For just a second or two after that first moment of clarity, Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had actually been relieved that, for the time being at least, she wouldn’t have to write a doctoral thesis. Moment of clarity—also known as the “Oh, no” moment—was the term Margie Francois had coined for those few seconds of dizzying intellectual free fall that came on when you realized deep down in your bones that you had fallen through a hole in the universe. If you were going to check out for good, they said, you were mostly likely to do so within thirty minutes of your own moment of clarity.

After her momentary spurt of guilty glee, Rachel’s reaction had shifted back toward the average, a mix of bewilderment and grief. Her first rational thought had been for her mother and father, who’d alternated between pride and alarm when confronted by their daughter’s choice of a career in the navy. She was the only Nguyen daughter, and they’d been aghast at the possibility of losing her. Well, she thought ruefully, they’ve lost me now. She wasn’t dead, but she felt so utterly lost it seemed as if she might as well be.

Such was her mood when the two reporters knocked on the door of her temporary office aboard the Clinton where she’d been transferred to work with a small group of history graduates. There was no escaping her damn degree.

“Hey, are you Rachel?” asked one of them. “I’m Julia Duffy, and this is Rosanna Natoli. The Hammer said we should come down and help you out.”

“Cool,” Nguyen said, though without much enthusiasm.

“Hey,” Natoli said, “you an Aussie?”

Rachel glanced down at the shoulder patch displaying her national flag.

“Apparently.”

“My cousin Stella married an Aussie. They moved to Melbourne. You from there? You might know them.”

“Yeah, Stella from Melbourne. Everyone knows her.”

“Jeez,” said Duffy, “you’re a bright beam of sunshine aren’t you, Lieutenant.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “I was just thinking about my oldies. You know, my parents.”

Natoli pulled a chair out, patted Rachel on the arm, and launched into a therapeutic routine that consisted of endless, labyrinthine tales of her five sisters’ weddings and her own plans to get to New York as soon as possible to find her grandparents and tell them to invest in IBM. Julia Duffy drifted about the small office, which was fitted out with half a dozen workstations and a large whiteboard Nguyen had been filling up with a local time line of the last month and the next two.

“Are you the only one working on this, Rachel? Do you mind us calling you Rachel?” Duffy asked during a lull in the Natoli family saga.