Final impact

Before the Transition, Willet had prided herself on running a tight but happy outfit. Cut off from their families for six months at a time, the forty-two men and women under her command had become surrogate family members. She wouldn’t have imagined they could really be any closer, but she’d been wrong. The Transition had seemingly welded them together forever. There were times when she thought her people were more comfortable on the boat than they were back in the historical theme park of 1940s Sydney. As much as twenty-first-century culture-and a good deal of its antecedent history-had been adopted by the avant-garde crowd and almost everyone under the age of thirty, in a way that merely served to reinforce the sense of isolation they all felt. There was something terribly sad about the ’temp parties she’d attended back on shore, with everyone doing their damnedest to make her feel “at home.” You were likely to find yourself talking to a 1940s artist dressed like a 1970s disco bunny, trying with all her might to discuss post-ironic pop culture of the early new millennium. There were a few bars and restaurants owned by uptimers who’d been invalided out of service or simply finished their hitch, and they did a great job of shutting out reality. But stepping out of them at the end of the night was like falling into the wormhole all over again.

Unlike Karen Halabi, with whom she kept in regular contact via data relay, Willet did not suffer overly much from the depredations of pigheaded buffoons. Partly that was because she still worked so closely with Kolhammer’s forces. With the immediate threat to Australia having receded, Canberra was happy to attach the submarine to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the same way that many of the Royal Australian Navy’s contemporary vessels served with U.S. forces. And partly, of course, it helped that she was white, good looking, and the end product of a military family stretching back four generations.

She had relatives living now whom she vaguely remembered as wizened old ghosts at the family barbecues when she was a little girl. One of them, who’d died long before she was born, was a brigadier with the Sixth Division. Tom Willet. Like most of his comrades, a citizen-soldier for the duration.

In civilian life Tom was a lawyer to and a good friend of Sir Frank Packer, the owner of a newspaper and magazine empire. He’d taken a shine to his great-grandniece and through the offices of Sir Frank had ensured that her run into the good graces of the local establishment was smooth and hassle-free. She’d like to think that all the Japs she’d killed might count for something, too. But her ghostwritten “Advice from the Future” column in the Women’s Weekly magazine probably counted for more. And saving the world hadn’t really helped Karen Halabi gain entrйe to the rarefied circles of the London elite, had it?

Her intel boss, Lieutenant Lohrey, touched her on the arm and nodded to a screen just off to the left of the monitor bank she’d been watching.

Thanks, Amanda, she mouthed silently.

All thoughts of the weird, contrary life she now lived fell away as she leaned forward to peer at the split screen. Willet chewed her lower lip. She heard Lohrey grunt softly beside her. It was like something out of the dark ages, or one of those 1630s films by Peter Jackson.

“We estimate a million and a half combatants,” Lohrey informed her sotto voce.

Willet said nothing. She could hear her own breathing. No keyboards clacked anywhere in the center. Her sysops used touch screens, and such conversation as was necessary was conducted briefly and in low tones.

On the main display cube, above the boat’s lifeless holobloc, a CGI schematic of the threat bubble showed them surrounded by Soviet warships. Four Japanese submarines-of the eighteen they’d originally been tracking-still survived. But like her, they were lying doggo. Unlike her, they were undoubtedly waiting for the moment when they might fire off a brace of torpedoes, to do the most damage possible before dying inside of a maelstrom of depth charges and antisubmarine torpedoes and rockets.

The latter two weapons were among the many unpleasant surprises they’d logged since taking up station to secretly observe the battle. The Communist sub killers were primitive by her standards, but far in advance of anything they’d seen the Japanese deploy. It was impossible to tell without actually retrieving one for examination, but as best they could discern through sensor readings, the Soviets had produced large numbers of something like their old SET-53 passive homing torpedoes and a small number of the much more lethal SET-65 active/passive analogs. Even more disturbing than the weapons, however, were the platforms they’d been launched from: dedicated ASW helicopters.