He was right, Evans realized. That was what threw him about the voice. It was black, like one of those Harlem jazz singers.

“What’re you trying to pull, lady,” he called back. “There’s no such ship as the Leyte Gulf, and if there was, the captain wouldn’t be a dame. You just put Tojo on the loudspeaker, if he knows any English. I’ll take a surrender from him.”

The cheers of his crewmates were punctuated by a good deal of laughter this time. Anderson didn’t reply, and he wondered if she’d been hustled away by her captors.

Clancy and Nix crouched on either side of the aperture giving on to Evans and his men. Both men had set their night vision to the soft emerald of low-light amplification. Infrared was useless. There were simply too many heat sources bleeding into the fused mayhem of junk metal. Sparks cascaded from shorted-out wiring. Steam vented from ruptured pipes in brilliant ruby-red geysers, and small spot fires burned all around them, adding a hot smoke haze to the saturated air.

Clancy hand-signed to Anderson. Did she want them to work around though the maze of scrap and attempt to subdue the targets?

The captain shook her head. She cut power to the small bullhorn in her left hand.

“The way you guys look,” she subvocalized, “they’d take you for a couple of Nazis.”

A chip implanted just below her jawline picked up the vibrations and converted them into a narrowcast quantum signal. Nix and Clancy heard their commanding officer’s words in their helmets as clearly as if she’d spoken at normal volume in a quiet room. Nobody else heard anything.

“Just keep it tight and try not to waste anyone” she continued. “I’ll try again.”

That amplified voice boomed out again.

“All right, Commander Evans. I’m coming forward with my CPO and Specialist Nix. Are you in the head that intersected our weather station?”

Evans’s eyes went wide at that. They were definitely hunkered down in a john and he figured that yes, maybe the science lab stuff could be weather equipment of some sort.

Mohr just looked at him as if to say What next?

“Yeah. I guess so,” replied the Astoria’s acting CO.

“We’re coming armed. You fire on us and Clancy will pop a frag through that crack as easy as the round that killed your other guy a minute ago. Be nice if he didn’t have to do that again.”