A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Instead of flying, instead of taking the fight to the enemy, Ted had devised a new tactic and hunted Fast Eddie instead. Apparently convinced, in opposition to all available intelligence, that the airfield was going to be overrun at any moment, he wanted defensive weapons: razor wire and land mines, field lasers, motion trackers, and caterpillar mortars. He wanted more planes to take the place of the three lost in the past two years. He wanted better planes. Jets, fighter/bombers, transatmospherics, and the technicians, crews, and equipment necessary to keep them flying. He would spy Eddie in the mess or moving between the tent line and the field house and fall onto his tail like it was a dogfight, shouting at the little lawyer to make it work. To find a way. He wanted Flyboy to hire another mercenary company to provide airfield security because he thought that the camp indigs (of which there no longer were any) were all spies planted by the other side, and possibly secret assassins. Come to find, it’d been his bright idea to have the lot of them escorted off the premises in the first place; had drafted the first dozen willing (all too willing) humans he’d come across to be his muscle, then had sat (much like Carter had sat) and watched the whole thing get done. It’d been stupid. Now who was going to wash everyone’s shirts?

  He told Eddie he wanted sheaf rockets and cruise missiles. He told Eddie to buy them, beg them, or steal them somehow. To conjure them from thin air. Carter hadn’t heard that conversation, but Emile Hardman had. He’d told everyone about it in the mess one morning, doing a fair impression of Ted and a very good one of Eddie, with his shoulders hunched and his ass in the air, running the hell away. Ted wanted the raw materials to build and outfit a patrol boat for the river (he had even drawn up the plans for one in a careful and surprisingly competent draftsman’s style that he’d shown to Fenn while Fenn was trying to eat his breakfast), and one night he got on the tight-beam FTL relay himself, called corporate, and tried to ask for sixty canisters of Virox nerve gas.

  Carter was alone in the mess tent drinking cold coffee and playing solitaire with a deck of Charlie Voss’s girlie cards (which made it more like fortune-telling than card playing) on the night after Fenn had made his kill, the night Ted had tried to call home. He came storming in with Eddie, now hot on his six, in kill position. Eddie was yelling—something Carter had never seen him do before—and Ted was in retreat—something else he’d never seen. They both hung up at the doorway when they saw Carter, likely not expecting to find anyone in the tent at such a late hour while, across the camp, everyone else seemed to be celebrating a productive night’s work. For his part, Carter froze, too—redheaded Irene, the queen of hearts, in his hand. Suddenly, he wished he weren’t there either.

  Ted broke first. “Carter,” he barked. “Nerve gas.”

  “None for me, thanks. I’m fine with coffee.”

  Ted made for his table, slapping his hands down hard on its surface, leaning down, eyeballing Carter with crazy, sparking intensity like his eyes were two lightbulbs shorting in the socket. Eddie stood where he was in the doorway, shaking his head and mouthing, “No.”

  “Don’t get smart, Captain. Virox. Fifty or sixty cans. We can just kill them all. Gas the fuckers. Let ’em choke. Then we can all just go home before anyone else shows up to ruin our little picnic here, right?”

  Carter looked at Ted. He was a man badly in need of reinforcement. He looked past Ted at Eddie, who was silently waving his hands like an umpire signaling safe, shaking his head, mouthing, “No, no, no.”

  Ted jinked his head on his neck, bringing it back in front of Carter’s with a snap. “Don’t look at that little snake, Carter. Don’t you look anywhere but right here. I am your goddamn commander. You look at me.”

  He did. Irene was still in his hand, biting her lip, sitting on her heels amid a rumple of pure white sheets. He laid her down in her place and stood up. Ted followed him, tight on his every move. There was a serious fear in Ted. Carter could smell it on him like rotten lemons. See it in his fixated, unblinking, red-eyed stare. He folded his arms and turned to face Eddie across the empty room.

  “I’m with Ted,” he said. “Nerve gas. Nukes. Burn all the little savages right the fuck up.”

  He did it because Ted was his chief, no matter what. He did it because Ted flew (and well) and Eddie didn’t at all. He did it because if he hadn’t, he honestly believed Ted would have lost his shit right then and there, and because, frankly, going all crazy and just carpet bombing this whole boondock nowhere, raining nuclear fire down on it from on high, really ripping and torturing the land, sounded like big fun. Mostly he did it because he didn’t like lawyers.

