Breakthroughs gw-3

by Harry Turtledove

  When the barmaid finally got over to him, he ordered a double shot of whiskey and gave her a dollar, which would have been outrageous before the war and was too damned expensive now. Pinkard wasn’t one of the ones who groused about that, though-what the hell else did he have to do with his money except spend it on hooch and whatever other pleasures he could find?

  He knocked the whiskey back in a hurry after the barmaid-Consuela, some of the guys were calling her-brought it to him. It wasn’t the sort of whiskey to sip and savor. It tasted like kerosene and went down his throat as if it were wearing shoes with long, sharp spikes. But once it got to his stomach, it made him hot and it made him stupid, and that was the point of the exercise.

  He waved his empty glass, a signal that he wanted a full one to take its place. Eventually, he got one. He drank it and peered around. The Gold Nugget looked cleaner. The kerosene lamps looked brighter. He wondered what the devil the barkeep was putting in the whiskey.

  When he waved the glass again, Consuela brought him another refill. She looked better, too. A moment later, she plopped herself down in his lap. Coyly, she spoke in Spanish: “Te gustaria chingar?”

  He had a pretty good idea what it meant. Chinga tu madre was one of the things Hip Rodriguez yelled at the Yankees when he ran out of English. To leave Jeff in no possible doubt, Consuela wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a big kiss. He wondered whom else she’d kissed lately-and where. After a few seconds, though, his blood heated and he stopped worrying.

  “We go upstairs?” she asked, coming back to English. Then her voice got amazingly pragmatic: “Ten dollars. You have a hell of a good time.”

  Ten dollars was at least five dollars too much. With three doubles sloshing around inside him, Jefferson Pinkard wasn’t inclined to argue. “Upstairs,” he agreed, surprised at the way his tongue stumbled inside his mouth. “Ten dollars. Hell of a good time.”

  Going up the stairs took longer than it would have if he’d been sober. The cubicle to which Consuela led him was cramped and humid and smelled as if someone should have taken a hose to it a long time before. She held out a hand for the money, then shucked out of her clothes with nonchalant aplomb.

  He had a little trouble rising to the occasion. “I’ll fix,” Consuela said, and started to lower her head.

  “No!” Jeff exclaimed. She looked up at him in surprise; she probably hadn’t had anybody refuse that offer lately. But instead of Consuela’s face, Jeff saw Emily’s, her eyes glowing, on the night he’d caught her with Bedford Cunningham. She’d lowered her head that same way. The mixture of pleasure and pain was too strong for him to want to repeat it.

  He spat on his palm and played with himself instead till he was stiff enough to go into Consuela. She shrugged and did her best to hurry him along once he was inside her. The second after he spent himself, he wished he hadn’t bothered. That was too late, of course.

  Hip Rodriguez came out of a little cubicle two doors down from the one he’d used. The little Sonoran looked drunk and sad, too. “Ah, Jeff,” he said, “I do this, it feels good, and I still miss my esposa. Maybe I miss her more than ever. Where is the sense in this? Can you tell me?” He was drunk, all right, and drunkenly serious.

  “Sense?” Jefferson Pinkard shook his head. “Damned if I see any of that anywhere at all.” He wondered if he missed Emily. He supposed he did. When an opium fiend couldn’t get his pipe, he missed it, didn’t he? That was how Jeff missed his wife. He wanted her. He longed for her. And he wanted her and longed for her even though he knew she wasn’t good for him.

  Downstairs, the bouncer and a couple of military policemen were breaking up a brawl. The military policemen looked like men going about their business. The bouncer looked like someone having a hell of a good time. Pinkard wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with him, and he was a big man who’d been a steelworker before going into the Army. He wondered why the bouncer wasn’t wearing a uniform himself. Maybe they didn’t make one wide enough through the shoulders to fit him. Had a tent had sleeves, that might have worked.

  Consuela didn’t waste much time upstairs. Pretty soon, she was down on the floor of the saloon again, hustling drinks. And pretty soon again, she was going up the stairs with another soldier.

  “Look at that,” Jeff said. “Just look at that. If she does that kind of business every day, she’ll end up owning half of Texas by the time the war’s over.”

