Liberating Atlantis

IX

"Wait." Sitting up there on the dais in front of the Conscript Fathers of Atlantis, Consul Jeremiah Stafford had trouble believing what his colleague had just said. "Repeat that, if you would be so kind."

He wasn't the only one to doubt his hearing, either. Half the Senators were staring at Leland Newton as if he'd just disappeared an elephant right before their eyes. One fellow dropped his glasses. Jaws dropped on both sides of the aisle in the Senate House, but especially among the men who came from south of the Stour.

Consul Newton turned to Stafford with an ironic smile. "You heard me correctly, sir," he said. "I spoke, and I shall continue to speak, in favor of using an Atlantean army to interpose itself between the insurrectionists and the New Marseille militia-and, if necessary, between the insurrectionists and the militias belonging to the other southern states."

A burst of applause echoed from the ceiling of the Senate House. Some of it, again, came from southern men. But others-firebrands like Radcliffe of Penzance-also joined in the cheering. That they did roused Stafford's ever-vigilant suspicions.

"Wait," he said again. "What precisely do you mean when you say you want to interpose an Atlantean army down there?"

"I mean what I say: neither more no less," Newton answered blandly. "As you do, sir, I consider that an admirable habit. In my opinion, we would be better off if more persons in political positions followed our example."

"We would also be better off if fewer persons in political positions were as exasperating as you make a point of being," Stafford said.

His colleague gave him a seated bow. "I am your servant, sir."

Stafford ignored that. It wasn't easy, but he managed. "In a game of chess, for instance, you may interpose a bishop between your king and your opponent's castle."

Newton beamed at him. "Just so! You see? You understand perfectly! So why were you so troubled a moment ago?"

"Why? I'll tell you why," Stafford answered. "Because an interposed piece does not necessarily capture the one that is causing the difficulty."

Leland Newton stopped beaming. Consul Stafford got the idea that his colleague hadn't expected him to realize that quite so fast. Croydon men commonly thought no one was clever except their own kind. Comprehension took longer to dawn out on the Senate floor than it did inside Stafford's mind-which might have meant that Consul Newton had a point.

In case any of the Conscript Fathers missed anything, Stafford made it-he hoped-unmistakably clear: "You want to put the national army between the niggers and the honest white men now fighting them. You have not said one word about using the national army to fight them, however. Why is that, if I may enquire?"

"Separating the opposing forces seems to me an excellent first step toward peace," Newton answered.

"Wait a minute!" Senator Bainbridge shouted from the Senate floor. "You just wait one damned minute! An excellent first step toward peace is stringing up all the slaves who rose up against their rightful masters. That's what a first step toward peace is!"

He got thunderous cheers from his southern friends. This time, though, Senator Radcliffe and the other northern fire-brands sat on their hands. That told Stafford as much as he needed to know about the kind of game Newton and his cohorts were playing.

But there were games, and then again there were games. "I am willing to support Consul Newton's resolution," Stafford said. Jaws dropped again. Eyes popped-among them, those of Leland Newton. No, Newton wouldn't be able to call Stafford names for rejecting the resolution out of hand, even if it came with a poison pill. Stafford went on, "The usual command arrangements will of course apply."

"Of course," Newton said. "I am not trying to change the way the United States of Atlantis work."

"No, indeed." Sarcasm dripped from Stafford's tongue. "Freeing the mudfaces and niggers would do nothing of the sort."

"As a matter of fact, sir, it wouldn't," Newton said. "It would only extend citizenship to men and women who are now but residents."

"And it would ruin an entire class of white men who have contributed greatly to making Atlantis strong," Consul Stafford pointed out.

"Some form of compensation might be arranged," Newton said.

"How generous!" Stafford fleered. "Tell me: what compensates for murder?"

"Killing in war is not murder," Newton replied.

"Killing in an uprising is," Stafford said. "And inflicting a fate worse than death upon helpless women is a foul crime in war or peace."

