Signal Moon(9)

“‘Dammit Jim, you’re a Y Station listener, not a forger?’”

“What?”

“Old TV show. Never mind,” Matt muttered on the other end. Lily glared at him, or at least the transmitter. She wanted to ask about these bizarre references he kept making, but there wasn’t time. Five hours and counting . . . she was pacing up and down the room, or at least the few steps and back, which was all the cord would permit. She somehow knew that he was pacing too: she could hear the scrape of shoes, and periodically he stubbed his toes on something and muttered Goddamn tiny Brit furniture. She imagined him as one of those tall, lanky Yanks, towheaded, very white teeth. Pacing, probably rubbing a hand through his hair. She’d only been talking to him for a day, and she had no idea what he looked like, but somehow she’d built up a picture anyway.

“Look, could you go to your commanding officer first thing and convince him I’m real?” she asked instead. “Give him the full story, corroborating details.”

“Uh-huh. So I walk in, ‘Oh, good afternoon, sir, ST1 Jackson here. Just a heads-up, I’ve been talking to a Wren from 1943 on this eighty-year-old wireless she sent me, and she knows for a fact that we’re going to be sunk in a few days. Mind talking to the admiral about turning the battle group around?’ Sorry, Lady Rose, I don’t see that going well.”

“You could take the wireless receiver onto the ship.”

“What if I can’t get you on the freq? We’re talking through a wormhole or some quantum fluctuation or whatever the hell this is; we’re lucky it’s lasted this long.” Lily imagined him looking out the window of his room at the Grand. She wondered what it looked like—how the skyline of her birth city had changed in nearly a century. “How are we doing this?” he asked finally. “Talking across time.”

“Well . . . because of what you said in your transmission, I only knew one exact point of time where you were going to be—on land, anyway. At the Grand, room 202, the ninth of March. So I thought I’d send the wireless and see if it could, I don’t know, create a link.”

“Which was pretty goddamn genius, Lady Rose. If I’d realized I was listening through a wormhole to someone dying three generations in the future, I’d have run around in circles screaming, not put together an eighty-year-old go-package in forty-eight hours flat.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Petty Officer Jackson. You’re pretty cool under fire from everything I heard.” She stopped herself before she could choke up. Even in his last moments, the compartment flooding around him, he’d still been trying to transmit. Throwing out information to help any fellow ships who could hear.

Silence expanded through the airwaves.

“I guess what I mean is, how did you hear me to begin with?” he asked quietly. “How did Lily Baines in her little Y Station in Yorkshire pick up my voice eighty years in the future?”

“I’ve got ears like a bat,” Lily offered.

“You’re coming in amazingly clear. Eighty years away and I can hear every silver spoon and castle turret in your vowels.”

“I didn’t grow up in a castle, thank you.” She sat on the edge of the bed again. She heard a sigh of bedsprings through the transmitter and knew he was sitting on his. “You’re coming in clear too. I’ve practically got ranch dust and mooing cattle coming through the headphones.”

“I’m in York, not Wyoming. Besides, not all American boys grow up on ranches, Lady Rose.”

“Not all English girls grow up in castles, cowboy.”

Another silence.

“Maybe the wormhole or anomaly or whatever came through on my end,” he said. “I’ve heard some chatter about spooky new tech the Russian navy’s supposedly got. Some quantum encabulator thing that can break encryptions on the fly, deny spectrum usage, render most of our security inoperable, who knows.”

“How?”

“How should I know; I’m not there yet in the timeline. I’d tell you to ask me in a few days, but we’ll be out of comms range.”

“Let’s assume that’s it, then.” Lily waved a hand magisterially, even though he couldn’t see it. “Pin it all on the spooky stuff from the Soviets.”

“Russians, actually. Soviets haven’t been around for over thirty years now. And it’s spooky shit, Baines. This is officially a situation where even proper English flowers like you can swear.”

“I have never said that word in my life, and I never will. My nanny tanned my backside for letting slip with bloody awful when I was ten. And are you saying the Soviet Union is gone?”

“Eh, more like they changed the name on the door. And I’m sorry if I shock you. I’m a sailor; we use the word fuck as a comma.”

“Typical Yanks.”

“Hey, your sailors talk like this too, in the twenty-first century.”

“I see the Empire’s standards have slipped shockingly.”

“Yeah, about this Empire business . . .” Lily could hear the smile in his voice, and she returned the smile, flopping on her back across the bed next to the wireless. “You know what,” Matt continued, “never mind. I already let it slip about the USSR dissolving, I can’t risk screwing up the future by telling you too much more.”