  “Yes, and the Yankees will own the other half,” Rodriguez said. “And do you know what else, Jeff? I will not be sorry. Sonorans have no love for Texans. More than anyone else in the CSA, Texans treat Sonorans like niggers. Let the Yankees have Texas. Hasta la vista. Hasta luego.” He waved derisively. “Adios.”

  “But you’re fighting in Texas,” Pinkard pointed out. “Never heard you talk like this here before.”

  “Yes, I am fighting in Texas,” Rodriguez agreed sadly. “Mala suerte-bad luck. You never hear me talk like this?” His smile was oddly sweet. “I am not so drunk before, I think, when we talk of Texas.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Texas myself any more,” Pinkard said. “Hell, we’ve lost the damn war. Like you say, the damnyankees are welcome to the place. All I want to do is go back home.”

  “You no say, ‘Go back home to my wife,’ like you used to,” Rodriguez said. “You didn’t used to go up with the putas, neither, when they take us out of line.”

  “Leave it alone, Hip,” Jeff said. “Leave it the hell alone. Whatever happened back there happened, is all. It ain’t anybody’s business but mine.”

  Rodriguez looked at him with large, liquid eyes. He realized he’d never before admitted anything out of the ordinary had happened back in Birmingham. The Sonoran said, “I hope it turns out well for you, whatever it is.”

  “I got my doubts, but I hope so, too,” Jeff said, and fell asleep in his chair.

  Even out in the middle of the ocean, Sam Carsten kept a weather eye peeled for aeroplanes whenever he came out on the USS Dakota’s deck. He was still amazed at how much damage a bomb explosion could do; the one from the Argentine-based aeroplane had caused at least as much harm as a hit from a battleship’s secondary armament.

  Hastily welded sheets of steel covered the destruction the bomb had wrought; they looked as out of place as bandages covering a wound on a man’s body. Because the patches were neither painted nor smooth, they drew the wrath of petty officers merely by existing. Sam laughed when he had that notion-he was a petty officer himself these days, even if he did still think like an ordinary seaman.

  Hiram Kidde came up beside him. Kidde had been one of the exalted for a long time now; Carsten waited for some snide comment about the way the Dakota looked with a steel plate in her head, or at the least a grumble over the repairs’ not having been neater.

  He got nothing of the sort. What Kidde said was, “It’s a good thing those limey sons of bitches didn’t have an armor-piercing nose on that bomb, the way we’ve got armor-piercing shells. Otherwise, that one little bastard would’ve done even worse than it did.”

  Carsten considered that. After a couple of seconds, he nodded. “You’re likely right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” he said. “This was only a first try, though. I expect they’ll get it right, or we will, or somebody will, pretty damn quick.”

  Kidde gave him a look that was anything but warm. “You know what you’re saying, don’t you?” he demanded. “You’re saying we might as well melt the Dakota and all the other battlewagons in the whole damn Navy down for tin cans right now, on account of by the time the next war rolls around, aeroplanes’ll sink ’em before they get within five hundred miles of where they’re going.”

  “Am I saying that?” Sam did some more thinking. “Well, maybe I am. But I tell you what-maybe we don’t melt ’em down for cans till after this here war is over, because I don’t figure the aeroplanes’ll sink too many battleships this time out.”

  “Real white of you,” the gunner’s mate said. “Real white. You make me feel like a
guy in the buggy-whip business, going broke an inch at a time because people are buying Fords instead of buggies these days.”

  “Hell of a big buggy whip we’re sailing on,” Sam observed after letting his eye run along the Dakota from bow to stern.

  “Don’t talk stupid,” Hiram Kidde snapped. “You know what I’m talking about. You’re a squarehead, yeah, but you never were a dumb squarehead.”

  “Goddamn, ‘Cap’n,’ you say the sweetest things,” Carsten said, and they both laughed. After one more pause for thought, Carsten went on, “Maybe we’ll get some use out of battleships in the next war after all.” He didn’t doubt there would be a next war; there would always be a next war.

