The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  They reached Vichuisse’s altitude and kept climbing—4,500 feet; 5,000 feet. Crispin’s ears popped. He and Burns were forcing their kites toward the apex of a gigantic triangle with one foot in no-man’s-land and one in the Kirekuni Raw. Finally, at 5,300 feet, they met and circled. Vichuisse was directly below them. Right about now he must be starting to wonder what was going on.

  The windshields of Burns’s Killer B-99 were frosted with a multitude of cracks. Crispin found it slightly unnerving not to be able to see Burns inside as they passed within forty feet of each other, coasting, letting their daemons catch their breath. Then Burns waggled his rudder: the Bee did a little waltz step in the air. Crispin took his hand off the stick for an instant to give Burns the thumbs-up.

  They dived.

  Gravity pressed Crispin back into his seat. His vision strobed black. Princess Anuei’s daemon bellowed in pain. He was vaguely aware of Burns diving beside him, wingtip to wingtip, as if they were flying an exhibition. For whom were they parading their skills? Vichuisse? The orange-streaked mess of the battle spun upward, with the single star of the Cerdres 500 superimposed on it, metal wings reflecting the sunlight into Crispin’s eyes. Somehow, he managed to fix Vichuisse in his sights. How was Burns able to target through the opaque ruin of his windshield? He was edging dangerously close aport. Crispin sheered off a little.

  The Cerdres filled his sights. He opened fire and felt a fair-sized burst of screamers leave the ports: the dive must have forced every last one of them back into the gun chambers. Emeralds and rubies and sapphires streamed out ahead. He actually saw Vichuisse’s pale face in the shadow of the cockpit as the little daemons glommed onto the Cerdres’s fuselage, which after all contained no real silver, nothing to repel them. Then he yanked the stick hard sideways, forcing the Gorgonette into a port-side spin which was necessary so that he should not dive into his own fire, and as he fought to bring Princess Anuei under control, he blacked out. A split second later he was jerked back to consciousness by an unbearable pain in his leg.

  A screamer.

  He must have flown into his own fire after all.

  This is how pilots die! Quick, quick!—side revolver, safety catch, aim, bring her out of the spin damn it, what if I shoot my foot off— pain—

  The crack of the shot deafened him. Gunpowder filled the cockpit. The screamer that had attacked him, and the screamer from his revolver, fell wrangling into the space under his feet. But there were more of them. On the windshield, skinny arms splayed. They were trying to gnaw through the glass. On the wings. Bits of screamer caught in the props. The cockpit wasn’t a sealed chamber; they would have no trouble getting in.

  His revolver only held six rounds.

  Crispin dispatched the three that found their way into the cockpit, and Princess Anuei’s vertiginous spin shook the rest off. But the trouble was that in order to shoot at them, he had had to take his left hand off the stick—there was no letting go of the whipcord—which meant the spin worsened. And he was losing altitude without regaining control—3,500 feet; 3,000 feet.

  Just as he was on the brink of leveling her out, a double fountain of garnet arched across his wings.

  The shock made him lose control again. Quite accidentally, Princess Anuei tumbled out of the way of the jeweled rain. Crispin cursed as he struggled once more to level her out. A Ferupian enemy on his tail! Had the attack somehow failed to finish Vichuisse off—was he now chasing Crispin to exact his vengeance? That couldn’t be right! Vichuisse wouldn’t try to kill Crispin! Knowing him, he’d probably promote him instead?

  In Crispin’s reflectors.

  Burns.

  And it all fell into place.

  Every smile, every handshake, every conspiratorial nudge, every last fucking minute of their hypocrisy. “Damn it,” Crispin said. “Damn them all, and me, to hell and back.”

  How stupid had he been? How trusting, how gullible, how wrong?

  He did not lose control again, even though his hands were shaking worse than before, and his left arm ached from the kick of the revolver. He could not lose control again. The determination to get out of this made his blood run cold and slow. The Bee was a black silhouette against the whiteness that filled his reflectors. The dead eye of its shot-up windshield seemed to glow: opaque, merciless. The sun shone brilliantly above. The sky had taken on an overbaked sheen. Crispin could not shake Burns off. Burns fired again: he must have been conserving his ammunition specially for this. This time Crispin did not lose control, and few of the screamers caught Princess Anuei’s wings. Two of them found their way into the cockpit. He dispatched them. Now his revolver was empty.

