“I must say, Baines,” he said, his voice crackling through the static, that warm baritone putting on an atrocious English accent, “I am utterly fizzed to hear your dulcet tones.”
Lily clapped a hand to her mouth as tears began to leak from her eyes. And despite the grin in his voice, she was fairly certain her Yank’s eyes were leaking too.
She ended up curled on her bed around the wireless, transmitter up to her lips as if she could get closer across the decades. “So, tell me.”
“We stopped the attack. It took a couple cycles of disruptions to figure it out. But I dug out the signal. We ran the analysis and realized it for what it was, ran it up to the skipper. Once the Colin Powell went Quick Quiet on all radars and comms, we realized that if we powered things down, the disruptions didn’t affect us nearly as bad. Once we came back up, we passed word to the rest of the fleet on the Guard.”
“En garde?”
A low laugh. “No, not like in fencing. The Guard frequency, international air distress. All countries listen in case planes go down. We put word out as fast as possible so the diplomats could open emergency channels with the Russians and figure out what was going on.”
“What was going on?”
“Some bugs in their new tech. The first disruption blast ended up killing all comms on the Invincible by mistake—the ship was fine, just no one could find it and they were dead in the water, so we go on high alert and roll out the battle group. And all the Russians see is us bristling. They’re tense; we’re tense; then their tech starts killing comms on our ships, except they’re having the same issues and think it’s us attacking . . .” Matt blew a breath out. “Only I found the signal first, so people had time to start talking before any missiles cooked off.”
Lily blinked, hovering somewhere between disbelief and outrage. “You’re saying a shooting war nearly started by mistake?”
“They call it a confusion live-fire exchange, and yes, people have actually died that way. Ships have died. But not mine, not this time.” Another hesitation. “Everyone’s still going apeshit trying to figure out these disruptions. They were detected all over, around half the globe. People are saying they got texts from impossible dates; phones went wonky thinking it was 1850 or 1972 . . . It was nuts. That’s why it took months for the Colin Powell to put into port so I could finally take leave, hightail it back to York, and call you.”
Lily pillowed her head on her folded elbow. “I’m assuming you’re not at risk”—if he was back on leave in Britain again, there obviously wasn’t any bally state of emergency—“but might there be more attacks?” How cruel of fate if they’d been able to fend off one attack, but others came like knives out of the night and took everything down some different way.
“Unlikely.” There was a shift of springs in the background; Matt was clearly back on some hotel bed again, probably too long for it, feet in their boots hanging off the edge. He was six feet three; he’d told her that at some point—she could no longer remember when. “Everyone’s making all nice now, not admitting to anything. Tensions de-escalating.” A pause, and then he added very low, “You saved us.”
“You did that.”
“No. It was the trickiest thing I’ve ever tracked. No way in hell I’d have dug it out if I didn’t already know it was out there. My whole ship is alive because you told me to keep listening. So—thank you. One petty officer to another.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “If for no other reason, my reputation on the Powell right now is pretty goddamn epic.”
“One petty officer to another, you’re welcome.”
Silence stretched before he spoke again. “Funny, isn’t it? We did this monumental thing together, and we can’t ever tell anyone.”
“There’s already so much in this war I won’t ever be able to tell anyone.” The Official Secrets Act had drummed that into Lily’s bones: her parents, her ex-deb friends, her future husband—none of them could know about her work here.
“I know, me too. Most of what I do is classified. Even then, we’ve got people who do the same work as we do, who know the game. I’ve got fellow STs; you’ve got fellow Wrens. But this is a whole new level.”
Lily nodded. Maybe someday the period of secrecy would be expired for anything done in 1943; maybe it would be all right to discuss things discreetly. But she wasn’t ever going to talk about this thing with Matt. Or else her children or her grandchildren would think Granny had gone barmy. “Do you think we’ll just—forget, after a while? The brain likes to do that, just put things away and forget them if they don’t make sense.”