Lieutenant Commander Black cracked his big broken knuckles. “You know, I might look like a real palooka, but I have a master’s in civil engineering. It’s only from Dakota State, but I had to sit down for five years of book learning like everyone else. Just because I used to break rocks for a living doesn’t make me a fuckin’ rockhead. I understand progress. The way I worked a mine was a hell of a lot different from the way my granddaddy did.

“I look at this bird and it seems mighty queer to me, but Ensign Curtis, he tells me these things are already on the drawing board. You got a woman flying this thing? Fine. I’ll bet Amelia Earhart could fly rings around her. And as for you, Colonel Jones, my great-great-granddaddy on my mama’s side was a lieutenant with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a black regiment with white officers. He died with his men, charging the Confederate guns at Fort Wagner. The grapeshot cut them up so bad, you couldn’t tell who was who, or who was what, if you get my drift. So the home I grew up in, you ever spoke the word nigger, you got your ass whupped good and proper. Maybe you want to bear that in mind, Colonel Jones, before you go judging the content of a man’s character by the color of his skin.”

Jones gave Dan Black the benefit of his hardest glare, until a sly smile cracked open his granite features.

“Well put, Commander. Touché.”

“Admiral Kolhammer?”

“Yes, Ensign?”

“How can you be sure you went back in time, and we didn’t come forward?”

Kolhammer shifted his weight as they banked for approach. “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” he answered. “But we can’t access any of our satellites. Our radar, which is a hell of a lot more powerful than yours, isn’t giving us the returns that it should. We were just off the coast of East Timor, down the bottom of the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia in our day. But it’s not coming up anymore. We can’t find anything, TV, radio, GPS, nothing. Our equipment is fine. It’s just like there’s nothing out there.”

The two Enterprise officers only understood about half of what he said, but the admiral’s demeanor left no doubt as to what he was getting at.

“And what about this ship, the Nagoya? Where’d it get to?” asked Black.