  Out of ammo, completely out! He couldn’t keep this up! If Burns fired successfully on him again, he would be done for. And in the game of cat and mouse, Burns was chasing him downward toward the buzzing swarm of KEs. The Kirekunis had surrounded the few remaining Gorgonettes and were picking them off with deliberate cruelty. Crispin wondered in a moment of black humor what they thought of the spectacle above—one Ferupian hell-bent on shooting down another.

  We’re doing their job for them, aren’t we, and have been all along!

  Burns fired yet again, and Crispin stalled Princess Anuei dead. It was an old trick. The screamers fell ahead of the Gorgonette’s nose, dropping into the void. For a minute Crispin thought Burns would overshoot him, cheated by his own velocity—but not for nothing had the Wraith half-breed worked his way up through the ranks, any more than Crispin had; and they had both learned their craft in the same school. There Burns was again, firing a long burst, maddened now by the determination to destroy his prey. Crispin knew that feeling well, too. This time the screamers fell just short of Princess Anuei’s tail.

  And then came salvation in the form of a Gorgonette out of the sun. Mickey had not got out of the battle, no one could have escaped that: he had evidently fought free earlier, and been circling high, high up, watching and waiting for his moment. Burns, concentrating on targeting Crispin, was taken completely by surprise. Mickey’s screamers poured over the Killer B-99 like a waterfall. Burns shook the craft like a wet cat, but the screamers clung to it like leeches. One stuck right in the middle of the frosted windshield, giving the opaque eye a red pupil. Now it was Burns’s turn to defend himself with his revolver. Crispin’s disbelief turned to jubilation as he watched the Bee’s windshield shatter wide open to a shot from inside the cockpit. “Finish him off, Mick!” he shouted, forcing Princess Anuei around out of danger. “Finish him off!”

  But Mickey wasn’t firing again, just waggling his wings frantically, and almost immediately he turned his Gorgonette and fled east. Of course, Crispin realized, he, too, was out of ammo. That must have been his last burst. Thank the Queen he’d had it! Thank the Queen he’d been frugal!

  His leg felt as if it were on fire. He didn’t need to touch the wound to know it was still bleeding. With difficulty, he turned Princess Anuei’s nose eastward and jerked the whipcord cruelly, forcing the exhausted, disoriented daemon to put on speed. Ahead of him, the sky was completely empty. Mickey’s Gorgonette was the only fleck on the lavender-colored haze hanging above the Wraithwaste. Behind him, the KEs were finishing off the last of his crewmates. Quite possibly, he and Mickey were the only survivors of the engagement. No one else could have escaped, not unless they had fled earlier—in which case they were cowards.

  And Mickey calls himself a coward ...! Crispin thought. I’ve never seen such ...!

  And far to the south, a third little wooden monoplane fled east. From the drunken way it was dipping and rolling, Crispin could tell it was Burns, navigating blind. With his windshield shot out, he must be in agony, scarcely able to breathe. But Crispin felt sure he would make it back to base—if not his base, then somewhere he could put down in safety. Damn! Crispin should have guessed he, too, would escape: he was too good a shot for one burst of screamers to finish him off, and too good a pilot not to make a successful getaway.

  Vichuisse: bits of aluminu
m across no-man’s-land: a death: a daemon burned alive in its collar, in its cell.

  But at what a cost! What a massacre!

  If Burns and I hadn’t been so fixated, each on our own secret ambition, Crispin thought, maybe we could’ve got our men out of there—maybe we could’ve saved Jones, Harrowman, Dupont, Eakin, Cochrane—

  It did not bear thinking about.

  He was soaked with sweat. His nose and eyes stung from the residue of gunpowder in the air of the cockpit. His ears rang. He had never in his life felt so battered, wounded, and despondent. Vichuisse was dead. There was that. But maybe he would have died anyway, in a disaster like that! Maybe we should have fought our real enemies and let the war take its toll! Because it does, even on cowards, as we have just witnessed, ladiesangentlemen! What a nightmare—what a Queen-awful show—

  But at least I found out—

  Mickey: I think you’re going to crash and burn. If you want to know the honest truth, I don’t like the sound of this business.

