Return engagement sa-1

by Harry Turtledove

  All Dover did ask was, "You reckon he can do the job?" That didn't just mean keeping the customers happy and knowing which fork went where. It meant showing up on time every day no matter what. It meant not making yourself intolerable to the cooks. It meant a good many other things, too, but those were the big ones.

  Scipio nodded without hesitation. "Yes, suh. He do it. Dat man don't give you no trouble, not fo' nothin'."

  "All right, then. I expect I'll take him on. We both know that Marius fella isn't working out."

  This time, Scipio's nod was reluctant. Marius meant well. Scipio was convinced of that. But he also knew which road good intentions paved. The young waiter would come in late, and without letting Dover know ahead of time he'd be late. He was clumsy, and the cooks ragged him because of it. Like any cooks, the ones here were merciless when they scented weakness. And Marius couldn't take ribbing, and he was no damn good at giving it back.

  Jerry Dover clapped Scipio on the back. "Don't worry about it. You're not the one who's going to can his ass. I am." He laughed. "And he'll probably end up in a war plant two days after I do it. Getting fired might be the best thing that ever happens to him."

  "Yes, suh," said Scipio, who didn't believe it for a minute. Working in a war plant was better than getting shipped off to a camp, but it wasn't a whole lot better. The hours were long, the work was hard, and the pay was lousy. Very few blacks complained where whites could hear them. By all appearances, nobody did that more than once.

  Out to the dining room Scipio went. It hadn't started filling up yet. A couple of businessmen sat smoking Habanas and going on in low voices about the killings they were making. Blacks might not gain much from the war plants. More than a few whites did.

  Off at a corner table, a Confederate captain was spending a week's pay to impress a pretty blond girl. Scipio wondered if he'd get as much return for his investment as the businessmen did for theirs. He must have thought so, or he wouldn't have brought her here.

  Scipio smiled at the eagerness blazing from the young officer. Confederate soldiers bothered him much less than Freedom Party stalwarts or guards. Soldiers mostly looked outward, not inward. The Party oppressed Negroes. Soldiers aimed at the USA.

  And yet… Scipio wished he hadn't thought about and yet. He'd killed a Confederate officer in 1916, as the Congaree Socialist Republic fell to pieces. Plenty of other officers and soldiers had helped to break it. He wished he could forget those days, but he didn't think he'd ever be free of them.

  Before long, more people started coming into the Huntsman's Lodge. Scipio was glad enough to serve them, and wished there were more still. As long as he stayed busy, he didn't have to think. Not thinking, these days, counted for a blessing.

  Bathsheba would have wagged a finger at him if he'd said something like that where she could hear it. Her faith sustained her. Part of Scipio wished he too believed in God and in good times to come. He wished he could. But what kind of God would let people go through what the Negroes in the CSA were enduring? No kind that Scipio wanted anything to do with.

  When his shift ended, he made his way home. That was plenty to put the fear of God in him. Since the two auto bombs went off, black predators weren't all he had to worry about in the Terry. Whites with pistols or rifles or submachine guns often came in after night fell and shot up the place almost at random. They'd hit his building only once, and never the floor where he and his family lived. Who could say how long that would last, though?

  Sometimes people in the Terry would shoot back. But that carried its own risks. The only thing that would guarantee a Negro a more horrible death than killing a white man was raping a white woman. No matter how desperate for self-defense the blacks of Augusta were, any serious resistance would bring more firepower than they could hope to withstand down on their heads.

  Damned if we do, damned if we don't, Scipio thought miserably. Somebody not too far away chose that exact moment to fire off a whole magazine from a submachine gun. It punctuated his bitter thoughts. So did the laughter-without a doubt from a white throat-that followed.

  "Praise the Lord you're here," Bathsheba said when Scipio finally walked into their apartment.

  "Praise de Lawd," Scipio echoed, tasting his own hypocrisy. He added, "You should oughta be sleepin'."

  "Guns woke me." By the calm way his wife said it, it might have been an everyday occurrence. Increasingly, it was. As Scipio got out of his tuxedo, Bathsheba asked, "What's the news?"

  He had some this evening: "Look like Aurelius be comin' to work at de Huntsman's Lodge."

