A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  But now Morris Ross had died. Ted had carried him on his lap. Ted had held his head against his shoulder, felt the weight of him, smelled the terrible smells that death hangs on a man. He’d been chewed to pieces by someone else’s machine gun, and when Ted had returned with the body, he’d lost control of things. He’d felt it leaving him, that control—a sensation like reins slipping through his fingers, the threads of command dissolving or hanging slack.

  He should’ve said something, but he couldn’t. His brain wasn’t functioning; it was filled only with a blankness that he couldn’t think around. He’d clung to Morris’s body as though the weight of it were the only thing holding him rooted in place. Without it, he thought he might just float up and away forever. Or worse, sink. When hands had finally taken Morris from him (to lay him down gently onto plastic, to arrange his arms and his legs in some semblance of order—Billy crouching over him and staring into Morris’s slack face like he was just waiting for him to wake up and say “boo”), Ted had staggered at the sudden lightness. He’d walked off quickly so no one would see him fly away.

  There’d been a wake. It’d gotten out of hand. While the men were grieving, he’d washed up, shaved, changed clothes. The indig who did his laundry wasn’t around, so he’d piled his gear in a corner and kicked it. Then kicked it again. That had felt good. He’d stalked the length of his tent and back again a hundred times, then cleared the comms tent and sat in it with Eddie, with maps, with plans. They’d behaved as men do, with coffee and pens and lists, grinding their way through the past two years of violent history and trying to make something good of it. Something that would appease and mollify their corporate masters—some proof that all hadn’t been wasted and that, somehow, their inexplicable failures and thousand wrong moves had all been part of a path to ultimate victory, riches, success. They made lies of everything, but pretty ones.

  “Who reads these reports?” Ted had asked of the air, then answered himself. “No one, that’s who. There are only two communications that matter to the company: the one that says we’ve arrived and the one that says we’ve won.”

  In the tent, they waited on the final call from corporate—the confirmation of their final orders. That it had only been twenty-four hours surprised Ted. How could it only have been that long? How could this disaster be only a day old? He was losing track of time somehow, the entire business growing distended and strange. Like a bubble in a vein, choking off the orderly flow.

  It was cold. Ted blew into his hands and rasped his knuckles against the edge of the table. Together, he and Eddie wrote a new history and predicted a new future in anticipation of that call: victory in a month. Or a week, why not? A minute. All they were begging for was time. A new clock to be started. Mercy. It would be the only chance they’d get. A moment where, perhaps—with the right words, the right numbers—their future could be changed. So they’d hunched together, head to head, light spilling across the table from a lamp, and they’d waited. They drank all the coffee and when it was gone, there was nothing but the lingering warmth of the cups.

  When the final call from corporate came in, Ted crouched silently beside Eddie with earphones pressed to the side of his head, listening to every word. Eddie was polite, businesslike. He said all the right things. He laid out their position in the brightest possible light. He bargained. He made impossible promises. None of it mattered. Eddie grew strident, then angry, then desperate. The voice on the other side (Loewenhardt, Ted thought, though he wasn’t entirely sure) was cold and distant the whole time, speaking with implacable tones like a cash register ringing. The voice said no and no and no some more, and Ted felt himself falling into the void of it, a gentle rush like the nearness of death. At a certain point, he closed his eyes. The voice gave spreadsheet reasons that were difficult to argue against. “We cannot, at this time, see a way to profit from any further expansion of the Carpenter mission and have shifted resources away to more likely theaters.”

  “I’m not asking for any expansion, sir, just—”

  “At this time, the company can’t commit any additional resources, owing to a rapidly shifting political situation.”

  “Sir, we don’t need resources. If you could—”

  “Currently, your operation is in danger of jeopardizing other ongoing company projects, and any further direct action from the company would only expose us to more risk. I’m sure you can understand this from the shareholders’ perspective.”

  “Sir, I think that the shareholders would be anxious to—”

  “As far as this company is concerned, this operation was never intended to be a sustained commitment. As observers, you were never expected to single-handedly fight this war.”