  He had guessed at Burns’s scheme. But Crispin had not. How could he have been so gullible?

  In his heart, he knew why. His own weakness, after the fact, was painfully apparent to him. He could not permit himself to name it—he could only vow never to make the same mistake again. But even as he promised himself never, never, never, he felt an ocean of loss in that resolve, and through the spume he glimpsed the colder shores of cynicism, distant and blue.

  Grief braided itself into a rope, binding him in regret, sealing the knots with truth. He wanted to kick himself for his own stupidity. In retrospect, each detail of the plot was crystal clear, each motive outstanding, each dropped hint so obvious that he wondered uselessly how he could have failed to smell a rat. The future whirled before him, a white void. The names of the conspirators sounded in his head: Burns, Emthraze, Thraxsson—oh, that you could stoop so low, Lieutenant-Marshal!—Lennox, Duncan, Butch.

  Butch.

  Knife in the heart, twist, flourish, keep this, it’s a bit of nothing, I know, but it comes from me, I want you to remember that. Crispin was actually wearing that little wooden monkey today; he’d tied a string on it and hung it around his neck, under his flight suit.

  Some good-luck charm!

  Butch!

  Below, the Raw of the Cerelon sector lay peaceful and still in the sunlight. The day was so calm and clear under the blazing white sky that the land looked like an artificial construct: hills of papier-mâché under a daemon glare. Drawing strength from the spirit of Millsy, the spirit of Anuei, the spirit of the circus, Crispin thought, There is nothing to be gained from stopping here. The show must go on! My leg hurts like the devil, is all, my leg hurts—

  —and he wanted a cigarette and a drink, he needed a cigarette and a drink, Queen, his hands were shaking, and no matter how soon Burns carried his tale of treachery to HQ, no matter how soon they came for him, he would not meet them before he had a cigarette, a drink, a wash, and a change of clothes, even condemned men were allowed such things! Even traitors had their rights—

  Sarehole came into view below, weathered pine buildings gleaming softly in the sun. It was the most welcome sight Crispin could imagine. His remaining squaddies did not know their captain was a wanted man. They would succor him.

  His pocket watch said it was 1:30. As he came in to land, the riggers were putting Mickey’s plane away. Mickey himself stood at the end of the runway. Even from this height, Crispin could see his tail switching. When Crispin climbed stiffly down out of Princess Anuei’s cockpit—the shakes already making a comeback—Mickey hurried up to him and hissed, grabbing his arm with clawed fingers: “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “One hairbreadth escape a day is enough for me. I hope you’ve broken the bad news to the rest. I’m not up to it. I need a drink.”

  “Don’t you understand? He was shooting at y—”

  “A triple whiskey.”

  “You’ve got to escape.”

  My man is my man only some of the time

  Cause some of the time he’s like hard to find —

  Living kind of hard for a lot of his days

  Cause see, in our days he had the phrase that pays —

  And now I never see him while he do a bid

  While he do a bid

  Here’s the real truth, kid:

  —Terminator X

  Base Treacherous World

  50 Avril 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Air Base XXI

  It was 4:15 P.M. and the remaining lieutenants of 130 Squadron—Smith, Dixon, Carnation, and Kimbrough—had just left Crispin’s office. After he described the multiple disasters of the day, there had been a long interval during which no one said anything much. Perhaps their stunned silence had been due in part to Mickey’s presence. Crispin had kept trying to catch his eye and indicate that it was inappropriate for him to be at an officers’ meeting; but he had hovered, mixing drinks, like a self-appointed waiter.

  Crispin went into the bedroom and sank down on the edge of his bed. Mickey stood before him, tail flicking. Over one shoulder he had slung a carpetbag, a Jimenez relic, into which he had packed what he must have assumed were Crispin’s most treasured possessions. In fact, Crispin owned nothing that he treasured—nothing that had not once been somebody else’s. Soon, shorn of his rank and his Gorgonette, he would be as free of material ties as a newborn baby. The few things he’d taken from Smithrebel’s that had survived his flight through the Wraithwaste had been lost forever in Chressamo. He had emerged from the toothlike tower with a shaved head, a cast-off uniform, a kit bag, and a resolve to do right for the first time in his life—not by the law of the land, which had given him up before it gave him a chance, but by the law of the armed forces, which was firmer, cleaner, and based on survival of the fittest, not the petty concerns of respectable people.

