A Private Little War (10 page)

Ted had set a clock of his own and had placed it proudly on the bedside table in his tent. It’d been the last thing he’d done before going to bed that night, putting 8,500 hours and change on the display and setting it to count down. He’d felt good about things. Strong.

The two walled cities that straddled the river had been taken in short order, soon after Flyboy’s arrival in the area, and everything had looked good. The fighting had been almost comically one-sided and, on the ground, the pilots amused themselves with impressions of the combat formations of the enemy—every one of them involving turning one’s back and running as fast as possible away. On the night that Riverbend had been taken, the local mercs—the foot-sloggers and tin-hats, leading their companies of Akaveen indigs—had celebrated and accidentally burned half of it to the ground. Ted’s pilots had seen the smoke and flames from the air, thought it a counterattack, and nearly bombed the whole lot of them. Everyone had a good laugh about it the next morning, but walking the new front—boots scuffing broken cobblestones, pacing the smashed reaches of the walls along the river that had been breached by Flyboy bombs, and stepping over shattered, burnt bodies that already smelled worse in death than they had in life—Ted had seen many of the victorious merc infantry commanders down by the water scrubbing blood and hair off their body armor and greatcoats, so had always wondered how accidental that fire had really been.

The war had moved up to the high moors—the Sispetain moors, in the language of the fingernail monsters. After almost a year, just when
Ted’s clock had been tickling zero, it’d advanced over the foothills until the backside of the mountains they’d seen on insertion had been in sight. His pilots had flown and fought and performed beautifully—all early timidity or anxiousness gone. It was a job and they were the men to do it. Orders came in. Orders were executed. Everyone ate steaks for dinner, sucked fire, and shit high explosives. In that first year, Ted lost three men, but not one of them to combat. There’d been a mechanic who’d had an accident (a plane had fallen on him). Another—Gottlieb, was that his name?—had caught some kind of weird infection that’d taken him down in a day and left him comatose and on a permanent antibiotic drip. And one of the controllers had drank himself half to death and just plain lost his shit. All three had been extracted by the company. All three had been alive when they’d left and probably still were today. It was strange, but Ted couldn’t remember any of them. Not really. Maybe it was because none of them were pilots. Ted’s pilots had been inviolate. Untouchable.

Sitting in his tent in the dark, with his eyes closed, his lamps extinguished, Ted thought hard about the men who’d been shipped home. One of them might’ve been called William, he thought. Or Williams. He just wasn’t sure.

A year. They’d been on track to almost making the deadline. Coming really close. Within weeks, Ted remembered thinking at the time, and had made similar promises to corporate—speaking through cutouts, to men who reported to other men who reported to other men.

The moors, where they rose and brushed against the feet of the mountains, were the last big part of the map that’d needed to be pacified before pushing on to the cities of the coast with no enemies left at their backs. The thinking was that with one last push—a combined operation utilizing all available forces in the area—the enemy could be broken there, out in the open, in the fields where the slaughter would be extraordinary.

And that was the way things had been going right up until they’d inexplicably turned and gone the other. Marie had died on the moors. Connelly lost more of his indigs than could be counted. Twenty human officers had gone out one night from the Palas FOB with a thousand native troops on a quick march to a collapsing flank position and just
disappeared—none of them ever seen again. Skirmishers from Applied Outcomes would report armies massing, and by the time main body troops could be brought to position, the armies would’ve vanished and it would be nothing but ambush after ambush for miles of hard walking.

Native troops defected in the night, abandoning their lines, then leading the enemy back through the holes they’d created by their absence; leading them unerringly and silently to the bodies of their sleeping friends who would only wake when the blades were going into their skulls, at a weak point in the bone structure between the eyes. Wherever the Akaveen lines of advance were weakest, the path most narrow, Lassateirra indigs would seem to rise from the ugly ground to smash through the ranks. They came from behind, from below, from God only knew where. More than one human officer, stepping out a pace into the dark for a piss or a breath free of the stink of his own native troops, would be found, five minutes or an hour later, with his throat cut, his own dick in his mouth, and when engineers from Cavalier would try to build earthworks of loam and sod, they’d find the earth already choked with bones no matter where they dug. What had been a fight against a few became a war against thousands, tens of thousands, until no square foot of the high moors felt safe that wasn’t actively burning or already stacked with the dead.

Things got spooky. Sispetain became like a curse word, something that no one wanted to say out loud. Pieces of it took on an almost animate malice and so were given names. Diller’s Cut, the Gap, Cadillac Ridge, the Rockpile—all marks on the corporate maps, renamed by the men who killed and died there because their original, alien names were too long or ridiculous or unpronounceable.

Even the ground seemed angry and would open like a mouth in places for no good reason and swallow men whole. In the aftermath, no one had been exactly sure how it’d happened—the losing. The math had all been so solid. On paper, everyone involved should’ve already been at home, drinking whiskey and polishing their medals.

There was a saying, coined by men supposedly much smarter than Ted Prinzi, which said that every war looked perfect on paper but that true leadership was knowing what to do when your war moved off paper, out of the boardroom, and down into the mud. That was what Connelly
had said to him on that night they’d first met, after the exchange of pleasantries, before Ted had kicked everyone out.

