The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  But Vichuisse had been prevented from whatever apotheosis he had planned for himself. He had died in the least noble way possible. By Crispin’s hand.

  Did Crispin himself, therefore, deserve the end he had denied the commandant? Was heroism his lot in life—as he had assumed, as he had hoped it was? Or had he already, back in Jevanary when things first “got personal,” slipped without knowing it out of the plane in which heroes moved?

  He massaged his eyes hard, his head spinning with unwelcome yet unexpectedly appealing logic.

  Desertion. Yes... it would have to be. But where, when, and how?

  Possibilities opened up before him, very quickly shedding their disguise of self-abnegation.

  He shook himself and ran his hands over his scalp and down his neck, locating an incredible number of bruises and sore muscles.

  Mickey still looked stunned by Crispin’s revelation. Never broke a law in his life, Crispin thought contemptuously.

  Then he remembered that Mickey had been a deserter and a traitor to his own long before Crispin so much as set foot in the Raw.

  “Well?” he snapped. “Anything to say to that?”

  Mickey swallowed and said, “There’s another possibility. You could go to Kirekune.”

  Crispin said nothing. Mickey rushed on.

  “If you make it across the Raw, you can make it to Okimako. The first bit will be the hardest, not to get shot down. Then you can hop, skip, and jump. Load up on splinterons; there are no daemons to be had in the plains, they’ve all been requisitioned. I’ll give you my family’s address in Okimako, they’ll help you out if you say you’re a friend of mine—I mean, I know you might not want to say you’re a friend of mine, but I promise they’ll help you out, if you’ll try.” He paused again, obviously taking Crispin’s silence as rejection of his suggestion. “Look, you’ve got to—if you ever I—if you ever took me seriously—please—”

  Crispin reached out and took his sleeve, pulling him closer. “You knew about Burns, didn’t you?” he said softly, looking up into the worried face. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Something had shifted inside him: something, he did not know what, was changing. Vichuisse’s death had not been the solution, but the catalyst. He felt as if he were about to explode, or fall to pieces. And no one was near to help, or to bear the brunt, except Mickey. “You knew!”

  Slowly, Mickey said, “I guessed.”

  “When?”

  “When you told me what was going on. After we talked to him that night, I was practically sure of it.”

  “How could you have been sure?”

  Mickey tossed his head. “I dunno... the way he looked at you.”

  The way he looked at me! “Then why the hell didn’t you say anything?”

  Mickey closed his eyes. “You wouldn’t have believed me. You wanted to think they were... ”

  “Stop right there!” Crispin’s voice cracked out like a whip. “Not another word! Not another fucking word, all right?”

  “Then I’m sorry,” Mickey whispered. “Significant.”

  The sunlight coming in the window slanted onto the bare wooden floor and the carpetbag. Dust danced in the rays. An air patrol churned noisily by, flying low. Crispin closed his eyes.

  I can’t go on, he thought in a moment of absolute clarity.

  When he opened his eyes again the world looked different: sharper-edged, multidimensional, unknowable. The air patrol passed overhead and was gone. The only sounds were Mickey’s breath and the wind outside rustling over the grassy rise. Freed from the manacles of false humility, Crispin’s thoughts hurtled ahead, out of control. Minutes, hours, days. The Blacheim, and its daemon of dubious health. The explanations he would concoct to put the riggers and lieutenants off the scent. Provisions. Weights. Splinterons. Maps. Money. The Kirekuni Raw. Okimako, the city of fire. There were so many unknowns it made his head hurt even to think about it. And underneath, of course, the blank gray horror that Mickey’s suggestion of flying to Kirekune had seeded, which had bloomed when Crispin realized there was no real reason not to go. There is nothing quite as unnerving as seeing a component of a hallucination tumbling out of the world of dreams, into possibility, crossing a gulf which nothing should be able to survive undamaged.

  Crispin braced himself and forced a grin. “I apologize!”

  He rose and clapped Mickey on the shoulder.

