A Private Little War (39 page)

He didn’t, but refusal wasn’t easy. He’d also kept from them that he’d come from privilege and private school, from engineers who’d probably designed some of the things that these people so obliquely hated. His brief commune past with Sara served him better, made his arrival more obvious and easier to explain. He was nineteen years old.

On a salvage ship called
Band of Brothers
, a blind former Colonial Marine commando called Applebaum taught twelve of them the delicate art of bomb making and schooled them in the less delicate theories of engineered demolition. Theirs were not the simple butane-and-nails terror bombs or the wasteful compound-4 jacket of the suicide martyr, but rather structural explosives, sabotage bombs, and complicated implosion chains that could take down entire buildings. It was fun. And while no one there pretended not to know why they were being taught all of these fascinating things, neither did anyone talk about it. Maybe
someday they’d be called on to blow something up. Save a space gopher. Whatever. In the meantime, they were kept busy.

They practiced first with dummies in the few pressurized compartments that remained on the
Band of Brothers
, then moved into soft vacuum for the real thing; gleefully blasting huge chunks of the derelict superstructure and learning the chemical intricacies of zero-atmosphere demolition.

Carter had the knack for destruction. It was nothing more than the opposite of engineering. And he was enjoying himself right up until one of his fellow scholars—a short, fat, normally gifted chemist named Barley—made a tragic miscalculation with a concussion tamper and blew himself and his kit straight into space.

The
Band of Brothers
was in a constantly decaying orbit around Calisto, its tumble corrected somewhat by the explosions that would bump its trajectory, more by the transit bubbles that would always land and lift from its down-facing Calisto side. Equal and opposite force and all that. At any time, there were a dozen or so of these little single-use engines with life-support bubbles attached and glommed onto the wreck, each with a little fuel left over from its single trip out from whichever NRI transport had delivered students into the vicinity and Colonel Applebaum’s tender care. And it was to one of these that Carter charged the minute he saw Barley blown off in the general direction of Venus, several million miles away.

Long story short, he caught him. In his vac suit, Barley was able to cling to one of the bubbles’ debarking clamps while Carter got it turned around and headed back toward the
Band of Brothers
. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about orbital mechanics, relative velocities of bodies in space, or piloting in general at the time. After catching up to Barley, matching his velocity, maneuvering in close enough for him to grab on, getting the bubble turned and faced in the direction he’d come from, the
Band of Brothers
was long gone. Carter found her in the glass, rapidly receding, then made the one mistake that probably saved his life—aiming low, past her horizon, and giving one long, hard acceleration burn.

Then his bubble ran out of gas.

It took most of a Calistan day, but his ballistic trajectory eventually merged with that of the
Band of Brothers
, his faster relative speed and
lower orbital arc allowing him to draw close enough that he could start screaming for help over the suit radio. Colonel Applebaum, having assumed them both dead of misadventure and adding them to his long mental list of the same, dispatched students with tethers to rope Carter, Barley, and their bubble in like a wayward, floating calf, and Carter, having now gotten a taste for it, was in love with flying. It was childish and instantaneous, but real. Something he knew in his blood.

When NRI got wind of Carter’s dumbass heroics, they called him back from the
Band of Brothers
and had him thrown into a torture cell for six days where interrogators (mostly students, one of whom fainted after putting the battery cables to him) did their best to prove that he was actually a spy sent to infiltrate their ranks by any one of a dozen colonial or federal agencies that they believed (wrongly) gave a damn about anything they did. Carter was used as a demonstration case, a live subject, and he broke under questioning a hundred times but never gave them anything that made them worry. NRI was concerned with grand conspiracies. About the motivations of the faithful and their small betrayals? They couldn’t have cared less.

On the seventh day he was cleared, his physical wounds dressed, the rest apologized for in the most bureaucratic of terms, and he was farmed out in secret to a small conglomerate of belt miners who made some side money letting rookie NRI pilots in training crash their machinery for a while. He was shifted again to an agrarian/utopian colony on Ceti Z, which alleged to grow food for starving aliens under the boot of colonial authority but actually grew gengineered drugs for sale on the black market and operated as a cover for an NRI training and development unit that flew low-g crop dusters and reconfigured rescue helicopters into and out of simulated crisis situations. Ceti Z was far out and well off the galactic plane, a distant colonial experiment that attracted only those who wanted extraordinary isolation. As such, this was where Carter got his first taste of live fire and serious indoctrination. This was where he was taught not just to fly, but to kill. There were targets first—twisted metal or rag bags. Then there were the ’phants—club-footed pachyderms that traveled in herds around the ragged edges of the terraced fields. The meat that the ’phants were turned into at the
business end of the trainees’ guns was used to feed the settlers, the NRI staff, and the pilots. “No waste,” it’d been explained to him. “It wouldn’t do to waste the gift of life being offered us.”

So much for the defense of species. Carter didn’t know any vegetarians on Ceti Z. The meat tasted a little like he imagined frog might taste. Or lizard. Dark and oily and rank. It tasted considerably better after smoking a little of the settlers’ product—a strain of cannabis kafiristancia that grew ferociously fast and was shipped in toward the hub in containers packed with thousand-pound bales—but it never tasted good.