  “Observers? But we never—”

  “And we thank you for all your efforts in the past two years.”

  “I understand that the company might need to—”

  “Good. We’re glad you understand. This hasn’t been an easy decision for any of us. And as soon as the situation, both on the ground and in council, becomes more tenable, we look forward to renewing a relationship with you on Iaxo.”

  “Wait, what?”

  No answer.

  “Wait. You can’t just leave us here.”

  No answer. Dead air. The whistle of empty, impossible distances.

  “We just need a fucking ride!”

  Ted laid a hand over the controls and killed the connection. He shook his head, suddenly deprived of the power to speak. This was his fault. This was all his fault. He stood up, dragging his fingertips across the FTL relay until his hand fell leadenly off the console.

  “Wait. Commander, this is ridiculous…”

  Ted just smiled at Eddie—a thin and brittle thing. He had an overpowering urge to pat him on the head like a child. Loewenhardt, he thought. It must’ve been Loewenhardt. He’d met the man before. A couple of times, in passing. Better days. No one else in the world was able to talk that way. To speak completely in a language of abstractions. To wring assent out of words like squeezing oil from a stone with his bare hands.

  “Commander,” said Eddie.

  Ted pushed things around on the table with numb fingers. He stacked cups and gathered the pens, tried to shuffle the papers together.

  “Ted,” said Eddie.

  He turned down the light of the lamp until it was barely a firefly glow. Conservation of resources. Everything they had was suddenly finite.

  “Tell me this isn’t what they mean, Commander. We’re being left here?”

  “We’re being lost,” Ted said. His voice sounded very loud inside his own head and though he thought he’d spoken in barely a whisper (conserving even breath, never knowing which might be his last), he thought he might have been screaming.

  “Why?”

  “Am I shouting?”

  “What? No. You’re not shouting.”

  “You sure?”

  Eddie nodded. “Why are we being lost?”

  “That conversation? It was all being recorded. It’ll play if legal sanctions are ever brought.” Ted smiled at Eddie again—a doddering old man’s grin, lips peeling back from his fake teeth. “Am I shouting?”

  “You’re not shouting.”

  Ted turned off the lamp. He folded the thick stacks of paper and shoved them into his pockets.

  “We were observers,” he said. “Subcontractors, unrelated to the company, who came here and decided to fight a war without the company’s knowledge. That’s how it’ll sound. In court, I mean. Later.”

  “Not if we say different.”

  Ted tilted his head. He took the two coffee cups by their handles, looping a finger through each of them, and looked at Eddie quizzically. “How would we do that?” he asked. “We’re all going to be dead.”

  After that, Ted had gone out and gotten drunk. He’d burned the papers full of plans he’d taken from comms and then tried to burn the coffee cups, too. After that, Ted had found Eddie in his tent, sitting with his head down, forehead touching sta
cks of other papers piled into high palisades around him. Ted had walked right in. Things had been thrown. Things had been broken. Ted told Eddie to not say anything to the pilots. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  “This isn’t over yet,” he’d said, and slapped Eddie hard on the shoulder. “Not yet.”

  Then he’d staggered out into the dawn and, in doing so, couldn’t recall whether Eddie had been awake. He turned around. He pushed through the door again. Eddie was lying on the floor, curled up and weeping. Ted nodded once, sharply. That, he thought, was a man finally coming to terms with his situation.

  The sun was coming up. Or would at some point. He’d gathered pilots. He’d broken planes out of the longhouse. With a powerful urge to do some damage, he’d organized a dawn patrol with the idea of, beginning now—beginning right fucking now—taking over the whole of the planet for himself. Becoming King for Life of this wet and backward shit hole and ruling Iaxo like a despot. Teach these monkeys a little something about civilization right quick, he thought. With his planes, his pilots, he could do it. Maybe talk to Connelly, too. See what he thought about being queen.

