Red Delta

Book excerpt: In July of 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia scored a narrow victory over the Union Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Gettysburg. Soon after, President Abraham Lincoln was killed during a Confederate raid on the outskirts of Washington. With the war at an effective stalemate, rising opposition at home, and the growing threat of European intervention, the United States was forced to recognize the CSA as an independent nation. This victory, however, carried the seeds of disaster. Within a decade of their independence, the Confederate States began to tear themselves apart over many of the same divisive issues that had led to their breaking from the Union. By the 1970s, the former CSA is a patchwork of minor countries, often clashing with one another over resources, territory and ideology. Many blacks in these nations, seeking to escape the discrimination and subjugation they have endured since slavery's grudging end in the 1880s, have turned to guerrilla warfare, under the banner of the Brotherhood Liberation Army. The United States has largely avoided becoming involved in this and other Southern conflicts, preferring to prop up or engineer the fall of this regime or that, seeking to maintain its influence and dominance over these former states without provoking another war against the entire South. Nation reporter Terry Garrison-descendant of discredited abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison-knows this history all too well, and what it has done to him and his family. Sent to cover a momentous peace accord between the Republic of Mississippi and the BLA, he views the assignment as pointless: one more doomed attempt to bring peace to the fractious South. Then he stumbles across a soldier with an earth-shaking secret-one that could not only destroy the fragile peace in Mississippi and the Delta region, but potentially set off a new conflagration across the entire continent. But there is more to this secret than even Terry can guess. And there are those-South and North-who will stop at nothing to keep it buried... Mark Ciccone is a writer from the American Midwest, specifically Wisconsin. He writes alternate history, soft science fiction, and historical fiction. This is his first novel-length work.