But he’d been hunting for days now—the attack that would sink this ship was coming in twelve hours—and he still hadn’t heard a trace of that T/C signal.
He’d heard rumors, sure. Rumors about the still-missing Invincible, rumors about the new quantum tech in the Russian fleet running training ops in these same Atlantic waters . . . but for Matt, it all came down to the same old thing. The cold, claustrophobically small room. The long rollers underneath his boots as the Colin Powell chopped through stiff northern waters. The blinking glow of screens. The headphones. The stack of mixed energy drinks next to him, half the cans already emptied.
“Chicory coffee for me,” Lily had said on that last call. “Ghastly stuff. Keeps you awake, though.” He could imagine her voice so clearly, she might have been in the seat next to him—but she wasn’t. The seat next to him held another ST whose name he didn’t know, working on the hourly situation report. Something the next twelve hours would render supremely irrelevant.
You can do this, Lily said. He’d told her goodbye five days ago after talking nearly three hours on that wireless. She’d called a halt twice to switch her position, just in case her transmission might be tracked, and they’d been interrupted twice more on the channel by harrumphing British voices telling them to get off the ruddy air—didn’t they know they shouldn’t be transmitting in the open; didn’t they know there was a war on?—but Lily had planned for that, of course she did; they just gave a quick over-and-out, and hooked back up on the next frequency she’d given him on her scrawled list. They’d worked their way three-quarters down that list by the time Matt had to sign off, check out of the Grand, and run for his Uber.
“Go save the ship, cowboy.” Lily’s voice had been just a shade too brittle to be as flippant as she sounded. “Go save the world.”
“You too, Lady Rose.”
That had been five days ago. They had a plan for talking again, but that was only if he lived past the next twelve hours.
Me at my desk, Lily, Matt thought, cracking another Rip It and rolling his neck, and you at yours. He imagined her slugging some chicory coffee, pulling her coat around that trim brass-buttoned uniform, twiddling the dials on her wireless. Not eighty years in the past, now. In some way, in some where, she was doing this now, thinking of him just as he was thinking of her. Both of them thinking, to themselves and to each other, You can do this.
Matt pulled on his headphones just as she pulled on hers, and the two of them kept hunting.
1943
Withernsea
Check the last frequency on the list, every day at noon.” That had been the agreed-upon plan, but in truth, Lily checked it a lot more often. One month went by as Lily took her various penalties for skipping out on Fiddian the way she’d done; despite the reprimands and the docked leave and the punishment detail, by hook or by crook, she always managed to tune in at noon. On loo breaks from her Y Station shift if she had to, but she checked in at the end of every shift too. And the beginning of shifts . . . and in the middle of the night sometimes as well.
Two months went by. Nothing but static. Maybe Matt was dead; maybe he’d failed. And the kicker was, she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t know maybe ever, unless she made it to 2023. Matt had seen her obituary; maybe she’d actually live to be that old, but who knew if she’d remember? Put her dentures in and dodder over to these computing machines Matt said came out of her war and were so prevalent in his, and check the headlines to see if the USS Colin Powell had been sunk with all hands aboard? What if it had all been for nothing, and she’d just traded claustrophobic terror about this war for claustrophobic terror about another one still to come?
Three months. The Axis forces had surrendered in Tunisia; the North African campaign was over, and everyone was speculating when Sicily would be invaded . . . but no word from Matt.
They hadn’t talked about an end date, when she would stop checking. They hadn’t dared. They’d just disconnected, Matt trying to hide the dread in his voice, Lily shaking from head to toe. I’ll give it one more month, Lily thought.
But there came a warm June night, when she’d just tottered off her shift at midnight, getting the room to herself as the tart from Epping tramped downstairs to take over the headphones. Lily hauled the wireless out from under the bed and idly turned the dials, already yawning and poised for bed, only to hear out of the crackle of static: “By—Lady Rose, do you copy? Over.”
And the Honorable Lily Baines snatched up the transmitter, and yelped, “Holy fucking shit!”