A Private Little War (30 page)

At the front of the room, Eddie turned to Ted. His smile shone like a burning strip of magnesium. “Commander? Anything to add?”

Ted stepped forward. “Dismissed!” he shouted.

The officers stepped out into the sunlight and cold as if walking away from a mine cave-in—blinking, gape-mouthed, unsteady on their feet. It was quiet in the camp. The air was still. A perfect day.

Jack Hawker took Carter by the arm. “We’re all going to die here,” he said, speaking with exaggerated slowness, his eyes wide with shock.

“No,” Carter told him. “We’re not.”

“Can I have your bunk when you go then? It’s more comfortable than mine.” He doggedly held to Carter’s arm, his eye.

“Sure thing, Lieutenant,” he said gently, trying to brush Jack’s hand off his arm. “Anything for a friend.”

Jack smiled, stuck a cigarette in his face with his free hand. Fenn appeared beside them, grinning, his cheeks ruddy with excitement. He put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Gentlemen,” he said, “are we dancing?”

“We’re all going to die here,” Jack repeated.

“We’re not,” Carter said. “They’ll pull us out before NRI comes. Before the marines. They have to. No one is going to die here, Jack.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

Jack looked Carter in the eyes searchingly for a few more long seconds. His hand was like a vise. Desperate strength. Fenn tried to guide Jack away, to move him, but Jack wasn’t budging. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, put it in Carter’s, pressed his face close.

“I don’t believe you,” he whispered.

“Ah, Jack…,” said Fenn. “No kissing among the commissioned ranks. You know the rules.” He moved to pull Jack away now, and clamped a hand over his wrist. But Jack chose that moment to release Carter, turn, and walk away—toward the mess where, no doubt, things were about to become very ugly all over again.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Fenn said.

“He’s just scared,” Carter said, watching Jack stalk purposefully across the field, rushing to catch up with the rest of the officers. “He’ll get over it.”

“No, I mean you.” Fenn reached up, straightened the mussed collar and pleats of Carter’s uniform, brushed at its shoulders. “We had a deal. I get your bunk when you die. It really is more comfortable, you know.” Fenn touched a hand to the side of Carter’s face and patted it gently, then turned smartly on his heel and followed along after Jack.

Carter went in the opposite direction, toward the tents. All along the way he saw faces peeking out at him—from windows, behind tent flaps, everywhere. They were pilots’ faces, mechanics’ faces, technicians’ faces, even indigs’ faces, though those were rare. Everyone knew something bad had happened, was about to happen, was coming their way very fast. Carter had to fight to keep from laughing. He had to cover his mouth with his hand as sick giggles bubbled up from his chest.

He went to bed. He couldn’t sleep. He felt light as a feather. Unburdened. He felt like he was flying.

“Now,” he whispered over and over again. “Now, now, now…”

Back in the field house, Ted waited until the last of his officers’ backs had gone out the door, then whirled, meaning to punch Eddie Lucas right in the face. Meaning to really hang one on him and beat him bloody for springing this ambush, this bushwhack on him and the men with no warning.

But when he turned, Eddie wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room because Eddie, though not a fighter, was not an idiot. He knew a dangerous, cornered animal when he saw one.

“Over here, Commander,” he said.

“You knew?”

“Of course I knew. I told you: You’re not the only one with friends at the company.”

“You knew about this when we walked in here.” Ted moved toward Eddie, hands hanging loose at his sides.

Eddie started circling away, backing off at equal speed, moving around the outside edge of the tent until he came to the door. “I found out this morning.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“I told you I had a surprise.”

“That’s not funny.”

Eddie favored Ted with one of his blinding smiles. He said, “Ta-da,” then slipped out the door and into the sun.

Ted stood alone in the middle of the room, surrounded by chairs, humming equipment, and Jimmy McCudden, who sat at his post with his eyes closed, his head down, and his hands folded over the back of his neck. Last man standing, but once again Ted Prinzi had a feeling that he’d lost a fight without really understanding how.

NATIVE RIGHTS INTERSYSTEM
, more commonly called just NRI or Natives R Us, was a political association, foreign aid organization, and lobbying group dedicated to the protection and preservation of indigenous cultures and native peoples the galaxy over. It said so right on the covers of all their brochures.

NRI had a snappy logo that looked nice on posters. It translated well to television and the Net. They had a very slick and practiced public relations department that made commercials and organized rallies and crafted public service announcements full of pathos and inspiring music. Their proficiency at fund-raising was almost unparalleled, gathering their treasure ten dollars at a time from softhearted university students and grade-schoolers and a million at a go from corporations aching for a whiff of social activism on their prospectus. The group also had a certain air of fanatical missionary zeal, which was attractive to those who really felt the need to care deeply about something but had neither the motivation to actually
do
anything nor the desire to examine their convictions too closely. NRI was full-service. Opinions, heroes, villains, smart catchphrases, and T-shirts were provided to the faithful, all in gross amounts.

