The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  At last, it was done. Essentially, he'd deeded his son to the Confederate States. He hugged Pedro and kissed him on both cheeks. "Be strong," he said. "Do what they tell you and be strong." Then he left the alcalde's residence in a hurry, so neither the clerk there nor his son would see him cry.

  He headed for La Culebra Verde. If he wasn't entitled to drown some sorrows after giving his son to the Army, when could he? Not even Magdalena would complain about that… he hoped.

  Before he got to the Green Snake, though, a couple of young men he'd never seen before came up to him. They were both dirty and ragged and weary-looking. One was barefoot; the other wore a pair of sandals that had more patches than original shoe leather. "Buenos dнas, seсor," the barefoot man said in Spanish. "Do you by any chance need someone to help you with your work?"

  "No, for I have three strong sons, thank God," Rodriguez answered in the same tongue. Out of curiosity, he switched to English: "Do you know this language?"

  "No, seсor. Lo siento mucho," the stranger said. "Solamente espaсol."

  Rodriguez had expected nothing different. Dropping back into Spanish himself, he asked, "From which province in the Empire of Mexico do you come?"

  Both newcomers in Baroyeca looked alarmed. The man with the patched sandals, who was older and stockier than his friend, replied, "You have made a mistake, seсor. Like you, we are citizens of los Estados Confederados."

  "Bullshit," Rodriguez said in English. They couldn't even understand that, and he couldn't imagine a Sonoran or Chihuahuan who didn't. He returned to Spanish: "Don't tell me lies. Do you think I'm too stupid to know the difference? Times are hard here, but I know they're worse south of the border."

  The ragged men sighed in equally ragged unison. That older fellow said, "Very well, seсor. Usted tiene razуn. We have come from near Mocorito in Sinaloa province." Rodriguez nodded, unsurprised; Sinaloa lay just south of Sonora. The other man went on, "We have to have work, or we will starve. So will our families, if we cannot send them money."

  "It is as I told you-I have no work for you to do," Rodriguez said. "If you keep looking, though, maybe you will find someone who does."

  He waited to see what would happen next. If the Sinaloans were hungry enough, desperate enough, or maybe just stupid enough, they might try to get his money without working. If they did, he aimed to fight back. But their shoulders slumped and they went on down the street. As they went, they exclaimed about how fine and fancy everything was. If that didn't prove they weren't from the CSA, Rodriguez couldn't think of what would.

  He wondered if they would find someone who'd pay them. They weren't the first men from the Empire of Mexico he'd seen passing through Baroyeca. He was sure they wouldn't be the last. Even though the town now boasted electricity, it was a backwater in Sonora, and Sonora was a backwater in the CSA. By the standards prevailing farther south, though, even a Confederate backwater seemed rich and bustling.

  I have a dollar in my pocket, he thought. To those fellows, that makes me a rich man. God help them, poor devils.

  He walked into La Culebra Verde. Robert Quinn sat at the bar, drinking a bottle of beer. "Hola, Seсor Rodriguez," he said. "What brings you to Baroyeca this morning?"

  "Pedro reports to the Confederate Army today," Rodriguez answered. "I came in with him to fill out papers and to say good-bye."

  "Congratulations to you and congratulations to him," Quinn said in his deliberate Spanish. "This is a good time to be a young man in the Confederate States. We aren't going to be pushed around any more."

  Rodriguez wasn't so sure whether that made this a good time or a bad one. He almost said as much. Then he remembered the two men from Sinaloa who thought times in the CSA were better than those in the Empire of Mexico. He spoke of them instead, meanwhile sitting down beside the Freedom Party man and ordering a beer for himself.

  Quinn nodded. "More and more men keep coming north," he said. "Enough of them do find work to encourage others. We are trying to tighten things at the border, but"-he shrugged-"it is not an easy job."

  "If they do work no one else will or no one else can, I do not suppose it is so very bad," Rodriguez said, sipping his beer. "But if they take jobs away from Confederates… That would not be good at all."

