Free In at the Death by Harry Turtledove Page A

Blow ’em to hell and gone. I won’t shed a tear, and you can bet your…backside on that.”
    “An interesting proposal,” the ambassador said. “I am not authorized to agree to it, but I shall put it to the Prime Minister. If he deems it feasible, we can proceed from there.”
    “How long will that take?”
    “My dear sir!” Lord Halifax spread his hands. “That’s in Winston’s court, I’m afraid, not mine. I will say he is not a man in the habit of brooking delay.”
    Featherston wondered if they really did speak the same language. He thought he understood what the British ambassador meant, but he wasn’t sure. Hoping he did, he answered, “He’d better not wait around. You’re in trouble, and so are we. The more we can help each other, the better our chances, right?”
    “One could hardly disagree,” Halifax said.
    “Fair enough.” But Jake wasn’t smiling. He was scowling. “Thing you’ve got to remember is, this cuts both ways. You want what we know about rockets—any fool can see you do. You want to get, but you don’t want to give. And I’m here to tell you, your Lordship, sir, that ain’t gonna fly.”
    Lord Halifax
was
a diplomat. If Featherston’s bluntness offended him, he didn’t let on. “I assure you, Mr. President, I intend to make your views plain to the Prime Minister. What happens after that is up to him.”
    Jake knew perfectly well he would have the hide of any Confederate ambassador who exceeded his authority. In fairness, he couldn’t blame Winston Churchill for feeling the same way. But his definition of fairness was simple. If he got what he wanted, that was fair. Anything less, and the other side was holding out on him.
    Most of the time, he admired Churchill. Like him, the Prime Minister had spent much too long as a voice crying in the wilderness. In a way, Churchill had a tougher job than he did. Britain needed to worry about fighting both the USA and the German Empire.
    But Britain hadn’t been invaded the last time around. She hadn’t been disarmed and had to start over. All she’d lost was Ireland—and the way the Irish felt about their longtime overlords meant she might be better off without it. With Ireland gone, the British didn’t have to worry about keeping the lid on a country where a third of the population hated the guts of the other two-thirds. Ireland was under British control now, to keep the USA from using it as a forward base, but military occupation had a whole different set of rules. The limeys weren’t as tough on the micks as the Freedom Party was on Confederate Negroes, but they didn’t take any crap, either.
    “Tell him not to wait around, that’s all,” Jake said. “For his sake and ours.”
    “Winston is a great many things, but not a ditherer. He may from time to time find himself mistaken. He hardly ever finds himself unsure,” Halifax said. “I do not know what his answer will be. I am confident you will have it in short order.”
    “Good. Anything else?” Jake was no ditherer, either.
    “The United States are making a good deal of propaganda capital from that camp they captured in Texas,” Lord Halifax said. “Did you have to be quite so open in your destruction of the colored populace?”
    “You know what, Your Excellency? I don’t give a shit how much the damnyankees squawk about that.” Jake wasn’t being truthful, but he didn’t care. He had to make the limey understand. “What we do inside our own country is nobody’s business but ours. We’ve had a nigger problem for hundreds of years—even before we broke away from England. Now I’m finally doing something about it, and I really don’t care who doesn’t like that. We’re going to come out of this war nigger-free, or as close to nigger-free as I can make us.”
    “Your solution is…heroic,” Halifax said.
    Jake liked that better than the British ambassador probably intended. He felt like a hero for reducing the CSA’s colored population. “I keep