A Private Little War (12 page)

When it was done, he nodded his head once and sat back down again, sucking on his burned fingers like a child. If anyone at comms needed him, they could come find him. He was the goddamn commander, after all. No need for him to be everywhere at once.

CARTER’S PLANE WAS CALLED ROADRUNNER AND IT WAS HIS BABY
, his best girl, queen of Iaxo’s maddeningly not-quite-earthly sky. She was done up in mottled gray, black, and white night-fighter camo with laughing skulls and swords and flaming spades painted slapdash onto her doped skin of fire-retardant cloth. Childish, but severe. The natural result of drink and paint and too much time on his hands.

She was a mutt, a Sopwith fighter with a little Spad blood dirtying up her clean lines—short in the nose like a Pup with a Camel’s forward-leaning wings, but boxy in the tail after the fashion of the elder Spads, modeled on the best notions of those primordial aeronautics hobbyists (Blériot and Saulnier; Béchereau; Herbert Smith; the Italian, Rosatelli; Camm and Fokker) who’d invented the idea of killing from the air centuries ago; with a few improvements in weight and airframe dreamed up by the generations of flight engineers who became heir to all that wicked knowledge.

When Carter chose, she could be the fastest thing in the sky—which was to say faster than the few birds that lived here, the bugs, and the clouds shushing icily above him, which were the only competition. Only now, he did not want her to be fast. Now, they—Roadrunner and he—were moving as slowly as any unnatural creature of the air
might while still
remaining
a creature of the air and not suddenly choking out, stalling, and becoming a creature as one with the cold, hard, and distant ground. He could feel her moving from good air to bad, could feel the slide of lift along her control surfaces. He could feel her bucking and struggling as they chugged along because she was a machine that wanted to fly, to climb; that wanted never to descend into the drab oppression of gravity. And on that one point, Roadrunner and her pilot were in absolute agreement. Neither had ever done so well with their gear on the ground as they did in the air.

Roadrunner’s instrumentation was archaic. There was a compass (oriented for a different polar environment), dial altimeter, pitch-and-roll bubble, fuel stick, airspeed indicator, engine RPM and pressure and temperature gauges. Here, on this world, it was high-line voodoo. And the onboard computers were both more and less impressive for being less simple, more contained, and worlds stupider.

The computers were never in complete agreement with the plane’s more elemental mechanisms. Always a difference of opinion. The digital gauges showed a redundant, simplified, and three-color view of the world; a child’s vision, all bright triangles and wavy lines and bold numbers. Between Carter’s legs, the idiot lights showed green: fuel, oil pressure, engine temp, hydraulics, prop speed. In the center of his panel, a computerized map showed hieroglyph landmarks, blinking navigational aids, distances from this and to that. But it spoke to something in the distance between the world Carter had known and the world in which he now found himself that he understood less about how Roadrunner’s analog altimeter knew his distance from the ground or the wet compass knew the way home than he did about the workings of the FTL drive on the container ship that’d brought him to the Carpenter system or the hydrazine thrust belts on the dropship that’d deposited him on Iaxo.

Because the company and its men couldn’t use satellite positioning (what they were doing on Iaxo was clandestine at its most polite, but mostly just plain criminal, so the satellites themselves—even the very small ones—were too conspicuous in orbit around a planet full of natives who still thought God made the lightning), and because radar was right out, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning, surface track, and radio triangulation against preset navigational markers. All of which
was for shit when the difference between flying and crashing was measured in feet and inches, not miles.

So Carter, like his mates, carried a programmable stopwatch instead, accurate to one-hundredth of a second, a handheld UV/thermal spotting scope with a pulse range finder, and a map—pen on paper—made by Billy Stitches from first squadron. Carter had his flash-taped to his thigh and, at night, flew the way a submariner once piloted: trusting his life to the inarguable tick of the clock. Billy, he trusted. The watch, the scope and the map were all he truly believed in—his trinity. For lack of any more solid theological footing, he put his faith in Billy Stitches and, thus far, Billy had never let him down.

