A Private Little War (9 page)

Ted had decided that corporate was either lying or stupid or ignorant or maybe all three. He’d shaken his head at the ridiculousness of it all. These had been days when delusion and corporate absurdity had still been funny, not fatal. Ted had a sense of humor then. Or thought he had.

When everyone had lined up to load, he’d assigned the unexpected equipment poverty-style: a loaded rifle to one man, extra ammo to the one going out the door behind him. If the man with the gun should die, the one behind him would pick it up and carry the fight forward. He’d told everyone it was just for safety’s sake, hooked his thumbs in his belt, puffed out his chest, and said, “Just in case, yeah? Company’s just looking out for our tender asses. But this is going to be quiet as a civilian drop. You’re not going to be fighting your way off anything.”

And then they’d all buckled in and fallen from the sky like a meteor, from the belly of the
Junholdt
to the soft earth below. Eight minutes of free fall, then atmosphere interface, then forty-four minutes of translation between sky and ground. Ted had kept his eyes open, watching. He’d watched the drop master, who spent the entire fall, up until the last three minutes, reading a tattered paper book with no cover, one arm looped through a standing strap, just like he was riding the train. He watched the men. Eddie Lucas, he remembered, had thrown up an amazing number of times. A few of the men talked, or tried to. Most of the pilots slept.

Arriving on a new planet,
any
new planet, is like being born again. Everything is new. Nothing has a name. For lack of anything better or more productive to do, you ascribe malice or creeping evil to the stupidest of things: that rock, this plant. It’s the same everywhere. Everyone does it. After his first half-dozen landings for Flyboy, Ted was never able to look at a baby the same way again, knowing for a stone fact that from the moment they come into the world, they are full of hate and formless terror.

Carpenter, though, was different. Iaxo was different.

Aboard ship, the lights in the troop compartment had gone red for the final sixty seconds of cushioned descent. Ted had rallied everyone
up to their feet, organized them. The drop master was standing by the ramp, shouting: “Everyone up! Everyone off! Quick-quick! There ain’t no round-trip tickets here!” And Ted had wondered what movie he was living in that’d put those words in his mouth.

The drop master had counted down the final thirty seconds on his hands, holding up three fingers, then two, then counting down from ten—his mouth forming words but no sound coming out. Nerves, Ted remembered. His nerves had been terrible. A weight pressing on his chest so heavy that his legs had gone numb and he’d felt sweat prickling the backs of his ears.

They touched down with a jerk. The assault ramp boomed open, fell to the strange earth, and they all went charging out with a whoop—rifles first, ammo bearers behind, all gushing out of the ass-end of the ship in a single spasm of violence.

And then they’d faltered. All of them. The first men out wound down and stood, finally, stunned, with the rest of the mission all running up their heels.

It’d been like charging into a fairy tale. A sun-dappled glen. Tall grasses unbowing after having been pushed flat by the wash of the dropship’s turbines. Wildflowers in purples, golds, and blues, and mountains rising in the middle distance, still young and jagged. Closer, a tree line. Primordial, but sunlit and almost impossibly lovely where it formed a thick bower over the course of a river running over pebbles and flat stones.

That, Ted sometimes thought, was where it’d all gone wrong: in that first, blinking instant. They’d been infected, the lot of them. They’d breathed in, taken the sweet, honey-touched summer perfume of Iaxo into their lungs, and been lost. Like some cosmic joke, in two years here there’d never been another day so lovely. Not another hour.

The drop master had shouted everyone clear of the ramp, running them like sheep out of a pen. When they’d heard the bangs of the restraining bolts letting go and the rumble of the cargo containers rolling down the ramps, many of the men had winced. There was something defiling about the harsh noise, metals grinding on metals, and the plasticky smell of lubricating oil. Ted had wondered whether those were the loudest sounds that had ever been heard here. In the moment, it’d felt like maybe they were.

Ted had taken all the rifles away, trying not to look sheepish about it. He’d wanted to give a speech—some kind of warning, a note of caution to temper the sudden infatuation he saw in too many eyes—but couldn’t find the words. Two of the pilots were chasing butterflies, scampering across the field like children and swatting at them with their hands.

