Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  There was one person who didn’t seem to give a shit, though, and she was sitting directly across from him. She was a civilian, but she’d seen more combat than any of them. Maybe even anyone in the whole squadron. Amundson knew a few guys who’d fought in the Pacific, but almost everyone else in the Seventh had never fired a shot—not in combat. Nor had they come under fire themselves.

  But they’d trained as hard as any outfit in the world. And in one of those weird, head-spinning paradoxes, they’d learned the lessons of another D-Day, one that had taken place on another world. Amundson knew, for instance, that a field full of French cows most likely wasn’t mined, but if those cows kept staring at a bush or a hedgerow, there was probably a German hiding there. Their equipment was without a doubt the best. The poor old infantry, down in those Higgins boats, they didn’t get any Starlite goggles, or even body armor. And they were still armed with the M1 Garand, not the brand-new assault rifles with integrated grenade launchers.

  But even though he’d been honed to a razor’s edge and was riding at the head of the most powerful cavalry unit ever assembled, Gil Amundson couldn’t help but wonder. Would he crumble when the first bullet zipped past? Would he freeze up over the Landing Zone? Would he fail his men? And would he look like a coward in front of this woman who seemed not to give a damn that they were less than an hour away from certain death?

  The chopper banked sharply as the dark sky to the north suddenly filled with dozens of beautiful, sinuous lines of light. Tracer fire. Where the hell had that come from? They’d been told that the air force was going to bomb the coast back to the Stone Age.

  He struggled to get a view back to the rest of the squadron, which followed the lead chopper. He heard the copilot calling in a position estimate for the antiaircraft batteries and half expected to see a couple of gunships peeling away to deal with them. But everyone stayed in formation, pressing on toward the objective.

  They left the lead elements of the fleet behind them. The only movement on the sea was a rippling crescent of reflected moonlight as they sped on. The pilot’s voice crackled out of a speaker above Amundson’s head. “We’ll be over the coastline in five minutes.”

  Amundson looked south as four gunships pulled ahead, their job to rake the ground clear of defenders. When he looked back at the woman, she was talking to Gadsden. Or rather he was yelling something in her ear. She smiled and nodded.

  Amundson felt a brief, irrational surge of jealousy. He slowly and deliberately stamped it down. She wasn’t his girl, after all. They’d shared a bed in London for a couple of nights, made love in ways he hadn’t thought possible—and which wouldn’t have been, if he wasn’t in such amazing physical shape. But she’d made it clear that she wanted nothing more than sex. She didn’t even like to cuddle. The couple of times he’d tried, she had rolled on top of him, fucked him insensible, then rolled off and gone back to sleep.

  When he’d told his best buddies, lieutenants Savo and Lobes, they’d stared at him like he’d just won the Kentucky Derby. And actually, it kinda bugged him, them just looking at him like he was out of his mind.

  Julia Duffy was famous. And beautiful. And rumor had it that she was as rich as a Rockefeller. So if he didn’t feel like sharing her bed, then Savo and Lobes reckoned they’d be more than happy to volunteer. After all, if she was good enough for the president of the United States of America—well, he’d be president someday, at least, if he survived the war—then who were they to turn her away?

  Amundson caught himself staring at her just before she locked eyes with him. He glanced away guiltily.

  Julia kicked him. It would have hurt if he hadn’t been wearing a thick rubber knee pad.

  “You and your boys, you’ll be fine, Lieutenant,” she called out over the noise. “Don’t sweat it. You’re gonna eat those fuckers alive. Garry-fuckin’-owen.”

  The men in his chalk roared back.

  “Garryowen!”

  Amundson smiled. But he felt sick in the pit of his stomach.

  About three months after the Allies had retaken Hawaii, a package had arrived for Julia at The New York Times. She’d been back home for a month by then. After the slaughter on Oahu, the paper had insisted that she take a proper vacation, and to everyone’s surprise she had agreed.

  She’d still been with Dan at that point, but she hadn’t gone out to the Zone. Hadn’t even bothered to phone and tell him she was back. Mostly, she just stayed drunk.

