Dreadnought

traveling alone.” The horse took half a step forward and backward, shuffling to keep from stepping off the walkway and onto a narrow metal rail.

“Both of them things are true,” she admitted.

“You’re all by yourself, headed west from Richmond?”

“My husband died. In the war. I just learned a week ago, and now I’m going home to my daddy’s.” She did not add that her trip was going to take her another couple thousand miles west of Fort Chattanooga, because she had a feeling she knew where this conversation was going.

She wasn’t perfectly correct. Jensen-and whether that was his first name or last, she’d never asked and would never know-pulled a small cotton satchel off his chest and handed it to her. “George thought maybe you ought to take these with you. They belonged to the doctor, who was a Texan by birth, and he traveled like it.”

She took the satchel and peered inside. The light from the platform’s lamps cast a yellow white square down into the khaki bag, revealing a gunbelt loaded with a pair of six-shooters, and several boxes of bullets. Mercy said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“You ever fire a gun before?”

“Course I have. I grew up on a farm. But these are awful nice.” She looked up at him, and back at the guns. “These must be worth a lot of money.”

Jensen ran a hand through his hair, shifted, and shrugged. “I reckon they probably are. He was a good doctor, and he’d made good money before joining us out in the fronts. But our colonel is a good man, too, and he’s worth more to us than these guns. The doc won’t be needing them anymore, anyway. George just thought . . . and I thought so, too . . . that you ought to take them.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“You didn’t have to stop and pick all that iron out of poor Colonel Durant. So you take these, and we’ll call it even. So long as you take care of yourself, and have a safe trip to Fort Chattanooga.” He touched the front of his hat with a polite little bow and swung himself back up over his horse’s back. Still holding the reins of the one who’d toted Mercy, he gave his beast a tap with his heel and rode back over the tracks, back to the trees, and back to the front.

A large, nervous man in an engineer’s uniform and cap ushered everyone on board the train-a lean vehicle for all its size, identified by gold-painted script that said Birmingham Belle. It towed only two cars. One was heaped with coal, and the other was a passenger car that had seen better days, and had clearly been scared up for the occasion at the very last moment.

“Everyone on board, please. Quickly-we need to leave the yards. Let’s get all of you to town before we’re closed off for good.”

Mercy didn’t know what he meant by that, so when she finally hauled herself up the steps-the very last of the passengers being evacuated-she asked. “What could close off the yard?”

“Ma’am, please move along,” he said stiffly.

But she didn’t move from the top step.

He looked her up and down, this woman covered with someone’s blood, smudged with gunpowder from hair to gore-flecked boots, and thought it might be less trouble to tell her than to fight with her. So he said, “Ma’am, the rail junction was sewed up tight till the Dreadnought came through, carrying that mechanized walker up to the line. And they didn’t recall that miserable machine back to Washington-it’s still here, crawling the tracks. Prowling around, tearing up everything it meets. So we’ve got to get out of its way.”

“It’s coming here? Now? For us?”

“We don’t know!” He sounded almost frantic. “Please, ma’am. Just get aboard so we can fire up the engine and take you someplace safe.”

She allowed herself to be ushered into the car and down to a seat that was really just a bench bolted into the floor. Her head fell slowly against the window. She didn’t sleep, but she breathed deeply and crushed her eyes shut when someplace, far too close, a train whistle pierced the coming dawn.

Six

The Birmingham Belle rolled into Fort Chattanooga as the sun rose over the green-covered Appalachian ridges that welled up around the Tennessee River. The motion of the train must’ve lulled Mercy more than she’d imagined, because she didn’t remember much of the getting there-only the rollicking lurch of the vehicle’s progress, clipping along the rails.

There was a station there-a proper station, with rows of platforms and a cafe, and porters and patrons and clocks-out on the south side of the city, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain. Mercy lowered her window and leaned her head out to catch the morning air and refresh herself, inasmuch as possible. She smelled soot, and more diesel fuel. She whiffed coal dust, ash, and manure; and over the clatter of the arriving train, she heard the lowing of cattle and the natterings of goats, sheep, and the people who ushered them along.

The Birmingham Belle stopped with an exhausted sigh, seeming to settle on its rails. A few minutes later, the engineer himself drew out the passenger steps and opened the doors to release them.

All of them, from the Zephyr folks to the strangers who’d likewise required evacuation from Cleveland or the railyards, stumbled into the light and blinked against the steam that clouded the platform like battlefield smoke.

The Fort Chattanooga Metropolitan Transit Station looked unaccountably normal.

Laborers moved luggage, supplies, and coal in every direction-some carried right along the platforms, and some pumped by hand-moved carts that clung to the rails, darting between the trains at every switch and junction. Scores of dark-skinned men in red uniforms did most of the toting and directing, guiding the flow of everything that must come and go from a train, including people.

None of them were slaves anymore, and most hadn’t been for years. Like Virginia and North Carolina, Tennessee had ratified an amendment abolishing the practice back in the late 1860s, over the grumbles and general disapproval from the deeper Confederacy. But preaching states’ rights was only talk if a nation wouldn’t uphold its own principles, so these three upper states got their way. Over the next ten years, most of the others followed suit, and now only Mississippi and Alabama held out . . . though there were rumors that even these two bastions of the Peculiar Institution might crack within the next year or two. After all, even South Carolina had caved to English abolitionist pressure in 1872.

Like so many things, in the end it had come down not to a matter of principle, but a matter of practicality. The Union had more warm bodies to throw at a war, and the Confederacy needed to harness a few of its own or, at the very least, quit using them to police its vast legions of imported labor.

It was Florida that first got the idea to offer land grants as added incentive to settle or sign up and fight. Texas caught on shortly thereafter, inviting the former slave population to homestead for almost precisely the same reason as Florida-an enormous Spanish population that had never quite come to terms with its territory loss. Besides, Texas was its own republic, with plenty of farmland available, and its informal allies in the Confederacy had an army to feed. In 1869, the governor of Texas said to a local newspaper, “Looks like easy math to me: We need people to grow food, and we’ve got nothing but room to farm it, so bring in the free blacks and let them break their backs on their own land for a change.”

Florida was already sitting on a large free colored population, mostly courted from the Carolinas by the Catholic missions in the previous century; and besides, Texas was nursing a war on two fronts: against the Union to the northeast (though not, of course, officially) and with growing ranks of dissatisfied Mexican separatists from the south and west. These two states had the most to gain from claiming the ex-slaves as their own, inviting them to make themselves comfortable, and calling them citizens. This was not to say that things were egalitarian and easy for the free blacks, but at least they were employees rather than property throughout much of the CSA these days.

There in Tennessee, a great number of freed slaves had found themselves welcoming their brethren from