"I would agree with you," his colleague said. "So, no doubt, would countless black and copperskinned women compelled to be the vessels of their masters' lusts."

"It's not the same thing," Stafford insisted uncomfortably, recalling the mulatto woman who'd initiated him into the rites of loving.

"No, eh?" Newton said. "It all depends on who is doing what to whom, I suppose."

"You make that into a joke, and a nasty one, at that," Stafford said. "But you are quite right. A chattel has no say over his person-"

"Or over hers," the other Consul broke in.

"Or over hers," Stafford agreed. "But when a slave callously violates a free white woman-"

"He only imitates what white men have done to the women he is not permitted to call wives."

"That is not what I was going to say."

"Really? Why am I not surprised?"

Once the bickering ended, the resolution passed. And we'll see who ends up outsmarting whom, Jeremiah Stafford thought. His guess was that, once an army full of white men bumped up against the insurrectionists, it would go after them full bore whether Consul Newton wanted it to or not. And even if by some mischance it didn't, he could still use his alternate days in command to steer it in the direction he wanted it to go. He looked forward to it.

Politicians in Atlantis won votes by railing at bureaucrats. Leland Newton had done it himself. If you listened to politicians, bureaucrats were miserable old slowcoaches. The fist-sized snails in the southern states could move faster than they did. And cucumber slugs had more in the way of brains (to say nothing of less in the way of slime).

If you made a speech like that, you commonly believed it, at least while you were giving it. Newton knew he sometimes exaggerated for effect, but even so… He expected the Ministry of War would need weeks to gather together the soldiers and munitions and other supplies an army required if it proposed campaigning against the rebels west of the Green Ridge Mountains.

The army was ready to move four days later. The Minister of War told Newton that Colonel Balthasar Sinapis, the senior officer who would accompany the Consuls into the field, had already apologized for taking so long. "I hope you will not be hard on him because of the delay," the functionary added.

"Well, I may possibly forgive him this once," Newton said.

"He does promise to do better in any future emergency," the Minister of War said.

"Good," was the only answer Newton could find.

Colonel Sinapis was a swarthy professional soldier who spoke with some sort of guttural accent. He'd come to Atlantis in the wake of the upheavals following the recent failed revolutions in Europe. Consul Newton thought of him as a human rifle musket: aim him at whatever you pleased, and he would knock it over for you.

What the colonel thought of the Consuls was something that hadn't occurred to Newton till Sinapis sat down in the leading railroad car of the leading train that would take the army into action against the rebels. Sinapis had an axe-blade of a face, a shaggy gray mustache under a scimitar nose, and the fierce, unblinking stare of a peregrine falcon.

"You gentlemen will have a plan of campaign for the days ahead?" he asked. When he spoke, his accent and his ferocious manner gave him the aspect of a talking wolf. The only wolves Newton had ever seen paced an iron-barred cage back in Croydon. Had one of those wolves worn a gray uniform instead of coarse gray fur, it might have been Balthasar Sinapis' brother-in-law.

However lupine Colonel Sinapis' manner, his question was only too cogent. Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford. He was anything but surprised to find the other Consul looking back at him. "Well…" they both said slowly. Neither seemed to want to tell the colonel how much they disagreed about what ought to happen after the army encountered the insurrectionists.

A flash of scorn in Sinapis' dark eyes warned that he already knew they couldn't even agree to disagree. "Some thought now would spare us much trouble later," he said, as if to squabbling children.

His accent might remain strong, but his English was grammatically perfect. Newton had already noticed as much. The colonel might have said, Some thought now will save us much trouble later. He might have, but he hadn't. Which meant… what? That he expected no such planning; he just wistfully hoped for it.

Consul Stafford's expression said he was making the same calculation, and liking it no better than Newton did. "We'll do what we can to obtain a satisfactory result," he said at last.

"Certainly, your Excellency," Colonel Sinapis said. "And how do you propose to define success?"

"When we find it, we'll know it," Newton said.

