Final impact

Brasch gripped the back of a chair as the ship took another wild ride through a canyon of seawater. “And tell me, does the effect persist? Are they using it as a-”

“As an area denial weapon?” Harry finished for him. “Yes. It appears so, which is why we wanted to know if you knew anything of this program. Nerve agents that do not easily disperse tend to come from what we call the V-series. They wouldn’t have been synthesized for another seven or eight years yet. This doesn’t look like the sarin or tabun Hitler began making at the start of the war.”

Brasch’s lighter mood evaporated, replaced by a dark melancholy that felt all too familiar from his time on the Eastern Front. So inured to surprise had he become since the Emergence-indeed, since his survival at Belgorod-that for a moment part of his mind seemed to float free, to detach itself from his body with a slight tug and hover just above the clutch of military men and women gathered here. Two days earlier, had any of these people chanced to cross his path, they would surely have tried to kill him.

The disconnected moment collapsed in on itself abruptly as Captain Halabi pressed a hand to her ear and began to speak to someone he could not see. Brasch assumed she enjoyed some sort of communications link, perhaps even embedded in her body, of which he was ignorant. There had been no guided tour of the Trident for him, but what little he had seen bespoke a level of technological advancement that was still almost incomprehensible.

“Excuse me,” she said, and Brasch was fascinated to see that they all deferred to this small, colored woman as easily as they might have to Eisenhower himself. “We have more data feeding through on the laser links. Live coverage this time.”

Halabi then said something in a hushed tone to the machine operator sitting at the console around which they were gathered. The young woman-another schwarzer, although much darker in skin tone than the captain-began to dance her fingers across the screen in front of her. Brasch watched in fascination as items on the display seemed to follow her touch, some collapsing, some inflating to display new windows in which he could see some sort of movie that was running, this time in full color. The woman occasionally dropped her hands to a keyboard and ripped out quick bursts of typing, doubtless entering some command that required more than the brush of a fingertip on a monitor.

“My Intelligence Division informs me that the Soviets are trying to push a division through a valley just here.” She pointed at a topographic map on one of the screens. “We’d best watch this down in the CIC, but…”

She favored Brasch with a level stare.

“Herr General. It’s is not my usual policy to allow enemy combatants into the heart of my ship. But Colonel Windsor and your controllers in London assure me that you can be trusted.”

Brasch bowed slightly in the direction of the warrior-prince, but Halabi wasn’t finished.

“I can be trusted, too, Herr General. I can be trusted to have you thrown over the side in heavy chains if you give me even the slightest reason to doubt you.”

“I would expect no less, Kapitдn. You have quite a fierce reputation in the Reich. Gцbbels calls you the black widow, but the men of the Kriegsmarine prefer the Black Widowmaker,” Brasch said with a wry curve of the lips. He saw Prince Harry smile and heard a couple of the English officers snigger.

Halabi merely cocked a very cool eyebrow. “Well then, if you wish to see your family again, you will behave yourself.”

“Of course.”

“Mr. Waddington!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Brasch jumped slightly at the strength and proximity of the voice behind him. He hadn’t realized that anybody was standing there, but turning slightly he found a slab-shouldered, hard-faced man holding a black device of some sort down near the small of his back.

“Chief, stay close to our guest. If you have to, taser him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man called Waddington replied, with an evil glint in his eye.

“Right, then, follow me ladies and gentlemen,” Halabi said, and they began to file out.

Prince Harry hung back and fell in beside the German.

“She is quite the dictator, yes?” Brasch said.

“Liberated women.” Harry shrugged. “What’s a bloke to do?”

In a different part of the ship, Julia Duffy awoke to find herself dreaming-or at least she thought she was dreaming for a few seconds of free fall before she realized that Captain Marcel Ronsard was indeed standing, somewhat awkwardly, by the side of her bed.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Ronsard shrugged. “Not the welcome I was hoping for, but it will have to do. And how are you, mon cherie?”

“Well, for one thing,” she said, pushing herself up in the bed, which moved to compensate at least partly for the pitch and yaw of the ship, “I’m not your fucking cherie. But I guess I’m glad to see a friendly face. A little surprised, though. What the fuck are you doing here?”