Harry Turtledove: In At the Death

As the scout led the blindfolded officer away, Cassius found himself nodding. Gracchus had nailed that, probably better than he knew. All across the Confederate States of America, whites and Negroes had nothing left to say to each other.

"Reckon we better get outa here," Gracchus said after the white man in butternut was gone. "They ain't gonna wait around. Soon as he tell 'em we say no, they gonna pound the shit outa where they thinks we's at."

He proved a good prophet. Artillery started falling not far from their camp inside of half an hour. A couple of Asskickers buzzed around overhead, looking for targets they could hit. The Negroes stayed in the woods till nightfall.

"You reckon they come after us from the same direction as that captain?" Cassius asked Gracchus.

"Mos' likely," the guerrilla leader answered.

"Maybe we oughta rig us an ambush, then," Cassius said. "That'll learn 'em they can't run us like we was coons an' they was hounds."

"We is coons," Gracchus said with a grim chuckle. He clapped Cassius on the back. "But yeah, you got somethin' there. We see what we kin do."

Next morning, right at dawn, close to a company of Confederate soldiers approached the woods where the guerrillas sheltered. Cassius and a couple of other Negroes fired at them, then showed themselves as they scurried away. That was dangerous. A fusillade of bullets chased them. But nobody got hit.

Shouting and pointing, the Confederates pounded after the fleeing blacks. Down deep, the ofays still thought Negroes were stupid and cowardly. They wouldn't have pursued U.S. soldiers with so little caution.

The machine gun opened up from the flank and cut them down like wheat before the scythe. The Confederates were brave. Some of them tried to charge the gun and take it out with grenades. They couldn't work in close enough to throw them. The white soldiers broke off and retreated. They did it as well as anyone could, leaving not a wounded man behind.

"We done it!" Cassius whooped. "We fuckin' done it!"

Gracchus was less exuberant. "We done it this time," he said. "Ofays ain't gonna make the same mistake twice. Next time, they don't reckon it's easy."

That struck Cassius as much too likely. Gracchus moved his band away from the ambush site as fast as he could. Artillery and bombs from above started falling there a few minutes later-probably as soon as the beaten Confederate soldiers could send back word of where they ran into trouble.

Armored cars and halftracks began patrolling the roads around the guerrilla band. The Negroes got one with a mine, but the vehicles trapped them and hemmed them in, making movement deadly dangerous. Before long, they started getting hungry. The rations the Confederate captain had promised in exchange for quiet seemed better to Cassius every time his belly growled.

"Reckon we kin hold 'em off when they come again?" he asked Gracchus.

"Hope so," the guerrilla leader answered, which was a long way from yes.

Cassius made sure his rifle was clean. He didn't want it jamming when he needed it most. How much good it would do him against a swarm of Confederates supported by armor…he tried not to think about.

Then one night the northwestern sky filled with flashes. Man-made thunder stunned his ears. The C.S. attack the guerrillas were dreading didn't come. The Confederates needed everything they had to hold back the U.S. forces hitting them.

And everything they had wasn't enough. Soldiers and vehicles in butternut poured back past and through the guerrillas' little territory. They weren't interested in fighting the blacks; they just wanted to get away. Wounded men and battered trucks and halftracks floundered here and there. The Negroes scrounged whatever they could.

And then Cassius spotted an advancing barrel painted not butternut but green-gray. It had a decal of an eagle in front of crossed swords on each side of the turret. He burst into unashamed tears of joy. The damnyankees were here at last!

A fter capturing Camp Determination and the vast mass graves where its victims lay, Major General Abner Dowling had trouble figuring out what the U.S. Eleventh Army should do next. He'd handed the United States a huge propaganda victory. No one could deny any more that the Confederates were killing off their Negroes as fast as they could.

Some of the locals were horrified when he rubbed their noses in what their country was up to. The mayor of Snyder, Texas, and a few of its other leading citizens killed themselves after forced tours of the graves.

But others remained chillingly indifferent or, worse, convinced the Negroes had it coming. Only coons and goddamn troublemakers were phrases Dowling never wanted to hear again.

He scratched at his graying mustache as he studied a map of west Texas tacked on the wall of what had been the mayor's office. Snyder, under military occupation, was doing without a mayor for now. "What do you think, Major?" he asked his adjutant. "Where do we go from here?"

Major Angelo Toricelli was young and handsome and slim, none of which desirable adjectives fit his superior. "Amarillo's too far north," he said judiciously. "We don't have the men to hold the front from here to there."

Dowling eyed the map. If that wasn't the understatement of the year, it came in no worse than second runner-up. "Abilene, then," he said. It was the next town of any size, and it didn't lie that far east of Snyder.

"I suppose so." If Major Toricelli was eager to go after Abilene, he hid it very well. Dowling knew why, too. Even if the Eleventh Army captured Abilene…Well, so what? Taking it wouldn't bring the USA much closer to victory or do anything more than annoy the Confederates.

With a sigh, Dowling said, "We've pretty much shot our bolt, haven't we?"

"Unless they're going to reinforce us, yes, sir," his adjutant answered.

"Ha! Don't hold your breath," Dowling said. Hanging on to the men Eleventh Army had was hard enough.

"Maybe you'll get a new command, sir," Major Toricelli said hopefully.

"Sure. Maybe they'll send me to Baja California." Dowling's voice overflowed with false heartiness.

His adjutant winced. The USA had tried to take Baja California away from the Empire of Mexico during the last war, tried and failed. This time around, the United States seemed to have succeeded. And, having taken Baja California away from Mexico, what did the USA have? Baja California, and that was all: miles and miles and miles of the driest, most godforsaken terrain in the world.

Holding Baja California mattered for only one reason. It let the United States sit over the Confederates in Sonora. U.S. ships could block the outlet to the Gulf of California. U.S. airplanes in Baja California could easily strike the C.S. port at Guaymas. Of course, Confederate aircraft in Sonora could hit back at the warships and the air bases. They could, and they did. The luckless brigadier general in charge of that operation was welcome to it, as far as Abner Dowling was concerned.

"With what you've done here, you ought to get a command closer to the Schwerpunkt," Major Toricelli said.

"How about Sequoyah?" Dowling asked innocently.

That was closer to the center of things than west Texas, which didn't mean Toricelli didn't wince again anyhow. Sequoyah was a bloody mess, and probably would go on being one for years. Thanks to a large influx of settlers from the USA, it had voted not to rejoin the Confederacy in Al Smith's ill-advised plebiscite. But the Indian tribes in the east, who'd prospered under Confederate rule, hated the U.S. occupation. And most of the oil there lay under Indian-held land.

The oil fields had gone back and forth several times in this war. Whoever was retreating blew up what he could to deny the oil to the enemy. When the United States held the oil fields, Confederate raiders and their Indian stooges sabotaged whatever wasn't blown up. That led to U.S. reprisals, which led to bushwhacking, which led to hell in a handbasket.