A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  But if none of this worked, NRI had another side—a militant one that, while less easy to defend in public, was even more effective on the ground. With no sense of hypocrisy, NRI would lay aside the protest signs and injunction paperwork and use guns. Or bombs, flamethrowers, atomics, starships, and anything else at their disposal to go in and kick a little ass in the name of alien gopher solidarity. Nothing made them happier than when one of their own people—wild-eyed with fanaticism, wearing a black NRI armband, holding a terrified space gopher in one hand and a rifle in the other—made it onto the news back home. It was even better if that person was being arrested and dragged away by the Colonial Marines while the cameras rolled. Made them appear fearless and unswervingly committed to their cause. And whenever one of their own got killed under the media glare? Jackpot. After something like that, the donations always came flooding in.

  One of the most famous promotional campaigns NRI ever had—the one that brought in more money than any other, that showed up, in poster form, on the walls of more university dorm rooms—centered around a single picture. It was very dramatic, full of fire and action, and showed, center frame, the blasted, bloodied face of one of their young recruits. He sat with his knees up against his chest, his back pressed against a scorch-marked and twisted steel antitank barricade, his arms folded protectively around some froglike, babyish alien critter with huge, expressive eyes and a look of abject, shrieking terror on its reptilian face.

  The kid, on the other hand, was almost smiling. There was a look of sublime peace on his face, a holstered pistol under his arm and, in the background, the twisted metal of a crashed aircraft, towering flames licking at a smoke-black sky, and the silhouettes of Colonial Marines in their distinctive, bulky power armor charging toward him.

  At the bottom of the picture, NRI ran the simple caption: IF NOT US, THEN WHO?

  And if you looked closely, you could see the kid’s name stitched over the pocket of his black, NRI-issue jumpsuit: Carter, Kevin H.

  It was Native Rights Intersystem that’d taught Carter how to fly.

  In his bed, in his tent on Iaxo, Carter thought back to that day, that moment, that picture. He knew that he hadn’t had that look on his face because he was happy. He’d been shot in the neck while piloting the rescue helicopter crashed and burning in the background. He was dying. And those marines certainly weren’t headed his way to help. They were coming to arrest him. To drag him to his feet, stomp the little frog-thing he’d been holding beneath their heavy boots, popping its head like a grape; to dig their fingers cruelly into the wound in his neck until he screamed and cried for them to stop; then to beat him into unconsciousness—which, if he recalled correctly, hadn’t taken much.

  Carter spent eleven years in a military prison after that, and all of NRI’s politicians and lawyers and rich members and documentary filmmakers and idealistic young followers and sympathetic supporters and soldiers and believers and faithful didn’t do a goddamn thing to get him out. He was beaten regularly in prison. Left to rot in solitary confinement, on a diet of water and thin protein gruel all full of spit and piss and worse. He was raped. Humiliated. Passed around. Starved. He was left for dead by guards more times than he could count, by men who wanted him to die because he didn’t belong. Because he was a race traitor, a tree hugger, an alien lover. Because he was an aberration, an enemy combatant imprisoned among those against whom he’d fought. For eleven years he was kept mostly in solitary because, if left to the appetites of the general population for more than five minutes, no one would’ve ever found enough pieces of him to identify his body.

  To NRI, he’d served his purpose, and was forgotten but for a once-a-year care package with some cigarettes, candy, toiletries, and a form letter from the board of directors thanking him for his brave sacrifice and saying how concerned they were for his health and well-being. It was the same goddamn letter every year. That Carter remembered very clearly. None of them could even be bothered to sign it themselves. He checked every year before using the letter as toilet paper, or to smear the blood of another beating from his face.

  One year they’d even sent him a T-shirt with that picture screened onto the front and the NRI logo on the back, telling him he should wear it often, “to show his continuing dedication to the cause of native rights.”

  His name had been blacked out of the picture. He’d assumed it was so that no one who saw it ever asked, Hey, whatever happened to Kevin Carter?

