A Private Little War (15 page)

Artillery.

From above, the explosions unfold like flowers—crimson and sharp at the center, then fluffing outward to pale yellow, gray, then black. They blossom, open, then collapse back in on themselves as the laws of physics, momentarily brutalized, reassert themselves. Flames die, waves calm, vacuums are filled, shock stills, and gravity pulls all that dust and debris and death back down to the ground where it belongs. It’s fast, yet still appears to happen all in one long, slow motion. This is the difference between bombs and high-explosive artillery shells. Bombs are quick all through. They flare and are gone. Exploding shells, though, do that strange trick of seeming slow. That’s how one can tell the difference. See it enough and it’s a hard thing to forget.

Carter had seen it enough. Not here. Elsewhere. Other jobs in other places. He’d been caught once in a similar pressure wave, flying low over the trench and bunker lines on a planet called Feldike way out on the rim. Gravity was different there, harder and heavier, the atmosphere thick and poison. The company’d been flying for the cause then, too—Marxist revolt among the miners who’d decided that they deserved a piece of all the money being burned and cut and melted from the planet’s guts. Maybe not
entirely
Marxist, actually, but that didn’t matter. Those miners could pay up front, would pay an additional fortune when they won. And they were grateful for the help. Until the arrival of the flying circus (sixteen Flyboy squadrons, plus nearly five hundred command, control, and support personnel) the battles on Feldike had been fought mostly with the mining equipment—enormous rolling ore mills the size of an office block, tunneling machines like nightmare millipedes as long and large as bloated, rock-muddled skyscrapers laid on their sides. The machines could take a phenomenal amount of punishment but carried tools able to dish out phenomenal damage: massive stone grinders, lasers meant for cutting rock, jackhammers and rock drills, atomics. On the ground, they fought in environment suits, loader bodies, whatever was available—men like ants scaling the sides of the massive machines and planting demolition charges meant for blowing tunnel mouths, always going for the track linkages, articulated joints, the heat sinks or pilot’s compartments that sat behind six-inch-thick
bubbles of shatterproof diamondoid but could be popped like a zit by a determined enemy.

The company’s arrival had changed the dynamics of the war. The machines still in the hands of management were slow, large targets and could be pummeled from afar by sheaf rockets, laser-guided smart munitions, and bombs meant for cracking mountains. Up close, they could be eviscerated by chain guns firing deuterium-tipped rounds, six thousand per minute, or thermite rockets. They could be crippled by high explosives and then killed by the miners who swarmed over them. On nights off, camped out in the top floors of seized company offices, the pilots would stand with their noses pressed against the diamond glass, watching the distant action like a fireworks show. The best entertainment in town.

The planes they’d flown there had been strange tractor/jet mutants, sucking in the poison atmosphere from a scoop in the nose, accelerating it through the length of the dart-like body and then spitting it out the back end as turbine thrust. They were slow, flew with all the elegance of a brick, fell from the toxic sky like killed birds almost every day from wear and corrosion and just plain orneriness. They’d been custom engineered for the environment just like the biplanes they flew now had been for Iaxo, but Feldike’s was an environment that was hostile to everything. There was no native life there. Just humans who’d come for the stones.

The mining company had been almost beaten, had resorted to desperation tactics to dislodge the miners, when Carter’d had his accident. They’d begun employing the magnetic accelerators, once used to fling things into orbit, like primitive mortars, dialing the charge way down and throwing all kinds of things into them, blind-firing in the direction of the trench lines that had, at that point, been dug within fifty miles of the corporate headquarters and port facilities. One thing the miners were very good at was digging. The war was going to be over within a week.

