Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

They plunged into the woods. Some of the cavalrymen carried carbines. Others had eight-shooters at the ready. Stafford had a revolver himself. A carbine or a rifle musket could easily outrange it. In a forest where you couldn't see past pistol range, though, so what? And, with eight bullets in the cylinder, he could put a lot of lead in the air in a hurry if he had to.

Would the insurrectionists even bother posting sentries on their flanks? Copperskins and Negroes were notoriously lazy and shiftless, so Stafford wouldn't have been surprised if they didn't. But that thought had hardly crossed his mind before somebody let out a startled, "Who's there?"

"The Atlantean army and the Lord Jehovah!" the captain answered, stealing a line one of Victor Radcliff's officers had used a lifetime earlier.

"Well, shit!" the enemy lookout exclaimed. If the redcoats had said anything like that in response to the Atlanteans long ago, it hadn't got into the history books. It probably wouldn't get into the history books now. The shooting started a couple of seconds later. Shooting would make the books. Shooting always did.

Bullets cracked past people. They slammed into tree trunks. They whispered through the undergrowth, cutting leaves and fronds as they went. And a few of them smacked into soft flesh. Shrieks rose up along with the shots and the fireworks smell of gunpowder smoke.

Something up ahead moved. Jeremiah Stafford thought it did, anyway. He squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked and roared in his hand. Maybe he drilled a vicious Negro right between the eyes and dropped him to the forest floor before he could even blink. Or maybe he'd wasted a bullet on ferns stirred by a vagrant breeze. Unless he tripped over a corpse on his way forward, he'd never know.

On the Terranovan mainland, they called something like this a copperskin fight. Both sides hid behind trees and shot at each other as they tried to move. The savages on the western mainland used bows and arrows, too: silent, unnerving weapons. The copperskins here banged away like their black brethren.

So did the Atlantean cavalrymen. They still had the advantage of surprise, and tried to make the most of it. Frederick Radcliff was in there somewhere. The faster they could grab him, the better.

When Stafford ran forward, his shoes sank into the ground. His feet felt wet-water was leaking in. Almost without his noticing, the hemlocks and pines were giving way to moss-draped cypresses. A flapjack turtle stared at him out of cold yellow eyes from a puddle-one of too many puddles that suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere.

"Sweet suffering Jesus!" he exclaimed. "We're in a swamp!"

The cavalrymen had made the same unwelcome discovery at about the same time. Their complaints were even more heartfelt, and much more profane. Stafford started swearing, too, though he was an amateur alongside virtuosos. It might have been funny if it weren't so revolting. This whole mission had been predicated on speed and surprise. Surprise was gone, shot dead by an alert sentry. As for speed… How could you do anything in a hurry with mud trying to suck the shoes off your feet, and maybe trying to suck you down into it?

Another maybe crossed Stafford's mind. Maybe the insurrectionists' leader wasn't so foolish to base himself in a place like this. Maybe he wasn't so foolish, period. That might have made the Consul wonder whether Negroes and copperskins generally were as foolish as he'd always thought. It might have, but it didn't. Instead, it made him decide that Frederick Radcliff had his grandfather's blood in him, all right.

"Those lying, poxed-!" The captain's furious voice broke off, as if he couldn't find anything bad enough to say about the people he had in mind, whoever they were. That came a moment later, when he tried again: "Nobody said anything about this being a God-damned mudhole!"

Back in the Atlantean camp, the captured insurrectionists would no doubt claim their captors hadn't asked them the right questions. Technically, Stafford supposed they'd be telling the truth. All the same, he couldn't help wondering what would have happened had the soldiers hurt them a little, or more than a little, to make sure they weren't withholding.

It couldn't very well have turned out worse.

"Snake!" a trooper wailed on a rising note of horror. "Lousy snake just bit me!" That gave Stafford one more thing to worry about: not what he needed at such a crowded moment.

"Frederick Radcliff!" the captain shouted. "Come out and surrender, Frederick Radcliff!"

A chorus of voices told him what he could do with his surrender. Their curses showed more ingenuity than Consul Stafford would have expected from such a pack of colored riffraff. "Go after them!" Stafford called. "The more noise, the more insurrectionists, and the more likely we are to catch our man."

He wondered whether they would know their man even if they caught him. What exactly did Frederick Radcliff look like? Who would bother painting a slave's portrait? Nobody-no money in it. And the leader of the uprising wasn't likely to have sat stock-still for a newfangled photograph, either. Stafford pictured Frederick Radcliff as looking like his famous grandfather, only with dark skin and kinky hair. That might be right, or it might not. He wasn't sure within twenty years how old the jumped-up slave was. That might make things harder, too.

But much harder? Stafford didn't think so. Some Judas among the insurrectionists would give their leader away if he saw him. Maybe the copperskin or black wouldn't do it on purpose. An involuntary gasp of surprise would serve well enough, though. And then Frederick Radcliff would dance on air or face a firing squad or suffer whatever other lethal fate his captors decided upon.

And then… what? Would the insurrection quietly fold up and fail because the man who started it got what was coming to him? Stafford hoped so. That was why the raiding party had come here, after all.

But what would happen if someone else-that damned arrogant Lorenzo, say-kept things going even after Frederick Radcliff was dead and gone? What would happen farther east, where slaves were rising up even though chances were they'd barely heard of Frederick Radcliff?

Stafford muttered under his breath. It wasn't a happy kind of muttering. The closer he looked at the insurrection, the worse it seemed. Back in New Hastings, he'd thought everything was simple. Sally forth, slaughter the insurrectionists, and march home in triumph.

He hadn't imagined the uprising was like the Hydra, sprouting two heads for each one you chopped off. But just because he hadn't imagined it back in New Hastings, that didn't mean it wasn't so.

To make matters worse, the enemy must have heard his well- intentioned advice to the cavalrymen. The Negroes and copperskins started making a racket first here, then there, then somewhere else. Anyone who tried following the trail of noise would be chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.

Panting, his heart pounding, Stafford thought, Sinapis was right, damn him. I am too old for this. He pushed through the ferns anyhow. Maybe he would stumble over Frederick Radcliff. Maybe-a bigger unlikelihood, however little he cared to admit it to himself-he would recognize the rebel leader if he did stumble over him. Or maybe something else worthwhile would happen.

Something else did happen, worthwhile or not. The green curtain in front of him parted. A Negro carrying a musket he must have stolen off a planter's wall was also hurrying forward. They stared at each other in mutual shock and horror for a split second, the dapper, middle-aged white man and the young black in filthy, ragged clothes. Then, after simultaneous gasps, they both raised their guns and fired.

And they both missed.

They couldn't have been ten feet apart, but they missed anyhow. The twin shots and the crack of the insurrectionist's bullet darting much too close past Stafford's ear all but stunned the Consul. The Negro looked as desperately unhappy as Stafford felt. But they were in different situations. It would take the insurrectionist at least half a minute to reload and fire another round. All Jeremiah Stafford had to do was pull the trigger.