A Private Little War (3 page)

The smell of fuel was thick, like breathing soup, and the air felt wet and greasy against his skin. The sky was old iron, socked in with close-hung clouds that seemed near enough to touch, to comb through with his fingers like an ashen pudding. A sodden ceiling forever crashing in toward the earth.

The atmosphere here was strange. The light, diffuse and irrational; making dawns the color of a bruise, of sickness, of toothaches or misery. Ted had seen men cowering beneath it, crouched under a gangrene sky and looking out as though haunted. Possessed by a cold, unquantifiable fear that something was just wrong and getting wronger by the hour, here in this place where even the light was cruel.

Ted coughed again, stamping out across the dirt in the direction of the comms tent, and saw a mess of activity out by the longhouse across the stubble field—men and machines in a tumult. The mess and chaos of a war that, sometimes, refused to be fought by anyone.

Ted had been on Carpenter 7 Epsilon for two years. Ted, his men, his machines, the tents, Diane, the FTL relay, all of it. Two years spent trying
to complete a mission that should’ve taken a week or a month. A year on the outside.

Carpenter 7 Epsilon (known locally as Iaxo) was a footnote. The mission was a double-hush, back-burner project long-tailed into the Flyboy Inc. corporate Annual Operations Plan for eight quarters running but sick now with blown deadlines and cost overruns. Ted had been there when it was new—a fresh idea so ripe that his bosses had been wiping drool off their chins when they’d discovered it. So exciting that they couldn’t stand up too fast without snapping their dicks off at the root. In two years, there’d been successes, but not enough of them. There’d been too many mystifying failures.

And now it’d gone sour and Ted had been waiting for this call for most of a year—a hint from a friend, a former compatriot, from someone in the organization who’d been told to carefully, quietly,
gently
warn Ted Prinzi that bad news was coming fast and that he’d be wise to prepare for it. Nothing official, of course. Just a nod in the direction of calamity, which was the way things were done in the back channels of the company he’d spent most of his life working for.

Inside the comms tent it was warm—proscribed machinery bleeding heat as a consequence of information. Diane was guarding the FTL relay with crossed arms and a set jaw that radiated menace. The other controllers ignored her with a fixity that was reflexive. She was at the end of another night shift and wasn’t ever a terribly pleasant woman at the beginning of one.

Ted made for the relay. When Diane didn’t move aside quite quickly enough, Ted pushed her without really thinking about it. Not roughly, but still. When he moved to sit down, Diane felt the place where Ted’s palm had cupped her shoulder, trailing her fingertips across it as though hunting for the dissipating warmth of his touch.

Ted didn’t notice that either. He had eyes only for the technology. The screens were all live, but there was no picture, no telepresence. A zillion dollars in technology, and they were using it like two tin cans and a string hundreds of light-years long. He sat, put the phones on his head, coughed into his fist, and closed his eyes.

“This is Op Chief, Carpenter 7 Epsilon, TAG 14-447 actual. Go ahead.”

He’d guessed the call would come from Garros, deputy chief of external ops, based out of London, Earth—the ancestral Flyboy headquarters. Ted knew Garros a little and thought that the courtesy would not be completely unusual coming from his mouth. In the dark, he’d imagined the conversation a hundred different ways.

Or maybe it would be Jackson Chaudhary, the assistant deputy. That would be insulting, but not devastatingly so. Ted had decided long ago not to let it show in his voice if it was Chaudhary who made the call; that a courtesy was a courtesy even if it was delivered in a discourteous fashion. He would act the professional, bite his tongue, and remember to call Chaudhary sir no matter how much it pained him.

Tallis Marks, who managed operational security, would be bad, as would anyone in his department. If the call came from the security department, it would be a flag—a warning that meant arrests were imminent, or worse—and it would be expected that he would know that. To act appropriately no matter how deep the blood got.

Slava, Oliver, Victor Wes, that fat fuck Apostol who’d breadcrumbed his way into the CFO’s seat after Hinrik’s third stroke. It could be any of them. Loewenhardt, even, though that was probably expecting too much. Better that it wasn’t Loewenhardt, but Ted knew that so long as the call—the warning call, the one to inform him personally that the
official
bad news would be coming at some later date—came from someone above the line and inside the London headquarters, someone of management level or above, assistant to a deputy or higher, everything would be okay. It would be bad, but not, so to speak, fatally so. He’d won wars for his company. Bled for them. He’d spent so long in Indian country that he’d grown feathers—which was something he said now about himself because it was something that Garros had said to him once, years ago, when introducing him to a prospective client.
Prinzi, come here. Gavril, this is Ted Prinzi, one of our battle captains. Where are you just in from, Ted? Doesn’t matter. Gavril, this man has spent so long in Indian country he’s growing feathers. I can’t even keep track of the fights he’s won…

“Commander Prinzi?” said the disembodied voice on the other end of the relay. Ted didn’t recognize it. He mentally checked Garros off the
list. Chaudhary. Marks. Loewenhardt, of course. Also Slava, Oliver, Wes and Apostol, Ballard, Coley, Ma, Archer. Ted ran down the Flyboy org chart in his head. He racked his brain to come up with another name. Someone else. Someone who’d maybe been promoted since he’d left. Someone new.

