Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"The innocent white men and women being despoiled by the insurrectionists are not toys, either," Stafford said.

"Neither are the slaves who have been despoiled for centuries by these so-called innocents," Newton returned. He stared steadily back at Balthasar Sinapis. "What is your personal view of slavery, Colonel?"

"It is my personal view, sir, and I prefer to keep it that way," Sinapis said. "Whatever it is, it is less important than my view that throwing away an army on account of lack of foresight and cooperation will do Atlantis more harm than good."

"We are all three of us men of strong opinions." Stafford sounded-amused? Yes, amused: Newton was sure of it. The other Consul went on, "Now, if only any two of us shared some of those opinions."

"We are what the country has," Newton said. "If from among us we can't piece together a course that will do the country good, then Lord have mercy on the USA."

"Yes. Kyrie eleison," Sinapis said, which meant the same thing but sounded much more elegant.

In the eastern foothills of the Green Ridge Mountains, the insurrection really caught up with the army. Like his colleague, Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that a diet of salt pork and hardtack left a lot to be desired to start with, and went downhill in a hurry from there. When the train stopped in the evening, some soldiers pounded their hardtack crackers into crumbs and fried them in pork fat. Stafford tried that himself-once. He found that different and better meant two widely separate things.

He also found he hardly needed pipeweed. The inside of the car in which he and Newton and Colonel Sinapis traveled was smoky enough without pipes or cigars. The derailments had broken several windows. He supposed they were lucky all of them hadn't broken. Even as things were, he feared he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The soot on his white shirtfront told him how much he was likely to have on his face. The rasping coughs he let out every so often certainly warned him how much he had in his lungs.

Iron squealed on iron and sparks flew up from the wheels as the locomotive driver braked as hard as he could. "What the deuce?" Stafford said.

"I wonder if some of our not-quite-friends put something new on the tracks." Leland Newton sounded pleased with his own cleverness.

Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, sniffed scornfully. "If they had any tactical sense, they would have put the boulder or log or whatever it was around a bend in the track," he said. "Then the driver would not have been able to see it until he had no chance to stop."

But the insurrectionists did have tactical sense, even if not of the sort Balthasar Sinapis had looked for. As the train slowed, they started shooting at it from the pines and redwoods to either side of the roadbed.

For a moment, those bangs meant nothing to Stafford. But when a bullet punched through the side wall of the car and cracked past his head before drilling out the far side, he figured things out in a hurry. "They're firing at us!" he exclaimed, more angry than frightened.

"What do we do?" Newton added.

"For the sake of the country and for the sake of your own skins, I suggest you get low and flat-now," Colonel Sinapis said.

He couldn't give the two Consuls orders; they outranked him. But his "suggestion" had the snap of what would have been a command. It also seemed a very good idea. No sooner had Stafford got down than another bullet smashed through the space where he had been.

Sinapis did not get down. He drew his eight-shooter and started banging away through one of the broken windows. The reports only a few feet from Stafford's head stunned his ears. Lying beside him on the none-too-clean planks, Leland Newton grimaced every time the colonel fired. "This is most undignified," Newton said.

"Among other things," Stafford agreed.

He wondered what would happen if they both got killed here. He knew what the Atlantean Charter prescribed. If both Consuls died or abandoned their office for other reason, the Senate had to choose an interrex to serve as the chief executive till the next Consular elections were held. It had to choose him by a two-thirds majority, too. The way the Senate was divided these days, Stafford doubted whether Jesus Christ Himself could win a two-thirds majority of the Conscript Fathers.

Which meant that, if they both perished, chaos would descend on the United States of Atlantis. Worse chaos, Stafford amended as another bullet snarled by not nearly far enough above his prostrate frame.

If only one of them died here, the other Consul would serve alone till the next election. Stafford eyed Newton, and found his colleague eyeing him right back. "Isn't it nice that we're friends?" Newton said.

"Wonderful," Stafford said in distinctly hollow tones. His colleague laughed.

That the USA did not suffer a Charter crisis lay to the credit of the army's junior officers and sergeants. The cars in which they rode farther back were getting peppered with bullets, too. They rushed their gray-uniformed soldiers out with fixed bayonets to drive the insurrectionists away. A few of the soldiers went down as soon as they jumped from their cars. The rest, stolidly professional, advanced into the woods regardless, shouting as they went.

The firing kept on, but it wasn't aimed at the train any more. The rebels were shooting at the soldiers, and vice versa. Stafford and Newton got up again to watch. Colonel Sinapis grunted. "That ought to shift them," he said.

And it did. When the soldiers came back, some of them dragged rebel corpses by the feet. One rebel they caught wasn't a corpse-and then, quite suddenly, he was. They brought out their own casualties, too. The surgeons attended to them as best they could. Consul Stafford watched with great-if slightly nauseated-interest. His colleague might admire the rebels, but these men sent to put them down would probably feel differently.

Down the west side of the Green Ridge Mountains the train chugged… slowly. Coughing a little, Leland Newton peered out through the swirling smoke that belched from the locomotive's stack. "Well," he said, "I did think we would get to New Marseille faster than a horse can walk."

"So did I," Consul Stafford said fretfully.

Balthasar Sinapis coughed, too: a cough of correction, Newton judged, not one caused by smoke. "As a matter of fact," he said, "we are going at the speed a horse can trot."

So they were. Atlantean dragoons in their tall black felt hats trotted along to either side of the railroad track. They had eight-shooters, shotguns, and carbines. Their job was to keep the Negroes and copperskins who'd risen in these parts from attacking the train. The foot soldiers inside the cars carried loaded weapons. Sinapis had made it plain he didn't like doing that, but he recognized the need.

The dragoons had done their job up till now. No more bullet holes marred the battered railroad cars. No more screams rose as surgeons probed for musket balls. Newton missed them not at all.

But if the copperskins and Negroes thought of themselves as the army's enemies, as they seemed to, wouldn't the soldiers in the army think of those Negroes and copperskins the same way? If that wasn't what Consul Stafford expected, Consul Newton would have been astonished.

Setting out from New Hastings, Newton would have called Stafford's expectations so much foolishness. The Consul from Croydon wasn't so sure now. If a man was willing to lay his life on the line to try to kill you, you weren't going to love him on account of it. No: you were going to want to keep him away, or else to do unto him before he could do unto you.

And if the soldiers got off the train with the notion that they needed to kill any slave who looked at them sideways firmly fixed in their heads, they wouldn't be interested in interposing themselves between the rebels and the whites they were rebelling against. No: they'd want to join the local whites in slaughtering every insurrectionist they could catch.