The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  On the other hand, nobody shot down behind the Ferupian lines was ever heard of again. But (thought Yozi desperately, at twenty-five hundred feet, with sweat drenching his pullover and jacket) that didn’t mean the captured pilots weren’t sitting in a cozy prison somewhere in the land of the Queen, dicing and writing their memoirs! Not a half-bad way to spend the rest of your term!

  He banked, conserving height. Below, the front lines were a hilly tone-on-tone morass of rock and soil, almost white in the winter sun, netted with ramparts and jeep tracks and barracks. But it must thin out soon. In the hazy east he could see flat ground: the desertified Raw under Ferupian control.

  “What it comes down to is that you’re a fucking awful pilot, Akila,” he muttered, poking his head out into the slipstream, his eyes watering, to scan the ground below. (Ju agreed, loudly, through the speaking tube.) The terrain was getting worse. There was nowhere to land. Now the ramparts had been replaced by sprawling wooden ordinance dumps—favorite ground-strafing targets of the SAF command, and therefore equipped with screamer guns, which opened up as Yozi glided over. He must have been the easiest target that ever waltzed into their sights. He made the sluggish Miss Drybones dance to the best of her ability, but inevitably, he felt a series of thunks on his port wing, and Ju shouted through the tube:

  “We’re hit! You son of a whore!” His voice was thick with fear and fury. Explosions deafened Yozi as Ju used his revolver to pick off the slavering, multilegged daemons scrambling up the wing. “Bastard dog, no-balls coward, incompetent—”

  Yozi reached up with his tail and ripped the speaking tube off his helmet. The wind cocooned him in its voiceless roar.

  Miss Drybones’s nose propeller had slowed almost to a stop. The dials were all dead, but he estimated he was at about four hundred feet. At least he’d gotten past that lot of screamers. He supposed he could try to land on the sand, fuck the tree stumps, right here where new ramparts were being constructed in readiness for the day when the Ferupian troops at the front would be pushed back this far. The men on the ground had seen him; they were shouting and running. Even in the middle of his calculations of crosswind and speed and how much distance he’d need to taxi, Yozi got a certain pleasure from scaring the shit out of them. It was true, Ferupians were all cowards.

  At least, he believed so until he saw them dragging some kind of a wheeled firearm into position. Pale orange flared at its breech. An F-99—a ground-based long-distance flamethrower. One of the few weapons the Ferupians possessed that fired something other than daemons. And one of their least pleasant.

  Ju was thumping on Miss Drybones’s fuselage, tying to alert Yozi to the danger. Yozi nodded. They had to put down. Just had to put down and prove they were harmless. Then they would put the F-99 up. How am I doing, Commander Izigonara?

  Then Ju opened up Miss Drybones’s rear guns, and in an instant all was confusion, and the rattle of bullets, and barbarian voices yelling as fire arced across Miss Drybones’s nose. As Yozi made his second pass and came in to land, he felt heat on the back of his neck and realized that the tail was burning. So that was why the rudder hadn’t been responding! Significant! Ju might be burned alive. “Fuck,” he said aloud, and brought her down fast. Touch; bump; touch; taxi. The terrain was impossible. It was all he could do, dragging at the stick, to keep her from yawing over. For a couple of minutes, while the fire crackled behind him, he thought he was actually going to make it. And then she was over on her nose in the sandy soil, and there was a terrific crunching of wood and metal, and something that looked suspiciously like the rudder sailed past the cockpit, and despite the restraining grip of his harness he lurched forward, cracking his head on the metal sights apparatus. He scarcely even felt frantic fingers unfastening his harness. He scarcely heard Ju grunting curses as he dragged him clear.

  He woke on hard ground with fire shooting through his back. He struggled upright and nearly screamed. Then he choked it down. Disciples didn’t scream!

  As he got to his feet he realized that only a moment had passed. Miss Drybones lay with her tail in the air and her nose in a half-constructed rampart, burning yellowly in the brilliant sun. Men swarmed as close as they could get to her, heaving buckets of sand and earth at the flames. KE-111s were constructed almost completely of metal, of which the Ferupians were desperately short; of course they wanted to salvage her. Where was Ju? Had he escaped? Yozi swung around, stumbling dizzily, to see whether it would be possible to make a getaway.