  No one ever did.

  ALL OF THE INDIGS WERE EXPELLED FROM CAMP AT GUNPOINT the afternoon after the meeting with Fast Eddie. They were walked out en masse, a dozen Flyboys motivating them with hard looks, harsh language, and fingers on triggers; moving them past some invisible boundary of influence and ownership where their land ended and indig land began again, then leaving them there.

  For a time, the indigs all just milled around, looking bewildered while a few of the pilots and mechanics lingered to call them wogs and monkeys and, occasionally, throw clods of dirt at them. There were more than a hundred indigs: sentries and postriders and laborers and cleaners and camp followers of all descriptions. And they were no doubt confused by this sudden and drastic turn in their fortunes. One minute, they’d been mixing with the Big Gods—doing their laundry, carrying their messages, burning their shit, and watching them while they slept. And the next, they were turned out. Cast down. Eighty-sixed from whatever weak Eden their belief system had led them to believe the pilots, the company, and their squalid little camp represented.

  And they were all still standing there an hour later when Fast Eddie, looking neither left or right, stalked out to talk things over with them. Eddie didn’t speak a lot of indig, but he could say a little. More than anyone else in camp. For their part, the indigs mostly stared—standing or squatting right where they’d been left, looking at Eddie or back mutely toward the airstrips and tents and just waiting for something else to happen. Eddie brought Ted with him and Ted was in full Godly kit—black leather and shiny buckles, the whole nine yards. His job was to just stand there and look indestructible, which, conveniently, was one of the things Ted was good at.

  Carter didn’t know what Eddie said to them, but after a few minutes, the indigs all came filing back in and went right back to their business with no trouble and without a word.

  Having been unable to find sleep no matter how hard he looked, Carter’d been watching most of the excitement from the tent line—sitting wrapped in his warm coat, campaign blanket across his lap, in a chair he’d dragged over for a better view of the proceedings. He had a jug of coffee with him, spiked with vitamin supplement, and a tin cup, some cigarettes. It was better than television, except that he couldn’t really hear anything. But he sat and made hard jokes along with Tommy Hill (“You look like a grandma,” Tommy had said. “All you need are glasses and forty cats.”) and Jack, who was looking significantly less spooked now, and had been one of the gang who’d marched the indigs out in the first place. Oddly, he couldn’t seem to remember quite why it’d been a good idea. When Carter asked him about it, he claimed it was something about spies, about traitors. “Didn’t much matter once the guns came out,” he said. “It was something to do.”

  Seeing the indigs come back, Carter wondered how much doubt had been sown in the hearts of their ostensible comrades by that little misunderstanding. He wondered what happened to a people when their strong, alien gods and saviors were suddenly proven fallible, mortal—proven merely human, for lack of a better word. What happened when that façade of all-powerful omnipotence abruptly began to show cracks?

  Nothing, to look at them. And Carter thought how maybe that wasn’t so surprising. His mother was a born-again Christian, having drifted late in life into a sect of severe Pentecostal believers. She had, for a time, tried to instill a similar whiplash faith in the magic of Jesus and the Resurrection in Carter and his brothers. It never really took, but he remembered the way she’d believed so unquestioningly in everything. God didn’t m
ake mistakes. And even when it was apparent that God had made a mistake, God still didn’t make mistakes. It was all part of a divine plan, the details of which mere mortals were not privy to. It was all intended.

  Convictions like that could make things very easy for the faithful, and Carter thought that maybe it was the same thing here. So long as they killed for the indigs, beat down their age-old enemies from on high, and spilled blood for their cause, maybe they didn’t care much what else happened.

  So when it was done—once all the indigs had stepped back across that invisible boundary and back into camp—Carter had continued watching, curious about what would come next until nothing did and, eventually, he grew bored.

