Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  Willie Moore said, “The damn micks—our damn micks, I mean—had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. It’s their goddamn country. If they can’t hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain’t gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” He adjusted the elevation screw again. “Let ’em have the next one now.”

  “Aye aye.” Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.

  Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell’s force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam’s head and into Gilbert’s neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire—he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn’t always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn’t go up.

  Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam’s shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn’t been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert’s twitching corpse as if he’d never seen one before. He was a veteran—everybody aboard the Remembrance was a veteran—so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.

  Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.

  He stooped beside Moore. “Here, Chief, I’ll take care of you.” He gave the gunner’s mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.

  “That’s too much,” Wesley said. “It’ll kill him.”

  “That’s the idea,” Sam said. He watched Moore’s chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Carsten shook himself. “Come on, God damn it. We’ve got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?”

  “I better,” Wesley answered. “I seen you guys do it often enough.”

  “All right, then. You load and fire, and I’ll aim the damn gun.” Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. “Fire!”

  Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: “Anybody alive in there?”

  “Fire!” Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. “Undog it.”

  “Aye aye.” The shell-jerker obeyed.

  Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. “Two dead, sir,” Carsten said crisply, “but we can still use the gun.”

  “So I gather.” Grady looked at the bodies. His rabbity features stayed expressionless; he’d seen his share of bodies before. After a moment’s thought, he nodded briskly. “All right, Carsten, this is your gun for the time being. I’ll get you shell-heavers. We’ll clean up this mess and get on with the job.”

  Another shell from the shore splashed into the Irish Sea, close enough to the Remembrance to send some water through the hole the hit had made in the sponson’s armor. Sam said, “Sir, if we can use a couple of aeroplanes to shoot up that gun and its crew, our life will get easier.”

  Even as he spoke, one of the Wright fighting scouts buzzed off the deck of the aeroplane carrier, followed a moment later by another and then another. Commander Grady said, “You aren’t the only one with that idea, you see.”

  “Never figured I would be,” Sam answered, not altogether truthfully. All his time in the Navy had taught him that officers often had trouble seeing things that should have been obvious.

  Grady pointed to two of the ratings with him. “Drinkwater, you and Jorgenson stay here and jerk shells. Carsten, can Wesley cut the mustard as a loader?”

  “Sir, if we fired with a two-man crew, we’ll sure as hell do a lot better with four,” Sam answered. Calvin Wesley shot him a grateful glance. Loader would be a step up for Wesley, as crew chief was a step up for Sam. Sam wished he hadn’t earned it like this, but, as was the Navy way, nobody paid any attention to what he wished.

  Grady pointed to the dead meat that had been Willie Moore and Joe Gilbert. “Get these bodies out of here,” he ordered the men he hadn’t appointed to the gun crew. “We’ve already spent too much time here.”

  As the sailors dragged the corpses out of the sponson, Sam took what had been Willie Moore’s spot. The chief of a gun crew had an advantage denied the rest of the men—he could see out whenever he chose: through the vision slit, through the rangefinder, and now through the hole that would, when time allowed, no doubt have a steel plate welded over it.

  Sam peered southwest, toward the shore half a dozen miles away. The fighting scouts the Remembrance had launched were buzzing around something. A flash told Carsten it was the gun that had fired on his ship. The shell fell astern of the aeroplane carrier.

  He twisted the calibration screw on the rangefinder and read out the exact distance to the target: 10,350 yards. Willie Moore had known without having to think how far to elevate the gun for a hit at that distance. Sam didn’t. He glanced at a yellowing sheet of paper above the vision slit: a range table. Checking the elevation, he saw the gun was a little low, and adjusted it. Then he traversed it ever so slightly to the left.

  “Fire!” he shouted. He’d given the order before, with only Calvin Wesley in the sponson with him, but it seemed more official now. If he fought the gun well, it might be his to keep.

  Wesley let out a yelp as the shell casing just missed mashing his instep. But when one of the new shell-heavers handed him the next round, he slammed it home in good style.

  “You want to mind your feet,” Sam said, traversing the gun a little farther on its track. “You can spend some time on crutches if you don’t.” He turned the screw another quarter of a revolution. “Fire!”

  He spied another flash in the same instant as his own gun spoke. The shell the pro-British rebels launched was a near miss. At the range at which he was fighting, he could not tell whether he’d hit or missed. But the gun on the shore did not fire again. Either his shell had silenced it, one from a different five-incher had done the trick, or the aeroplanes from the Remembrance had exterminated the crew.

  He didn’t waste time worrying over which was so. As long as the Irish rebels couldn’t hurt the Remembrance any more, he was free to go back to what his gun had been doing before the ship came under fire: pounding Belfast to bits. Sooner or later, the rebels would figure out they couldn’t win the war against their more numerous opponents—and against the might of Germany and the United States. If they needed help figuring that out, he would gladly lend a hand.

