The Victorious opposition ae-3

by Harry Turtledove

  He was her kid brother. Having him safe back here in South Carolina wouldn't break her heart. Oh, no, not at all.

  "Be careful," was all she did tell him.

  He nodded. "You know what they say: old soldiers and bold soldiers, but no old bold soldiers. I'm going out there to do a job, Anne. I'm not going out there looking to get shot. I've got too much to come home to."

  "All right, Tom." Was it? Anne wondered. She never liked it when somebody whose life she'd run for a long time slipped away from her control. She'd made more allowances for Tom than she did for most because they were flesh and blood. And now here he was, leaving not only her control but his wife's as well, heading off into the brutal, masculine world of war.

  Clarence Potter was going the same way. He actively despised the regime. He was ready to put his life on the line for it just the same, and for the same reason: it was in charge of the country, and the country mattered to him.

  "Be careful," she said again, and reminded herself to say the same thing to Clarence as soon as she could.

  "You, too," Tom said then.

  "Me?" She laughed. "I won't be up at the front, and you probably will." That probably was her hope against hope. She knew damn well he would. She took another sip of whiskey. However much she drank, though, the most she could do was blur that knowledge. She couldn't make it leave.

  But her brother was serious, even if he'd taken on enough in the way of whiskey to speak with owlish intensity: "How much difference do you think being at the front will make? Bombers have a long reach these days. In this war, everybody's going to catch hell, not just the poor bastards in uniform."

  That had an unpleasant feel of truth to it. Anne said, "Bite your tongue."

  He took her literally. He stuck it out and clamped his teeth down on it so she could see. She laughed; she'd had enough that things like that were funny. But she couldn't help asking, "You think they'll bomb civilians, then?"

  "Look what they did to Richmond last time," he said. "And it's not like our hands are clean. They had more airplanes, that's all."

  Anne had been in Richmond for one of the U.S. air raids. She still remembered the helpless terror it had roused in her. "Well, we'd better have more this time, that's all," she said. "Let them find out what they did to us."

  "I hope so," Tom said. "I expect so, as a matter of fact. But God help us if it turns out they give us another dose."

  He got to his feet. Anne stood up, too. They hugged. "You be careful," she said for a third time.

  "I promise," he answered. She didn't believe him for a minute. He would do what he would do. The only reason he hadn't got killed in the last war was dumb luck. She wished him more of that. It might serve where promises didn't.

  Tom went out the door and off to the train station. Anne watched him from the window. He wobbled as he walked; she'd poured a lot of whiskey into him. That was all right. He'd sober up before he got to wherever he needed to go. She realized he hadn't said where that was. Military security had fallen between them like a blanket.

  She muttered a curse against military security. She muttered another curse against war. That second one was halfhearted, and she knew it. She wanted all the horrors of war to come down on the damnyankees' heads. She just didn't want anything to happen to Tom or to Clarence or to the people of the Confederate States. That wasn't fair, of course. She couldn't have cared less.

  Tom turned a corner and was gone. No. Anne shook her head. He wasn't gone. She just couldn't see him any more. There was a difference. "Of course there's a difference," she said aloud, as if someone had told her there wasn't.

  Another drink didn't seem likely to let her know what the difference was. She fixed one for herself anyway. She'd thought Tom would have the sense to stay home with his wife and children. She'd thought so, but she'd been wrong. She hated being wrong.

  And she even saw how she'd been wrong. Jake Featherston had spent years building up the passion for war in the Confederate States. He'd needed to, to get the revenge on the United States he wanted. Anne also wanted that revenge, and so she'd helped him. What could be more natural, then, than that the passion took someone who otherwise would have stayed home?

  What indeed? Anne gulped the new drink in a hurry. Somehow, seeing where she'd been wrong didn't help a bit.

  Even in late spring, the North Atlantic pitched and tossed. The USS Remembrance was a big ship, but the waves flung her about even so. Sam Carsten thanked heaven for his strong stomach and for the cloudy skies that kept his fair, fair skin from burning. Other than that, he had little for which to be thankful.

