Camouflage

their noon meeting, and while brewing tea orchestrated a huge sandwich. Ham and beef and salami slices alternating with goat and cheddar cheese, sliced pickle, and tomato and lettuce. They were out of pickled beet slices; he put them on the list. One slice of bread was slathered with mustard and mayonnaise, the other with peanut butter. He compressed the thing down to manageable proportions and sliced it in two diagonally.
    “You’re not going to eat all that by yourself, are you?” Jan was watching from the door.
    “I’m willing to share.” He put half of it on another plate and carried both to the table.
    “Want tea?” She poured two mugs and brought them over.
    She inspected the sandwich carefully and removed the pickle. “We’ve modified the thing so the first shot will be a tenth of the normal minimum power.” She sliced a corner off the sandwich and nibbled on it. “Peanut butter?”
    “So that would be about a thousand megajoules?”
    “More like one and a half times that. We tried it out on a big block of stone down at the quarry.”
    “I’m surprised I didn’t hear the explosion,” he said around bites. “Peanut butter’s the healthiest part of the sandwich.”
    “The engineers took precautions. It was swaddled in a ton of some kind of protective cloth. I mean, it is a spalling laser.”
    “So it spalled impressively?”
    She nodded. “Blew it to flinders. Then blew out a piece of the quarry wall behind it, two hundred meters away.”
    “How long did it go?”
    “Half a microsecond burst, they said.”
    He shook his head. “It’s too big a leap. That must be athousand times the energy flux we’ve brought to bear on the thing.”
    “About eight hundred, I think. But that laser didn’t even warm it up.” That was true; they’d tried a twenty-million-joule industrial laser on it, and the thermal sensors hadn’t budged. The thing seemed to be an infinite heat sink.
    “What if we destroy it?”
    “I think we’ll be lucky to get enough ablation for an absorption spectrum.”
    “And if you don’t, you crank it up to full power?”
    “Only by degrees. We’ll be cautious, Russ.”
    “Oh, I know you will.” He took a big bite and concentrated on chewing it. “I’m mainly . . . I’m just worried about the first shot. If that doesn’t affect it, it can handle another factor of ten.”
    “You anthropomorphize it. Brave little spaceship versus the monstrous military-industrial complex.”
    “You’ve been hanging around too much with Jack. Speaking of anthropomorphizing. He’s angry with the thing.”
    “Well, it’s resisting his advances.” She looked at him steadily. “He doesn’t like that.”
    Russ couldn’t repress a smile. “He doesn’t, eh?” Jack’s attraction to the astrobiologist had been immediately obvious.
    She rolled her eyes. “I’m a grandmother.”
    “But not very grandmotherly.”
    “Don’t you start. I’m ten years older than you.”
    Eight or nine, Russ thought, but didn’t press it. “You want something besides the sandwich?”
    “Pepcid. I brought my own.”

- 20 -
bataan, philippines, 28 march 1942
    T housands of American and Filipino captives were herded onto dusty fields outside of the town of Mariveles, and made to sit under the baking sun without provision of food, water, or latrines.
    The changeling and Hugh had each managed two canteens, and they had a loaf of hard bread between them. The other fifty-some Marines were someplace else in the vast sea of suffering men. Some units had stayed together, which proved a significant advantage for individuals’ survival; others, like the Marine detachment, were broken up.
    Hugh carved an inch-thick slice of the bread with his mess-kit spoon, and they split it. The changeling could have done without, of course, but couldn’t think of a reason to refuse. He took the smaller half.
    “God, I’d kill for a burger,” Hugh said quietly, eating the bread in pinches of crumbly dry crust.
    “People will kill for bread soon enough,” the changeling said, “unless they decide to feed us.”
    “Kill for water,” Hugh said, taking a small sip.
    People did die from water, starting that day. Dehydrated, they would greedily lap or suck from any source, and every source that wasn’t purified was contaminated. Dysentery increased the foulness of the camp, and further dehydrated the dying men. The Japanese opened a tap that gave a trickle of brown water to people who were strong enough to