by Various
As a stand-in for the Lord Jesus was Durba’s only daughter, Marie, who’d once been his first sergeant and second-in-command. What made this proxy arrangement disconcerting (even more so than Durba’s own self-promotion within the spiritual hierarchy), was the fact that Marie had been killed more than six months ago—pierced through by a cavalryman’s lance on the Sispetain moors during a disastrous attempt by Connelly’s indigs to hold the last of the region’s high ground against an onslaught by overwhelming numbers of someone else’s. Marie’d been in the dirt now for some time, but that never stopped Durba from speaking of her as though she’d just gone ’round the other side of some tree for a piss. It got to a point where it began to bother some of the pilots and, one night, Carter asked him if he, Durba, still thought Marie sang the Lord’s praises so prettily with half a foot of native hardwood through her lungs.
“All souls live eternally in the light of God’s righteous fury,” said Durba.
“That count for the monkeys, too?” Carter asked.
“The natives here are abominations in his eyes,” said Durba. “Heathens who worship trees and clouds.”
“Well, if Marie loved Jesus and is dead and the monkeys pray to sticks and dirt but are still alive, whose fucking god does the math say is winning?”
At that point, the theological discussion devolved into punching, and the two of them had to be pulled apart and hustled out opposite doors. It was Fennimore Teague, Carter’s friend, who’d dragged him outside, shoved him backward, and held him off with one hand flat on Carter’s chest while Carter spit part of a broken tooth into the dirt.
“Baby, that was somewhat less than hospitable,” Fenn said, smiling while watching Carter close. “What do we say? No talking about politics, sex, or religion at the dinner table.”
Carter said that Durba had started it. That all he’d done was ask a question. That everyone was just as tired of hearing about Durba’s dead cunt of a daughter as he was and that no amount of talking was going to bring her back.
“Talking is what the man has left, Kev,” Fenn said. “To keep her close. Though I grant you, at this point, odds on her resurrection are running very long indeed.”
They laughed. What else was there to do? Everyone knew Durba was too sensitive. Eventually, Carter apologized and showed Durba the tooth he’d broken and showed him how he could spit whiskey through the hole like a sniper. The war went on and on.
• • •
Durba took position across the ford without firing a shot, though it was again rumored that Connelly, in a panic, had nearly ordered his 4th company to retreat once more when he’d heard the riflemen moving up in the night behind him.
The men—the pilots—laughed about this. “Connelly… ,” said Tommy Hill. “Fought every battle he ever saw walking backward.” They shook their heads, rattled their drinks, and said Connelly’s name over and over again the way one might speak of a younger brother or favorite pet, forever mixed up in something complicated beyond their years or wit.
“Connelly… Going to outlive us all.”
“Connelly… Fucking Connelly.”
“Connelly… ,” said Albert Wolfe. “That man is going to chickenshit himself right through this war. Afraid of the dark. Whoever heard of such a thing?”
Again, it was dark, so the planes couldn’t fly.
Two
WHEN TED PRINZI slept, he dreamed of sleeping. Of clean white sheets and clean white spaces. Of cool plastic curves, aquiline cambers that existed nowhere in nature, and the competence of institutional design. He dreamed of a space among a thousand spaces. A million. More. And of a deprivation of the senses as pure as summer sunlight filtered through a sheet.
It wasn’t a lot, but it was his: Ted Prinzi’s clean and aired-out place. Dry, warm, bright and completely artificial. Manufactured. In the moments before sleep would come to him—if he was having difficulty letting it overtake him—he would imagine this room. Furnish it. Add small fillips of detail, shave down a curve here, soften the glow of a hidden light there. It was no place that he knew, but it was close to several. A station berth he’d kept for some time once. Acceleration stasis aboard the Swift. Any one of a half-dozen hospital rooms, each as sterile and generic as a uniform.