  To put it mildly, things did not look good. The Remembrance and the cruisers and destroyers surrounding her were on full war alert. Everyone seemed sure it was coming. The only questions left were about when and where and how.

  Maybe the clouds in the sky didn't matter so much. Sam spent almost all of his time belowdecks, either at his battle station in damage control or in the officers' mess or sacked out in his tiny cabin. On his schedule, a vampire would have had trouble getting a sunburn.

  He might as well have been married to Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger. He saw his superior nearly every waking moment. The two of them prowled through the bowels of the ship, looking for trouble they could eliminate before it got the chance to eliminate them. Every once in a while, they would find something and turn their sailors loose on it. Then they would pause and nod and sometimes shake hands. That was what they were supposed to do, and by now they were both damn good at the job.

  Sam still remembered that he wanted to get in on the aviation side of things. He remembered, but nostalgically, as if thinking of a long-lost love. Years of doing the duty he was in had shaped him and scraped him till he wasn't a square peg in a round hole any more. By now, he fit the slot in which the Navy had put him. That was how things worked.

  He kept right on going up to the wireless shack whenever he found the chance. Maybe that proved he was a mustang; he still had a rating's insatiable appetite for scuttlebutt. The yeomen who kept the Remembrance in touch with the wider world grinned whenever he poked his head in. They teased him about it, as much as they could tease a superior officer.

  "Going to tell the limeys everything you know, sir?" one of them asked.

  "Hell, no." Sam shook his head. "I'm going to save it till we get over to the Pacific. Then I'll tell it to the Japs."

  They all laughed. The only thing Sam wanted to tell the Japanese was where to head in. He would gladly have helped guide them on the way, too. They'd shelled a ship he was on once and torpedoed him twice. If they hadn't sunk him, it sure as hell wasn't for lack of effort.

  Before any of the yeomen could say something else slyly rude, loud, mournful music started coming out of the wireless set. "Something's up," Sam said. "What station is that?"

  "German Imperial Wireless, sir," answered the man who'd been teasing him. The yeomen and Carsten looked at one another. Wilhelm II had been failing for a long time now. If he'd finally gone and failed…

  A torrent of German poured from the speaker. "You picking that up, Gunther?" another yeoman asked.

  "I will if you don't jog my elbow," Gunther answered. He was a big blond kid, not so fair as Sam but fair enough. Another Midwestern farm boy who'd decided to go to sea instead of spending the rest of his life walking behind a couple of horses' asses. (These days, he'd probably ride a tractor. That still wasn't Sam's idea of fun.)

  "Is it the Kaiser?" Sam asked.

  "Yeah. Uh, yes, sir." Gunther corrected himself. "It's him, all right. Blood clot on the lung, the wireless says. Went into a coma last night, died this morning." More music replaced the announcer's voice. This time, Sam recognized the tune: Deutschland ьber Alles. When the German anthem ended, the announcer came back on the air. "He's hailing the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm-King Friedrich Wilhelm V of Prussia and Kaiser Friedrich I of Germany," Gunther reported.

  "Kaiser Bill had a hell of a run: better than fifty years," Sam sa
id. His son and heir wouldn't match that; Friedrich Wilhelm, who'd lived so long in his father's shadow, was already close to sixty.

  More German came out of the wireless. This was a different voice. Gunther said, "Uh-oh. This is the new Kaiser's mouthpiece. He says Friedrich Wilhelm's first act is to declare that he can't possibly give up anything his father won."

  "Uh-oh is right," Sam said. "That means trouble with France and England and probably Russia, too." He whistled softly. "Big trouble, I think. I wonder what the hell we do now."

  "Well, sir, we're already on battle alert," Gunther said practically.

  "Yeah," Sam said: not the ideal reply, perhaps, for an officer and a gentleman, but one both accurate and concise.

  Gunther got on the telephone to the bridge. Sam ambled out of the wireless shack, whistling tunelessly to himself. For the next little while, he would know something the skipper didn't. Of course, knowing did him no good. He couldn't bring the Remembrance, or even the damage-control parties, to a higher state of alert than they were already in.

