A Private Little War (47 page)

Charlie Voss and Emile were walking across the work yard wearing their gear and trying to enjoy the thin comfort of the sun that’d suddenly emerged from a break in the solid ceiling of cloud. They looked, oddly, like young men again in the light—walking in a bubble of strange calm through the riot of planes and men and weapons and mechanics. Like children almost, on a day out at the museum, stopping here and there to touch a wing, a strut, a bomb. They were talking about the marines coming because, today, that was the rumor: that the Colonial Marines were on their way. And that was the only thing that anyone was talking about, discussing what they thought would become of them when it happened, if it happened, if the company didn’t come and get them first.

“We’ll do jail, I think,” Emile said.

“Jail for sure,” agreed Charlie.

“But not for long.”

“No.”

“A warm bed. Hot meals. Quiet.”

“No missions.”

“No fucking indigs. And the company, they’ll get us out, I think.”

“Yeah, they will. Have to, I’d think.”

“Have to. Be an embarrassment otherwise. And we’re still worth something to ’em.”

“Sure. Absolutely.”

“It’ll be a nice break, I think.”

“You think?”

“I really do.”

Fenn was still shaking even though he’d been down on solid ground now for almost fifteen minutes. His legs were jerking so much that he’d had to cross them at the knee like a dandy to keep them from jumping, sitting in the mess, on a bench, leaning back against the edge of a table in an attempt at looking calm. His face was locked in what he hoped was a look of bemusement. When he’d landed, he could barely walk. His hand on his coffee cup shook enough to make rings in the greasy liquid surface. His jaw was clenched against the chattering his teeth wanted to make, and he breathed in a hiss—drawing in air across his teeth, blowing it out his nose—while his heart (disloyal organ that it was) tried to hammer its way out of his chest or climb out through his throat. Go for a jog. Run.

He focused on breathing. On stilling the tremors that coursed through him. He didn’t know how long he was going to have to sit there. He thought, perhaps, a very long time.

Emile and Charlie came in, saw him, sat.

“That was something, eh?” Emile asked.

“Something,” said Fenn, favoring his squadron mates with a smile. “It truly was.” All three of them had been up near Riverbend. All three of them had broken the rules, violated the cordon that Ted had put up around the walled cities, had poked their noses too deeply into enemy territory. They had seen the high moors, the invisible land just over the artificial horizon created by months of stalemate, covered in men and indigs and equipment. Hundreds of containers. Thousands of bodies. An army just sitting, waiting for them. When the battle had erupted on the ground, they had come together into tight formation to watch the sudden collapse of time frames, of anachronisms fighting one another in the dirt and frozen mud. Fenn had begged release from Ted to turn his flight loose upon the enemy, but he had been refused, had been called home with guns cold. That wasn’t what had scared him, though.

“We were talking…”

“No good will ever come of that,” Fenn interrupted.

“Hilarious,” said Charlie, and Fenn gave him a wink, squeezing his hand tighter on his coffee cup, and sighing with what he hoped sounded like collected peace.

“So we were talking about going to prison, right?”

Fenn nodded.

“Because we figure, Charlie and me, that that’s where we’re going to end up.”

“In prison?”

“Right.”

“Like, just eventually? Or were you planning on doing something specifically illegal?”

And the two of them sat a moment, confused by the complex twists and turns of Fenn’s logic before grinning together and breaking out laughing.

“You’re joking,” said Emile.

“Joking, right?” asked Charlie.

“No, gentlemen. Really, I’m not. Why would you be talking about going to prison?”

“For what we’re doing here,” said Emile.

“When the marines come,” said Charlie.

“Oh,” said Fenn. “The marines. Prison.” He had to remind himself that the boys knew nothing of what he now knew. That he carried with him the specific and terrible knowledge of their own ending here and was one of only four who did, the weight of it enough to warp his every thought down toward the hard, cold center of fact: that they were going to die here, and likely soon. NRI, the natives, they would settle this and do the company’s dirty work of eliminating all witnesses long before the marines arrived. And even if they didn’t—even if, by some miracle, the Flyboy Inc. Carpenter mission survived the coming battle and won through by some impossible turn of fate—then when the marines did arrive, none of them would be going to jail. Of that, Fenn was positive. And short of flying an open cockpit biplane across hundreds of light-years to land on Victoria Street in London, at the front doors of the home office, Fenn didn’t know how any of them would ever get home.

Through one of the windows in the mess, he spotted Carter walking the flight line, looking dazed by all the action surrounding him, and a little lost.
A boy
, he thought.
Lost among a tribe of boys.

“Colonial prison,” added Emile again. “When the marines come.”

He looks half-dead already
. And Fenn wondered, not for the first time, if he, too, looked as bad on the outside as Carter did.

With effort, he focused his attention back on Emile. “No,” he said. “I really hadn’t considered that.”

“Well, shouldn’t you then?” Charlie asked. “I mean, the way things are going, don’t you think they’ll come sooner or later? They’ll shut us down and, the way Emile and me were looking at it, probably shut us up in jail for a bit, at least.”

“To be completely honest, gentlemen…” Fenn paused, careful with his words and fighting to maintain the tattered curtain of nonchalance he pulled ever tighter across his throbbing heart and jittering hands, the heel of his boot tapping painfully against his shin. “I’d never truly considered prison as an outcome. Or, for that matter, the arrival of the marines.”

