He fairly stalked over to the commander of the Multinational Force, fixing their CO with a frigid glare.
“You Kolhammer?”
“I am.”
That neither man had made to salute spoke eloquently of their uncertainty. Nobody was sure of what rules applied here, of whose turf they were treading on. Spruance turned to take in the stony visage of Colonel Jones and the bewildering Karen Halabi. Jones ripped out a parade-ground-perfect salute, to which Spruance merely sketched a return, somewhat grudgingly and after a noticeable pause.
“You people have killed thousands of my men tonight,” he said. “You’ve probably lost us this war in the space of less than an hour.”
“And you’ve killed plenty of mine,” Kolhammer replied equably. “Tried to kill thousands more. We’re both at war, Admiral. People die. Sometimes for the worst of reasons. I’m sorry for your losses and if you’ll allow us, we’ll do what we can for the survivors.”
“And what about the Japs?” Spruance said in a cold, level voice. “What do you intend to do for them, since I notice you seem to be running with them?”
The Siranui. Kolhammer knew it had been spotted. It could hardly have been missed, emerging as it did so close to the Enterprise. He wondered whether Spruance had laid eyes on her himself. Probably.
“We have a Japanese Self-Defense Force ship operating as part of our task force, that’s right. But they’re of no threat to you here, or to Midway, or the United States of America.”
“Tell it to the Portland,” Spruance forced out through pursed lips. “I have a destroyer over where she went down and they haven’t found a single survivor. Not one! And I watched that rocket fly up off the deck of your Japanese friend myself. So please, spare me. All I want to know is, what the hell is going on here. You say you’re American, but you’re obviously treating with our enemies.”
“Well, if we could just sit down—”
Spruance rode in over Kolhammer. “Absolutely not. No secret parleys tonight, my friend. You were trying to kill these men a short while ago.”
He took in the hundreds of onlookers with a sweep of the hand.
“You can make your apologies and explanations to them.”
Kolhammer’s fuse was beginning a long, slow burn. He’d known this wouldn’t be easy, but he had his own casualties, and he’d be damned if they’d be treated as less valuable in some wretched body count. A line of Shakespeare occurred to him. We are enough to do our country loss. If his suspicions held true, every man and woman under his command was going to be counted as lost before too long.
The satchel of printouts and photocopied magazine articles felt heavy and useless in his hands. He could hardly lay them out on the wet flight deck and take a couple of hundred overtly hostile onlookers through a primer on quantum mechanics and Multiverse Theory, even if he knew what the hell he was talking about.
He turned to Jones and Halabi, his eyes asking them if there was any point in sugarcoating it. Both looked back at him, clearly relieved that they weren’t the ones in the rumble seat.
“Bad medicine is best swallowed in one gulp, Admiral,” said Jones.
“It can hardly sound more ridiculous than it did to us,” Halabi added.
Spruance clearly didn’t feel he had time for double talk. “Well?”
Kolhammer drew in his breath. He took some time to look around him. Just a second or so to convince himself it was all real: the wet wooden planking beneath his feet, the cumbersome equipment for the antique gun mounts, the unchanging sea of white male faces peering out from behind the textbook image of Raymond A. Spruance. All of this under a lowering sky in the deep of night, with the chilled air tasting of brine beneath the synthetic smells of oil and steel.
They were a long way from the tropics.
“My name is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer,” he said directly to Spruance, but loud enough to carry to the listening crowd. “I was born in the year nineteen sixty-nine. The same year, incidentally, in which you passed away, Admiral. I command a Multinational Force comprising American and Allied units, which was tasked with forcing a passage through the Indonesian Archipelago, what you would know as the Dutch East Indies, and putting an end to the mass murder of ethnic Chinese Indonesian citizens. Until an hour ago we were readying for that deployment in January twenty twenty-one. In transiting from Pearl Harbor, American elements of the Multinational Force were also providing security for a research vessel, the Nagoya, which was undertaking sea trials of a new weapons system. I can’t confirm it yet, but I suspect something has gone wrong with those trials . . . and that we are here as the result of some malfunction of that system.”
With that, he stopped speaking. Spruance stared at him, as he had expected, blinking only once, slowly. The color had drained from his face, leaving a waxy sheen and two points of high color on his temples.
; “Do you really expect me to believe that?” he asked very quietly.
“No sir, I do not,” Kolhammer replied. “In your position, I wouldn’t either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all I can offer you is our presence. Here we are. Myself. The colonel. Captain Halabi. Our flight crew and helicopters. You ever seen a helicopter before, Admiral? No? I didn’t think so. The ships of our task force are some twelve thousand meters to the southwest—that’s about six nautical miles. As alien as the helicopters might appear to you, those ships will be even stranger. You’re free to inspect any of them. To ask any questions you might care to ask. But every minute you waste doing that, more of your men die in the water. You can see with your own two eyes, right now, that we don’t belong here, this is not our place—”
“You’re damn right about that,” Spruance said. “Go on.”
“I’d suggest that you come back with us. The Seahawk ride, and a few minutes aboard the Clinton, and you’ll . . .”
Spruance actually laughed at him, a short flat bark that left no doubt what he thought of that suggestion.
“All right,” Kolhammer persisted. “You could send someone in your place. Someone you trust, but can afford to lose, to put it bluntly.”
Spruance worked his jaw, staring past the strange interlopers at the even stranger aircraft in which they had arrived. Before he could respond, a deep voice spoke up from behind him.
“We’ll go, sir,” said a Lieutenant Commander Black.
In fact the man seemed less than happy about the idea, but beside him, a much smaller and greener-looking ensign was doing a fair impersonation of a young man who might just shatter into a thousand pieces if denied a chance to fly one of those “Hiller-Copters.”
“You sure about that, Dan?” asked Spruance.
Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Page 15
