Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Come on,” Fremont Dalby said again. “Let’s find us a gun.” He trotted off as if he knew exactly where to do it.

And damned if he didn’t. Twin 40mm mounts were almost as thick as fleas on land as well as aboard ship. This one had fallen silent because a bomb burst behind it turned the crew to tattered red rags. George gulped. Blood splashed the guns’ breech ends and dappled the shells.

Dalby looked at the fallen gunners. “They’re dead,” he said, which was almost an understatement. “Not a damn thing we can do for ’em-except maybe pay the Japs back. You guys feed and load, I’ll aim, and we’ll all hope like hell.”

George got blood on his hands when he passed shells to Fritz Gustafson. The loader got more on his when he shoved them home. Dalby aimed at a bomber.

The gun roared. Shell casings leaped from the breeches and clanged on the cement sidewalk. With only three men to serve the piece, it couldn’t fire as fast as it would have with a whole crew. Nobody cared. They were hitting back, not just taking a pounding the way they had been.

George had no idea whether they hit anything. He didn’t have time to look up. He was too busy doing his job, trying to pass as much ammunition as two men would. The loader didn’t complain, and neither did Fremont Dalby. He couldn’t have done too badly, then.

Only when the gun fell silent did he pause, blinking in surprise. “No more targets,” Dalby announced. “They’ve flown the coop.”

When George glanced at his wristwatch, he blinked in amazement. He also took a good, long look to make sure the second hand was going around. “We’ve only been here fifteen minutes?” he said.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Dalby said. “I think maybe we ran ’em off. Other question is, what did they do to us?”

Whenever George moved, his shoes left bloody footprints. He didn’t want to look at what was left of the gun’s original crew. But, in a fight like this, men were small change. How many airplanes had the Japs lost? Would they lose any carriers? Measure that against the damage they’d done and you’d get some idea of who’d come out on top. Maybe.

“You men!” That was an unmistakable officer’s bark. Along with his shipmates, George turned, came to attention, and saluted. The unmistakable officer-a lieutenant commander, no less-kept on barking: “I haven’t seen you before, and I know damn well this isn’t your proper station. Explain yourselves.”

“Sir, we’re from the Townsend, ” Dalby answered. “We were looking for a way to hit back at the enemy. You can see for yourself what happened to the men who were posted here. We fought this gun as well as we could, sir.” He spoke calmly, quietly, respectfully. Only his eyes asked, What were you doing while all this crap was going on?

The lieutenant commander had some mileage on him. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d started out during the Great War. He knew what the petty officer wasn’t saying. Knowing, he turned red-not so red as George’s footprints, but red enough. “Carry on,” he said in a choked voice, and got out of there in a hurry.

“You showed him,” George said.

“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby didn’t sound happy. “You shouldn’t have to show officers, though, especially not the ones who’ve been around the block. But some of ’em just have to make like they’re God.”

When stretcher bearers came by, the men from the Townsend waved to them. They hurried over, but they didn’t stay. “We’re supposed to be looking for wounded,” one of them said. “Those birds ain’t goin’ anywhere if we leave ’em where they’re at. Sooner or later, the meat wagon will deal with ’em.”

“Not right,” George said. “These guys were doing everything they could till their number came up. Shouldn’t just leave ’em like garbage.” Actually, they reminded him of what was all over the decks of the Sweet Sue after the men on the fishing boat had been gutting big cod.

But Dalby cut the stretcher bearers more slack than he’d given the officer. “Wounded count for more,” he allowed. “You can still save them.”

“Thanks, Chief,” said the man who’d spoken before. The bearers hurried away.

Dalby looked at his shipmates. “Either one of you notice if we had bombers taking off?”

“Not me,” George said at once. “I was too busy trying not to let the Japs blow me to kingdom come, and then trying to shoot ’em down.”

“We did,” Fritz Gustafson said. “They were already airborne when I hit the trench.” Two consecutive sentences from him were a telephone book, an unabridged dictionary, from a noisier man.

Fremont Dalby nodded. “That’s pretty good. We ought to be hitting back pretty damn quick, then. Those bastards need to pay.”

“Bombers should have taken off the minute we picked up the Japs’ airplanes on the Y-range set,” George said.

“Yeah,” Dalby said thoughtfully, and then, in deeper, gruffer, angrier tones, “Yeah!” He kicked at the sidewalk. “Yeah, goddammit. Somebody was asleep at the switch again. That would have been the best way to do it, sure as hell. Christ, there are times when I really do think we want to lose this fuckin’ war.”

“Hey, Dalby, you still in one piece?” The shout came from the direction in which the gunners had come. Only another CPO would have used the gun chief’s naked surname with such relish.

“Yeah, we’re here, Burnett.” Dalby gave back what he’d got. “Leastways we didn’t stay in the trench sucking our thumbs and hanging on to our Theodore bears.”

Chief Burnett’s reply offered an improbable and uncomfortable destination for both thumbs and Theodore bears. Dalby suggested that Burnett’s mother already resided there. Burnett gave forth with an opinion on certain habits of Dalby’s mother about which he was unlikely to have personal knowledge. Then, in the same unruffled tone of voice, he asked, “You cocksuckers hit anything?”

“Damfino,” Dalby answered, also without much heat. “We gave it our best shot, that’s all.” He slapped Gustafson and George on the back, staggering them both-and George was not a small man, and Fritz Gustafson was a big one. “You already knew the squarehead’s solid. And this guy here ain’t half bad.”

George shuffled his feet on the blood-splashed sidewalk. “Thanks, Chief,” he mumbled. A Naval Cross from the hands of an admiral wouldn’t have meant nearly so much as that laconic praise from a man who mattered to him.

“Well, well,” Tom Colleton said. “What have we here?”

What they had there was a company of Confederate barrels: big, snorting machines painted in butternut with swirls and splotches of dark green and dark brown to make them harder to spot and harder to hit. But they were barrels the likes of which hadn’t been seen up in Ohio before.

Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton strolled over for a closer look at the new monsters. They were plainly related to the beasts that had spearheaded the Confederate thrust to Lake Erie the summer before. They were just as plainly bigger and meaner- Tyrannosaurus rex next to the earlier Allosaurus. They seemed more squat, lower to the ground. As Tom Colleton got up to them, he realized they weren’t, but the impression remained. Instead of going straight up and down, most of their armor was cleverly sloped to help deflect shells. And their turret guns were bigger and longer than those of the earlier models.

One of the barrel drivers was head and shoulders out of his machine: no point in buttoning up when the damnyankees weren’t close. “That’s a two-and-a-half-inch cannon you’ve got there?” Colleton asked.