  The shell-heavers were just hired muscle, big men with strong backs. Calvin Wesley did his new job well enough, though Sam knew he’d done it better himself. He shrugged. Willie Moore would have handled the gun better than he was doing it. Experience counted.

  “Only one way to get it,” he muttered, and set about the business of acquiring as much as he could.

  Roger Kimball’s heart thumped with anticipation as he knocked on the hotel-room do
or. He’d met Anne Colleton this way whenever she’d let him. Once, she’d opened the door and greeted him naked as the day she was born. Her imagination knew no bounds. Neither did his own appetites.

  With a slight squeak, the door opened. The figure in the doorway was not naked. It was not Anne Colleton, either. Kimball’s heart kept pounding just the same. Vengeance was an appetite, too, as Anne would have agreed in a flash. “Welcome to Charleston, Mr. Featherston,” Kimball said.

  “Thank you kindly, Commander Kimball,” Jake Featherston answered. The words were polite enough, but he didn’t sound kindly, not even a little bit. And he bore down on Kimball’s title in a way that was anything but admiring. But, after he stood aside to let Kimball come in, his tone warmed a little: “I hear tell I’ve got you to thank for whispering my name into Miss Colleton’s ear. It’s done the Party good, and I won’t say anything different.”

  That was probably why he’d agreed to see Kimball. Did he recall the dismissive telegram he’d sent down to Charleston? He must have; he had the look of a man who remembered everything. Kimball didn’t intend to bring it up if Featherston didn’t. As for whispering Featherston’s name into Anne Colleton’s ear…well, mentioning it on the telephone was one thing, but when Anne let him get close enough to whisper in her ear, he had other things to say.

  “Want a drink?” Featherston asked. When Kimball nodded, the leader of the Freedom Party pulled a bottle out of a cabinet and poured two medium-sized belts. After handing Kimball one glass, he raised the other high. “To revenge!”

  “To revenge!” Kimball echoed. That was a toast to which he’d always drink. He took a long pull at the whiskey. Warmth spread from his middle. “Ahh! Thanks. That’s fine stuff.”

  “Not bad, not bad.” Jake Featherston pointed to a chair. “Set yourself down, Kimball, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I’ll do that.” Kimball sat, crossed his legs, and balanced the whiskey glass on his higher knee. Featherston seemed as direct in his private dealings as he was on the stump. Kimball approved; nobody diffident ever commanded a submersible. “I want to know how serious you are about going after the high muckymucks in the War Department.”

  “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” If Featherston was lying, he was damn good at it. “They made a hash of the war, and they don’t want to own up to it.” Something else joined the anger that filled his narrow features, something Kimball needed a moment to recognize: calculation. “Besides, if the Freedom Party Congressmen keep asking for hearings and the Whigs and the Radical Liberals keep turning us down, who looks good and who looks bad?”

  Slowly, Kimball nodded. “Isn’t that pretty?” he said. “It keeps the Party’s name in the papers, too, same as the passbook bill did.”

  “That’s right.” The calculation left Featherston’s face. The anger stayed. Kimball got the idea that the anger never left. “Niggers haven’t gotten half of what they deserve, not yet they haven’t. And even the nigger-loving Congressmen up in Richmond now won’t stop us from giving it to ’em.”

  “Bully.” Roger Kimball’s voice was savage. “When the uprising started, they kept my boat, the Bonefish, from going out on patrol against the damnyankees. Instead, I had to sail up the Pee Dee and pretend I was a river gunboat so I could fight the stinking Reds.”

  “I knew they were going to rise up,” Featherston said. “I knew they were going to try and kick the white race right in the balls. And when I tried to warn people, what did I get? What did the goddamn War Department give me? A pat on the head, that’s what. A pat on the head and a set of stripes on my sleeve they might as well have tattooed on my arm, on account of I wouldn’t get ’em off till Judgment Day. That’s what I got for being right.”

  His eyes blazed. Roger Kimball was impressed in spite of himself, more impressed than he’d thought he would be. He’d known how Featherston could sway crowds. He’d been swayed in a crowd himself. He’d expected the force of the Freedom Party leader’s personality to be less in a personal meeting like this. If anything, though, it was greater. With all his heart, he wanted to believe everything Jake Featherston said.

  Kimball had to gather himself before he could say, “You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. The War Department could do the country some good, once the dead wood got cleared out.”

  “Yeah, likely tell,” Featherston jeered. “Best thing that could happen to the War Department would be blowing it to hell and gone. And anybody who says anything different is just as big a traitor as the lying dogs in there.”