  She did manage to visit Rosanna’s family, and for about three hours in their company she felt half human. But she fell apart when Poppi Ugo brought out the family album and insisted on taking her through every shot they had of Rosanna. She’d guzzled down nearly three-quarters of a bottle of grappa, crying hysterically all the time, and had passed out on the couch. She woke up at three in the morning, shivering under the Natoli family quilt, then vomited and snuck out the front door, leaving twenty dollars to cover the dry-cleaning bill. Hours later she remembered that dry cleaning as she knew it didn’t exist yet.

  She’d gone back to apologize, but the Natoli clan refused to hear it. They tried to talk her into staying for another 188-course dinner, but—fearing a meltdown—she had begged off and fled back to the city. The next she heard from them was when this package turned up at the Times.

  The mailroom cleared about a thousand items a week for Julia. Letters from servicemen she’d written about. Cookies baked by their moms. Crayola drawings by little girls who said they wanted to grow up and be just like her. And at the other extreme, hate mail and death threats from fans of the former FBI director who blamed her for his ruin, or from nutjobs who just didn’t like her. There were plenty of those. Many of them working for the same paper as her.

  The package from Rosanna’s family lay on her desk for about two weeks before she could bring herself to do anything about it. Worried that she might fall apart in front of her colleagues, Julia had carried the parcel back to her apartment and left it in a closet for nearly a month.

  It took a fifteen-hour liquid lunch at the Bayswater before she could get it back out of the closet, and two pots of black coffee before she could take a knife to the packing tape without cutting a finger off.

  She had no idea what was waiting in there. Part of her thought the Natolis might have sent the quilt over for her to clean up. But the package wasn’t big enough, and when she spilled the contents of the thick, padded envelope onto her Castiglioni coffee table, a small “Oh!” escaped her, and she had to run to the bathroom to be sick again.

  The snoring man in her bed stirred but didn’t wake as she lost a whole day’s worth of Manhattans and finger food in the bathroom. She sucked a few mouthfuls of cold water straight from the faucet, thought about taking a shower, and decided to go without, lest she wake up the asshole in her bedroom.

  Walking very unsteadily back into the lounge area of her huge open living space, Julia studied the sad collection of personal effects that lay on the tabletop. Rosanna’s flexipad and a dozen data sticks, a traditional leather-bound diary, some jewelry, an Hermès scarf, her imitation Bordigoni handbag, a wristwatch, a small piece of notepaper, and some cosmetics.

  Julia stared at the pile of detritus for a long time while her stomach threatened to rebel again. She tried to think, but it was as though her mind could gain no traction. It kept slipping over the sight in front of her, refusing to latch on to anything in particular. After a few minutes, with a shaking hand, she picked up the piece of paper.

  Rosanna’s great auntie Tula had written on it in her large, looping style.

  Dearest Julia.

  A very kind Captain Schapelli from the army came by today with a large carton of little Rosie’s belongings recovered from Hawaii. She had made out a will and hidden it in her apartment. The Japanese killed everyone there, I hear, but they never found Rosie’s last testament or the things she had hidden away. Captain Schapelli, a lovely boy, but Jewish, insisted that we send them to you. He’s quite a fan. There is a larger b
ox, which we could not afford to send because of the postage being what it is these days, and Captain Schapelli says there are some things in there for you, too. We would love to have you around for dinner again, and you could collect the things little Rosie wanted you to have. Please do call or write.

  Love and best wishes,

  Tula

  Eight months later Julia sat braced against the forward bulkhead of the lead chopper. It was the Seventh Cav’s first charge since they’d gone tearing around after Pancho Villa.

  She adjusted a shoulder pad as Corporal Gadsden yelled something into her ear about a couple of London barmaids he’d screwed a couple of weeks earlier. What a dick, she thought, but she just smiled and nodded.

  Her titanium weave armor was way past its expiration date. It’d been repaired time and again with reactive matrix panels and patches bought, borrowed, and occasionally stolen from other twenty-first-century reporters who didn’t share her enthusiasm for front-line action. So it had taken on the appearance of a camouflage quilt. The ballistic plating was brand new, though, thanks to Rosanna, who had left all her own mostly unused equipment to her friend.

