Harry Turtledove: The Guns of the South

The air inside smelled hot and burnt. Caudell dove and rolled. He bumped up against a stack of crates, neatly stenciled MEALS, READY TO EAT. Mollie crouched beside him. He blinked again and again to make his eyes adapt to the sudden gloom. The shed wasn’t as dark as it should have been. Over in one corner, hidden behind more crates, a bright white light shone off the cobwebby ceiling.

Mollie pointed to it with the muzzle of her AK-47. “That’s the same kind of light Benny Lang had in his house, ‘cept he had ‘em all over, not just the one.”

“To hell with Benny Lang.” But Caudell was already scuttling forward on hands and knees. “Reckon we’ve got to find out what that is.” Mollie went right behind him, and several other soldiers, too. He waved them to a halt when he came to a turn in the maze of crates. “If I touch off another torpedo, no need for us all to go up.”

He rounded corners one by one, each time by himself. He didn’t think about bravery till long afterwards; at the time, the only thing in his mind was the luckless lieutenant’s empty shoes. If he did touch off a torpedo, he’d never know what hit him. Oddly, that helped steady him. He’d seen too many worse ways of dying.

Then he came to the last: turn. Ahead of him, the light spilled out bright as day, maybe brighter. One of the men in back of Mollie said, “Where the hell’d all them Rivington bastards get to?”

Caudell turned the corner. Since he had no idea what a time engine was supposed to look like, he couldn’t have honestly said the machine took him by surprise. It had a small platform, perhaps three feet square, that glowed almost like the sun. His first quick thought when he saw it was relief that it was no larger—who could say what deviltry the Rivington men might have brought from the future through a big time engine?

He blinked so he could squint through the glare, and to make sure he could trust his eyes. On that platform stood a Rivington man, but Caudell could see right through him, as if he were one of the ghosts old Negroes talked about incessantly. While one part of him chewed on that, another brought up his repeater. Before he truly thought about what he was doing, he squeezed off half a dozen rounds.

The bullets passed right through the Rivington man. He did not crumple—he disappeared. The glowing platform went dark, plunging the shed into blackness. The Confederates behind Caudell shouted in alarm; for that matter, so did he. The time engine spat sparks like a railroad car going forty miles an hour with its brakes locked. The wall behind it and the crates to either side caught fire almost at once.

“Let’s get out of here!” three people yelled together. The soldiers scrambled and stumbled and cursed their way back through the maze toward the light from the shed’s blasted doorway. Caudell, who brought up the rear, was coughing and choking on smoke by the time he made it to the blessed fresh air.

But even as he rubbed his streaming eyes, he wondered what had happened to the Rivington man on the platform when he shot up the time engine. Had the man made it back—or rather forward—to his own year? When the engine smashed to bits, was he rudely dumped into 1882, or 1923, or 1979? Or had he vanished into a limbo of no time at all? Caudell knew he would never find out—or stop wondering.

A brisk crackle of gunfire from the south made him quit speculating in a hurry. Here were the outflanked Rivington men, come too late to save their link to whatever year had spawned them. But they still carried rifles in their hands, and they’d proved themselves fighters as tough as any Caudell had ever run into. If they wanted revenge, they could take a fair-sized chunk of it.

Caudell ran south, away from the burning shed. He flopped down by the horse trough from which he’d fired at the train station, only now on the opposite side. Where was Mollie? There, shooting from behind the steps of the general store. A big knot of fear eased inside him when he saw her.

The shed and the supplies inside blazed fiercely now; he could feel the heat on the back of his neck from a hundred yards away. He looked over his shoulder. The thick column of black, black smoke mounting to the sky came from the funeral pyre of the Rivington men’s hopes.

He peeked round the edge of the horse trough for a muzzle flash at which to shoot. He fired twice. Then the AK-47 clicked uselessly—another clip empty. He clicked in his last one, chambered a round. As he did so, he remembered how nearly impossible it was to load a rifle musket while lying down. He crawled along, peeked round the other edge of the trough—maybe someone in mottled green was waiting for him to show up in the same place twice in a row. He hadn’t lived through the Second American Revolution by being stupid.

No muzzle flashes—but what was that, flapping from behind a pokeberry bush? “A white flag,” he said, doubting his own words while he spoke them aloud. But a white flag it was. A Rivington man stepped out from cover to wave it back and forth. Slowly, firing on both sides died away. The men of America Will Break emerged, one by one, hands raised in surrender.

Even after a couple of dozen fighters in mottled green, all of them rifleless, came out into the open, Caudell stayed low behind the horse trough. He had trouble believing the Rivington men, after battling so long and hard against everything the Confederacy could throw at them, would give up now. Nor was he alone. Hardly any Confederate soldiers left hiding places to take charge of their enemies.

So the Rivington men kept walking, hands up, heads down. That more than anything else at last convinced Caudell they really were giving up: they looked like beaten troops. He got to his feet, ready to dive back to safety in an instant at the least hint of danger. When Mollie made as if to join him, he waved her back, saying, “Keep me covered.”

Some of the other Confederates moved with him. Others stayed in place to support them: how many he was not sure, for when he turned around to look, he could see only a couple of them. He also saw the blacks and native whites of Rivington coming out of their hiding places now that the shooting had stopped. A few of them also started toward the men of America Will Break, the men who had ruled their town, ruled their lives, for the past four years and more.

The man with the white flag was the same big fellow who had parleyed with Nathan Bedford Forrest. Caudell searched for his name, found it: Andries Rhoodie. Rhoodie turned his head from one of the approaching Confederates to the next. Finally he made straight for Nate, hailing him with: “You seem to be the ranking soldier here, sir.”

“Me?” Caudell’s voice was a startled squeak. He looked quickly to either side. Sure enough, Rhoodie was right; no Confederate officers had broken cover—he wondered if any of the detachment’s officers were still alive—and no other first sergeants. He gathered himself. “Yes, sir, I guess I am at that. I’m First Sergeant Nate Caudell, 47th North Carolina.”

“Then you are the man to whom we must surrender.” Rhoodie sounded as if he would sooner have faced red Indians, scalping knives. He wore no sword, but took off a belt that held a holstered pistol, thrust it at Caudell. “Here.”

“Uh, thanks.” Though no connoisseur of surrender ceremonies, Caudell suspected they could be handled with more grace. Awkwardly, not wanting to let go of his AK-47, he belted the pistol round his own waist. Then he blurted, “What made you just up and quit like that?”

“What the bleeding hell d’you think?” Rhoodie stabbed a finger toward the burning shed. “With our time machine gone, how are we supposed to fight a whole country?” He did not even try to hide his bitterness.