  British airplane carriers, he thought unhappily. British battleships, if they can get in close enough. British and French submersibles. French destroyers, too, I suppose. What a joy. Would Britain and France declare war on the USA, too, once they went to war with Germany, which they sure looked as if they'd do? The frogs might not. They were taking dead aim at their next-door neighbors.

  The limeys? Carsten worried more about them. They owed the USA a kick in the teeth. The United States had booted them out of Canada, Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. Sam couldn't see them mounting an invasion to take back Toronto. The islands out in the Atlantic? They were a different story. And to get to the islands, the British would have to get past the U.S. Navy.

  With a spatter of static, the Remembrance's intercom came to life. Sam blinked. The squawkboxes didn't get used very often. "This is the captain speaking." Sam blinked again. When the intercom did come on, Captain Stein hardly ever spoke himself. That was usually the exec's job. But the skipper continued, "Men, you need to know that the German Empire has just announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II has passed away. His son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, has just become the new German Kaiser.

  "Friedrich Wilhelm has formally rejected the demands France has made for the return of territory lost in the Great War. The international situation will grow more dangerous as a result of this. For the moment, we are not at war with France or Britain or anyone else." That could only mean the CSA. Sam shook his head. No, it could mean Japan and even Russia, too. Captain Stein went on, "However, we must not let ourselves be caught off guard by a sneak attack. Be more alert than ever. If in doubt about anything, let a superior know. You may save your ship. That is all." With another spatter of static, the intercom went dead.

  Later, after Sam had gone back on duty, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, "The French and the English won't declare war on us, will they, Carsten?"

  "Damned if I know, sir," Sam answered. He wondered why the devil Pottinger was asking him. The other officer had two grades on him and wore an Annapolis ring to boot. If anybody knew the answers, Pottinger should have been the man. On the other hand, though, Sam had twenty years on his superior officer. Maybe Pottinger thought that counted for something.

  "We'll just have to lick 'em if they do," Pottinger said. He hadn't been old enough to see action in the Great War, but he'd seen his share in the Pacific War against the Japanese. He'd be all right.

  Even though the Atlantic was rough, airplanes roared off the Remembrance's flight deck. Having a combat air patrol up could save the ship if the British or French or Confederates decided to declare war by attacking, the way the Japs had.

  No doubt the cruisers in the squadron were launching their seaplanes, too. Those would range farther afield. With luck, they would spot the enemy before he got close enough to launch an airborne strike force.

  Unlike Pottinger, Carsten wasn't usually the sort who borrowed trouble. Even so, he wished he hadn't decided to contemplate the meaning of the phrase with luck. It reminded him too vividly of what could happen without luck.

  Day followed day. An oiler came alongside to refuel the Remembrance. Sam remembered an oiler refueling the USS Dakota just before the USA attacked Pearl Harbor and took the Sandwich Islands away from Britain. Back then, most ships had been coal-fired. Even the Dakota had burned both oil and coal. Things had changed since. He didn't think any front-line ships burned coal any more.

  He was in the officers' wardroom fueling up himself-on coffee-when Commander Cressy came in looking thoroughly grim. "Oh, boy," said one of the other officers in there.

  "Oh boy is about the size of it," the exec agreed. "France has declared war on Germany and sent soldiers and barrels into Alsace and Lorraine. Britain has joined in the declaration. Her airplanes are bombing several cities in northern Germany. The Tsar has recalled his ambassadors from Berlin and Vienna and Constantinople. It can't be more than a matter of days before Russia joins in."

  "Here we go again," somebody said, which summed up exactly what Sam was thinking.

  "That wasn't all," Cressy said. "Latest word is that Jake Featherston's declared war on Germany."

  Several sharp exclamations rang out. "On Germany?" Sam said. "Not on us?"

  "Not yet, anyhow," Commander Cressy replied. "Declaring war on Germany sounds good and doesn't cost him anything. It's almost like the Ottoman Empire declaring war on the CSA. Even if they do it, so what? They can't reach each other."

