In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  Only occasional craters showed on the ground till he flew over what had to be eastern Indiana. From there on, it was one disaster after another: deserted, unplowed farmland, with towns and cities smashed into ruins. How long would repairing the devastation take? How much would it cost? What could the country have done if it didn’t have to try to put itself together again? He couldn’t begin to guess. That was a question for politicians, not soldiers. But a soldier had no trouble seeing the USA—and the CSA, too—would have been better off without a war.

  Though Dowling didn’t see what had happened to the Confederate States, he knew that had to be worse than what he was looking at. “If they were smart, they would have left us alone,” he said to Major Toricelli.

  “If they were smart, they never would have elected that Featherston bastard,” his adjutant replied. Dowling nodded—there was another obvious truth.

  His airplane landed outside of Pittsburgh to refuel. As it spiraled down toward the runway, he got a good look at what the battle had cost the city. His first thought was, Everything. But that wasn’t an obvious truth. Smoke rose from tall stacks—and from some truncated ones—from steel mills that were either back in business or had never gone out of business. Nobody had bothered repairing shell-pocked walls or, sometimes, roofs. Those could wait. The steel? That was a different story. Trucks on the roads, trains in the railroad yards, and barges on the rivers took it where it needed to go.

  When he got out of the airplane to stretch his legs and spend a penny, his nose wrinkled. He’d expected the air to be full of harsh industrial stinks, and it was. He hadn’t expected the stench of death to linger so long after the fighting ended.

  “Not as bad as the graves outside of Camp Determination,” Toricelli said.

  “Well, no. I don’t think anything in the whole world is that bad,” Dowling replied. “But this is what the Great War battlefields were like. Most of the ones this time around aren’t so foul. They move faster and cover more ground, so there aren’t so many bodies all in the same place.”

  “Except here there are,” his adjutant said.

  Dowling nodded. “Yeah. Except here there are.”

  Philadelphia was another bomb-pocked nightmare of a city, another place where factories sent up defiant plumes despite the destruction. A green-gray motorcar met Dowling at the airport. “I’ll take you to the War Department, sir,” said the bright young captain who accompanied the enlisted driver.

  “How bad are these long-range rockets we hear about?” Dowling asked as the auto picked its way through streets often cratered and rubble-strewn.

  “They sure aren’t good, sir,” the captain answered. “First thing you know is, they go boom—and if you’re there when they do, then you aren’t any more.”

  That was convoluted, but Dowling got the message. Damage grew worse as the auto got closer to the center of town. A lot of the rockets seemed to have fallen there. Dowling saw the finned stern of one sticking up, and curved sheet metal from a couple of more.

  The War Department had taken lots of near misses but no direct hits Dowling saw. He had to show his ID before they let him in. Even after he did, they patted him down. No one apologized—it was part of routine. The captain took him down to John Abell’s office. “Good to see you, sir,” Abell said, his usual bloodless tones sucking the warmth from the words.

  “And you,” Dowling replied, which wasn’t entirely true but came close enough. He pointed to a map of Virginia on Abell’s wall. “What are we going to do to them?”

  Abell got up and pointed. “This is what we’ve got in mind.”

  Dowling whistled. “Well, whoever came up with it sure didn’t think small.”

  “Thank you,” Abell said. That made Dowling blink; the General Staff officer was more likely to see what could go wrong than what could go right. This scheme, though, definitely counted on things going right.

  “You really think they’re on their last legs, don’t you?” Dowling said.

  “Last leg,” John Abell replied. “They’re standing on it in Georgia. If we hit them here, too, the bet is that they fall over.”

  “It could be.” Dowling hesitated, then said the other thing he thought needed saying: “Is General MacArthur really the right man to knock them over?”

  “If you want command of the army group, sir, you won’t get it.” Now Abell’s voice was as icy as Dowling had ever heard it, which said a good deal.

