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

by Harry Turtledove

  Morrell looked east. Then he looked west. Then he muttered something uncomplimentary about Jake Featherston’s personal habits, something about which he was in no position to have firsthand knowledge. Sergeant Pound was altogether too likely to be right. The thrust up to Lake Erie was starting to hurt the USA. Morrell wondered what the exact problem was. Could they ship enough fuel or enough barrels on the rail lines north of the Great Lakes, but not both at once? Something like that, he supposed. Logistics had never been his favorite subject. No good officer could afford to ignore it, but he preferred fighting to brooding about rolling stock.

  Of course, if not for rolling stock he’d still have had his barrels with him. They would have broken down one after another if they’d had to get to eastern West Virginia under their own power. Breakdowns kept almost as many of them out of action as enemy fire did. Morrell wished it were otherwise, but it wasn’t. The weight of armor they carried stressed engines and suspensions to the point of no return, or sometimes past it.

  Half a dozen barrels still in Caldwell had their engine decking off. Soldiers were attacking them with wrenches and pliers. Some, maybe even most, of them hadn’t broken down. A barrel whose crew kept it in good running trim didn’t fail as often as one whose crew neglected it.

  Far off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Morrell cursed under his breath. He should have been up there punching, not stalled in this jerkwater town. And how could he ever hope to land any punches if they kept siphoning away his strength? He couldn’t, but they’d blame him because he didn’t.

  The Constitution said U.S. soldiers weren’t supposed to quarter themselves on civilians. Like most rules, that one sometimes got ignored when bullets started flying. Morrell didn’t ignore it, though. He was perfectly happy in a tent or a sleeping bag or just rolled in a blanket—he liked the outdoors. That was a concept General Staff officers back in Philadelphia had trouble grasping.

  He was glad he had a tent when it started to pour about eight that night. Rain bucketed down out of the sky. It wasn’t a warm summer rain, either: not the kind you could go out in and enjoy. The nasty weather said the seasons were changing. It would turn everything but paved roads into soup, too. Morrell muttered to himself. Enough mud could bog down barrels. That would slow things here.

  He did some more muttering a moment later. If it also rained like this in Virginia, it wouldn’t do the building U.S. offensive any good. That wasn’t his campaign, but he worried about it. He worried about it all the more because it wasn’t his campaign. But all he could do was worry. The weather did as it pleased, not as he pleased.

  He’d just stretched out on his cot when Confederate bombers came over Caldwell. The drumming rain drowned out the drone of their motors. The first he knew that they were around was a series of rending crashes off in the woods east of the little town. Frightened shouts came from nearby houses. Morrell almost laughed. Civilians got a lot more excited about bombing than soldiers did.

  With those clouds overhead, the Confederates were bombing blind. Morrell didn’t worry that they would actually hit Caldwell . . . until the bomb impacts started walking west from those first blasts. The lead bombers had missed their targets by a lot. But the ones behind them, trying to bomb from the same point as they had, released their bombs too soon, an error that grew as it went through the formation.

  That sort of thing happened all the time. Here, though, it was bringing the bombs back toward where they should have fallen in the first place. Morrell had taken off his boots to get comfortable. He put them on again in a tearing hurry, not bothering to tie them. Then he bolted from his tent and ran for the closest shelter trench.

  He splashed and squelched getting down into it. It filled rapidly with cursing crewmen from his remaining barrels. However much they cursed, they kept their heads down. A chunk of bomb could do as neat a job as a headsman’s axe—but a messy one would leave you just as dead.

  “Here they come,” somebody said as bombs started falling inside Caldwell. The ground shook. Fragments hissed and screeched not nearly far enough overhead. As Morrell bent to tie those boots, he hoped the civilians had had the brains to go down into their basements.

  One crash was especially loud, and followed by a flash of light. “Fuckin’ lucky bastards,” a soldier said. “If they didn’t just blow a barrel to hell and gone, I’m a monkey’s uncle.” Ammunition cooking off inside the stricken machine proved him right.