  A brief, sad smile died at the edge of Julia’s mouth.

  Still lookin’ out for me, babe.

  The copilot’s voice crackled inside her powered helmet. “Ten minutes to insertion.”

  Amundson repeated the call and held up both hands. Everyone nodded.

  Julia could see that the young officer was trying to control his nerves. She guessed it had less to do with fear of being killed than with fear of fucking up and letting everyone down. He was a sweet kid, really. They’d had some good times in London, even if he was a little clingy. In fact, thinking about it, she’d spent more time with Gil than any man she’d been with after Dan had died.

  And now the poor kid was shitting himself.

  “You and your boys, you’ll be fine, Lieutenant,” she yelled over the uproar. “Don’t sweat it. You’re gonna eat those fuckers alive. Garry fuckin’ Owen.”

  She punched the air between them.

  The men grinned fiercely and called out the Seventh Cav’s war cry.

  As the troopers began yet another round of equipment checks, Julia performed her own precombat routine. A software aid scanned all her built-in combat systems, most of which were useless now anyway for want of tac-net coverage. She unsheathed her knife. The monobonded carbon blade was a dull gray, but more than razor sharp. Her Sonycam was powered up and loaded with four blank data sticks—again thanks to Rosanna—enough for two days’ continuous filming. Her medikit was an eccentric mix of original 21C supplies, some AT stuff, and some plain old-fashioned ’temp gear—assorted twentieth-century items she’d scavenged here and there.

  Apart from a gene shear contraceptive, which of course she couldn’t switch off now—and hadn’t that been a fucked-up decision—her bio-inserts were tapped out. If she took a round in the guts, there’d be no warm flush of anesthetic from her thoracic pips. She’d be screaming for a medic and a shot of morphine, just like the best of them.

  “Five minutes.”

  Amundson repeated the gesture he’d made before, except this time he held only one hand up. A harsh burning smell reached them, and one of the cavalry troopers, Private Steve Murphy, asked her what the hell was going on.

  “Be cool,” she called back. “And learn to love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

  When nobody got the reference, she rolled her eyes.

  “It’s the air force. They would have come through here and bombed the shit out of the place. That’s what you smell. Toasted Nazis. Mmmmmh. Crispy.”

  Gadsden sniggered. Murphy seemed to ponder the point before nodding his approval.

  The chopper banked to the right and began to lose altitude as it put on speed.

  “Just passed over the release point,” reported the copilot.

  In the cabin, the pilots were now free to ditch their maps and fly by dead reckoning. They were close. The door gunner primed his .30 cal. Amundson glanced around quickly to catch a look at the whole squadron as it formed up for the assault. Like the others, Julia tugged at her chinstrap and cinched her pack just a little tighter.

  Cobra gunships roared past them on both sides as she waited for the familiar snarl of miniguns and the whoosh of rockets leaving their pods.

  “Lock and load,” Amundson cried at two minutes out as a dense black canopy of trees sped beneath the skids.

  The cav troopers tapped their mags against their steel pots before slapping them into place. Julia did the same, pulling the charging handle back along with everyone else. The bolt carrier slapped the first round into place. After Hawaii she’d switched over to using the same ’temp weapons as the units she covered.

  Other than a small stock of ammunition kept for research purposes, none of the original loads that had come through the Transition remained. All the marines coming out of the Zone, and a few of the ’temp forces like the cav here, now loaded out with AT gear like the M4 assault rifle, a workmanlike copy of Colt’s venerable old martyr-maker.

  Indeed, fitting her goggles and sweeping her eyes over Amundson’s chalk, it was hard to separate them from some of the units she’d covered as a young pool reporter in Yemen. Swap their olive drab battle dress for Desert MARPAT, and you were almost there. The knee and elbow pads, camel backs, combat goggles, webbing, and weaponry were all uptime variants, manufactured decades ahead of their time.

