Captain Prather was a believer.

Julia had met a lot of them, both here and uptime. There was a USAF major in Syria who wanted to air-drop billions of genetically engineered “attack” scorpions on Damascus, to paralyze the entire population before a coded gene sequence killed all the stingers two days later.

There was the CIA contractor who wanted to raise a private army of orphaned Arab children, to run as deep-penetration agents when they were old enough to send back into their parent societies. He thought that eleven or twelve years old would be just about right.

There was Manning Pope, of course, the scientist who’d marooned them all here. And there was an armored division colonel named MacMasters who came up with the idea of sewing jihadi insurgents into pigskins before burying them. Actually, he’d borrowed the idea from “Black Jack” Pershing, who’d done the same thing to Islamic guerrillas in the Philippines back in the 1900s.

She had no idea what happened to the scorpion guy, or the spook, or even to Pope. The colonel, however, had gone on to become the Republican senator for Kansas, where he’d made certain that his favorite tactic became a “sanctioned field punishment” available to U.S. commanders when dealing with Islamic extremists. Last Julia knew of him, he was still confounding the liberal press with his boyish enthusiasm for the never-ending war, back up in twenty-one.

Captain Chris Prather still had his boyish enthusiasms, too. She found him atop the reinforced turret of one of “his” Easy Eight Super Shermans, in a holding area about fifteen klicks back from the front-although the way Patton kept driving forward, “the front” wasn’t a stable concept. When she located him, after slopping through a muddy parking lot full of tanks, jeeps, and deuce-and-a-halves, he was bent over with his head buried inside the turret, talking to the crew. This gave her a wide-screen view of his butt.

“Hey,” she called out. “Does that big ass up yonder belong to a Captain Prather?”

Two African American tankers, members of the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, were standing by the treads. They favored her with flashing white smiles.

“Well picked, madam,” the taller one said with an incongruously polished Bostonian accent. “You clearly know your asses.”

He stepped forward and extended his hand. She returned the firm grip as Prather extracted himself from the turret. Snatching up an old rag, he called down to somebody inside the tank. “Take five, Robinson. We got company.”

Prather was a good-looking white boy with a southern accent. Kentucky, perhaps. He stood about five-eight with black hair and hazel eyes. He had broad shoulders and looked like he punched in around 180 pounds. He was a ’temp but seemed perfectly at ease surrounded by his black comrades. Not for the first time Julia had to remind herself to stop thinking of the ’temps as a nation of rednecked buttheads. You’d have thought she might have learned that from Dan, if nothing else.

“Miss Duffy, I guess?” Prather used the rag to wipe grease from his powerful hands.

“Ms. Duffy,” she replied, “but Julia or Jules will do.”

Prather jumped down from the body of the tank, landing softly but still splashing up a little mud. He nodded to the two other men. “You’ve met Lieutenant Burnett and Sergeant Turley.”

The noncom smiled shyly and dipped his head. “Ma’am,” he said softly.

“Hey, Sergeant.” Julia nodded toward the tank. “So what’s up with my ride?”

Prather looked a little surprised. “Oh, nothing. We’re just fixin’ a few things. I love to fix things. And anyway, this ain’t your ride-that’s over by Dog Company. But this baby’s a beauty anyway, don’t you think?”

“Guess so,” she answered.

Prather gestured theatrically. “Aw, come on. This is a work of art, Miz Duffy.” He turned back to his colleagues. “You guys gonna help Jackie with that wet storage sealant? I gotta take Ms. Duffy over to battalion. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

“Jackie? Jackie Robinson?” she wondered aloud as they headed away at a brisk pace. “The ballplayer?”

“Will be, one day soon,” Prather confirmed. “They say he’s gonna play the majors. One of the first black guys ever. For now, though, he’s working for me. He’s a good guy, too.”

A cold front was coming in from the Atlantic, ruining the perfect weather. The first cool gusts had whistled through the streets of Calais as Julia had said good-bye to Ronsard. She’d hopped a Huey that took her up to the staging area just outside Brugge, in Belgium, and it had seemed like they were running just ahead of the weather all the way up. Now a towering wall of dark gray clouds filled the sky to the west, behind them, while in front the sun still shone brightly down on the Belgian countryside. Along the way she had noticed that some villages and farms had been destroyed, but not others, reminding her of flying over Oklahoma twister country.

Fifteen minutes before reaching the armored depot, they passed over a five-kilometer-wide tract of dead earth littered with the burned-out hulks of Shermans and Tigers. Almost every building in the area had been destroyed, except for one small farmhouse, which remained untouched.

The fortunes of war.

Julia was glad for her thermopliable combat jacket: there was a good chance the cold weather would intensify over the next few days. Bring on global warming, she thought. Prather talked excitedly as they walked along the lines of tanks.

“It was a hell of a fight after you guys turned up,” he said. “There was a strong push in the army for scrapping the Sherman and going straight to the Pershing, which would have been a match for the krauts. But in the end, momentum won the argument.”

“Momentum?”

“Thirty thousand Sherman chassis already built by ’forty-three. All those plants already tooled up, Allied armies depending on them. It made more sense to go with what we had.”

Julia stepped around a large pool of oily mud. “That was your argument, then.”

Prather smiled. “Yeah, well, mine and others’. Nobody really listens to me, though. I’m just an engineer. Anyway, the M-Four, your classic Sherman, she had a few problems. Even I have to admit that. A low-velocity seventy-five-millimeter popgun, wafer-thin armor, and a gasoline engine that just loved bursting into flames. In the long run I would have recommended discontinuing some of the Sherman production and switching over to the M-Twenty-nine Pershing heavies, with a ninety-millimeter high-velocity main gun. And that’s just what’s happening with some outfits. But there are quite a few mods that can be put in place on the Shermans, since we’ve been churning them out so fast.”

Julia wondered where he’d picked up the term mod. That was uptime gaming slang, as best she knew. But Prather was just a kid really-in a way he was a gamer, yet he was playing for life and death. She’d already decided she liked him.

He pulled up in front of a tank with a crude painting on the turret of a big-busted woman. She took a few still shots with her Sonycam.

“Check it out,” he enthused. “We got some slat armor. Simple, you know, but it really messes up the krauts’ RPG shots. We redesigned the turret to accommodate a high-velocity hundred-and-five-millimeter gun, and a lotta frame reinforcement went into that, but it means they can go toe-to-toe with old Fritz, although a lot of the time, you know, the Germans just use their tanks as pillboxes. They’re still a lot slower than the Easy Eights, even with all the changes we made, and we tend to get around in back of them, messing with the infantry, while the choppers hammer them with rocket fire.”