"Yes, I suppose we will," Stafford… agreed?

Colonel Sinapis sighed like a wolf that had failed to outrun a deer. So many images in our language of animals not native here, Newton thought. The colonel said, "What you mean is, you have not got the faintest idea of what you want the army to do. Or perhaps each of you has an idea, but you have not got the same idea. Is this true? Am I right or am I wrong?"

The two Consuls looked at each other. They both sighed, too, at the same time and on the same note. "You may be right-for now," Newton said. "I think we both hope we will have the answer once the army goes into action."

Sinapis' brows came down over his eyes like battlements protecting a keep. The lines on his cheeks deepened like entrenchments in a siege. "Meaning no disrespect to you gentlemen," he said, a phrase that always meant disrespect to its targets, "but an army without a plan is like a drunkard on a stroll. If you have no notion where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Or if you get there?"

"Let's get there first," Consul Newton said. "Once we do, I expect we'll sort things out."

"I hope we'll sort things out," Consul Stafford said. That wasn't exactly agreement, but it wasn't exactly disagreement, either. Newton decided he would take it.

By the way Balthasar Sinapis whuffled out air through his mustache, he was less satisfied. "Politics," he said disdainfully. "Gamemeno politics."

That sounded like a participle derived from gameo, the classical Greek verb meaning to marry. Leland Newton was mildly surprised and pleased that he recognized the form, and that he remembered what the verb meant… or had meant. Marrying politics made no sense. Perhaps the word had changed meaning in the centuries since Plato and Xenophon used it.

Before he could ask, the emigre officer went on, "All you think of are your gamemeno political points." There it was again, just as incomprehensible as before. "What I think of, gentlemen-and you had better keep it in mind-is the blood of my soldiers. It is what you intend to spend to make your political points, and I do not believe you care a cent for it."

Newton started to deny that indignantly. He stopped with the words unspoken. It wasn't that he didn't care what happened to the Atlantean soldiers rattling along behind him. Sinapis had that wrong, but Newton hadn't thought at all about what might befall the gray-uniformed men. If he admitted as much, the colonel would be within his rights to call him on it.

"I have been thinking more of what our army will do to the insurrectionists," Consul Stafford said.

"Of course you have-you are a politician, too." No, Sinapis didn't bother hiding his dislike for the men who outranked him. "You leave it to a soldier to worry about the other, don't you?"

Stafford seemed to have no comeback for that. Newton knew too well he didn't. Except for the dull, metallic rumble of iron wheels on iron rails, silence filled the compartment.

Wheee-oooo! The locomotive whistle screamed as the train crossed the railroad bridge from the state of Freetown to the state of Cosquer. The land on the south side of the Stour looked no different from that on the northern side. All the same, Jeremiah Stafford let out a long sigh of relief. At last, he was back in God's country-or at least in a country with civilized laws.

Before long, the train stopped in a sleepy little town called Pontivy. A gang of black and copperskinned slaves lugged fresh lumber to the tender. A swag-bellied white man in overalls had a pistol on his belt, but Stafford would have bet he hadn't had to draw it for years. Thump! Thump! The sawed lengths of wood replaced what the locomotive had devoured since the last stop.

Another slave went down the train, oiling the wheels. The lazy black devil didn't bother lifting the spout of his oil can between one set of wheels and the next. He just let the expensive oil spill out onto the dirt. Why should he worry? He wasn't paying for it.

Seeing that kind of thing made Stafford grind his teeth. The overseer either didn't notice or didn't care-he wasn't paying for the oil, either. Somebody was, though, dammit: the railroad company's supply department, or the shareholders, or, on this journey, the Atlantean government.

Stafford hated waste. He knew slaves generated more of it than he would have liked. Because things weren't their own, they didn't care about them. That was why, for instance, planters had to give their field hands those heavy, clumsy tools. They would have broken the better ones white farmers used, and in short order, too.

