In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  “Can I buy you a glass of beer, Señor Quinn?” Jorge asked.

  “No, but you can let me buy you one, by God,” the Party organizer answered. “I’ve got plenty of money, believe me. Some of the people who think they can play poker haven’t got the sense God gave a duck.”

  Jorge smiled. “All right. Do you remember where La Culebra Verde is?”

  “I’d damn well better,” Quinn said. “¡Vámonos, amigo!”

  It was dark and cool and quiet inside the cantina. A couple of men looked up from their drinks when Jorge and Robert Quinn walked in. It stayed quiet in there, but now the silence was one of suspense. Slowly and deliberately, the bartender ran a damp rag over the counter in front of them. “What can I get for you, señores?” he asked.

  “Dos cervezas, por favor.” Quinn set a U.S. half-dollar on the bar. He sat down on a stool. Jorge perched next to him. The bartender made the silver coin disappear. He drew two beers and set them in front of the new customers.

  “Thanks.” Jorge put down another quarter. “One for you, too, or whatever you want.”

  “Gracias.” Bartenders didn’t always want the drinks customers bought them. This time, though, the man in the boiled shirt did pour himself a beer.

  “¡Salud!” Quinn raised his glass. He and Jorge and the bartender drank. “Madre de Dios, that’s good!” Quinn said. Was he even a Catholic? Jorge didn’t know. He’d never worried about it till now.

  One of the men at a table in the back raised a finger to show he and his friends were ready for a refill. The bartender filled glasses and set them on a tray. A barmaid picked them up and carried them off, her hips swinging. Jorge followed her with his eyes. So did Robert Quinn. They grinned at each other. Once you got out of the Army, you remembered how nice it was that the world had pretty girls in it.

  As the beers emptied, the bartender murmured, “Good to have you back, Señor Quinn. We didn’t know if we would see you again.”

  “Good to be back,” Quinn said. “There were some times when I wondered whether anybody would see me again, but war is like that.”

  “Sí.” Jorge remembered too many close calls of his own. The man behind the bar was about his father’s age. Had he fought in the Great War? Jorge didn’t know; again, he’d never wondered till now.

  “What are we going to do here, Jorge?” Robert Quinn asked. “Are you ready to live quietly under the Stars and Stripes? Or do you remember what your country really is?” He hadn’t been so bold in the train station. Could one beer have done it to him?

  Jorge looked down at his glass. He looked around the cantina. His mind’s eye took in the rest of Baroyeca and the family farm outside of town. All that made him feel less determined than he had over at the station. “Señor Quinn,” he said sadly, “I have seen all the fighting I want to see for a long time. I am sorry, but if the damnyankees do not bother me, then I do not care to bother them, either. If they do bother me, the story will be different.”

  “Well, that’s a fair answer,” Quinn said after silence stretched for more than half a minute. “You’ve done your soldiering. If you don’t want to do it again, who can blame you? I wish you felt different, but if you don’t, you don’t.” He drained his glass and strode out of La Culebra Verde.

  “Did you make him unhappy?” the bartender asked.

  “I’m afraid I did. He doesn’t want the war to be over, but I’ve had enough. I’ve had too much.” He wondered how Gabe Medwick was getting along. He hoped the U.S. soldiers had picked up his wounded buddy back in the Virginia woods. Was Gabe back in Alabama by now, or did he still languish in a POW camp like Miguel?

  And what about Sergeant Blackledge? Jorge would have bet anything that he was raising trouble for the Yankees wherever he was. That man was born to bedevil anybody he didn’t like, and he didn’t like many people.

  The bartender drew another beer and set it in front of Jorge. “On the house,” he said. “I don’t want to go to the hills. I don’t want the United States shooting hostages here. I don’t want to be one of the hostages they shoot. Por Dios, Jorge, enough is enough.”

  “Some men will eat fire even if they have to start it themselves,” Jorge said, looking at the door through which Robert Quinn had gone.