He dreamed of nothing but interstices: The moment of slipping, for the first time, between those stiff, cool, white sheets, toenails hissing against the cloth. The moment of waking to a white purity of artificial light and artificial heat and artificial air, all so perfect and formless and affectless that it was itself like a kind of blind, deaf and brainless dispossession of the senses. Nothing ever happened in his dreams. Nothing ever had to. It was enough to be warm and clean and bathed in light, to reach out and touch a soft, plastic curve and know that it had never been any natural or dirt-bound thing.
Ted was sleeping when Diane came for him. Asleep and dreaming of cool whiteness in his tent that smelled of must and mold and smoke, under canvas the color of rot, of sickness, on his straight iron cot that squeaked when he moved, beneath piles of blankets that scratched like steel wool and stank of sweat, skin, hair, breath, feet and him.
She must’ve knocked on the wood frame of the door, but Ted hadn’t heard her. She must’ve called his name. She was polite like that, if politeness was the right word.
When Ted swam up out of whiteness, she was standing over him, reaching out a hand that she drew back quickly when she saw his eyes pop open, terror-bright. She pulled the hand back and held it pressed between her small, boyish breasts, cupped by her other hand as if Ted had bitten her.
“Call for you,” she said.
“What?”
“Call.”
Ted was wearing his jumpsuit. Two pairs of socks. He dug his hands into a pocket of warmth beneath the curve of his back and closed his eyes again. He could hear voices outside, the buzz of engines. It was day, barely, and still the cold chewed at his face, smelling vaguely of ammonia.
“Ted.”
“Don’t, Diane,” Ted said. He thought that maybe he could recapture the dream if he tried. He could feel the wisps of it still trailing through his mind.
“The call…”
“Get Eddie. Take it yourself. I don’t care.”
“It’s the company.”
Ted coughed. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut, until whiteness exploded behind his lids, willing himself to sleep, ordering himself to dream. “Who else would it be?”
“No, I mean the company company. Direct from the offices.”
Ted opened his eyes. The engine sounds were cycling, getting louder and softer. There was shouting.
“Personal for you,” she said.
“Get out.”
“But—”
“Go. I’ll be there in one minute.”
It took him less. As soon as Diane left, Ted hurled himself out of bed and to his feet, splashed icy water on his face from a pan that was capped with a thin skin of ice that he’d had to crack with a fist. He pulled on a clean uniform shirt, pants that he pressed carefully every night between gun cases, his boots and belt and sidearm. He scratched furiously at his scalp, took three seconds to clear his lungs (hands balled into fists, knuckles digging into his knees as he bent double), then squared himself behind the closed door of his tent before charging out into the graying dawn like a man who knew what was going on.
• • •
The smell of fuel was thick, like breathing soup, and the air felt wet and greasy against his skin. The sky was old iron, socked in with close-hung clouds that seemed near enough to touch, to comb through with his fingers like an ashen pudding. A sodden ceiling forever crashing in toward the earth.
The atmosphere here was strange. The light, diffuse and irrational; making dawns the color of a bruise, of sickness, of toothaches or misery. Ted had seen men cowering beneath it, crouched under a gangrene sky and looking out as though haunted. Possessed by a cold, unquantifiable fear that something was just wrong and getting wronger by the hour, here in this plac
e where even the light was cruel.
Ted coughed again, stamping out across the dirt in the direction of the comms tent, and saw a mess of activity out by the longhouse across the stubble field—men and machines in a tumult. The mess and chaos of a war that, sometimes, refused to be fought by anyone.
Ted had been on Carpenter 7 Epsilon for two years. Ted, his men, his machines, the tents, Diane, the FTL relay, all of it. Two years spent trying to complete a mission that should’ve taken a week or a month. A year on the outside.
Carpenter 7 Epsilon (known locally as Iaxo) was a footnote. The mission was a double-hush, back-burner project long-tailed into the Flyboy Inc. corporate Annual Operations Plan for eight quarters running but sick now with blown deadlines and cost overruns. Ted had been there when it was new—a fresh idea so ripe that his bosses had been wiping drool off their chins when they’d discovered it. So exciting that they couldn’t stand up too fast without snapping their dicks off at the root. In two years, there’d been successes, but not enough of them. There’d been too many mystifying failures.
