Final impact

Prather levered himself up, his knees creaking painfully. He felt about fifty years old.

How does an old fart like Patton do it?

One of the scouts noticed Duffy’s breasts.

“Hey, is that is a dame?”

“Yeah,” Prather said. “Good eye. Okay, let’s get it done. Tag the site. Call in a medevac for Ms. Duffy. Mark the grid up for War Crimes and Graves registration. Then we’ll push on.”

He turned away and walked slowly back to his tank. He was looking forward to climbing back inside and embalming himself in the rank stew of diesel fumes, body odors, and mechanical stink. His face was contorted with disgust. It was an expression he recognized on every man he passed.

Fucking Nazis, he thought. “I hope the Reds nuke the fucking lot of ’em.”

D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 2134 HOURS.

HMS TRIDENT, NORTH SEA.

“One of ours, you say? I didn’t think we had any of ours out there at the moment?”

“Aye, Captain. Seems to be a wee stuff-up. She’s a civvy. An embedded reporter. Ms. Duffy,” explained her XO.

“Julia Duffy?” Halabi asked, raising her eyebrows in surprise. It was deep night outside, and she could see her reflection in the armored glass of the slit windows in the stealth destroyer’s bridge.

“Aye, Cap’n. Embedded with the U.S. Seventh Cavalry on D-Day. But she’s still listed in Fleetnet as part of the original Multinational Force complement. So she’s been sent to us.”

Halabi shook her head at the way clerical errors seemed to be the only constant across the multiple realities.

“Do we have the bed space?”

“Aye, ma’am. Three empty cots. No waiting.”

“Oh well,” the Trident’s skipper said, “no harm done then. How is she?”

McTeale checked his flexipad. “Four broken ribs, a small puncture of the left lung. Deep-tissue damage to the upper torso. Apparently she survived an impromptu firing squad. We can patch her up, send her on in a day or two.”

“Sweet mother of God,” Halabi said as she sipped at a steaming mug of tea. “She’s indestructible. Is she conscious? Is she talking to anyone?”

McTeale nodded. “Aye, ma’am. Cursing up a storm, by all reports.”

“That’d be right,” Halabi said, grinning. “You can look after the shop for a few minutes, Mr. McTeale. I might as well pop downstairs and have a word with our celebrity contestant.”

“Very good, ma’am.”

Halabi left the bridge and headed across into the starboard hull of the trimaran. The ship was quiet, but not exactly calm. The storms of the last few days had whipped the North Sea into a bit of a washing machine, and her passage through the companionways of the stealth destroyer was a matter of lurching from one handhold to the next. She passed only a few crewmembers, however. Many of her sailors were asleep in their bunks, although the Combat Information Center was fully staffed around the clock, the sysops keeping a constant watch on the feed from the Nemesis arrays. A third of them were monitoring the Eastern Front, and the ship was full of ’temps again, as “experts” in the Soviet military had come aboard to make sense of the data stream pouring in from Poland.

She always felt as if she had unwanted houseguests when the number of ’temps passed a certain point. This lot wasn’t too bad. They tended to be of a more academic bent than the usual run of buffoons, and she hadn’t been dragged into a pissing contest with any of them so far.

Still, she felt uncomfortable, which was ridiculous, wasn’t it, really? It was her ship. The crew respected her, and she was doing a great job. In her cabin she had personal letters of thanks from both the king and the prime minister. Her dress uniform was heavy with medals, and the BBC had even had her in as a guest on Desert Island Discs. She’d chosen Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a Dvorбk setting of Te Deum, and a couple of grrrl-power standards like the Donnas’ “Fall Behind Me” and Anna B’s “Mister Tubbs,” before finishing with Jurassic 5 kicking it on “What’s Golden.” The host, Roy Plomley, was a charming man who was more than chuffed that his little radio program would play on well into the next century-all things being equal. But of course, they weren’t.

As pleasant as the interlude with Plomley had been, it was one of the few really enjoyable moments she’d had since coming home. Some days it was hard even to think of England as her home anymore. She had some family here, on her mother’s side, but one meeting with them had been more than enough. They’d been horrified at the idea of a “darkie” in the family. Her father’s family was somewhere in Pakistan, which wasn’t even Pakistan yet, and perhaps never would be. They’d disowned her back up in twenty-one, when she’d left home to join the navy. They thought her a traitor to the faith, and a couple of the nuttier ones had even written to tell her that her life had been forfeited the moment she’d turned her back on Allah.

Dickheads.