American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,195

rebellion, but left him feeling gassy and bloated. He read for a while, found himself yawning, and went to bed.

Bells in the night woke him. He yawned again, enormously, put the pillow over his head, and very soon went back to sleep. When morning came, he was halfway through breakfast before he remembered the disturbance. “Those were fire bells,” he said, and then, “Good thing the fire wasn’t next door, I reckon, or I’d be burnt to a crisp right about now.”

Somebody had been burnt to a crisp. Newsboys shouted the story as they hawked their papers. “Liar’s house goes up in smoke! Read all about it!” a kid selling the Sentinel yelled.

A cold chill ran through Reggie Bartlett. He didn’t buy the Sentinel; that would have been the same as putting fifty thousand dollars in the Freedom Party’s coffer. Two streetcorners farther along, he picked up a copy of the Examiner and read it as he walked the rest of the way to Harmon’s drugstore.

He shivered again as he read. The paper reported that Thomas and Margaret Brearley had died in “a conflagration that swept their home so swiftly and violently that neither had the slightest chance to escape, which leads firemen to suspect that arson may have been involved.” It talked about Brearley’s naval career in general terms, but did not mention that he’d served aboard the Bonefish.

Jeremiah Harmon had a newspaper in his hand when Reggie walked into the drugstore. Reggie didn’t need to ask which story he was reading. “You see?” the druggist said in his mild, quiet voice.

“Oh, yes,” Reggie answered. “I see. God help me, Mr. Harmon, I sure do.”

Sylvia Enos sank into the trolley seat with a grateful sigh. She didn’t often get to sit on her way to the galoshes factory. And, better yet, the seat had a copy of the Boston Globe there for the grabbing. She snatched up the paper before anyone else could. Every penny she didn’t spend on a newspaper could go to something else, and she needed plenty of other things, with not enough pennies to go around.

Most of the front page was filled with stories about the inauguration of President Sinclair, which was set for day after tomorrow. Sylvia read all of them with greedy, gloating interest; she might not be able to vote herself, but the prospect of a Socialist president delighted her. She didn’t quite know what Upton Sinclair could do about Frank Best, but she figured he could do something.

Another prominent headline marked the fall of Belfast to the forces of the Republic of Ireland. No wonder that story got prominent play in Boston, with its large Irish population. “Now the whole of the Emerald Isle is free,” Irish General Collins was quoted as saying. The folk of Belfast might not agree—surely did not agree, else they wouldn’t have fought so grimly—but no one on this side of the Atlantic cared about their opinion.

Sylvia opened the paper to the inside pages. She picked and chose there; the factory was getting close. A headline caught her eye: REBEL ACCUSER PERISHES IN SUSPICIOUS FIRE. Most of the story was about the death of a man whose name was spelled half the time as Brierley and the other half as Brearley. He had drawn the wrath of the Freedom Party, a growing force in the CSA, the Globe’s reporter wrote, by claiming that a leading Party official in one of the Carolinas was, while in the C.S. Navy, responsible for deliberately sinking the USS Ericsson although fully aware that the war between the United States and Confederate States had ended. The Freedom Party has denied this charge, and has also denied any role in the deaths of Brierley and his wife.

The trolley came to Sylvia’s stop. It had already started rolling again before she realized she should have got off. When it stopped again, a couple of blocks later, she did get off. She knew she should hurry back to the factory—the implacable time card would dock her for every minute she was late, to say nothing of the hard time Frank Best would give her—but she couldn’t make herself move fast, not with the way her mind was whirling.

Not a British boat after all, she thought. It was the Rebs. They were the ones George worried about, and he was right. And they did it after the war was over, and the fellow who did it is still running around loose down there. She wanted