Morrell almost looked over his shoulder to see whom she meant. He'd passed fifty a couple of years before, and his weather-beaten features didn't seem young even to himself. But her gray hair and the turkeylike wattles under her chin said she was some distance ahead of him. "What can I do for you, ma'am?" he asked, as politely as he could.

"Young man, I know you come from the United States, and so are ignorant of a good deal of proper behavior, but I must tell you that colored people are not permitted to go armed in this country," she said.

He looked at her. He did his best to look through her. "They are now."

"By whose authority?" she demanded.

"Mine." He tapped the stars on his shoulder strap.

"You should be ashamed of yourself, in that case," she said.

Of itself, his hand dropped to the.45 he wore on his belt. "Lady, I think you better get lost before I blow your stupid head off," he said. "You people did your best to murder every Negro you could catch, and you have the gall to talk to me about shame…There's not a word low enough for you."

"The nerve!" The matron flounced off. Reality hadn't set in for her. He wondered if it ever would, or could.

Over in Texas, General Dowling had taken local big shots through the Confederate death camp and into the mass graveyard so they could see with their own eyes what their country had done. Some of them had the decency to kill themselves afterwards. Others just went on the way they had before.

Morrell wished he had one of those camps to show the locals. Then they wouldn't be able to shrug and pretend there'd never been that many Negroes in this part of the CSA. But he feared the matron wouldn't be much impressed afterwards. She was one of those people for whom nothing seemed real if it didn't happen to her.

Somebody'd painted YANKS OUT! on a wall. Morrell grabbed the first soldier he saw. "Get some paint and grab a couple of these assholes and have 'em clean this shit up," he told the man in green-gray. "If they give you a hard time, do whatever you have to do to get 'em to pay attention."

"Yes, sir!" the soldier said, and went off to take care of it with a grin on his face.

Artillery rumbled, off to the northeast. Morrell cocked his head to one side, listening, gauging. Those were Confederate guns. The enemy was still trying to blunt the U.S. attack and drive Morrell's forces back. He didn't think Featherston's men could do it. Before long, counterbattery fire or air strikes would make those C.S. gun bunnies sorry they'd ever been born, and even sorrier they'd tried messing with the U.S. Army.

From what Morrell had seen, the only thing Confederate civilians were sorry about was that their army hadn't done a better job of keeping the damnyankees away. Somehow, that left him imperfectly sympathetic.

"General!" Another woman called to him. This one was young and blond and pretty, pretty enough to remind him how long he'd been away from Agnes. She also looked mad enough to spit nails.

"Yes?" He'd give her the benefit of the doubt as long as he could.

"Those niggers of yours!" she snapped.

"What about 'em?" Morrell didn't want them getting out of hand and raping all the women they could catch. He could understand why they'd want to. He could sympathize, too. But he wasn't running a mob. He was running an army, or trying to.

"They looked at me. They leered at me, the grinning apes," the blond woman said. "You ought to string them up and horsewhip them."

Morrell needed a moment to realize she was dead serious. When he did, he almost wished the Negroes had dragged her into an alley and done their worst. "That's not how things'll work from here on out, so you'd better get used to it," he said. "Nobody gets whipped for looking. Heck, I'm looking right now. You're worth looking at, no offense."

"Well, of course." As pretty women often did, she took her good looks for granted. "But I don't mind it from you-too much. You're a Yankee, but you're not a nigger."

"If they touch you and you don't like it, you can complain. If anybody touches you and you don't like it, you can complain," Morrell said. "But they can look as much as they want."

"You mean you won't do anything about it?" The blond woman sounded as if she couldn't believe her ears. She looked disgusted, almost nauseated.

"That's what I said," Morrell told her.

"You damnyankees really are animals, then." She pursed her lips, perhaps getting ready to spit at him.

"If you do anything stupid," he said, "you'll find out just what kind of animal I am. You won't like it-I promise."

He didn't shout and bluster. That had never been his style. He didn't need to. He sounded like a man who meant exactly what he said, and for a good reason: he was. The local woman stopped looking like somebody saving up spit. She did look a little deflated. Then she gathered herself, flung, "Nigger-lover!" in his face instead of saliva, and stalked off. Fury gave her a fine hip action. Morrell admired it. He was sure the Negro auxiliaries had, too.

Up till now, he hadn't had much use for Negroes. Few whites in the USA did. Had he seen a couple of black men staring at a white woman's butt on a street corner in, say, Indianapolis, that might have offended him. In Monroe, Georgia? No. In fact, he smiled. The enemies of his enemies were his friends, all right.

After dark, Confederate bombers came over Monroe and dropped explosives on the U.S. soldiers in and around the town-and on their own people. A thin layer of low clouds hung above Monroe, so the Confederates might as well have been bombing blind. They couldn't come over by day, not unless they wanted to get slaughtered. In their shoes, Morrell supposed he would have preferred bombing blind to not bombing at all, too.

He had a few minutes' warning from Y-ranging gear that spotted the approaching bombers and sounded the alarm before they started unloading. U.S. night fighters were also starting to carry Y-ranging sets. So far, those sets were neither very strong nor very easy to use, but they were already making night operations more expensive for the CSA. Pretty soon, electronics might make nighttime raids as risky as daylight ones.

Crouching in a trench with bombs crashing down around him, Morrell could see a day where neither side on a battlefield would be able to hide anything from the other. How would you fight a war then? You could be so strong you'd beat your enemy even if he did see what you had in mind. You could, yes, but it wouldn't be easy, or economical.

Or you could make him think all your fancy preparations meant one thing and then go and do something else instead. Morrell nodded to himself. If he had his druthers, he would play it that way. If the enemy kept staring at the cape, he wouldn't see the sword till too late. You saved your own men and matйriel that way…if you could bring it off.

The all-clear warbled. Morrell got out of the trench and went back to his cot. He didn't know how much damage the Confederates had done. Probably some-probably not a lot. Without a doubt, they'd screwed a lot of U.S. soldiers out of a night's sleep. That counted, too, though no civilians who hadn't got up groggy after an air raid would think so. Morrell yawned. His eyes closed. Air raid or not, the Confederates didn't screw him out of more than forty-five minutes.

J onathan Moss had been on the run ever since a tornado let him break out of the Andersonville POW camp. Joining Spartacus' band of Negro guerrillas had kept the Confederates from getting him (it had also kept the guerrillas from shooting him and Nick Cantarella). But joining them also ensured that he stayed on the run.

U.S. forces weren't far away now. The rumble of artillery and the thud of bursting bombs came from the north by day and night. Running off to the troops from his own side would have been easy as pie…if not for God only knew how many divisions' worth of Jake Featherston's finest between him and them.