King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
I enjoyed it. The loony tunes reference was a bit odd but still entertaining. I also had a weird experience with it since the first time I saw the name Israel I thought that you were maybe trying to obliquely reference Israel Harel but then I realized that was my brain connecting unrelated stuff and it was just a filler name. Still a solid omake and another 500 exp for Simon.The Metropolitan Clan, Ch. 29
Petersburg, Virginia
Rear-Line Trenches,
3:40 a.m., July 30, 1864
John Henry- John Henry Irons, newly of the 10th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, shifted a bit in his dugout. The weight of the pack didn't bother him to speak of, but a buckle was digging into his shoulder. He hadn't expected war to be an exercise in boredom shot through with bits and pieces of terror, but he reckoned that was how it was after all. And this? This was terror.
He'd been stronger than the common run of men for years, now. Most boys filled out and reached a man's strength and weight, he'd just kept on getting stronger. He hadn't bothered to question it, and usually hid most of that raw might to avoid trouble. Being as strong as an ox- not just as a figure of speech, but really as strong as an ox, maybe stronger, might sound good, but it could get a man in trouble if he didn't use his head. It never paid to let a man with a whip let you know everything you could do; either he'd work you half to death getting it, or he'd be afraid.
On the other hand, when he'd finally realized that Mr. Luthor wasn't lying, and that they really were manumitting slaves who exerted themselves on the railroad crews… well, he'd stopped holding back. [1] The pay was good for freedmen. He might even go back to work for the M&O again when the war was over. He… might. The ability to even think about that question, to be captain of his fate, was something he was still getting used to.
Which was why he was here, in the dark, waiting for orders from Colonel Wild- a white man, but an abolitionist at least- about what to do now that they'd been ordered out of the assault every man of them had hoped would break good old Marse Robert's army once and for all.
He was strong and he was tough, maybe tougher than any ordinary man. But his muscles wouldn't stop a bullet; he was sure of that after the quarry explosion in '61. He was scared. But he was here for a reason, and that would have to do.
From down the line, he heard a quiet voice, and a quiet answer.
"What time is it, suh?"
"...Almost four," said the officer, squinting at a pocketwatch in the light of a small candle they'd kept lit in a recess in the trench wall.
The bomb had been supposed to go off between half past three and a quarter to four.
John Henry frowned. Next to him, Israel grunted in the darkness, with only faint hints that dawn might come in a few hours' time. Then his friend spoke. "Where's the Reb-smashing kaboom? There was supposed to be a Reb-smashing kaboom."
Had something gone wrong? They waited tensely, quietly, not wanting to risk somehow giving things away. Maybe Colonel Pleasants' men were having trouble with the fuse. You couldn't drive steel for tunnel-diggers without learning how tricky a fuse could be. They waited. Minutes crept long in the summer night. The horizon behind them was turning blue. It couldn't be more than half an hour to sunrise. The sun that would reveal the attacking men to Confederates with rifles, be they white, black, or green.
Then, half a mile distant or nearly so, ruddy light flamed into being, like the sun rising in the west, in the direction of the Confederate lines. Men looking over the trenches in the dim light of the crescent moon could suddenly be seen clearly, their eyes wide. They tumbled backwards-
Thunder roared. Pleasants must have buried tons of gunpowder under the enemy trenches. A stretch of Rebel line, a hundred yards long if it was an inch, was swathed in flame-shot, volcanic chaos. Light and dark and dust and smoke danced. The echoes vibrated across the landscape. A few tiny bits- of stone or wood or metal or even flesh and bone for all John Henry knew- pattered across the ground near where he stood.
And nothing happened. And nothing happened. Nothing went on happening for such a long time. What could be going on? He could hear sounds, cries, but nothing like the sound of men in front of him attacking or defending a post.
Israel whispered to him, "Do you think Ledlie and his white boys are all asleep?"
"I don't think anyone could have slept through that."
Could they?
The lack of preparation cost Ledlie's division dearly. They did not emerge from their trenches until ten minutes after the explosion, by which point dawn had nearly arrived. This bought the Confederates time to recover from the tremendous stunning effect of the explosion, which had instantly killed nearly three hundred men in a single blow.
Whereas the colored troops had been trained to move around the crater, Ledlie's troops saw it as an enormous rifle-pit and began clambering down the sides to hold it against a counterattack. This was a disastrous mistake. Once inside the steep-sided crater, the Union soldiers would find it hard to climb back out again- they were trapped in an enormous pit. And within minutes after the delayed Union attack reached the crater itself, Confederate reinforcements under Brigadier General Mahone were rushing up to the new hole in their lines from all directions, shelling the troops trapped inside and bombarding them with bullets and shrapnel.