  Another, different-sounding, crash probably meant a bomb had come down on a house. Going to the basement wasn’t likely to save the poor bastards who’d lived there. Morrell sighed a wet sigh. Nothing to be done about it—and it wasn’t as if U.S. bombers weren’t visiting the same kind of hell on Confederate civilians.

  “Pay those stinking sons of bitches back for getting me all wet and muddy,” a barrel man said. Civilian casualties worried him even less than Morrell. His own discomfort was another story.

  The bombs stopped falling. Morrell stood up straight and looked out of the trench. The barrel that had taken a direct hit was still burning in spite of the rain. By that yellow, flickering light, Morrell saw that two or three houses had fallen in on themselves. They were trying to burn, too, but weren’t having an easy time of it in the downpour.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do for the locals.”

  A civilian lay in the middle of one of the streets, suddenly and gruesomely dead. What had he been doing out there? Watching the bombs come down? Did he think it was sport? No one would ever know now.

  Other people came staggering out of houses. Some of them were wounded. Some were simply in shock, and crying out their terror to whoever would listen, or maybe to the world at large. “My baby! My baby!” a woman shrieked. She was holding the baby, which was also shrieking.

  A corpsman took the baby from her. After looking it over—carefully, because fragments could produce tiny but deadly wounds—he spoke in tones of purest New York City: “Lady, ain’t nuttin’ wrong wid dis kid but a wet diaper.”

  “But the poor thing is frightened half to death!” the woman said.

  What the corpsman said after that was memorable, but had very little to do with medicine. The woman squawked indignantly. Irving Morrell filed away some of the choicer—the corpsman would have said chercer—phrases. When he found a moment, he’d aim them at Philadelphia.

  When Scipio looked in his pay envelope, he thought the bookkeeper at the Huntsman’s Lodge had made a mistake. That had happened before, two or three times. As far as he could tell, the bookkeeper always erred in the restaurant’s favor. He took the envelope to Jerry Dover. “I hates to bother you, suh, but I’s ten dollars light.”

  Dover shook his head. “Sorry, Xerxes, but you’re not.”

  “What you mean?” For a second, Scipio thought the restaurant manager thought he’d pocketed the missing banknote before complaining. Then he realized something else was going on. “You mean it’s one o’ them—?”

  “Contributions. That’s right. Thought you might have seen the story in the Constitutionalist yesterday, or maybe heard about it on the wireless. It’s on account of the bombing in the Terry.”

  “Lawd!” Scipio burst out. “One o’ dem bombs almost kill me, an’ now I gots to pay fo’ it? Don’t hardly seem fair.” It seemed a lot worse than unfair, but saying even that much to a white man carried a certain risk.

  Jerry Dover didn’t get angry. He just shrugged. “If I don’t short you and the rest of the colored help, my ass is in a sling,” he said. If it came to a choice between saving his ass and the black men’s, he’d choose his own. That wasn’t a headline that would make the Augusta Constitutionalist.

  Scipio sighed. Only too plainly, he wasn’t going to get his ten dollars. He said, “Wish I seen de newspaper. Wish I heard de wireless. Wouldn’t be such a surprise in dat case.”

  “How come you missed ’em?” Dover asked. “You’re usually pretty well up on stuff.” He didn’t even add, for a nigger. Scipio h
ad worked for him a long time now. He knew the colored man had a working brain.

  “One o’ them things,” Scipio said with a shrug of his own. He’d missed buying a paper the day before. He hadn’t listened to the wireless very much. He did wonder how he’d managed not to hear the newsboys shouting the headline and the waiters and cooks and dishwashers grousing about it. “Been livin’ in my own little world, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, well, shit like that happens.” Dover was willing to sound sympathetic as long as he didn’t have to do anything about it.

  Before Scipio could answer, a dishwasher came up to their boss. “Hey, Mr. Dover!” he said. “I got ten clams missin’ outa my envelope here!”

  “No, you don’t, Ozymandias,” the manager said, and went through the explanation again. Scipio knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn’t been the only one not to get the word.

