Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(2)

I now believe that, faced with only one of these enemies, we could’ve prevailed rather quickly, despite the odds. Burdened by both, we could never concentrate our forces, and the war lingered on. To make matters worse, the Grik were aided by the madman Kurokawa, who, after losing his Amagi at the Battle of Baalkpan, pursued a warped agenda all his own. And just as we came to the monumental conclusion that not all historical human timelines we encountered exactly mirrored ours, we began to feel the malevolent presence of yet another power centered in the Mediterranean. This League of Tripoli was composed of fascist French, Italian, Spanish, and German factions from a different 1939 than we remembered, and hadn’t merely “crossed over” with a pair of battle-damaged destroyers but possessed a powerful task force originally intended to wrest Egypt—and the Suez Canal—from Great Britain.

We had few open conflicts with the League at first, though they seemed inexplicably intent on subversion. Eventually we discovered their ultimate aim was to aid Kurokawa, the Grik, even the Dominion, just enough to ensure our mutual annihilation, removing at one time multiple future threats to the hegemony they craved. But their schemes never reckoned on the valor of our allies or the resolve of Captain Matthew Reddy. Therefore, when the League Contre-Amiral Laborde, humiliated by a confrontation, not only sank what was essentially a hospital ship with his monstrous dreadnought Savoie but took some of our people hostage—including Captain Reddy’s pregnant wife—and turned them AND Savoie over to Kurokawa . . .

Excerpt from the foreword to Courtney Bradford’s

The Worlds I’ve Wondered University of New Glasgow Press, 1956





PROLOGUE


////// Sovereign Nest of Jaaph Hunters

Zanzibar

October 18, 1944

Sandra Tucker Reddy had been inwardly terrified when that fascist French weasel, Victor Gravois, handed her and her companions to the Japanese after the League of Tripoli battleship Savoie sank SMS Amerika and brought them here. She’d seen what the Japanese on her old world were doing to prisoners of war when Mizuki Maru and Hidoiame . . . arrived, so she’d known how bad it might be. Instead, for now, it certainly could’ve been worse. She and her young companion, Diania, had been separated from Chairman Adar, Kapitan Leutnant Becher Lange, Gunnery Sergeant Arnold Horn, and the three Lemurian sailors she’d never even come to know, and locked in a small wooden shed, taller than it was wide. It was obvious by the streaked droppings that the structure was built as a nesting coop for lizardbirds to lay their eggs for human harvest. The vicious, duck-size flying reptiles were like the akka on Borno and could apparently tolerate one another long enough to jumble their eggs together in enclosed, shady places before abandoning them to hatch. The first to do so feasted on the others until large enough to fly—and reenter the food chain outside. Attrition was horrendous, of course, but lizardbirds had no mating season and there was a constant flow of careless mothers. Even now, they often darted through gaps high in the walls beneath the thatched roof and fluttered around inside. Finding the nesting shelves removed, they usually painted the place—and Sandra and Diania—with more foul-smelling excrement before flitting somewhere else to dump their eggs.

At least the gap allowed daylight, and a slight breeze to stir the stifling heat, lizardbird-shit stench, and sour sweat reek pervading their prison. Sandra and Diania were both small women, and even standing on each other’s shoulders they couldn’t reach high enough to peer outside, let alone escape. And if they did, where would they go? Sandra knew they were on an island—probably Zanzibar—completely controlled by the Japanese and their Grik allies. She couldn’t imagine how they’d get away. Meals came twice a day, delivered by a young Japanese sailor flanked by two fearsome Grik carrying wickedly barbed spears. The young man never met their eyes, wouldn’t speak, and acted almost ashamed. He also seemed resentful, even terrified, of the reptilian Grik accompanying him. That surprised Sandra, since she thought the Grik here served the Japanese. But the sailor was just a kid, and Grik were very frightening. It was probably as simple as that.

Their meals were always the same tasteless glop of unidentifiable vegetable matter mixed with gobbets of meat she didn’t want to identify, but they weren’t being starved. She and Diania even had enough energy for light exercise and practicing some disabling moves that Diania’s lost love, Chief Gray, had taught her. And as bad as they smelled after weeks confined aboard Savoie, plus another week here—with lizardbird crap in their hair—they kept the cell as clean as they could. The single refinement easing their captivity was a box seat for them to do their business, with the waste dropping to the sand below. Even that was periodically removed by Grik fatigue parties, so they didn’t have to endure that rising stench as well. Diania had seen the Grik tasked with the chore through the hole in the seat, and the women had shared a rare giggle at the thought of “bombing” them.

Fortunately, Sandra supposed, though she remembered plenty of reports of atrocities in ’forty-two, the Japanese who had them now arrived when they thought they were winning the war back home, before it degenerated to a level of savagery that could fill a Mizuki Maru with living skeletons under the “care” of men who, in their postarrival panic, actually considered eating them. Most of those men, along with Hidoiame, and even Mizuki Maru—which had been given a chance, at least, to redeem herself—were dead. And some of the “skeletons” had survived and recovered. Gunny Horn was one, Sandra remembered. Wherever the others are, he has to be in a special hell right now.