Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  Sam wished he hadn’t thought about all that. It made him realize how alone out here in the Pacific the Remembrance was. If something went wrong, the USA would have to send a carrier around the Horn—which wouldn’t be so easy now that the British and Confederates had retaken Bermuda and the Bahamas. The only other thing the United States could do was start building carriers in Seattle or San Francisco or San Pedro or San Diego. That wouldn’t be easy or quick, either, not with the country cut in two.

  Most of the crew enjoyed the weather. It was mild and balmy. The sun shone out of a blue sky down on an even bluer sea. Carsten could have done without the sunshine, but he had special problems. Zinc oxide helped cut the burn a little. Unfortunately, a little was exactly how much the ointment helped.

  He glanced up to the carrier’s island every so often. The antenna on the Y-range gear spun round and round, searching for Japanese airplanes. Midway also had a Y-range station. Between the two of them, they should have made a surprise attack impossible. But Captain Stein was a suspenders-and-belt man. He kept a combat air patrol overhead all through the day, too. Sam approved. You didn’t want to get caught with your pants down, not here.

  Fighters weren’t the only things flying above the Remembrance and the cruisers and destroyers that accompanied her. As she got farther out into the chain of Sandwich Islands, albatrosses and their smaller seagoing cousins grew more and more common. Watching them always fascinated Sam. They soared along with effortless ease, hardly ever flapping. The smaller birds sometimes dove into the ocean after fish. Not the albatrosses. They swooped low to snatch their suppers from the surface of the sea, then climbed up into the sky again.

  They were as graceful in the air as they were ungainly on the ground. Considering that every landing was a crash and every takeoff a desperate sprint into the wind, that said a great deal.

  The other impressive thing about them was their wingspan, which seemed not that much smaller than an airplane’s. Sam had grown up watching hawks and turkey buzzards soar over the upper Midwest. He was used to big birds on the wing. The goony birds dwarfed anything he’d seen then, though.

  “I hear the deck officer waved one of them off the other day,” he said in the officers’ wardroom. “Fool bird wasn’t coming in straight enough to suit him.”

  “He didn’t want it to catch fire when it smashed into the deck,” Hiram Pottinger said. “You know goonies can’t land clean.”

  “Well, sure,” Sam said. “But it shit on his hat when it swung around for another pass.”

  He got his laugh. Commander Cressy said, “Plenty of our flyboys have wanted to do the same thing, I’ll bet. If that albatross ever comes back, they’ll pin a medal on it.”

  Sam got up and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He was junior officer there, so he held up the pot, silently asking the other men if they wanted any. Pottinger pointed to his cup. Sam filled it up. The head of damage control added cream and sugar. Before long, the cream would go bad and it would be condensed milk out of a can instead. Everybody enjoyed the real stuff as long as it stayed fresh.

  Pottinger asked Commander Cressy, “You think the Japs are out there, sir?”

  “Oh, I know they’re out there. We all know that,” the exec answered. “Whether they’re within operational range of Midway—and of us—well, that’s what we’re here to find out. I’m as sure that they want to boot us off the Sandwich Islands as I am of my own name.”

  “Makes sense,” Sam said. “If they kick us back to the West Coast, they don’t need to worry about us again for a long time.”

  Dan Cressy nodded. “That’s about right. They’d have themselves a perfect Pacific empire—the Philippines and what were the Dutch East Indies for resources, and the Sandwich Islands for a forward base. Nobody could bother them after that.”

  “The British—” Lieutenant Commander Pottinger began.

  Sam shook his head at the same time as Commander Cressy did. Cressy noticed; Sam wondered if the exec would make him do the explaining. To his relief, Cressy didn’t. Telling a superior why he was wrong was always awkward. Cressy outranked Pottinger, so he could do it without hemming and hawing. And he did: “If the British give Japan a hard time, they’ll get bounced out of Malaya before you can say Jack Robinson. They’re too busy closer to home to defend it properly. The Japs might take away Hong Kong or invade Australia, too. I don’t think they want to do that. We’re still on their plate, and they’ve got designs on China. But they could switch gears. Anybody with a General Staff worth its uniforms has more strategic plans than he knows what to do with. All he has to do is grab one and dust it off.”