It didn’t mean he felt any safer, flying blind into the endless dark. And it certainly didn’t mean he didn’t pilot with a horrible, sick feeling that, at any moment, he was going to crash prop-first into an odd copse of hard alien trees, stick there like a dart, and burn. Night missions, he would always fly with the sour taste of anxious vomit in the back of his throat, squeezing and straining the eyes right out of his head looking for death oncoming at a hundred miles an hour, and then land again, hours and hours later, with a relief like waking alive from a bad dream of falling and a headache that only drink, sleep, or decapitation would cure.

He hated flying at night.

It surprised Carter when he found Billy Stitches and Morris Ross up in the middle of the night. Billy was out night-flying for fun in a two-seat spotter (a rebuilt Bristol fighter, actually, with a jumped-up rotary V-8 turboprop salvaged from one of the two wrecks the company had so far suffered). Billy was sitting in the gunner’s chair, peeking downward, backward, and sideward through UV light amps while Morris flew, sketching terrain details and shouting directions in Morris’s ear. Carter had Billy on the radio periodically, making jokes, keeping him amused while he zigged and zagged his way along a broken, preset course to the ford. Carter asked Billy how he could work on his maps at night. Billy told him to shut up before Carter jinxed him. Even with night vision and a moon and a half playing tag through breaks in the
clotted clouds, the world below was nothing more than the
suggestion
of a world to Carter. Touches of silver here and there, gilt flourishes, a sense of undulating life, and somewhere off his left wing, the river catching reflections and shattering them against its banks. They had names, those moons. Carter didn’t know them.

Much as he disliked it, there were moments when even he felt this world deserved a poet. It had, in instants, a kind of unspoiled beauty that Carter imagined Earth once might’ve before the earth became home to humans and all their clutter. In the light, Iaxo was occasionally fantastical, something out of a fairy tale. In the night, it was intermittently magic.

Still, it was an easier place to hate than to love. Hating was more useful, too. And for all Carter knew, Iaxo might’ve already had a poet. Might’ve had scores of them. And he felt that if he and his friends or others like his friends didn’t kill them all, perhaps someday some indig would say something lovely about this place. It was their home, after all. Carter and his kind were just visiting.

Billy called in, saying Morris had gotten him lost.

“How would you know?” asked Carter.

“It’s all Zen, son,” Billy said. “The maps, the flying. The whole deal. Your problem is you are under the illusion that you actually exist.” His laughter grated like iron filings in Carter’s teeth.

Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his face looked like a medical school cadaver’s face—a practice face on which young and untalented knife artists had attempted to hone their skills. Billy’s scars were burn scars, surgery scars, the fleshy archaeological record of meatball reconstruction in a field hospital somewhere back when he was a colonial pilot flying supersonic fighter-bombers and killing for the cause. Alternate version: Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his scars were his pride, earned during a crash-and-burn on some
distant hell where everything ate everything and the only safe place for those made of meat was high aloft—dropping jellied fire and chemical defoliant onto alien landscapes that looked like something out of a deep pharmaceutical nightmare.

He’d been flying for a different company at the time, trying to tame this frontier backwater for the pioneer families already on their way. And when he’d gone in, he’d shattered the face shield of his helmet and been force-fed some of the bigger, more jagged pieces.

Eight days he’d survived in the jungle, waiting for rescue. His wounds had rotted, become home to bugs and flies and centipedes, and his hot, sweet blood had driven even the trees into a starving frenzy. Billy was eaten, a little bit at a time, by every living thing in the jungle and would often say that what he was left with when the recovery team finally found him were only those parts that even nature had found undigestible.

Carter said, “So long as the payroll department is under that same illusion, I think I’ll be okay, Billy. Meanwhile, I now have considerably less faith in your maps, knowing you do them blind in the middle of the night.”

“Got to trust me, boy. I do this all the damn time. For kicks. Go out in the day with Morris blindfolded for practice!”

“You’re going to get yourself dead,” Carter told him. Billy laughed again.