  “No, no, no. I wasn’t asking for myself. After a question like that, I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me on a silver platter,” Dowling said. “But if we’ve got somebody better than that scrawny bastard handy, we ought to use him.”

  The General Staff officer relaxed fractionally. “Since you put it that way…Well, General Morrell is busy in Georgia, which is also of vital importance. And General MacArthur is the man on the spot, and familiar with conditions.”

  “All right,” Dowling said. It wasn’t, not really, but he’d made the effort. “When we’re ready down there, I’ll do everything I can.”

  Clarence Potter was so glad to get away from Georgia and George Patton that he almost didn’t mind shuttling back and forth between Richmond and Lexington every few days. President Featherston couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he wanted Potter to pick up his work in Intelligence again or act as liaison with the uranium-bomb project.

  Either way, Potter figured he was better suited to the work than he was to commanding a division under Patton. As far as he could see, the only things that suited a man to command a division under Patton were a rhino’s hide and an uncanny ability to turn off one’s brain. That probably wasn’t fair—Patton had grievances with him, too. Potter didn’t much care. Not dealing with Patton was such a pleasure.

  Of course, not dealing with the general meant dealing with the President of the CSA—and, incidentally, with Professor FitzBelmont. But Potter had been dealing with Jake Featherston since the Great War, and he scared the living bejesus out of the professor. He could handle both of those jobs without wanting to retread his stomach lining twice a day.

  FitzBelmont was a man facing a problem all too common in the CSA these days: he was trying to do a key job without quite enough men or resources, and with the damnyankees pounding the crap out of him from the air. Back before the United States found out what was going on there, Washington University had been a lovely, leafy, grassy campus. Potter remembered what a joy coming to Lexington had been after the devastation visited on Richmond.

  Lexington was making up for lost time these days. Everything except the uranium-bomb project had abandoned the university campus, which looked like a real-estate poster for a subdivision in one of the ritzier neighborhoods of hell. The slagged and cratered earth might have caught smallpox. Ruins of what had been elegant, graceful buildings, many dating back before the War of Secession, offered a sorry reminder of better times. Only the square, brutal simplicity of reinforced concrete, ton upon ton of it, had any hope of surviving the Yankees’ nightly visits.

  Down below that concrete, the pile was turning uranium into jovium, which was what FitzBelmont had christened element 94. Enough jovium would go boom, just like U-235. Making it go boom, though, wasn’t so simple.

  “With U-235, we could shoot a plug into a hole in a bigger chunk, and then everything would go up,” FitzBelmont said.

  “Why can’t you do that with the jovium, too?” Potter asked.

  “Our calculations show it would start going off too soon and get too deformed for a full blast,” the physicist answered.

  “Well, you seem to think you can make it go off,” Potter said, and Henderson FitzBelmont nodded. Potter asked what looked like the next reasonable question: “How?”

  “We have to slam a lot of pieces down into a sphere—that’s what the math says,” FitzBelmont replied. “It’s harder than making a U-235 bomb would be, because it’s so much more precise. But getting the jovium is easier, because we can chemically separate it from the uranium in
the pile.”

  “My chemistry prof at Yale told me transmutation was nothing but a pipe dream,” Potter said.

  “Mine told me the same thing.” FitzBelmont shrugged. “Sometimes the rules change. They did here. Transmutation isn’t chemistry—it’s physics.”

  “It could be black magic, and I wouldn’t care,” Potter said. “As long as we say, ‘Abracadabra!’ before the damnyankees do, nothing else counts.”

  “They’re doing their best to make sure we don’t. Are we doing the same to them?” the professor asked.

  “What we can. Getting to Washington State isn’t easy for us, and it got tougher after they went and grabbed Baja California from Mexico,” Potter said. Henderson FitzBelmont looked blank. He was no military man. Patiently, Potter explained: “It makes it much harder for us to get ships and subs out of Guaymas. But we did it not so long ago, and we attacked their facility.”

  “And?” FitzBelmont asked eagerly.