"We have to do something about that," he muttered. Atlantean slaveholders had been saying the same thing since the seventeenth century. The only answer anyone had come up with was making the slaves afraid to be careless with their tools-their owners' tools. And that worked only up to a point. Press a nigger or a mudface too hard and he'd either try to murder you or he'd run off. Both were more expensive than broken tools.

Consul Newton had also got off the train to watch the refuel ing and to stretch his legs. He didn't seem to notice the Negro wasting oil, which relieved Stafford. But he did notice Stafford mumbling to himself, and asked, "What was that?"

"I wish we would make our workers more efficient and considerate," Stafford said.

"Why don't you try paying them?" Newton asked, his tone not in the least ironic. "Nothing makes a man a careful worker like the fear of getting docked."

"The whole point of our system is to keep from enslaving workers to money," Stafford said.

His fellow Consul raised an eyebrow. "So you enslave them to their masters instead? A dubious improvement, I fear. And I have never yet heard of a slaveowner who broke out in hives when some cash came his way. No, the owners only worry when their slaves see a coin once in a blue moon."

"Slaves don't need money," Stafford said. "Remember, their masters feed and clothe and shelter them."

"None too well, more often than not," Newton said.

"They live better than factory hands in Hanover-or in Croydon, come to that," Stafford retorted. "Who said that the first freedom was the freedom to starve? Whoever he was, he knew what he was talking about."

"I don't see white factory hands swimming across the Stour to work on your plantations," Newton said tartly.

"We would not enslave them if they did, and you know it perfectly well," Stafford said.

"Fine. Have it however you please. I don't see free Negroes and copperskins volunteering to go back under the lash, either."

"It has happened," Stafford said. "I recall one such case just a couple of years ago. The copperskin couldn't make a go of it in Freetown, so he decided to come south. He knew he wouldn't starve here, and his children wouldn't, either."

"It must not happen very often, by God, or you would not be able to call particular instances to mind," his colleague said.

Since that was true, Stafford maintained a discreet silence. The train whistle blared again. It was even louder when heard out in the open than from inside a railroad car. The windows, commonly closed against soot and cinders, muffled some of the ferocious squeal.

"All aboard!" the locomotive driver bawled from the back of his iron chariot. He might have been piloting a ferry boat, not the most modern conveyance in the world. "All aboard!" The whistle shrilled once more.

Colonel Sinapis nodded coolly to the Consuls when they joined him in the compartment they shared. He hadn't got off the train. Reading glasses perched on that curved blade of a nose, he pored over maps of the southwest. Regardless of whether the Consuls were ready for whatever might happen when the army got where it was going, he intended to be.

What he wasn't ready for, any more than they were, was their train derailing just outside of Pontivy. The only thing that saved them from worse misfortune was that they hadn't got going very fast yet. There was a jolt and a crash. The next thing Stafford knew, the locomotive and tender had flipped over onto their sides-and so had the car he was riding in. He had time for one startled exclamation before he landed on what had been the side of the car and Colonel Sinapis landed on him.

"Oof!" Stafford said, which summed up exactly how he felt about the situation. The colonel had a more detailed opinion, which he expressed in English and what sounded like several other languages. Stafford didn't understand them all, but admired the effects, especially the one that sounded like ripping canvas.

Leland Newton had also fetched up against the side of the car. He, however, was not festooned with a colonel, so his remarks were less impassioned. "Are you all right, Jeremiah?" he asked.

It was, as far as Stafford could remember, the first time his colleague had used his Christian name. "I seem to be, Leland," he said, returning the courtesy, "or I will be, if the good Colonel Sinapis would remove his elbow from the vicinity of my navel."

The good colonel did move the pointed part in question, and the Consul did gain considerable relief as a result. Sinapis scrambled to his feet. He stepped on Stafford once more in the process, but without malice. "We must help the injured-and there will be some," he said.

Stafford only grunted, because Sinapis was bound to be right. Derailments were lamentably common, and produced more than their fair share of lost limbs and broken bones. The colonel wrestled the door open. It didn't want to open sideways, but he made it obey. He scrambled out. Stafford and Newton followed.