  “He will find hotheads. People like that always do. Look at Jake Featherston.” The bartender never would have said such a thing while the Freedom Party ruled Baroyeca. It would have been worth his life if he had. He went on, “I don’t think anyone will speak to the soldados from los Estados Unidos if Señor Quinn stays here quietly. But if he goes looking for stalwarts…Then he’s dangerous.”

  Was the bartender saying he would turn in Robert Quinn if Quinn tried to raise a rebellion? If he was, what was Jorge supposed to do about him? Kill him to keep him from blabbing? But that was raising a rebellion, too, and Jorge had just told Quinn he didn’t want to do any such thing.

  He also didn’t want to sit by while something bad happened to his father’s old friend. Sometimes nothing you did would help. He had the feeling that that was true for much of the CSA’s last war against the USA.

  He also had the feeling it would be true if Confederates tried to mix it up with the USA in the war’s aftermath. Yes, they could cause trouble. Could they cause enough to make U.S. forces leave? He couldn’t make himself believe it.

  When he came back to the farm alone late that afternoon, his mother’s face fell, the way it always did when he came back alone. “No Miguel?” she asked sadly.

  “No Miguel. I’m sorry, mamacita.” Then Jorge told of meeting Robert Quinn as the Freedom Party man got off the train.

  His mother only sniffed. Next to her missing son, a man who wasn’t from the family didn’t cut much ice. The news excited Pedro, though. “Does he want to—?” He didn’t go on.

  “Yes, he does,” Jorge answered. “I told him I didn’t.” He spoke elliptically, as Pedro had, to keep from making their mother flabble.

  Pedro looked discontented. But Pedro hadn’t done a whole lot of fighting. He’d spent most of the war behind barbed wire. He didn’t have such a good idea of what the United States could do if they decided they wanted to. Jorge did. What he’d seen in Virginia as the war wound down would stay with him for the rest of his life. The overwhelming firepower and the will to use it scared him more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.

  “What are we going to do? Sit here quiet for the rest of our lives?” Pedro asked.

  “You can do what you want,” Jorge answered. “Me, I’m going to stay on the farm and see how things go. We have a crop this year, and that’s enough for now. If things change later, if the United States make life too hard to stand…Then I’ll worry about it. Not until.”

  “What kind of patriot are you?” his brother asked.

  “A live one,” Jorge answered. “That’s the kind I want to go on being, too. Los Estados Confederados are dead, Pedro. Dead. I don’t think they’ll come back to life no matter what we do.”

  “You think we’re beaten.”

  “Sí. That’s right. Don’t you?”

  Pedro didn’t answer. He stormed out of the farmhouse instead. Jorge started to go after him, then checked himself. His brother could figure out what was going on without him. Jorge hoped he could, anyhow.

  The Oregon cruised off the Florida coast. The weather was fine. It felt more like August than October to George Enos. Back home in Boston, the leaves would be turning and it would be getting cold at night. Everything stayed green here. He didn’t think autumn would ever come.

  All the same, he didn’t want to stay stuck on the battleship the rest of his life. He wanted to get home to Connie and the boys. Fighting in a war was one thing. Yeah, you needed to do that; he could see as much. Occupation duty? As far as he was concerned, they could conscript somebody else for it.

  He griped. Most of the sailors on the Oregon who weren’t career Navy guys were griping. Griping let off steam, and did no other good he could see. Nobody who matter
ed would pay attention. Nobody who mattered ever paid attention to ratings. That was how the Navy operated.

  “Hey, you sorry bastards are stuck,” Wally Fodor said. “We can’t just pretend the fucking Confederates’ll be good little boys and girls, the way we did the last time around. We know better now, right?”

  “All I know is, this ain’t what I signed up for,” George answered. “I got a family. My kids hardly remember who I am.”

  “As soon as you swore the oath and they shipped your sorry rear end to Providence, they had you. They had you but good,” the gun chief said. “You might as well lay back and enjoy it.”

  “I’ve been screwed long enough,” George said. “Too damn long, to tell you the truth. I want to go home. I’m not the only one, either—not even close. Congress’ll pay attention, whether the brass does or not.”

  “Don’t hold your breath—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” Fodor gave what was much too likely to be good advice.