  But he had not known that at a certain level of the hierarchy, military law, too, stopped applying—or at least, became fuzzy. The tensions of power, ambition, and greed warped pure survivalism into neo-aristocratic immorality. Murdering one’s personal enemies and expecting to get away with it was not a practice of soldiers, nor of the right-living masses. It was a practice of the gutter, and also of the Ferupian nobility—who, Crispin thought now, must surely be the most desolate people on earth.

  All was quiet outside. The base had sunk into a torpor, stunned by the loss of a third of its men. It would not be much longer before the jeeps rolled up. Even taking into account the fact that Sarehole was a forty-five-minute drive from Cerelon, Burns would not need more than five hours, if he was hurrying. And Crispin guessed he would hurry. The possibility that Crispin might not try to escape wouldn’t even cross that sneaky half-Wraith mind.

  It had been three and a half hours.

  “You’ve got to get away,” Mickey said, breaking the silence.

  “No, no. No.”

  “If you don’t get out of here, they’re going to court-martial you! You’ll be in front of a firing squad before you can say it wasn’t me!”

  “Leave off, Mick. I did it. I’ll have to pay for it.”

  Insidiously, perhaps while he flew over the Raw, perhaps while he drank whiskey with the stoic lieutenants, shouldering their silent blame—guilt had infiltrated Crispin’s heart. The idea of fleeing his fate had become unacceptable. He had fired on Vichuisse a split second before Burns did. It had almost certainly been one of Princess Anuei’s screamers that had eaten Vichuisse’s vital organs. And how could a traitor get off by complaining that he had been betrayed?

  “There’s such a thing as being too scrupulous,” Mickey said urgently.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Since I’ve known you, Captain, you haven’t been prone to stupid heroics! What’s happened?”

  “You yourself said that I was the very embodiment of grace and selflessness and bravery. And all the rest of it.”

  “Yes, but it’s gone beyond that now! That stuff is fine, but none of it applies anymo
re! It was all very well to risk your life and your reputation for the good of six squadrons—”

  Just a personal vendetta, Crispin corrected him silently.

  “But now it’s gone beyond that. It’s got personal.”

  It always was personal! Why, oh why does he think so highly of me?

  “Burns isn’t an abstract cause, he’s an ambitious, treacherous, double-crossing bastard. They’re all double-crossing bastards! Are you going to die for them?”

  “Someone’s got to carry the can!”

  “They could say Vichuisse was shot down by the enemy. If they wanted. But you’re a danger to them now, Captain. They want to take you out. Of course you know that, too, now. But I saw it even back then, the way Burns looked at you. You have to desert! Take Princess Anuei and fly back across the Wraithwaste! Put her down in an empty field in western Ferupe—”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “It’s the only possible—

  Crispin looked up. “I haven’t told anyone this in three years. But I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. I got into trouble with the police in Lovoshire. I stole a truck. And I was fingered for arson. That’s a serious crime—a hanging crime, if anyone was killed, which I don’t know. What I do know is that the white-coats had it in for me. If they found out about the man I did kill, after I got away from them the first time round, in all likelihood they circulated my description to the cities. It’s been three years—they probably wouldn’t come down on me right away—but I can’t even contemplate spending the rest of my days on the mud-show circuit with military and civil charges hanging over my head. I wouldn’t be able to perform; I might get to drive trucks if I could find an owner who’d overlook my sketchy history; but I’d probably end up as a laborer. I’d rather die.”

  Even to him, it sounded melodramatic. But then he remembered Vichuisse saying I’d rather die than go home... even though I sense my last days approaching...

  At the time, he had thought the commandant a fool, but now he understood, because he stood in the very same trap that had been closing on Vichuisse three days ago. Anyone for whom heroism—or even the belief in heroism—had been a way of life was inevitably ambushed at the end, even after he had discarded his pretensions to glory, by his own pride. His own need for a heroic end. Vichuisse’s talk of being ill had been his way of saying that he was going to go out in a blaze of glory—a final, visible commitment to the ideals he had lived for. During his career, he had failed to be a hero. But a noble death was within the grasp of even the chronically cowardly. It required nothing except determination.