“Here’s hoping, anyway.” Chester wasn’t about to commit the sin of optimism. Justifiably or not, he feared it would jinx everything.

No one would see the sun even when it rose. Clouds filled the sky. They couldn’t seem to make up their mind whether to give rain or snow or sleet. Since they couldn’t decide, they spat out a little of each at random. Even when nothing was coming down, the wind out of the northwest had knives in it. Chester would have disliked the weather much more than he did if it hadn’t kept C.S. Asskickers from diving on him.

“Here we go!” Lieutenant Wheat shouted when the barrels moved out. He might have been a kid on a Ferris wheel at a county fair. Chester suspected he wouldn’t take long to lose that boyish enthusiasm. Once you’d been through a few fights, once you’d seen a few horrors, you might be ready to go on with the war, but you weren’t likely to be eager anymore.

A train ahead chugged east. On its way to Pittsburgh? Chester wondered. He couldn’t think of any other reason why an engine pulling a lot of passenger cars should be on its way through what had been territory firmly under the Confederate thumb.

The barrel commander evidently decided the same thing. The big, snorting machine stopped. The turret-one of the massive new models, with a bigger gun-slewed to the left, till it bore on the locomotive. When the cannon fired, the noise was like the clap of doom. Hearing it, a man with a hangover might have his head fall off-and if he didn’t, he might wish he did. The shot was perfect. It went right through the boiler. Great clouds of steam rose from the engine. Only momentum kept it moving after that; it wasn’t going anywhere under its own power.

Other barrels started shelling and shooting up the passenger cars. Chester had an abstract sympathy for the soldiers in butternut who tumbled out like so many ants when their hill was kicked. The Confederates had been going toward battle, yes. They’d been thinking about it, worrying about it, no doubt. But they hadn’t expected it, not yet. Too bad for them. Life was what you got, not what you expected.

“Come on, boys,” Chester said to the men on the barrel with him. “Let’s make them even happier than they are already.”

They got down and started shooting at the dismayed Confederates from behind the barrels and whatever other cover they could find. The machine guns in the turret and at the bow of each barrel raked the scattering soldiers in butternut, too. Every so often, for variety’s sake, a cannon would lob a high-explosive shell or two into the Confederates.

A few bullets came back at the U.S. barrels and foot soldiers, but only a few. A lot of the Confederates probably hadn’t even been able to grab their weapons before they spilled from the train. Some of the ones who had were bound to be casualties. And others, instead of returning fire, were doing their best to disappear, keeping the battered railroad cars between themselves and their tormentors as they ran for the woods.

Chester wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have done the same thing. Sometimes going forward, or even staying where you were, was asking to be killed. He’d retreated more than once in the Great War, and by Fredericksburg not so long ago. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he did it again before too long.

Now, though, he was going forward. That was better. He didn’t suppose even the Confederates could disagree with him. They’d done more advancing than retreating in this war. He hoped they enjoyed going the other way.

The sergeant in charge of the barrel he rode popped out of the cupola again. “We’ve got orders to get moving,” the other noncom said. “Faster we put a ring around Pittsburgh, faster we can pound Featherston’s fuckers inside to pieces.”

Somebody was driving the U.S. forces as if a pack of wolves ran right behind them. Chester didn’t mind. They probably needed driving. If they weren’t driven, they wouldn’t do what needed doing. Even if they were, they might not.

On they went. Every so often, Confederate soldiers would shoot at them. That caused a few casualties, but only slight delays. Machine-gun and small-arms fire didn’t make the barrels slow down. They had somewhere important to go, and they wanted to get there in a hurry. More foot soldiers would be coming along behind them, and artillerymen, too. People like that could deal with the odd set of holdouts.

From everything Chester heard, Featherston’s men and barrels fought that way when they stormed through Ohio to Lake Erie, and then again this summer when they smashed east to Pittsburgh. He didn’t think the United States had ever done anything like this before. He wondered why not.

The barrels and the men who rode them and the men who tried to keep up with them did have to slow down when they passed through towns. That usually wasn’t because Confederate soldiers made stands there. Most towns held hardly any Confederates. But the people who hadn’t fled ahead of the advancing Confederate tide came out in droves to welcome the U.S. Army’s return.

Chester got handed eggs, an apple pie, a chunk of home-cured ham, and a pouch of pipe tobacco. He got snorts of booze ranging from good Scotch to raw corn liquor. He got his hand shook and his back slapped. Several pretty girls kissed him. What Rita didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If he could have stayed in any one place for a little while… But the speed of the advance helped hold him to the straight and narrow.

Locals hauled down the Stars and Bars and burned it. Up went the Stars and Stripes in its place. Chester hoped the CSA didn’t retake any of these towns. People would catch it if the Confederates did. They didn’t seem to care. “Them bastards would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” an old man said. “My pa, he fought ’em in the War of Secession. He always said they fought fair then. No more. They hanged one poor son of a bitch for thumbing his nose at ’em when they rode down the street. Hanged him from a lamppost, like he was a nigger.”

In the field, the Confederates played by the rules most of the time. Up till now, Chester hadn’t seen what they did behind the lines. It didn’t make him like them any better. It did make him think the atrocity stories he heard were more likely to be true.

Lafayette, Ohio, was a little town notable only for the red-brick tavern in the middle of it-the place looked older than God. As Chester’s barrel paused in the village square, more green-gray machines rumbled up from the south. Barrel crews and the infantrymen with them exchanged backslaps and cigarettes. “Lafayette,” Chester said happily. “Here we are!” They’d encircled the Confederates. Now-would the ring hold?

Mr. President, sir, we have got to break out from Pittsburgh,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We have got to do it right now, right this minute, the sooner the better, while the machines still have enough gas to go at least partway.”

Jake Featherston scowled at the head of the Confederate General Staff. “We’re doing all right in there,” he said.

“We are now, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’ve still got ammo. We’ve still got fuel. When we start running low…” He shook his head. “And it won’t be long, either. They’ve cut the supply routes, same as we cut the USA in half last summer.”

“If we can’t get the shit in by road or railroad, we’ll damn well fly it in,” Jake said. “That’ll keep the men fighting.”

“Sir, we’ve got a whole army in there,” Forrest replied, shaking his head. “No offense, sir, but no way in hell we can bring in enough by air to keep that many men going.”

“That isn’t what the flyboys tell me,” Jake said. “I’ve talked with ’em. They say they’re up for the job.”

“They’re lying through their teeth, Mr. President, on account of they’re scared to tell you you truth,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III declared. “You tell me who you talked to, and I’ll personally go punch the son of a bitch in the nose.”