  Pottinger was Navy to his toes. He took the correction without blinking. “I wonder how the limeys like playing second fiddle out in the Far East,” he remarked.

  “It’s Churchill’s worry, not mine,” Cressy said. “But they’re being good little allies to the Japs out here. They don’t want to give Japan any excuses to start nibbling on their colonies. They make a mint from Hong Kong, and it wouldn’t last twenty minutes if Japan decided she didn’t want them running it any more.”

  “Makes sense,” Hiram Pottinger said. “I hadn’t thought it through.”

  “Only one thing.” Sam spoke hesitantly. Commander Cressy waved for him to go on. If the exec hadn’t, he wouldn’t have. As it was, he said, “The Japs may not need any excuse if they decide they want Hong Kong or Malaya. They’re liable just to reach out and grab with both hands.”

  He waited to see if he’d made Cressy angry. Before the exec could say anything, general quarters sounded. Cressy jumped to his feet. “We’ll have to finish hashing this out another time, gentlemen,” he said.

  Neither Sam Carsten nor Hiram Pottinger answered him. They were both on their way out of the wardroom, on their way down to their battle stations below the Remembrance’s waterline. Panting, Sam asked, “Is this the real thing, or just another drill?”

  “We’ll find out,” Pottinger answered. “Mind your head.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Sam said. A tall man had to do that, or he could knock himself cold hurrying from one compartment to another. He could also trip over his own feet; the hatchway doors had raised sills.

  Some of the sailors in the damage-control party beat them to their station. They’d been nearby, not in the wardroom in officers’ country. “Is this the McCoy?” Szczerbiakowicz asked. “Or is it just another goddamn drill?”

  He shouldn’t have talked about drill that way. It went against regulations. Sam didn’t say anything to him about it, though. Neither did Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. All he did say was, “We’ll both find out at the same time, Eyechart.”

  “I don’t hear a bunch of airplanes taking off over our heads,” Sam said hopefully. “Doesn’t feel like we’re taking evasive action, either. So I hope it’s only a drill.”

  The klaxons cut off. The all-clear didn’t sound right away, though. That left things up in the air for about fifteen minutes. Then the all-clear did blare out. Commander Cressy came on the intercom: “Well, that was a little more interesting than we really wanted. We had to persuade a flight patrolling out from Midway that we weren’t Japs, and we had to do it without breaking wireless silence. Not easy, but we managed.”

  “That could have been fun,” Sam said.

  Some of the other opinions expressed there in the corridor under the bare lightbulbs in their wire cages were a good deal more sulfurous than that. “What’s the matter with the damn flyboys?” somebody said. “We don’t look like a Jap ship.”

  That was true, and then again it wasn’t. The Remembrance had a tall island, while most Japanese carriers sported small ones or none at all. But the Japs had also converted battleship and battle-cruiser hulls into carriers. Her lines might have touched off alarm bells in the fliers’ heads.

  “Nice to know what was going on,” a junior petty officer said. “The exec may be an iron-assed son of a bitch, but at least he fills you in.”

  All the sailors
nodded. Sam and Hiram Pottinger exchanged amused glances. They didn’t contradict the petty officer. Commander Cressy was supposed to look like an iron-assed son of a bitch to everybody who didn’t know him. A big part of his job was saying no for the skipper. The skipper was the good guy. When, as occasionally happened, the answer to something was yes, he usually said it himself. That was how things worked on every ship in the Navy. The Remembrance was no exception. Some executive officers reveled in saying no. Cressy wasn’t like that. He was tough, but he was fair.