Trapped and exposed, Ledlie's division began suffering terrible losses, while Ledlie himself cowered in a bunker far behind Union lines, drinking liquor. Burnside ordered Ferrero to lead the colored troops into battle to rescue the situation, but their training was no longer of use in context. They had trained to attack in darkness, facing Confederates who would be dazed and immobilized by the gigantic explosion mere minutes before. But by the time they arrived, the sun was up, the explosion was an hour or more in the past, and the Confederates had had ample time to form new lines of resistance to stop any Union attacks from slipping through the gap created by the blast.
It was a frightful slaughter. The colored troops fought bravely, as did the survivors of Ledlie's division, managing to at least push back the Rebels with hand-to-hand fighting- but the effort could not be sustained. Gradually, the Confederates fought their way back to their original battle-lines, recovering all their lost ground except the crater itself. Thousands of Union men were wounded, captured by the Confederates, or both. Despite the hundreds of deaths caused by the explosion, the battle ended with Grant's army having taken over twice as many casualties as Lee's.
It was a horrific example of the limitations of pre-industrial siege warfare techniques, in the face of industrial age firepower and tactics. Grant wrote to the War Department, "It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war. Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have."
Excerpt, Metropolis at War, by Simon Sejret
City Point, Virginia
August 20, 1864
HQ, Army of the Potomac
You are Hiram Grant, called Ulysses by all men. You've settled into a stable headquarters at a manor in this town at the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers, eight miles from Petersburg.
You do not rest quietly here. The failure of what the newspapers are calling the Battle of the Crater has left you with few options for ending the siege in victory any time soon. Lee's army is well entrenched, and though you have whittled down his numbers, he still has enough men to be formidable on the defensive. Your efforts to cut the railroads into the city have met with mixed success, and the defenses are so strong that no assault seems capable of triumphing.
At least the news from afair is mostly good. Billy Sherman has the Rebels on the run around Atlanta. You'd expected Joe Johnston's Army of the Tennessee to give him a long, cagey, bloody fight- much like the one Lee's given you. But Jeff Davis must have gotten impatient, and replaced Johnston with the fiery Texan, John Bell Hood. That was a mistake, you think to yourself with a tinge of professional satisfaction that someone else's fight has gone right, thanks in part to your efforts.
You and Billy had worked hard to strengthen the Army of the Tennessee's supply line. That included cartridges for Luthor gun batteries. And Hood, for all his experience at Gettysburg, apparently hadn't taken that threat seriously- from what Meade says, probably because the guns he'd faced at Little Round Top had run out of ammunition, and it had been Chamberlain's bayonets that finally pushed Hood back.
Your friend is too canny to create an opening big enough for an attack to go through easily, and too canny not to make good use of his Luthor guns- as you've tried to do against Lee. And Hood's too bullheaded to stop trying to make an attack work. He's thrown one assault after another against Sherman's army, and they've all ended badly. By the time Billy made it to Atlanta, the rebel forces were so chewed up that they could barely hold the siege lines. He captured the city within a couple of weeks, telegraphing Washington on the ninth that "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won."
That was the same day a rebel saboteur set off a bomb in your ammunition stockpiles, killing hundreds and doing millions of dollars of damage to the wharves of your supply depot.
You take joy in Sherman's success, and wish you could boast of a similar feat of arms. But with the disaster at the Crater, there will be no quick or easy victory. And chewing away at the Confederate lines, one slow assault at a time, soaking the landscape in blood as fall turns to winter and winter to spring, is an idea you like not at all. Pounding on them with siege mortars and huge Dahlgren guns seems to make only limited impressions on their lines.
There may be a way, though. Maybe.
The president sent a letter about this new brainchild of Leland Luthor's in person. You, again, find yourself uncertain. President Lincoln is easily impressed by contraptions, sometimes. On the other hand, Luthor's endless repeaters are the real thing, though they'd be a lot more useful if they didn't jam so often. And it was his ironclad that saved the Navy at Hampton Roads.
Luthor boasts that he's found a way to break the siege of Petersburg, but that his prototypes won't be ready to deliver until some time in September or October.
For the sake of your men, you hope he's right.