And now it’d gone sour and Ted had been waiting for this call for most of a year—a hint from a friend, a former compatriot, from someone in the organization who’d been told to carefully, quietly, gently warn Ted Prinzi that bad news was coming fast and that he’d be wise to prepare for it. Nothing official, of course. Just a nod in the direction of calamity, which was the way things were done in the back channels of the company he’d spent most of his life working for.
Inside the comms tent it was warm—proscribed machinery bleeding heat as a consequence of information. Diane was guarding the FTL relay with crossed arms and a set jaw that radiated menace. The other controllers ignored her with a fixity that was reflexive. She was at the end of another night shift and wasn’t even a terribly pleasant woman at the beginning of one.
Ted made for the relay. When Diane didn’t move aside quite quickly enough, Ted pushed her without really thinking about it. Not roughly, but still. When he moved to sit down, Diane felt the place where Ted’s palm had cupped her shoulder, trailing her fingertips across it as though hunting for the dissipating warmth of his touch.
Ted didn’t notice that either. He had eyes only for the technology. The screens were all live, but there was no picture, no telepresence. A zillion dollars in technology, and they were using it like two tin cans and a string hundreds of light-years long. He sat, put the phones on his head, coughed into his fist and closed his eyes.
“This is Op Chief, Carpenter 7 Epsilon, TAG 14-447 actual. Go ahead.”
• • •
He’d guessed the call would come from Garros, deputy chief of external ops, based out of London, Earth—the ancestral Flyboy headquarters. Ted knew Garros a little and thought that the courtesy would not be completely unusual coming from his mouth. In the dark, he’d imagined the conversation a hundred different ways.
Or maybe it would be Jackson Chaudhary, the assistant deputy. That would be insulting, but not devastatingly so. Ted had decided long ago not to let it show in his voice if it was Chaudhary who made the call; that a courtesy was a courtesy even if it was delivered in a discourteous fashion. He would act the professional, bite his tongue, and remember to call Chaudhary sir no matter how much it pained him.
Tallis Marks, who managed operational security, would be bad, as would anyone in his department. If the call came from the security department, it would be a flag—a warning that meant arrests were imminent, or worse—and it would be expected that he would know that. To act appropriately no matter how deep the blood got.
Slava, Oliver, Victor Wes, that fat fuck Apostol who’d breadcrumbed his way into the CFO’s seat after Hinrik’s third stroke. It could be any of them. Loewenhardt, even, though that was probably expecting too much. Better that it wasn’t Loewenhardt, but Ted knew that so long as the call—the warning call, the one to inform him personally that the official bad news would be coming at some later date—came from someone above the line and inside the London headquarters, someone of management level or above, assistant to a deputy or higher, everything would be okay. It would be bad, but not, so to speak, fatally so. He’d won wars for his company. Bled for them. He’d spent so long in Indian country that he’d grown feathers—which was something he said now about himself because it was something that Garros had said to him once, years ago, when introducing him to a prospective client. Prinzi, come here. Gavril, this is Ted Prinzi, one of our battle captains. Where are you just in from Ted? Doesn’t matter. Gavril, this man has spent so long in Indian country he’s growing feathers. I can’t even keep track of the fights he’s won…
• • •
“Commander Prinzi?” said the disembodied voice on the other end of the relay. Ted didn’t recognize it. He mentally checked Garros off the list. Chaudhary. Marks. Loewenhardt, of course. Also Slava, Oliver, Wes and Apostol, Ballard, Coley, Ma, Archer. Ted ran down the Flyboy org chart in his head. He racked his brain to come up with another name. Someone else. Someone who’d maybe been promoted since he’d left. Someone new.
“Who is this?” Ted asked.
