Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  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 José 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.

  A delegation from the navy was scheduled to politely ignore him while he told them to fix the torpedoes on their submarines. And another group from the army would soon arrive to rudely ignore him while he tried to convince them of the benefits of issuing a basic assault rifle.

  He really wished Jones could have been around for that one, but the last time Kolhammer had checked, the commander of the Eighty-second was all tied up getting swarmed by a couple of Japanese divisions. And anyway, Colonel Jones wasn’t the sort of officer who inspired confidence in your 1940s army types. He was a marine, and he was black. About the best that could be said of his visitors today was that they were equally prejudiced against both.

  When Kolhammer wasn’t trying to bang heads with people who refused to see the benefits of 20/21 hindsight, he had to juggle the competing demands of his new role as the sovereign lord of the San Fernando Valley. This meant dealing with everyone from disenfranchised citrus farmers to L.A.’s downtown power elite. Labor unions, land developers, minority rights activists, Hollywood moguls, industrial combines, and local home owners all hammered at his door without respite.

  And at the very end of the day, he had a deniable back-channel meeting with William Stephenson, the Brits’ top intelligence man in the U.S. Yet another fruitless attempt to deal with the ugliest pain in the butt he’d ever had to endure—a pain so severe, it surpassed even the nationally televised three-day cornholing he’d taken from Senators Springer and O’Reilly at the Armed Services Committee hearing regarding the Yemen fiasco. That occurred just after he’d first made admiral, and Kolhammer had been secretly grateful for the experience. He’d figured that nothing outside of close combat could ever be that bad again.

  But of course, at that point in his life he’d never had to contend with a vengeful and paranoid cross-dressing closet-case like the legendary FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover.

  The express trolley carrying Dan Black out to the Zone took its own sweet time covering the distance to the city’s newest center of power. “Travel through eight decades in just one hour,” or so it said in all the brochures. And people did, by the thousands. Tourists and rubberneckers passed through, wanting to catch a glimpse of the future—even though at the moment it was mostly just half-dug foundations and unfinished factories. Volunteers and recruits poured into the barracks of the Auxilliary Forces, which were growing like topsy around the core of the original Multinational Force.

  Representatives from the “old” armed forces came to learn what they could as fast as possible, and not always with good grace. Engineers and scientists traveled there from all over the free world. Students bussed in from across the country. Factory workers and their families streamed in to fill the plants and production facilities, which were starting to sprawl across the Valley floor, chewing up thousands of acres of orange groves and ranchland. They filled the constellation of fast-growing, prefab suburbs known collectively as Andersonville so quickly that they threatened to outpace the contractors who were building the vast tracts of cheap housing. Indeed, most were still living in tents, like itinerant workers during the Depression.

  Still, they came whether or not there was a bed or a job waiting for them. Riding the overcrowded trolley back to the Zone with about a hundred new arrivals, Commander Black wondered how Kolhammer could possibly hope to manage the explosive growth of his strange new world.

  It reminded him a little of the California he’d known in the thirties, when waves of nomads from the dust bowl states had fetched up on the western shore of the continent. Glancing up from his flexipad, he could see that about half the passengers fit his recollection of those days. Families clung tightly together around rotting cardboard suitcases held together with twine. They swayed back and forth as the tracks carried them eastward, forcing them to retrace some of the last steps they had taken on their long trek to the coast.

  To Black, they didn’t look any less desperate than the thousands of Okies and chancers who’d poured into the state during the Depression, but for one small difference: hope burned a little brighter in their eyes than it had in his own when he’d lit out from Grantville. Even now, months after the world had adjusted to the fact of the Transition, the newswires still hummed with developments taking place in California, be they dry stories in the business pages about new manufacturing techniques, or yellow press hysteria about the “perversions” and “moral sickness” that were widely believed to be rampant within the confines of the San Fernando Valley. Some days it seemed to Black as if half the country wanted to drive the time travelers back into the sea from which they’d appeared, while the other half would sell everything they owned just to purchase a ticket west, and into the future.

  Eddie Mohr and that Mexican kid Diaz were a good example of the latter. Black had no idea about why the chief petty officer had opted to transfer from the old navy to the AF, but he wasn’t alone. The applications list ran to tens of thousands of men and women, all wanting to get out of their original units and into new Auxilliary Force outfits that, for the most part, existed only on paper—or data stick, he corrected himself. Sometimes, Dan knew, they were simply drawn by the lure of flying rocket planes—which hadn’t yet been built—or sailing in missile boats—ditto.

  Diaz, on the other hand, was like any number of hopefuls who had been seduced by a single promise. When they set foot on that relatively small patch of turf, which had been established by a narrow vote of Congress as the Special Administrative Zone (California), their skin color, gender, religion and—most controversially—what they did in their own bedrooms, ceased to be a factor in determining the path their lives would take. Once inside the Zone, they became subject to the laws of the United States of America, and the provisions of her Uniform Code of Military Justice, exactly as they existed on the morning of January 15, 2021, the day of the Transition.

  It meant, for instance, that nobody could call Diaz a wetback or a greaser, at least not without incurring significant legal penalties. It also meant, however, that they couldn’t drive without a seat belt, smoke in public spaces, or “cross a public roadway while immersed in a virtual reality.” Not that much of that sort of thing went on just yet, anyway.

  Black couldn’t help but smile a little smugly at the warm self-regard the uptimers had for themselves and their many personal liberties. To him, they looked lik
e people who’d been freed from heavy iron shackles—only to bind themselves just as tightly in a million threads of silk.

  As the trolley line swung up through Cahuenga Pass, the old wooden 800-series interurban slowed noticeably. Pacific Electric had recommissioned dozens of the cars to handle the extra traffic flowing into and out of the Valley. They seemed to wheeze and groan beside the sleek red-and-cream 700-series “Hollywood” trams, which fairly zipped along the new track, laid at breakneck speed by the company that had a lucrative contract to provide mass transit services into the Zone.

  Glancing out the window, Black noted that as quickly as the PE engineers could lay track, the road gangs still seemed to be outpacing them, adding another lane to the Hollywood Freeway. There had to be two thousand men out there working on the link that would stretch between the Valley and Santa Monica. Personally, he didn’t have a view about it, but he’d seen fistfights break out among the uptimers when talk turned to the new freeways. It was a hell of a strange thing to start throwing punches over, if you asked him.

  But nobody asked. And anyway, he’d learned to keep his opinions to himself. Julia had smacked that much sense into him, at least.

  He was tempted to close the file he had up on the flexipad screen and sneak a peek at the home movie Jules had shot for him the last time they’d stayed together in New York. But he could tell that about half the carriage was still staring at the device in his hands, and they really didn’t need to see his fiancée do her pole-dancing routine on a four-poster bed at the Plaza. So instead, he tried to concentrate on an epic dissertation from a Captain Chris Prather about building a better Sherman tank.

  You’d have thought, being a navy man, he’d be safe from the likes of Prather. But General Patton was set to come calling today, and Black would have to shepherd him through the visit. He knew from recent experience that Patton would cut him no slack at all. Navy or not, he was Kolhammer’s chief liaison to the old forces, and so he was about to become an instant expert on the care and feeding of Shermans.