So day one, they’d had a party instead. Drinks all around. Without even unpacking, they’d blown down some trees with shaped charges made from unscrewed bomb heads and fusing wire, doused them with kerosene and lit them on fire. They’d mixed ethanol from the medical supplies with bottled water and orange drink powder and poured it into tin cups and pretended they were roughing it while the leaping fires turned midnight to noon for a hundred yards in every direction. They’d posted no security. The rifles had been mounded up in a stack, unfired. They hadn’t even uncrated the sidearms. It was a lark. A picnic. That’d been a good night, Ted recalled. Nothing yet had gone wrong. He’d laughed a lot. Slapped the backs of his young murderers. Pissed into the embers of the fire when it’d burned low. They slept as though they’d just invaded Eden and found it lacking snakes.

But everything since then had been falling back—retreat disguised as strategic maneuvering. They’d been given (
granted
, like it was a gift to be handed down) that one day to acclimate and then a heavy lifter had come down, unannounced, from parking orbit—spinning down through the rapidly graying atmosphere like some nightmare insect, steel legs twitching and undulating along the empty curve of its belly. It’d put a hump on all their lightweight gear, waited ten minutes for everyone to load into another cramped troop compartment—jammed in among the huge containers of aviation fuel, construction supplies, and proscribed electronics—then moved them from the wrong side of the mountains, across the moors, across a river, onto a backwater lowland plain and over the somewhat-abbreviated horizon from two walled cities, much smaller than the cities on the coast, that seemed to be the focal points of aggression in the area. Ted had gotten on the blower and asked what the fuck was going on—why they were being moved so far away from the good fight and stuck out in the boonies.

“Orders, sir,” said the pilot of the lifter. “Just doing what I’m told. I suggest you shut up and enjoy the ride, sir.”

Eight days to dig in. They’d cut airstrips in historical formation—a lopsided triangle mown into the tough, alien grasses, flattened by earthmovers from Cavalier Mechanics. Cavalier was another mercenary company, a military contractor that specialized in moving things and wrecking things and building other things in their place. They’d been contracted by the company prior to arrival and paid by Eddie Lucas, Flyboy Inc.’s Man on Iaxo, out of a private stock of hard currency he held. Paper money was worthless. Promissory notes were worse. But Fast Eddie paid in gold—everyone’s favorite color.

After that, vital structures had gone up. Machinery had gone in. Tent lines had been pegged out. The
Junholdt
was long gone and they were cut off—ninety days at least until their next supply drop and the first possible ride out if, for some reason, everything went terribly wrong. It’d taken two days for their own mechanics and flight engineers to assemble the first half-dozen planes once the longhouse was bolted together and raised. One afternoon for test flights. One crash. No injuries.

On the tenth day, Connelly (who actually worked for Eastbourne Services Group, Proxima, though it was tough to tell) had presented himself at the nascent airfield, along with Antoinne Durba and Marie, two of his other company commanders, and a handful of his indigenous officers. Connelly had been decked out in native drag: armored skirt, necklaces of chicken bones, breastplate like the seat of a wicker chair. He had a long beard that he wore tied off like links of sausage, a drooping mustache the color of rust, and had his head mostly shaved. Gone bamboo, totally, and Ted had laughed right at him, not caring a damn who he was.

Durba wore the wreck of a military uniform, patched and tattered. Marie had been lovely, tall and narrow, with long hair blowing out behind her in a breeze, one blind eye whitened like milk, and an old scar that cupped the sharp plane of one cheekbone.

That day was the first time that Ted had seen one of the natives up close. They were tall, dirty, lumpy, furred with something that wasn’t really fur but more like the frayed ends of an old rug, matted and overlapping, in colors from ashy gray to shit brown. Their faces appeared dumb and slow and thick, more delicately hairy, with large, heavy heads like slugs of iron pushed down into their sloping shoulders and small
eyes set too far apart. Their backs curved oddly, making them appear always hunched, though, at the time, Ted had mistaken this for the exhaustion of the march. In the cups of their shoulders, the points of their elbows, the wings of their tilted hips, you could see the rubbed, bare skin beneath the fur—or not skin, exactly, but something like scales. Plates. The hair all grew from the loose edges of these, and it made Ted think of something he knew: that fingernails were really made of hair, all stuck together.

