Free Beneath Gray Skies by Hugh Ashton

we could have put a cruiser or two conveniently in the neighborhood and picked up the survivors and interned them somewhere handy, like the Falklands.”
     
    “But that’s not going to happen, sir?”
     
    “Correct. It is not going to happen, Dowling. Which is why I have decided I want you to go to Bremen and wait there for our friend Bloody Brian. Get him out of that damned Confederate army uniform, and bring him back here.”
     
    “What if he won’t listen to me, sir?”
     
    “Kill him.”
     

Chapter 9: The CSS Robert E. Lee , somewhere in the North Atlantic
    “ Armies the world over, what? Hurry up and wait. Always the way.”
     
    C orporal David Slater wished he was somewhere else. He’d asked Brian how he could stop being seasick, and Brian told him, grinning, that sitting under a tree was a sure-fire cure. David, retching horribly, hadn’t thought that Brian’s joke was funny, and told him to go away and find a tree of his own to sit under.
    The
Robert E. Lee
had been built a little before the Great European War as a luxury ocean liner, named after the great Confederate general, whose mere reputation, so it was said, had been enough to prevent the Yankees from invading the Southerners’ homeland. The
Lee
had been designed to take wealthy passengers between New Orleans and the islands of the Caribbean, but a number of matters had put paid to that notion. Almost no-one in the CSA could afford the prices that the
Lee
’s owners were asking. Naturally, no Union passengers would travel on a Confed ship, and there were not enough Europeans who had both the money and the lack of conscience that would allow them to travel in luxury on a ship where the stokers and half of the crew were slaves, kept in line with the lash. The half-slave crew also meant that the ports of most Western countries refused entry to the
Robert E. Lee
. And then, as a final blow to the
Lee
’s owners, the Great European War had started.
     
    The
Robert E. Lee
had been turned over to the government by her owners for a nominal sum soon after all these things became apparent, and she spent most of her time slowly rusting in New Orleans harbor, kept in reserve as a general-purpose carrier. Among other things, she’d run guns to the white minority in Haiti in 1914, and a small expeditionary force to the Virgin Islands in 1915, when it looked as though there was a chance of Denmark’s being invaded by Germany, and the CSA could take advantage of the distraction (the invading force had been swiftly and ignominiously repelled by a militia armed with nothing heavier than an antique 2-pounder artillery piece).
     
    Designed for cruises in the Caribbean, the
Lee
was straining in the heavy seas of the North Atlantic. As her bow pitched down, her screws thrashed wildly in the air, sending a hideous shudder through the whole length of the hull. Then, with a sickening lurch, the stern crashed down as the ship rolled to the left (left on a ship was called “port”, Brian had told David), and the creak of the plates set David’s teeth on edge.
     
    David, along with eleven other soldiers, was sharing a stateroom originally built for two passengers. They were sleeping in jury-rigged bunks, but traces of luxury remained. The mirror over the sink in the bathroom where David examined his face daily for the growth of a hardly existent mustache still had a gold filigree frame to it, but twelve Confederate soldiers, chewing and spitting constantly, had soon covered the red and gold carpet with brown stains. David had tried chewing soon after he’d joined the army, but it made him feel sick. Brian mostly didn’t chew, but since the
Lee
had run into heavy seas, he’d started to chew all the time.
     
    “Keeps my mind from wandering,” he had said with a faint smile.
     
    The company’s office was located in what had been the walk-in closet of the stateroom on the top deck where David’s Captain and two other officers were bunking. The rolling and