Sixty medics, three-quarters of them ’temps, had embarked at New Caledonia, when they’d rendezvoused with the convoy of troop transports and converted passenger liners for the long run to the South China Sea. They plowed along between two antique Royal Navy destroyers and the three modern ships, of which only the Trident was really a fighter. Their course took them through some of the same waters they’d crossed on their way to Timor in the twenty-first century. Like many of her colleagues she was past being bothered by a fractured sense of déjà vu. It was there all the time now, like your heartbeat.

Nobody had spoken on the bridge for a while. The tension was building as they rounded the northern tip of Sumatra and laid on steam for the objective. Even so, they were restricted to the speed of the slowest ship in their group, a Dutch liner, the Princess Beatrix. She made twenty-one knots, which wasn’t bad, Nguyen supposed. But even the Ipswich could break thirty at a gallop, and she was a sea pig, loaded down with 2 Cav’s armor and attack choppers.

A half-moon illuminated the ships and their phosphorescent wakes.

“Won’t be long now,” said Captain Sheehan.

Nguyen checked her threat boards out of habit. She needn’t have bothered. They weren’t about to be swarmed by Chinese sea skimmers. A screen at her station, one of three, displayed the threat bubble out to a thousand kilometers, courtesy of the battle link with the Nemesis arrays of HMS Trident. Seven aircraft were being tracked and three surface contacts, further down the Strait of Malacca toward Singapore. The stealth destroyer’s sensor and weapons suites were infinitely more powerful than anything she had to play with. When the shit hit the fan, there’d actually be very little for her to do. The Trident’s Combat Intelligence would take control of all of Nguyen’s defensive systems and wield them as one with its own.

She wondered what the crews on the old ships made of it all. She didn’t even know what they’d been told of the mission. Perhaps nothing. No sane man from this time would willingly steam into the heart of the Japanese empire. Rachel used a trackball to train a mast-mounted cam on the nearest vessel, a New Zealand hospital ship, HMZNS Christchurch. She smiled at the image of three sailors lined up against a railing on the forecastle. She could see them quite clearly through her night vision lens. They were swapping a single pair of binoculars, pointed first to the Trident, then to the Australian catamaran. They seemed less interested in HMAS Ipswich. It was a more conventional-looking ship.

Captain Sheehan appeared at her shoulder.

“You have to wonder what they make of this.”

A tone in Nguyen’s earpiece told her that Trident had locked onto a possible hostile aircraft.