  "We have to take care of ourselves first," Quinn agreed. After another pull at his beer, Hipolito Rodriguez began to laugh. Quinn cocked his head to one side, a quizzical look on his face. "What is the joke?"

  "In other parts of the Confederate States, people worry the same way about Sonorans and Chihuahuans taking their jobs."

  "Yes, they do, some. Not so much as they used to, I do not think," Quinn answered seriously. "They have seen that people who come from these parts are good and loyal and work hard. And they have seen that los mallates are the worst enemies the Confederate States have."

  "Yes." Rodriguez said the same thing in English-"Niggers"-just to show he knew it. "In this country, los mallates are nothing but trouble. They have never been anything but trouble. Los Estados Confederados would be better off without them."

  Quinn waved to the bartender. "Another beer for me, Rafael, and another for my friend here as well." He turned back to Rodriguez. "It is because you understand this that you are a member of the Partido de Libertad."

  "Is it?" After thinking that over, Rodriguez shook his head. "No. I am sorry, but no. That is not the reason."

  The bartender set the beers in front of his customers. Robert Quinn gave him a quarter and waved away his five cents' change. After a sip that left foam on his upper lip, he asked, "Why, then?"

  "I'll tell you why." Rodriguez drank from his beer, too. "I joined the Freedom Party because it was the only one in Sonora that didn't take me for granted. You really wanted to have me for a member. And you want vengeance against los Estados Unidos. Men from los Estados Unidos tried to kill me. I have not forgotten. I want vengeance against them, too." But if Pedro fights them, they will shoot back. He took a big sip from his new beer. Life wasn't simple, dammit.

  "Ah, yes, the United States," Quinn said, as if reminded of the existence of a nation he'd forgotten-and been glad to forget. "Well, my friend, you are right about that. Every dog has its day, but theirs has gone on for too long."

  "If we fight, can we beat them?" Rodriguez asked.

  "I am no general," the Freedom Party man replied. "But I will tell you this: if Jake Featherston says we can beat them, then we can."

  Somewhere up ahead-somewhere not very far up ahead-the state of Houston and the USA ended, and the state of Texas and the CSA began. Colonel Irving Morrell bounced along in a command car. Bounced was the operative word, too, for the command car's springs had seen better years, while the roads in these parts went from bad to worse.

  However bad its springs might have been, though, its pintle-mounted machine gun was in excellent working order. Morrell had carefully checked it before setting out. If it hadn't been in excellent working order, he wouldn't have got into the command car in the first place.

  Above the growl of the engine, the driver, a weather-beaten private named Charlie Satcher, said, "Looks quiet enough."

  "It always looks quiet enough," Morrell answered. "Then they start shooting at us."

  Satcher nodded. "Big country," he remarked.

  "Really? I hadn't noticed," Morrell said, deadpan. The driver started to say something, caught himself, and grunted out a little laughter instead.

  It was a very big country indeed. The horizon seemed to stretch for ever and ever. The sun beat down out of a great blue bowl of a sky. The only motion in the landscape was the tan trail of dust the command car had kicked up, slowly dispersing in the breeze, that and- Morrell suddenly swung the machine gun to the right, and as suddenly took his hands off the triggers. That was only a roadrunner, loping through the dry brush with a lizard's tail hanging out of the side of its mouth.

  "Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles," Charlie Satcher said, as if he were the first one ever to bring out th
e line.

  "Not quite nothing," Morrell answered. "Somewhere out there, those Freedom Party fanatics are bringing guns and ammo into Houston."

  Calling them fanatics made him feel better. If he could paint them as villains, even if only in his own mind, he could do a better job of trying to deal with them. When he wasn't thinking of them as fanatics, he had to think of them as tough, clever foes. Not all of them belonged to the Freedom Party. Nobody in the Confederate States had much liked losing Houston, and not many people in Houston liked being part of the USA, either. The people who did like it kept quiet. If they didn't keep quiet, their neighbors made them pay.

  "Miles and miles of miles and miles." Satcher liked to hear himself talk.