  "How come?" Bathsheba asked. "Don't you tell me Mr. Oglethorpe threw him out. I don't believe it." John Oglethorpe was the most decent white man either of them knew. He would have clouted anybody who told him so in the side of the head with a frying pan. In an odd way, that too was a measure of his decency.

  Scipio shook his head. "Mistuh Oglethorpe closin' down on account of he ain't well no more. Aurelius got to find what he kin."

  "I pray for Mr. Oglethorpe," Bathsheba said. Scipio nodded. Prayer couldn't hurt. On the other hand, he didn't think it would do much good. Oglethorpe had to be pushing eighty, or maybe past it. When you got to that age, you didn't sit down and start War and Peace.

  Sliding his nightshirt on over his head, Scipio brushed his teeth at the sink and then lay down beside Bathsheba. Had he been in a mood to thank God for anything, it would have been for good teeth. He still had all but two of the ones he'd been born with, and they didn't give him much trouble. He knew how lucky he was by the misery so many people went through.

  Then again, he still had the skin he was born with, too. That caused him lots of misery all by itself. That kind of skin caused millions of people in the CSA misery. And who cared about them? Nobody in this country. Nobody in the United States, or they would have protested louder when the Confederates started abusing Negroes over and above the ways they'd always abused them. Nobody in the Empire of Mexico. Nobody in Britain or France, not when they were on the same side as Jake Featherston.

  Nobody at all.

  "Ain't easy, bein' a nigger," he muttered.

  "What you say?" Bathsheba asked sleepily. He repeated himself, a little louder this time. She nodded; he could feel the bed move. "Never was, never is, never gonna be. You ain't used to that by now?"

  Her words paralleled his thoughts all too well. But, for once, however bad it had been, however bad it might be, didn't measure up to how bad it was now. Scipio started to say so. But his wife's breathing had gone soft and regular; she'd fallen back to sleep.

  Scipio wished he could do the same. No matter what he wished, he couldn't. He had too much on his mind. What if a white man sent a burst of submachine-gun fire through this flat in the next five minutes? What if a black man set off an auto bomb in front of the building? What if…?

  What if you relax and get some rest? Scipio shook his head. Those other things might happen. They were only too likely to happen. Rest and sleep were unlikely to come any time soon. He didn't know what he could do about that. He didn't think he could do anything. And that by itself made a perfectly good reason not to be able to sleep.

  Armstrong Grimes loped in the direction of Provo, Utah. Barrels rumbled along with the advancing U.S. infantry. Most of them couldn't go any faster than he could. The Army had hauled Great War machines out of storage and put them to work against the Mormons. Philadelphia needed its modern barrels for the fight against the CSA, and must have figured these antiques would do well enough here.

  In a way, Armstrong could see the War Department's point of view. Against an enemy with no barrels of his own, any old barrels would do. But these beasts had enormous crews, broke down if you looked at them sideways, and couldn't get out of their own way. It did make him wonder how seriously the folks back East took this fighting.

  A machine gun in a farmhouse up ahead started chattering. Armstrong dove behind a boulder and shot back. He didn't know how much good that would do. A lot of the houses
here were built like fortresses. The Mormons defended them as if they were fortresses, too. Armstrong had already discovered that.

  One of those slow, awkward barrels turned toward the farmhouse. Since it had a prow-mounted cannon instead of a rotating turret, it had to turn to make the gun bear on the target. It waddled forward. Bullets from the machine gun spanged off its armor. It could ignore those, though any cannon shell would have ripped into it like a can opener.

  Confident in its immunity, the barrel moved in for the perfect shot-and ran over a buried mine. Whump! Armstrong didn't know how many tons the barrel weighed, but the mine made it jump in the air. Smoke and flames poured out of the cannon port and all the machine-gun ports. They poured from the escape hatches, too, when those flew open. Only a handful of crewmen managed to get out, and the Mormon machine gunners remorselessly shot most of them down.

  Ammunition started cooking off inside the carcass of the machine. The pop-pop-pop sounded absurdly cheerful, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. By then, whoever was still inside the barrel had to be dead.

