A Private Little War (4 page)

Time passed. By afternoon, a damp fog had settled in the lowlands and rain was expected—so, obviously, the planes couldn’t fly.

The rain held off. Ugly gray-black clouds massed in wet clots on the horizon but then hung there as if dithering about approaching any closer to the pilots’ obvious magnificence. To pass the time, they played indig baseball—a game that’d been invented by one of the men (no one remembered who) and involved more than the usual number of bats and balls, more than the usual amount of punching the opposing team.

The pilots played on one side. The other was made up of a dozen or so of the camp followers—big, hairy, slumping indigs who’d been pulled off whatever odd jobs they were doing and drafted into playing whether they wanted to or not. They cringed a lot, muffed bare-handed catches of the men’s line drives, looked wide-eyed and terrified every time one of the pilots went streaking out into the bush to tackle one of them. They clapped their hands and bowed whenever the pilots laughed at them for their ineptitude at a game they didn’t understand and were being forced to play by men they understood even less.

Being neighborly, the pilots would always help the indigs back to their feet, give them a couple of hard punches in the arm or chest that appeared (maybe) brotherly because the hitting was always attended by a flinty smile. Then there would be more clapping, more bowing, some amount of the indig language that none of the men understood but imagined to mean
Good play!
or
Wasn’t that fun?
even if it was far more
likely that it meant something closer to
Why are you doing this?
or
Please don’t hit me again
.

At one point, Jack Hawker, who was pitching for both sides, laid a nice, fat, slow ball across the plate for George Stork, who hit it like it had said something nasty about his mother. The ball climbed into the smothering sky, zipping along as pretty as anything, and seemed destined for home-run distance.

But then it suddenly faltered as though it’d hit thick air, seemed to hang a moment, and fell short of the distant tree line. One of the indigs went scrambling for it, put a hand on it, and loped into the base path between second and third, meaning to tag Stork out. But Stork was already running and he didn’t slow—just lowered his shoulder and plowed straight into the monkey like a truck. Both of them went down in the pounded dirt. Both of them got up again and even from the sidelines, the company men could hear the indig shouting. They could see it waving its arms around. Stork waved his arms, too. The indig hissed at him and bared sharp teeth. Stork calmly reached down, drew his sidearm, and shot the indig through the face.

“Well, shit,” said Carter, who’d gone out to join Jack on the mound. “Guess that’s game then.”

“Trouble with your indig,” said Jack Hawker, Carter’s squadron leader from number two, in his languid, roughneck accent, “is that he don’t understand basic sportsmanship.”

“Trouble with the indigs,” countered Stork as he walked back toward home plate, brushing dirt and grass from his pants and smudging a bit of blood from his knuckles, “is that they don’t understand baseball.”

They went up in the late afternoon. The fog had burned off, the rain never materialized, and the men were bored, so they rolled their planes out of the longhouse again, splashed some fuel into them, and went out hunting. Sightseeing, they called it. Reconnaissance in force. Carter took two squadron out into badland, and they managed to maintain formation until they crossed the twisting snake of the river that was just called the River because there was no need to name it anything else.
After that, each plane just sort of wandered off on its own, spinning and looping and buzzing the tops of the alien trees because there was nothing else to do.

On the radio, David Rice was telling a long and convoluted story about his last deployment as a naval aviator, on garrison duty, flying off one of the big colonial carriers.

“It was orbit work,” he was saying. “BMF Ashland, over Balantyne. You ever been on one of the big boats, you know it’s dull as fuck, right?”

Carter had done some carrier duty, though not as a naval. BMF, that stood for
Big Motherfucker
. Capital-plus. Command element for an entire battle group. A ship that’d been assembled in orbit and would never, ever know gravity.

“Right, Davey,” he said. “Dull as fuck. Roger that.”

“So we fly ten hours, down for twenty. And down for twenty, that’s rough, right? Nothing to do. Like liberty every day, but it gets dull.”

“As fuck,” said Carter.

“Right…”

Davey had a friend who was a bad garrison soldier. Always in trouble. Threatening MPs, getting in fights, whatever. Spent more time under restraint than in his fighter.

“So his big thing was making rain, right? He’d get into the hangar bay, up in the lift gantries, and he’d bring, like, five gallons of water with him. Drink the water while he was up there. Just drink and drink. And then he’d spend hours pissing down on the MP posts from, what? Three hundred feet up or whatever. But the thing is, with the drive thrust, corriolis, the weird gravity, he’d have to know how to aim it just right—standing up there on the cats with his dick in his hand and—”

“Got one!”

The call-in from Jack Hawker on the all-hands channel interrupted Davey’s story.

“Two squadron flight, I have a target.”