• • •
Diane watched as Ted seemed to receive an invisible punch in the chest. He folded, put the points of his elbows on the table in front of him, and sunk his head down until he was gripping the back of his own neck with strong hands. She could see the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Panic breaths. Sharp and shallow like silent laughter. She could hear only one side of the conversation, but she was worried that she’d woken him for no good reason even though she had orders to fetch him for any call originating from the home office, at any hour. Standing orders, given to her almost a year ago and refreshed with maddening frequency anytime it crossed Ted’s mind to do so.
Ted said, “You’re a clerk in the accounting department…”
Ted said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Assistant clerk. How long you been working for the company, son?”
Ted said, “Two weeks?”
Ted said, “That must be really exciting for you…”
Ted said, “I’m ready. What’s the message?”
Diane figured she was going to be yelled at. This was obviously just some bit of paperwork or some small detail that plainly didn’t rise to the level of involving the commander. Stupid, she said to herself and bit down on the inside of her cheek until the pain became sharp and clarifying. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
But when Ted disconnected a few seconds later, he said nothing. He stood, straightened his uniform, looked briefly around the room, then turned and strode purposefully toward the door without saying a word. When he walked out, a blast of cold air whipped in and, briefly, Diane luxuriated in it, feeling like she’d dodged a bullet that had come almost close enough for her to hear.
Three
IN THE MORNING, word had come down that they would fly in the early afternoon.
“Reconnaissance, they reckon,” Charlie’d said, and that was his idea of a joke. The pilots laughed because there was nothing else worth laughing at. The coffee was terrible and most of them were still hungover from the night before. Then Charlie threw up in the dirt next to the officers’ table in the mess tent they’d pitched two years ago and called the Flyboy O Club, and everyone laughed at that, too.
They pulled the planes out, the pilots pitching in to help drag them into position, and they argued over who was going where and what plane needed what and when. The morning light, the false dawn, was strange and silvery and got into everyone’s heads, making tempers short and sharp. Charlie Voss and Lefty Berthold got into it outside the big sliding doors of the longhouse and almost went after each other, but a couple of the mechanics pulled them apart at the last minute.
Kevin Carter, captain of two squadron, was sitting on the lower wing of his biplane, forearms resting on his knees while he hummed some snatch of nonsense to himself. Fennimore Teague, captain of number three, stood near him, leaning back against the stiff, doped skin of the fuselage, watching the exci
tement with a careful eye. Charlie was in his squadron, Lefty in Carter’s. Neither man could be spared if one or the other got in a lucky punch.
“Lefty’s a prick; you know that,” Fenn said.
Carter looked up and watched the two men shoving each other—their faces twisted in sudden rage over nothing. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting at each other over the burr and cough of engines starting up, choking out, burning through idle fuel, but he knew that it didn’t matter. There was nothing of consequence anywhere on this planet; therefore the argument couldn’t be about anything of substance. About air. About breath. About blood. Plenty to go around.
“Your Charlie is no better,” Carter said.
“He is, though,” Fenn replied. “Much.”
Carter considered that a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “He is. But I think Lefty could take him.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What can you bet?”
Carter thought for a second. “Whole jar of peanut butter. What do you got?”
“My virgin sister’s cherry.”
Somewhere an engine caught and coughed to life. Carter sniffed. “Those are high stakes.”
“Not when I know I’m going to win.”
Carter watched Charlie Voss take a wild swing at Lefty and miss by a country mile. Both men were being held back now by three or four other men, and neither of them seemed to be trying too hard to break free. “If I’m not mistaken, I believe you said your sister was forty and had two kids.”
“Yup. And you don’t have any whole jar of peanut butter.”
“You’ve also said you didn’t have a sister.”
“And I don’t much like peanut butter anyway.”
Carter chuckled and eased himself to his feet. He was in all his gear. Had slept in most of it like the filthy, careless barbarian that he half wanted to be. They watched as the scrap broke up of its own heat—the offended parties spinning off across the cold field like atoms being split—and then Fenn looked away. When he saw Ted come banging out of the comms tent with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, making straight for the evacuated tent line, Fenn tracked him with squinted eyes, like he was watching an enemy coming down high out of the sun.
