In at the Death by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

won’t like it, either, sir,” he answered, “and that counts a hell of a lot more with me.”
    “Sounds like the right attitude,” Sam allowed. Myron Zwilling clucked like a fretful mother hen. Yes, he worshipped at Authority’s shrine.
    They got through the invisible barricade and tied up in the Boston Navy Yard. As soon as they did, a swarm of Marines and high-ranking officers descended on them. One of the captains nodded when he saw the guards outside Sam’s door. “As per instructions,” he said.
    “Yes, sir,” Sam said, and when was that ever the wrong answer?
    Everybody waited impatiently till he opened the safe and took out the package. He wondered what would happen if he pretended to forget the combination. Odds were the newcomers had somebody who could jigger the lock faster than he could open it with the numbers.
    “Here you go, sir.” He handed the package to a vice admiral. “Any chance I’ll ever know what this is all about?”
    “No,” the man said at once. But then he unbent a little: “Not officially, anyhow. If you can add two and two, you may get a hint one day.”
    Even that little was more than Carsten expected. “All right, sir,” he said.
    “Officially, of course, none of this ever happened,” the vice admiral went on. “We aren’t here at all.”
    “How am I supposed to log that, sir? ‘Possessed by ghosts—summoned exorcist’?” Sam said. The vice admiral laughed. So did Sam, who was kidding on the square.

II
    C amp Humble wasn’t perfect, but it came as close as Jefferson Pinkard could make it. The commandant probably had more experience with camps designed to get rid of people than anybody else in the business. One thing he’d learned was not to call it that or even think of it like that.
Reducing population
was a phrase with far fewer unpleasant associations.
    That mattered. It mattered a surprising amount. Guards who brooded about the things they did had a way of eating their guns or otherwise doing themselves in. If you gave it a name that seemed innocuous, they didn’t need to brood so much.
    Back at Camp Dependable, outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, guards had actually taken Negroes out into the swamps and shot them. That was hard on the men—not as hard as it was on the Negroes, but hard enough. Things got better when Jeff thought of asphyxiating trucks. Then the guards didn’t have to pull the trigger themselves. They didn’t have to deal with blood spraying everywhere and with screams and with men who weren’t quite dead. All they had to do was take out bodies and get rid of them. That was a hell of a lot easier.
    And the poison-gas chambers he’d started at Camp Determination in west Texas were better yet. They got rid of more blacks faster than the trucks did, and saved on fuel besides. The prairie out by Snyder offered plenty of room for mass graves as big as anybody could want. Everything at Camp Determination would have been, if not perfect, at least pretty damn good, if not for the…
    “Damnyankees,” Pinkard muttered. “God fry the stinking damnyankees in their own grease.” Who would have figured the U.S. Army would push into west Texas? One of the reasons for building Camp Determination way out there was that it was the ass end of nowhere. The enemy hadn’t seemed likely to bother a camp there.
    But the Freedom Party underestimated how much propaganda the USA could get out of the camps. And earlier this year the United States had attacked everywhere they could, all at once: not seriously, but hard enough to keep the CSA from reinforcing the defenders in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the real action was. And it worked. Kentucky and Tennessee were lost, and Georgia was in trouble.
    And Camp Determination was lost, too. The United States had bombed the rail lines coming into the camp so it couldn’t reduce population the way it was supposed to. And they’d also bombed the crap out of Snyder; Jeff thanked God his own family came through all