  In the meantime, there was Miami, right off the starboard bow. If anybody got out of line, the Oregon’s big guns could smash the city to bits. That was what battleships were good for nowadays: blasting the crap out of people who couldn’t shoot back. In the Great War, they’d been queens of the sea. Now they were afterthoughts.

  “Think we’ll get liberty?” one of the shell-jerkers asked, a certain eagerness in his voice. Miami had a reputation almost like Habana’s. Didn’t hot weather produce hot women? That was how the stories went, anyhow.

  George didn’t know whether to believe the stories. He did know he’d been away from Connie long enough to hope to find out if they were true. He could hope it would be his last fling before he went back to his wife for good. That would help him feel not so bad about doing what he wanted to do anyway.

  But Wally Fodor repeated, “Don’t hold your breath. Besides, do you really want to get knocked over the head if you go ashore? They don’t love us down here. Chances are they’re never going to, either.”

  “Hey, I don’t care about love,” the shell-jerker said. “Long as I can get it in, that’s good enough.” Laughter said it was good enough for most of the gun crew.

  They didn’t get liberty. They did get fresh produce. Boats came alongside to sell the battleship fruit and meat and fish. Fresh orange juice and lemonade appeared in the galley. So did fresh peas and green beans, and salads with tender lettuce and buttery avocados and tomatoes and celery. The sailors ate fried shrimp and fried fish and spare ribs and fried chicken.

  George had to let his belt out a notch. The chow beat the hell out of any Navy rations he’d had before. Bumboats brought out fresh water, too, enough so the crew didn’t have to use seawater and saltwater soap when they showered. If that wasn’t a luxury, he’d never known one. Peace had its advantages, all right.

  He’d just stripped off his uniform to get clean when an enormous explosion knocked him ass over teakettle. “The fuck?” he said, which was one of the more coherent comments from the naked sailors.

  Klaxons hooted. He ran for his battle station without thinking about his clothes. Bodies lay on the deck. He’d worry about them later. Right now, he had a job to do, and he could do it with pants or without. He wasn’t the only naked man heading for duty—not even close.

  Petty Officer Fodor had a cut on his face and another one on his arm. He didn’t seem to notice either one. “They blew up a goddamn bumboat,” he said. “Right alongside us, they blew up a goddamn bumboat.”

  “They’re idiots if they did,” George said. The Oregon, like any modern battleship, had sixteen-inch armor belts on either side to protect against gunfire and torpedoes. They weren’t perfect, as the melancholy roll of torpedoed battlewagons attested. But they were a hell of a lot better than nothing. A blast that might have torn a destroyer in two dented the Oregon and killed and hurt people exposed to it without coming close to sinking her.

  “This is the captain speaking!” the PA blared. “Odd-numbered gun stations, aid in casualty collection and damage assessment. Even numbers, hold your posts.”

  As the skipper repeated the order, George and the other men from his twin-40mm mount dashed off to do what they could for the sailors who hadn’t been so lucky. There were a lot of them: anybody who’d been on deck when the bumboat exploded was down and moaning or down and thrashing or down and not moving at all, which was worst.

  Some of the paint was burning. Men already had hoses playing on the fires. The stink made George’s asshole pucker. When your ship got hit, that odor was one of the things you smelled. And he almost fell on his face skidding through a puddle of seawater from the fire-fighters.

  He knelt by a burned man who was clutching his left shoulder. “C’mon, buddy—I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

  “Thanks.” The wounded sailor groped for him. “Sorry. I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The docs’ll fix you up.” George had no idea whether they could or not. The other man’s face didn’t look good, which was putting it mildly. “Your legs all right? I’m gonna get you on your feet if I can.”

  “Give it a try,” the injured man said, which might have meant anything. He groaned and swayed when George hauled him upright, but he didn’t keel over again. George got the fellow’s good arm around his own shoulder. He also got blood on his own bare hide, but that was something to flabble about later.

  Helping the other sailor down three flights of steep, narrow steel stairs when the poor guy couldn’t see where to put his feet was an adventure all by itself. George managed. Other sailors and groups were carrying injured men and trying to get them down in stretchers without spilling them out.

