Final impact

The cav troopers tapped their mags against their steel pots before slapping them into place. Julia did the same, pulling the charging handle back along with everyone else. The bolt carrier slapped the first round into place. After Hawaii she’d switched over to using the same ’temp weapons as the units she covered.

Other than a small stock of ammunition kept for research purposes, none of the original loads that had come through the Transition remained. All the marines coming out of the Zone, and a few of the ’temp forces like the cav here, now loaded out with AT gear like the M4 assault rifle, a workmanlike copy of Colt’s venerable old martyr-maker.

Indeed, fitting her goggles and sweeping her eyes over Amundson’s chalk, it was hard to separate them from some of the units she’d covered as a young pool reporter in Yemen. Swap their olive drab battle dress for Desert MARPAT, and you were almost there. The knee and elbow pads, camel backs, combat goggles, webbing, and weaponry were all uptime variants, manufactured decades ahead of their time.

The Seventh Cavalry Regiment, along with all the other regiments in the First Air Cavalry Division, were still ’temp units, however, which meant that some things were very different. There were no African American cavalry troopers riding in this or any other helicopter. And no women. Other than Julia.

“Thirty seconds!” Amundson yelled.

“Clear left,” the crew chief called.

“Clear right,” the door gunner added.

The world turned opal green inside Julia’s Oakleys when she powered up the low-light-amplification system. They were descending rapidly onto a large field, where dozens of black-and-white-or rather, dark-jade-and-lime-green-dairy cows scattered in fear. A wire-guided rocket, a stubby little SS-11, swished overhead and detonated behind a copse of oak trees. Secondary explosions followed, and the night erupted. The chopper flared over their LZ, and Julia stood up.

“Let’s go!” Amundson yelled.

2

D-DAY + 2. 5 MAY 1944.

SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE (CALIFORNIA).

It was a hell of a thing, the way the smog had come back to Los Angeles.

Well, not back, he supposed. Most Californians were getting to know it for the first time. When Kolhammer had arrived in mid-’42, the air over the LA basin and the San Fernando had been so painfully clear, you could hurt yourself breathing it in too quickly. That had changed.

It still wasn’t anything like the carcinogenic soup of his era, but when he flew in these days there was a definite brown haze hanging over the mountains to the east, and a blurring on the horizon out in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the admiral shrugged and took a long, deep breath, just because he still could. To his leathery old lungs the air tasted sweet.

Perhaps after the war there’d be a chance to slow down and do things differently. Some people were already headed in that direction. He’d met some of the pointy-heads up in Berkeley who were looking at fusion, and he knew there was a small but well-connected group in the National Security Office studying options that would help the United States avoid ever falling hostage to the whims of the Saudi royal family “again.”

On his infrequent trips to downtown LA, he never failed to notice some manifestation of the future folding back in on itself. Last time it had been a billboard advertising the arrival of disposable diapers. Before that it was a restaurant that proclaimed its “all-microwaved” menu to the world-very unwisely, in Kolhammer’s opinion. Some days it seemed as if the postwar economy was already with them. Despite the demands of war production, some resources were now being allocated to manufacturing consumer goods like automatic washing machines and pop-up toasters. They weren’t available in great numbers, but that scarcity only added to the hysteria of desire for each new arrival. He’d read somewhere that each of five hundred “experimental” color television sets made by General Electric had been bought before they rolled off a special assembly line last month. Even though there were no network broadcasts for them to tune in to yet.

Everyone of the top five hundred companies in the United States now had a wholly owned subsidiary resident in the Zone. Some, like GE or Boeing, were there to exploit their own future intellectual property. Others were simply hydra-headed monsters like Slim Jim Enterprises or McClintock Investments, which had moved quickly and aggressively to cash in during the confusion of the months following the Transition. They had accumulated enough wealth, and with it power, to protect their often dubious claims to ownership over myriad products and patents.

So much money had been pouring into the Zone via its own stock exchange-an offshoot of New York’s-that regulators in Washington had been forced to step in and stem the capital tide, lest it unbalance the outside economy.

It was amazing what happened when hindsight became foresight.