  "Son of a bitch," Armstrong muttered. A moment later, another barrel hit a mine and started to burn. "Son of a bitch!" he said. The Mormons had known what they'd be up against, all right, and they were ready to fight it. Did anybody know what we'd be up against? he wondered.

  Whistling screams in the air made Armstrong dig in for dear life. The shells that came down on the U.S. soldiers weren't of the ordinary sort. The Mormons had some conventional artillery, but not a whole lot. As they had with their biplane bomber, they'd improvised. Large-caliber mortars didn't shoot very far, but you didn't want to be on the receiving end when the bombs landed.

  The earth shook under Armstrong. He jammed his thumbs into his ears and yelled as loud as he could. That eased the blast, a little. Dirt and small stones-and a couple not so small-thrown up by near misses pattered down on his back.

  Corporal Stowe jumped in the foxhole with him. The squad leader shouted something. Armstrong took his thumbs out of his ears. Stowe shouted it again: "Gas!"

  "Shit," Armstrong said, and grabbed for his mask. If it was mustard gas or nerve gas, even the mask might not help. Those could get you through the skin-you didn't have to inhale them.

  More mortar bombs thudded home. They were obviously homemade. What about the poison gas in them? Did the Mormons have labs cranking it out in the desert somewhere? That wasn't impossible; who paid attention to anything in Utah but the stretch from Provo up to Ogden? But it was also possible that the rebels here had had some help from others who called themselves Rebels. The Confederates would have to be crazy not to do all they could for the Mormons. As long as this uprising tied down large numbers of U.S. soldiers, those soldiers wouldn't go into action against the CSA.

  Armstrong breathed in air that tasted of rubber. He peered out through little portholes that needed cleaning.

  A U.S. barrel was shelling the house that held the machine gun. Part of the roof had fallen in, but the machine-gun crew was still in business. Muzzle flashes and the streaks of tracers made that very clear. Sooner or later, U.S. forces would drive the Mormons out of that house, but at what price? The USA had already lost two barrels and most of the big crews the lumbering Great War machines carried. And another old-fashioned barrel wasn't moving and wasn't shooting. Had gas got the men inside? Armstrong wouldn't have been surprised.

  We aren't buying anything cheap today, he thought. Whatever the price, in the end the United States could afford to pay it and the Mormons couldn't. Just because the United States could, though, didn't necessarily mean they should. That seemed obvious to PFC Armstrong Grimes. He wondered if it had occurred to anybody in the War Department. On the evidence, it seemed unlikely.

  U.S. artillery started pounding the machine-gun position. More U.S. shells fell farther back: counterbattery fire against the Mormon mortars. Of course, the mortar crews might not have hung around to get pounded. Mortars were much lighter and more portable than regular artillery. Again, did anybody on the U.S. side think in those terms?

  Any which way, Armstrong knew what his job was. He jumped out of his foxhole, ran forward twenty or thirty feet, and threw himself into a crater one of the mortar bombs had made-they hadn't all been loaded with poison gas. The machine gun's stream of bullets came searching for him, but too late. He'd reached new cover.

  Have to stay here a while, till they forget about me. He panted. Running hard in a gas mask wasn't easy. It was, in fact, damn near impossible. The filter cartridge wouldn't let you suck in enough air.

  He could have all the air he wanted if he took off the mask. Of course, he would also keel over in short order if he got unlucky. Some men didn't care. They took big chances with poison gas, just because they couldn't stand their gas masks. Armstrong took his share of chances, too, but not like that.

  When artillery failed to silence the Mormon machine gun, dive bombers paid it a call. They didn't scream like Confederate Asskickers, but they flattened the house. The machine gun fell silent at last. U.S. soldiers, Armstrong among them, cautiously moved forward.

  No one shot at them from the shattered house any more. But as they drew near, somebody stepped on a cunningly buried land mine. The man in green-gray screamed, but not for long-he'd been blown to red rags below the waist. And another machine gun a couple of hundred yards father back, whose crew seemed to have waited for just that, opened up on the Americans.

