A Private Little War (17 page)

Second, a biplane was cheap. The necessary components for building, arming, and outfitting a replica Fokker D.VII or Sopwith Camel
could be had for about the same price as one lightly used cruise missile. Wood, titanium, rubber, linen, machine parts—none of that was even illegal. It was cheap as sand. The pieces could be fabricated anywhere, then shipped and assembled like a toy model somewhere else by three monkeys with a torque wrench. The engine was generally the only piece that was difficult to come by since, in an age of orbital-velocity scramjets and LOx-burners, high-range valence motors, and FTL drives no bigger than the average skyscraper, it could be somewhat tricky finding someone with the proper archaic expertise and talking them into scratch-building a 400-horsepower petro-rotary. Tricky, but far from impossible. Some people had the strangest affection for antiques.

“Control, Roadrunner.”

Diane, exasperated: “Five minutes, Roadrunner.”

Third, prior to the arrival of Flyboy and their old-timey flying machines on Iaxo, air superiority could’ve been had by a child with a kite. The ramping up of technology was a function of technology itself: Least application of force was often the most effective application of force—a motto that Flyboy Inc. had both lived and profited by for a century. Fourth, it was fun. Most of the time it was fun. For the pilots, Iaxo had all the excitement of being in a real war with all the danger of a carnival midway.

Carter felt as though he’d been up for days and nights already. In reality, it’d only been an hour and a little, all told. Night flying tore him up, a certain knot of muscles in his back always bunched like a fist, waiting for the surprising crash and bang—flying blind into the side of a mountain. There was a joke: What’s the last thing that goes through a pilot’s mind in the instant of a crash? The tail of his plane.

His flight computer had twinkled briefly to life a minute ago before dying again with a terrible groaning sound. The cockpit was dark. He’d taped his pocket flashlight to the panel just so he could see his
instruments and gauges and was struggling through lazy, slow circles now at ten thousand feet, wallowing like a drunken bumblebee. He thought to himself how none of the constellations here was right. There was no North Star or Big Dipper or Orion and his dog. He could forget sometimes how many things about Iaxo pissed him off, but never for very long. That was just one more.

“Diane?”

“Carter, just don’t.”

There was still another reason why Flyboy had chosen the technological apex of 1918 as its model for combat operations on Iaxo rather than, say, just wiping the natives off the face of their planet with thermobaric bombs and orbital kinetic weapons. As always, there was the Colonial Council.

As was generally the case with fun things, what the company was doing on Iaxo was completely illegal. It was wrong, morally and ethically, and completely against the law as dictated by the council, which stated that bringing advanced technologies to the savages (even advanced technologies that were centuries old by the reckoning of those bringing them) was a big no-no. Chewing gum and transistor radios would get a man tossed in the pokey for twenty years. Getting the poor boondock aliens hooked on Coca-Cola and setting up a fried-chicken franchise? That was worse. And once one strapped on a gun and started picking sides? They called that something like treason, and it would get a man shipped out fast for some fetid hole somewhere for a lifetime of hard labor if he was lucky. Executed if he was not.

But then, a man had to be caught first. A man (or a company) had to be found, prosecuted, proven guilty beyond doubt. And in the end, there were a lot of planets out there in the great, wide whatever and not so many people around who cared too much about what went on anywhere but on their own.

So the Colonial Council—underfunded, undermanned, universally disliked and overly fond of sticking its bureaucratic nose in other people’s business—was out there trying to keep watch over the million little flyspeck nothings in the sky; trying to make sure that companies like Flyboy, Cavalier, Eastbourne, and men like Carter, Ted, Durba, and Connelly didn’t go around botching up developing cultures with their ray guns, litter, and bad habits.

But as dim and bumbling and near-sighted as the council was generally assumed to be, though, it did have at its disposal the whole of the navy and fifty-six divisions of Colonial Marines who, for the most part, just sat around waiting for an excuse to kill things. That was no small threat. And so, everyone simply tried to avoid the attention of the council and its muscle because they were the law and the law was best avoided whenever possible.