“So you think they’re not going to come then? Even after—”

“Even after,” said Fenn.

“So you think we’re going to be okay then, Captain?” Emile leaned forward, as though being closer to a man who he thought believed things were going to turn out all right would help him catch some bug of optimism, some invulnerability. “Because prison, you know… Charlie and me were saying that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Compared to what?” Fenn asked.

“To this,” Charlie said. He gestured, in the smallest way possible, with a tiny bob of his head, to everything and everybody in the whole, wide world.

“To what?”

“To missions. The goddamn indigs.”

“To the food. And Ted. And flying in the dark and stuff.”

“It can’t be so bad.”

“Have you ever been to prison, Emile?” Fenn asked. Emile shook his head. He asked Charlie, and Charlie, too, said no—that he’d always been
just a little too fast. “Then don’t fool yourselves,” he said. “It would, in fact, be so bad. It would be worse.”

“But that don’t matter, right?” Emile asked. He was looking at Fenn’s hand on the coffee cup and Fenn made an effort to relax it. When that didn’t work, he carefully took it away and hid it in his lap. “It don’t matter because you said the marines won’t come, right? You said.”

“The Colonial Marines don’t take orders from me, Emile. They’ll come or they won’t. I just said that I hadn’t been thinking about prison.”

“Then what were you thinking about?”

Carter had disappeared again into the mess and riot of the airstrip, but Fenn stared out at the place he had been, wondering where he’d vanished to, how difficult disappearing might really be.

“Something even worse than that,” he said to Emile.

Carter couldn’t find Fenn and had stopped looking very hard. He was in the field house, maybe. Or the mess. The longhouse. Doing something other than wanting to be found, which was fine by Carter. He was tired and had lost his taste for company halfway through the looking. Now, hands in his pockets, he just walked, watching clouds scudding in and closing like a ceiling over the world.

At the far end of B strip, down by the armory and weapons lockers, Max waved him down. He was sitting, reclined against a massive pile of loose .303 belts, with a stripped Spandau-style drum-fed machine-gun body across his knees and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip.

Carter changed course and made for the sunlit corner where Max sat, grinning a gap-toothed smile and cleaning the Spandau’s fouled chamber with a black toothbrush. He was missing his four front teeth—had lost them in a fight in a transfer station spacer’s guild bar the month before they’d all shipped for the final, plunging leg of their trip to Iaxo—and was forever poking his tongue through the hole. He smelled like rotten teeth and warm gun oil.

“Hear the news, Captain?” he lisped.

Carter’s heart stalled. Three squadron’s flight was home. He’d counted all their planes. The one/two flight with Jack flying drag had been
coming right in behind his patrol with no trouble reported. It couldn’t be bad news, but it’d been so long since he’d heard any good news that Carter immediately assumed the worst. It was a habit. “What news?” he asked, bracing for it.

“Monkeys moved on Riverbend this morning while you was out gallivanting. About four thousand of them. That entire northern flank.” Max removed his cigarette, spit in the dirt, and beamed maliciously. “And they got the shit blown right out of them, too. Three squadron rolled up just in time to see the little chickenshit yellow fuckers running. They never even seen the inside of the walls.”

“Did everyone come home safe?”

“Ours did. Fully loaded, too. Guns clean. No one cleared to fire a shot. Indigs probably haven’t stopped running yet.”

“We headed back up there?”

Max raised a mangled eyebrow. “I got stripes on me I haven’t noticed? If you are, no one’s thought to inform me. All’s I know is all planes are in turnaround now, Ted’s orders, and I do see our fearless leader over there”—he gestured off toward the strip’s apron with his toothbrush, to where Ted stood apart from the messy throng staring up into the clouds—“watching the skies with what I would call a particular focus, if you know what I mean.”

Carter looked at Ted. He looked up and down the flight line at the planes coming and going, being pushed in and out of their berths in the longhouse; the activity had been nearly constant since flights had resumed. Watching it, he tried to weigh today’s hurry against last night’s and yesterday’s and the day before. He looked at pilots and mechanics, ground crews, planes, bomb trucks, fuel hoses, and saw them all as one body, its internal systems going through the motions of regular operation, not yet galvanized by the spark of any specific action.

He turned back to Max. “You’re the man with the guns,” Carter said. “When we’re about to go kill something, you generally know first.”

“That is true,” he said, nodding. “When’s your next flight?”

Carter checked his watch. The face of it was frosted with condensation. Its hands had stopped. “Two hours,” he said. “Two hours or so. Up to the Ridge, out and back.”

Max licked a greasy finger and held it up as if testing the quarter of the wind. He cupped a hand around his ear and pretended to listen with exaggerated concentration. “Hmm…,” he said. “If I was you?”

“Yeah, Max. If you were me.”

“I was you, I’d go look up your boyfriend in the mess. He was there at Riverbend and might know a bit of something that I don’t. And then I’d get you a hot cup of coffee and a quick piss. Have a laugh. Rest that weary trigger finger. But I wouldn’t stray too far, you read me?”

“Five-by-five, Max.”

“Things around this place have been a bit too quiet a bit too long, you know?”

“I do. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, Captain. Just taxi.”

Carter nodded and was about to say something else when Max looked skyward, squinting. “Motherfucker…,” he said, sounding pleasantly bewildered, surprised, almost happy. “Is that snow?”