Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"Grenades, machine guns-and artillery, if you can find a way to get it to us," Orson answered. "But the first two especially. Rifles we've got. We've had rifles for a long time."

"We can get the weapons over the border for you. If you got in, we can get them out," Potter promised. "It's just a matter of setting up exactly where and when. How you get them to where you use them after that is your business."

"I understand." Orson snapped his fingers. "Oh-one other thing. Land mines. Heavy land mines. They're going to throw barrels at us. They didn't have those the last time around. We'll need something to make them say uncle."

"Heavy land mines." Potter scribbled a note to himself. "Yes, that makes sense. How are you fixed for gas masks?"

"Pretty well, but we could probably use more," Orson answered. "We didn't have to worry much about gas the last time around, either."

"All right." Potter nodded. "One more question, then. This one isn't about weapons. What will Governor Young do when Utah rises? What will you do about him if he tries to clamp down on the rising?" That was two questions, actually, but they went together like two adjoining pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Orson said, "There are some people who still think we can get along with the USA. We'll take care of them when the time comes. We have a list." He spoke without anger but with grim certainty. He didn't name Heber Young-one of Brigham's numerous grandsons. On the other hand, he didn't say the governor wasn't on the list, either.

"That's good," Clarence Potter said. "I was hoping you might."

The Mormon-nationalist? patriot? zealot? what was the right word?-eyed him with no great liking. "Occurs to me, General, that it's just as well we won't share a border no matter how things turn out. You'd be just as much trouble as the United States are."

"You may be right," Potter said, thinking Orson certainly was. "But what does that have to do with the price of beer?"

Beer. Orson's lips silently shaped the word. Potter wondered how badly he'd just blundered. The man in the somber suit undoubtedly didn't drink. But Orson could be practical. After a small pause, he nodded. "Point taken, sir. Right now, it doesn't have anything to do with anything."

"We agree on that. If we don't agree on other things-well, so what?" Potter said. "I'm going to take you to my colleagues in Logistics. They'll arrange to get you what you need when you need it." He got to his feet.

So did Orson. He held out his hand. "Thank you for your help. I realize you have your own selfish reasons for giving it, but thank you. Regardless of what you're doing here in the CSA, you really are helping freedom in Deseret."

I love you, too, Potter thought. Whatever his opinion of Orson's candor, it didn't show on his face. But as they walked to the door, he couldn't help asking, "Would the, um, gentiles in your state agree with you?"

Orson stopped. His face didn't show much, either. But his pale eyes blazed. "If they'd cared what happened to us for the past sixty years, maybe I would worry more about what happens to them. As things are, General… As things are, what do they have to do with the price of beer right now?"

"Touche," Potter murmured. He took the Mormon down the hall to Logistics. People gave the obvious civilian curious looks. He didn't seem to belong there. But he was keeping company with a brigadier general, so no one said anything. And, even if he didn't belong in the War Department, he had the look of a man of war.

Logistics didn't receive Orson with glad cries. Potter hadn't expected them to. They parted with ordnance as if they made it themselves right there in the War Department offices. But they'd known the Mormon was coming. And they knew one other thing: they knew Jake Featherston wanted them to do what they could for Orson. In the Confederate States these days, nothing counted for more than that.

George Enos, Jr., found himself facing the same dilemma as his father had a generation earlier. He didn't want to join the U.S. Navy. He would much rather have stayed a fisherman. If he tried, though, his chances of being conscripted into the Army ranged from excellent to as near certain as made no difference. He relished the infantry even less than the Navy.

"I'd better do it," he told his wife on a morning when the war news was particularly bad-not that it had ever been good, not since the very start of things.

Connie began to cry. "You're liable to get killed!" she said.

"I know," he replied. "But what's liable to happen to me if they stick a rifle in my hands and send me off to Ohio? Where are my chances better? And it's not safe just putting to sea these days." He remembered too well the gruesome strafing the British fighter had given the Sweet Sue.

"Why don't you just get a job in a war plant here in Boston and come home to me every night?" Connie demanded.

They'd been over that one before-over it and over it and over it again. George gave the best answer he could: "Because I'd start going nuts, that's why. The ocean's in me, same as it is with your old man."

She winced. Her father had been a fisherman forever. As long as he could keep going out, he would. She and George both knew it. She said, "That's not fair. It's not fair to me, it's not fair to the boys…" But she didn't say it wasn't true. She couldn't, and she knew it.

"I'm sorry, hon. I wish I was different," George said. "But I'm not. And so…"

And so the first thing he did the next morning was visit the Navy recruiting station not far from T Wharf. It was in one of the toughest parts of Boston, surrounded by cheap saloons, pawnshops, and houses where the girls stripped at second-story windows and leaned out hollering invitations to the men passing by below and abuse when they got ignored. George wouldn't have minded stripping himself; the day was breathlessly hot and muggy. Even walking made sweat stream off him.

A fat, gray-haired petty officer sat behind a sheet-steel desk filling out forms. He finished what he was doing before deigning to look at-look through-George. "Why shouldn't I just be shipping your ass on over to the Army where you belong?" he asked in a musical brogue cold enough to counteract the weather.

"I've been going to sea for more than ten years," George answered, "and my father was killed aboard the USS Ericsson at-after-the end of the last war."

The petty officer's bushy, tangled eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. He pointed a nicotine-stained forefinger at George. "We can check that, you know," he rumbled. "And if you're after lying to me for sympathy's sake, you'll go to the Army, all right, and you'll go with a full set of lumps."

"Check all you please," George said. "Half the people in Boston know my story." He gave his name, adding, "My mother's the one who shot Roger Kimball."

"Son of a bitch," the petty officer said. "They should have pinned a medal on her. All right, Enos. That's the best one I've heard since the goddamn war started, so help me Hannah." He pulled open a desk drawer. It squeaked; it needed oiling, or maybe grinding down to bright metal. "I've got about five thousand pounds of forms for you to be filling out, but you'll get what you want if you pass the physical." One of those eyebrows rose again. "Maybe even if you don't, by Jesus. If you come from that family, the whole country owes you one."

"I can do the job," George said. "That's the only thing that ought to matter. I never would have said a word about the other stuff if you hadn't asked me the way you did."

"You've got pull," the petty officer said. "You'd be a damn fool if you didn't use it." He pointed again, this time towards a rickety table against the far wall. "Go on over there and fill these out. To hell with me if we won't have the doctors look you over this afternoon. You can say your good-byes tonight and head off for training first thing tomorrow mornin'."