The count went wrong. For one thing, there’d been the influx of new prisoners. For another…The scrawny Negro standing next to Scipio muttered, “These ofays so fuckin’ dumb, they can’t count to twenty-one without playin’ with themselves.”

In spite of everything, Scipio snorted. “Thank you,” he whispered-he’d already seen making noise during roll call could win you a beating.

“Fo’ what?” the other black man said. “Ain’t nothin’ to thank nobody for, not here. I’s Vitellius. Who you be?”

The real Vitellius, if Scipio remembered straight, had been a fat man. This fellow didn’t live up to the name. “I’s Xerxes,” Scipio replied. That was funny, too, in the wrong kind of way. He’d used Xerxes for years, fearing his own handle might get him sent to a camp. Well, here he was. What more could they do to him? One way or another, he’d find out.

Major General Abner Dowling’s guns pounded Lubbock, Texas. Confederate artillery in and behind the city sent high-explosive death northwest toward Dowling’s Eleventh Army. Back East, the Eleventh Army wouldn’t even have made a decent corps; it had about a division and a half’s worth of men. But the war out here in the wide open spaces ran on a shoestring, as the last one had. Dowling’s men outnumbered the Confederates defending Lubbock.

Jake Featherston’s soldiers were fighting with everything they had, though. He couldn’t push them out of Lubbock, and he couldn’t flank them out, either. Up till recently, it hadn’t mattered. As long as he kept them too busy to send reinforcements east to help rescue their army in Pittsburgh, he was doing his job.

But now Pittsburgh wouldn’t fall to the CSA. Now Lubbock became valuable for its own sake, or as valuable as a city of 20,000 in the middle of nowhere could be. Dowling’s headquarters lay in Littlefield, the last town northwest of Lubbock. He studied the map. He’d tried outflanking the Confederates to the south. Maybe if he swung around to the north this time…