John Birmingham: Final impact

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.

“Refill, Admiral?”

It was all he could do not to jump. The female seaman had appeared at his elbow without making a sound.

Kolhammer swirled the dregs of his cold coffee around in the bottom of a mug he’d taken off the Clinton nearly two years ago. The gold-plated motto IT TAKES A CARRIER was patchy in places, and there was a chip right where he put his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it. It was a rare link to the “old” world.

“No thank you, Paterson. I’d best be getting back inside, anyhow.”

It was really too hot to be standing around in the midday sun, sipping coffee, but Phillip Kolhammer was a creature of habit. When he was buried in work, he tended to eschew a sit-down lunch in favor of a ham sandwich and a quick cup of joe, taken out on the balcony of his office. It was a fine view from up here on the eighth floor, all the way back to the Santa Monicas. In between there lay a patchwork of undeveloped farmland, industrial estates, and miles of cheap tract housing for the hundreds of thousands of workers who’d migrated here.

Kolhammer poured the last of his drink into a much-abused potted plant, then turned to go back inside, momentarily closing his eyes to help them adjust to the darker interior.

He stepped through into his air-conditioned office, pulling the glass door closed behind him. Paterson took his mug and disappeared through the main office door, telling his personal assistant, Lieutenant Liao, that the boss was back on deck. Kolhammer strode over to his desk and dropped into the gelform swivel chair-another piece of Clinton salvage, as was the enormous touch screen that dominated his work space.

On that screen, multiple windows ran the first images from D-Day, mostly in color and V3D. That meant the source had to be twenty-first-century equipment, since it still took them a few days to convert contemporary black-and-white film coverage. So for now he was restricted to whatever came down the wire from Washington-and even that had to be encoded on a data stick, then physically flown across the Atlantic before it was sent via cable to San Diego.

There, at last, it could be laser-linked to the Zone.

Any assets that might have been used to grab the take from Halabi’s Nemesis arrays were fully engaged in-theater, meaning that even the Trident’s data bursts had to travel by stick. Coaxial cable just wasn’t up to carrying encrypted quantum signals, not without significant degradation. Still, despite the time delays, he had an excellent overview of the titanic struggle Eisenhower insisted on calling the “Great Crusade.”

That phrase brought a quirk to his lips whenever he heard it. Back in 2021, after twenty years of the jihad, you still weren’t allowed to use the C-word.

Kolhammer traced his fingertips across the screen, bringing three windows to the fore, filling most of the display. One carried raw vision from the air assault over the villages of Coquelles, Peuplingues, and Frethun, towns that sat astride the main road leading into and out of the port of Calais.

The window next to it ran footage of the mass parachute drop by 101st into the same area, just two hours later. And in the third and smallest window, a continual loop showed the first wave of Higgins boats coming ashore on the wide sandy beaches of the Pas de Calais, where a half-built section of the Atlantic Wall had been reduced to smoking rubble by a six-hour-long storm of precision-guided five-hundred-kilo bunker busters and fuel-air explosives, the “poor man’s nukes.”

A chime sounded, and Lieutenant Liao appeared in a pop-up.

“I have your conference call, Admiral. General Jones and Captain Judge on screen. Links verified secure.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Kolhammer collapsed the D-Day coverage into thumbnails as his two closest friends and colleagues took over 90 percent of the screen in two separate windows. Judge was down in San Diego on board the Clinton, while Jones was in his office at Camp Hannon, the Eighty-second’s induction and training facility just a few klicks over in Andersonville.

“Morning, Lonesome. Mike. You’ve been following the progress in Calais, I suppose.”

“As best I can, Admiral,” Jones replied. “Things are a little hectic over here, but I’ve been getting the highlights from your guys. It looks like it’s gonna work. I can’t believe Hitler bought the Normandy fake-out, but then you never could tell what that fuckin’ loon would do, could you?”

Mike Judge, sitting in Kolhammer’s old cabin on the supercarrier, shook his head. “Nope, it’s true. Bookies are still six-to-five that he’ll go nuclear, though.”

“You taking those odds?” Kolhammer asked.

“Nah. My bet’s that if he had ’em, he’d a used ’em already,” Judge said. “I doubt he’d even wait for the invasion. That guy’s got poor impulse control. He woulda lit up London as soon as he got the wrapping off his first bomb.”