  “It’s no business of mine grilling you about something that’s in the past! Especially when you’re my ticket out of here! Queen, I should be thanking you on my knees!”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mickey said stiffly, obviously suspecting another outbreak of sarcasm.

  Crispin grabbed him by the arm and swung him around. “Listen, don’t be a fucking prima donna!” He kept the false grin plastered on his face. “Time’s passing! And we have to think of some pretext for getting the Blacheim out and having her checked over!”

  “The Blacheim?”

  “She’s the only two-man kite on base. She’s old, but as far as I know, her daemon is still alive—I’ve been having them feed it, no point letting it die.” He swooped the carpetbag up off the floor and took a look inside. Mickey seemed to have an eye for anything which might possibly be of monetary value—that, at least, was the only explanation for his egregious taste in souvenirs. Crispin went to Jimenez’s wardrobe and stuffed a dress suit and a smoking suit into the bag. Jimenez had been a big man; Crispin had had his clothes altered to fit. They would crumple, but it didn’t matter. Such garments were ubiquitous the world over, and so were hot irons.

  Mickey stood unmoving in the rhomboid of sunlight on the floor. “Captain?”

  “Call me by my name! We’re partners now!”

  “You’re not suggesting... ”

  “Suggesting?” Crispin caroled.

  “That I... ”

  “That you come with me? I wasn’t aware there was any question of your not coming!”

  “Someone’s got to cover for you,” Mickey said desperately.

  Crispin turned on him. He felt disgustingly incapable of matching Mickey’s capacity for self-sacrifice. “What do you think I am? A snake like Burns? A daemon in human form? Has it slipped your mind that you fired on Burns, not me—as far as he’s concerned, you’re a worse traitor than I am! Talk about treachery! Talk about firing squads! You wouldn’t even get the travesty of a trial. You’re coming, no question about it.”

  “But... but! I can’t! Not to Kirekune!” Mickey looked as if he were about to break down.

  Oh, Queen, Crispin thought. “Look, we’re in this together. I pulled you in. That means I’ve got to pull you out.”

  The sun highlighted the meaningless tattoo patterns on Mickey’s lashing tail. “You’re not responsible for me! I can take care of myself!”

  “Don’t be childish. If it weren’t for you, I might already have flown into Cerelon and given myself up. I owe you that much, at least.”

  “You don’t understand... ”

  His voice was halfhearted. Crispin pressed his advantage. “I need you. There’s no guarantee I’ll even make it over the Kirekuni Raw. And if I get shot down on my own, I’m dead.”

  “You’ll have more of a chance on your own than you would with me,” Mickey whispered.

  Crispin ignored him. “And supposing I make Kirekune; it might as well be the dark side of the moon for all I know about it! Just how far d’you think I’d get in Okimako without someone who speaks the language?” Galvanized by the thought of danger, both distant and impending, he chivvied Mickey across the room and through the office. “The Blacheim’s in Hangar Four. You deal with the riggers—tell them it’s my say-so, we have to make a trip to Cerelon, tell them the commandants are recalling all the antiquated bombers, tell them what you like. I’m going to say good-bye to the lieutenants. There are a few things... I have a few apologies to make. Then I’ll come back here and pick up some maps. Make sure to get as many barrels of extra splinterons into her as she’
ll hold. Use the bomb holds. Food isn’t that important. But water is. If we’re flying for long stretches at a time, the radiator will blow if we don’t cool down the engine. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir,” Mickey said sadly.

  He saluted. It should have been an ironic, even humorous gesture; but when Crispin glanced at his face, he saw a look of—fear? longing? craven terror? A look such as he had never seen before.

  Why had Mickey overreacted so violently to a plan that was, after all, his own? Was there something Crispin did not know?

  There was a great deal, Crispin thought, that he did not know.

  No time to ponder. Five hours, and four of those were gone. They went out into the summer evening.

  Delight to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him.