“Who is this?” Ted asked.

Diane watched as Ted seemed to receive an invisible punch in the chest. He folded, put the points of his elbows on the table in front of him, and sunk his head down until he was gripping the back of his own neck with strong hands. She could see the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Panic breaths. Sharp and shallow like silent laughter. She could hear only one side of the conversation, but she was worried that she’d woken him for no good reason even though she had orders to fetch him for any call originating from the home office, at any hour. Standing orders, given to her almost a year ago and refreshed with maddening frequency anytime it crossed Ted’s mind to do so.

Ted said, “You’re a clerk in the accounting department…”

Ted said, “Oh, I’m sorry.
Assistant
clerk. How long you been working for the company, son?”

Ted said, “Two weeks?”

Ted said, “That must be really exciting for you…”

Ted said, “I’m ready. What’s the message?”

Diane figured she was going to be yelled at. This was obviously just some bit of paperwork or some small detail that plainly didn’t rise to the level of involving the commander.
Stupid,
she said to herself and bit down on the inside of her cheek until the pain became sharp and clarifying.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But when Ted disconnected a few seconds later, he said nothing. He stood, straightened his uniform, looked briefly around the room, then turned and strode purposefully toward the door without saying a word. When he walked out, a blast of cold air whipped in and, briefly, Diane luxuriated in it, feeling like she’d dodged a bullet that had come almost close enough for her to hear.

IN THE MORNING
, word had come down that they would fly in the early afternoon.

“Reconnaissance, they reckon,” Charlie’d said, and that was his idea of a joke. The pilots laughed because there was nothing else worth laughing at. The coffee was terrible and most of them were still hungover from the night before. Then Charlie threw up in the dirt next to the officers’ table in the mess tent they’d pitched two years ago and called the Flyboy O Club, and everyone laughed at that, too.

They pulled the planes out, the pilots pitching in to help drag them into position, and they argued over who was going where and what plane needed what and when. The morning light, the false dawn, was strange and silvery and got into everyone’s heads, making tempers short and sharp. Charlie Voss and Lefty Berthold got into it outside the big sliding doors of the longhouse and almost went after each other, but a couple of the mechanics pulled them apart at the last minute.

Kevin Carter, captain of two squadron, was sitting on the lower wing of his biplane, forearms resting on his knees while he hummed some snatch of nonsense to himself. Fennimore Teague, captain of number three, stood near him, leaning back against the stiff, doped skin of the
fuselage, watching the excitement with a careful eye. Charlie was in his squadron, Lefty in Carter’s. Neither man could be spared if one or the other got in a lucky punch.

“Lefty’s a prick; you know that,” Fenn said.

Carter looked up and watched the two men shoving each other—their faces twisted in sudden rage over nothing. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting at each other over the burr and cough of engines starting up, choking out, burning through idle fuel, but he knew that it didn’t matter. There was nothing of consequence anywhere on this planet; therefore the argument couldn’t be about anything of substance. About air. About breath. About blood. Plenty to go around.

“Your Charlie is no better,” Carter said.

“He is, though,” Fenn replied. “Much.”

Carter considered that a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “He is. But I think Lefty could take him.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What can you bet?”

Carter thought for a second. “Whole jar of peanut butter. What do you got?”

“My virgin sister’s cherry.”

Somewhere an engine caught and coughed to life. Carter sniffed. “Those are high stakes.”

“Not when I know I’m going to win.”

Carter watched Charlie Voss take a wild swing at Lefty and miss by a country mile. Both men were being held back now by three or four other men, and neither of them seemed to be trying too hard to break free. “If I’m not mistaken, I believe you said your sister was forty and had two kids.”

“Yup. And you don’t have any whole jar of peanut butter.”

“You’ve also said you didn’t have a sister.”

“And I don’t much like peanut butter anyway.”

Carter chuckled and eased himself to his feet. He was in all his gear. Had slept in most of it like the filthy, careless barbarian that he half wanted to be. They watched as the scrap broke up of its own heat—the
offended parties spinning off across the cold field like atoms being split—and then Fenn looked away. When he saw Ted come banging out of the comms tent with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, making straight for the evacuated tent line, Fenn tracked him with squinted eyes, like he was watching an enemy coming down high out of the sun.

“That’s bad news walking, right there,” Fenn said.

Carter glanced in Ted’s direction, then stretched. His back was killing him and, as far as he knew, Ted Prinzi was never anything but bad news—sometimes walking, sometimes not. He just wanted to get up in the air and kill something.