Brasch looked on with creeping horror as a movie played in a window on the screen. Shells burst among what he assumed to be Soviet troops. A few near the detonation were knocked down by the blast. Then within seconds their comrades had also dropped, their bodies racked by violent seizures. The small room remained in silence while the footage played. At the end of it, Brasch released a deep breath.

“I see. And how much of this…gas, I suppose…how much has been used?”

Prince Harry spoke up, his usually jolly personality held in check. “It’s impossible to say with accuracy, but we think at least five SS artillery regiments have been equipped with the stuff.”

“Only SS?”

“Yes. No Wehrmacht units, so far.”

Brasch gripped the back of a chair as the ship took another wild ride through a canyon of seawater. “And tell me, does the effect persist? Are they using it as a-”

“As an area denial weapon?” Harry finished for him. “Yes. It appears so, which is why we wanted to know if you knew anything of this program. Nerve agents that do not easily disperse tend to come from what we call the V-series. They wouldn’t have been synthesized for another seven or eight years yet. This doesn’t look like the sarin or tabun Hitler began making at the start of the war.”

Brasch’s lighter mood evaporated, replaced by a dark melancholy that felt all too familiar from his time on the Eastern Front. So inured to surprise had he become since the Emergence-indeed, since his survival at Belgorod-that for a moment part of his mind seemed to float free, to detach itself from his body with a slight tug and hover just above the clutch of military men and women gathered here. Two days earlier, had any of these people chanced to cross his path, they would surely have tried to kill him.

The disconnected moment collapsed in on itself abruptly as Captain Halabi pressed a hand to her ear and began to speak to someone he could not see. Brasch assumed she enjoyed some sort of communications link, perhaps even embedded in her body, of which he was ignorant. There had been no guided tour of the Trident for him, but what little he had seen bespoke a level of technological advancement that was still almost incomprehensible.

“Excuse me,” she said, and Brasch was fascinated to see that they all deferred to this small, colored woman as easily as they might have to Eisenhower himself. “We have more data feeding through on the laser links. Live coverage this time.”

Halabi then said something in a hushed tone to the machine operator sitting at the console around which they were gathered. The young woman-another schwarzer, although much darker in skin tone than the captain-began to dance her fingers across the screen in front of her. Brasch watched in fascination as items on the display seemed to follow her touch, some collapsing, some inflating to display new windows in which he could see some sort of movie that was running, this time in full color. The woman occasionally dropped her hands to a keyboard and ripped out quick bursts of typing, doubtless entering some command that required more than the brush of a fingertip on a monitor.

“My Intelligence Division informs me that the Soviets are trying to push a division through a valley just here.” She pointed at a topographic map on one of the screens. “We’d best watch this down in the CIC, but…”

She favored Brasch with a level stare.

“Herr General. It’s is not my usual policy to allow enemy combatants into the heart of my ship. But Colonel Windsor and your controllers in London assure me that you can be trusted.”

Brasch bowed slightly in the direction of the warrior-prince, but Halabi wasn’t finished.

“I can be trusted, too, Herr General. I can be trusted to have you thrown over the side in heavy chains if you give me even the slightest reason to doubt you.”

“I would expect no less, Kapitдn. You have quite a fierce reputation in the Reich. Gцbbels calls you the black widow, but the men of the Kriegsmarine prefer the Black Widowmaker,” Brasch said with a wry curve of the lips. He saw Prince Harry smile and heard a couple of the English officers snigger.

Halabi merely cocked a very cool eyebrow. “Well then, if you wish to see your family again, you will behave yourself.”

“Of course.”

“Mr. Waddington!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Brasch jumped slightly at the strength and proximity of the voice behind him. He hadn’t realized that anybody was standing there, but turning slightly he found a slab-shouldered, hard-faced man holding a black device of some sort down near the small of his back.

“Chief, stay close to our guest. If you have to, taser him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man called Waddington replied, with an evil glint in his eye.

“Right, then, follow me ladies and gentlemen,” Halabi said, and they began to file out.

Prince Harry hung back and fell in beside the German.

“She is quite the dictator, yes?” Brasch said.

“Liberated women.” Harry shrugged. “What’s a bloke to do?”

In a different part of the ship, Julia Duffy awoke to find herself dreaming-or at least she thought she was dreaming for a few seconds of free fall before she realized that Captain Marcel Ronsard was indeed standing, somewhat awkwardly, by the side of her bed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Ronsard shrugged. “Not the welcome I was hoping for, but it will have to do. And how are you, mon cherie?”

“Well, for one thing,” she said, pushing herself up in the bed, which moved to compensate at least partly for the pitch and yaw of the ship, “I’m not your fucking cherie. But I guess I’m glad to see a friendly face. A little surprised, though. What the fuck are you doing here?”

Ronsard unloaded another Gallic shrug on her. “You know I cannot say. You, however, I have heard all about. If you did not want to join me in Scotland, you had only to say so, you silly girl. There was no need to run away with Patton to end our affair.”

“Asshole.” She smiled. “You hear I almost got waxed?”

“They told me,” he said, the levity disappearing from his voice. “They said the fascists tried to murder you, along with some GIs.”

Duffy sighed, feeling ragged and all too fragile.

“They killed all those boys,” she said, shaking her head. “Woulda killed me, too, but I was so covered in mud and crap by that stage they didn’t see that I was wearing matrix armor. I don’t think they even realized I was a chick. And the boys kept it quiet, God bless ’em. It was kind of a rush job. Not up to the usual efficient SS standards when it comes to atrocities. Himmler is gonna be pissed.”

She found a relatively comfortable position and settled into the pillows. “So if you can’t tell me where you’ve been, can you at least say where you’re going?”

“Back to Scotland, like I told you. I was delayed in France by a broken heart.”

She chuckled, and then winced at the pain. “Jesus, Ronsard, you’ll fucking kill me where the Nazis failed.”

Julia felt the ship climb up a precipitous wall of water, hover in the air, and come crashing down on the other side with an almighty hollow boom. In her specially constructed bed she was hardly troubled, but Ronsard had some difficulty keeping to his feet.

“You wanna hop in with me?” she asked.

“Well, I-”

“I don’t mean in that way, Filthy Pierre. I couldn’t put out at the moment if my life depended on it.”

Ronsard gingerly hopped up on the bed, making sure not to squash her. “So, you are on your way to hospital back in England then?” he said. “And I could come down from Scotland, perhaps, when you are well enough to, what was it, get the leg over?”

Duffy patted him on one leg. “Nice thought, but I’m going back to France.”

“You cannot be serious, surely?”

“I am, and don’t call me Shirley…sorry, old joke.”

He looked confused and for a sad, terrible moment she was reminded of Dan. Looking back on their relationship, he’d sported the same poleaxed expression more often than not.