other half would sell everything they owned just to purchase a ticket west, and into the future.
Eddie Mohr and that Mexican kid Diaz were a good example of the latter. Black had no idea about why the chief petty officer had opted to transfer from the old navy to the AF, but he wasn’t alone. The applications list ran to tens of thousands of men and women, all wanting to get out of their original units and into new Auxilliary Force outfits that, for the most part, existed only on paper—or data stick, he corrected himself. Sometimes, Dan knew, they were simply drawn by the lure of flying rocket planes—which hadn’t yet been built—or sailing in missile boats —ditto.
Diaz, on the other hand, was like any number of hopefuls who had been seduced by a single promise. When they set foot on that relatively small patch of turf, which had been established by a narrow vote of Congress as the Special Administrative Zone (California), their skin color, gender, religion and—most controversially—what they did in their own bedrooms, ceased to be a factor in determining the path their lives would take. Once inside the Zone, they became subject to the laws of the United States of America, and the provisions of her Uniform Code of Military Justice, exactly as they existed on the morning of January 15, 2021, the day of the Transition.
It meant, for instance, that nobody could call Diaz a wetback or a greaser, at least not without incurring significant legal penalties. It also meant, however, that they couldn’t drive without a seat belt, smoke in public spaces, or “cross a public roadway while immersed in a virtual reality.” Not that much of that sort of thing went on just yet, anyway.
Black couldn’t help but smile a little smugly at the warm self-regard the uptimers had for themselves and their many personal liberties. To him, they looked like people who’d been freed from heavy iron shackles—only to bind themselves just as tightly in a million threads of silk.
As the trolley line swung up through Cahuenga Pass, the old wooden 800-series interurban slowed noticeably. Pacific Electric had recommissioned dozens of the cars to handle the extra traffic flowing into and out of the Valley. They seemed to wheeze and groan beside the sleek red-and-cream 700-series “Hollywood” trams, which fairly zipped along the new track, laid at breakneck speed by the company that had a lucrative contract to provide mass transit services into the Zone.
Glancing out the window, Black noted that as quickly as the PE engineers could lay track, the road gangs still seemed to be outpacing them, adding another lane to the Hollywood Freeway. There had to be two thousand men out there working on the link that would stretch between the Valley and Santa Monica. Personally, he didn’t have a view about it, but he’d seen fistfights break out among the uptimers when talk turned to the new freeways. It was a hell of a strange thing to start throwing punches over, if you asked him.
But nobody asked. And anyway, he’d learned to keep his opinions to himself. Julia had smacked that much sense into him, at least.
He was tempted to close the file he had up on the flexipad screen and sneak a peek at the home movie Jules had shot for him the last time they’d stayed together in New York. But he could tell that about half the carriage was still staring at the device in his hands, and they really didn’t need to see his fiancee do her pole-dancing routine on a four-poster bed at the Plaza. So instead, he tried to concentrate on an epic dissertation from a Captain Chris Prather about building a better Sherman tank.
You’d have thought, being a navy man, he’d be safe from the likes of Prather. But General Patton was set to come calling today, and Black would have to shepherd him through the visit. He knew from recent experience that Patton would cut him no slack at all. Navy or not, he was Kolhammer’s chief liaison to the old forces, and so he was about to become an instant expert on the care and feeding of Shermans.
Before he could help himself, he wondered idly what Julia was up to. He shut down the thought before it could go any further. She was somewhere on the east coast of Australia, covering MacArthur’s defense of the Brisbane Line.
And apart from that, he really didn’t want to know.
3
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, THE BRISBANE LINE
The last mortar round nearly fucked her video rig, but Julia got the little Sonycam back online by slamming the data stick into its port a couple of times. It wasn’t a recommended fix, but it’d worked before. A small window in her battered Oakley combat goggles flickered into life again, the scene around her in the foxhole emerging from a blur of white noise.
Five men lay in the shell crater, protected from most of the Japanese fire by a huge granite outcrop halfway up the slope of Hill 178. Two of them were dead. Unable to directly target the rest, the Japanese had been dropping mortars all around, but the rock formation would provide just enough overhead cover to protect them for a few minutes—until the odds caught up with them.
One of the men had died when a nearby eucalyptus tree had been shattered by the blast of a small mountain gun; a foot-long splinter of wood had speared into his throat. The other guy, they had no idea. He was just dead, and he didn’t have a hole in him.
Julia let her gaze slide down the slope, the Sonycam zooming in and out, taking in the wreckage of the shattered company. Less than two minutes earlier, over a hundred marines had been creeping up through the darkened scrub, toward the Japanese positions just below the crest of the hill. They had moved silently and with a speed that had surprised her, calling to mind a platoon of Gurkhas she’d once covered in Timor.
These marines were ’temps, fighting without body armor, remote sensors, or tac net. Three rifle platoons of older prewar volunteers. She’d interviewed many of them over the past few days, and now, in the space between two ragged breaths, their lives passed before her eyes. At least a third of them were dead, and near as many so badly torn apart by the Japanese claymores as made no difference.
She breathed out against a wave of overpressure as another packet of high-explosive bombs bracketed their hideout. Shrapnel rattled against the granite overhang, and the familiar scramble to check for wounds mechanically repeated itself, with each man who was able to instinctively patting himself down where a superheated shard of metal might have tugged at a sleeve or sliced so cleanly through living tissue that no pain or shock had yet registered.
Each quickly cupped his balls, she noted, in fear of the Wound.
Cocooned in her titanium-weave reactive matrix armor, her own responses deadened by ten years of this bullshit, Julia Duffy logged the screams of the dying for recall as she checked her machine pistol. No damage. The best part of a full clip jacked in, alternating penetrators and dumdums with a single tracer round three from the bottom to warn her when it was time to reload. She’d taped two clips together, for grease. A little trick some of the marines had quietly copied from her.
She sucked a mouthful of chilled Gatorade through a rubber tube that emerged from the padded collar of her coveralls. Something heavy fell into their midst, and Julia nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was a koala, its fur burned to black tar and weeping red skin. It keened pitiably as smoke curled from its charred body. The marines regarded it, and her, with horror as she drew her sidearm, a SIG Sauer P226, and put one round of Nytrilium fragmentable hollow point into the animal. It blew apart like an overripe tomato.
“Jesus Christ,” someone croaked.
She looked at the men and essayed the faintest of shrugs as a furious eruption of small-arms fire broke over them.
In the distance on the slope above them, someone gave a shrill shout.
“Ah, shit.”
Julia glanced quickly in the direction of the sergeant who’d just cursed, measuring his likely response to what was coming. She didn’t know him. The chaos and madness of the ambush had thrown them together. The man looked to be a good deal older than his two buddies. She couldn’t guess at his actual age, though, through the gore and dirt, but his eyes looked like pools of dead water.
“You ever shoot anything besides a stuffed toy?” he spat at her with unexpected vehemence.
She didn’t reply, but moved her selector to three-round bursts, unsafed the weapon, and drew her knife from its scabbard. Satisfied that she could get to it in a hurry, Julia sheathed the evil-looking blade.
The crescendo of Japanese rifle fire seemed to build in an infinite curve that merged with the