  They flew the Vickers and Billy’s Bristol. Albert Wolfe from first squadron went up in Carter’s Roadrunner. Max, the armorer, had wisely stripped the planes and locked the armory as soon as he’d seen the bottles come out, and then had locked himself inside with the key for safekeeping. Having no guns or bombs, they’d headed out looking for trouble with their sidearms, the pockets of their flight rigs stuffed with beers just like in the good old days before Danny Diaz. They went up with empty glass and clay bottles and rocks, with bows and arrows stolen from their own indig guards at gunpoint, and a few Molotov cocktails made out of aviation fuel siphoned off the fresh tanks at the field.

  They spotted an indig supply caravan well north of the river, moving contentedly through badland and in the lee of a low rise of hills. This, they went after with some vigor, banging away with pistols, throwing the rocks and bottles and then the bows and arrows, too, when it became clear that one couldn’t properly operate them while in flight and sitting. They started a good-sized grass fire with the Molotovs, but it sizzled out too quickly, and Ted even managed to piss over the side of the Bristol and onto the heads of the column from a hundred feet up. He’d stood with one foot wedged behind the gunner’s seat, the other braced in the empty Foster mount, and let go over the side while holding one-handed to the top wing. Lots of style, little effect. But when Carter heard about this stunt later, it would make him like Ted a little bit more.

  The planes went up. The planes came down. It was an inauspicious start to the reign of King Ted. When he landed, he went to see Eddie. Eddie was in the comms tent again. Eddie was waging his own private war. A lawyer war. He had more papers—new papers, stacks of them. He had memos and orders and a pen in his teeth. When Eddie heard Ted come in, he’d looked up and the two men had stared into each other’s eyes and maybe saw a little too much madness there, a little too much sudden kinship. The reflections were jarring.

  “Call them in,” Eddie had said. “We need to have a meeting.”

  “Who?”

  “The pilots. Officers and squadron leaders. We need to talk.”

  “We don’t have anything to tell them,” Ted said.

  “I do. You’re not the only one who has old friends back home.”

  “Eddie, we can’t tell them…”

  “Call the meeting, Ted. Gather them up. Dig them out. I don’t care. I have information now. We need to talk.”

  IT WAS THE SOUND OF THE DAWN PATROL LANDING that woke Carter and triggered the instant onset of a brutal hangover that made him wish he’d never been born. A just punishment, perhaps, for the previous evening’s indiscretions. But still, it was mean.

  Most everyone had gotten drunk as hell the night after Morris Ross was killed. Spooky drunk, mostly. Quiet and focused, at least at first, but by midnight the quietness had worn off and the party spilled out of the mess and the field house, across the airstrips and up and down through the longhouse. To those involved, it must’ve felt like an affirmation of life in the face of the death of one of their own and, in that spirit, they broke things, hit one another, and accidentally burned one of the tents to the ground. To the camp indigs, it seemed like something else entirely and, in quiet places, away from the quaking epicenters of grief, they gathered to softly discuss it among themselves, hunkering in the shadows cast by guttering flames, away from the shouting, casting their eyes occasionally skyward as if expecting heavenly reinforcement or, perhaps, retribution.

  As should have been expected, Carter woke up beneath Vic at some point during the night with her knees straddling his hips, her fine, pale skin glowing ghostly in the moonlight. He didn’t remember going there, getting there, nor being there, but he did remember Vic, that was sure. He remembered warmth, softness, aliveness, and her dark hair running like oil through his fingers when he reached for the back of her neck to pull her down closer on top of him.

  Now it was only cold. And in the thin, watery blue light of morning, waking wrapped in a blanket out in the tall grass next to B strip, they were both probably half-dead from hypothermia. Leaning over her, Carter saw Vic’s hair crunchy with frost, her lips pale in the bitter, hard chill.

  A truly awful landing by Wolfe in Roadrunner nearly ended the war for both of them, but the near-death passing of his wingtip over Carter’s head when he sat up only made him laugh, goggle-eyed with wonder. He recognized the insignia of his plane and said aloud to himself that he really shouldn’t be flying in his condition.