[1] Notably, LS&S's decision was motivated by the realization that slavery was going to be abolished in the next 2-3 years in Maryland anyway. The company had a lot of slaves, and always had; Lucius and Leland decided that incentivizing them by 'paying' them 'credit' towards their manumission, even if it meant a loss on the company's theoretical balance sheets, would be more productive than trying to hold onto slaves who could run away at any time in an increasingly abolitionist Union that was actively fighting the pro-slavery CSA. The decision was not, to put it mildly, made out of the kindness of the Luthors' hearts..
And on the other hand we have another omake by Mystery CPU. I missed the MysteryCPU omakes as they tend to be a lot of fun and have excellent elements of comedy to them. The best part about these omakes is that the characters tend to be really grounded despite poking a bit at the ridiculousness of the situation.LexCorp Jump City is Different from LexCorp Metropolis, Right?
"No! He did not!" Felicity Smoak asked, knowing the answer even as she asked the question.
"Swear to god: Hal just climbed out of the crashed plane with the crew slapping at his behind to get the fire out. And he turns to me and says "now you can't deny I have a hot ass"," Carol Ferris finished her story by taking a sip of her wine.
Felicity laughed with Carol. At least once a month, Felicity or Carol would make the trip to the other's city to have a "LexCorp Ladies" dinner with all the senior management of LexCorp invited. Most of the time, such as this night, it was just Felicity and Carol since Roxanne liked to do her own thing, Mercy was often doing whatever the right hand person of Lex Luthor did, and Katherine and Pamela tried to spend their off nights together.
"God, the ego," Felicity shook her head.
"Thing is: he does have a hot ass- which makes sense since he is such an ass. I don't miss that, though: flying by the seat of our pants and hoping against hope that THIS crash won't crush my company. LexCorp, at least, has given me the resources to run a normal company."
At that last sentence, Felicity rose an eyebrow.
"Really? A normal company?"
"Yeah- just a normal company with, granted, a few odd projects here and there."
Felicity shook her head," Normal? Well, that may be how things in Jump City LexCorp work but...not what I've noticed in LexCorp tower."
"Now you've got to dish."
"Well, it's not that things are bad. Just...it's like a mix of a mad scientist's dreamhouse and a daycare. So, for instance, I was working in my office the other day on the ISP updates. You know, after launch stuff."
"Don't I know it. Let me tell you about the combat drones' prioritization of rabbits- because they were programmed to act like hawks."
"Yeah. Things like that. So, there I was typing up a storm, when I heard a shuffle above me in the ventilation shaft. And who did I see but the boss' mute daughter in the ventilation shafts looking down at me with a wide smile. And, here is the thing, she could speak! With a stutter, but still she could speak. And guess what her first words to me were?"
"I'm stalking you?"
"Creepy- but, no. She F-bombed me in the cheeriest voice you could imagine. She came to apologize an hour later when it turns out that another kid who is the ward of the company (and how does that work?) played a prank by telling her it was a way of saying hello. So many questions that one incident brings forth. How did Cassandra learn to speak, why did she think it was a normal thing to spy on me while in the vents, and what was she doing in the vents?"
"Well, kids can be weird. Though, I get the daycare thing."
"It's not just that. You know we have an actual two-headed Lion cub wandering Lex's level, right?"
"Yeah, Janus. I get that he's a bit of a mascot."
"Oh, yeah. Super-cute. We even named the durable glass that the new LexPhones are made of LionGlass after him. But, anyways, I was walking around to give Lex a report when I ran into him...wearing glasses on his right head."
Carol frowned at that. She liked animals, "Well, that was just mean. Putting glasses on him."
"Yeah, but I'm not sure that anyone actually put the glasses on him. He turned his right head to me, and meowed. Before using a paw to adjust the glasses."
"That's odd."
"Oh, yeah. And never mind the fact that we have ladies who wear moon crystals on them walking in the R&D halls. It's just...not what I imagined one of the fastest growing companies in the world to be like."
"Well, that's not how I run my branch. But...it sounds like you don't mind."
"Oh, it's interesting. Just...really, really weird. Like, the entire company has a " I'm going to find out that magic really exists and that there is a secret world that I'm as-of-yet unaware of" sort of vibe."
"Ha! That would so be Lex."
It says something that the one thing that keeps me from canonizing this omake is the fact that Janus adjusts the glasses with his paw (which a lions anatomy shouldn't allow it to do) rather than anything else in the omake. I'll be happy to canonize it once that tidbit is changed a bit or if MysteryCPU prefers he can keep it as is and I'll award 400 exp.
All in all it was a lot of fun to read and I look forward to seeing more.
