Svenson had already partly disassembled the carburetor. Pound continued the attack with his own wrenches and, soon, a needle-nosed pliers and a jeweler’s screwdriver. Svenson watched with interest, occasionally offering a suggestion. He wasn’t a bad mechanic himself, but recognized Pound was a better one.

“What do you think?” the driver asked in due course.

“Looks to me like the metering rod’s not quite in synch with the throttle valve, so you get that delay when you want high power,” Pound answered. “I like a power jet better-less to go wrong. But we’ve got what we’ve got. Clean everything out there real well and it should be all right.” He crossed his fingers.

“Yah, I’ll do it, Sarge.” Some of the flat vowels of Scandinavia lingered in Svenson’s speech. “Thanks. I’m not sure I would’ve picked that up myself.”

“I expect you would have.” Pound didn’t know whether the driver would have or not, but Svenson worked hard. He was also a man whom a pat on the back helped more than a boot in the backside. He grinned a dirty-faced grin at Pound as he started setting the delicate mechanism to rights.

When they moved out the next morning, the engine was noticeably smoother. Pound reminded himself to say something nice to Svenson when they stopped somewhere. There wasn’t a lot of really open ground as they moved northwest towards Akron. Ohio was densely settled; suburbs spread from towns like tentacles. That meant a barrel commander had to have eyes in the back of his head to keep from walking into trouble.

Lieutenant Poffenberger did his best. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could look around in all directions. Staying buttoned up and using the periscopes was safer for the commander but much more dangerous for the barrel as a whole.

The open cupola also let a little fresh air into the machine. That was good; it felt hot enough in there to cook meat. At least the engine had a compartment of its own, which it hadn’t in Great War barrels. Pound wiped sweat off his forehead with a coverall sleeve and thought longingly of blizzards.

Foot soldiers trotted alongside the barrels. If they started yelling about gas-or if they started putting on masks, for they might not be heard no matter how they yelled-the machine would have to button up. That would be… even less pleasant than it was already.

For all of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s good intentions, he never saw the C.S. barrel that wrecked the one he commanded. The shot came from the side. Wham! Clang! It was like getting kicked by a mule the size of a Brontosaurus. The barrel stopped at once. The steel bulkhead between the engine compartment and the crew would hold fire at bay-for a little while.

“Holy Jesus!” Poffenberger yipped, his voice high and shrill.

“Sir, we’ve got to get out of here right now,” Michael Pound said urgently.

“Yes,” Poffenberger said. Had he said no, Pound would have clipped him and then got out anyway. Poffenberger started up through the cupola. A burst of machine-gun fire from that same Confederate barrel-or so Pound thought-made his body jerk and twitch. The lieutenant let out a thin, startled bleat and slumped back down into the turret.

He blocked Pound’s escape and the loader’s. Swearing, Pound heaved his body up again so he himself could get at the escape hatch on the far side of the turret. His hands left blood on the steel as he undogged the hatch. “Come on!” he shouted to the man who sat below him and to his left.

“What about the lieutenant?” asked the loader-his name was Jerry Fields.

“He’s gone. Get moving, goddammit! Next one hits right here.” Pound hauled himself out of the turret with his muscular arms. He crouched on the stricken barrel’s chassis, then dropped to the ground. The loader was right behind him. They used the barrel as cover against enemy fire from the flank. Flame and black smoke boiled up from the engine compartment. That would help hide them from Confederates trying to do them in.

A hatch opened at the front of the barrel. Tor Svenson and the bow gunner tumbled out one after the other. Pound shouted and waved to them. That enemy machine gun blew off the top of the bow gunner’s head. Svenson’s dash turned into a limp, and then a crawl.

As Pound crouched to bandage the driver’s leg, another armor-piercing round slammed into the barrel, just as he’d known it would. Ammunition started cooking off inside, the cheerful pop-pop-pop of machine-gun cartridges-like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July-mingling with the deeper roars of the shells for the main armament. The explosions blew what was left of Lieutenant Poffenberger’s body off the turret. More flames and smoke burst from the cupola-including a perfect smoke ring, as if Satan were puffing on a stogie.

“How is it, Svenson?” Pound asked.

“Hurts like a bastard,” the driver answered with the eerie matter-of-factness of a just-wounded man.

Pound nodded. The bullet had taken a nasty bite out of Svenson’s calf. Pound gave him a shot of morphine, then yelled for a corpsman.

“Feel naked outside the machine,” the loader said.

“No kidding,” Pound replied with feeling. He felt worse than naked-he felt like a snail yanked out of its shell. The infantrymen around him knew how to be soft-skinned slugs, but he had no idea. The.45 on his belt, a reasonable self-defense weapon for a barrel crewman, suddenly seemed a kid’s water pistol.

The war went on without him. Nobody cared that his barrel had been smashed, or that Lieutenant Poffenberger was nothing but torn, burnt, bleeding meat and the bow gunner’d had his brains blown out. Other U.S. barrels kept grinding towards Akron. For all he knew, some of them were hunting the C.S. machine that had put him out of action. Foot soldiers loped past. None of them stopped for the deshelled snails; as proper slugs, they had worries of their own.

A couple of corpsmen did come up. “All right-we’ll take charge of him,” one of them said. “Looks like you done pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Pound said. He turned to Jerry Fields. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

“Where to?” the loader asked reasonably.

“Wherever we can find somebody who’ll put us back in another barrel, or at least give us something to do,” Pound answered. “We can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure.”

He couldn’t have been righter about that. The Confederates on the U.S. flank ripped into the advancing men in green-gray. A shell from a C.S. barrel slammed into the turret of a U.S. machine, letting him see what he’d been afraid of a couple of minutes earlier. The high-velocity round almost tore the turret right off the barrel. The men inside never had a chance. They had to be hamburger even before their ammo started cooking off.

“Jesus,” Fields said beside him. “That could’ve been us.”

“Really? That never occurred to me,” Pound said. The loader, for whom sarcasm was a foreign language, gave him a peculiar look.

In the face of concentrated automatic-weapons fire, U.S. foot soldiers went down as if to a reaper. A reaper is right-a grim one, Pound thought. All he knew about infantry combat was to stay low. That didn’t seem to be enough. He pulled out the.45, in case any Confederate soldiers got close enough to make it dangerous. It didn’t seem to be enough, either.

The attack unraveled. It quickly grew obvious the U.S. soldiers weren’t going to make it to Portage Lake, let alone into Akron. Instead of going northwest, they started going southeast as fast as they could. The question became whether they would be able to hang on to Canton, and the answer looked more and more like no.

Pound hated retreats. He wanted to do things to the enemy, not have those nasty bastards on the other side do things to him. But one of the things he didn’t want them to do was kill him. He fired several rounds from the.45. He had no idea whether he hit anybody. With luck, he made some Confederates keep their heads down. Without luck… No, luck was with him, for he got back to Canton-still in U.S. hands-alive and unhurt. And as for what the powers that be came up with next-he’d worry about that later.