  A semicircle of uniforms watched him from a distance of about five feet. One of them was holding Ju by both arms. “Game’s up,” Ju said, his face twisted with pain. “We’ve got to die honorably. Now, before they take you! I’m bound—I can’t do it—do it, do it now—”

  One of the Ferupians stepped toward Yozi and barked something unintelligible. Yozi shook his head, his mind ticking at high speed. He was a pilot and a Wedgehead: technically he was Ju’s superior, so it was his duty to command Ju to commit suicide, and then he, Yozi, must in his turn draw his knife and stab himself through the heart before they could reach him. But in the unofficial hierarchy of Izigonara’s 20th, Jumone Fray, by virtue of his swaggering pride and boastful manner, was far superior to Yozi, though he wore only a gunner’s wings. So Yozi must obey Ju and kill both of them now, before they were captured and forced to tell everything they knew.

  But what, even under torture, could they say that the Ferupians might find of use? That Izigonara’s 20th Flight, out of Anno Ma, was so high in the esteem of SAF command that Yozi had always been miserably aware he was a disgrace to it? That Izigonara took a vastly unfair amount of credit for his flight’s successes—that he was really just a career bureaucrat irascible with arthritis and heartburn, trying to hold on until the 20th was rotated out of the combat zone? That the madam of Anno Marono Chadou was called Amita? That there had been a brawl between SAF officers and SAPpers last week which resulted in two men dead and thirty confined to base? What could the Enemy conceivably do with that kind of information? Neither Yozi nor Ju, in their years of active duty, had ever gone farther from Base 20 than Anno Marono. They knew no more than that of the Great Problem. Yozi’s war was the combat pilot’s exhausting routine of takeoffs, landings, kite checks, and daemon coddling, with death pressing stiflingly close on all sides, all the time: the death of opponents, the death of friends. Win or lose, it mattered not in the least. All a Disciple had to do was keep going to the best of his ability. And two years of thrice-weekly forays, occasionally relieved by a bout of pitch-black sex with whoever wanted it badly enough to approach him, had tired Yozi to the bone. He was tired of being a Disciple.

  But not tired enough to die like this.

  The Ferupian sergeant shouted at him again and gestured. The Ferupians were all tanned, heavily muscled fellows, squat as trolls. Next to them brawny Ju looked tall and willowy.

  Disciples don’t scream!

  His hand drifted almost of its own volition down toward his thigh knife.

  Two of the Ferupians grabbed him by the arms. “Oh, by the Significant,” he said in relief. He sagged in their grip.

  Ju’s face contorted with thwarted passion. “Have you never done anything honorable in your life, whoreson?” he shouted. As the rest of the Ferupians closed in around him, he threw himself from side to side, thrashing free. The commanding sergeant whirled around, yelling. For a moment Yozi could not see Ju. Then Ju lolled ungracefully to the ground, hair fluttering into wide-open eyes. His helmet rolled clear. Yozi smelled fresh blood, and saw it, spreading down Ju’s chest, blackening the tan leather jacket which the gunner had cleaned with such care.

  And instead of being punished for acting out of turn, the private who had knifed Ju was being congratulated. Was it possible? Smiles broke like sunlight over the Ferupians’ faces. They kicked Ju’s body, grinning at Yozi and pointing to it. One man even strode up to him, grabbed his face, and turned it in the right direction to make sure he saw.

  The sergeant sho
uted at Yozi, trying to direct his attention to the still-burning Miss Drybones. What did he want? Yozi said loudly, “I don’t speak Ferupian. But I surrender.”

  With some difficulty, he lifted his hands above his head. The men gripping his wrists held on tightly. “I surrender,” he said, looking first at one of them, then at the other. “I surrender.” Their expressions were blank. He shouted at all of the squinting, red, ugly faces. “I surrender! Do you understand? Surrender! Give up! Pax!”

  When he joined up, back in Okimako, he had taken the standard oath that he would commit suicide before he let himself fall into the hands of the Enemy. But even then, he had known he didn’t mean it. Without even having looked into the guns of a Gorgonette, he had known that he was a coward.