Sinapis' prophecy was confirmed at once. A couple of the stokers lay on the fern-splashed ground. One was clutching his leg and groaning. The leg had a bend in a place where it shouldn't.

Consul Stafford's stomach did a slow lurch. He looked away in a hurry. If an injury like this threatened to sicken him, how would he do on a battlefield with bullets and cannonballs ripping flesh? He hadn't thought about that when he set out from New Hastings. Maybe he should have.

The engine driver limped out of the capsized locomotive. He was not only hurt but incandescently furious. "A rock!" he screamed. "Some God-damned fucking son of a bitch put a fucking boulder on the fucking tracks!" He started to hop up and down in his rage, but his ankle made him think better of it. "That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, he went and derailed us on purpose! I hope he rots in hell and Old Scratch uses his short ribs for toothpicks!"

Slow, cold certainty formed inside Jeremiah Stafford's mind. "That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, was a mudface or a nigger." He sounded as sure of himself as any Biblical prophet.

"Yes. Very likely." Colonel Sinapis nodded. "Those people are the ones with the most reason to slow us down or stop us."

Rounding on his colleague, Stafford said, "You don't say anything, sir."

Consul Newton spread his hands. "What would you have me say? I agree: most likely a slave did place a rock there to derail us. I have never claimed slaves loved us. The most I have ever said is that they may well have good reason not to love us."

"Bah!" Stafford turned away from him in disgust. That let him look down the track. Half a dozen cars after the one in which he'd been riding had also overturned. Some of the soldiers inside them were bound to be hurt, too. The cars farther back had managed to stay on the rails. Had the train been moving faster, more of them would have gone off.

Those slaves were fools, the Consul thought. They would have done better to plant their boulder farther from town, so we would have built up more speed. Or maybe they didn't know we would stop in Pontivy.

A horrible shriek derailed his train of thought. The phrase had quickly become a commonplace after railroad lines began crisscrossing Atlantis. Now Stafford was reminded of the reality that had given rise to it.

Colonel Sinapis crouched beside the stoker with the broken leg. Among other things, the colonel knew how to set fractures, even if the process was painful. Stafford hoped the army surgeons had laid in a good supply of nitrous oxide and ether. The newfangled medicines seemed sovereign against even the worst agony.

"Hold still," Sinapis told the stoker. His strong hands made sure the man obeyed. The officer nodded to the other stoker, who hovered nearby. "Draw my sword. Cut a couple of saplings. Cut strips of cloth, too, so I can splint this leg. Don't just stand there, man! Move!"

Move the other stoker did, and smartly, too. When Balthasar Sinapis told you to do something, you did it first and worried about why later. He would have made a marvelous overseer. Consul Stafford chuckled softly. What was a colonel but an overseer who used a uniform and army regulations instead of a bullwhip to get his way?

Stafford stared this way and that. No slaves in sight now. He'd wondered if they would stick around to enjoy the chaos they'd caused, but no such luck. Even stupid slaves knew better. Too bad.

And the army was going to be later than it had expected getting to the insurrection. That was also too damned bad.

The train derailed once more before it got to Nouveau Redon. This time, people-no doubt colored people-had set logs on the rails. The train was going faster when it hit them. Leland Newton ended up with a knot on the side of his head and a left wrist sprained so badly, he had to wear it in a sling.

One of the army surgeons gave him a tiny bottle of laudanum for the pain. The potent mixture of brandy and opium pushed it off to one side, anyhow. The opium also settled his bowels, which had been flighty on a traveling diet of hardtack and salt pork: army rations.

"Slaves don't love you, either," Consul Stafford pointed out to him. "No matter how splendid you think they are, they'll kill you if they get the chance."

Worst of it was, Newton's colleague wasn't wrong. Newton hadn't let that enter his calculations when he left with the army. He wondered what else he hadn't thought about that he should have. He hoped he didn't find out the hard way.

