"Well, nobody ever said the Army would go out of style any time soon," Pound said.
"A good thing, too," Scullard replied. "If we're in deep shit now, we'd be in a lot deeper without this baby." He rapped his knuckles on the breech of the barrel's main armament, adding, "I just wish we had more like it."
"They're coming," Pound said. "Maybe not as fast as if we'd started sooner, but they are. We can make more stuff than the Confederates can. Sooner or later, we'll knock 'em flat, and it's getting on toward sooner."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before a Confederate antibarrel rocket slammed into a U.S. machine a quarter of a mile away. The green-gray barrel brewed up, sending an enormous and monstrously perfect smoke ring up and out through the open cupola. Fire and greasy black smoke followed an instant later as the barrel slewed to a stop. Pound didn't think anybody got out.
He swore under his breath. The United States were making more stuff than the Confederate States could, yes. Sometimes, though-too damn often, in fact-the Confederates made better stuff. The automatic rifles their infantry carried, these antibarrel rockets, the screaming meemies that could flatten acres at a volley, the long-range jobs that reached into the USA…The enemy had talented engineers. Their cause stank like a dead fish, but they were good at what they did.
Scullard must have seen the U.S. barrel go up, too. "I hope we knock 'em flat sooner," he said. "That way, the mothers don't have the chance to come up with anything really nasty."
"Yeah," Michael Pound said. That marched with his own thoughts much too well.
Fields and forest surrounded Columbiana. Two routes led up to the town from the south: a county road whose thin blacktop coat the barrels' tracks quickly wrecked, and a railroad line maybe a hundred yards to the west. They were both nice and straight, and Pound couldn't have said which he distrusted more. They both let the Confederates see what was coming long before it got there.
And what they could see, they were too likely to be able to hit. That blazing barrel said as much. Of course, banging your way through the woods was asking to get nailed by some kid in butternut crouching behind a pine tree. You'd never spot him till he fired off his stovepipe, and that was too damn late.
Pound stood up in the cupola. He wanted to find out just how much U.S. armor was close enough to follow his platoon's lead. He hoped the other barrels would follow, anyway. If they didn't, he was liable to end up slightly dead.
Or more than slightly.
Sometimes, though, a barrel's engine was as important a weapon as its cannon. This felt like one of those times. Accidentally on purpose, he sent his orders over the all-company circuit instead of the one that linked him to his platoon alone: "Men, we are going to charge up this miserable little road as fast as we can go. We are going to blast anything that gets in our way, and we'll be inside Columbiana before Featherston's fuckers figure out what hit 'em." I hope. "Follow me. If this goes wrong, they'll get my barrel first." He switched to the intercom so he could talk to his driver: "You hear that, Beans?"
"Yes, sir." The driver's name was Neyer, but he rarely had to answer to it. His fondness for one particular ration can had given him a handle he'd keep till he took off his uniform…or till he got blown to smithereens, which might happen in the next couple of minutes.
Don't think about it, Pound told himself. If you think about it, you'll get cold feet. "Then gun it," he said. He was sure his own platoon would come with him. The rest…Don't think about that, either.
The engine roared. The barrel zipped forward. Flat out, it could do better than thirty. On rough ground, going like that would have torn out the kidneys of the men inside. On the road, it was tolerable…barely.
"Shoot first if you see anything," Pound advised, shouting over the noise.
"Going this fast, the stabilizer ain't worth shit," the gunner answered.
"Shoot first anyway. Even if you miss, you make the other guy duck. Then you can make your second shot count."
Scullard grunted. Pound knew damn well he was right, but he could see that it wasn't the sort of thing where you'd want to bet your life if you didn't have to.
As they neared Columbiana, they found there were Confederate soldiers on the road. The men in butternut hadn't figured the Yankees would be dumb enough or crazy enough to thunder down on them like that. The bow machine gun and the coaxial machine gun in the turret both started jackhammering. The C.S. troops scattered.
"Give 'em a couple of rounds of HE, too," Pound said. "Something to remember us by, you know?"
"Yes, sir!" Scullard said enthusiastically, and then, to the loader, "HE!"
The main armament thundered twice. A 3Ѕ-inch shell carried enough cordite to make a pretty good boom when it burst. One round went off in the middle of a knot of fleeing Confederates. Men and pieces of men described arcs through the air.
"Nice shot!" Pound yelled. Only later did he remember he was cheering death and mayhem. They were what he did for a living, his stock in trade. Most of the time, he took them for granted. He wondered why he couldn't quite do it now.
Then he did, because the barrel roared into Columbiana. He had no time to think about killing-he was too busy doing it. The barrel crew might have been an extension of his arm, an extension of his will.
"Where the hell is Lester Street?" he muttered. That was where the C. B. Churchill Company was, and had been since 1862. A glance through the periscopes built into the cupola told him what he needed to know. The biggest building in town, the one with the Stars and Bars flying over it, had to be the munitions factory. "Send a couple of HE rounds in there, too," he told the gunner. "Let 'em know they've just gone out of business."
"Right." But before Scullard could fire, machine-gun bullets rattled off the barrel's sides and turret, clattering but doing no harm. The bow gunner sent a long burst into a general store with a big DRINK DR. HOPPER! sign out front. Pound had tried the fizzy water, and thought it tasted like horse piss and sugar. The enemy machine gun abruptly cut off.
Boom! Boom! Pound watched holes appear in the munitions plant's southern wall. He giggled like a kid. Sometimes destruction for its own sake was more fun than anything else an alleged adult could do. He wondered whether Jake Featherston had an advanced case of the same disease.
And then he got more in the way of destruction than even he wanted. Maybe one of those HE rounds blew up something inside the factory. Maybe somebody in there decided he'd be damned if he let the plant fall into U.S. hands. Any which way, it went sky high.
Pound and his barrel were more than half a mile away. Even through inches of steel armor, the roar was overwhelming. The barrel weighed upwards of forty tons. All the same, the front end came off the ground. The machine might have been a rearing horse, except Pound was afraid it would flip right over onto its turret. Scullard's startled "Fuck!" said he wasn't the only one, either.
But the barrel thudded back down onto its tracks. Pound peered out through the periscopes again. One of the forward ones was cracked, which said just how big a blast that was. It must have knocked half of Columbiana flat.
"Well," he said, "we liberated the living shit out of this place."
F lora Blackford was listening to debate on a national parks appropriation bill-not everything Congress did touched on the war, though it often seemed that way-when a House page hurried up to her. His fresh features and beardless cheeks said he was about fifteen: too young to conscript, though the Confederates were giving guns to kids that age, using up their next generation.
"For you, Congresswoman," the page whispered. He handed her an envelope and took off before she could even thank him.