Harry was trying to center himself in a mental exercise, releasing his ego and allowing the world to flood in through all his senses without interruption. Unfortunately the steady stream of piss gushing from the Jap into the bushes beside his head was proving to be a hellish distraction. His heart refused to stop hammering, and a smirk was threatening to break out all over his face. This would, no doubt give rise to a fit of fear-inspired, hysterical laughter if he should let it.

The fellow must have been bursting with tea, judging from the time it took him to empty his bladder. At last, however, the stream began to gutter and die and then, with a few shakes, which splashed a drop or two on Harry’s goggles, he was done. The special ops teams listened to the rustle of his fly being fastened and the crunch of his boots through the undergrowth as he continued his patrol. They waited five minutes before moving or even resuming normal breathing patterns. When Harry judged it safe he subvocalized, “Fuck me, that was unpleasant.”

A small biochip implanted at the base of his neck, and powered by the electrical charge of his body’s cells, picked up the bone vibrations caused by the comment, transforming them into a quantum signal that was captured by the processors in his ear bud and narrowcast to the rest of the soldiers. They heard his voice in their helmets as clearly as if he had pressed his lips there and whispered to them.

“And I thought those pricks were supposed to revere royalty,” whispered Mitchell.

They lay on a small ridge that rose twenty meters above a Japanese barracks complex at the edge of the town. Familiar with Singapore in his own time, Harry found himself amazed at every turn by the primitive, colonial outpost through which they’d crept. There were no high-rise buildings, no architecture he thought of as modern in any way. You could see the water from almost every vantage point. Shrieks and chirps and a thousand other noises of the jungle never ceased. Monkeys still roamed everywhere.

A strict curfew kept the captive population of Malays and Indians inside after dark, and most of the Europeans were locked up in the Changi prison camp. Even so, he could tell when they passed near one ethnic neighborhood or another. The Indian quarter smelled of peppers, curry powder, and exotic fruits, the Chinese of fried meat and jasmine rice. The odors must have settled into the skin of the place, he thought. There was very little food in Singapore at the moment.