He didn’t feel up to the task of explaining a distributed information system like the Web to a couple of rubes whose idea of a computer had stalled at the abacus. And he certainly didn’t want to give them the keys to the kingdom. His knowledge of history was patchy. What details he knew of the battle at Midway came mostly from the Tom Cruise miniseries he’d watched on a pirated media stick. But he did understand the enormous power of the United States, even in this era. And he flattered himself that he understood their culture, too. Better than these two, at any rate.

America could lose Midway, and even Pearl Harbor, and it would prolong the war, but not change the outcome. As a people the Americans were a strange mix of sophistication and barbarism. They wouldn’t feel avenged until Japan had been burned to the ground. Within a few years they would detonate atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was inevitable that the Japanese would learn about that from the ship’s files, or more likely from one of the crew.

They might react by suing for peace. More likely they would engage in a race for the weapon themselves. And they would lose. Everybody lost when they fought the Americans, didn’t they?

He sighed and reached for the flexipad. But before he could bring up the data his hand was stayed by the sounds of a struggle and a scream just outside the wardroom.

Besides Moertopo, only two men capable of working the Combat Information Center were conscious. One of them was a systems engineer named Damiri. Ten minutes after coming to, he opened a file containing stored radio intercepts, picked up by the Sutanto’s passive arrays while he’d been unconscious. The CIC was immediately flooded with a graphic audio tableau of the hostilities near Midway.

He lunged for the control panel. A Japanese marine took the sudden movement as a threat, shouting, and pulling Damiri back by the hair. The guard threw one arm around the Indonesian sailor’s neck, attempting to drag him away from the console while still holding his rifle in the other hand.

Damiri, with some basic training in the Indonesian martial art of Silat, reacted instantly, clamping one hand over the wrist and jerking it down, away from his windpipe. At the same time he gouged at a nerve bundle in the man’s forearm. The guard grunted in pain and a little surprise, then slammed his rifle into the side of the engineer’s head. White flares exploded behind Damiri’s eyes, compounding the low-grade misery he’d suffered since awakening. He slumped, and the guard heaved him away from the console.

A couple more rifle-toting Japanese guards quickly appeared and butt-swiped the Indonesian with their rifles. His screams brought Moertopo and the others running.