A Private Little War (29 page)

“Of course they were waiting for you,” Ted said. “We’ve been blowing the shit out of these dopey, primitive shits for months. You think they haven’t been watching what we do? I guaran-fucking-tee you, gentlemen, our planes have been the single most carefully observed thing on this whole stupid planet since the day we showed up, so every one of those shit-eating monkeys out there knows exactly what we’re going to do before we do it. And we did just like they expected, didn’t we?” He slashed at the map with his laser pointer. “The flight drops speed, comes in low and slow from the north to investigate Porter’s nothing in the trees, puts them in the kill box here, in the ideal position to be shot at. Porter? You want to take us through what happens next?”

“No,” said Porter.

And Ted whirled, his body a taut wire of rage, like something inside him was afire. “Yessir, you mean. Yes fucking sir. Porter, take us through what happens next.”

For a minute, Porter worked his jaw without any sound coming out. When the words finally came to him, they dropped leadenly from his
mouth, in short, clipped sentences with a breath between each. “They opened up on us as soon as we crossed the strike zone.” Breath. “Three guns in the near tree line.” Breath. “Fourth at the northeast end. To our flank. We were down close to the treetops—”

“Three-seven-five feet,” Ted clarified, turning back to the display.

“At choke speed.”

“Ninety miles per,” Ted said. He was close enough to the projection to read the indicators.

“The forward guns got Morris and me on approach. They had tracers. We flew right straight up on them. Impossible to miss. I think the flanking gun tried for Billy and Albert. It missed. They just got lucky with Morris and me.”

“That’s not luck, Porter. That’s planning. That’s wanting really, really badly to kill you right goddamn dead.” Ted turned to face the room once more. He tucked away his pointer. “What’s luck is that you aren’t.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, drew himself up with a breath, and finished out the narrative. “First squadron breaks for evasive with two planes damaged, overshoots the site, climbs to safety, and changes course for home.”

On the map behind him, both Porter’s and Morris’s triangles had turned to red.

“Fokker four had serious engine trouble, splintered prop, oil leaks. He was shot to shit and probably would’ve never made it back even if Morris hadn’t also been hit. He took seven rounds we could count. His suit stopped five, but he took one penetrating wound in the belly and one in the hand that mostly took it off at the wrist. Morris passed out from blood loss before going in and wrecking eight miles short of the field. Upon investigation, he was found KIA on-site.”

Morris’s triangle turned black, fell out of formation, then winked out.

“Everyone here knows the rest.”

Eddie jumped in. “I don’t want to be a prick about this, guys, but odds are airman Ross would’ve survived until a pickup could be scrambled if he’d been wearing his emergency gear. I can’t understand why he wasn’t, actually. But I’ve been informed that this has become common practice over the past year, and it ends right now. This stuff is here
for your protection, so from now on, no one goes up without a complete kit. That means helmet, protenolol and hemosclerex injectors, web gear—everything. That’s a direct order, understood?”

“They get it, Eddie,” Ted said, then to the pilots, “And we’re back to putting our Danny on as well, gentlemen. Just in case.”

Off to the side, Eddie nodded as if he had any idea what Ted was talking about. Ted shrank the map image to half size. He fiddled with this and that. Carter was feeling sick to his stomach. Probably, it was just the hangover.

Point five.

“Speculation,” Ted announced, and then began talking about weapons—those that Durba had lost in the rout, those that had gotten Morris, and how, odds were, these were not the same weapons. He talked of guns and bombs and said many tough things that were lost on Carter just then because all Carter could think about was the image of Morris’s hand blasted away by a bullet, by a kicked-back shard of prop or engine shrapnel punching through the firewall. He couldn’t get his head around the pain it must’ve caused, but he could see the wound in his head, Morris’s face at the moment of realization, the sickly feeling of suddenly seeing a piece of one’s self shattered, blown into hamburger, missing. The faces around him, with the exception of Fenn’s, were all gray. Porter was almost white and was shaking gently in his chair, still nodding, his mouth working even though he’d gone silent again.