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  THE END

  *clears throat* Hi! Your humble author here. Thanks for reading! Crispin’s in a bit of a spot, eh? I’m afraid to guess how he will cope in Okimako, if they even get that far (I practically had one hand over my eyes while I was writing that part). At least he has Mickey with him ... which may turn out not to be an advantage.

  Find out what happens next in The Daemon in the Machine, the next book in the EVER trilogy! Available now from all good booksellers. A quick Google search will get you set up. You can also click through to my website for a handy-dandy collection of buy links: http://felicitysavage.com/books/the-daemon-in-the-machine/

  And! If you enjoyed this book, please please pleeeease leave a review at Goodreads, or at the online retailer you purchased it from. Just a couple of lines will do! You’ll be helping other readers, and earning my undying gratitude.

  Now, read on for a preview of The Daemon in the Machine!

  BONUS PREVIEW: The Daemon in the Machine

  Book Five: The Fall

  A Handful of Dust

  2 Maia 1896 A.D.

  Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches

  The old Blacheim clattered westward across the sunlit ridges and shadowed gorges of the Raw Marches. Early that morning they had crossed into Kirekune.

  It had taken Mickey most of the previous day to pilot the airborne banger across the resettled territories, the two-hundred-mile-wide band of pastureland that he now thought of, in Ferupian, as the Occupied Raw. He was afraid to push the sick old daemon too hard. At sunset he’d put her down in a goat pasture so Crispin could take over the whipcord. It had felt like setting foot for the first time in a strange country. Mickey’s memories of his year at Anno Marono, hundreds of miles to the south, flying Wedgehead with Izigonara’s 20th, seemed oddly distant, irrelevant to this emergency. So, too, did the Occupied Raw seem irrelevant to Mickey’s sense of urgency. They hadn’t yet escaped the war, but you’d never have known it. The grass was the same faded green it had been at Air Base XXI, Sarehole, the air just as soft. Something about the light of the setting sun flattened the landscape, giving the far-off mountains a look of stage scenery. The stream from which they refilled their canteens tasted of metal.

  For a hundred years the Kirekuni Empire had been irrigating the former Wraithwaste as it captured it, saving the territory from desertification. Significant Disciples had built brand-new Anno villages and imported villagers from the Ochadou Plains west of the Raw Marches. Settlers and empire-expanding paraphernalia alike had to be either flown across or trucked south from the Teilsche and Lynche passes into Kirekune: the Marches were impassable by land. The Annos farthest from the war front were impoverished little hamlets where, despite the Disciples’ efforts, the Chadou engaged in the same sleepy struggle to survive that their countrymen did on the other side of the mountains.

  It couldn’t have been less like the Raw that Mickey and Crispin had just left, that narrow strip of deforested, quickly parching land rife with military activity, buffered from the Wraithwaste only by the Shadowtowns. Mickey tried to tell Crispin they were more or less safe now. Kirekuni SAPpers and airmen stayed on their bases; they didn’t roam freely across what was after all land belonging to ordinary Kirekuni citizens. Crispin wouldn’t relinquish his conviction that the countryside was crawling with Disciples. And Mickey couldn’t blame him for being jumpy. They might be deserters, fleeing from Ferupe for dear life, but all a Disciple patrol would see was their QAF uniforms.

  If so much as a harmless Chadou child had come on them while they rested and ate, Mickey suspected Crispin would have shot it. He kept touching his holstered daemon pistol as if it were a lucky charm. Even while he comforted the daemon, his face pressed against the warm wood of the Blacheim’s fuselage, his arms trying to hug its great curves, he’d kept on glancing around for danger. Didn’t he trust Mickey to alert him? Did he think Mickey had secretly turned into a lizard the minute his foot touched Kirekuni soil? Mickey was still a QAF pilot on a sortie. He was as careful as ever not to use his tail to grasp something when a hand would do as well—it was so important to impress on Crispin that now neither of them belonged to any air force, Mickey was on Crispin’s side. But Crispin hadn’t even noticed.

