A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  And now this. He’d spoken to London—been passed down through the ranks to some junior clerk in the accounting department stuck working over Christmas, who’d unknowingly told him that they were being lost here, laid off. He’d received confirmation of that same thing through channels, the lethality of it buried in jargon, clotted with acronym, but none of that making it any less of a death sentence. He touched the pocket with the letter in it. He imagined it like a bullet, slowly crawling its way toward his heart. All of their hearts. Ted knew something that none of the rest of the men did. Not even Eddie. A secret that, for the time being, he would carry alone.

  Fucked once again by time—stuck hundreds of light-years from home with a handful of men, a few antique airplanes, a certain number of bombs and hammers and shit-paper and beans and a supply drop coming that he alone now knew was going to be the last one, ever.

  Ted had no politics. No philosophy beyond the sure knowledge that seeing the hammer coming down reduced all of life’s complications to the simplest equation: Survive or don’t. Twenty years of corporate war had taught him many lessons, but this was the one he’d taken most to heart. This was what he believed. Or what he believed that he believed, anyhow. He’d seen the hammer, so what did he have to do next? And when that was done, what came after?

  There was noise coming from the infield. Raised voices, the sound of boots on cold ground, and the hiss and pop of hot metal cooling in the darkness. The drop was in. A bull’s-eye delivery right into the infield by a jock flying so high that, this time, Ted hadn’t even heard the engines. With the new supplies, his accounting was going to be all inaccurate. Fucked by largesse, not want—which was a new experience for him, to be sure, but it left things in no less of an erroneous state. He’d have to start over, do it again tomorrow or the next day. Count everything again. That was what he could do next. Not so he could know how bad things were now, but how bad they were going to become. He thought about going to supervise the unloading but didn’t. He’d given orders. They would be followed, more or less.

  He’d gone to his own tent instead. Distracted, looking back over his shoulder as he walked, he’d stepped on something that’d squished underfoot. He’d lit a match, crouched down to see what it was, and discovered it was a slug, big enough that his size-ten waffle-tread had split it in half with part sticking out one side of his instep, stalk eyes still wriggling, and part sticking out the other.

  It’d infuriated him, this slug. What was it doing here? It was nighttime. How could it see? And it was cold—the ground frozen—so where was it going? The slug should not have been there. It made no sense. And this, he’d thought, was how it went. It wasn’t ever the big things that got you; it was the little ones. It was walking along in the night on frozen ground and stepping on a slug as long as your forearm: The plain irrationality of this place. That was what drove you crazy.

  He’d shaken out the match and stabbed the smoking stub of wood down into the head half of the slug. He’d watched it squirm and writhe on the ground while his breath hissed between clenched teeth.

  Welcome to the fucking war.

  CARTER GOT UP. He got dressed. There was a process, an unfolding of one’s self from the calm of sleep into war, and the first hundred or so times he’d done this, it had been precisely as affecting and heavy as it was supposed to be. He’d really felt it, in his belly, balls, and his fingertips—a tingling like powerful magic. Now, it was only a drag.

  He put on the catheter and strapped the piss bag to his thigh. The planes they flew here could stay up for twenty hours if needed, and everyone pissed themselves on night missions.

  Dog collar next, right against the skin. The clasp in the back could be tricky if a man was drunk or scared enough that his hands shook. Carter’s hands did not shake. He wasn’t yet awake enough to be scared and wasn’t drunk either because he’d chosen to turn in early tonight—to sleep only because all other options were equally tedious and at least while sleeping there was the chance that he might dream about girls. Stupid me, he thought to himself as his fingers unerringly found the catches and latched them against the prickling stubble on the back of his neck. Stupid, stupid me.

  The collar read a pilot’s biologicals, controlled the emergency gear—the pump full of oxygenated blood clotting factors, the Protenolol injector (synthetic adrenaline, hell in a very small vial). There’d been a briefing before they’d left for Iaxo where all the equipment had been explained. A small room aboard the Junholdt, sour with the smell of antifungal spray and plastics kept too long in a closed space.