  Chattering, the sailors went back to their regular duties. Sam went up onto the flight deck, braving the sun for a chance to look around. Nothing special was going on. He liked that better than rushing up to jury-rig repairs after a bomb hit while enemy fighters shot up his ship. All he saw were vast sky and vaster sea, the Remembrance’s supporting flotilla off in the near and middle distance. A couple of fighters buzzed overhead, one close enough to let him see the USA’s eagle’s head in front of crossed swords.

  And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

  But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?

  Flora Blackford’s countrymen had often frustrated her. They elected too many Democrats when she was convinced sending more Socialists to Powel House and to Congress and to statehouses around the United States would have served the country better. But she’d never imagined they could ignore large-scale murder, especially large-scale murder by the enemy in time of war.

  Whether she’d imagined it or not, it was turning out to be true. She’d done just what she told Al Smith she would do: she’d trumpeted the Confederacy’s massacres of Negroes as loudly and as widely as she could. She’d shown the photographs Caesar had risked his life to bring into the USA.

  And she’d accomplished . . . not bloody much. She’d got a little ink in the papers, a little more in the weekly newsmagazines. And the public? The public had yawned. The most common response had been, Who cares what the Confederates are doing at home? We’ve got enough problems on account of what they’re doing to us right here.

  She shook her head. No, actually that wasn’t the most common response. She would have known how to counter it. And even a response like that would have meant people in the USA were talking about and thinking about what was going on in the CSA. Against silence, against indifference, what could she do?

  Confederate wireless hadn’t called her a liar. The Freedom Party’s mouthpieces hadn’t bothered. Instead, they’d started yelling and screaming and jumping up and down about what they called the USA’s “massacre of innocents” in Utah. They didn’t bother mentioning that the Mormons had risen in rebellion.

  Flora’s mouth twisted as she sat in her office. She supposed the Confederates might claim Negroes had risen in rebellion against Richmond. As far as she was concerned, that served Richmond right. The Confederate States oppressed and repressed their blacks. The United States had given the Mormons full equality—and they’d risen anyhow.

  Besides, the Mormons who died died in combat. The Confederates seemed to have set up special camps to dispose of their Negroes. Gather them in one place, get rid of them, and then bring in a fresh batch and do it again. It all struck her as being as efficient as a factory. If Henry Ford had decided to produce murders instead of motorcars, that was how he would have gone about it.

  Bertha knocked on the office door, which took her out of her unhappy reverie. “Yes?” she said, a little relieved—or maybe more than a little—to return to the here and now.

  Her secretary looked in. “The Assistant Secretary of War is here, Congresswoman.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” Flora shook her head again. It was eleven o’ clock. She’d had this appointment for days. This whole business with those photos really was making her forget everything else. “Please tell him to come in.”

  “All right.” Bertha turned away. “Go on in, Mr. Roosevelt, sir.” She held the door open so he could.

  “Thank you very much,” Franklin Roosevelt said as he propelled his wheelchair past her and into Flora’s office. He was only distantly related to Theodore Roosevelt, and a solid Socialist rather than a Democrat like his more famous cousin. He did seem to have some of his namesake’s capacity for getting people to pay attention to him when he said things.

  “Good to see you, Mr. Roosevelt.” Flora stood up, came around the desk, and held out her hand.

  When Franklin Roosevelt took it, his engulfed hers. He had big hands, wide shoulders, and a barrel chest that went well with the impetuous, jut-jawed patrician good looks of his face. But his legs were shriveled and useless in his trousers. More than twenty years earlier, he’d come down with poliomyelitis. He hadn’t let it stop him, but it had slowed him down. Some people said he might have been President if not for that mishap.

  “Can I have Bertha bring you some coffee?” Flora asked.

  “That would be very pleasant, thanks,” Roosevelt replied in a resonant baritone.