  “My name is Yozi Akila! I’m an officer in lshigonara’s 20th flight of the fifty-two north sector of the SAF, and I am surrendering!”

  The sergeant looked at him. Yozi had the feeling he was really seeing him for the first time. Behind him, the construction detail was finally succeeding in smothering the flames on Miss Drybones’s wings and fuselage. Ju’s body lay still, ignored now.

  “Honorable surrender taken,” the sergeant said then in halting but comprehensible Okimako dialect. His eyes were the same bluish shade as whey, like a ghost’s. Yozi could see the tiredness in them. “If officer waits—apology, guard necessary—jeep take him to place of translators. Safety assured. Ferupians understand Kirekuni officer’s oath same as life.”

  The sun beat down. Yozi could smell daemon smoke from the demogorgon he had soothed every night, that had already been dead when it burned with Miss Drybones. He laughed aloud.

  “Apologies, explain amusement, apologies,” said the sergeant suspiciously.

  “I’m a deserter. Do you know what that means for a Disciple? I’ve heard that your soldiers break their contracts quite regularly and suffer no consequences, But for us it’s different. Among us, a soldier who deserts is mourned as a dead soldier. And if he’s found, he will be a dead soldier.”

  In another life, that was what he said. In real life, he just smiled the brilliant smile that had made him the darling of his mother’s whorehouse. “Pardon me. I was just laughing at the awful terribleness of your Kirekuni.”

  By the time the jeep came and took him to the “place of translators,” Yozi was nearly delirious with pain and thirst. Ju—brave Ju—had wrenched his shoulders in dragging him out of the cockpit, and the bulge where his skull had crunched with the inside of his helmet was too tender to touch. He’d had to throw away his helmet because his hands were chained, and he could neither wear nor carry it. The chains were “for honor only,” as the sergeant had assured him. Yozi had never heard of there being honor in getting your arms fastened behind your back, but with Ferupians, everything was different. Unable to resort to sign language, he hadn’t been able to make either of his guards see that he wanted a drink. They passed a bottle back and forth in the front seat of the jeep, laughing loudly and ignoring their captive, even when he did foolish, gurgling imitations of a man enjoying a drink of water. Before the jeep had got very deep into Ferupian territory, he knew that they did understand he was thirsty, but they were ignoring him because they despised him.

  Oddly, he felt slightly better when he realized that. By now the fact of his desertion was hitting him hard. It meant that even if the Ferupians did not kill him he would never be able to go home again. His mother and sisters would reject him. They might even turn him in. That possibility required consideration, at some future date. But contempt was what he expected from the soldiers. It was what he, in their place, would have felt. He had failed to live up to the soldiers’ concept of the way a pilot should act. If they showed him anything other than dislike—then he would know he was done for.

  The Ferupian Raw was rolling and barren, dotted with trees and ancient-looking wooden structures.

  Yozi tried to distract himself from his parched throat by speculating about the uses to which the Ferupians were putting their territory. This was very different from the Raw he knew. The Army of the Significant did things properly: as they inched forward across the plain, they razed everything and erected new towns, villages, and irrigation systems. They then imported plains people—the Chadou—and set them to work catering to the needs of the army. It was called extending the empire. By contrast, the Ferupian Raw looked like a wasteland. Yet he suspected that many of the firebombed buildings were secretly in use, and that the Ferupians tore nothing down for strategic reasons. He saw the point, and admired it, though it showed that they had a pitiful lack of confidence in their air force’s ability to defend their territory. Commander Izigonara liked to say: They don’t make Ferupians the way they used to, boys! When was the last time a sortie came into our airspace? One could nearly feel out of sorts on their behalf.

  We’re winning, we really are, Yozi thought exultantly. Look at how empty this place is.

  Then his stomach did a sickening flip-flop.

  They’re winning.

  Whatever they chose to do with him, his fortunes were those of the Queensdogs now.

  After perhaps two hours, during which Yozi estimated they covered twenty to thirty miles, the jeep stopped outside a heavily strafed tower within sight of more trees in one place than he had seen in his entire life. Ordinarily he would have stared in fascination. Now the forest?—barely registered on his thirsty misery. Yet relief was not far off. The man whose office was sunk three flights of stairs into the ground beneath the tower, who wore three multicolored bars on either side of his wide gray chest, said, by way of a haggard Kirekuni translator: “My boy, you look half-dead and filthy. After we talk, a hot bath, perhaps?”