  “And past that I don’t know,” Potter admitted. “The attack went in—that’s all I can tell you for sure. The United States keep real quiet about their project, same as we keep quiet about ours. We haven’t picked up any leaks to let us know what we did—none I’ve heard, anyhow.”

  “We can’t hit them the way they hit us,” FitzBelmont said mournfully. “And it looks like they started work on this before we did.”

  Potter had been worrying about those very things for quite a while now. Except for getting the latest strike at the Yankee project started, he couldn’t do much but worry. “That means we have to be smarter,” he told the physicist. “We’re up to that, aren’t we? If we make fewer mistakes and don’t get stuck in blind alleys, we can still win. You’re as good as anybody they’ve got, right?” You’d better be, or we’re history.

  “Yes, I think so,” FitzBelmont replied. “They may well have more highly competent people than we do, though. And I worry about Germany a good deal. The Kaiser’s physicists, and the ones he can draw from Austria-Hungary, are the best in the world. Has the President been able to get any technical help from our allies?”

  “If he has, he hasn’t told me,” Potter said. “I’ll ask him next time I’m in Richmond.”

  That was only a couple of days later. Traveling inside Richmond was safer by day. U.S. airplanes mostly came at night. Confederate defenses and fighters still made daytime raids too costly to be common. The bombers had taken a terrible toll all the same. Intact buildings stood out because they were so rare. The streets were full of holes of all sizes. The smell of death floated through the air.

  The grounds to the Gray House might have been hit harder than anything else in Richmond. The United States wanted Jake Featherston dead. They wanted to avenge Al Smith, and they thought the Confederacy would grind to a halt without its leader. Potter feared they were right, too, which made him leery of plots against Featherston.

  After going underground, after a couple of unpleasantly thorough searches, he was escorted to the waiting room outside the President’s office, and then into Featherston’s presence. The President’s secretary sniffed as she closed the door behind him.

  “Lulu doesn’t much fancy you.” Jake Featherston sounded amused, which was a relief. “She doesn’t reckon you think I’m wonderful enough.”

  How right she is. But saying that was impolitic. “The country needs you. I know it.” Potter could tell the truth without giving away his own feelings.

  “What’s the latest from Lexington?” Featherston asked, letting Lulu go.

  “They’re doing everything they know how to do, and the United States are trying to make sure they can’t,” Potter answered. “Do you know what we did in Washington State?”

  “Something,” the President answered. “They’ve had repair crews in there—I know that for a fact. Don’t know much more, though.”

  How did he know even that much? A spy on the spot? Reconnaissance aircraft? Intercepted signals? Whatever the answer was, the word hadn’t come through Potter. “How are things in Georgia?” he asked. The wireless didn’t say much, which was never a good sign.

  “We’re going to lose Atlanta,” Featherston said bluntly. “They didn’t want to come in, so they’re sweeping around. They want to trap our army in there and grind it to pieces.”

  “For God’s sake don’t let them!” Potter exclaimed. The President had thrown away one army in Pittsburgh. Didn’t he see he couldn’t afford to do that again?

  He must have, for he nodded. “We’re pulling out. We’re wrecking the place, too. They won’t get any use from it when they get in.” He paused. “When Patton challenged you to a duel, did you really choose flamethrowers?”

  “Yes, sir,” Potter answered. “For a little while, I thought he’d take me up on it, too.”

  “That wouldn’t’ve been pretty, would it?” the President said. Potter shook his head; it would have been anything but. Featherston went on, “He was spitting rivets at you, though. Let me tell you, he was.”

  “Let him spit rivets at the damnyankees,” Clarence Potter said. “It would hurt ’em a lot more than some of the other things he’s tried.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Featherston scowled. “But who have I got who’d do better?”

  Potter grunted. That, unfortunately, was much too good a question. He found a question of his own: “If we can’t lick the USA no matter who we’ve got in the field, why are we still fighting?”