  Again, he wasn't wrong. The Confederates put up a few border checkpoints between Texas and Houston, but only a few, and they mostly cared about things passing into Texas, not things leaving it. As far as they were concerned, things passing from Texas into Houston didn't really cross a border. If the United States felt otherwise, then it was up to the United States to do something about it.

  And the United States hadn't. Even with all the unrest-hell, the out-and-out rebellion-in Houston, the United States hadn't. Morrell understood why. It would have cost too much, in money and in men. The USA would have had to put up barbed-wire emplacements the whole length of the border, and would have had to man them with an army. It would have been almost like a trench line from the Great War. No government, Democrat or Socialist, had been willing to do the work or deploy the manpower. And so the border remained porous, and so rebellion went right on simmering.

  All that unhappy musing flew out of Morrell's head the moment he spotted a plume of dust not much different from the one his command car was kicking up. This one, though, was coming from the east and heading west: heading straight into Houston. He had every reason to be where he was and doing what he was doing. Did that other auto? Fat chance, he thought.

  He tapped Charlie Satcher on the shoulder. "You see that?" he said, pointing.

  The driver nodded. "Sure as hell do, Colonel. What do you want to do about it?"

  "Stop the son of a bitch," Morrell answered.

  "He may not want to stop," Satcher observed.

  "I know." Morrell reached for the machine-gun triggers. "We have to persuade him he does want to after all-he just doesn't know it quite yet."

  "Persuade him." The driver's grin showed a broken front tooth. "Right you are, sir." He turned toward the motorcar that was raising the other dust trail.

  Excitement flowered in Morrell. He was going into action, all on his own. He'd seen plenty of action in Houston, much of it brutal and unpleasant. Armored warfare against people who flung Featherston fizzes couldn't very well be anything but brutal and unpleasant. This, though, this seemed different. This was fox and hound, cat and mouse. It was out in the open, too. Nobody could fling a bottle of flaming gasoline from a window and then disappear.

  Before long, whoever was in the other motorcar spotted the one that held Morrell and his driver. Whoever he was, he kept on coming. Maybe that meant he was an innocent, though what an innocent would be doing sneaking over the border was beyond Morrell. More likely, it meant he hadn't recognized the command car for what it was.

  As the two machines got closer, Morrell's driver said, "They've got a lot of people in there-and what's that one bastard sticking out the window?"

  A muzzle flash said it was a rifle. Nothing hit the command car-not for lack of effort, Morrell was sure. "Which side of the border is he on, do you think?" he asked.

  "If he's shooting at me, he's on the side where I can shoot back," Satcher answered without hesitation.

  "I like the way you think," Morrell said. The fellow with the rifle in the other motorcar fired again. This time, a bullet slammed into the command car. It must not have hit anything vital, because the machine kept running, and no steam or smoke or flame burst from its innards.

  Morrell squeezed the machine gun's triggers. Brass cartridge cases flew from the breech and clattered down around his feet. Tracers guided the stream of bullets towards and then into the other motorcar. Smoke immediately poured from its engine compartment. It skidded to a stop. The doors on the far side flew open. Several men got out and ran. A bullet knocked one of them down. Another man shot at Morrell from behind the automobile. Morrell hosed bullets back at him. The motorcar caught fire. The rifleman had to pull away from it. That made him an easier target. Down he went, too.

  And once the auto started burning, it didn't want to stop. As soon as the flames reached the passenger compartment, ammunition started cooking off. Some of the rounds were tracers. They gave the fire a Fourth of July feel.

  "Ha!" Charlie Satcher said. "They were running guns."

  "Did you expect anything different?" Morrell asked. The driver shook his head.

  A bullet cracked past Morrell's head. That wasn't one from the fireworks display in the motorcar-it had been deliberately aimed. He ducked, not that that would have done him any good had the round been on target. He'd known only a handful of men who could go through a fire fight without that involuntary reaction. It wasn't cowardice, just human nature.

  He tapped the driver on the back and pointed. "Go around there and give me a better shot at that fellow."

  "Right." Satcher steered the car in the direction Morrell indicated. The rifleman from the auto coming out of Texas scrambled away, trying to keep the burning vehicle between the command car and himself.

