Getting Real

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said resignedly. None of the American fighter planes had got close enough to Catalina or the other Channel Islands to endanger them. This whole unit—captain, sergeant, and everybody else, right down to the cooks—would have landed in big trouble if any of them had.

Reeducation? the sergeant thought. He shivered, though the night was mild. No thanks!

* * * *

Snow swirled around Pablo. It had lain on the ground for a while; it had a crust, and crunched under his felt boots at every step. The air was cold. Each breath felt like inhaling creme de menthe. Somewhere up ahead, the enemy lurked. They’d be tough. They always were.

This time, though, Pablo had a trusty comrade at his side. The tall, gray-eyed barbarian swaggered along as if he owned this valley. He carried a massive battle axe. His shoulders seemed too wide to fit inside his wolfskin coat. Like all the men of his clan, he shaved his head. A fox-fur cap kept him from losing precious warmth through his scalp.

The barbarian pointed toward a stand of snow-dappled firs ahead. In their perfect conical symmetry, they reminded Pablo of oversized Christmas trees. (Christmas trees? Just for a moment, the world seemed to waver around Pablo. Then he got Real again. External references and doubts vanished together.)

“They’ll be in there,” the massive axeman growled.

Pablo nodded. “They will.” He drew the blade that had drunk a dragon’s heartblood. “Let’s go get ‘em.”

“Indeed,” his companion said. “For great glory and great reward await us once we triumph. If we triumph. The fight will be hard.”

“They always are,” Pablo said. (The world wavered again. Had he been in fights against these foes before? This terrain seemed new to him. And yet ... He shook his head. Whatever the submerged maybe-memory was, it wasn’t Real—and if it wasn’t Real, it didn’t matter.)

Then the dwarves burst from the wood, howling their harsh battle hymns. Some had the features of black men, some of whites, and some of men with yellow skins. All were hideous. The big shaven-headed man by Pablo roared laughter. “May the gods smite me if those little warts don’t put me in mind of the ministers in a kingdom I left not long ago,” he said.

Jackson. Berkowitz. Kojima. The names rose unbidden in Pablo’s mind. Again, they might have blown in on a chilly breeze from another world. Stupid square must not be right where it oughta go. That thought also came out of nowhere. And it went right back to nowhere a moment later, for he was fighting for his life.

The dwarves might be little. They might be ugly. But they were fast and mean and brave. If they could have chopped his companion and him into cat’s-meat, they would have done it.

But they couldn’t. Gushing gore splashed the snow. Butchered body parts bounced. Pablo took a nasty cut on the forearm. He felt that as he felt everything else—it was all Real, of course. Still, it troubled him less than it might have, for battle fury filled him.

He and his comrade-in-arms worked a fearful, fearsome slaughter on the dwarves. At last, their foes had had more than flesh and blood could bear. They fled, shrieking in terror and throwing away swords and spears so they could run faster.

“Pretty good, friend,” the big man panted. His axehead was all over blood. He had a gash on one cheek; a dark wet patch on his trouser leg marked another. Both wounds would be annoying. Neither was anything worse.

“You ain’t bad, neither,” Pablo said.

They plunged into the fir forest. Who could say what kind of treasures the dwarves held? Who could guess how many women they’d stolen from human lands to serve their lusts and, later, to serve as the main course in their foul feasts? Who could imagined how overjoyed those women would be at rescue?

The treasures were splendid. Some of the women were better, much better, than splendid. Overjoyed didn’t begin to describe how glad they were. Furs and fires meant the snow all around didn’t matter one bit. And every single thing Pablo did felt Real.

* * * *

Jamming and spoofing gear filled the USS Rumsfeld. The hovercraft was designed to do one thing and one thing only: get in quick, tear the holy hell out of the target, and then get out again. One of Hillary Griffith’s shipmates said, “Fat lot of good jamming and spoofing did the real Rumsfeld.”

“Who was he?” Hillary asked. She’d been born not long before the turn of the century. The ship was way older than she was. It was probably older than the grizzled CPO doing the talking, too. As far as Hillary was concerned, that made it ancient.

“He was the clown who sucked us into Iraq,” the chief answered.

“Oh. Which time?” she asked—anything that had happened before she was born was as one with Nineveh and Tyre, as far as she was concerned.