It was a mining charge that’d erupted below Carter’s jet on Feldike. Smallish. A couple of kilotons, maybe. Enough to rip a fifty-meter crater in the terrible earth and pop Carter’s jet up like a cork, knock it clean
into a flip—nose over jet and ass over teakettle. The vacuum caused the turbine to sputter and fail. It’d refused to restart, and Carter had hit the switch, punching out just five hundred feet above the surface, briefly riding a hydrogen peroxide charge clear of the tumbling jet body, then watching the barrage as he descended, sealed cockpit hanging below three drag chutes and heading to ground fast. The explosions then had looked the same as the explosions on Iaxo—weird, slo-mo blooms making umbrellas rather than mushrooms in the heavy gravity but unfolding with the same peculiar indolence.

He’d fallen hard, finally, right in the path of one of the advancing ore mills. The treads rose a hundred feet high, clanking iron links rumbling like the end of the world. Around him, the explosions were still going off, blasting black gashes in the red-brown stone and dirt—the jerry-rigged mortar operators having found their range. He’d been rescued in plenty of time by a recovery team flying a heavy lifter, but he would never forget the image of those treads grinding down on him, his own hands pressed to the cockpit glass, staring past them at the mill pilot in his bubble, the two of them watching each other, waiting to see what would happen next.

EVEN IN HIS PANIC
, Carter’d been able to count the explosions blossoming below him on Iaxo. There’d been four of them, walking in a line. And then four more, oblique to him, off his right wing, opening outward and upward and, at a distance—too far away to hurt him—really rather beautiful. Down on the ground, he knew, it would seem like something different entirely.

He poked a shaky finger at the radio, clacking it twice, and adjusted his headset and collar. “Control, this is Roadrunner. Do you copy?”

“Roadrunner, this is control. We copy.” Diane still, her professional voice unfazed, even by the screaming. “What is your status?”

“I’m five-by-five. Just shook up, but still in flight and on-target. My flight electronics are out. Can you see where I am?”

“We’re trying to reboot you from here, Roadrunner, but I’ve got you smooth and level at ten-two-five off the deck, heading thirty-eight degrees east by double north, west of target six-point-five miles, closing angle.” A pause. “Also, biologicals show you pissed yourself. Nice going there, hotshot.”

Bloom of shame in Carter’s cheeks not at all unlike the bloom of artillery shells in the distance. “You want to come up here and try
flying for me, Diane?”
Everyone pisses themselves on night missions,
Carter thought.
Everyone
. “Jesus Christ, like I need this from some dumb—”

Diane interrupted. “Roadrunner, control. Hold for the commander. Diane out.”

Historically speaking, hearing Ted’s voice almost never meant one was about to receive good news. All the pilots knew this, discussed it at length sometimes when there was nothing else worth talking about. Bearer of shit and ill tidings was Ted Prinzi. Like Fenn had said, bad news walking.

“Carter?”

“Ted. What the f—”

“Stand down, Captain.”

“Artillery, Ted.”

“You’ve got one of Billy’s maps with you, Carter, yeah?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Map, Carter. Have one?”

“Artillery.”

“Map, Captain.”

“Artillery, goddammit. Artillery!”

“Map.”

Carter took a breath. “Yeah, map. Why?”

“Good. There’s a series of hills then, should be on your nose almost. North-nor’east of the ford a few thousand yards, dead west twenty-two miles from Southbend. Elevation near two hundred ten, ranging about four miles. See it?”

With his flight electronics out, there was no light to see by, so Carter had to fish a mini flashlight out of his jacket one-handed. When he found it, he stuck it in his mouth, then checked the map taped to his thigh, tracing Ted’s directions with his finger and finding the hills—the first line of them rising just beyond the reach of the forested bank of the river.

“Got it,” he said, keeping the place with his finger, free hand juggling the stick, and speaking around the light held in his teeth. “Why?”

“Because we think the natives have just discovered artillery.”

“Didn’t I just tell you that?”

“No, I’m telling
you,
Captain. Right now. It’s nothing fancy, we don’t think.”

“Nothing fancy,” Carter repeated.

“That’s what we think.”

