She was the last briefing officer of the day, and she had a tough act to follow: the poor bastards from physics, who were still riffing on old Star Trek episodes. She patted her breast pocket for maybe the tenth time to make sure the data stick was still there and tried to focus on her breathing in an effort to calm down. She wished she could take Julia and Rosanna into the meeting with her. Nothing seemed to freak them out. But they were ashore, having written her a three-page summary of U.S. antisubmarine operations in June 1942.

It was a left-handed gift. She was discovering that when you gave a bunch of admirals a golden egg, they invariably come back at you wanting a dozen more.

She could hear a man speaking with an English accent. He seemed to be saying that they should reprogram Metal Storm to prioritize kamikaze attacks and traditional iron bombs, rather than hypersonic, wave-skimming antiship missiles. It was off-topic, but he had a point, she thought. Resentfully aware that her bloody PhD had come back to haunt her, she quietly cursed her decision to enroll in postgraduate history. That’s when an ensign called her in.

Her fatigue fell away as she entered the meeting room. She recognized most of the senior commanders from the Multinational Force, but it was the immediate familiarity of men like Nimitz and Spruance that gave her a start. She’d seen those faces countless times in books and on screen, but here they were, alive and looking to her for . . . what? Salvation? To their minds they were still in the first days of a war they could very well lose. A couple of the men who sat with them shook their heads at her arrival.

She took her place the lectern and fumbled in her pocket for the data stick, nearly dropping it as she tried to slot it home. She exhaled audibly to settle her nerves as the stick clicked into place and the massive wallscreen behind her winked from neutral blue to a map of the world.

“Good evening. This is a summary of the relevant disposition of forces across the global theaters as of June ninth, nineteen forty-two.”

She paused briefly to glance up at her audience. Most of the faces were neutral; some, such as her own captain’s, were even encouraging. For the first time, however, she noticed that two men were openly scowling at her; contemporary Royal Navy types, to judge by their uniforms. They sat next to Captain Halabi from HMS Trident, who was acting on Kolhammer’s behalf while he was away in Los Angeles and Commander Judge was briefing MacArthur. Their body language betrayed the insurmountable gulf that she would be asked to somehow cross. Unfortunately, her presentation wasn’t likely to cheer up the Brits.