As a political action group, NRI lobbied, lied, and campaigned for the interests of all the fine, indigenous populations who occupied all those planets that the evil human race wanted to exploit. They labored mightily to keep away the strip miners, the real estate speculators, carpetbaggers, and squatters, the adventure capitalists and the developers, the smugglers, thieves, and snake-oil salesmen. With the outward appearance of unimpeachable virtue, they struggled to keep both the legitimate military and not-so-legitimate mercenary companies out of all the endless squabbles going on in every miserable backwater of the galaxy. It was their deeply and passionately held belief that every culture and nascent civilization should be granted the opportunity to grow and develop freely, without meddling humans constantly trying to trade them Zippo lighters and whiskey for whole continents or getting them hooked on Coca-Cola, cheeseburgers, and color TV before they’d even discovered, say, the wheel. This, too, was in their brochures—though worded somewhat more eloquently.

And in his bed, in his tent, on an airfield very far from home, Carter knew that, under other circumstances, NRI would’ve been heroes. Champions for the downtrodden, voices for the voiceless—this would have all been a good and decent thing for them to do had the local galactic neighborhood been densely packed with planets and short on life. But the fact of the matter was, the opposite was true. Because while yes, the galaxy was fairly fucking teeming with planets, nearly every goddamn one of them capable of supporting life, did.

A century ago, when mankind first began exploring the stupid galaxy in earnest, this was taken to be a good thing. Such bounty! Such wild diversity and wondrous multiplicity of nature in all her guises! Life, it seemed, was tenacious and far more varied than anyone had ever guessed—capable of flourishing in the strangest places and under the most extreme conditions. For a while, everyone thought it cute how critters of all description thrived in lava chutes, beneath nitrogen permafrost, under waxy oceans made of liquid hydrocarbons, and in atmospheres made up entirely of sulfur and noble gasses. Cities were found beneath roofed seas where giant walrus monsters cavorted in blood-warm seas with salinity so high the things could almost walk on the water. Humanoid paleolinds on the icy second planet of 18 Scorpii got
their own dedicated broadcast channel with high-def cameras recording every step, grunt, and shit they took. The planets surrounding Alpha Lyrae were the focus of much scientific inquiry because they contained no life at all, only its ruins.

Still, after the hundredth or so populated planet was found, it just became annoying. Wonder quickly transmuted to irritation. Discovery fatigue set in. In rather short order, mankind gave up all pretense of being careful curators of life in all its wondrous diversity and just started whacking the little alien fuckers with bats whenever they got in the way. And five minutes after
that
, Native Rights Intersystem was founded and immediately called for a galaxy-wide ban on the production of Louisville Sluggers.

Put simply, the local cosmic neighborhood was just flat-out packed with leaping, bouncing, slithering, gibbering monsters. And if it wasn’t a peaceful, advanced society of intelligent and socially progressive giant walruses on one planet, it was a bunch of slack-jawed, nose-picking bipeds on another who’d yet even to come down out of the trees. Nearly everywhere man went, it seemed there was already something there waiting, watching, standing on some distant, foreign shore waving arms, tentacles, proboscis, or genitalia at them and saying, “Sorry. All full up here. Maybe try the next planet over, thanks.”

And NRI was committed to defending the rights of every one of them to grub around in the dirt, live in miserable poverty, die of curable diseases, bash one another with rocks, and generally just lie around flinging their own crap at each other until such a day came that they got around to evolving, undisturbed by man, invented lawyers, and sued the shit out of humanity for willful neglect. Carter knew that tomorrow, a survey ship could discover a planet pimpled with solid gold mountains and inhabited entirely by semi-intelligent gophers. When it did, NRI would be right there, saying that everyone should keep their grubby hands off until such a time (undoubtedly a few billion years down the road) that the alien space gophers developed a sociocultural gestalt advanced enough to deal with mankind on an equal footing.

Human instinct, of course, said poison the stupid gophers and take their solid gold mountains back home to Earth where their value could be properly appreciated. NRI said no. The gophers had an inalienable
right to life and the fulfillment of their unique cultural destiny so, therefore, deserved protection from all such bastards who felt otherwise.

If this protection could be provided by the courts, then good. NRI had a lot of powerful friends in the Colonial Council. And while a good portion of their membership was made up of young and impressionable kids with too much disposable income, they kept on retainer even more high-powered attorneys.

When politics and the law failed them, NRI would use the media. In terms of public opinion, they swung a big weight because the defense of native species—like the defense of rain forests, the defense of displaced tribal peoples, or the defense of puppies, babies, and pie—gave them a moral high ground that was difficult to assail. It was hard to argue manifest destiny or resource scarcity in the face of sensitive, heartfelt documentaries about the tragic plight of the noble space gophers or pictures of them being starved out of their gopher-homes and clubbed to death by a bunch of swaggering, grimy deep-rock miners. Many tried. Few succeeded. In most cases, careers were ruined the minute they ran up against the NRI media machine.