“The hell you do,” said Carter. “Illuminate and hold for confirm.”

Carter strained against the belts, trying to look everywhere at once because, really, he hadn’t been keeping close track of where his planes were. He hung an arm out over the cockpit rail and banged a gloved hand on the biplane’s skin in annoyance.

After a few seconds he saw the bright point of white light from a hand-fired magnesium signal flare and knew where Jack was, so he tuned his radio to the flight address channel and called everyone in.

“Two squadron, rally on that flare.”

Come to find, Jack really had spotted something: an armed indig supply column moving in the shade, foot-slogging along the edge of a stand of fat, bushy trees way off in the middle of Indian country. Carter dutifully called it in. At altitude, it was impossible to tell whose indigs they were. Could’ve been friendly, supplies coming in for Connelly or Durba, scouts, outriders, anything. Could’ve been decidedly unfriendly, too. They all looked the same, even up close, but there were maps, supposedly. Schedules. The controllers sometimes knew right from left.

The call came in from comms: “No friendlies reported. Guns are free.”

Carter addressed the squadron: “Tallyho, motherfuckers. Get some.”

And they did, swarming around the area and then dropping like stones from the sky on short strafing runs, hitting the line from both ends with machine guns like museum-grade antiques so the monkeys wouldn’t know which way to run, making them dance.

When the indigs on the ground finally got their shit together, they abandoned their carts and their packs and whatever else they’d been hauling and hustled back into the trees, so Carter ordered those pilots so equipped to switch to cannons. They shredded the trees for a while—splitting the stumpy trunks like balsa and blowing the ever-loving shit out of the flora. And when that had less of an effect than he’d hoped, he ordered the squadron to switch to incendiary ammunition in hopes of lighting the stand of trees on fire and smoking the little fuckers out into the open.

The planes flew around for a time crazily, like gnats disturbed in the fading sun, while the pilots strained to pop the covers on their guns, unbreech their belts of standard AP, dig out the red-tip ammo from boxes secured by shock cords and stashed under or behind seats, then reload with control sticks pinned between their knees and their wings waggling like a bunch of spastics.

Somewhere to their west, three squadron was chasing heffalumps—the native equivalent of a water buffalo, but about the size of an elephant and with glossy black skin like oil floating on water. It would sometimes
take an entire belt of ammo to bring one down, screaming and kicking up the earth. And even in the cold they rotted and stank. First squadron had taken up a blocking position near the water, hoping for stragglers panicked by all the fire and flying, but they were unlucky and went home early, blue-balled and angrier and more bored than they’d been before climbing into their planes.

Down on the ground, the indigs had come to the edge of the trees again to see what was happening. They’d formed a line, and when the planes started to dive again, they loosed flights of arrows and stones.

Slings and arrows
, Carter thought.
Actual slings and fucking arrows…
It never ceased to amaze him how persistent the dumb monkeys could be. How stupidly brave and tenacious like the clap.

In any event, firing on the planes made them bad indigs (no matter what they’d been before Carter’s squadron had opened up on them, they were bad
now
), so in recognition of their foolhardy monkey courage and dedication to this dumb game of war, two squadron dove and dove and killed every single one of them.

When it got too dark to play, the pilots came home and retired themselves to the field house or mess where, by lantern light, they commenced (or continued) drinking, watched movies that they’d all seen a hundred times, played cards. The camp was under radiation blackout—part of the terms of operating in this place—so there were no soft calls home to sweethearts with weeping, declarations of love, or apology for terrors committed, witnessed, or cheered; no mail, no news, no stealing of entertainment from the distant ether. Iaxo was a war without cliché, it sometimes seemed to them, and it annoyed everyone to no end.

For a time, Captain Carter chose to linger among the boys, playing a few hands of poker in the mess with cards gone soft from passing through so many fingers. At one point, he saw Vic and Willy McElroy come in, laughing over some private joke. Vic was the mission’s chief mechanic on Iaxo. Willy was one of the ground crew who did double duty on the lathe and stamping press when he wasn’t walking planes around.

They’d been in the machine shop together, were blacked to the elbows and smudged about the face with engine oil and grease. Carter looked and Vic was there, standing in her rumpled jumpsuit and tattered leathers, smiling, eyes the color of new leaves, black hair tied back and spilling over her collar. He looked again and she was gone, having ducked out a different door, her brief passage leaving a burn on Carter’s retinas like his gaze passing across the hot light of a distant sun. Willy, too, stood confused as if wondering where she’d gone. Shrugging, he went to scrub up. Carter stood and made for his tent, consciously choosing a different door than Vic.

“Fastest disengage I’ve seen in a year,” he heard someone behind him say as he stepped out, then a cloudburst of laughter.