After that, he couldn’t think of anything but that they were talking monsters covered in shredding fingernails. When one of them (a lieutenant, Connelly had said, without the slightest hint of humor) extended a hand for an awkward shake (a thing which, it was plain, was a learned response, uncommon and unfamiliar), Ted had to force himself to take the offered appendage. Three fingers and a thumb, all of them too long. When he’d touched it, the thing’s hand was so hot it made him ache. For a day afterward, his fingers smelled like he’d been scratching an old dog—the stink of the aliens warm and soupy and thick.

There’d been other officers there. A representative from Applied Outcomes, another from Cavalier, another from Palas Risk Management. It’d been arranged, he was made to understand—a friendly welcome to the neighborhood by those already doing business there and a dignified exchange of radio frequencies and call signs. Something about it made Ted think of John Company middle managers standing deep in the bush in their mildewed broadcloth suits and pith helmets, trading business cards gone limp in the wet, heavy air.

Like a good manager, Ted had memorized names and faces. He’d shaken hands and mouthed meaningless words about cooperation and mutual concern, showed his guests to a flattened patch of grass in the infield where, eventually, the field house would rise, and then excused himself as quickly as he could, sniffing his fingers as he went. It didn’t escape his notice that most of the other professionals shied away from Connelly and his officers, his natives. That they seemed to walk on different earth and breathe different air.

The tight-beam FTL relay had gone live late that same night, and while the commanders and liaisons from all the local merc companies slept rough in the weed-choked infield, Ted had his first conversation
with Flyboy corporate, received his standing orders and, come morning, had politely kicked all the other contractors off his field with the explanation that any further combined ops would be planned through the Flyboy Inc. strategic services department. There was a number, a coordinate set. Ted had handed it around as a form of good-bye.

Most of the men had shrugged. Veterans, they knew how corporate wars were fought and understood the clean, distant appeal of office chairs, whiteboards, boardroom politics and proper hierarchies of command. No one ever died of paperwork.

Back in his tent, Ted flicked a corner of the orders on his desk with a clean, trimmed fingernail.

On that morning two years ago, while the other men were gathering up their things and their escorts, Connelly had tried to protest. Standing his ground with his aliens behind him, he’d tried to explain something that Ted wasn’t hearing—so new yet to this place that he hadn’t grown the necessary ears.

“I have my orders, gentlemen,” he’d said, and showed them, as they say, the door.

That had been the first of his serious mistakes. Ted understood that now. But corporate math at the time had predicted completion and cleanup of the Iaxo contract, with minimal to no casualties, at one year, Zulu time. They were here to put down an insurrection, to exploit the ancient enmities of an indigenous, tribal society to aid in the securing of 110 million acres of mixed terrain, and to kill the hell out of one group of natives (called the Lassateirra faction, though Ted didn’t know whether that was what they called themselves or what they were
being
called by those who prepared the paperwork) so that other, different kinds of mercenaries and widow-makers (lawyers, mostly, like Eddie) could follow on after them and negotiate with the other, surviving group (called the Akaveen Ctirad), who were apparently less hostile to the notion of handing over vast swaths of their land to developers who would settle it, clear-cut it, mine it raw, and just generally ass-rape the fuck out of it because Iaxo was a vaguely Earthlike planet and while such things weren’t exactly rare, they were still extraordinarily valuable. Too valuable to leave to a bunch of fingernail monsters, that was for sure. A bunch of walking rag rugs with pointed sticks and body odor.

Considering all their advantages—their ten-century technological leap on the locals, the logistical support of a distant and powerful private military company, and negotiated aid from several other similar outfits already on the ground—a year had seemed a reasonable strategic assessment to Ted at the time. Even if his planes were museum replicas of Spads and Sopwith Camels being flown by men more accustomed to vacuum fighters and modern strike aircraft, he had the only air force for a million miles in any direction. Flyboy was going to make out well. Ted would collect a nice paycheck and bonus for making a quick and clean job of this place. A clock had been started, with a scheduled pickup in 8,760 hours, as measured in London, Earth, where the company kept their home office.