  Carter thought that maybe the indigs felt they’d done something to anger the flying gods and that it was only a god’s infinite mercy for the chosen that allowed them back into their good graces. Believers, he knew, were big on that self-flagellation thing. The children of the Big Gods always seemed to believe that wrongness dwelt exclusively in them. That the objects of their devotion were made of stainless steel. At the time, he figured that must’ve just been the nature of the thing. He figured it was over.

  When they had their service for Morris Ross that night after dinner, many of the indigs crowded around to watch. They stood silently, just outside the ring of light cast by the hooded lamps the humans used to illuminate their mourning, and stared with big, damp eyes as the pilots, in turn, stood with their heads down, in full battle dress, and listened to Ted eulogize Morris. His coffin was already closed and sealed. When Ted was finished, each of the pilots approached and signed his name to the outside of the box with a laser etcher, and that was that. They’d done the same for Danny once. With Morris, it became a tradition.

  It took all of a half hour, the ceremony. But as it ended and they all turned to walk away, Carter noticed that the indigs had vanished. Not just from the area, but from the whole camp. It was very quiet and very dark and suddenly spooky in the way that a house, abandoned in haste, can sometimes be—the setting grown suddenly cold in the absence of living things.

  That night, they all heard explosions in the distance—artillery, almost definitely.

  Carter and Fenn lay awake in their racks, smoking and listening to the faraway cacophony. For a long time, neither of them said a word.

  It was only a few shells, and they never figured out who was shooting at whom. But that didn’t matter. The fact that someone had been shooting at all was enough. And when it was done, someone had come and stood a moment just outside the flap of their tent. Didn’t knock. Didn’t come in. Just stood there for a few long seconds, then was gone. It was too dark to see who it was, but Carter knew.

  A while after, he asked Fenn who it was that had Morris in their betting pool.

  Fenn just lay there breathing for a minute. Carter could see him only by the glow of his cigarette. “Ted,” he finally said. “Ted had Morris.”

  But Carter was pretty sure he was lying.

  The next morning, Ted made another appearance in the mess. Most of the outfit was there, everyone on edge, delicate, moving as if afraid absolutely anything had the potential to upset a fragile peace that wasn’t peace at all, but was just nothing having gone wrong for a minute, then two, then three.

  “New orders,” Ted had said. “Effective now.” He dropped a few sheets of paper on the table closest the door through which he’d entered. Then he exited through the same without saying anything more.

  No one looked. Not immediately. No one got up, no one went to examine Ted’s leavings. By unspoken consent, they all pretended he’d been a bad dream best banished by ignoring it’d ever come.

  But eventually, people had to leave. Had to go out into the cold and the world. And when they did, everyone went out through the door Ted had used and, on their way, looked at the papers he’d dropped.

  Carter was no different. He walked a deliberately long path around the mess, but the table, the papers, they had gravity. They drew him. And when he looked, he saw a new roster, handwritten in a small, fiercely controlled hand; three pages so crowded with times and patrol orders and map coordinates that they all ran together into a bramble. There were day flights and night flights. Overlapping coverages. Crossing radials. So fat now with fuel and bombs and bullets, why not? Ted’s plan was plain. He’d written it at the top of the first page, in letters scribbled in so heavy and dark that they’d torn the paper.

  NO ONE DIES.

  Later, Carter found Tommy Hill from his squadron and Charlie from Fenn’s third in his and Fenn’s tent, viciously stoking the fire in the little potbelly. They were jamming stick upon stick into the thing, working in tandem, each urging the other on. Tommy and Charlie both had night flights on the new roster—two of the first, and due to lift in a few hours. Fenn was on his bed, aimlessly thumbing a smartpaper copy of Wind, Sand and Stars, regularly touching the flip button without looking at the pages. Cat was backed into a distant corner, looking suspicious and pissed.

  Charlie and Tommy took no notice of Carter as he came in, sidled around the perimeter of the tent, and hauled up close to Fenn’s side.

