“No. It’s my name. And there’s another three of us on this project. I’m just the only one who’s here right now. There’s two Yanks and a Brit. We’ve all got doctoral qualifications in history, or were going for them when this shit went down.”

“You don’t look old enough,” said Duffy.

“I was still going for mine. Had a thesis due in a few months. It was killing me.”

“There you go!” said Natoli. “A silver lining.”

“And look,” said Duffy, jerking her thumb at the board as she sat down, “you can do field research for your PhD. Talk about winning the lottery.”

“You guys, don’t seem overly upset,” said Nguyen, intrigued by their chirpiness.

“Antidepressants,” Duffy said, smiling sweetly. “Come and see us when they run out. That’ll be a dark fucking day.”

“So why are you guys here?” asked Nguyen. “Kolhammer promised us more hands, but nobody said anything about civilians.”

Duffy shrugged. “They won’t let us talk to our offices. Well, I guess most of us don’t have offices now . . .”

Natoli rolled her eyes.

“So we volunteered to help. It’s that, or stay locked in our cabins. I guess they figured this is where we’d do the least amount of damage. We’re supposed to be writing some puff piece for the local yokels, explaining how the hell we got here. That took all of two hours. So now we got nothing to do, and I really don’t want to go back to watching Rosanna’s undies dry in our cabin.”

“Okay,” said Nguyen. “You guys do any history at uni . . . sorry, in college?”

“Not a scrap,” said Duffy.

“I majored in Olde Icelandic legends.” Natoli grinned.

“Super,” said Rachel. She cleared a pile of paper from the keyboard in front of her and brought up the Fleetnet search window.

“What we’re doing,” she explained, “is looking at things that are supposed to happen during the next few weeks in all the theaters of this war. We’ll start with the Web cache first, because it’s much quicker and we have a lot of full-text stuff stored anyway—”

“Like war histories and so on?” asked Natoli.

“Yeah, occupational hazard. When we’ve exhausted that, we’ll get into the hard copy.” She indicated a pile of cardboard boxes pushed into the far corner of the office. They were packed tightly with books. “But the net’s keeping us busy for now. You get ten thousand people, they’re going to build up a lot of data over time.”

“You know any of the guys in the physics group?” asked Duffy. “Maybe we could speak to them to pad out our story.”