  “Well, for one thing, they want unconditional surrender, and I’ll see ’em in hell first,” Jake Featherston answered. “And, for another, the longer we hold on, the better the chance FitzBelmont and the other slide-rule boys have of blowing ’em a new asshole.”

  Reluctantly, Potter nodded. The Confederate States had shown they were too dangerous for the United States to give them another chance to rebuild and try again. It was a compliment of sorts, but one the Confederacy could have done without now. As for the other…“What if they get a uranium bomb first?”

  “Then we’re fucked.” Featherston’s response had, at least, the virtue of clarity. “Then we don’t deserve to win. But that won’t happen, so help me God it won’t. We are going to lick those bastards right out of their boots. You wait and see.”

  When he said it, Potter just about believed it—a telling measure of how persuasive Featherston could be. But afterwards, coming up aboveground once more, seeing the devastation that had been a great city, Potter shivered. How often lately had Jake Featherston taken a good long look at what had become of his capital and his country?

  That afternoon, Potter and Nathan Bedford Forrest III walked through the disaster that was Capitol Square. Washington’s statue still survived; not even a mountain of sandbags had saved Albert Sidney Johnston’s. “What the hell are we going to do?” the chief of the General Staff said—quietly, so no passerby could hear.

  “What the hell can we do?” Potter answered. “We’re stuck between the Yankees and Jake Featherston. If we dump Featherston—if we kill him, I mean, because he won’t be dumped—the United States land on us with both feet. And if we keep fighting—”

  “The United States land on us with both feet anyhow,” Forrest finished bitterly.

  “They won’t let us quit,” Potter said. “They aim to wipe us off the map, same as they did in the War of Secession.”

  “Featherston never should have started this damn war,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said.

  “Oh, cut the crap…sir,” Potter said. His superior gaped. Not caring, he went on, “You aren’t mad at him for starting the war. You were all for it. So was I. So was everybody. You’re just mad because we aren’t winning.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Sure, but at least I know why. I—” Clarence Potter broke off.

  “What?” Forrest said, but then he heard it, too: the distant rumble of artillery suddenly picking up. He frowned. His eyes, which were more like his famous great-grandfather’s than any other feature, narrowed. “Damnyankees haven’t done that much fi
ring for quite a while.”

  “They sure haven’t,” Potter agreed. “I wonder if they think they can catch us with our pants down here because we’ve moved so much stuff to Georgia.” I wonder if they’re right. He didn’t say that out loud. Nathan Bedford Forrest III had enough to worry about, and the same thought was bound to be going through his mind.

  The chief of the General Staff stood there listening, his head cocked to one side. After a minute or so, he shook himself; he might almost have come out of a trance. “I’d better get back to the War Department, find out what the hell they’re up to,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Potter said. Forrest didn’t tell him no, even though he didn’t have a formal place there any more. The gunfire went on and on. Halfway back to the War Department building, both men broke into a trot.

  Cassius and Gracchus strode through the streets of Madison, Georgia. They both wore U.S. Army boots on their feet and green-gray U.S. military-issue trousers. Only their collarless chambray work shirts said they weren’t regular U.S. soldiers—those and their black skins, of course. Even the shirts had Stars-and-Stripes armbands on the left sleeve. The Negroes were at least semiofficial.

  Gracchus carried a captured C.S. submachine gun; Cassius still had his bolt-action Tredegar. Both of them were alert for anything that looked like trouble. Madison had only recently fallen to the United States. The whites here didn’t like seeing their own soldiers driven away. They were even less happy about Negroes patrolling their streets.

  A couple of days earlier, somebody’d fired at one of Gracchus’ men. The guerrilla got his left hand torn up. Madison got a lesson, a painful one. The U.S. commandant, a cold-eyed captain named Lester Wallace, grabbed the first ten white men he could catch, lined them up against a brick wall, and had them shot without even blindfolding them first.

  “Nobody fucks with anybody under U.S. authority in this town,” he told the horrified locals in a voice like iron, while the bodies still lay there bleeding. “Nobody, you hear?”