A Private Little War (44 page)

“Not in my bed, counselor,” Carter said.

“Good enough.” In a gentlemanly fashion, Fast Eddie Lucas stood, dipped from the waist in a sketched bow, then fell over—asleep before he hit the dirt.

“Christ,” Fenn said. “Now everyone’s going to think we killed him.”

Their laughter was loud enough to wake the dead. The drunk, however, slept on undisturbed.

This was later. A few minutes. An hour.

“So,” Fenn said, leaning back against the door frame. He’d put his jacket on, collar turned up, his cheeks buried in its fur. The cold was bitter. “What do you think?”

“It’s not good,” Carter said. He hugged himself, hands buried in his armpits, rollneck sweater pulled to his nose, muffling his words.

“Not good at all.”

“No.”

Inside, they’d banked the fire. Carter had taken a musty blanket from his foot locker and thrown it over poor, inebriated Eddie, then grabbed Cat from its pile of rags by the door—catching the little monster by the back of the neck while it was still half-asleep—and had tried to hold it, balled up in his sweater for warmth and to keep Cat from murdering Eddie.

Cat was having none of it, though, and had clawed free, hit the ground spitting, and bolted for the door. It huddled ten feet off and stared at Carter and Fenn in the cold, just waiting to be allowed back inside. He and Fenn had followed Cat outside for a breath of air and to clear their own heads. Carter’d kept the lawyer’s cigarettes and was smoking them now through a hole in the neck of his sweater, one after another.

“I think we shouldn’t tell anyone just yet.”

“Agreed.”

“I would desert if I thought there was anywhere to go.”

“I think that’s all part of the plan.” Fenn plucked the cigarette from Carter’s mouth-hole, took a drag, planted it back amid the cabled wool. When he spoke, he exhaled thunderheads. “Leaving us with no options but to soldier.”

“Damn sneaky if you ask me.”

Fenn nodded.

“So, was any of what you told Eddie true?”

“You mean…”

Carter nodded.

“God, no. We won at Palas and on Barson’s World. I shipped home with everyone else, sitting on my bonus payout. You?”

Carter shook his head. “Proxima was a wash after we switched sides. Spent six months plastering the place from a transorbital bomber, flew home on an Argo-Stanislav freighter after the truce. This is bad, though.”

“True enough.”

“Could still go our way. If Connelly attacks, diverts the Lassateirra. If NRI supplies don’t make it into the field fast enough. If the marines stay away or the council ignores the NRI request. It could go our way.”

Heroes, Eddie…

“Could,” Fenn agreed.

“But it won’t.”

Fenn shook his head. “No.”

Carter thought about the ships he’d seen the other night. The hooks of light on the horizon. He’d meant to tell Fenn about them, but hadn’t. Everyone had seen something similar anyway. He’d meant to tell Fenn about NRI. About what they would do when they got here in force. The shock. The death. Cameras rolling while poor scared kids came
tumbling out the back of dropships and veterans pressed grenades and pulse rifles into the hands of every native who reached. But he hadn’t. No time. Or something.

“Look, I’ve been told by plenty of bosses what a fuckup I am,” Carter said. “None have ever conspired to leave me for dead before. Eddie’s got to be wrong.”

Except that wasn’t true either.

“Don’t start believing your own propaganda, Kev. That’s dangerous business. It’s a lot of money on the line. A lot of legal troubles and bad press. I can see Eddie’s point. It would be a lot simpler for all concerned if the whole bunch of us just disappeared one day.”

“Well, not
all
concerned. I’d be pretty pissed about it.”

“It’s about the money, Captain. I think maybe it’s cheaper for the company just to let us die.”

“Bright and shiny, Fenn. Love the way you think. Really.”

Fenn shrugged. Coming out of the dark, they heard the crunching of a native post horse approaching, its big, clubby feet crackling on the scrim of ice that’d formed, like walking over broken glass. They watched as it came on down the line of tents and crossed right before them, its rider upright in the saddle, reins held loosely, eyes like black pools—wet and reflective.

It watched them as its horse picked its way along, head down, swaying slightly. Fenn noted the loop of charms around its wrist—shell casings, buttons, a braided wire, a battery—and the way it seemed made of a single creature, the horse and its rider, each perfectly suited to the other. Carter saw the rifle in its scabbard of stitched plastic sheeting, the scraps of ballistic cloth sewn into a pathetic barding for the horse’s barrel chest, and himself reflected in the absolute dispassion of the indig’s gaze as it went by. The creature did not bow or scrape. It did not smile or move to clap its hands or look away. It simply watched, as though the captains were stones or clouds or something less, and only once it was past them did it make a sound—a breathy hiss in the back of its throat that might’ve been a command to the horse or might’ve not.

“That one of ours?” asked Carter, once horse and rider had vanished again into the swallowing dark.

“Oh, good,” said Fenn. “You saw it, too.”

Carter thought of a question he’d never asked Fenn before. Same as a question Fenn had never asked him.

“Fenn, what did you do before you joined the company?”

Fenn smiled and stared off in the general direction of the horizon. “Nothing at all. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Funny how that works, huh? None of us did anything before, I guess.”

“I guess.”

For a minute, neither man spoke. Neither man looked at the other.

Carter remembered reading somewhere once how the captains of Spanish galleons, after sailing their load of conquistadors halfway around the earth to the New World, would burn their ships in the bay, giving their men a very showy lesson in commitment and dedication to a cause. With their ships in flames, a point was succinctly made: No one was ever going home again. There was no retreat. No surrender. Win or die.

