"You want to live in sin?"

"Yeah. It sounds really sexy when you put it like that, doesn't it."

He was completely unbalanced by her. Women weren't supposed to bat away a proposal of marriage. That's not how it worked in the movies. They were supposed to collapse into your chest and burst into tears. Julia was stuffing her running shoes into a gym bag and Dan wondered if he might actually get teary. Up to now he'd always suspected there was nobody special for him-and then she'd stepped through a rupture in space and time.

"I think I'm falling in love with you, Julia."

She stopped stuffing the bag and came over to sit down next to him, placing a hand on his thigh.

"Dan, you think that because we've shared an intense period of excitement, where we found ourselves physically attracted, and then intrigued by the strangeness that sits just under our similarities. We're sexually compatible. I suspect we're emotionally and intellectually well matched, too. And before your face gets any longer, it's a two-way street, I think I'm falling in love with you, too."

They nearly missed the ride back to Pearl.

The control room of the Havoc was unnaturally quiet as the navigator, Lieutenant Malcolm Knox, manipulated a dozen icons on the meter-wide touch screen at his workstation. Without GPS satellites, the task of position fixing was much more difficult. The sub's inertial navigation processors could place them with reasonable accuracy about three hundred nautical miles south of the Japanese home island of Shikoku, but Captain Willet wasn't a reasonable woman. She'd often said that without GPS coverage the modern military couldn't find its own arse with both hands in a small, well-lit room. The joke had come back to bite her.

"How's that fix coming?" she asked the navigator.

"Just scanning for the last beacon, ma'am."

They'd placed three position transmitters on the way over, on small rocky islets for which they knew the exact holomap reference points. Willet practiced a breathing exercise while she waited for the Havoc's quantum arrays to calibrate and align the incoming signals. She watched a small blue bar crawl across a window in the navigator's flatscreen. When the bar was filled, a series of faint chimes sounded and Knox gave her the thumbs-up.

"We have a firm position fix, ma'am. CI is plotting firing solutions for the drone launch."

"Thank you, Mr. Knox. Weapons?"

"VLS Three is armed, Captain. Boards green. And we have the solution."

A soft, familiar tone sounded once as the submarine's Combat Intelligence downloaded flight data to a Tenix Defense Industries surveillance mace.

"Take her down to one hundred meters and launch," Willet ordered.

The voice of the CI, a factory default mid-Pacific accent, warned the crew to prepare for a dive. The conning tower was sealed. Nobody had gone topside when they surfaced, so there were no hatches to shut. Procedure had to be followed, however, and the officer of the watch cycled through all the CCTV cams, calling each one clear as he checked for personnel who couldn't possibly be on deck.

Captain Willet felt the nonslip flooring tilt beneath her feet and reached for a grab bar with practiced grace. Strapped into their chairs, the Combat Center sysops continued to work at their stations, leaning against the angle of the sub's descent.

"One hundred meters, ma'am."

"Launch the Big Eye," said Willet.

"VLS Three launching, Captain, in five, four, three, two, one, launch."

She heard and felt the discarding sabot spit out of the vertical launch tube in the forward missile bay. Her intel controller, Lieutenant Lohrey, counted off the seconds until the cruise missile discarded its casing.

"Big Eye has fired, Captain," she announced. "Tracking for Hashirajima. On station in seventeen minutes."

A quarter of an hour later and hundreds of miles away the nose of the surveillance mace split open and ejected an object that looked very much like a Frisbee. Its mission done, the missile continued on across the home island of Honshu before diving down into the Sea of Japan and destroying itself.

The small whirring drone, a doughnut of superlight plasteel wrapped around a high-speed turbofan, deployed a series of antennae. Tiny doors swung open on the underside and long spools of microlight fiber dropped down from the ring.

A thousand kilometers to the south, the command center of the submarine HMAS Havoc was quiet as she lurked just below the waves with a high-gain antenna deployed. The boat's active and passive arrays were all operating at maximum return. The men and women on board were still and tense as the Havoc waited, like a predator. Signals from her telescoping mast pulsed across the sky, unheeded until they brushed past the tendrils of monobonded filament dangling beneath the drone.

The feed from Hashirajima came online at 2021.

"We have contact and control," said Lohrey as two screens lit up in front of her with a live feed from the Big Eye surveillance module. One screen carried multiple windows, showing a cascading series of numbers and letters. The other displayed three video windows. Infrared, low light, and a blank rectangle for full color.

Willet immediately recognized the outline of Hiroshima Bay and the Kure Naval District, but she waited while the CI cross-matched the incoming vision with its holomap banks.

"Target confirmed," said Lohrey. "I'm moving Big Eye south, Captain. We're about eighteen thousand meters north of the anchorage. We have a tailwind of one hundred fifteen knots. Should be there inside six minutes."

The scene relayed back from the drone was eerily beautiful. Six separate drone-cams panned wide to take in as much of the world below as possible. Willet could see the old castle city of Iwakuni sitting astride the Nishiki River with its back to the Renka and Rakan mountain ranges. Iwakuni was a major industrial center, but the wide-angle infrared cams transformed it into something ghostly and medieval, reminding her of the fantasy novels she'd read as a teenager.

The Seto-naikai, as the Japanese called the five water basins lying between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, were home to hundreds of islands. Willet silently wondered how many of them were populated at this time. Quite a few, she guessed, if only by antiaircraft gun crews, watching the skies over the home waters of the Japanese fleet. Dozens of them drifted across a large window displaying light-amplified video. They looked like small, irregular emeralds.

Small boats were clustered around some, probably belonging to fishing communities or one of the many villages devoted to harvesting salt from the shores of the Seto-naikai. As the drone moved away from the twisting, corrugated channels and inlets of Edajima Island toward Hashirajima itself, larger vessels began to appear. Destroyers and corvettes. Oilers, seaplane tenders, and torpedo boats. Minelayers and depot ships, submarines and sub chasers. She smiled at the thought of being pursued by the latter.

The first capital ship appeared on screen, and the Havoc's commander whistled softly.

"You sexy, sexy bitch. What d'you say, Chief?"

Her senior enlisted man, CPO Flemming, leaned forward to peer at the screen.

"Looks like a second-class cruiser, ma'am. Maybe the Kumano or Mogami."

Willet smiled at her chief petty officer.

"You should really get out more, Roy."

"Tried to pop outside for a quick smoke before, Cap'n. Got wet."

Big Eye was relaying footage of more and more capital ships. But not as many as Willet had expected.

"Have we got a full house, Ms. Lohrey?" she asked.