  "We're still formally allied to Germany, and we've got a bunch of the same enemies," Sam said. "If the Confederates declared war on the Kaiser, does that mean we have to declare war on them?"

  "You do ask interesting questions, Carsten," the exec said. "I don't think we have to do anything. There was that stretch in the twenties when it looked like we might square off against Kaiser Bill, and the alliance pretty much lapsed. But then the old snakes stuck their heads up again, so we never duked it out with Germany. Anyway, though, my guess is that Al Smith will sprout wings and fly before he goes and declares war on his own hook."

  A lot of men with stripes on their sleeves nodded at that. Most officers were Democrats. That made sense: they defended the status quo, which was what the Democratic Party stood for.

  Sam supposed he was a Democrat himself. But whether he defended the status quo or not, he feared it was going to get a hell of a kicking around.

  Colonel Irving Morrell saluted. "Reporting as ordered, sir," he said, and then, smiling, "Good to see you again, sir, too. It's been too long."

  "It has, hasn't it?" Brigadier General Abner Dowling replied.

  The last time they'd been together, Morrell had outranked Dowling. He tried not to resent the fat officer's promotions. They weren't Dowling's fault: how could anybody blame him for grabbing with both hands? Instead, they- and Morrell's own long, long freeze in rank-spoke volumes about the War Department's peacetime opinion of barrels.

  "We're going to be doing something different here," Dowling remarked. "The other side's got the ball, and they'll try to run with it."

  "And we have to tackle them," Morrell said.

  "That's about the size of it," Dowling agreed.

  Morrell whistled tunelessly between his teeth. "We're not going to be able to keep them from crossing the river," he said.

  "Oh, good," the fat brigadier general said. Morrell looked at him in some surprise. Dowling went on, "I'm glad somebody besides me can see that. Officially, my orders are to throw them back into Kentucky right away."

  "Sir, you'd bust me down to second lieutenant if I told you what I thought of the War Department," Morrell said.

  Abner Dowling surprised him again, this time by laughing till his jowls quivered like the gelatin on a cold ham. "Colonel, I spent more than ten years of my life listening to General George Armstrong Custer. If you think you can shock me, go ahead. Take your best shot. And good luck."

  That made Morrell laugh, too, but not for long. "
If we were fighting the Confederate Army of 1914, we'd kick the crap out of it," he said. "That's a lot of what the big brains in Philadelphia have us ready to do."

  The laughter drained out of Dowling's face, too. "Custer would have been louder about it, but I don't know if he could have been much ruder. We've got plenty of men, we've got plenty of artillery; our air forces are about even, I think. Our special weapons-gas, I should say; call a spade a spade-will match theirs atrocity for atrocity. Have you met Captain Litvinoff?"

  "Yes, sir." When Morrell thought about Captain Litvinoff, he didn't feel like laughing at all any more. "I get the feeling he's very good at what he does." He could say that and mean it. It was as much praise as he could give the skinny little officer with the hairline mustache.

  It was June. It was already warm and muggy. It would only get worse. He didn't like to think about being buttoned up in a barrel. He especially didn't like to think about being buttoned up in a barrel while wearing a gas mask. When he thought about Litvinoff, he couldn't help it.

  Thinking about being buttoned up in a barrel made him think about barrels in general, something else he wasn't eager to do. "Sir, if we are going to play defense, we don't just need gas. We need more barrels than we've got."

  "I am aware of that, thank you," Dowling replied. "Philadelphia may be in the process of becoming aware of it. On the other hand, Philadelphia may not, too. You never can tell with Philadelphia."

  "But if we're going to stop them-" Morrell began.

  His superior held up a hand. "If we're going to stop them, we've got to have some notion of what they'll try. We'd better, anyhow. What's your best estimate of that, Colonel?"

  "Have you got a map, sir?" Morrell asked. "Always easier to talk with a map."

  "Right here." Dowling took one from his breast pocket and unfolded it. It was printed on silk, which could be folded or crumpled any number of times without coming to pieces and which didn't turn to mush if it got wet. Morrell drew a line with his fingers. Dowling's eyebrows leaped. "You think they'll do that?"