  The Seventh Cavalry Regiment, along with all the other regiments in the First Air Cavalry Division, were still ’temp units, however, which meant that some things were very different. There were no African American cavalry troopers riding in this or any other helicopter. And no women. Other than Julia.

  “Thirty seconds!” Amundson yelled.

  “Clear left,” the crew chief called.

  “Clear right,” the door gunner added.

  The world turned opal green inside Julia’s Oakleys when she powered up the low-light-amplification system. They were descending rapidly onto a large field, where dozens of black-and-white—or rather, dark-jade-and-lime-green—dairy cows scattered in fear. A wire-guided rocket, a stubby little SS-11, swished overhead and detonated behind a copse of oak trees. Secondary explosions followed, and the night erupted. The chopper flared over their LZ, and Julia stood up.

  “Let’s go!” Amundson yelled.

  2

  D-DAY + 2. 5 MAY 1944.

  SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE (CALIFORNIA).

  It was a hell of a thing, the way the smog had come back to Los Angeles.

  Well, not back, he supposed. Most Californians were getting to know it for the first time. When Kolhammer had arrived in mid-’42, the air over the LA basin and the San Fernando had been so painfully clear, you could hurt yourself breathing it in too quickly. That had changed.

  It still wasn’t anything like the carcinogenic soup of his era, but when he flew in these days there was a definite brown haze hanging over the mountains to the east, and a blurring on the horizon out in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the admiral shrugged and took a long, deep breath, just because he still could. To his leathery old lungs the air tasted sweet.

  Perhaps after the war there’d be a chance to slow down and do things differently. Some people were already headed in that direction. He’d met some of the pointy-heads up in Berkeley who were looking at fusion, and he knew there was a small but well-connected group in the National Security Office studying options that would help the United States avoid ever falling hostage to the whims of the Saudi royal family “again.”

  On his infrequent trips to downtown LA, he never failed to notice some manifestation of the future folding back in on itself. Last time it had been a billboard advertising the arrival of disposable diapers. Before that it was a restaurant that proclaimed its “all-microwaved” menu to the world—very unwisely, in Kolhammer’s opinion. Some days it seemed as if the postwar economy was already with them. Despite the demands of war production, some
resources were now being allocated to manufacturing consumer goods like automatic washing machines and pop-up toasters. They weren’t available in great numbers, but that scarcity only added to the hysteria of desire for each new arrival. He’d read somewhere that each of five hundred “experimental” color television sets made by General Electric had been bought before they rolled off a special assembly line last month. Even though there were no network broadcasts for them to tune in to yet.

  Everyone of the top five hundred companies in the United States now had a wholly owned subsidiary resident in the Zone. Some, like GE or Boeing, were there to exploit their own future intellectual property. Others were simply hydra-headed monsters like Slim Jim Enterprises or McClintock Investments, which had moved quickly and aggressively to cash in during the confusion of the months following the Transition. They had accumulated enough wealth, and with it power, to protect their often dubious claims to ownership over myriad products and patents.

  So much money had been pouring into the Zone via its own stock exchange—an offshoot of New York’s—that regulators in Washington had been forced to step in and stem the capital tide, lest it unbalance the outside economy.

  It was amazing what happened when hindsight became foresight.

  “Refill, Admiral?”

  It was all he could do not to jump. The female seaman had appeared at his elbow without making a sound.

  Kolhammer swirled the dregs of his cold coffee around in the bottom of a mug he’d taken off the Clinton nearly two years ago. The gold-plated motto IT TAKES A CARRIER was patchy in places, and there was a chip right where he put his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it. It was a rare link to the “old” world.

  “No thank you, Paterson. I’d best be getting back inside, anyhow.”

  It was really too hot to be standing around in the midday sun, sipping coffee, but Phillip Kolhammer was a creature of habit. When he was buried in work, he tended to eschew a sit-down lunch in favor of a ham sandwich and a quick cup of joe, taken out on the balcony of his office. It was a fine view from up here on the eighth floor, all the way back to the Santa Monicas. In between there lay a patchwork of undeveloped farmland, industrial estates, and miles of cheap tract housing for the hundreds of thousands of workers who’d migrated here.