Another broadside. Another volley of massive, three-thousand-pound shells.

The decking tilted beneath him, and he felt the sudden overpressure as a discomforting sensation-not just in his ears, but throughout his whole body.

It felt splendid.

Yamamoto accepted a cup of green tea offered by a young officer. The steaming liquid vibrated inside the bone china cup, a small and delicate manifestation of the insensate violence tearing at the world around him.

"General Tanaga reports that the first transports are successfully away, Admiral," said the duty radio operator.

Yamamoto thanked the lieutenant and sipped at his tea.

He was content with the progress of the assault, but privately anxious that the army should get ashore and establish control as quickly as possible. Much of the contemporary U.S. naval power had been destroyed for now, but there remained significant forces from the group that had come through at Midway. Battle damage had negated some of the threat. The Clinton, for instance, had not been able to repair her catapult system with the tools at hand, and had been retired to the West Coast, perhaps to be stripped, perhaps to be refitted. He did not know.

What was important was that she had gone. The Trident was on the other side of the world; Kolhammer's "stealth" cruiser, the Leyte Gulf, was confirmed sunk. And the stocks of advanced weapons on the remaining ships were surely close to running out.

That was the gamble he had chosen to take.

Yamamoto closed his eyes and remembered the sacrifice made by Homma and the many navy men who had died off Australia, simply to exhaust Kolhammer's store of weapons. For a month now, no IJN ship had disappeared inside the infernal white fire of a "plasma yield" rocket, or had been torn to pieces by hundreds of tiny bombs spat out of the belly of a "hammerhead." None of his colleagues had been claimed by the barbarian woman on the submarine Havoc with her torpedoes that seemed to run as quickly through the water as a Zero flew through the sky.

And of course, the Dessaix had turned the Clinton's surviving Raptors into metal confetti.

Even so, he thought, as another thirty thousand pounds of high explosive erupted from the mouth of the ship's main batteries, he would have been happier to have delayed this moment until he could be sure. The Siranui and her treacherous crew still gave their loyalty to Kolhammer. And although the archival data indicated that the Kandahar's air wing was not equipped with antiship missiles, how could he be sure without being able to walk through the vessel's armory to check for himself? Midway had taught him that nothing was certain.

Unfortunately, nothing was perfect, either, and the warrior who waited until he had conditions exactly as he wanted them was in the end no warrior at all. He was a coward who would never know triumph.

"Torpedoes in the water! Off the port side."

Yamamoto did not react. This was not his battleship to command. So he very deliberately raised his cup and slowly drank the rest of the tea, without even looking out the window, like so many others who were searching for the telltale streak just beneath the ocean's surface. Captain Takayanagi would see them through this, or not. Yamamoto concentrated on drawing a slow, deep breath and focusing on the center of his being, his hara.

In spite of his outwardly unmoved appearance, however, the cry of torpedo had been a nasty jolt. Until he realized that it could not be the Havoc. Her torpedoes ran deep, and so swiftly that the first you knew of them was when your ship was disintegrating around you like an exploding star.

No, this would be an American submarine, firing torpedoes that hardly ever worked, assuming the U.S. Navy had not yet to come to its senses. Yamamoto didn't know why it was taking the Americans so long to fix their torpedoes, now that they must surely know of their defects. Perhaps they weren't listening quite so closely to Kolhammer as he would have, in their position.

The grand admiral tilted his head in a figurative gesture of peering into the sky, where he knew that robot planes were watching everything. He finished the tea, while around him sailors and their superiors shouted orders and acknowledgment back and forth as Takayanagi attempted to move the Yamato's seventy-thousand-ton bulk out of harm's way.

"Look!" someone shouted, and a strangled cheer arose, then quickly died as a little destroyer raced across the torpedoes' track. There were two explosions, and twin geysers of white water bracketed her, at stem and stern. The Yamato continued to pour on steam, leaning over at a noticeable angle, fighting to drag herself out of the path of any more enemy attacks.

Four other destroyers raced toward their crippled sister ship, popping depth charges as they sliced through the waves and sea spray.

Yamamoto sent a silent prayer of thanks to the ancestors of the men who had just perished on the little ship that had sacrificed herself in his behalf.

No, he thought, nothing was certain but death.

33

A lone Wildcat had appeared out of nowhere and strafed Corporal Yutaka Nanten's landing barge, turning it into a slaughtering pen. Cannon and machine-gun fire killed three quarters of his platoon, the first pass by the fighter scything them down, another pass pulverizing their remains into a scarlet gravy while Nanten screamed and screamed.

Three Zeros came and drove the demon away, but by then it was too late. Even the helmsman was dead; all that was left was one disembodied hand, still clutching at the steering wheel. Nanten himself was unharmed, except for a small sliver of bone that had pierced his left cheek. With tremors shaking his entire body, he pulled it out like a splinter, expecting half his face to come away. But the bone fragment wasn't even his.

As reason began to reassert itself, he realized he was not completely alone. Not everyone had been killed. He could hear three other men moaning or screaming over the sounds of the engine and the thump of the hull on the waves, as the helmsman's hand steered them ever farther from the other boats.

Nanten's limbs shook so much that he couldn't manage to drag himself up out of the bloody gruel that was sloshing up and down the length of the barge as they plunged through the swell.

The night before, as they had waited to transfer from the troopship, there had been a great deal of nervous talk concerning the time travelers they might encounter, and what weapons they might wield. Many of their greatest fears seemed to be centered on the lost souls of the ronin, those Japanese warriors who had come back with the magician Kolhammer. They were thought to be the most fearsome of all the time travelers, armed with "chaos blades" that could slice through the barrel of a tank. Since they had turned their backs on the emperor, the ronin had clearly gone mad.

Nanten himself felt madness gnawing at the edge of his mind.

Who needed chaos blades and lost souls, when a simple aeroplane could do this?

He wiped the blood from his eyes with one shaking hand and took in the ruin of his platoon. What he saw caused him to retch uncontrollably. He had no way of reaching the rail, so his vomit became a part of the foul mixture that filled the bottom of the barge.

The platoon had been together since the Nanking campaign, and now in a sense they would be together forevermore. One of the other survivors stopped screaming, but Nanten did not know why, and did not go to investigate. He did not wish to raise himself, lest another plane dive in to finish the job.

His fear began to shift, and his stomach knotted with fury. They had told him there were no American aircraft left. No rocket planes, or even any of the older types. He tried to wipe more blood from his eyes, but it only made things worse. His face was sticky with the remains of his friends.