  Instructing them had been a small and pretty young man with crazy eyes who spoke so fast that Carter had wondered whether he was paid a bonus for the number of words he could say in a minute. When he’d gotten to explaining the dog collar and emergency gear, he’d taken out a laser pointer and stabbed it randomly at the air. A kid playing pirate with a make-believe sword. Everywhere the dot of light touched, he would shout out, “Wound! Wound! Kill! Wound!”

  The pilots started twitching away from the bead of red light, started ducking and weaving, dancing where they stood because there were no chairs in which to sit and no room to run. But this only encouraged the young man, and he started yelling, “Bang! Bangbangbang!” until some of the pilots started to protest. How was it fair that this little boy with his laser was getting to kill them where they stood? To say who was wounded and who was dead? From the back of the room Carter had watched it all with a smile on his face, knowing that if the kid at the front of the room wasn’t careful, he was going to get himself killed for real.

  “Not fair?” the boy had asked, voice still quick, words spilling out of him like water from a split hose, but suddenly serious. “Not fair. A machine gun isn’t fair. Flak isn’t fair. It doesn’t discriminate or play favorites. But if you wear your gear—all of it, every time you go up—you’ll live. Simple as that. Everything else will die, you’ll live, and the company won’t have to pay out death benefits to your next of kin, which we hate to do. The emergency gear will save you. When you pray, pray to Harold Bolstrood, understand?” The kid had thrown his hands into the air, palms up, eyes turned toward the heaven of the Junholdt’s smooth steel ceiling. “Say, ‘Harold, save me,’ and it will be done.”

  There’d been a moment of quiet, then, “Who the fuck is Harold Bolstrood?” someone had asked. Carter thought it might’ve been Tommy Hill, but he was never sure.

  And the kid, the young man with the crazy eyes and the laser pointer, had cocked his head like a dog hearing its own name. His fine, thin eyebrows had knitted together, and he’d looked, for a silent instant, so sad that he might cry.

  “That’s me,” he’d said. “I invented this. Didn’t you know?”

  No one wore the pump. No one wore the injector. There was no flak on Iaxo. There were no machine guns other than the ones they’d brought with them. And the emergency gear was bulky and annoying and clumsy and rubbed painful sores onto the arm, so everyone had lost theirs or tossed them into a box somewhere and forgotten all about them, but they still wore the collars because the collars also contained the throat mike for the radio and looked pretty cool besides.

  Next came the jumpsuit—bespoke spidersilk of private manufacture, guaranteed to stop most any solid projectile. The pilots wore them like skin, with nothing beneath. Like everyone else’s, Carter’s jumpsuit smelled terrible.

  Thermal knickers, black. Boots to follow, also black, knee-high, fur-lined, comfortable for about five minutes but warm forever. Jacket the same way—long and black, heavy leather with silver buttons and buckles and a high collar. It was all very nice and functional, warm in the cold sky, occasionally bulletproof, but favored mostly because the flight rig made anyone who wore it look wicked, cruel, and indestructible.

  Gloves and goggles. A silk scarf—pure china-white and kept immaculately clean as a matter of pride even if nothing else was. Most paid the indigs to do that. Give them a couple of beads or bottlecaps and they’d do most anythi
ng. Laundry, fetch and carry, haul the trash, whatever. Carter was no different. He tucked the gloves into his belt and wound the scarf around his throat, leaving its tails flapping over his shoulder, fussing with them vainly until they lay just so.

  Each pilot had been issued a helmet. Carter used his to hold warm water when he shaved (which was not often). No one ever actually wore them. Again, a matter of style. Hard to look so dashing and devil-may-care behind a quarter inch of bulletproof mirrored Lexan.

  Hard to look so good with a bullet hole in the face, too, but that wasn’t much of a concern to the pilots. For the most part, the only bullets fired in anger were theirs. In the two years that the company had been on Iaxo, more men had been put on the sick rolls for cock-rot, cirrhosis, and misadventure (read: cracked their heads falling drunk over a tent peg) than had been injured in the line of duty. More by far.

  C’est la guerre.

