The Grapple by Harry Turtledove

seem to be trying.” The Assistant Secretary of War sounded less jaunty than was his wont.
    Fear clogged Flora’s throat. If the cities blown off the map belonged to the USA, Jake Featherston would win his war in spite of the disasters the Confederates had suffered in Pennsylvania and Ohio. “What can we do about that?” she asked. “Can we do anything?”
    “We won’t let them get away with it if we can possibly stop them, I promise you that,” Roosevelt said.
    “Good,” Flora said, before she asked herself how good it really was. What had Roosevelt promised? To stop the CSA from building a uranium bomb? No. He’d promised to try to stop the Confederates from building one. Of course the United States would do that. Flora found one more question: “What can they do to stop us?”
    “They haven’t tried anything yet,” Roosevelt said—another answer that wasn’t an answer. He went on, “They may have done some reconnaissance—we’re not sure about that. If they did, they won’t be able to do it again. We’ve tightened up since the last time we think they came around.”
    “Why weren’t things tight right from the beginning?” Flora admired her own restraint. She didn’t raise her voice at all, no matter how much she felt like yelling her head off.
    “Because we were asleep at the switch.” Roosevelt could be disarmingly frank. “We aren’t any more. We won’t be, either. That’s about the best I can tell you, Flora.”
    “All right,” she said, and hoped it was. “I’m sure we’ll do everything we can.” She said her good-byes then. She hoped the USA bombed the Confederates’ uranium-producing plants to hell and gone. She hoped the CSA didn’t do the same to the one the United States had. Was such hope enough? The only answer that occurred to her was painfully clichéd, which made it no less true. She’d have to wait and see.

III
    M ail call!” That shout always made the guards at Camp Determination hurry up to see what they had. Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t as good at hurrying as some of his younger, sprier comrades. He was still on the sunny side of fifty, but moved like an older man. He’d almost got electrocuted a year and a half earlier, and he’d never been the same since. He belonged to the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who couldn’t hope to fight at the front, but who could still serve the CSA behind the lines.
    All the men at Camp Determination, whether from the Veterans’ Brigades or not, were Freedom Party guards, with the funny ranks that accompanied Party positions. Rodriguez had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform. He thought of himself as a sergeant. He did a sergeant’s job and got a sergeant’s pay. If they wanted to call him something silly, who was he to tell them they couldn’t?
    Because he had three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez didn’t need to hurry as much as ordinary guards did. They got out of the way for him. They never would have if he hadn’t been promoted. To most Confederates, greasers from Chihuahua and Sonora were only a short step up from niggers. Rank carried more weight than race, though.
    And a short step could be the longest step in the world. Hipolito Rodriguez—Hip to men who grew up speaking English—wasn’t the only guard with Mexican blood. On the other side of the barbed wire were untold thousands of
mallates.
And the camp outside of Snyder, Texas, existed for one reason and one reason only: to kill them off as fast as possible.
    The two-stripe assistant troop leader with the sack of mail started pulling out letters and stacks of letters held together by rubber bands and calling off names. As each guard admitted he was there, the corporal tossed him whatever he had.
    “Rodriguez!” The noncom, a white man, made a mess of the name. Confederates born anywhere east of Texas usually did.
    “Here!” Rodriguez knew the ways they usually butchered it. He raised his hand. The corporal gave him