And Carter seemed to recall that it’d worked. The conquistadors—with their guns and steel and armor and horses and big, ridiculous hats—had decimated entire populations, had killed millions of indigenous peoples, murdering them with gunpowder, with swords, with plagues and starvation and, eventually, had installed themselves as rulers of a hot, sticky, smelly, and dangerous place, as alien to them as this place was to him even now.

Of course, it’d taken a century. And even at the end of it, there’d been plenty of indigenous peoples left to hate the Spaniards for what they’d done. It was a messy process, and there was a lot of dying to be done before the inevitable victory. Carter imagined that a lot of those dead conquistadors went to their graves thinking that the New World wasn’t all that nice a place anyway, that maybe everyone would’ve been a whole lot happier had they all just stayed home, eaten some olives, screwed their wives, and left the New World to the people who were already there.

And he was willing to bet that all of them, to a man, thought that burning the ships had been a really shitty idea.

“What’s on your mind, Kev?” Fenn asked.

Carter shook his head. “Ancient history,” he said. “So what do we do next? I feel like we should do something.”

“Cards? There’s been a rotating game going on in Stork and Hardman’s tent for the last day or so.”

Carter shrugged. It sounded as good to him as anything else. He figured he’d have plenty of time to sleep when he was dead, and told Fenn as much.

“Very cheerful, Captain. Be sure to tell the boys that one. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

Together, they stumbled off into the quiet dark. Cat waited until they were gone and carefully slunk back inside to walk in slow circles around the stove and sniff at the drunk lawyer on the floor.

CARTER WON THIRTY DOLLARS PLAYING POKER
. Vic was there. They were coldly cordial to each other, but neither of them could bluff, each knowing the other a bit too well. He took the two screamers about an hour before his next flight was due to lift, giving them time to work themselves in, swallowing them with a mouthful of cold coffee. In his condition, they hit almost immediately, and he was seized with a sudden urge to clean the tent. His, Stork’s, didn’t matter. His hands couldn’t seem to stay still.

Dawn patrol was uneventful. He flew a two/three with Tommy Hill and Ernie O’Day. Exhausted, hungover, hyped up, and feeling poorly, he went up in the bomber, taking a little DH.2 called Scrambler out of the house and up near maximum altitude. He just hung there, glad, for a change, for the cold and the quiet and the thoughtless boredom while the boys talked about girls on the flight channel and tried to get themselves shot at. Scrambler had been refitted with a 250-horse replica Rolls-Royce Eagle and bomb grapples under its lower wing, triggered hydraulically from a finger switch on the stick. He kept all ten of his far away, not trusting his own hands not to just drop the weight wherever to make some pretty flowers.

The cold made him ache. He’d forgotten his helmet in the tent, and the grease on his face made his skin smell like a hospital. He ducked low, curling within the body of the plane, and looked up past the top wing and into the gray-blue sky. It almost never snowed on Iaxo—it was one of the small mercies of the place. Clouds grew, darkened, fattened, but what fell, if anything, was freezing rain or a mist that seemed almost to sizzle and made the eyes sting like tear gas if one stayed out too long in it. Real snow was a rarity. On some nights, though, he longed for it simply because it felt as though it ought to snow.

The plane flew like a brick. They were down around Southbend, still under strict orders to stay clear of the walls and outlying mud huts and tents that huddled close around the periphery. At fourteen thousand feet it looked like a scene out of antiquity—the fortified town almost like a castle, white-walled and standing at the river’s edge. Peeking over the cockpit’s side rail, Carter imagined peasants going about their daily business in the shadow of its squat, roofed towers and massive gate, and he wondered what this place must’ve been like before they’d all arrived—a Heisenberg riddle, just enough to keep his mind churning through the dull, looping repetitions of air patrol.

Southbend was the smaller of the two towns. Dirty flags snapped from the walls. The land around it was flat, gray-black, and ugly, denuded of trees by whatever mysterious industry went on within. Gouts of smoke rose from inside the walls. Through the spotting scope, it masked all but the most massive details, but when the wind blew just right, Carter swore he could see tarps, camouflage netting. He wondered if it was his imagination. Could be thatch. Could be someone’s washing. Could be nothing at all. Every pilot reported the same thing when flying just a little closer than they were supposed to. Everyone thought the same thing.

He thought about how much difference 250 pounds of modern high explosives would make if dropped in just the right place. Trouble was, he didn’t know which place was the right one.

He circled lower. Tommy Hill and Ernie were back along the river, trolling for action. He thought again about just buzzing the city, dropping indiscriminately, praying for fool’s luck—black smoke, secondaries,
tongues of fueled flame. Lower. Closing his eyes, he imagined the perfect strike: the bloom of black and orange, action-movie style. Bodies and debris blown into the air. The whuff of tortured air.

His hands shook. In the hours since he’d talked with Eddie, the whole thing had begun to feel unreal. How could he die? He was the hero of this story—its main and most lovable character. He had guns. He had bombs. He had a fucking airplane. And some smelly, simple, backward abo monkey with a rock or a stick was going to kill him? No. That wasn’t going to happen. Eddie had been wrong. Carter stroked the red button of the bomb release taped onto the control stick with his thumb, running it over the smooth plastic, the simple plunger mechanism.

He rolled out then, climbed for the thin, high scratchings of the clouds, and flew awhile, sitting on his hands with the stick between his knees. Soon enough, he figured. And if not, he and Fenn would mutiny, lash Ted to a pole, raise their own air force, and blow the shit out of everything.