The Havoc’s captain wondered idly when the remaining Japanese boats would come to life and charge to the surface looking for a quick kill before the inevitable counterstrike took them out of the game. Unlike her, they didn’t enjoy the luxuries of remote sensor feeds, or the quantum processing power of an advanced Combat Intelligence. They’d be lashing out in the dark. Literally.

She checked the time hack on the nearest screen. It was twenty minutes after midnight.

The boat’s processors were fully engaged filtering the immense intelligence take from the Battle of Okhotsk as it raged through the darkness hours. The Soviets weren’t big on emission control, so in addition to the audiovisual coverage coming in from the Big Eye drone, the Havoc was also scooping up vast quantities of electronic and signals intelligence. Designed to stalk and strike at the infinitely more capable Chinese navy nearly eight decades hence, the submarine had little trouble accumulating data on her current targets. But with such a small crew, and none of them very well versed in post-Transition Soviet naval technology or tactics, Captain Jane Willet had orders to watch, and nothing more. The Sovs had done so much in secret, there were almost no patches or upgrades to the Nemesis files on them. Willet’s people were writing the first ones.

Every two hours Lieutenant Lohrey zapped another compressed, encrypted burst up to the drone, which relayed the package back to an AWACS bird loitering fifteen hundred kilometers to the southeast. From there it went back to the Clinton, where Kolhammer and Spruance had dozens of specialists working on the take and joining the very rough dots her Intel Section had mapped out. Even more analysts were on their way from Hawaii.

Willet grimaced as Master Chief Flemming pointed out an especially gruesome scene in one of the smaller windows. A Japanese artillery position was being overrun. The drone gave them a view of the carnage from a virtual height of one hundred meters. What was that line from Shakespeare, she thought. There’s none die well that die in battle… The Englishman had been writing about Agincourt, half a millennium ago, but he could just as well have been observing the fight for that gun battery.

From the comparative safety of her hiding place, Jane Willet gave thanks that her life paths had led her to the cool and quiet space of her bridge on the Havoc, and not into the middle of the insensate slaughter taking place just over the horizon.

For the first time since he’d taken command of the USS Armanno, Captain John F. Kennedy wished he could trade it for his old PT boat. The Armanno, a new Halsey-class guided missile destroyer, was a magnificent fighting ship. Unlike his old boat, though, he didn’t think she was really meant for this sort of work. He would have felt a lot more comfortable slipping in and out of Japanese-held waters on the much smaller, less conspicuous PT boat. He knew he could have accommodated the six-strong Force Recon team. Even with all their equipment and the rigid-hulled inflatable, he still could have squeezed them in.

But then again, if the nips tumbled them, it’d be a lot easier fighting their way out in the Armanno. And of course, Spruance’s armada didn’t include any torpedo boats.

“Coming up on the release point, skipper.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hubbard. XO, give our guests a five-minute warning.”

“Aye, Captain.”

His executive officer passed on the command via the ship’s intercom. Kennedy continued to sweep the sea with his Starlite goggles. He was past marveling at the opalescent view. He knew that down in the ship’s CIC, two dozen systems operators were scanning the threat bubble with infinitely more powerful sensors, but his days flitting around behind Japanese lines died hard, and he had lookouts posted all over the ship, just in case some gremlin decided to chew through a golden wire holding all his magical AT gear together. Sonar, radar, active, passive, phased array. It was all good, and he’d never be dumb enough to argue that a Mark 1 Eyeball was better. But as his father used to say, an extra set of peepers on a problem never hurt, did it?

A small meteor shower to the northwest caught his attention, the falling stars appearing as streaks of emerald brilliance in his Starlites. The last time he’d seen anything so beautiful had been up at the family place in Hyannisport back at the end of fall. A cool, crisp night, with the northern stars out in abundance. His father had thrown a party on the last night of his leave, a little going-away soirйe. Or that was how they’d sold it to him anyway. When he’d arrived with his date Natalia from upstate New York, the dozens of cars parked along Marchant Avenue spoke of an entirely different purpose. The summer house was full of political types and businessmen. His heart sank as soon as the whole circus caravan swung into view.

He’d tried to convince Ali, as she liked to be called, that they should split before anyone saw them. Head back to the cabin and spend the rest of his leave together there. But she was a sweet girl, and coming from LA she loved a party. They could hear the music drifting down across the lawns as soon as he cut the car engine.

“That sounds like Frank Sinatra,” she squealed. “Oh, come on, Jack. We simply must!”

Against his better judgment he gave in to her, and spent the next six hours regretting it as his dad forced him to glad-hand every sweating, drunken idiot in a suit on the East Coast. He died inside every time someone insisted on calling him Mr. President, which was more or less every time anyone spoke to him. He caught sight of Ali’s honey-blond hair just once, on the other side of a crowded room, where she was deep in conversation with Sinatra and a rough-headed character who had to be the famous Slim Jim Davidson. He hardly got to speak to his brothers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing, as his dad seemed intent on playing each off against the other. He’d have thought reading the future histories might have dampened the old man’s enthusiasm for pushing his sons into public life, but no. Far from it.

Foresight seemed to have fueled a deep, almost unnatural desire in Joe Kennedy to take a stranglehold on fate and choke the living shit out of it. He hadn’t been able to rest till he got that Oswald kid away from his mother and into that boarding school in Canada. And poor Joe Jr. still blamed him for getting yanked off the flight line over in England. Man, he’d heard the yelling and the hollering over that one all the way out in Hawaii.

“Hell of thing, ain’t it, buddy, having your past come back and bite you on the ass before you even have a chance to fuck it up the first time around?”

“Huh?”

He’d been woolgathering out on the patio, and the man had snuck up on him. The man and the woman, now that he looked.

“Don’t worry, Mack, I’m not gonna Mr. President you, you poor bastard.”

Kennedy found himself feeling genuine relief. He couldn’t help being amused by the cheeky, knowing grin on this guy’s face, either.

“Well, if you promise you won’t whistle ‘Hail to the Chief ’ while you’re blowing smoke up my ass,” he said, “I won’t call for the cops after I check to see if my wallet’s still here, Mr. Davidson.”

Slim Jim Davidson grinned broadly. “I ain’t like that no more, Captain Kennedy. These days I got me a whole bunch of minions to do my pickpocketing for me, and on a much grander scale.”

“And is this one of them?” Jack asked, nodding to the woman who stood, smiling enigmatically, just behind the famous businessman.

“No,” she answered for herself, “Slim Jim and I have had professional dealings in the past, but not like that. I’m a reporter. Julia-”