"They'll kill you, Moertopo. Your value to them declines each day as they become more familiar with your technology. One day you will be of no use to them at all. And then…"

The German shrugged.

A cold ball of acid seemed to burn at the Indonesian's gut.

"Why are you saying these things?" he asked, his voice nearly squeaking with indignation and fright.

"Because they're true," smiled Brasch.

Moertopo's hand shook as he tried to take another puff on the cigarette. Twice he opened his mouth to argue, but nothing came. He knew that what Brasch had said was true. There were days he wondered why he was even alive now. The night, which had seemed so pleasant and tranquil, now seemed darker and more malevolent. Shadows pooled under bushes, hiding assassins. He shuddered.

"Don't worry," Brasch said. "We're all dead men anyway."

His face seemed to freeze in the flash of a photographer's globe, but the blaze of white light did not fade. It grew stronger. And the thunder of the apocalypse shook the ground underfoot. Moertopo threw himself at Brasch.

"Hiroshima," he screamed.

"Wha-"

They crashed to the wooden deck and Moertopo flinched, expecting to see his skin blacken and begin to smoke, just before a blast wave pulverized them against the rock wall to their rear. Giant explosions hammered at the island again and again. And when he found that he was still alive after a few seconds, he realized how foolish he'd been.

"Are you all right," he shouted at Brasch.

The engineer was already climbing to his feet. His eyes bulged as he took in the sight before them. The idyllic panorama had been utterly transformed. The sleeping fleet, the silver moonlight, they were gone. The anchorage was now a cauldron in which half a dozen ships blazed like Roman torches.

"It's started," said Moertopo.

Shouts and cries reached them as the Japanese soldiers guarding their quarters realized they were under attack. A siren began its mournful wail, and the first lines of trace fire weaved up from the deck of a destroyer about three kilometers away.

A sergeant of the guard appeared at a run, panting and gesturing for them to follow him to a shelter.

"There's no need," said Moertopo.

Brasch regarded him with a strange expression. It took the Indonesian a second or two to recognize the look. It was respect.

He smiled.

"There's no need to run or hide because they don't miss, Major. If we were meant to die, it already would be so."

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2141 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

Admiral Spruance watched, mesmerized, as the missiles dived down on their prey like steel hawks. The rate of descent was so great, it actually made him feel a little giddy seeing the Japanese carrier rise up to fill the entire wallscreen so quickly. He marveled at the idea of putting a movie camera inside the nose of a bomb, and just had time to make out the aircraft spotted on the flight deck before they filled all three panels and the image cut back to recorded footage from the Havoc's spy drone. The switch, managed by a young woman in the Clinton's CIC, was so slick that the admiral was able to see how the mass of the Japanese carrier actually shuddered under the impact, just before a brilliant white starburst blossomed from deep within the body of the vessel.

It seemed almost peaceful, if that were possible. The brilliant globe of silent white light bloomed out to consume most of the ship, then disappeared just as quickly. For half a second he was left with a ghostly vision of what appeared to be the Ryujo, or what remained of her, resting serenely at anchor-an astounding sight, because three-quarters of the ship was gone, everything vaporized between the first forward gun mount and the rear elevator. For that brief moment, it appeared as though the two sections, fore and aft, might just sit there indefinitely-and then they toppled into the waves and were ripped apart by secondary explosions.

"Holy shit," said Commander Black.

They were standing in the otherwise empty section of the supercarrier's Combat Information Center that had once been devoted to antisatellite warfare. It afforded Spruance and his men a ringside view of the way Kolhammer's people made war. What they saw was chilling.

The big screen that dominated one whole wall of the center briefly divided again, presenting coverage of the other Jap ships dying in the exactly same fashion as the Ryujo. Then a single-field view pulled back to show the entire anchorage. Small bursts of light suddenly twinkled along the flanks of one vessel, a cruiser. The effect spread throughout the body of the fleet.

"Flak," explained Judge.

Looking at the faces of the men and women, sitting quietly at their banks of little movie screens and instruments in front the giant wallscreen, Spruance felt the power gathered in this room in a new way. At Midway he'd been hammered into a near state of shock by their weapons. Now, afforded the luxury of watching the onslaught from a distance, he was struck forcefully by the singular and passionless way they went about their killing. Their damn thinking machines had taken it upon themselves to slaughter his men while they slept. But seeing the indifferent response to the deaths they had just witnessed-deaths they had caused-he wondered whether these people were any more capable of feeling genuine emotion than their machines.

He could see they were satisfied with the result, but only his men seemed to have responded like true combatants.

Even young Curtis, who'd probably never seen blood spilled outside a shaving nick, reacted with greater emotion than the woman whose submarine had just unleashed such destruction. The ensign was babbling on to Dan Black, pointing at the screen and asking the same question over and over. "Did you see that, Commander? Did you?"

Captain Willet, by way of contrast, appeared at the start of her little war movie to explain the events that had transpired. Spruance saw no sense of triumph or vindication, or even mild regret at having cut so many lives short on her say-so. For the second time in a week he found himself wondering what sort of a world produced women like that.

And then-how long before they'd try to remake this one in their own image?

He shook his head. This was ridiculous. These people had been at war for nearly two decades. It was only natural that they would be completely inured to its savageries by now, just as his countrymen would surely grow coarse and insensitive to the horrors that lay before them. And he couldn't forget, either, that this wasn't their war. It belonged to their history, and the men who had died since they arrived were to them already long dead anyway. Perhaps that explained it.

Spruance heard somebody behind him, a woman. "Well, that's the end of that."

But he understood it was just the beginning.

"Singapore strike is inbound," another voice announced.

He turned back to the big screen. He wanted to see what happened next.