Harry Turtledove - The Valley-Westside War

“I guess.” Dan hadn't really thought about that before.

A few hundred yards ahead, some Westsiders were making another stand. They couldn't hope to stop the Valley army now-or they were flipping out if they thought they could. But they could slow down the advance through the pass. That would let more of their own men get away.

“Come on! Come on!” Captain Kevin shouted. “We have to outflank them. They'll be sorry they tried to mess with us then. They-” He broke off with a howl of pain, clutching at his right upper arm.

“The captain's hit!” Chuck shouted. He and Dan weren't especially near the wounded Valley officer.

One of Kevin 's lieutenants spoke up: “We have to go on! Our medics will see to the captain!” That deep voice had to belong to Hank. He made a pretty good number two man. Dan had never thought of him as a commander, but now he had the chance to show what he could do.

For the moment, he did what Captain Kevin had been on the point of doing. He led the Valley men around the makeshift scrape of earth and rubble the enemy had thrown up. He didn't wait for the heavy machine gun to make the Westsiders keep their heads down. Instead, he used riflemen and musketeers for the same job. They did what needed doing, too. There weren't that many defenders, which helped.

When the Westside soldiers saw the Valley men were starting to slip around behind them, they fled. Dan shot at one of them. He wasn't too disappointed when his arrow missed. He did think he aimed honestly-he didn't want to let his kingdom down or anything. But he still wasn't sorry not to be responsible for hurting somebody else.

Some of the other Valley men were hurting the Westsiders. Dan watched a man go down, clutching at his side. A Valley soldier ran over to him, picked up a loose chunk of asphalt, and bashed in his head. “For the captain!” the Valley man yelled. He kicked the Westsider-who had to be dead after that-and ran on.

If they'd won, they would have done the same thing to us, Dan thought. He knew that was true. The Westsiders wouldn't have turned Cal 's huge, horrible dog loose on anybody they loved. Even so, seeing what war was all about and what it did to people didn't make him happy.

Then a bullet cracked past his head. It came so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage. While he was being sorry war was so savage, somebody on the other side was doing his level best to kill him. And the enemy soldier's level best was almost good enough.

If the Westsiders were going to fight, how could he do anything else? He saw no way. They were probably asking themselves the same question about King Zev 's troops, but Dan couldn't do anything about that.

He'd been fighting and scrambling forward all day long. Even so, he realized, he wasn't nearly so hot and sweaty as he would have been back home. People said the weather on the Westside was cooler than it was in the Valley. They talked about the sea breeze. Dan had never seen the sea. He knew it was there, but he'd never gone down Topanga to see it. That was an all-day journey. A lot of the time, what people said was a bunch of bull. Here, though, it looked as if those people- whoever they were-knew what they were talking about. It really was cooler once you started coming down the south side of Sepulveda Pass.

“Jeep! Jeep! Jeep!” A scrub jay yelled at him from a bush. He almost jumped out of his skin. Scrub jays lived in the Valley, too-he saw them all the time. But he hadn't noticed this one till it started screeching. The way ice ran through him told him how jumpy he was.

Firing picked up again. The pass widened out as it got lower. There wouldn't be many more places for the Westsiders to make a stand before the Valley men came to Brentwood.

A cannon boomed. The smoke that poured from the muzzle looked like thick fog. Dan saw fog every so often in the Valley. There was supposed to be more of it down below the pass. The cannonball slammed down onto the 405, scattering chips of asphalt that probably bit like bullets. It bounced up the freeway, not much bigger than a softball.

A Valley soldier stuck out a foot to try to stop it. “Don't do that!” Sergeant Chuck screamed. The startled man jerked back his foot just in time. The cannonball bounced on.

“Why shouldn't he stop it, Sarge?” Dan asked.

“Because he wouldn't, that's why,” Chuck answered. “It's still going fast, and it's solid iron. If it hit him in the foot, they'd likely have to amputate, 'cause it'd smash him to the devil and back again.”

“Really?” Dan had trouble believing it. Had he stood where the other soldier was, chances were he would have done the same thing. He eyed Chuck. Was the sergeant pulling his leg?

But Chuck solemnly raised his right hand. “By King Zev 's name, I swear it's true,” he said. “I haven't seen it, but I know somebody who did. He wouldn't lie, either-he's not that kind.”

“Okay, Sarge.” Dan believed that Chuck believed it. Whether it was true… Who would want to find out by trying it?

The Westside cannon roared again. A horse shrieked and toppled, spouting blood. The man on the horse yelled, too, when its weight came down on his leg. Dan had been amazed to find out how much blood a man's body held. A horse's held much more, and it was just as red, just as scary.

From behind the advancing Valley soldiers, the heavy machine gun started up again. Those big, nasty slugs probed for the cannon crew. The machine gun had at least as much range as the miserable modern gun. The muzzle-loading cannon fired one ball at a time. After that, the crew had to go through a fancy dance to reload it. It got off maybe a round a minute. Maybe. The machine gun, on the other hand…

One after another, Westside artillerymen went down. The cannon stopped shooting. The Westsiders brought up horses to haul it away so it could fight somewhere else later on. The machine gunners waited till the Westsiders hitched the horses to the gun carriage. Then, cruelly efficient, they shot them down.

“You hate to do that,” Chuck said. “The poor horses don't know what's going on. This isn't their fault. But if they can help the bad guys hurt you…”

Down there in the Westsiders' shattered lines, were they calling the machine gunners the bad guys? They probably were. The gun had done more to smash their hopes than the rest of the Valley army put together.

Bang!… Bang! Bang! That wasn't a machine gun. But it was an Old Time rifle, fired from the Westside position. Dan needed a few heartbeats to figure out what was going on. Then he did. The Westsider was trying to pick off the machine gunners the way the Valley men had nailed the artillery crew.

He tried, yeah, but he didn't have much luck. The machine gun was just at or just past the extreme range of his piece. His bullets could reach about that far, but not with any accuracy. And he could also fire only one round at a time, though he managed several shots a minute.

When the machine gun answered, it put out a lot of lead. If one bullet didn't get the rifleman, the next would, or the one after that. A Westsider threw up his hands and then flopped down limply over the rough barricade behind which he was shooting. Was that the troublesome fellow with the rifle?

The machine gunners must have thought so. They kept shooting to make sure he'd been killed. Dan watched the body jerk several times. By the time the Valley machine-gun crew turned the weapon in a new direction, the Westsider had to be dead.

Another Westside soldier scrambled over the barrier to rescue the valuable Old Time rifle. The machine gunners shot him before he could get his hands on it.

“Serves him right,”' Sergeant Chuck said. “There's a time to show how brave you are, and there's a time to use your brains. You don't go sticking your head in the cougar's mouth, not more than once you don't.”