Harry Turtledove - The Grapple

“HE!” Bergman loaded a white-tipped high-explosive round into the breech.

The gun roared. The noise was tolerable inside the turret. To Lieutenant Griffiths, out there in the open, it must have been cataclysmic. Soldiers joked about artilleryman’s ear, but they were kidding on the square.

When the machine gun kept firing, Pound swore. A 2.4-inch HE shell just didn’t carry a big enough bursting charge to be very effective. He’d seen that in Pittsburgh, and he was seeing it again in among the trees here. “Give me another round,” he told Cecil Bergman.

“You got it, Sarge.” The loader slammed the shell home.

An instant before Pound fired, Don Griffiths groaned. Pound didn’t let himself pay attention till the second HE round was on the way. He saw the Confederate machine gun fly one way and a gunner, or some of a gunner, fly another. But he had no time to exult; Griffiths was slumping down into the turret.

“How bad is it, sir?” Pound asked, swearing at himself-if he’d knocked out the gun first try, the lieutenant might not have got hit.

“Arm,” Griffiths answered through clenched teeth. He had to be biting down hard on a scream. Sure as hell, his left sleeve was bloody, and blood dripped from his hand down onto the shell casings on the fighting compartment floor.

“Can you wiggle your fingers?” Pound asked. Griffiths tried, but gasped and swore and shook his head. He’d had a bone shattered in there, then-maybe more than one. Pound took a morphine syrette from the wound pouch on his belt, stuck it into Griffiths’ thigh, and pushed home the plunger. Then he said, “Let’s bandage you up.”

He had to cut away the sleeve to get at the wound. He dusted it with sulfa powder and packed it with gauze. As soon as he could, he’d get Griffiths out of the barrel and send him to the rear with some corpsmen.

“You’ve got yourself command here whether you want it or not.” The lieutenant sounded eerily calm, which meant the morphine was taking hold.

“Even if I did want it, sir, I wouldn’t want it like this,” Pound said, which was true. “You’ll be back soon.” He hoped that was true.

He stuck his own head out of the cupola. With the machine gun gone, all he had to worry about were ordinary Confederate infantrymen and maybe snipers in the trees. He looked around. Sometimes luck was with you, though he wished it would have shown up a little sooner. But he did see a couple of corpsmen with Red Crosses on smocks and armbands and helmets. He waved to them.

“What’s up?” one of them yelled.

Before Pound could answer, a bullet cracked past. He ducked. He knew it was a useless reflex, which didn’t mean he could help himself. He hoped it was a random round. If it wasn’t, the medics would have two casualties to deal with. Unless, of course, I get killed outright, he thought cheerily.

“Got a wounded officer. Forearm-broken bones,” he called after he straightened up.

“All right-we’ll take care of him,” the corpsman said. “Can you swing sideways so the barrel covers him while you get him out of the hatch?”

Pound liked that idea about as much as he liked a root canal. Expose the barrel’s thin side armor to whatever guns the goons in butternut had up ahead? But the medics weren’t armored at all. Neither was Lieutenant Griffiths, and he’d gone and proved it.

Sometimes you needed a root canal. It was no fun, but you had to go through with it. This wouldn’t be any fun, either. If they hustled, though, they ought to get away with it. “Will do,” Pound called to the medics. He ducked down into the turret and told the driver to make a hard right and stop.

“Jesus! You sure?” The protest came back through the speaking tube.

“Damn straight. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t,” Pound answered. “Come on. Step on it. The lieutenant’s bleeding all over everything back here.”

“It’s not so bad now.” Griffiths sounded as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The morphine must have hit him hard. Well, good.

Snorting, the barrel turned. The movement wasn’t so sharp as it might have been. Try too tight a turn and you might throw a track, in which case you wouldn’t go anywhere for a while. When Pound was satisfied, he yelled, “Stop!” and the barrel did. He undogged the side hatch and sketched a salute to Don Griffiths. “Out you go, sir. You did good. Hope I see you again one day.” He meant it. He wasn’t the sort to waste compliments on people who didn’t deserve them.

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Awkwardly, Griffiths scrambled out of the barrel. Pound helped him leave. The corpsmen took charge of him once he got through the hatch. They eased him down to the ground and got him moving away from the front. They were probably relieved to help somebody able to move on his own: they didn’t have to lug him in a stretcher.

After waiting till they’d gone some distance from the barrel, Pound clanged the hatch shut and dogged it. He yelled into the speaking tube: “All right, Miranda-square us up again.”

“You bet, Sarge!” The barrel jumped as the driver put the thicker steel of the glacis plate and the turret between the crew and the enemy.

Peering through the periscopes in the commander’s cupola, Pound saw the heaviest action off to his left. He ordered the barrel over that way. For now, it was his.

Clouds and rain and sleet shrouded the North Atlantic. A few hundred miles to the west of the Josephus Daniels lay Newfoundland. To the east of the destroyer escort, probably, lay trouble. The British never stopped sending arms and men to Newfoundland and to Canada to give the rebellion against the USA a helping hand. Lieutenant Sam Carsten and the skippers of his fellow picket ships did everything they could to keep the limeys from getting through.

He halfheartedly swore at the weather. It made enemy ships all that much harder to find. The rain and sleet even interfered with the Y-ranging gear. The wireless waves bounced back from raindrops, too. A good operator could peer through the interference, but it sure didn’t make life any easier. And the old-fashioned Mark One eyeball had a very short range here.

He swore only halfheartedly because the weather suited his own needs very well. He was a short step away from being an albino. His skin was pink, his eyes pale blue, and his hair white gold. It was even whiter these days than it had been when he was younger-he’d spent almost thirty-five years in the Navy now. Summer in the tropics was a never-ending misery for him. Summer in Seattle was a misery for him, and that took doing.

His executive officer was a young, auburn-haired lieutenant named Pat Cooley. If not for Sam, the exec might have been the the fairest man on the ship. Cooley had gone through Annapolis, while Sam was a mustang who hadn’t made ensign till some years after the Great War.

Cooley was a comer, a hotshot. He’d have a ship of his own before long. Sam didn’t want the exec promoted out from under him, but he knew things worked that way. As for himself, when he walked into the recruiting office all those years ago he never dreamt he would wear two stripes on his sleeve. He’d just been looking for a way to escape walking behind the north end of a southbound mule for the rest of his life.

The Josephus Daniels pitched down into the trough between two waves. Seas on the North Atlantic weren’t quite so fierce and mountainous as they had been earlier in the winter, but they weren’t any fun, either. “You all right, Mr. Cooley?” Sam asked when the exec grabbed for something to steady himself.

“Yes, sir. Just clumsy.” Cooley’s eyes were green as a cat’s. Just now, he looked like a cat that had rolled off a bed and was trying to pretend it hadn’t.