Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Gots to make the ofay pay.” Moss heard that again and again.

The band that approached Plains numbered about fifty-a platoon’s worth of men. Moss worried as he trudged through the night toward the little town. If the Confederates had a real garrison there, they could slaughter the raiders. “Don’t flabble about it,” Nick Cantarella said when he worried out loud. “First thing is, the smokes around here would know if they were layin’ for us. Second thing is, they don’t have enough guys to garrison every little pissant burg, not if they want to fight a war with us, too.”

Logic said he was right. Sometimes logic let you down with a thud, but… “Sounds good,” Moss said.

Sentries did patrol the peanut fields around Plains. With almost contemptuous ease, the Negroes disposed of the one who might have discovered them. The gray-haired man died almost before he knew someone was drawing a knife across his throat. Only a small, startled sigh escaped him. A guerrilla threw aside his own squirrel gun and appropriated the sentry’s Tredegar. “Too good a piece to waste on a damn fool,” he said.

“Let’s go,” Spartacus said.

They trotted silently into Plains. The silence didn’t last long. They started firing into some houses and tossing Featherston Fizzes into others. Fires roared to life. Alarm bells started ringing. Volunteer firemen emerged from their houses to fight the flames. The raiders picked them off one after another.

“Niggers!” somebody shouted. “Holy Jesus, there’s niggers loose in Plains!”

“Phone wires cut?” Cantarella demanded of Spartacus.

“We done took care of it,” the guerrilla leader said with a savage grin. “Don’t want no help comin’ from nowhere else.”

Here and there, townsfolk fired from windows with rifles or shotguns. Those houses got volleys of fire from the Negroes, as well as gasoline bombs to kill the resisters or drive them out in the open where they made easier prey. Moss also heard women’s screams that sounded more outraged than terrified. “You won’t find any fighting force in the world where that shit doesn’t happen,” Cantarella said. Moss nodded, which didn’t mean he liked it any better.

Somebody in Plains organized defenders who fought as a group, not as so many individuals. “Over here, Jimmy!” a woman called. “We got trouble over here!”

“Be there real quick, Miss Lillian!” a man answered. Moss got a glimpse of him in the firelight: a kid with a mouthful of teeth, wearing a dark gray C.S. Navy tunic over pajama bottoms. Home on leave? Whatever the reason he was here, he was tough and smart and brave, and he’d make real trouble if he got even half a chance.

He didn’t. Moss made sure of that. The Tredegar’s stock didn’t fit his shoulder quite the same way as the U.S. Army Springfield he’d trained with, but the difference didn’t matter. He pulled the trigger gently-he didn’t squeeze it. The rifle bucked. Jimmy, the Navy man here in the middle of Georgia, spun and crumpled.

“Good shot!” Spartacus yelled.

Without a commander who sounded as if he knew what he was doing, the defenders went back to fighting every man for himself. Spartacus’ raiders weren’t well disciplined, but they had a better notion of what they were doing than their foes. They killed as many whites as they could, started fires all over town, and faded back into the countryside. “Well,” Moss said, “we yanked their tails pretty good.”

“Sure did,” Nick Cantarella agreed. “Now we see how hard they yank back.”

Clarence Potter had been going at a dead run ever since he put on the Confederate uniform again. He’d been going even harder than that since the war started. And he was going harder still these past few weeks, since things started turning against the CSA.

To make matters worse, he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III flinched whenever they saw each other even if they were just getting bad fried chicken in the War Department cafeteria. He wished Forrest had kept his mouth shut. Now the chief of the General Staff had him thinking-always a dangerous thing to do.

What if Jake Featherston wasn’t crazy like a fox? What if he was just plain crazy, period? Around the bend? Nutty as a fruitcake? Two cylinders short of a motor?

“Well, what then?” Potter muttered. He wouldn’t have been surprised if there were microphones in his subterranean office. The President of the CSA wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust him, not after everything that had happened between them over the past twenty-five years. Featherston wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust his spymasters, either, no matter who they were. But that handful of words seemed safe enough; Potter could have been wondering about any number of things.

He laughed, as people will laugh when the other choice is crying their eyes out. The rescue drive toward Pittsburgh was moving forward. The map on his wall showed that. But it wasn’t moving forward fast enough. And the cargo airplanes that were supposed to supply the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket were taking an ungodly beating. Potter didn’t know what the officers who’d promised transports could do the job had been smoking. Whatever it was, he wished he had some now. Reality needed some blurring.

And Featherston still wouldn’t let the men in the pocket fight their way west to meet their would-be rescuers, either. “What we have, we hold!” he said, over and over again. Clarence Potter didn’t know what he’d been smoking, either.

Just to make matters more delightful, Lubbock was liable to fall. Some of the nuisance drives the USA had launched to keep the Confederates from strengthening themselves for the rescue effort in Ohio and Pennsylvania were turning into bigger nuisances than even the generals who’d launched them probably expected.

The Attorney General’s office, of all things, was having conniptions about this one. Somewhere southeast of Lubbock was something called Camp Determination. Clarence Potter didn’t know what that was, not in any official way. He didn’t want to know, not in any official way. He had a pretty good unofficial idea.

He also saw the need for places like that. Negro raiders were getting more and more annoying. That Navy man in that little Georgia town, shot down in front of his mother… Half the town was wrecked, too, and it wasn’t the only one guerrillas had hit. Two people bombs in Augusta, one in Savannah, another in Charleston…

Potter whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The really alarming part was, things could have been worse. The USA did only a halfhearted job of supplying black guerrillas. Whites up there didn’t love them, either. If the damnyankees had gone all-out, they could have caused even more trouble than they did.

One bit of good news-Mexican troops would take some of the spook-fighting off the CSA’s hands. Potter didn’t know what Jake Featherston said to Maximilian. Whatever it was, it got the Emperor of Mexico moving. It probably scared the living bejesus out of him, too. Jake Featherston was not a subtle man.

Someone knocked on Potter’s door. He paused to put a couple of papers into drawers before he said, “Come in.”

“Here you are, sir.” A lieutenant handed him a manila envelope.

“Thanks,” Potter said. “Do I need to sign for it?”

“No, sir,” the junior officer answered, which surprised him.

“All right, then.” The lieutenant saluted and disappeared. When Potter opened the envelope, he understood. It was a progress report from Henderson V. FitzBelmont. That project was so secret, it didn’t have a paper trail. This way, no Yankee spy filing sign-off sheets would wonder about it. Better safe.

He quickly read through the report. It was, for the most part, an account of technical difficulties. Uranium hexafluoride was poisonous and savagely corrosive. FitzBelmont and his people were still working out techniques for handling it. Till they did, separating U-235 from U-238 couldn’t even start.