  “That’s shit,” Kimball said without raising his voice. Featherston’s eyes opened very wide. Kimball grinned; he got the idea nobody had spoken that way to Featherston in quite a while. Grinning still, he went on, “Without the War Department, for instance, how are we going to get decent barrels built? You’d best believe the damnyankees are working to make theirs tougher, same as they are with aeroplanes. Don’t you reckon we ought to do the same?”

  “Barrels. Stinking barrels,” Featherston muttered under his breath. He’d stopped jeering. Now he watched Kimball as a man might watch a rattlesnake in the shocked instant after its tail began to buzz. No, he hadn’t had a supporter talk back to him for a while. It threw him off stride, left him startled and confused. But he rallied quickly. “Well, yes, Christ knows we’ll need new barrels when we fight the USA again. But where the hell are they? Are we working on them? Not that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve got ears in all sorts of funny places. We’ve got people—mercenaries—using some old ones down south of the border, but new ones? Forget it. Proves what I told you, doesn’t it?—pack of damn traitors in the War Department.”

  When we fight the USA again. Featherston’s calm acceptance of the next war took Kimball’s breath away, or rather made it come fast and hard, as if Anne Colleton had greeted him in the doorway naked. He wanted that next war, too. He hadn’t wanted to give up on the last one, but he’d had no choice. Seeing how much Featherston longed for it made him forget their disagreement of a moment before.

  When he didn’t answer back right away, the sparkle returned to Featherston’s eye. The Freedom Party leader said, “Reckon you were just sticking up for the officers in Richmond, seeing as you were one yourself.”

  “Screw the officers in Richmond,” Kimball said evenly. “Yes, I was an officer. I fucking earned being an officer when I won an appointment at the Naval Academy in Mobile off a lousy little Arkansas farm. I earned my way through the Academy, too, and I earned every promotion I got once the war started. And if you don’t like that, Sarge”—he laced Featherston’s chosen title with scorn—“you can go to hell.”

  He thought he’d have a fight on his hands then and there. He wasn’t sure he could win it, either; Jake Featherston had the hard, rangy look of a man who’d cause more than his share of trouble in a brawl. But Featherston surprised him by throwing back his head and laughing. “All right, you were an officer, but you ain’t one of those blue-blooded little goddamn pukes like Jeb Stuart III, that worthless sack of horse manure.”

  “Blue-blooded? Me? Not likely.” Kimball laughed, too. “After my pa died, I walked behind the ass end of a mule till I figured out I didn’t want to do that for a living any more. I’ll tell you something else, too: it didn’t take me real long to figure that out, either.”

  “Don’t reckon it would have,” Featherston said. “All right, Kimball, you were an officer, but you were my kind of officer. When I’m president, reckon I can find you a place up in Richmond, if you want it.”

  When I’m president. He said that as calmly as he’d said, When we fight the USA again. He said it as surely, too. His confidence made Kimball gasp again. A little hoarsely, the ex-submersible skipper said, “So you are going to run next year?”

  “Hell, yes, I’ll run,” Featherston answered. “I won’t win. The people here aren’t ready yet to do the hard things that need doing. But when I run, when I tell ’em what we’ll hav
e to do, that’ll help make ’em ready. You know what I’m saying, Kimball? The road needs building before I can run my motorcar down it.”

  “Yeah, I know what you’re saying.” Kimball knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn’t help it. He’d thought about guiding Jake Featherston the way a rider guided a horse. After half an hour’s conversation with Featherston, that seemed laughable, absurd, preposterous—he couldn’t find a word strong enough. The leader of the Freedom Party knew where he wanted to go, knew with a certainty that made the hair stand up on the back of Kimball’s neck. Whether he would get there was another question, but he knew where the road went.

  Far more cautiously than he’d spoken before, Kimball said, “I’m not the only officer you could use, you know. You shouldn’t be down on all of us. Take Clarence Potter, for instance. He—”

  Featherston cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. “You and him are pals. I remember that. But I haven’t got any real use for him. There’s no fire in the man; he thinks too damn much. It’s not the fellow who thinks like a professor who gets a pile of ordinary working folks all het up. It’s somebody who thinks like them. It’s somebody who talks like them. He’d just piss and moan about that, on account of he can’t do it himself.”

  Recalling Potter’s Yale-flavored, Yankee-sounding accent and his relentless precision, Kimball found himself nodding. He said, “I bet you would have had more use for him, though, if he’d come over to the Party right away.”

  “Hell and blazes, of course I would,” Featherston said. “But I can see him now, lookin’ down his nose, peerin’ over the tops of his spectacles”—he gave a viciously excellent impression of a man doing just that—“and reckoning I was nothing but a damn fool. Maybe he knows better nowadays, but maybe it’s too late.”

  Kimball didn’t say anything at all. Featherston’s judgment of Clarence Potter was close to his own. Clarence was a fine fellow—Kimball wouldn’t have gone so far in denigrating him as Featherston had—but he did think too much for his own good.