A Private Little War (20 page)

And this had gone on for a week, progressing with a grim sort of calculating passion. Word traveled. No cruelty or expense was spared in the searching. Men who’d never met Danny, who’d never heard his name or seen his face, poked into every hole they could think of, rode hard, marched nights, put their own lives at risk for him just because that was what men (if not always corporations) did: They took care of their own. This, they thought, was what made them better than the abos. Danny was human, and no one wanted to think what might’ve been happening to him in indig hands. No one wanted to think that his fellows would do any less if it were him in duress and them left to look.

The pilots, of course, searched twice as hard. They were in the air around the clock, spotting and marking terrain, attacking everything that moved. They appreciated the help to the tune of owing all involved more favors than could possibly be repaid. But for all the cost, vigorous brutality, and appalling acts committed in Danny Diaz’s name,
it came to nothing. After a week, the search was called off at Ted Prinzi’s insistence.

It was a decision that made him no friends, but deep down, all the pilots knew it was the right choice. It was a big country they were covering, and one that the natives knew better than anyone. If they didn’t want something found, it generally didn’t get found.

So Ted had grounded everyone, threatened a general confinement to quarters after some of the men got it in their heads that there must’ve been a spy among the camp wogs, and began trying their unskilled hands at interrogating the dishwashers and postriders and laundresses. Some indig huts were burnt, a couple of the locals were killed. And when those men were pulled off the indigs, they spoke about what they were doing as though it’d all been very sane, rational, even
important
, in words that weren’t even words, and sentences stripped of all meaning by their grief.

Carter hadn’t been involved in that, but only because he’d already voluntarily confined himself to quarters, along with Fenn, Porter Vaughn, and Billy from first squadron, in order to wake Danny—a period of mourning that had taken the form of a drinking contest and ended badly all around. Things at that point had started getting very weird. The jargon of retribution blew around the camp like bullets. And then, two days after they’d given up all hope, Danny came home. Or what was left of him did, anyway.

It was a ratty mob of Workman’s light horsemen who brought him in. They’d found his corpse being carried in a caravan they’d raided two nights prior, far to the north, and had ridden day and night to deliver him. They’d come with prisoners as well—three of them—and through translators, the pilots learned that Danny had been picked up away from his plane as he’d been making for cover, then tortured for most of the week by indig elders and wise men.

That much they could tell by the condition Danny’s body had been in. He’d been very systematically beaten, flayed, and brutalized. Most of his bones had been broken. He’d been primitively blinded, likely by having his eyes burnt out. His fingers and toes were missing, as well as some other bits and pieces. There was indig chicken scratch burned and cut into his graying skin, sigils that the horsemen wouldn’t even look
at, let alone read aloud. And at some point, he’d been split open like a fish, throat to belly, then crudely stitched back together. That was the part that Carter’d remembered most clearly: the incision mark, in a Y, just like a body carved up for autopsy. Everyone was wondering how much of it he’d lived through and praying to their human gods that it wasn’t very much.

In a fury, the company men had turned on the three prisoners from the caravan and demanded to know why. And how. They wanted details to justify the terrible things they all wanted to do to the prisoners, were
going
to do to them regardless, and were shouting—at the prisoners, at Workman’s light horsemen, at their own translators and at one another. It was madness. They learned that it wasn’t out of blind cruelty that this had been done to Danny. Neither was it in revenge or out of plain malice. The indigs who’d taken him had been curious, more than anything, and however vicious their methods, they’d had a reason for what they’d done.

They’d wanted to know where Danny’s wings were. How he became like a bird. They’d been trying to make Danny teach them how to fly.

Carter could still remember that morning. The strangest details had stuck with him. He remembered the day and the hour and the light. He remembered the sound of the abos all talking at once. Like stones in a can. He remembered the sweet smell of their horses, ridden half to death and washed in sweat that stank vaguely of what he imagined damp hay would smell like (as if he’d ever smelled such a thing), and a little like high-grade machine oil—plasticky and warm.

Carter remembered the pounded mud spatters on the horses’ feet, black and thick like old blood, and thinking how he didn’t know what that part of a horse was called. Not in the language of Iaxo, but any language. The part above the hoof but not quite the leg. Its ankles, he guessed. On a plane, it would be the shortening linkage or the torque link assembly, but horses were not planes and, really, these were not horses. He didn’t have any other name for them, though, so found himself lost in the language and, soon enough, the problems dissolved into
violence anyway until, at a certain point, after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth punch or kick he’d delivered to the prisoners, he’d had to stop. He was tired, yes. His hands ached and one of his toes felt wrong inside his boot. But more than that, he’d stopped to consider what kind of line they were crossing. It wasn’t an ethical line or a moral one he was considering. In this cold and damp and occasionally blazing but mostly just scourging alien environment, any sense of morality had already been corroded out of them. Carter understood that. He wasn’t a child.

