“We have a Japanese Self-Defense Force ship operating as part of our task force, that’s right. But they’re of no threat to you here, or to Midway, or the United States of America.”

“Tell it to the Portland,” Spruance forced out through pursed lips. “I have a destroyer over where she went down and they haven’t found a single survivor. Not one! And I watched that rocket fly up off the deck of your Japanese friend myself. So please, spare me. All I want to know is, what the hell is going on here. You say you’re American, but you’re obviously treating with our enemies.”

“Well, if we could just sit down—”

Spruance rode in over Kolhammer. “Absolutely not. No secret parleys tonight, my friend. You were trying to kill these men a short while ago.”

He took in the hundreds of onlookers with a sweep of the hand.

“You can make your apologies and explanations to them.”

Kolhammer’s fuse was beginning a long, slow burn. He’d known this wouldn’t be easy, but he had his own casualties, and he’d be damned if they’d be treated as less valuable in some wretched body count. A line of Shakespeare occurred to him. We are enough to do our country loss. If his suspicions held true, every man and woman under his command was going to be counted as lost before too long.

The satchel of printouts and photocopied magazine articles felt heavy and useless in his hands. He could hardly lay them out on the wet flight deck and take a couple of hundred overtly hostile onlookers through a primer on quantum mechanics and Multiverse Theory, even if he knew what the hell he was talking about.

He turned to Jones and Halabi, his eyes asking them if there was any point in sugarcoating it. Both looked back at him, clearly relieved that they weren’t the ones in the rumble seat.

“Bad medicine is best swallowed in one gulp, Admiral,” said Jones.

“It can hardly sound more ridiculous than it did to us,” Halabi added.

Spruance clearly didn’t feel he had time for double talk. “Well?”

Kolhammer drew in his breath. He took some time to look around him. Just a second or so to convince himself it was all real: the wet wooden planking beneath his feet, the cumbersome equipment for the antique gun mounts, the unchanging sea of white male faces peering out from behind the textbook image of Raymond A. Spruance. All of this under a lowering sky in the deep of night, with the chilled air tasting of brine beneath the synthetic smells of oil and steel.

They were a long way from the tropics.