  That scramble proved his undoing. He was behind the trunk when either the fire or one of the rounds going off in the passenger compartment reached what the men from Texas had been carrying there. The explosion sent flaming chunks of motorcar flying in all directions. One slammed down about a hundred feet in front of the command car; Satcher almost rolled it steering clear.

  No more aimed shots came, though Morrell needed a little while to be sure of that, because rounds did keep cooking off every now and then with a pop-pop-pop that would have been merry if he hadn't known what caused it. He got a look at the Texan who'd been shooting at him, and wished he hadn't. The rear bumper had torn off the man's head and his left arm.

  The grim sight didn't unduly upset his driver. "For all I care, they can bury the bastard in a jam tin," Satcher said, "either that or leave him out for the buzzards. If I was a buzzard, I'd sooner eat skunk any day of the week."

  His words seemed to come from a long way off. Firing the machine gun left Morrell's ears temporarily stunned. He hoped the stunning was temporary, anyhow. Some of it probably wasn't. He knew he didn't hear as well as he had when he was younger. Would he go altogether deaf in another ten or twenty years? He shrugged. Not much he could do about that. It wasn't the rarest ailment among soldiers.

  "Sir?" Charlie Satcher said.

  "What is it?" Morrell's own voice seemed distant, too.

  "I heard you had balls," the driver answered. "The guy who told me, though, he didn't know the half of it."

  Morrell shrugged. The motion told him how tense his shoulders had got in the fire fight. He didn't think of himself as particularly brave. When the shooting started, he didn't think much at all. Reaction took over. "They started it, Charlie," he answered.

  "Yeah," Satcher said admiringly. "And you sure as hell finished it."

  "I wonder which side of the border we're on." Morrell shrugged again. "Doesn't matter much, not when their auto went up like that. Nobody can say they weren't running guns into Houston."

  "Damn well better not try," the driver said. "Me, I thought I was gonna shit myself when that goddamn back seat landed in front of us."

  "Back seat? Is that what it was?" Morrell said. Charlie Satcher nodded. Morrell managed a laugh. "I've got to tell you, I didn't notice. I was busy just then. You did a hell of a job getting around it. I noticed that."

  "Neither one of us would've been real happy if I hit it," Satcher said. Morrell couldn't very well argue with that. The driver asked, "Shall we head on back to L
ubbock, sir?"

  "I think we'd better," Morrell replied. "I want to report to General MacArthur, and he'll want to report to the War Department. I suppose they'll report to the president, or maybe to the State Department. Somebody will have to figure out how loud we squawk."

  "Squawk, hell," Satcher said. "We don't scream our heads off, they deserve to roll like that last Confederate fucker's."

  Morrell only shrugged. "I won't tell you you're wrong, but the people in Philly are liable to. Because I can tell you what Richmond's going to say. Richmond's going to say they didn't know anything about these fellows, they didn't have anything to do with them, and they aren't responsible for them."

  "My ass," Charlie Satcher said succinctly.

  "Now that you mention it, yes," Morrell agreed, and the driver laughed. But Morrell went on, "You know it's crap, I know it's crap, and Jake goddamn Featherston knows it's crap, too, but how do you go about proving it's crap?"

  "Screw proving it," Satcher said. "Blow the bastards to hell and gone anyway."

  "I do like the way you think," Morrell said.

  Brigadier General Abner Dowling remembered George Armstrong Custer. There had been times-a great many times-when Dowling's dearest wish would have been to forget entirely the officer whose adjutant he'd been for so long. Things didn't seem to work that way, though. All those years with Custer had marked him for life. Scarred him for life, he would have been inclined to say in his less charitable moments. This was one of those days.

  When Dowling thought of Custer nowadays, he thought of the general after the Great War, when Custer had come back to Philadelphia to fill an office and count corks and write elaborate reports on the best deployment of paper clips in the U.S. Army. With nothing real, nothing important, to do, Custer had wanted to jump out of a window. Dowling often thought the only thing that stopped him was his office's being on the ground floor.