issued in his name are to be obeyed.'
Sam wondered exactly what that meant, too. Had Willy Knight tried to get the Army, or some of it, to move against Jake Featherston? If he had, it didn't sound as if he'd had much luck. Luck or not, though, nobody in either the USA or the CSA had ever tried to play that particular game before.
'He wanted to put on a Napoleon suit, but it turned out to be three sizes too big,' Sam judged. Both yeomen in the wireless shack nodded this time.
He hung around the wireless shack, hoping for more details, but no more seemed forthcoming. About ten minutes later, the klaxons began to hoot, ordering the crew to general quarters. He thought it was a drill. He hoped it was a drill. He got down to his station in the bowels of the Remembrance in jig time even so.
'What the hell's going on, sir?' a sailor in the damage-control party asked. 'They ain't sprung one of these on us in a while.'
'I'm not sure,' said Sam, who had a pretty good idea. 'Maybe Lieutenant Commander Pottinger knows more about it than I do.'
But when Pottinger got there half a minute later, he said, 'Now what?' in tones mightily aggrieved. He proceeded to explain himself: 'I was in the head, God damn it, when the hooters started screeching.'
A couple of sailors smiled. Nobody laughed. That had happened to every man who'd been in the Navy more than a few months. Carsten said, 'Well, sir, I don't know for certain, but…' He told what he'd heard about Willy Knight.
'Shit.' Pottinger didn't usually talk that way; maybe his recent misadventure preyed on his mind. He gathered himself and went on, 'What the hell are the Confederates going to do now?'
'Beats me, sir,' Sam answered. 'But I expect it explains the general-quarters call: they want to make damn sure they don't go and do it to us.'
'Makes sense,' Pottinger agreed. He shifted uncomfortably. 'If they keep us here too long, though, I'm going to need a honey bucket.' Again, nobody laughed. Carsten approved of an officer who wouldn't abandon his post even in the face of what would ordinarily have been an urgent need.
The all-clear sounded before Lieutenant Commander Pottinger was reduced to such indignities. The officer in charge of the damage-control party left with dignified haste.
Carsten headed back to the wireless shack. He found the door closed against snoopy interlopers like himself. Somebody on the Remembrance was taking the news out of the CSA very seriously indeed. Sam's suspicions fell on Commander Cressy. Taking things seriously was how the exec earned his pay.
Balked from getting more news, Sam went out on the flight deck. By the rumors flying among the sailors there, the powers that be had shut the door to the wireless shack too late. Somebody claimed Willy Knight had already been shot. Somebody else said he was still in jail, awaiting trial as a U.S. spy. A grizzled bosun insisted Knight had been trying to flee up into Maryland when he was caught. Other claims seemed to spring from thin air.
Some of them were probably true. Sam had no idea which, though. He listened to them all, admiring the ones he found most impressive. He might have done the same thing watching girls on a street corner in a liberty port.
The Remembrance pitched a little as she steamed south, but the sea was a lot calmer here than it would have been in the open waters of the North Atlantic at this time of year. The sun shone down out of a sky mostly blue. In these latitudes, even the winter sun could burn Sam's tender hide. Sea birds scudded along the breeze or dove into the ocean after fish.
But that buzz Carsten heard didn't come from gulls or petrels. Those were aeroplane motors-and they weren't the motors of the machines aboard the Remembrance. This was a different note. Peering west, Sam saw several brightly painted aeroplanes nearing the carrier. They zoomed past low enough for him to read the words confederate citrus company on their sides.
A sailor saluted the machines from the CSA with his middle finger. Another man said, 'I hear those bastards all have guns in 'em these days.'
Sam had heard the same thing. As with the news about Willy Knight, he didn't know how much to believe, but there was probably a fire somewhere under all that smoke. A petty officer said, 'We ought to splash a couple of 'em, fish 'em out of the drink, and damn well see for ourselves.'
That took things right to the edge, because a lot of sailors were nodding. Sam felt he had to draw back a step or two, and he did: 'We don't shoot at them unless they shoot first, or unless we get orders from the skipper, which means orders from the Navy Department back in Philadelphia.'
That petty officer muttered something Carsten decided he didn't have to notice in any official way. Just as well, too, for it wasn't a compliment. The fellow knew he was a mustang, and wondered why he took the attitudes of ordinary officers. That was what it amounted to, anyhow; the way the petty officer put it, it would have knocked down one of those confederate citrus company machines without bothering about the carrier's antiaircraft guns.
Both the flyby and the news out of the CSA got kicked around in the officers' mess that evening. The foulmouthed petty officer might have been surprised, for a lot of the officers he'd sneered at agreed with him. 'Those Confederate bastards are just poking at us, seeing how much they can get away with,' was a common sentiment. 'We ought to break their fingers for 'em, remind 'em who won the last war.'
'Maybe this business with Knight means they'll start fighting among themselves and leave us alone for a while,' a lieutenant said.
'Don't bet on it.' Commander Cressy entered the fray with his usual authority. 'If they'd got rid of Featherston, then, maybe. The way things are, he just gets the excuse to clamp down harder.'
'Wonder if Knight really was spying for us,' a lieutenant commander said.
In your dreams, Carsten thought. He didn't say that, not to an officer two grades senior to him, but he held the opinion very strongly.
And he wasn't the only one, for the executive officer snorted and said, 'Not likely. He's done us too much harm over the years to make it easy to believe he was on our side all along. But we can deny it till we're blue in the face, and that won't do us any good.'
'Wonder what excuse Knight had for getting rid of him,' someone said. 'Whatever it was, too bad it didn't work.'
'Featherston is going to run again, and Knight didn't think he should,' Sam said. 'Knight figured he was going to get elected this coming November, but their Constitutional amendment screwed his chances.'
'Could be,' Commander Cressy said. 'Could be, but we don't know for sure. The Confederates are saying Knight was the guy behind those fellows who tried to shoot Featherston, but how do we know that's true? Far as I can see, we don't. Featherston might be using the assassination attempt as an excuse to get rid of Knight, regardless of whether he really had anything to do with it.'
That cynical assessment stopped talk in its tracks. At last, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger whistled in reluctant admiration. 'You don't believe in anything, do you, sir?' he said.
'Not without evidence,' Cressy answered at once. 'We haven't got any, except for what the Confederate wireless says. And the Confederate wireless lies. It lies like a drunk telling his wife what happened to the grocery money. Are you going to trust it just because it says something you might want to hear?'
Again, no one spoke for a little while. Sam eyed the exec with real respect. He had believed the wireless reports from the CSA. They were the only news he had, so why not believe them? He hadn't found any reason not to, but Commander Cressy had-and a damn good reason, too.
'Makes it harder to figure out what the Confederates are up to if we can't believe anything they say,' he remarked.
'That's not our worry,' Cressy said. 'The way I look at things is, we don't believe any of it till we either have evidence of our own that we should or until our superiors tell us what's true and what isn't. You can bet they've got spies inside the CSA finding out what the straight dope is.'
I hope they do. They'd be damn fools if they didn't, Carsten thought. That cheered him, but not for long. A lifetime in the Navy had convinced him that a lot of his superiors were damn fools, and the only thing he could do about it was try to keep them from causing as much harm as possible.
He did say, 'I wonder how many spies the Confederates have in the USA.'
Nobody answered the question, which produced a chilly silence in the wardroom. He might have started