“Look,” he’d said. “You have your orders.”

“I have my orders.”

“But I have to tell you this, Commander. There’s this saying. Not mine, but I like it. And it says that while wars might be
planned
on paper, they are all fought down in the mud. Do you know this saying?”

“Not my war.”

“What?”

“Not. My. War,” Ted had repeated slowly, and jerked a thumb up into the air. “I don’t fight in the mud.”

Connelly had shaken his head. “You’re not understanding me. What I mean is, everything looks very nice on paper, but those papers were not written on Iaxo. This place… I don’t want to worry you or anything. I’m not trying to…” He’d struggled for just the right words, pressing his tongue against his teeth and grunting something that might have been alien talk and might’ve just been frustration. “You’re going to die here thinking like that. Leadership, this saying says, is knowing what to do when your war moves off the paper and down into the mud. And we are
all
here now. In the mud.”

“Not me, friend,” Ted had said. “That’s why God invented airplanes.”

In his tent, Ted laid his hand flat over the folded paper on his table. He opened his eyes and watched his own hand, as if not entirely sure what it was going to do. Whether it was going to crumple the orders, leave them, open them.

People said all sorts of things about Connelly. Bad things. Some of them probably true. Ted said lots of bad things about Connelly, too. He’d called the man every name there was. Held him up in his own head like an avatar—the embodiment of the thing he did not ever want to become.

The clock on Ted’s bedside table now read -8,041 hours. He thought about resetting it to zero, starting a new kind of countdown, but didn’t have the energy. He was so tired.

Thinking back, Ted wished he knew who’d made up that saying in the first place, about the papers and the mud. He wanted to find the man who’d first said that and kill him right fucking dead.

Carter had left the tent and Cat behind and drank his bottle walking now. He listened to the night sounds: the rustle of tent canvas moving in the frigid breeze, the scrape and jingle of hoodoo charms hung around the neck of an indig sentry pacing his watch, footsteps crunching in the frozen grass, and the snort of a native post horse, the animal hitched and asleep on all six of its feet.

Everything on Iaxo except the indigs had too many feet by some multiple of two. It was another reason why Carter didn’t like it here. Not a big one, but a reason. He took a swallow from the bottle and spit between his teeth.

It was cold. Even in all his gear, it was cold. What he wanted was another cigarette, but there were none. He’d smoked the last of his allotment weeks ago, had won a few more gambling, then smoked those, too. The indigs all smoked stubby pipes filled with a thick, mossy black flora cut with wood shavings for flavor. It made them weird if they smoked enough of it. Weirder than normal. And lit, the mixture smelled like cedar and tasted of burning hair. Carter had tried it, of course. Everyone had. It did nothing but make him sick.

Ted apparently had a stash of cigarettes, and Carter considered trying to find them, steal them, blame it on the natives. He contented himself by stoking the inner furnace with another pull from Fenn’s bottle instead and turning up his collar around his ears. He thought about how much of a man’s life is determined by what terrible things he chooses not to do.

He walked south through darkness, making for the dim glow of the mess and the close-cut grass of the airfield, stepping finally off the quarter line and onto the clipped fringe of A strip. He crossed at a run out of habit, reflexively glancing skyward and listening for the grumble of a descending engine cycling down. There were lights burning in the longhouse. In the infield, generators were chugging. Once he was clear of the strip and onto the opposite apron, he slowed again, childishly kicking his toes at the frozen ground with each step, stalling as best he could while still, technically, making his way to where his presence was required.

On the field, Fenn was organizing the unloading of the drop as best as such a thing could be organized. He’d made sure no one had been crushed by the containers coming in, had stood amid the close-pressed mass of men while they’d watched the big boxes steaming, throwing off residual heat and warming them like an invisible fire. When they were cool enough to be cracked, he’d prepared an expedition to the machine shop to fetch generators and lights and pry bars and mallets—making sure that the men were supplied with enough drink to make it there and back safely. They had, but it’d taken them almost a half hour to stagger a couple hundred yards and come back again. And they’d lost at least two men in the process who wouldn’t be found again until morning because war was hell even in the quietest of moments.

Back in the field house, the boys had all been drinking party liquor made from dried alien fruit and antifreeze, boiled, condensed, and dripped through gas mask filters. Before Carter had left them to go and try to sleep, before Ted had come and screwed up all the fun, they’d been playing poker under the spectral glow of a halo lamp, betting with corks and shell casings or gambling away their days off and roster positions. Vic had been there for a minute. Tommy Hill and Lefty from Carter’s squadron. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3
^rd
. Billy Stitches and Morris Ross and Wolfe and Stork and Johnny and some of the mechanics and ground crew as well. Everyone was having trouble sleeping these days. No one liked the mornings, but the nights were becoming unbearable.

Fenn had been talking to someone and so had missed most of Carter’s departure, catching only the end of it, which had involved an overturned chair and hard words and the men all jeering him as he’d left—laughing and making jokes about missing his beauty sleep. Someone had bounced a cork off the back of Carter’s head. More laughter. Carter’d given the lot of them the one-finger salute, pushed through the door, and made for his tent without saying a word to Fenn.