When he remarked on that, Colonel Sinapis said, "Plan ahead. Always plan ahead. It will not be perfect, but it will help."

The latest dose of laudanum had worn off, leaving Newton sore and irritable. He wiggled his arm in the sling the surgeon had put on him. That only hurt more. "How do you propose to plan against what happens in a derailment?" he snapped.

To his amazement, the colonel had a sensible answer for him: "Belts across the seats would hold the passengers in place and not let them fly about promiscuously in an accident. That would save many casualties."

"Damned if it wouldn't," Newton said in surprise, his pique evaporating. "I wonder why we don't do it now."

"Because the railroad companies say it would cost money to put all these belts into place. Because, they say, some people do not care to be closed in with a belt. Because, they say, feminine costume would be inconvenienced. And so people break limbs and sometimes break their heads, but a few cents are saved! Hallelujah!" Sinapis did not so much as raise his voice, which only made the irony more cutting.

Gingerly feeling the side of his own head, Newton could sympathize with that irony. He turned to Jeremiah Stafford, who'd come through the latest derailment unscathed. "Here is something about which the government should have its say, don't you think?"

"Not quite so urgent as a servile insurrection," Stafford remarked. But that wasn't necessarily a veto, for he went on, "Bound to be easier to gain consensus on account of that."

"One would hope so, yes." Consul Newton was not about to let anyone display more sangfroid than he did.

"A plan," Colonel Sinapis said again. "Have you gentlemen yet devised one?" He was relentless as a hurricane.

"How can we?" Newton did his best to sound reasonable. "We won't fully know the situation till we arrive. Many telegraph lines are down-"

"Slaves' doing," Stafford broke in.

Newton shrugged. "As may be. But what comes over the surviving wires is the most amazing twaddle. If you tell me the slaves are responsible for that, I shall be most surprised."

"No, no," the other Consul said impatiently. "Do you expect calm and good judgment in the middle of an uprising, though?"

"Perhaps not. Occasional accuracy, however, would be welcome," Newton said.

"Do we fight the colored rebels? Do we fight the people fighting the colored rebels?" Sinapis persisted. "Do we try to keep them from fighting? What do we do if they don't feel like stopping?"

Those were all good questions. Newton had answers to none of them. Well, that wasn't strictly true. He had his own answers. Unfortunately, Consul Stafford also had his own answers, which weren't the same… which were, in fact, as different as coal and kohlrabi.

At least Stafford also didn't try to tell Colonel Sinapis exactly what would happen when the army got off the train in the state of New Marseille. He knew Newton had different answers, too.

Sinapis looked from one Consul to the other and back again. He might have been examining two insects with revolting habits. His voice suggested that he was: "Or will the army try to do one thing one day and something else the next, depending on who is in command? I tell you, gentlemen, this army is not a toy to be pulled back and forth between you as if you were a couple of spoiled children who needed spanking. You will cost me soldiers if you try to do things that way, and I remind you that soldiers are not toys."

"The innocent white men and women being despoiled by the insurrectionists are not toys, either," Stafford said.

"Neither are the slaves who have been despoiled for centuries by these so-called innocents," Newton returned. He stared steadily back at Balthasar Sinapis. "What is your personal view of slavery, Colonel?"

"It is my personal view, sir, and I prefer to keep it that way," Sinapis said. "Whatever it is, it is less important than my view that throwing away an army on account of lack of foresight and cooperation will do Atlantis more harm than good."

"We are all three of us men of strong opinions." Stafford sounded-amused? Yes, amused: Newton was sure of it. The other Consul went on, "Now, if only any two of us shared some of those opinions."

"We are what the country has," Newton said. "If from among us we can't piece together a course that will do the country good, then Lord have mercy on the USA."

"Yes. Kyrie eleison," Sinapis said, which meant the same thing but sounded much more elegant.