At the front of the room, Ted was backing away, turning to Eddie, who had laid a hand on his shoulder and was taking the floor with a grin. Eddie had a laser pointer of his own—small and metal and about the size of a bullet. He toyed with it, walking it back and forth across his knuckles while he talked. It was a trick he probably did in bars to impress girls in places where there were bars and girls to impress.

“All right, guys. Here’s the situation…”

Fuck you and your situation
, Carter thought.

“Had the fire come from the guns captured from the rifle position, it would’ve been bad news, but not awful. We would know they had only the three light machine guns and a finite amount of ammunition for them. Only now, we know that the fire came from four guns, not three,
and that the rounds recovered from flight leader Vaughn’s plane were of a larger caliber than those used by Antoinne. They were…”

He paused, looked back at the podium where Carter thought he probably had a stack of notes stashed:
Be casual. Smile. Curse more
. And a list of nomenclatures under the double-underlined heading,
NOMENCLATURES
. He aimed his pointer at the projection screen. A picture of a Federated Arms light support gun came up, a belt-fed 8 mm.

“Nope,” Eddie said. “Not that one. Dammit.” He waved the pointer around until another image swelled: a water-cooled .30 caliber antiaircraft machine gun. Simple but tough, efficient, easy to maintain, and the least necessary application of force to counter the advantage given by the company’s heretofore uncontested command of the skies over Iaxo.

“Okay,” Eddie said. “There we go. It was probably something closer to this.”

Ted grumbled something under his breath that none of the pilots could hear. Carter silently measured in his head. A .30-caliber round was about as long as his middle finger, as big around as his pinky. Almost identical to the ammunition in his own plane’s guns, the difference essentially cosmetic. Eye for an eye.

“We also know from Captain Carter’s flight that the Lassateirra faction had field artillery pieces at their disposal. Reports from survivors of Antoinne’s unit estimate something in the…” Eddie checked his notes again.

“One-oh-fives,” Ted said. “Modern shells, trained gunners or computer rangefinders, imported tubes and hardware mounted with native carriage. Least force, most bang.”

Eddie nodded. “Exactly. There were four that we hit, but there’s no reason to think there’s not more out there. Also, on the night you guys hit the artillery position, Captain Carter took ground fire from crossbows using imported arrows.”

“Bolts,” Ted corrected.

“Bolts,” said Eddie, tapping his notes with the tip of his pointer. “Right. Says that right here. Aluminum shaft, steel tip.”

There was sniggering in the ranks—first sign of life in some time. Fenn, suddenly awake, leaned over to Carter and whispered, “Geez, Kev. Why didn’t you tell me? Being shot at by crossbows? Sounds so
dangerous
. Why, all you had to defend yourself with was an airplane, a couple of machine guns, and a whole wing of bombers overhead. You’re so brave.”

“Must’ve slipped my mind,” Carter grunted. He crossed his arms over his chest.

Eddie plowed on. “Right. So anyway, this is serious. Corporate has been suspicious for some time that someone had finally gotten through to the Lassateirra with off-world supplies, but until this morning we didn’t know who or what or how much.”

“Gotten through to the who?” asked Jack.

“The Lassateirra faction,” Eddie repeated.

“That the bad guys?”

The pilots laughed. Carter laughed. Porter didn’t laugh. Eddie’s mouth turned into a hard straight line, and he tried to stare down Jack Hawker but failed.

At the front of the room, Ted was balling his hands into fists, then releasing them, balling them up again. “Get to the point, Eddie,” he said.

“In good time, Commander,” Eddie replied. “There are important details here. Recently, the company has been in communication with sources on the ground here on Iaxo—”

“I thought we were under blackout,” Billy said.

“We are,” said Ted. “Eddie?”

“We are,” said Eddie. “Corporate is not. These were back-channel conversations, mostly, so don’t go getting any ideas.”

“Well, what sources then?”

“Other mercenary organizations,” Eddie continued. “Some well-placed friends of ours in various foreign aid groups and noncolonial charities. That’s in addition to their contacts in several of the large shipping conglomerates and guild spacers. And for some time, the company has been very concerned about other groups moving supplies through the blockades. With this recent turn of events—”

“Eddie…,” said Ted, warningly.

“Not to mention their substantial investment in material resources here and the usual risk of legal sanction involved in such an operation, there has been some discussion—”

“Eddie!” snapped Ted.