  Automatically Yozi’s hand went to his thigh. But they had taken his knife. The office was a box-shaped cavern hewn out of the ground rock, as large and gray as its inhabitant, lit shadowless by lights brighter than Yozi had ever seen except in the houses of nobles on the old-city hill. The floor was uneven, but the corners of walls and ceiling formed perfect right angles. A decorative waterfall tinkled through an arrangement of copper pipes in one corner. The place was not like anywhere Yozi had ever seen in Kirekune. Were the Ferupians poor? Or did they just not believe in beauty? Yozi, the gray man, and the Kirekuni woman all sat on hard wooden chairs. Guards stood to attention by the door curtains.

  “What would you like to drink?” the translator said. She spoke nearly simultaneously with the gray man. Yozi had no idea how she did it. He blinked and tried to smile.

  “Uh—wine. I’d really like a glass of wine.”

  The gray man laughed, it seemed for an unwarrantedly long time, and shook his head. The translator said in her soft, dead voice: “You are in Ferupe. We drink ale. I will have a mug of southern brew brought.”

  Yozi bobbed his head politely. The gray man laughed again.

  “I find the manners of Kirekunis most amusing,” the woman translated. “Tonight you will sleep under this tower, in a deluxe suite. This is Chressamo, the headquarters of Intelligence for the Lovoshire Parallel. You are not a prisoner. You are an officer and my guest.”

  “May I know your name, sir?” Yozi asked the gray man, remembering to look at him and not at the translator.

  This time it seemed as if the man would explode with laughter. He shook, his eyes ran, and he clamped his hands on his large knees, straightening up only when a servant’s footsteps rang on the stone and glasses of foaming golden beer were placed on the small round table between them. “Ahhh.” He grinned, winked at Yozi, and drank deeply. Yozi followed suit, closing his eyes for a moment in relief.

  “There is absolutely no reason for you to know my name,” the translator said. No beer had been brought for her. She held her elbows out from her sides, her hands in her lap, like a bird’s wings, “After today you will never see me again. I am sending you a hundred miles north of here to 80 Squadron. They have had experience with Kirekuni traitors... drink, drink!” Her voice was low and expressionless, where
the gray man’s tone was genial. The contrast was eerie. “You’re not drinking!”

  Yozi startled. Obediently, he raised the glass to his mouth and swigged the bitter liquid.

  “Isn’t the ale excellent? As I was saying, they have seen men like you before. Chissa—” the translator stopped and listened for a moment. She answered the gray man in harsh, glottal Ferupian, then turned back to Yozi and said, “Eighty Squadron had a Kirekuni on their rosters for six years before he was killed. You won’t find it difficult to fit in.”

  “Was he killed in action, sir?” Yozi said warily.

  “No. In a fight with other men of the squadron. Over a matter of a girl. I believe his balls were kicked to a pulp and his tail torn off. You would do well to be careful.” The gray man watched Yozi, obviously anticipating a reaction.

  Yozi drank again. The alcohol made him bolder. He leaned forward and looked into the translator’s eyes, making it clear he was speaking to her and not through her. “Mademoiselle, please. Is he telling the truth? Am I to be spared, to fight on Ferupe’s side?”

  Something like pity flickered in her eyes. “Your life is yours to defend, Disciple,” she said. Her voice sounded even fainter without the rumble of Ferupian behind it. “You have no one but yourself to blame for your defection.”

  “If they are recruiting prisoners of war they must be very short of trained pilots. Is that so?”

  The gray man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tired of you,” the translator said in a frightened voice. “Out.” She added hurriedly, “He’s only a sergeant, Disciple. This isn’t his office. It’s mine.” But there’s nothing Kirekuni in the place! Yozi thought. “And I answer only to Sostairs—the colonel of this place. All the officers interview their prisoners in my office, for the effect of the thing. He doesn’t have the authority to kill anyone. It’s not like it is in the field.” Her mouth worked.