Breakthroughs

Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
the kid named Hamburger—David, his first name turned out to be—he asked, “Listen, if your sister’s in Congress, what the hell are you doin’
here
? She don’t like you or somethin’?”
    “She likes me fine,” Hamburger said through more laughter. His swarthy face flushed. “She just doesn’t think it’s right to use her job to make things soft for her family. That’s not why the working people elected her.”
    Socialist,
Martin thought from the way the kid said
working people
. It didn’t faze him; about one soldier in three voted that way. “New York City?” he asked.
    “Yeah.” Hamburger nodded. “You can tell from the way I talk, I bet.”
    “Right the first time,” Martin said. He would have tagged the kid for a dago from his looks, but with that last name he was likelier to be a Jew. “Your old man a peddler?”
    “No—he sews for a living, same as me, same as my other two sisters.” That explained the deft hand with a needle. “How about you, Sarge?”
    “I was a steelworker in Toledo before the war, like my pa still is,” Martin answered. “He makes the stuff, and we throw it at the Rebs. That works out pretty good, hey?” David Hamburger nodded again. Martin thought he’d get on here well enough—except he didn’t like Corporal Reinholdt’s eyes.

Anne Colleton paced back and forth like a caged lioness in the little room she’d rented in St. Matthews, South Carolina. “I will not go any farther from Marshlands,” she snapped, as if someone had insisted that she should.
    A wisp of dark blond hair escaped from its pin and tickled her cheek. She forced it back into place without breaking her furious stride. The Red uprising of 1915 had sent the Marshlands mansion up in flames; her brother Jacob, an invalid after the damnyankees gassed him, died then, too. She’d been in Charleston when the Negroes rebelled, and, unlike so many white landowners, returned to her plantation after the revolt was quelled. She’d even managed to bring in a cotton crop of sorts. And then—
    “God damn you, Cassius,” she said softly. In the days before the war, he’d been the chief hunter at Marshlands—and a secret Red, when she’d thought the Negroes there had no secrets from her. In the rebellion, he’d headed the murderous outfit that styled itself the Congaree Socialist Republic. He still led a ragtag band of black brigands who skulked through the swamps, eluding the authorities and calling murder and thievery acts of revolution.
    They had friends among the Negroes who’d gone back to work at Marshlands. They had more friends among them than Anne had imagined. A month or so earlier, on Christmas night, 1916, they’d come horrifyingly close to killing her.
    “I will have my revenge,” she said, as she’d said a hundred times since managing to escape. “I will have—” A knock on the door interrupted her. She stormed over to it and threw it open. “What is it?” she demanded.
    Even though the delivery boy for the Confederate Wire Service wore a uniform close in color and cut to that of the Army, he couldn’t have been a day above fifteen years old. The sight of a tall, fierce, beautiful blond woman twice his age glaring at him unstrung him altogether. He tried to stammer out why he had come, but words failed him. After a couple of clucks a hen would have been ashamed to claim, he dropped the envelope he carried and incontinently fled.
    Feeling triumph over so lowly a male would have demeaned Anne. She bent, scooped up the envelope, tore it open, and unfolded the telegram inside. REGRET NO CONFEDERATE TROOPS AVAILABLE TO AID SOUTH CAROLINA FORCES IN HUNTING DOWN BANDITS. HOPE ALL OTHERWISE WELL. GABRIEL SEMMES, PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES.
    She crumpled up the telegram and flung it into the wickerwork wastebasket that had come with the room. “You stingy son of a bitch!” she snarled. “I poured money into your campaign. The niggers burned down Marshlands, and I still

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