Behind his podium, Eddie Lucas turned on his thousand-watt smile, passed it over the assembled pilots like a searchlight. He could tell them everything. That was in his power. He could crash this entire mission with a word or two. But that wasn’t the surprise he had. He looked at Ted and saw him leaning forward, waiting, maybe, to tackle him. To hit him. Eddie loved this. He really, really did.

“It’s bad news,” Eddie said.

“Fucking out with it already!” someone shouted, and Carter was surprised to discover that it’d been him.

“Stow that shit, Captain,” Ted barked.

“I spoke with a couple friends of mine in the legal department back home just a couple of hours ago, and they informed me that…” He paused briefly and then Eddie came back, quoting from his notes. “A motion to provide humanitarian aid for Carpenter 7 Epsilon, also known as Iaxo, was presented four days ago before the Colonial Council, currently in session at Tranquility. The request was vague. No specific cause was presented before the officials, and there was no specific or implied mention of ours or anyone else’s presence here. But it’s there now. It’s in the hands of the council, which means that Iaxo is now a real place. It’s on the map, so to speak. And while the company feels it likely that the motion will be dismissed without a formal hearing, the operations department feels that it is only a matter of time now before someone comes and pokes their noses into our business here.”

Carter was drifting. Repeated shocks, his hangover, the nausea of relived death—it was all numbing him. He’d had some very specific reasons for taking this job when he did. One of them had been that he would never again have to sit in a little room, in an uncomfortable chair, and listen to someone lie to him about how concerned his bosses were for his health and well-being. Another was that he would never have to talk (or hear, or even think) about politics, corporate or otherwise. He’d had enough of that in his other life—the one that’d come before this. Before Flyboy. So sitting there, he decided that Ted and Eddie could talk at him all they liked. It didn’t mean he had to listen. He closed his eyes and put his chin on his chest. He was going to sleep. No one could make him care against his will.

“But after the events of the past two days,” Eddie continued, “it has become obvious that this filing was only part of a larger strategy. Off-world supply has been coming in to the Lassateirra for some time now.” He paused again to look at his notes and shuffle through the pages. “No one seems sure exactly how long. But there is equipment in theater, and potentially quite a bit of it. Most deliveries have been coming in far up-country…” He looked at his papers, running a finger down a page. “Arkhis Mountains,” he muttered. “And the coast.”

Carter told himself to sleep. He
ordered
himself to sleep. He thought he knew what was coming—could imagine the worst thing, suddenly, as a real thing. And just like Ted talking Morris’s plane onward toward death and Carter’s wish that he could’ve just stopped, just changed the path of the past with a word, so, too, did he want to not be here when Eddie said what he thought he was going to say. He wanted to not hear it, to go forth in ignorance, unworried. Part of him cheered Eddie on, begging for the worst. Another part dove for the deep, dumb blackness of sleep. If he didn’t hear it, things wouldn’t have to change, get worse. To hear the words, that would make it real.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Eddie plowed on.

At the front of the room, Ted took a step toward Eddie. Next to Carter, Fenn leaned forward in his chair, thinking that this was like the greatest show ever. And if not, then at least it was something new. Carter squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and shouted
Sleep!
inside his own head.
Sleep, goddammit. Sleep!

“The motion for aid was filed through the Office of Cultural Affairs by Native Rights Intersystem.”

The room and everyone in it exploded.

They yelled. They cursed. Ted did both at the same time because, apparently, this was the first he’d heard of it, too, and Eddie had been keeping it from him. Billy shouted pointless questions toward the front of the room, and Porter turned his face skyward and howled. Eddie stood behind the podium, looking terribly proud of himself. This was what he did. This was what he was good at. No one could take command of a meeting the way Eddie Lucas could. No one could control the environment like him.

Fenn was smiling a lost, beatific smile. Jack was laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks. Charlie Voss was on his feet, stabbing a finger toward Eddie and his podium. And Carter, as though feeling some supporting structure inside himself let go the instant Eddie said the words, had sagged into his seat, thrown his head back, and now was just shouting nonsense up into the air, his mouth wide, eyes still pinched shut, just because it felt good to make noise.