  Kidde got a cigar going, then held it in his mouth at an angle that made his dubious look even more dubious. “Wait a minute. You’re the same guy who was just saying somebody’d have armor-piercing aeroplane bombs long about day after tomorrow, or next week at the latest. Soon as that happens, the jig is up, right?”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe not, too. It’s up if the aeroplanes get to drop the bombs on the ships, sure as hell. But if our side has aeroplanes, too, to shoot down the other fellow’s bombing aeroplanes, the battleships can get on with the job they’re supposed to be doing, right?”

  Now Kidde stopped and did some thinking. “That sounds good,” he said when he came out of his own study, “but I don’t think it works. You squeeze enough, you might be able to mount two or three aeroplanes on a battleship, maybe one or two on a cruiser. That won’t be enough to hold off all the aeroplanes the other bastards can throw at you from dry land.”

  “Mmm,” Carsten said-an unhappy grunt. “Yeah, you’re right. A fleet’d need a whole ship stuffed full of aeroplanes, and there is no such animal.”

  “See?” Hiram Kidde said. “You got to keep your head on your shoulders, or else you go flying off every which way.” He walked down toward the stern, puffing contentedly on his cigar.

  Carsten stuck his thumbs in his trouser pockets and slowly mooched after the gunner’s mate. His idea had been pretty foolish, when you got down to it. He had a picture of the Navy, whose business was ships, building a ship to take care of aeroplanes. It hung in his mental gallery right alongside the portrait of the first Negro president of the Confederate States.

  The Dakota swung through a turn toward the west, toward the Argentine coast. Sam knew what that meant: it meant that, aeroplanes or no aeroplanes, the flotilla was going to bore in and see what they could do to the British convoys scuttling along in or near Argentine territorial waters.

  He supposed that made sense. It sure as hell made dollars and cents. This attack had surely cost millions to fit out, and as surely hadn’t worked near enough devastation to be worthwhile. Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske either had wireless orders from Philadelphia to do something worth doing, or else he was going to try to do something big to keep from getting wireless orders from Philadelphia telling him to sail his command back to Valparaiso and forget about marauding in the South Atlantic. Carsten had no way of knowing which of those was true, but he’d been in the Navy long enough to be pretty sure it was one or the other.

  Rear Admiral Fiske was also doing everything he could to keep the Dakota and the American and Chilean ships with her from getting a nasty surprise of the sort they’d already had once. Long before klaxons hooted men to their battle stations, he had crews at all the antiaircraft guns on the battleship’s deck.

  He also sent not only the Dakota’s aeroplane but the other two the flotilla boasted off to the west ahead of the ships. They wouldn’t be able to fight off any bombing aeroplanes, but they could at least warn of their presence. Sam wondered how much good that would do. He shrugged. It couldn’t hurt.

  The U.S. aeroplanes could and did do one other useful thing: they could spot convoys for the Dakota and her companions to attack. Down in the five-inch gun’s sponson, Sam attributed a sudden shift in course to the north as likely springing from a wireless report. “Hope they haven’t stuck some freighters out there to humbug us into getting too close,” Luke Hoskins said.

  “Now there’s a nice, cheery thought,” Carsten said. He turned to Hiram Kidde, who was peering out through the vision slit. “See anything, ‘Cap’n’?”

  “Smoke trails,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “Can’t spot the ships that are making ’em, though. Land behind ’em. We-”

  A thunderous roar interrupted him. “That’s the main armament,” Sam said unnecessarily. If it weren’t the main armament, it had to be the end of the world.

  Kidde looked disgusted. “They must have let the big guns open up as soon as they could take the range up in the crow’s nest on the observation mast. Skipper doesn’t want to get in close enough to let us do any work.”

  “After what happened that one time, do you blame him?” Sam asked.

  “Blame him? Hell, yes, I blame him. I want to be in on the fun, too, ’stead of sitting around here like some homely girl nobody wants to dance with,” Kidde said. He paused. “Now if you ask me whether I think he’s smart to do it this way, that’s a different question. Yeah, he’s smart.”

  “Listen,” Hoskins said from behind Sam, “the best fighting is the fighting you don’t have to do.” As he spoke, he had both hands on the casing of a shell, ready to pass it to Carsten.

  “Nope.” Kidde shook his head. “What matters is winning.”

  “If we can win here easy enough so they don’t have to squawk for the secondaries, that’ll be fighting we don’t have to do,” Sam said. “We, this gun crew, I mean.”

