Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

Wright 27 dove. The ground swelled. So did the Confederate soldiers and barrels in front of Lebanon, Ohio—he thought it was Lebanon, anyway, and if he was wrong, he was wrong. He wasn’t wrong about the advancing Confederates. Thanks to the barrels, they’d already smashed through trench lines that would have held up a Great War army for weeks, and the war was only a couple of days old.
    Someone down there spotted him. A machine gun started winking. Tracers flashed past his wings. He jabbed his thumb down on the firing button on top of the stick. His own machine guns spat death through the spinning disk of his propeller. Soldiers on the ground ran or threw themselves flat. That damned machine gun suddenly stopped shooting. Moss whooped.
    Here and there, Confederates with rifles took potshots at him. Those didn’t worry him. If a rifle bullet knocked down a fighter, the pilot’s number was surely up. He checked six as he climbed. No Confederate on his tail. In the first clash, the CSA’s machines—they were calling them Hound Dogs—seemed more maneuverable, but U.S. fighters had the edge diving and climbing. Neither held any enormous advantage over the other.
    The Confederates had some real antiaircraft guns down there. Puffs of black smoke appeared in midair not far from Moss’ fighter. They weren’t quite round; they were longer from top to bottom than side to side. “Nigger-baby flak,” Moss muttered to himself. With extensions of gas out from the main burst that could have been arms and legs, the smoke patterns did bear a certain resemblance to naked black dolls.
    A bang said a shell fragment had hit the fighter somewhere. Moss’ eyes flicked anxiously from one gauge to another. No loss of oil pressure. No loss of coolant. No fuel leak. No fire. The controls answered—no cut wires or bad hydraulics. He breathed a sigh of relief. No damage done.
    Trouble was, he hadn’t done the Confederates on the ground much harm, either. They would keep right on pushing forward. They weren’t trying to break into Lebanon, which looked to be heavily fortified. They were doing their best to get past it and keep pushing north. If it still had some U.S. soldiers in it afterwards . . . well, so what?
    Neither side had fought that way during the Great War. Neither side could have. That had mostly been a war of shoeleather, with railroads hauling soldiers up to the front and with trucks lugging supplies. But no army then had moved faster than at a walk.
    Things looked different here. Barrels were a lot faster than they had been a generation earlier. Trucks didn’t just haul beans and bullets. They brought soldiers forward to keep up with the barrels. The internal-combustion engine was supercharging this war.
    His fighter’s internal-combustion engine was running out of gas. He streaked north to find another airstrip where he could refuel. He’d started the war in southern Illinois, but they’d sent him farther east right away. For the time being, the action was hottest along the central part of the Ohio River.
    The strip he found wasn’t even paved. He jounced to a stop. When he pulled back the canopy and started to get out of the fighter, a lieutenant on the ground shouted, “Can you go up again right away?”
    Moss wanted nothing more than sleep and food and a big glass of something strong. But they didn’t pay him for ducking out of fights. He said, “Fill me up and I’ll go.”
    “Thanks—uh, thank you, sir,” the young officer said. “Everybody down south is screaming for air support.”
    “Why aren’t they getting more of it?” Moss asked as groundcrew men in coveralls gave the fighter gasoline. Another man in coveralls, an armorer, wordlessly held up a belt of machine-gun ammunition. Moss nodded. The armorer climbed a ladder and went to work on the airplane’s guns.
    “Why? ’Cause we got sucker-punched, that’s why,” the lieutenant said, which fit too well with what Moss had seen and heard in the