In the eastern foothills of the Green Ridge Mountains, the insurrection really caught up with the army. Like his colleague, Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that a diet of salt pork and hardtack left a lot to be desired to start with, and went downhill in a hurry from there. When the train stopped in the evening, some soldiers pounded their hardtack crackers into crumbs and fried them in pork fat. Stafford tried that himself-once. He found that different and better meant two widely separate things.

He also found he hardly needed pipeweed. The inside of the car in which he and Newton and Colonel Sinapis traveled was smoky enough without pipes or cigars. The derailments had broken several windows. He supposed they were lucky all of them hadn't broken. Even as things were, he feared he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The soot on his white shirtfront told him how much he was likely to have on his face. The rasping coughs he let out every so often certainly warned him how much he had in his lungs.

Iron squealed on iron and sparks flew up from the wheels as the locomotive driver braked as hard as he could. "What the deuce?" Stafford said.

"I wonder if some of our not-quite-friends put something new on the tracks." Leland Newton sounded pleased with his own cleverness.

Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, sniffed scornfully. "If they had any tactical sense, they would have put the boulder or log or whatever it was around a bend in the track," he said. "Then the driver would not have been able to see it until he had no chance to stop."

But the insurrectionists did have tactical sense, even if not of the sort Balthasar Sinapis had looked for. As the train slowed, they started shooting at it from the pines and redwoods to either side of the roadbed.

For a moment, those bangs meant nothing to Stafford. But when a bullet punched through the side wall of the car and cracked past his head before drilling out the far side, he figured things out in a hurry. "They're firing at us!" he exclaimed, more angry than frightened.

"What do we do?" Newton added.

"For the sake of the country and for the sake of your own skins, I suggest you get low and flat-now," Colonel Sinapis said.

He couldn't give the two Consuls orders; they outranked him. But his "suggestion" had the snap of what would have been a command. It also seemed a very good idea. No sooner had Stafford got down than another bullet smashed through the space where he had been.

Sinapis did not get down. He drew his eight-shooter and started banging away through one of the broken windows. The reports only a few feet from Stafford's head stunned his ears. Lying beside him on the none-too-clean planks, Leland Newton grimaced every time the colonel fired. "This is most undignified," Newton said.

"Among other things," Stafford agreed.

He wondered what would happen if they both got killed here. He knew what the Atlantean Charter prescribed. If both Consuls died or abandoned their office for other reason, the Senate had to choose an interrex to serve as the chief executive till the next Consular elections were held. It had to choose him by a two-thirds majority, too. The way the Senate was divided these days, Stafford doubted whether Jesus Christ Himself could win a two-thirds majority of the Conscript Fathers.

Which meant that, if they both perished, chaos would descend on the United States of Atlantis. Worse chaos, Stafford amended as another bullet snarled by not nearly far enough above his prostrate frame.

If only one of them died here, the other Consul would serve alone till the next election. Stafford eyed Newton, and found his colleague eyeing him right back. "Isn't it nice that we're friends?" Newton said.

"Wonderful," Stafford said in distinctly hollow tones. His colleague laughed.

That the USA did not suffer a Charter crisis lay to the credit of the army's junior officers and sergeants. The cars in which they rode farther back were getting peppered with bullets, too. They rushed their gray-uniformed soldiers out with fixed bayonets to drive the insurrectionists away. A few of the soldiers went down as soon as they jumped from their cars. The rest, stolidly professional, advanced into the woods regardless, shouting as they went.

The firing kept on, but it wasn't aimed at the train any more. The rebels were shooting at the soldiers, and vice versa. Stafford and Newton got up again to watch. Colonel Sinapis grunted. "That ought to shift them," he said.

And it did. When the soldiers came back, some of them dragged rebel corpses by the feet. One rebel they caught wasn't a corpse-and then, quite suddenly, he was. They brought out their own casualties, too. The surgeons attended to them as best they could. Consul Stafford watched with great-if slightly nauseated-interest. His colleague might admire the rebels, but these men sent to put them down would probably feel differently.