He made it back to Sol before his twenty-first birthday and took drop training on Luna, of all places. It was a commercial course for pilots looking to become orbital certified, paid for by NRI through a shell company. Carter adopted the name Tino Vasquez for the duration and spoke as little as possible. It took a week and was the most civil time he’d experienced since leaving Midland. He thought about going AWOL (if that was even the word); of vanishing, finding passage back to Earth, trying to pick up the tatters of his old life. There was a party on the first night for the eleven pilots taking the course—cold beers and real steaks, fiddle music, potato salad, and backslapping. They were staying in a surveyor’s dome—little more than an emergency shelter but compared to what Carter had become accustomed to a palace: fresh, clean oxygen, seals that didn’t leak, beds that were actually beds (not repurposed pallet decking or hammocks woven from fronds), and people who didn’t talk incessantly of the need for armed, violent insurrection against the tyranny of the colonial-industrial complex. Instead, they talked of paychecks and benefits packages, of their children and wives and husbands and families back on Earth or Mars or among the belters; of birthday parties and bad bosses and the weather. Carter missed his family terribly. When someone noticed him crying, he said it was a bad reaction to some antihistamines and went inside to lie down for a while.

They made drops on both the light side and the dark side of Luna, practiced emergency procedures, and sat through classroom lectures in ballistics, physics, and orbital mechanics. They learned how to plot courses and calculate falling trajectories, how to make everything go right, and how to recover when everything went wrong. Then they
practiced all of it and then they ate and then they slept and then they started all over again the next day.

At the end of the week, there was another party. Everyone exchanged contact information. Carter’s was all fake, but the sentiments were real. He liked these people. He would miss them. He thought again of escape but knew there was no way. NRI had retained all his real identification. He had no money, no credit. All through the final party, he’d hung close to the center of the celebration, drinking fast and hoping that someone, anyone, would ask him what was wrong. Why he had this look in his eyes like he was drowning a little bit at a time. But no one did. He hadn’t become close enough to any of his classmates to just come out and ask for their help. NRI was his only ride out, his only refuge. And there was still a part of him that was a little curious about what they had in mind for him next.

Re-education. Cold tofu and protein porridge. An iron bunk welded to the bulkhead of a poorly pressurized cargo hold where he and two thousand other quote/unquote volunteers sweated out the wait before their ship could make the translation to Alpha Lyrae. Everyone was sick. Everyone had raging ear infections, bleeding from the sinuses, lung problems, DCS skin rashes, and seizures.

Carter cut his teeth in the Alamora campaign, Lyrae, on a planet called Oizys in eccentric orbit around Vega. A bare twenty-five light-years from Sol, it was a rather close thing—a jungle hell of greens and poison being logged naked by competing resource interests, none of which had any patience for one another or for NRI.

Carter flew—fast-insertion boats full of bewildered volunteers and cadre leaders and commandos and commissars, launched from orbit and falling like shooting stars through the heavy, dense atmosphere. The dropship was one of the favored transports of NRI because it allowed them to unload hundreds of protestors or soldiers or lawyers into anywhere with all the speedy shock and surprise of an orbital bombardment. And this was exactly what Carter did, delivering his human cargoes to programmed coordinates where they were hustled out, down the combat ramps in some semblance of military order, to confront the loggers and their machines with cameras rolling. Under cover of the
frenzied, panicked, choking volunteers being herded by the commissars, the commandos would slip away to sabotage machinery and burn fuel dumps. The cadre leaders would take groups of volunteers in riotous charges toward armed loggers or instruct them to chain themselves to trees standing before the onrushing clear-cutting apparatus. Meanwhile, Carter would lift, return to orbit, take on another cargo and some fuel, then do it all again.

This went on for days. On his return trips, he would ferry the wounded and corpses back into orbit. He would clean the decking of his ship’s bay with a high-pressure hose and, under orders, spray air freshener so those in his next load wouldn’t smell the stink of blood and puke and shit and death on their way down into the grinder. The native species the NRI volunteers were allegedly protecting killed said volunteers in droves. The plants killed them. The environment killed them. It was a wonder there were any left for the human loggers and their mercenary security teams to put bullets into.

This was how NRI truly operated—a scene that would be repeated over and over again for Carter throughout the next two years. Sometimes there was more death, sometimes less. He ferried soldiers and he ferried paralegals. He delivered supplies. He made night drops on alien shores, guided in by infiltrators with IR strobe lights who, when he set down to unload whatever he was carrying, would always say something like “You didn’t see nothing here, Chief. Nothing at all. You were never here.”

Occasionally he fought, flying air cover or bombing missions in aircraft that could barely take to the air and were only craft at all by the loosest of definitions. Again, he didn’t understand how killing anything could possibly be in sync with the goals of NRI, but he never raised a fuss about it because it never particularly bothered him. He did what he did in defense of alien species and alien planets simply because no alien had ever abandoned him or beat him or tortured him or brainwashed him. No alien had ever called him pussy or faggot or traitor or terrorist. He would defend them not because he loved them more than his fellow man, but because, at that point, he hated them slightly less.

That changed, of course, but not until Gliese 581c, called Frogtown, where he was shot down, apprehended, and incarcerated. Not until the
marines came for him. Not until NRI discarded him, forgot about him, and left him to suffer and rot.

It was funny, but when he was in the mood for telling himself the truth, Carter blamed it all on the girl. A bucket of paint, a chance word, a warm smile as alien to him then as the worlds he would someday see—these were the things on which his entire life had pivoted.

And he had never forgiven her. Not even a little.

CARTER WOKE LATE AND VIC WAS ALREADY GONE
. He liked her tent. It was cleaner than his, smelled nice. She had no roommate, no Fenn, no real neighbors even, save the planes and the longhouse.

He rolled over onto his back and stared up at the canvas. He thought about the girl—the artist—in a variety of savage ways and then stopped when it began to make his chest hurt. He tried to think about his brothers, his mother, but had difficulty conjuring their faces. His memories of them all felt so distant, like he was trying to imagine a family he’d never quite had but had heard described once, a long time ago.