  “What are they doing?” he asked, squatting beside Fenn’s rack, whispering because there was something so focused and unreal about the sight of the two of them blindly jamming lumber into the stove, stoking a fire that was already throwing off waves of blistering heat.

  “Haven’t the slightest idea,” Fenn said, brushing the paper with his thumb and making it turn another page. “They showed up about a half hour ago. Said it was too cold in Tommy’s tent and wanted to make a fire. Been at it ever since.”

  “And you don’t think that’s a little weird?”

  Fenn looked at Carter, looked down at his lap, looked back at Carter. Carter looked down. Hidden by the paper was Fenn’s sidearm—cocked and loaded—lying on his belly.

  “I think it’s a lot weird,” he said, and went back to turning pages.

  Carter stood, then stepped forward. “Tommy,” he snapped. “The fuck are you two doing over there? Drop the lumber and step away from the stove.”

  Neither of them slowed. Neither acknowledged Carter had spoken. He looked back at Fenn and rolled his eyes. Fenn shrugged. “‘La vérité pour l’homme, c’est ce qui fait de lui un homme,’” he said, and tapped the page without looking at it.

  Carter shook his head, walked over to them, laid a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. Tommy, who was closest to him, feeding sticks to Charlie. Tommy, who’d been his friend and his squadron mate for two years, been solid and dependable, been always on Carter’s wing.

  Tommy, who felt the touch of Carter’s hand on his shoulder, spun and laid the snapped end of an inch-thick branch across the side of Carter’s head with a snarl and shouted, “Get off me, you fucker!”

  The stick did no damage, but it hurt like a lash, and Carter staggered back, mostly out of surprise. For an instant, his brain seemed torn between laughter and rage. His breath snagged in his throat in half a giggle. Then the red veil dropped over his eyes and he charged in, swinging. He hooked Tommy (who’d gone back to hunching over the rapidly diminishing woodpile) under one arm, spun him around, and gave him a jackhammer punch in the eye, his whole body weight behind it, dropping it on him from a height. Tommy went down to his knees and Carter hit him again. He tried for a third, but Tommy’d gotten his arms up, so he kicked him instead—heel of his boot into Tommy’s side, pushing him over and stepping across him. When he looked up, he saw Charlie, his two fists, squeezed together, coming around like a bat.

  Charlie was wearing his gloves. Lucky for Carter. But when the impact came, he saw stars anyway and fell hard, back and across Tommy, which, in any event, kept Tommy from getting up and laying in as well. Charlie was still coming for Carter as he went down.

  Next thing, nothing. Charlie stopped in his tracks. Squirming beneath Carter, Tommy shoved him off and struggled to his feet. Carter rolled to his stomach, then scrambled up, bringing his hands in front of his
face like a boxer, trying to look better than he felt. Then he saw Fenn standing with his legs spread, shooting hand braced, his gun leveled at his own squadron leader.

  “Stand down, Charlie,” he said, voice calm, unhurried. “You know I won’t kill you, but I’ll put one in your leg that’ll have you in the sick line for a week.”

  Charlie actually whipped his head back and forth a couple of times as if he’d been possessed by something and needed to shake it off. He looked at Tommy, at Carter, at Fenn and Fenn’s pistol. He smiled sheepishly, which was not a look that came easily to him because he was older and had a veteran’s hardness about him. Tommy, on the other hand, had none of this. He was twenty-two. Iaxo was his second tour with Flyboy, his first with Carter, and he looked about to cry or laugh or throw up or all three at once. He’d had a cut opened below his eye—a ragged tear that was just starting to leak a film of blood into the sheen of sweat on his face. He reached a hand out to Carter, and he felt it scrabbling at the sleeve of his coat.

  “We were cold, Captain. That’s all. I don’t…” His voice trailed off. From the look of them, Carter didn’t even think they’d been drinking. “We were just trying to get the fire banked, and…”

  Charlie stepped up. “Put it away, Fenn. It’s done and we’re sorry. I don’t know what got into us.”