“I’m afraid not.” FitzBelmont shook his head. “Whatever it is, they’ll be keeping it secret, too.”

“I suppose so.” Potter hesitated, then asked, “Are they likely to be ahead of us? If we get hold of them about it, will they be able to give us information that would help us move faster?”

“It’s possible, certainly. I don’t know how probable it is.”

“Have to find out.” Potter wrote himself a note. He wondered whether the British and French would help the Confederacy. They’d always looked on the CSA as a poor relation, a tool to keep the United States weak but never more than a local power. But if the Confederate States had this superbomb, they wouldn’t be a local power anymore. “One more question, Professor: do you think the Germans are helping the United States?”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont looked at him over the tops of those gold-framed spectacles. “You are the Intelligence officer, General. Surely you would know better than I.”

So there, Potter thought. The truth was, he had no idea. He didn’t think anyone in the CSA did. You couldn’t find an answer if you didn’t know you should be asking the question.

Glancing at his watch, FitzBelmont said, “Is there anything else? I have to go to class in a few minutes. Some of the people I’m teaching will probably be working with me when we start real work on this-if we do.”

“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that, Professor,” Potter said. “If the damnyankees are going full speed ahead on this, we will be, too. We can’t afford not to, can we?” He imagined superbombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans off the map. Then he imagined them coming down on Philadelphia and New York City and Boston instead. He liked that much better.

Cleveland was a mess. Tom Colleton had been sure it would be a mess before his regiment got into the city. Built-up terrain was bad for barrels-too many places to ambush them. Machine-gun nests cut into the firepower edge his men had over their U.S. opponents. This was Great War fighting: block to block and house to house. It wasn’t the way the Confederates had wanted to fight this war.

Sometimes, though, you had no choice. Leaving Cleveland and its harbor untaken would have asked for worse trouble than slugging it out in the wreckage. A U.S. landing and a thrust south from the city would have played merry hell with supply lines. Meanwhile, though, a lot of good men were dying.

The only good news was that the damnyankees didn’t have as many men in the city as they might have. They’d weakened their defenses to put as much as they could into Virginia, and not all the men who’d gone were back. That let the Confederates keep pushing forward despite casualties. A lot of the big steel mills and refineries on the Flats by the lake, structures that could have turned into formidable fortresses, had already fallen. The Confederate advance had touched the Cuyahoga in a couple of places, but the men in butternut didn’t yet own bridgeheads on the east bank of the river.

Above the city, Confederate Hound Dogs and U.S. Wright fighters wrestled in the sky. When the Hound Dogs had the edge, Mule dive bombers screamed down to pound U.S. ground positions. When the Wrights gained the upper hand, they shot down the Asskickers before the bombers could deliver the goods.

Right now, the Confederates were on top in the air war. Maybe C.S. bombers had hit airstrips farther east, so U.S. fighters had trouble getting off the ground. Whatever the reason, Asskickers smashed U.S. positions that even barrels couldn’t take out. Antiaircraft fire was heavy, but antiaircraft fire was only a nuisance. Fighters were a Mule pilot’s great fear.

All the bridges over the Cuyahoga were down. Tom Colleton wondered if any bridges in the USA and the CSA didn’t have demolition charges, ready to go up at a moment’s notice. He wouldn’t have bet on it.

“Sir!” A runner came back from the line, a couple of hundred yards ahead. “Sir, looks like the damnyankees are pulling back. That machine gun that was givin’ us hell-it ain’t there no more.”

“No?” Tom’s suspicions roused before his eagerness. That was natural in anyone who’d seen more than a little war. “All right,” he said at last. “Send a patrol forward. Only a patrol, you hear me? They’re liable to be setting up to bushwhack us if we get too happy.”

“Yes, sir. Send a patrol forward.” The soldier started forward himself. He ran hunched over, dodging from cover to cover. Any runner who lasted more than twenty minutes learned that gait. Odds were it just put off the inevitable. Few runners were likely to last out the war.

Tom waited. He ordered the regimental reserve up closer to the front. If the U.S. soldiers truly had retreated, he wanted to be in position to take advantage of it. If they hadn’t… Well, the patrol would find out if they hadn’t.

The runner came back again. “Sir, they’re really gone,” he reported. “We’re moving up till we bump into ’em again.”

“Good. That’s good,” Tom said. His company commanders were up to snuff. They could see what needed doing without his telling them. He would have been angry if they’d waited for orders before advancing. He turned to his wireless man. “Get back to Division-let ’em know we’re up in square Blue-7.”

“Blue-7. Yes, sir,” the wireless man answered. When the next artillery duel started, Tom didn’t want his own side’s shells coming down on his men’s heads. Some would anyway-some always did. But there wouldn’t be so many if the gunners knew where his soldiers were.

Corpsmen wearing white smocks with the Red Cross on chest and back and helmets with the emblem painted in a white circle carried the wounded back to aid stations. “You’ll be fine,” Tom said more than once, and always hoped he wasn’t lying.

One of the injured men wore green-gray, not butternut. The corpsmen had no doubt risked their lives to bring in the Yankee. Nobody was supposed to shoot at them, but accidents-and artillery, which didn’t discriminate-happened. To be fair, U.S. medics did the same for wounded Confederates. The Geneva Convention was worth something, anyhow.

Geneva Convention or not, the smell of death filled Tom Colleton’s nostrils. So did the other stenches of war: cordite and shit and blood and fear. Just getting a whiff of that sharp, sour tang made him want to be afraid, too. It struck at an animal level, far below conscious thought.

Confederate artillery might have spared his men, but gunners in green-gray didn’t. Some of the shells gurgled as they flew through the air. Some of the bursts sounded… odd. Colleton swore. He knew what that meant. He’d known since 1915. “Gas!” he shouted, and yanked his mask out of the pouch on his belt. He pulled it on and made sure it fit snugly. “Gas!” he yelled again. This time, the mask muffled the word.

Others, though, were also taking up the cry. Somebody was beating on an empty shell casing with a wrench. The clatter penetrated the din of combat better than most other noises.

It was a hot, sticky summer day in Cleveland. It was, in fact, as hot and sticky as it ever got down in St. Matthews, South Carolina. The damnyankees had nastier winters than the Confederacy ever got, but their summers were no milder. As far as he could see, that meant they got the worst of both worlds.

Even without the mask, he didn’t feel as if he were getting enough air. With it, he might as well have been trying to breathe underwater. One of the gases the Yankees used could kill if a drop of it got on your skin. People were issued rubberized suits to protect them from the menace. Tom had never ordered his men to wear those suits. He didn’t know anybody who had. Especially in this weather, moving around in them steamed you in your own juices. Soldiers preferred risking the gas to dying of heat exhaustion, which more than a few of them had done.