  Ozymandias, a young man, didn’t take it as well as Scipio had. He cussed and fumed till Scipio wondered whether Jerry Dover would fire him on the spot. Dover didn’t. He just let the Negro run down and sent him out the door. Quite a few white men boasted about being good with niggers. Most of them were full of crap. Jerry Dover really was good with the help at the Huntsman’s Lodge, though he didn’t go around bragging about it.

  Of course, Dover was good with people generally, whites as well as Negroes. We are people, dammit, Scipio thought. The Freedom Party had a different opinion.

  Dover said, “You be careful on the way home, you hear? Don’t want your missus and your young ones grieving on account of some bastard who’s out prowling after curfew.”

  “I’s always careful,” Scipio said, and meant it. “But I thanks you fo’ de thought.”

  He went out into the black, black night. Augusta had never been bombed, but remained blacked out. Scipio supposed that made sense. Better safe than sorry was a pretty good rule.

  The weather was cooler and less muggy than it had been. As fall came on, the dreadful sticky heat of summer became only a memory. It wasn’t cold enough to put all the mosquitoes to sleep for the winter, though. Scipio suspected he’d get home to his apartment with a new bite or two. He couldn’t hear the mosquitoes buzzing any more unless they flew right past his ears. Those nasty whines had driven him crazy when he was younger. He didn’t miss hearing them now—except that they would have warned him the flying pests were around.

  An auto slid past, going hardly faster than Scipio was. Masking tape reduced its headlights to slits. They cast a pallid glow that reached about as far as a man could spit. At least the driver here didn’t have the delusion he could do more than he really could. Accidents were up even though fewer motorcars were on the road. That meant one thing and one thing only: people were driving like a bunch of damn fools.

  As usual, Scipio had no trouble telling when he got to the Terry, even though he could hardly see a hand in front of his face. As soon as the sidewalk started crumbling under his feet, he knew he’d come to the colored part of town.

  He skirted the shortest way home, which took him past what had been the bus stop for war workers. It remained a sea of rubble. Repairs got done slowly in the Terry—when they got done at all. Some of the buildings white mobs had burned in the pogroms after the Freedom Party took over remained ruins after seven years.

  He’d almost died then. Two different auto bombs had almost killed him. He’d lived through the bloody rise and even bloodier fall of the Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d outlived Anne Colleton, and he never would have bet anything on that. After what I’ve been through, maybe I’ll go on forever, he thought.

  A bat flittered past, not a foot in front of him. It was out of sight almost before he realized it had been there. He wondered if the war had brought hardship to bats. Without street lights to lure insects, wouldn’t they have to work harder to get enough to eat? Strange to imagine that one man’s decision in Richmond might affect little furry animals hundreds of miles away.

  “Hold it right there!” The harsh, rasping voice came out of an alley not ten feet away. “Don’t even breathe funny, or it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

  Scipio froze. Even as he did it, he wondered if it was the worst thing he could do, not the best. If he ran, he might lose himself in the darkness. Of course, if he ran, he might also give the owner of that voice the excuse to blast him to hamburger with a charge of buckshot. He’d made his choice. Now he had to see what came of it.

  “All right, nigger. Suppose you tell me what the fuck you’re doin’ out after curfew.”

  He’d thought that was a white policeman there, not a black robber. He would have been more likely to run from a man of his own color. “Suh, I works at de Huntsman’s Lodge,” he answered. “Dey don’t let me off till midnight. I goes home at all, I gots to go after curfew.”

  “Likely tell,” the white man said. “Who’s your boss, damn you? Make it snappy!”

  “Jerry Dover, suh,” Scipio said quickly. “Mebbe he still dere. I ain’t left but fifteen minutes ago. He tell you who I is.”

  Footsteps crunching on gravel, thumping on cement. A dark, shadowy shape looming up in front of Scipio. The silhouette of the juice-squeezer hat the other man wore said he really was a policeman. He leaned forward to peer closely at Scipio. “Holy Jesus, you’re in a goddamn penguin suit!”

  “I gots to wear it,” Scipio said wearily. “It’s my uniform, like.”

