Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

She nodded. But her conscience niggled at her all the same. She’d applauded when she heard about auto bombs going off in the Confederate States. The Confederates, after all, deserved it for the way they treated their Negroes.

Again, who thought the United States deserved it? The Confederates, because the USA had had the gall to win the Great War? The Mormons, because the United States wouldn’t leave their precious Deseret alone? She would have bet one them, but what did she have for proof? Nothing, and she knew it. The Canadians, because the United States still held their land? The British, because the Americans had taken Canada away from them?

All of the above? None of the above?

Sounding both furious and frightened, Robert Taft went on, “We’d better get a handle on this business in a hurry. If we don’t, any damn fool with an imaginary grievance will think he can load dynamite into a motorcar and get even with the world.”

Flora’s thoughts hadn’t gone in that direction, which didn’t mean the Senator from Ohio was wrong. She said, “We’d better get a handle on this for all kinds of reasons.” Two firemen carried a moaning, bloody woman past her on a stretcher. She pointed. “There’s one.”

“Yes.” Taft tipped his fedora to her. “We have our differences, you and I, but we both love this country.”

“That’s true. Not always in the same way, but we do,” Flora said. Cops helped a wounded man stagger by. Flora sighed. “At a time like this, though, what difference does party make?”

Sergeant Michael Pound was not a happy man. His barrel-and, in fact, his whole unit of barrels-had finally escaped from the southern Ohio backwater where they’d been stuck for so long. They were facing the Confederates farther north. That should have done something to improve the gunner’s temper. It should have, but it hadn’t.

No, Pound remained unhappy, and made only the slightest efforts to hide it. He was a broad-shouldered, burly man: not especially tall, but made for slewing a gun from side to side if the hydraulics went out. He had a deceptively soft voice, and used it to say deceptively mild things. When he thought the men put above him were idiots, as he often did, he had a way of making sure they knew it.

What really irked him was that he’d been the gunner on Irving Morrell’s personal barrel. Whatever Morrell found out, Pound had learned shortly thereafter. Morrell hadn’t minded his sarcastic comments on the way the brass thought (if the brass thought at all: always an interesting question). And Michael Pound hadn’t thought Morrell was an idiot. Oh, no-on the contrary. The only thing wrong with Morrell was that his superiors hadn’t seen how good he was.

The Confederates had. After their sniper put a bullet in Morrell, Pound was the one who’d carried him out of harm’s way and back to the aid tent. Scuttlebutt said Morrell was finally back in action. That was good. The CSA would be sorry.

But Morrell wasn’t back in action here. That wasn’t good, and it especially wasn’t good for Michael Pound. He’d declined a commission several times. Now he was paying for it. Because of his reputation as a mouthy troublemaker, he didn’t even command his own barrel, though a lot of sergeants did. They’d put him under a young lieutenant instead. Pound didn’t know if they’d deliberately intended to humiliate him, but they’d sure done the job.

Bryce Poffenberger might have been born when Pound joined the Army, but probably hadn’t. But he owned a little gold bar on each shoulder strap, and Pound had only stripes on his sleeve. That meant Poffenberger was God-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask him.

He never asked for Pound’s opinion. He didn’t seem to think the War Department had issued opinions to enlisted men. If he’d had a better notion of what he was doing himself, Pound wouldn’t have minded so much. But he never had been able to suffer fools gladly, and he never had been able to suffer in silence, either.

When Poffenberger ordered the barrel to stop on the forward slope of a hill, Pound said, “Sir, we would have done better to halt on the reverse slope.”

“Oh?” The second lieutenant’s voice already had a defensive quaver to it, and he’d known Pound for only a few days at that point. “Why, pray tell?”

Pray tell? Pound thought. Had anyone since the Puritans really said that? Bryce Poffenberger just had, by God. Patiently, the sergeant answered, “Because on the reverse slope we’re hull-down to the enemy, sir. This way, the whole barrel makes a nice, juicy target.”

Lieutenant Poffenberger sniffed. “I don’t believe there are any Confederates close by.” He stood up in the turret to look out through the cupola. That was something good barrel commanders did. It took a certain nerve. Poffenberger might have been a moron, but he wasn’t a cowardly moron.

Not half a minute later, a round from a Confederate antibarrel gun assassinated an oak tree just to the barrel’s left. Poffenberger ducked back down with a startled squeak. Sometimes-not often-Sergeant Pound was tempted to believe in God. This was one of those times.

“Reverse!” Poffenberger ordered the driver. “Back up!” The Confederates got off one more shot at the barrel before it put the hill between itself and the gun. Lieutenant Poffenberger eyed Michael Pound. “How did you know that was going to happen, Sergeant?”

“I have more combat experience than you do, sir,” Pound answered matter-of-factly. So does my cat, and I haven’t got a cat.

“They warned me about you,” Poffenberger said. “They told me you had a big mouth and were insubordinate.”

“They were right, sir.” Pound knew he shouldn’t sound so cheerful, but he couldn’t help it.

The young lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “They told me you were all puffed up because you’d served with Colonel Morrell for so long, and he used to let you get away with murder. They told me you’d started to think you were a colonel yourself.”

That did hold some truth, which Sergeant Pound also knew. He said, “Sir, there was one difference between when I talked to Colonel Morrell and when I talk to you.”

“Oh?” What’s that?” Poffenberger sounded genuinely intrigued.

“When I said something to the colonel, sometimes he’d believe me before the barrel almost blew up.”

Poffenberger was a fair-haired, fair-skinned youngster from somewhere in the upper Midwest. When he turned red, it was easy to see. He turned red as a traffic light now. “Maybe you have a point, Sergeant,” he choked out. “Maybe. But I command this barrel. You don’t. There’s no getting around that.”

“I don’t want to get around it, sir,” Pound answered earnestly. “I don’t want to be an officer. I could have been an officer years ago if I wanted to put up with the bother.” Watching Lieutenant Poffenberger’s jaw drop was amusing, but only for a little while. Pound added, “I don’t want to be an officer, but I don’t want to get killed, either. Not even sergeants like getting killed… sir.”

“I didn’t think they did.” Poffenberger couldn’t have sounded any stiffer if he’d been carved out of marble.

Pound pretended not to notice. He said, “Well, in that case, sir, don’t you think we ought to scoot to one side or the other? We’re hull-down here, but we’re not turret-down, and if those butternut bastards get a halfway decent shot at us, they’ll remind us the hard way.”

He waited. How stubborn was the lieutenant? Stubborn enough not to listen to somebody with a lower rank even if not listening made getting nailed with a high-velocity armor-piercing round much more likely? Some officers-more than a few of them-were like that. They wanted to be right themselves, even if it meant being dead right. Short of knocking them over the head, what could you do?