It was something else. Another kind of line. Tactical, maybe. Certainly physical. Panting, standing bent with his hands on his knees, ceding his turn at the prisoners to someone else with fresher hands, it’d occurred to him that this was the first time he’d touched one of the indigs on purpose. The first time that he was hurting them up close. Personally. With his hands and his feet. It was the first time he’d been able to look into their heavy, wet eyes and say, “See this? This is
me
that’s doing this. And motherfucker, you are going to
die
today.”

He didn’t much like it, truth be told. It’d taken him a while to realize it, but when he did, the intimacy of it disturbed him on a level he’d been previously unaware he possessed. After a time, he’d walked away to stand in the circle of men and watch rather than participate.

That had felt better. Not clean, exactly. But better.

After that, the war had picked up again and continued on like normal. In the aftermath of Sispetain, the neighborhood was lighter on humans than it had been before. Many of the gangs and companies that’d fought there had been beaten right off-planet, had given up and gone home to cut their losses. Workman had stuck it out for a little while but vanished not long after. Connelly was reinforcing from among the native fighters. And among the pilots, each man now carried a single TCM-40 fragmentation grenade in his flight bag, just in case. For a while, they’d flown with them taped to their chests, called it “putting the Danny on.” But in time, that’d come to seem rather ridiculous. Uncomfortable, too. So now, they just carried them. Either way, no one ever wanted to end up like Danny had. He was shipped out in a steel coffin, sealed, the
outside of it marked
REMAINS UNVIEWABLE
. Among all the many ways to get off-planet, it was roundly agreed that this was the worst. A terrible way to go home.

So Carter hadn’t been the first to take fire in combat like Vic had said. Danny Diaz was really the first, even though his memory had been banished, his name scrubbed from the history. No one liked thinking about Danny and no one talked about it, ever. There was nothing to be learned from death by dumb, bad luck.

On the day that Danny had come back to the Flyboy camp, Ted had shot the three prisoners in the head with his pistol, appearing out of nowhere with his sidearm drawn and walking up behind them—
pop pop pop
. He’d done it before any of the pilots could do worse, seen the light horse troop paid off for its efforts, and ordered his men up. All of them. On scouting patrol for twelve hours. Radio silence. Alone with their thoughts and hatred, they had nothing to do but let it all bleed away into the cold gray sky.

After, Vic had come up behind Carter while he was walking to the field house and taken his hand in hers like a girl. That was all it took. And, later still, lying with her, feeling confused but also rather proud of himself and wrapped up in grief as much as in her, Carter would ask, “Why me?”

He remembered Vic saying, in a completely matter-of-fact way, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Because you’re next.”

Vic had a thing for tragedy and death. Everyone knew that. Danny hadn’t been her first love to die, or even her second or her fifth. She had a strange sense for seeing the reaper coming at great distances, people said, and was more in love with that than she’d ever been with any pilot. So Vic had been wrong about her and Carter being friends, too, because Carter, at times, wanted Vic not to exist at all or, at the very least, to be as gone from his thoughts as Danny was.

Because you’re next
. There were times when Carter felt like just another number. There were times when he felt as though he was being stalked by her—hunted, her steps just a little bit quicker than death’s. And he’d
tried to forget her a hundred times, but it never took. All too often, when she wasn’t even around, he would find himself conjuring her in his head: the curve of her neck, the arch of her eyebrows, the sound of her heart pumping, her gasping breath, the tight skin on the small of her back and the close smell of her when they pulled a sheet up over their heads like two children hiding from monsters.

He’d buried his traitorous thoughts and emotions (and other, arguably more salubrious organs) in some of the other company girls whenever opportunity and communal desire presented itself, but he always came away feeling even worse. He felt that Vic was bad for him, physically and spiritually. That she would get him killed. And he kept telling himself that, even if he would then be assailed with thoughts of the sweetness of her sweat, the tightness of her cunt, the heat of her breath in his ear when she whispered his name, and have to get up in the air and make something die just to be rid of her for a moment.

Absently, he fooled with the three crossbow bolts she’d brought him, fingertips running down their smooth shafts, teasing the stiff plastic fletching of their flights. Finally, he tucked them carefully into his flight bag, stood, and made for the tent line. He was exhausted.