  “Get the fuck outa here,” the cop said. “Nobody’s gonna be dumb enough to go plantin’ bombs or nothin’ in a lousy penguin suit.”

  “I thanks you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. If the policeman had been in a nasty mood, he could have run him in for being out after curfew. Scipio thought Jerry Dover or the higher-ups at the restaurant would have made sure he didn’t spend much time in jail, but any time in jail was too much.

  “A penguin suit,” the cop said one more time—another dime Scipio didn’t have. “Shit, the boys at the station’ll bust a gut when I tell ’em about this one.”

  With a resigned chuckle and a dip of his head to show he was a properly respectful—a properly servile—Negro, Scipio made his way deeper into the Terry. He peered carefully up and down every street and alley he came to before crossing it. How much good that would do, with so many inky shadows for robbers to hide in, he didn’t know. But it was all he could do.

  When he came to a couple of the places where he was most likely to find trouble—or it was most likely to find him—he wished he had that foul-mouthed policeman at his side. He shook his head, ashamed and embarrassed at wanting a white man’s protection against his own people. Ashamed and embarrassed or not, though, he did. The Terry was a more dangerous place these days than it had been a few years before. Sharecroppers and farm workers forced from fields when tractors and harvesters took their jobs away had poured into Confederate cities, looking for whatever they could find. When they could find nothing else—which was all too often— they preyed on their fellow Negroes. And Reds sheltered here, too. They weren’t above robbery (from the highest motives, of course) to keep their cause alive.

  He got through the worst parts safely. His last bad moment was opening the fortified door to his building. If somebody came up while he was doing that . . . But nobody did. He quickly shut the door behind him, locked the lock, and used the dead bolt. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. Made it through another night, he thought.

  As the fear dropped away, he realized how tired he was. The climb up the stairs to his flat felt as if he were going up a mountain. He’d had that happen before, too. He didn’t know what he could do about it. If he didn’t work at the Huntsman’s Lodge, he’d be waiting tables somewhere else. And if he couldn’t do it anywhere, what would he be doing then? Prowling the alleys, looking for someone unwary to knock over the head?

  Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. He might make the Constitutionalist if he tried it. What would the headline be? Augusta’s oldest strongarm man? Augusta’s dumbest strongarm man? Oldest and dumbest? That
would probably do the job.

  He trudged down the hall and opened his front door. A light was burning inside. Blackout curtains made sure it didn’t leak out. Here as in other colored districts throughout the CSA, blackout wardens and cops were likelier to shoot through lighted windows than to bother with a warning and a fine.

  As usual, he got out of his tuxedo with nothing but relief. Putting on his nightshirt felt good, where even that much in the way of clothes had been a sore trial in the hot weather not long before. Bathsheba murmured sleepily when he lay down beside her. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Not too bad,” he answered automatically. But then he remembered that wasn’t quite true. “Got my pay docked ten dollars, though.” He couldn’t hide that from his wife—better to let her know right away, then.

  The news got her attention, no matter how sleepy she was. “Ten dollars!” she said. “What you do?”

  “Didn’t do nothin’. Everybody git docked,” Scipio said. “De gummint fine de niggers here fo’ de auto bombs.”

  “Ain’t fair. Ain’t right,” Bathsheba said. “Gummint don’t fine no ofays when they do somethin’ bad.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ you wrong,” Scipio replied. “But what kin we do ’bout it?” The answer to that for Negroes in the CSA had always been not much.

  Jonathan Moss led his squadron of Wright fighters out over Lake Erie. They were looking for trouble. They would probably find it, too. Just in case they couldn’t on their own, they had help. The wireless set sounded in Moss’ earphones: “Red-27 leader, this is Mud Hen Base. Do you copy?”

  “Go ahead, Mud Hen Base,” Moss said. “I read you five by five.” Mud Hen Base was the Y-ranging station back in Toledo. For reasons known only to God, the Toledo football team was called the Mud Hens. They didn’t play in one of the top leagues, so maybe Confederate wireless men monitoring the conversation—and there were bound to be some—wouldn’t figure out where the fellow on the other end of the circuit was for a while.