  Armstrong didn't know whether to shit or go blind. He threw himself to the ground, wondering if explosives hidden beneath it would blast him sky-high an instant later. Bullets stitched malevolently through the dirt all around him, kicking dust off the portholes of his gas mask. He crawled for the shelter of a rock. It wasn't much shelter, because it wasn't much of a rock. He gratefully took anything he could get.

  Behind him, an American machine gun opened up. Bullets zipped over his head-not far enough over it, as far as he was concerned. They'd probably nail some of his buddies, not that the gunners would give a damn. He didn't shed a tear when machine gunners got shot. They were almost as bad as snipers.

  And they couldn't knock out the Mormon machine gunners, which made them all the more worthless. He had no idea where or if the Mormons had done their basic training. Wherever it was, they all fought like ten-year veterans. They never showed much of themselves, they always had gun positions supporting other gun positions, and they didn't seem to have heard of retreat. The only way U.S. soldiers moved forward was over their dead bodies.

  Armstrong spotted Corporal Stowe sprawled behind another rock. He pointed toward the Mormons ahead-making sure he exposed no part of himself to their fire-and shouted, "Why can't we turn these fuckers loose against the Confederates? They'd kick Featherston's ass." Through the mask, he sounded disembodied, unearthly.

  "Tell me about it," Stowe yelled back. "Only trouble is, they'd rather shoot us."

  "Yeah. I know." Armstrong started digging in behind his rock. The corporal was only too right.

  As usual, U.S. artillery went into action to try to neutralize the latest Mormon machine-gun nest. Neutralize was a nice, meaningless word. If you neutralized somebody, you just took him off the board like a captured checker. You didn't blow his arm off halfway between the elbow and shoulder or drive red-hot metal shards through his balls or take off the top of his skull like the shell from a hard-boiled egg. Of course, he was trying to do all those charming things to you, too. You couldn't afford to waste a lot of grief on him. Not wasting grief on him was what brought words like neutralize front and center.

  The machine gun stopped shooting. Armstrong stayed right where he was. He'd seen soldiers play possum before. If you thought they were really down for the count, you'd pay for it. Armstrong's goal in life was to make the other guy pay for it. So far, he'd managed.

  He glanced over to Corporal Stowe. The two-striper wasn't going anywhere, either. Armstrong just hoped some whistle-ass lieutenant wouldn't order everybody forward. That would show wheth
er the Mormons were fooling, all right-probably show it the hard way.

  Before a junior officer could do anything stupid, some dumb kid did it for him, standing up so he could move toward the objective. Somewhere up the road was a town romantically called Thistle. That was about as good as naming a place Dandelion or Poison Ivy.

  As the kid walked forward and a couple of other soldiers stood up to go with him, Armstrong hoped the artillery had got lucky. It could happen; a direct hit from a 105 would make even a sandbagged machine-gun nest say uncle.

  Armstrong still sat tight. He wanted to see what was happening before he put his neck on the line. He didn't always get the chance, but he wanted to. Then more trusting soldiers trotted forward. They carried their Springfields at the ready. Fat lot of good it'll do them, Armstrong thought.

  Fat lot of good it did them. The machine gun, very much unsubdued, opened up again. Several advancing soldiers fell. Others dove for cover. Fools. Suckers, went through Armstrong's mind. He was no great brain, but he could figure out when somebody was lying in wait for him. Maybe some of the men who'd managed to take cover would learn that lesson now. The sorry bastards who'd stopped bullets wouldn't get the chance.

  Eventually, a barrel shelled the machine gun into silence. Armstrong scurried forward. Would Thistle be worth having once the Army finally took it? Not likely. And what would happen after that? They'd push on to Provo, where the Mormons would fight from house to house, and which was big enough to have a lot of houses. How many men would go through the grinder there? How many would come out the other side? And the most important question of all: will I be one of them?

  Alec Pomeroy wrinkled his nose when he walked into the barn on his grandmother's farm. "It smells like animal poop in here!" he said.

  "Well… yes." His mother fought not to laugh. To Mary Pomeroy, the smell of a barn was one of the most normal, natural things in the world. She'd grown up with it. Even now, she took it altogether for granted. But Alec was town-raised. Farm life and farm smells didn't come natural to him. Mary said, "Don't you like it?"