The Australian submariner shook her head.

“No, but Commander Judge tells me that Canberra is very keen to see us back in home waters. They’re not putting pressure on yet, but you can bet they will if there’s any concerted Japanese push south. At this time, mid-nineteen-forty-two, they very likely think of themselves as facing a full-scale invasion.”

Commander Judge spoke up from beside Kolhammer.

“That’s about right, Admiral. They’ll take their lead from Washington for now. But MacArthur is down there banging the drums, desperately trying to get his hands on the whole force. If he thinks he can get in Prime Minister Curtin’s ear to recall the Australian national contingent, I’m certain that’s exactly what he’ll do. He wants Brigadier Barnes’s battalion and the SAS under his wing as soon as possible. If he can get the Eighty-second as well, he’ll be in seventh heaven.”

“He only thinks so,” said Colonel Jones.

Kolhammer nodded as he digested the information.

“This isn’t an immediate issue—at least not yet,” he said. “For now, unless anyone has any drastic objection, I don’t intend to split our forces. Captain Halabi, you leave London to me.”

He looked at the foreign commanders. None of them said a word. So Kolhammer stood up again and walked around in front of the wallscreen.

“We agree we’re stuck here, for the moment,” he said. “Effectively forever. Even winning this war and accelerating the rate of technological development in this time line, the best guess says we won’t be able to build anything like the Nagoya for thirty or forty years. I’m not just quoting from our own amateurs in the Physics Group we put together. I spoke to Professor Einstein and a whole bunch of other eggheads back in LA, and they agree. They’re champing at the bit to pore over the information we brought with us. But even leapfrogging their theoretical understanding forward by three or four generations, we have to wait for the industrial base to catch up.”

He began to pace back and forward as he built his argument.

“Bottom line, we’ve got to make this work, and we’ve already got problems. Some people will never forgive us for Midway. Then there’s Anderson and Miyazaki, that’s a bad business. Maybe it was an opportunistic homicide, maybe it wasn’t. The riot in Honolulu, that chief petty officer getting shot, none of it bodes well. We don’t fit in here. I don’t know that we ever will with any great ease. But I think we have to try. We’ve got to bring something more than disruption and chaos with us. That’s why I’m thinking of hitting those Japanese prison camps. We can save more lives than we took when we came here. I think we need to do it. Not just politically, but morally. We owe them.”