At its most basic, what this came down to was not drawing attention to one’s self. To anyone else, moving a couple dozen replicas of antique engines, some titanium, canvas, computers, simple machinery, and a few old guns (disassembled, of course) through customs and shipping security in the belly of a two-hundred-million-ton freighter looked a lot like taking out the trash. Who was going to look at a broken-down copy of a Spandau machine gun or the ribbing assembly of a Morane pusher and think it was anything but a bunch of crap someone forgot to unload a thousand years ago? No one, that’s who. Which was, more or less, the Flyboy business plan on Iaxo. To anyone else, the company’s best gear looked like garbage. But to the indigs? Pure fucking magic.

These were all good reasons, Carter knew. They made sense. They’d been discussed, turned over, discussed again, endlessly, by the pilots and the crews. It went on and on: an argument perennially favored among those forced by penury, circumstance, and politics back into the avionic stone age, when the zenith of killing technology was a man with a gun riding a 140-horsepower engine through the sky.

All the good reasons in the world didn’t make it any less cold, though. And for the time he spent hanging there in the frigid dark, fighting with an aircraft that didn’t want to be doing nothing, Carter dreamed of a vacuum suit, a closed cockpit, the relative comfort of sterile, modern warfare. He rolled over and felt the weight of his body straining against
the restraints, tilted his head to look down on the world below him, and spit at it out of spite.

“Roadrunner, control. Four minutes actual.”

It was Diane again. Carter righted himself. She was using her professional voice once more, sounding sulky to Carter’s ear. He thought maybe Ted had lit into her, but he doubted it. Ted didn’t have much to do with the girls on the mission. Fraternization and all that, or so he would occasionally claim. Among the pilots, speculation had run rampant for a time, until it got dull. The boss’s sexual predilections—whether he preferred the ladies or the fellas, the boots and leather or maybe the whip—became gross sooner rather than later. And Carter’d always assumed the man was simply asexual, assembled by the company out of spare parts without any manly tackle at all. A command-eunuch. It would explain a lot.

“Make your run at two minutes, then remain on station for fire control, Roadrunner,” Diane continued. “Use channel four to talk to wing command, this channel ground. Ted’s on two to coordinate. Out.”

Carter put his stopwatch on countdown and began spiraling toward the deck, circling out on drift and rudder, his thumb on the fuel cutoff, manually choking the engine, starving it of fuel. The sudden quiet was eerie, but also comforting—a strange tranquility after all the night’s action. At two minutes, he would make his run, coming down onto the target in a silent, dead dive in hopes of surprising the indigs or whoever else was down there, not giving them time to run before the bombers came in.

At seven thousand feet he caught a swirling updraft and rode it while he checked the hills through his scope. The targets were easy to pick out now on the bald terrain—a distended yellow blob on a blue-green rise, hot gun barrels throwing out heat like crazy. Another circle, wind rushing along the cowlings, and at five thousand feet the blob separated into four separate heat signatures, tightly grouped, twenty feet between them.

Carter clicked the radio, switched over to the wing frequency. “Bomber night flight, this is Roadrunner, copy?”

“Kevin? This is flight command.”

“Evening, Charlie.” Carter wondered what Fenn, rightful captain of three squadron, must’ve had on poor Charlie to shunt off on him a night run that, by all rights, ought to have been his. “Figured you’d be sleeping.”

“Passed out apparently doesn’t count,” said Charlie. “No rest for the wicked, you know. But how’s things with you? Ted told us you saw something scary in the dark that needed blowing up?”

“Artillery. Four tubes on the hill. I’m ready to light ’em up.”

“Taking fire?”

“What? No. Why? You know something I don’t?”

“No, uh…” Charlie coughed into the radio, and Carter flinched away at the booming sound of it. “Not at all. Not a lot of time for a briefing before we lifted. Don’t really…”

“Charlie?”

“Tonight just seems to be the night for new things, doesn’t it?”

Understatement, to be sure. Carter took one more fast look through the scope and fixed the target point in his head. “How far out are you, Charlie?”

There was a sound like growling on the other end of the radio, then Charlie cursing under his breath. “One minute and change, Roadrunner. Approaching east-northeast at ten thousand and falling. What’s the target elevation?”