“That’s one I really can’t answer.” Kolhammer shrugged. “We’ve been looking for it, believe me. I’m hoping to God it hasn’t come through and landed in Tokyo Bay. But I doubt it. We’re missing a couple of other ships, but they were all some distance from the center of the group, and the simplest explanation is that they just didn’t get sucked up with the rest of us. We lost a couple of nuclear submarines and some Indonesian destroyers like that. Although the destroyers weren’t such a great loss. Another ship got cut in half by the event horizon.

“The Nagoya was tucked away between the Clinton and a couple of cruisers. It would have been at the epicenter of whatever went wrong. It was probably destroyed, but we’ll have to invest significant assets confirming that.”

“Because that’s your only way home, right?” said Curtis.

“Got it in one, son,” said Kolhammer. “But for now, if you’d care to look outside, you can see what the Enterprise will grow into, given eighty years or so.”

They two visitors leaned over. Black swore softly. Ensign Curtis didn’t bother to hide his surprise.

“Good gosh! It’s as big as a city.”

USS ENTERPRISE, 0005 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

Captain Halabi couldn’t remember ever being at such an uncomfortable gathering. There were only three of them standing in Spruance’s cabin as the admiral methodically leafed through her copy of Fuchida and Okumiya’s Midway. The other officer present, a Commander Beanland from his planning staff, had attempted to engage her in polite chitchat, but the conversation curled up and died on the deck after he had blundered into a morass of nonsensical questions about the hygiene difficulties of “women’s troubles” on board a warship. Halabi had snapped back at him that menstruation proved itself to be much less of a problem than the standard array of sucking chest wounds, compound fractures, and deep tissue burns with which one had to deal after a missile strike.

“Fascinating,” Spruance murmured, closing the book with a snap. “If it’s true.”

“Well, it won’t be now of course,” Halabi ventured. “The collision between our two forces has seen to that.”

“Indeed . . . Captain. And so, what now? If you are what you claim to be, what do you do now? Throw the lever on the magic box that brought you here? Leaving us in the lurch? You might very well find when you get home that everyone speaks German and Japanese.”

Halabi rubbed her tired eyes. “Well, to begin with, we seem to have lost our magic box. And even if we could throw it into reverse, all the currently accepted theories of time distortion posit an infinitely variform multiverse rather than a single linear universe . . .”

She lost them with that, and so decided to try a different tack.