  Once dressed, Carter had little choice but to fly, but he knew that ten minutes was ten minutes in Ted’s mind only. A mere suggestion of hurry. And to obey, he thought, would only encourage the man, stroke the armature of ego that kept him upright and stiff, and make him think people listened when he spoke. There was no reason to foster that kind of illusion.

  Fenn had been kind, considerate, and thoughtless enough to leave a half-full bottle of the local pop-skull sitting in the dirt next to his cot, so Carter requisitioned it as a spoil of war, eased himself down onto the edge of his bed, and drank it. Near the door, Cat (something less than Carter’s pet, something more than just another ugly local rodent) lay curled into a ball on its pile of rags. Silently, Carter raised the bottle in a toast to the sleeping, monstrous thing. To survival, he thought, at any cost. And then Carter drank. He did not rush. Neither did he linger. There was work to do, but he’d be damned if he was going to do it sober.

  Back in his own tent, Ted felt each breath like taking in a weight and exhaling only half of it. Steam rose like smoke. His mouth tasted of tar and too long between brushing. He regretted fiercely those few drags he’d taken off that cigarette while standing in Carter’s squalid quarters, but it’d been necessary. He’d wanted to bring the man a present—an apology of sorts for slights that Carter couldn’t possibly have understood—and a cigarette had seemed the least obviously cajoling. The least fraught. Ted had lit one for himself simply because it’d felt wrong to do otherwise. Appearances mattered, Ted knew. Especially when one had very little else.

  He’d taken out the orders from corporate again and laid them on his desk, straightening the folded page until it was square with the corners, the edge, nudging it with his fingertips until it was perfectly aligned.

  Ted thought of the coast. Gray water, sick with foam. Cities that looked to have been built from mud by giant idiot children and then abandoned halfway through. The Arkhis Mountains like sharp teeth in an angry mouth. Hills 201, 204, 218a and b, the central highlands—names on corporate maps that were all less terrible for their banality, for the refusal to call them after the awful things that’d been done there when he and his pilots had flown low and dropped fire from the sky.

  The Sispetain moors. The bloody fucking moors, and the river valley below them. The city they called Riverbend, then here—the lowlands, a flood plain that never flooded. Ted drummed his fingers on the folded orders. He’d made a tour, for sure. He’d seen some things. They all had. And now it was done. Or would be soon.

  They’d dropped, initially, not far from those cities on the coast—the sprawling mud and stone trading centers and maritime capitals everyone knew were the keys to final victory on Iaxo even if no one really knew what they were called. Two years ago, seven hundred days ago—one more than that now, maybe—they’d come down, bearing in like a dart on that first day, and they’d been able to see nothing. Strapped down inside the troop compartment of their dropship, sitting so close they’d almost been on one another’s laps, breathing the warm, recycled air and shaking like a hundred individual earthquakes. Their view of Iaxo had been better from orbit, and from orbit it hadn’t been very good. But anything was better than trying to stare through steel.

  Morale had been an issue. These men, they’d never worked together before. Most of them had never met before finding themselves crammed into the dropship with all their personal gear, survival gear, jump-out kits, whatever. Some 52.2 kilograms per man, about 115 pounds. No one had known whether or not they’d have to fight their way off the dropship—leaping, guns blazing, onto alien soil: the classic hot landing. When Ted had asked, corporate had said no. Corporate had assured Ted: “Quiet as a civilian drop. You’re not going to be fighting your way off anything.”

  But then on the day—the first day, while the men had been sitting through briefings in cold storerooms on how to use the gear bestowed upon them by the company, how to fly planes that no one had flown in centuries—Ted had found fourteen rifles to distribute among the members of the Carpenter 7 mission. Fourteen Hiland-model assault rifles, older than he was, plus clips, cleaning kits, and fourteen thousand rounds of ammunition waiting, crated, unmarked, and sitting on the deck plates of the transport Junholdt beside the dropship’s ramp. This, Ted had thought, was very strange. Either it was expected to be a hot LZ or it wasn’t. If it was, then why would the company allocate only fourteen rifles instead of one for every man? And if it wasn’t, why offer any at all?

  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 bac
ks 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.