  “Give the man a big, fat, smelly cigar and put him in the judge advocate’s office,” Kidde said with a snort. “Sure as hell sounds like a bunkroom lawyer to me.”

  “I always hated a Rebel accent,” Carsten said, “but this one time when I was a kid, I heard a fellow from Louisiana going on and on about lawyers-he’d just lost a lawsuit down in the CSA, I guess-and every time he said the word, it sounded like he was saying liars. I liked that. The older I get, the better I like it, too.”

  “I remember one time I-” Luke Hoskins began. They never found out what he’d done or said or thought one time, because the main armament bellowed out another broadside. Speech was impossible through that great slab of noise, thought nearly so.

  Then Kidde shouted “Hit!”-his voice sounding thin and lost after the guns spoke with twelve-inch throats. Everybody yelled after that. Carsten elbowed his way to the vision slit. Sure enough, out there far away, a British or Argentine or French freighter was burning, sending up more smoke than could ever have come out its stack.

  The cruisers with the flotilla were firing, too; their guns had enough range to reach the freighters. The destroyers stayed silent, for the excellent good reason that their main armament was no match for the five-inch guns of the battleships’ secondary weaponry. Battleships were fierce, proud creatures, sure as sure. Nothing that prowled the sea could beat them.

  For a moment, that thought made Sam Carsten feel as large and powerful as the ship of which he was a tiny part. Then he remembered submersibles and floating mines and the gnat of an aeroplane that had carried such a nasty sting in its tail. Twenty years earlier, battleships might have been all but invulnerable, save to one another. It wasn’t like that any more.

  What would it be like for battleships twenty years down the road? He and Hiram Kidde had had that discussion just a little while before. He came up with the same answer as he had then: it would be tough as hell.

  That was twenty years down the road, though. Now, here, the battleships and cruisers methodically pounded the convoy of freighters to bits. No one came out to challenge them: no torpedo boats, no submersibles, no aeroplanes. They had everything their own way, just as they would have in the old days before aeroplanes, before submersibles, when even torpedo boats were hardly to be feared.

  Sam should have felt triumphant. In fact, he did feel triumphant, but only in a limited way. We pounded them to bits wasn’t reall
y what was going through his mind. It was much more on the order of, Thank you, Jesus. We got away with one this time.

  The Canucks and the limeys were pushed back to their last line in front of Toronto. They’d been working on that line since 1914-probably since before that-and had no doubt worked on it again after barrels entered the picture. If Toronto fell, the war for Ontario was as near over as made no difference. They did not intend to let it fall.

  What the Canadians and British intended was not the most urgent thing on Jonathan Moss’ mind. He had been a part of the struggle since the day it opened. Thinking back on the Curtiss Super Hudson aeroplane with the pusher prop he’d flown then, he laughed. If either side presumed to put a flimsy old bus like that in the air in this modern day and age, it would last only until the first enemy fighting scout spotted it and shot it down-unless, of course, it fell out of the sky of its own accord, as such antiques had been all too prone to do.

  Moss set a gloved hand on the doped-fabric skin of his fast, graceful, streamlined Wright two-decker. Here was a machine to conjure with, nothing like the awkward makeshifts with which both the Quadruple Alliance and the Entente had gone to war.

  Archie from the enemy’s antiaircraft guns burst a little below Moss’ flight. Some of those black puffs came close enough to make his aeroplane jerk from the concussion. He started his game of avoidance, speeding up, slowing down, gaining a little altitude, losing some, swinging his course now a few degrees to one side, now a few to the other.

  Along both sides of the line, tethered observation balloons hung in the sky like fat sausages. Some pilots went hunting for them with whole belts of tracer ammunition, hoping the flaming phosphorus that made the rounds visible would set the hydrogen in the balloons afire. Anyone who got forced down on the other side’s territory with that kind of load in his guns was unlikely to survive the experience, even if he landed perfectly.

  And some pilots hunted balloons with no more than their usual ammunition. Moss had gone after a few in his time on the front line, but he’d never really worked at being a balloon buster. To him, enemy aeroplanes and enemy troops on the ground seemed more important targets.