  “I’d like a cup, too, Bertha, if you don’t mind,” Flora said. She and Roosevelt made small talk over the steaming cups for a little while. Then she decided she might as well get to the point, and asked, “What can I do for you today?”

  “Well, I thought I would come by to thank you for your excellent work on publicizing the outrages the Confederate States are committing against their Negroes,” Roosevelt answered.

  “You did?” Flora could hardly believe her ears. “To tell you the truth, I’d begun to wonder if anyone noticed.”

  “Well, I did,” Roosevelt said. “And you can rest assured that the Negroes who are fighting for justice in the CSA have noticed, too. The War Department has made a point of being careful to let them know the government of the United States sympathizes with them in their ordeal.”

  “I . . . see,” Flora said slowly. “I didn’t say what I said for propaganda purposes.”

  “I know that.” Roosevelt beamed at her from behind small, metal-framed spectacles. “It only makes things better. It shows we understand what they’re suffering and want to do something about it.”

  “Does it?” Flora had held in her bitterness since discovering she couldn’t even raise a tempest in a teapot. Now it came flooding out: “Is that what it shows, Mr. Roosevelt? Forgive me, but I have my doubts. Doesn’t it really show that a few of us may be upset, but most of us couldn’t care less? What the Confederate States are doing is a judgment on them. And how little it matters here is a judgment on us.”

  Franklin Roosevelt pursed his lips. “You may be right. That may be what it really shows,” he said at last. “But what the Negroes in the CSA think it shows also counts. If they think the United States are on their side, they’ll struggle harder against the CSA and the Freedom Party. That could be important to the war. When you play these games, what people believe is often as important as what’s really so. I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing in your brand of politics.”

  Flora studied him. That was either the most brilliant analysis she’d ever heard—or the most breathtakingly cynical one. For the life of her, she couldn’t decide which. Maybe it was both at once. Was that better or worse? She couldn’t make up her mind there, either.

  Roosevelt smiled. When he did, she wanted to believe him. When Jake Featherston talked, people wanted to believe him. Roosevelt had some of the same gift. How much had poliomyelitis taken away from the country?

  Or, considering to whom she’d just compared him, how much had it spared the country? Either way, no one would ever know.

  “You see?” he said.

  With his eyes twinkling at her, she wanted to see things his way. “Maybe,” she said, though she hadn’t expected to admit even that much. “It hardly seems fair, though, to use them for our purposes when they’re so downtrodden. They’ll grab at anything they see floating
by.” She realized she’d just mixed a metaphor. Too late to worry about it now.

  “This is a war,” Roosevelt said. “You use the weapons that come to hand. The Confederates have used the Mormons. The British and the Japanese have both worked hard to rouse the Canadians against us. Should we waste a chance to make the Confederates have to fight to keep order in their own country? Isn’t that a choice that would live in infamy?” He thrust out his chin.

  He had a point, or part of one. Flora said, “In that case, we shouldn’t let the Negroes in the CSA live on hope and promises. If they’re going to fight Confederate soldiers and Freedom Party goons, they ought to have the guns to make it a real fight. Otherwise, we just set them up to be massacred.”

  “We are sending them guns, as we can,” Roosevelt replied. “They do live in another country, you know. Smuggling in weapons isn’t always easy. We did some in the Great War. We can do more now, because we can drop more from bombers. It’s less than I would like, but it’s better than nothing. If we give them the tools, they can finish the job.”

  Finish the job? It was a fine phrase, but Flora didn’t believe it. Blacks in the Confederate States would always be outnumbered and outgunned. They could rebel. They could cause endless trouble to the whites in the CSA. They couldn’t hope to beat them.

  Could they hope to live alongside them? That would take changes from both whites and blacks. Flora wished she thought such changes were likely. When she asked Franklin Roosevelt whether he did, he shook his head. “I wish I could tell you yes,” he said. “But if people are going to change, there has to be a willingness on both sides to do it. I don’t see that there. What Negroes want is very far removed from what whites will give.”