  In the sick bay and in the corridors outside it, the battleship’s doctors and pharmacist’s mates were working like foul-mouthed machines. One of the mates took a quick look at the sailor George had brought down. “Put him there with them,” he said, pointing to a group of other men who were hurt but not in imminent danger of dying. “We’ll get to him as soon as we have a chance to.”

  “Good luck, pal,” George said as he eased the wounded sailor down. It was painfully inadequate, but it was all he could offer.

  “Thanks. Go help somebody else,” the other man said. Somebody—maybe a pharmacist’s mate, maybe a rating one of the doctors had dragooned—stuck a needle into him. Morphine sure wouldn’t hurt.

  George was helping to get another injured man down to first aid when someone said, “I wonder what we’ll do to Miami for this.”

  “Blow the fucking place off the fucking map,” the wounded sailor said. That sounded good to George. He’d heard of people bombs and auto bombs, but a boat bomb? The son of a bitch who thought of that one had more imagination than he knew what to do with. George hoped he’d been on the boat and pressed the button that blew it up. If he had, maybe the scheme would die with him.

  Or was that too much to hope for?

  “Hell of a note if we’ve got to inspect every boat that brings us supplies,” a CPO said. “Sure looks like we will, though.”

  When George got down to sick bay this time, he noticed a group of badly hurt men nobody was helping. They had to be the ones the doctors thought wouldn’t get better no matter what. No time to waste effort on them, then. That was cruel logic, but it made sense.

  The Oregon, he learned later, lost 31 dead and more than 150 wounded. In response, the U.S. Army seized 1,500 Miamians. Some of the attempted seizures turned into gun battles, too. The locals knew what the soldiers were coming for, and weren’t inclined to give themselves up without a fight. Because of the casualties the Army took rounding up the hostages, it rounded up more hostages still.

  Guns aimed toward the city, the Oregon sailed close inshore. The sharp, dry crack!s of rifle volleys came across the water, one after another after another. They got the message across: if you messed with the USA, you paid. And paid. And paid.

  Some of the sailors weren’t satisfied even so. “We ought to blast the shit out of that place,”
Wally Fodor said. “Those assholes fucked with us, not with the Army. We ought to give them a fourteen-inch lesson.”

  “Sure works for me,” George said. All right, so battleships were shore-bombardment vessels these days. There was a shore that needed bombarding, and it was lying there naked and undefended in front of them.

  But the order didn’t come. The men pissed and moaned. That was all they could do. They couldn’t open up on Miami without orders. Oh, maybe they could—the men on the smaller guns, anyhow—but they were looking at courts-martial and long terms if they did. Nobody had the gall to try it.

  Discipline tightened up amazingly. They’d taken it easy after the Confederate surrender. They didn’t any more. You never could tell what might happen now. George would have bet skippers and execs all around the fleet were preaching sermons about the battleship. That was just what he wanted, all right: to serve aboard the USS Object Lesson.

  “Isn’t it great?” he said to Fodor. “All those guys are going, ‘See? You better not be a bunch of jerkoffs like the clowns on the Oregon. Otherwise, the Confederates’ll blow your nuts off, too.’”

  “Yeah, that’s about the size of it, all right,” the gun chief agreed. “They can fix up the scar on the side of the ship and slap fresh paint all over the place, but the scar on our reputation ain’t gonna go away so fast. Goddamn Confederate cockknockers took care of that in spades.”

  “Fuck it,” George said. “I just want to get back to Boston in one piece. Goddamn war was supposed to be over months ago.”

  “You think we were down here for no reason?” Fodor patted the gun mount. “I wish they would’ve lined up the hostages right there on the beach. Then we coulda opened up on ’em with the 40mms. Boy, we would’ve gone through ’em in a hurry.”

  “Yeah.” George hadn’t thought of the antiaircraft guns as weapons that could substitute for a firing squad. But Wally Fodor wasn’t wrong. “You turn these babies on people, you know what you’ve got? You’ve got Grim Reapers, that’s what.”