Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

resentment. The veteran had a deep, authoritative rasp in his voice. Would they have paid that kind of attention to her contralto? Not likely!
    “Where’s a shelter?” somebody called. “This goddamn building hasn’t got a cellar.”
    “Across the street,” someone else said. He sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. People got up and started leaving. Anne wasn’t sorry to go—far from it. She had all she could do not to run for the door. Again, fear of being thought weak carried more weight than fear of death. She didn’t know why that should be so, but it was.
    Out in the street, the noise was ten times worse. Chunks of shrapnel from spent antiaircraft shells rained down out of the sky. A man cried out in pain when one hit him in the shoulder. He sat down, hard, right there in the middle of the road.
    Anne looked around for the U.S. airplanes that were causing all the commotion. She didn’t see any—and then she did. Here came one, over the tops of the buildings, straight toward her. It was on fire, and still had a bomb slung below the fuselage. Maybe the pilot was dead. If he wasn’t, he couldn’t do anything with or to his airplane.
    “Run!” Half a dozen people yelled it. It was good advice, but much too late. The bomber screamed down. The world blew up.
    When Anne came back to consciousness, she wished she hadn’t. She’d heard you often didn’t feel pain when you were badly wounded. Whoever had said that was a goddamn liar. Someone very close by was screaming. She needed a little while to realize those noises were pouring out of her own mouth. She tried to stop, and couldn’t.
    Kirby Walker lay a few feet away, gutted like a hog. He was lucky. He was already dead. Anne looked down at herself, and wished she hadn’t. Consciousness faded. Black rose up to swallow it.

II
    S omewhere down below Major Jonathan Moss was Ohio, somewhere Kentucky. He saw the ribbon of the Ohio River, but could not for the life of him have said which side of it he was on, not just then. He’d just broken off a dogfight with a Confederate fighter pilot who’d run into a cloud to get away from him, and he didn’t know north from his elbow.
    Then he saw shells bursting on the ground, and he realized that had to be Ohio. The CSA had kicked the USA in the teeth, attacking without bothering to declare war first. The Confederates had the edge right now. They were across the river in Indiana and Ohio, across with infantry and artillery and barrels, and they were pushing forward with everything they had.
    No Great War army had ever moved like this. Moss knew that from experience. Going from Niagara Falls to Toronto had taken three long, bloody years. The Canadians had defended every foot of ground as if they were holding Satan’s demons out of heaven. And, with trenches and machine guns, they’d been able to make every foot of ground count, too. Moss had started out flying a Curtiss pusher biplane, observing the front from above. He’d imagined himself a knight of the air. He’d ended up an ace in a fighting scout, knowing full well that his hands were no cleaner than any ground-pounding foot slogger’s.
    Living conditions were better for fliers, though. He hadn’t got muddy. He’d had his own cot in a barracks hall or tent out of artillery range of the front. He’d eaten regularly, and well. And people with unpleasant attitudes had tried to kill him only every once in a while, not all the time.
    So here he was back again for another round, something he never would have imagined when the Great War ended. He’d spent a lot of years as a lawyer specializing in occupation law in Canada. He’d married a Canadian woman. They’d had a little girl. And a Canadian bomb-maker had blown them up, maybe under the delusion that that would somehow help Canada toward freedom. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. It hadn’t. All it had done was wreck his life and drive him back to flying fighters.
    He pushed the stick forward. The