“We? Who else you got in there with you, Ted?
I’m
telling you right now. Durba’s position was just hit by artillery fire. Saw it myself.”

“Right,” Ted continued, and it suddenly occurred to Carter that Ted was working off some kind of honcho-in-crisis script, something issued by corporate, kept in a locked drawer in a yellow folder,
To be opened in the event of…
Or maybe it was just in his head; a thing he’d practiced, that he’d been cooking up for months.

“As I said, we don’t think it’s anything fancy. Field cannon and the like. Simple howitzers. But that’s a rather precocious leap, technologically speaking, from bows and fucking arrows, don’t you think?”

A script. He’d rehearsed it, alone at night in his one-man commander’s tent, standing balls-out naked in front of a full-length mirror and standing in his uniform. Cleaning his fake teeth in the morning, mumbling snatches of it into the cold air. Lying in his bed at night, straight as a board, mouthing it like talking dirty to a lover in the dark. Sound tough, make hard jokes, be confident, be strong, act like a man, like the worst actor of all time.

“Carter, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Ted. I do,” Carter said.
You crazy fucker,
he didn’t say.
No fucking bullshit indig monkey suddenly smacked two rocks together and invented what happened down there,
he didn’t say. “Though I bet Durba found it more shocking than you do.”

“Right,” Ted said, cleared his throat into the mike—an incredibly annoying habit—and moved on to page two. “We don’t know how many there are, but—”

“Four,” Carter interrupted. “There are four. I’m watching them hit the ford right now. Just watched.”

“Four… Well, that’s not very many now, is it?”

Carter wanted to bomb Ted in his tent. Terrified, he wanted very badly to kill something, and his mouth tasted sour. He spit out the flashlight instead, its steel body trailing a string of his spittle.

“Anyway, Carter, it looks like someone out there is trying to level the playing field a bit, and the last goddamn thing we want around here is a level playing field. Bad for business. Bad for you, bad for me. Bad for the company. Means we might have to work for a living instead of getting drunk and just flying around. No fun. That line of hills is your new illumination area, got it?”

He imagined that to the indigs on the ground, for whom anything more technologically advanced than a catapult was astonishing and something like a cigarette lighter inspired pure fucking awe and wonderment, an artillery barrage by one gun would’ve been enough to scare them out of their gourds. Four had probably been something like the end of the world. He didn’t bother speculating to Ted, though. In Carter’s experience, Ted was unimpressed by things like the feelings of people who were not Ted.

“Carter?”

“Illumination,” he parroted.

“Carter. That hill. On the map. That’s your area of operation. Illumination run.”

“Illuminating for what?”

“For the bombers. Just gotta find the little rinky-dink fuckers first, yeah? So find them, pilot. And light ’em up.”

Without thinking, Carter had brought the plane around again, boxing the compass until he’d come into line with the new target almost by feel. He coughed. His right leg was shaking like it had its own battery. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Ted?”

“What?”

“What’s, like, going on here. I don’t know, just tell me…” The explosion, the shock, the pretty lights—they’d knocked something loose in Carter. Through clenched teeth he said, “Tell me what’s this done. What’s happening.”

Even Carter knew he was making very little sense, but the stick was alive in his hand. His feet were working the pedals.

“Going on? Since when is ‘going on’ any of your goddamn business, pilot? Ending this—that’s your business. Go end it.” Whistle of feedback, muffled chatter of voices in the tent, then Ted again. “You’re on the clock, pilot. Go fly.”

“Roger that.” Carter pawed at his face with his free hand, dragging fingers down the rough stubble on his cheeks and pressing them into the frozen skin along his jaw.

“Flare the area, try to sort out where those guns are at, then remain on target as air spotter for the rest of the flight. They’re on the field now, wheels up in sixty seconds or I’ll murder the bunch of them. They should be at your A.O. in less than fifteen. Copy?”

“Copy that, control. Where’s Antoinne?”