Free Last Orders: The War That Came Early by Harry Turtledove

knew that entirely too well. The only shelter was in shallow trenches scraped in the sand. Midway had hardly any real dirt. It was sand or rock.
    Every bombing pounded the Japanese living quarters worse. The Americans weren’t all that accurate, but they didn’t need to be. They dropped so many bombs, some were bound to hit. Those barracks halls weren’t in great shape to begin with, either. Japan had captured them from the Yankees when the Empire seized Midway. After each air raid, engineers worked to repair the damage. It grew faster than they could keep up with it.
    The only thing on Midway that the Japanese engineers went out of their way to fortify were the desalinization plant and the fuel dump that kept it going. Those got covered over with steel-reinforced concrete. Freighters brought in the stuff along with rice and munitions. They had to. Without the desalinization plant—captured from the Americans—Midway was uninhabitable by more than a handful of men. It simply didn’t have the fresh water to support more.
    When the sun came up after yet another U.S. air raid, Fujita stoodup in the trench where he’d been trying to grab a little sleep. The landscape reminded him of nothing so much as one of the shabbier suburbs of hell. Most of Midway was nothing but dunes with scraggly bits of grass here and there. The bombs tore the sorry vegetation to bits.
    They did worse to man’s works on the island. The runways were cratered. Some of the American bombs had hard, thick noses. They penetrated before their delay fuses went off. That made for more damage to things like runways. Fujita wondered if those bombs could also pierce the reinforced concrete protecting the desalinization plant.
    If they could, they hadn’t done it yet. The plant’s motors kept chugging away. It pulled salt water out of the Pacific and turned the stuff into something people could drink. The water still tasted metallic, but the doctors swore it wouldn’t hurt you. They drank it, too, so they evidently believed what they said.
    All the Japanese planes on the island hid in sandbagged revetments covered with camouflage netting. The only way a bomb could find them was by luck. Drop enough bombs and one or two were bound to get lucky. Two pyres of black, greasy smoke climbed high into the blue, blue sky. The netting burned, too, adding its smoke to that from the planes.
    The barracks … Well, the less said about the barracks, the better. They’d been pounded hard before. They were even more knocked around now. A couple of small fires burned in them, too, but those were as nothing next to the blazing airplanes.
    Another sergeant stood up a few meters from Fujita and also surveyed the damage.
“Eee!”
Ichiro Yanai said mournfully. He gave Fujita a sour grin. “Aren’t you glad you volunteered to come way the demon out here and give the round-eyed barbarians a kick in the slats?”
    “Well, I was,” Fujita answered. “But now they’re kicking
our
slats, and that isn’t half so much fun.”
    “
Hai!
You’ve sure got that right!” Yanai looked southeast, in the direction from which an American fleet would surely come. “What do we do if they send soldiers here instead of just bombing us?”
    Fujita’s glance went toward the smoldering barracks. He knew where his rifle was, but he wouldn’t want to try to get it right now. Heshrugged broad shoulders. He was a peasant from a long line of peasants; he’d been working on his father’s farm when conscription got him.
    “What can we do?” he said. “Fight till we can’t fight any more. Maybe we’ll throw them back into the sea.” His wave encompassed the whole broad, blue Pacific. “Or if we don’t … Well, our spirits will meet at the Yasukuni Shrine,
neh
?”
    “That’s right. That’s just right!” Yanai nodded vigorously. The spirits of all Japanese war dead gathered at the shrine in Tokyo. Fujita was as sure of that as he was of any religious matter.
    His eye searched