  Below, the Blacheim’s shadow scudded across the jagged western slopes. Sitting idle in the rear cockpit, Mickey had to keep looking down at that shadow to remind himself where he was, what was happening. After twelve straight hours in the air he was starting to share the beast’s consciousness as if he were in the pilot’s seat, its pain and fear coloring his resurgent memories of the country to which he was returning.

  He still wasn’t sure he should have come. He’d been going to stay at Air Base XXI to put Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson off the trail. He’d had it all planned out. He’d have claimed responsibility for shooting down Commandant Vichuisse, the incompetent whom everyone in the squadron had hated. Crispin would have been far away by then, flying high and free in his maneuverable little Gorgonette, Princess Anuei. And in Crispin’s absence, the traitorous Captain Burns of 96 Squadron would surely have settled for Mickey. He had to have someone to carry the can. It wouldn’t suit his purposes to blame Vichuisse’s death on the disastrous encounter with the enemy during which it had taken place. Merely having been the only survivor of a fiasco wouldn’t warrant the promotion of a man like Burns, a half-Wraith who’d worked his way up from the ranks. And it was promotion Burns craved. If he were to make commandant, he needed to be a hero-patriot, the best of the best of the best. And who’d make a more appropriate counterweight to balance his rise to power than Mickey, the Kirekuni turncoat whose traitorousness was, after all, an open secret, whose execution had merely been put on hold by the Bureau of Intelligence at Chressamo?

  Staying in Ferupe to face his fate would have been the first noble thing Mickey had done in his life. And who more worthy of such a sacrifice than Crispin, the only genuinely principled man Mickey had ever known, the only man who didn’t have a cowardly bone in his body?

  He should have expected that Crispin’s principles wouldn’t countenance Mickey’s dying for him!

  Crispin hadn’t admitted it was a matter of principle, of course—he’d said he needed Mickey. Kirekune might as well be the dark side of the moon for all I know about it. Just how far d’you think I’d get in Okimako without someone who speaks the language? But he was just giving Mickey an honorable way out of going through with his plan to martyr himself. And Mickey had taken it. That was what he couldn’t forgive himself for. When he fired on Captain Burns yesterday morning, risking his life to save Crispin’s, he’d thought he was shaking his lily-livered monkey for good and for all—but the monkey had spoken, again, and dived down the first available bolt-hole. It was the coward in him who’d agreed to return to Kirekune. When he suffered such persecution and humiliation at the hands of 80 Squadron that he’d seriously considered suicide as a solution, the coward in him, Yozi, hadn’t let him take his own life. Yozi remembered Okimako and love and wine and sweet things. Yozi refused to believe that even if he did make it home, he’d find himself an outc
ast, an embarrassment to his family. And probably find himself being tried as a deserter from the SAF, too—that had been more than three years ago, but Significance could hold a grudge for three hundred.

  The wind in the open cockpit was dry and cold. Mickey knew it was like an oven on the ground. West of the Raw Marches, Maia was summer, and summer meant murderous heat everywhere in Kirekune except perhaps on the northern plains, or on the western coast, where Mickey had never been. In Okimako in summer, the sewerlike Orange River was so full of people day and night there was practically no room for the water. In Okimako, in Kirekune. Ever since they flitted across no-man’s-land into enemy airspace late yesterday afternoon, Mickey had been aware the rules of the game were subtly altered.

  And Crispin hadn’t spoken into the tube in hours. Mickey wanted to say something just to see if he’d respond. While they flew up the eastern slopes, the daemon wheezing in the thinning air, Crispin had issued a stream of instructions and brittle banter. But then they’d crossed the ridges. Sunlit knife edges standing up between canyons unfathomably deep, black as if they were filled with water, but no water anywhere; and then those gave way to slopes scored by deep gullies running east-west now instead of north-south. Occasional birds sailed by on the head wind. The daemon was tiring. Mickey could no longer pretend he wasn’t hearing it cough, snort, and roar in pain, its voice audible over the wind. It was too old. All Crispin’s coaxing had made no difference.