  He spent the next twenty minutes throwing up beside the longhouse, and when he came back, weak-kneed and stark naked, to the spot where he’d been lying, Vic had gone and taken the blanket with her. There were no clothes to be found. He knew for stone certain that he’d been fully dressed at the start of the night, was less sure at what point he’d become undressed, and hadn’t a clue as to where those clothes might be now. It was precisely these sorts of things that Carter felt ought to concern him more, but they didn’t. Maturity, one might say, is always knowing where one’s pants are, but weak-kneed and naked was how Carter’d stumbled back to his tent that morning.

  Morning at the Flyboy camp looked like the aftermath of a bad night fight with no survivors. There were bodies everywhere. Max had fallen asleep locked inside the armory. Tommy was found by Doc Edison, the Carpenter mission’s medic and least busy man on all of Iaxo. He was facedown in the middle of C strip, arms and legs spread like he was trying to make a puke angel. Davey Rice was sprawled close to the remains of the burned tent, smears of blood dried across his nose and cheek. Charlie wasn’t far away, half-frozen in all his gear. They discovered Emile inside an empty shipping container beside the machine shop, buried like a tick in cast-off packing materials, his head pillowed on a mound of slick pornography.

  Raoul and Lori Bishop, having obviously picked up where they’d left off the last morning, were all tangled together on a table in the mess like a horrible accident at a contortionists’ school and were left alone to wake to their own misery, the growing search party of mechanics, ground crews, and communications personnel led by Doc Edison backing out quietly, smothering grins behind their hands.

  Carter found Fenn in the tent where he belonged, but stretched out in the dirt beneath his rack with his boots off and his helmet on, a halo of empty beer cans ringing his head. Cat had taken a predatory interest in one of his bare feet and was stalking it with a cold and lethal intensity.

  Slowly, they put themselves back together and got on with the painful business of being the living.

  Carter and Fenn could feel Ted coming before they saw him. It was like a game. Once a man got the feel for it, he could sense Ted coming a hundred yards off, and the first one to say his name won. Or lost, depending.

  It was a few hours past dawn and the two men were recovering, not really doing much of anything and most surely not in the mood for company. They could barely tolerate each oth
er’s; they weren’t speaking, breathing too loudly, or even looking in each other’s direction. Cat lay curled in a tight ball on Carter’s stomach, snoring while Carter scratched between where he thought some of the little monster’s shoulders ought to be. It would wake periodically, just long enough to open one eye and spit at Fenn before dropping back into a heavy, blissful slumber. For a while, Fenn had been spitting back, but he’d quickly lost interest.

  Carter said, “Ted.”

  Fenn said, “Fucker.”

  Ted walked straight in. He didn’t knock.

  “Captains,” he said.

  “Commander,” said Fenn.

  “Ted,” said Carter.

  “Good to see you both conscious.”

  They both nodded. Neither saluted or came to attention or even sat up, for that matter. Ted stood straight as a rail, was showered, clean, and shaven so close and so recently his chin and cheekbones looked blue. It was, in Carter’s opinion, obscene.

  Ted stood a moment, surveying. The two pilots and one cat-snake, the empty bottles, cigarette butts crushed into the dirt, the wreckage and general slobbishness of their bachelor officer quarters. There was no doubt that everything in his sight offended Ted—from Fenn’s socks drying on the potbellied pig-iron stove they heated the place with to the tattered, vicious girlie spreads and war porn hung everywhere by way of decoration. But when he spoke, he did so slowly, as if trying to initiate a friendly conversation but not exactly sure how to go about it.

  “So… Morris, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Carter.

  “Morris,” said Fenn.

  “It’s a shame about him. He was a…” Ted sniffed, but apparently thought better of breathing too deeply, so grunted instead. His hands were clasped behind his back, but Carter could see the twitch of the muscles in his shoulders and arms, as though he were wringing his hands behind him or digging his nails into his palms hard. “He was a good man. No sense of direction and not the best flier, but a good… a good guy.”