Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Nothing to do but take the pounding and try to get away. Sam had heard Great War stories about how raiders caught between their trench line and the enemy’s hated star shells with a purple passion. Now he understood exactly how they felt. There you were, all lit up, naked as a bug on a plate.

A big boom and a flash of light from the shore said the Daniels’ gun had hit something worthwhile-probably the ammunition store for one of the guns shooting at the ship. Before Sam could let out a whoop, a Confederate shell burst just forward of the bridge. He watched a machine-gun crew blown to cat’s meat. Fragments whistled and screeched past him. After pausing to make sure he was still in one piece, he asked, “You all right, Mr. Cooley?”

“Everything’s copacetic here, Skipper,” Cooley said, and then, “Well, almost everything.” He displayed his left sleeve, which had a brand-new gash in it. An inch farther in and he would have gone down to the sick bay with a wounded arm. Six inches farther in and they would have had to carry him to sick bay with a belly wound. Even with all the fancy drugs they had these days, belly wounds were very bad news.

“Good for you, Pat.” That sliced sleeve made Sam less formal than usual. “You don’t really want a Purple Heart, no matter how pretty the ribbon would look on your uniform.”

“Yes, sir,” Cooley said. Another shell screamed in. He and Sam both ducked automatically, not that ducking was likely to do a hell of a lot of good. The shell was a clean miss, bursting a good hundred yards to starboard. A little hesitantly, the exec asked, “Are we going to get out of this, sir?”

Sam thought of talking about the Battle of the Three Navies, when the British and the Japanese hit the Dakota with everything but their purse. He thought about the Remembrance ’s last fight, when Japanese air power finally sank the tough old carrier. In the end, though, he just stuck to business: “Unless we take one in the engine room that leaves us dead in the water, we will. Otherwise, those 105s may hurt us, but they won’t be able to kill us before we get out of range.”

Cooley considered that, then nodded. He looked at his wristwatch. “At flank speed, we’ve got to stand the gaff for-what? About another fifteen minutes?”

Carsten checked his watch, too. He laughed ruefully. “Yeah, that’s about right. I didn’t think it would be so long. Aren’t we lucky?”

“Lucky. Right.” Cooley managed an answering grin, but one of a distinctly sepulchral sort. A Confederate shell burst just behind the stern. Those near misses were dangerous, because fragments still flew. Screams from that direction said some of these had struck home.

“Can you give us any more down there?” Sam yelled to the engine room through a speaking tube.

“Sir, she’s flat out,” the chief engineer said. “Shit, we’ve got the valves tied down the way they did on the old paddle-wheel riverboats.”

“All right-thanks.” Sam sighed. He shouldn’t have expected anything different. He hadn’t really, but he’d hoped for something like, Oh, yes, sir, we’ll dreelspayl the paragore and get you two more knots easy as you please. Two more knots? He snorted. He wanted ten more. Well, sonny boy, you ain’t gonna get ’em. He turned back to the exec. “Do you think we ought to throw some zigzags into the course?”

“Straight gets us out of range faster,” Cooley said doubtfully.

“Yeah, but it lets them lead us, too,” Sam answered. “Ever hunt ducks?”

“Once or twice, but I didn’t like it. It’s not all it’s quacked up to be.”

“Ouch. Don’t do that again. I think I’d rather-” Sam broke off. However bad Cooley’s occasional puns were, he didn’t prefer being under Confederate gunfire to listening to them.

The exec did start zigzagging at random. That would have been better with another ten knots, too, but you did what you could with what you had. Sam thought it helped. They took another hit and a couple of more near misses, but nothing that slowed them down. And, even though those were some of the longest fifteen minutes of Sam’s life, they finally ended.

By then, all the shells were coming in astern of the Josephus Daniels. When the Confederates realized as much, they ceased fire.

“Now we’re home free, if one of their airplanes doesn’t find us,” Sam said.

“You’re full of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you, sir?” Cooley said.

“Like a sardine can is full of sardines, son,” Sam answered. “Straighten out and head for home. I’m gong to assess the damage. Keep straight unless we’re attacked. If they jump us before I’m back to the bridge-” He broke off again. “Belay that. I’ll take the conn. You go assess the damage and report back.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley didn’t question him. The Josephus Daniels was his, Sam Carsten’s, no one else’s. Responsibility for her was his, too. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything happening if he wasn’t there when it did. Cooley said, “I’ll hustle, sir.”

Sam stared at the Y-range screens as the ship sped up toward Maryland. No aircraft heading his way, nothing on the water. He didn’t think the Confederates had anything bigger than a torpedo boat operating in the bay, but a torpedo boat could ruin you if you didn’t spot it till too late.

Cooley came back. “Sir, looks like four to six dead, a couple of dozen wounded. We’ve got one wrecked 40mm mount-that’s the worst of the damage. The rest is mostly metalwork. All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. We got away cheap. The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took. By that grim arithmetic, the Josephus Daniels had got away cheap.

Hyrum Rush had gone back to Utah and been passed through the lines into Mormon-held territory under flag of truce. As far as Flora Blackford was concerned, even that was better than he deserved. His parting words before getting on the train that would take him west were, “You people will see what this costs you.” If he hadn’t been under safe-conduct, that would have been plenty to make Flora lock him up and throw away the key.

“The nerve of the man!” she spluttered when his warning-his threat? — got back to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. “We should never have talked with him in the first place!”

“There I agree with you completely,” Robert Taft said. “You will have more luck persuading the administration than I’m likely to, though.”

Taft was a famously acerbic man, and also one given to understatement. He remained the leading hard-line Democrat in the Senate. Flora worried about agreeing with him. He no doubt also worried about agreeing with her.

“I’ve never said Socialists can’t make mistakes,” Flora answered. “I have said they aren’t the only ones who can make mistakes. Some people don’t recognize the difference.”

He gave her a tight smile-the only kind his face had room for. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, and she found herself smiling back.

They had plenty to do, questioning officers and men about the bloody fiasco at Fredericksburg. About the most anybody-including Daniel MacArthur-would say to defend it was, It seemed like a good idea at the time. Trying to pin down why it had seemed a good idea was like trying to scoop up water with a sieve. The committee remained very busy and accomplished very little.

Like anyone else these days, Hyrum Rush had to go up through Canada to travel from east to west. Flora kept track of his progress through Franklin Roosevelt. “I hope you’re making him cool his heels up there,” she told the Assistant Secretary of War.