Ghosts of Time by Steve White

Author:Steve White [White, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, science fiction, General, Action & Adventure, Time Travel
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2014-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For all its ear-shattering shriek of brakes, the locomotive couldn’t stop short of the break in the tracks. It veered off the tracks, pulling the train of freight cars with it, toppling over the right side of the embankment and crashing onto its side with a roar and a scream of escaped steam. Then the car immediately behind it rammed into it and its boiler exploded, spewing red-hot cinders.

The yells of the sixty waiting Rangers split the frigid mid-January night as they spurred their horses from the trees along the southern side of the tracks. The few Union guards were still trying to hold onto the tops of the now wildly canted freight cars. Most of them simply threw away their rifles and surrendered, or else fled into the darkness, down the slope toward the upper Potomac River. Most of the shooting consisted of Rangers discharging their Colts into the air to emphasize the ill-advisedness of resistance.

Angus Aiken blazed away with the best of them, just as glad that he wasn’t having to actually shoot anyone as an alternative to being shot himself. Not that he was unwilling to do so, after some of the things he had seen in the last two weeks.

He had lived as the other Rangers did, boarding with pro-Southern families. He’d been constantly on the move, for Sheridan had continued to send cavalry raids through Mosby’s Confederacy and nearby areas of the valley. Aiken had seen the results when a Ranger was found at a farm. The fences of such a farm were destroyed, all livestock except one milk cow were confiscated, and a warning was issued that if partisan activities continued the entire area would be devastated and all civilians relocated elsewhere. Aiken was not unaware that such things, and worse, had happened before in Western warfare, but it still seemed to him like a grim foretaste of the total war of the twentieth century. Perhaps the fact that it was happening to people who had befriended him made a difference.

Between these raids and Mosby’s absence, Sheridan had become convinced he could economize on security for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the northern reaches of the valley, a long-standing victim of Mosby’s raids. So he had dismissed the Maryland 2nd Eastern Shore Infantry regiment from Duffield’s Depot, leaving only Colonel Marcus Reno’s 12th Pennsylvania Cavalry near Charlestown, south of the B&O, and infantry pickets along the Winchester and Potomac Railroad that joined the B&O at nearby Harper’s Ferry.

The reorganization of the Rangers as the 43rd Virginia Cavalry regiment had become official on January 9, with the still convalescent Mosby as a full colonel. Due to some bureaucratic snag, Chapman’s and Richards’ promotions had still not been authorized. But they continued to command their battalions as captains. Richards, operating in the Valley almost as freely as in upper Fauquier County, had excellent intelligence of Sheridan’s moves, and knew of the new weakness. He had crossed the Shenandoah River and slipped past Reno to this spot, a mile and a half east of the now undefended Duffield’s Depot.

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