  Ted turned back to Eddie with a smug look on his face, a told-you-so glare of total and complete victory, as though Carter’s opinion was all he’d needed to make his case for depopulating an entire planet and going straight home before supper. To prove, maybe, that he wasn’t absolutely out of his mind.

  Eddie shook his head, turned, and kicked his way out the door. Before it slammed closed, he caught it, stuck his head and shoulders back inside, pointed a finger at Ted, and said, in level tones, “You know better than this, Commander. Don’t go near the relay again. That’s an order.”

  Ted laid an arm across Carter’s shoulders and gave Eddie the finger.

  Eddie left. Ted, removing his arm from Carter, straightened up, smoothed the front of his wrinkled and stained shirt, and did the same—going out the opposite door without another word. He was muttering to himself plenty. He just didn’t appear to have anything further to say to Carter.

  And Carter, for his part, just stood there—bewildered last-man-standing, survivor of some sharp and speedy melee that he couldn’t begin to comprehend. For an instant, it felt like Ted had taken all the oxygen out of the room with him when he left. Then it didn’t feel that way anymore, and it just felt strange to be standing.

  So Carter sat. He squared up the cards. In his head, he tried to figure what had Ted so scared. Having someone funnel supplies to the other side was bad, no doubt. It would ruin all their fun here. But really, it was almost to be expected. And now that it’d happened, it was surprising only in that it hadn’t happened sooner. NRI was bad news for sure. The possibility of the Colonial Council sending in the marines was worse. And the thought that either organization might actually come to Iaxo—and that he and his friends might find themselves flying souped-up biplanes against jump ships, assault helicopters, orbital corvettes… That would get weird and out of hand very quickly.

  But no one was saying that this was going to happen. For sure, they’d be long gone before the marines arrived. No private military contractor could afford the kind of trouble that would come from that. They might lose this fight, and probably already had, but no one would ever know about it. The company would lose a two-year investment in the Carpenter mission and the chance at owning a gigantic stake in a viable planet. That would hurt, sure, but it was only money. When things got wrong-sided enough, the orders from corporate would come. They’d strike their camp, bury what they could, burn the rest, and then vanish like they’d never been here. That was the way it was done. There were plans, procedures—corporate directive memos that detailed specific steps that needed to be taken. Or at least Carter hoped there were. Personally, he’d been trying not to think about it. Ted, obviously, had been thinking about it far too much.

  Carter slowly began to deal out another hand. Halfway through, it occurred to him that he hadn’t shuffled. Didn’t much matter, though. He could never win. The ace of spades was missing from the deck. In any military outfit, there were never enough aces of spades to go around.

  CARTER WAS BETWEEN FLIGHTS—stoop-shouldered, exhausted, his hips and tailbone, one elbow, both shoulders, a patch between them and the balls of both his feet all numb from the constant vibration of flying, the repetitive motion, the rub of straps, components, whatever. Fenn had been feted last night for his clean kill on the caravan. The party had occurred mostly in the tent, so Carter was hungover, too. Toast upon toast to the kil
ler instinct of his friend, to his glamorous victory over, what? A bunch of filthy monkeys and some horses. Brilliant.

  Carter had ducked out. He’d gone to the mess tent, and that’d been where the Ted-and-Eddie show had erupted all around him.

  Gas the fuckers. Let ’em choke.

  Fuckin’-A right, Ted-O. Fuck ’em all and let’s go home.

  An hour later, a three/one flight had come back from badland. Stork, Hardman, and Porter Vaughn. There’d been cheering. Carter’d heard it even from inside his own weird bubble of distraction—still in the mess, dealing hands of solitaire but getting nowhere. After a time, he’d just taken to spreading the cards and trying to pick redheaded Irene out of the deck with his eyes closed. When he heard the noise, he’d gone to investigate.

  They’d been standing right on the apron when the flight had come down, waving bottles and goggles and white scarves. Everyone who wasn’t due up with the dawn patrol was hammered. Lori Bishop had her tits out. Vic was there in her leathers. She’d spotted Carter and smiled at him while brushing prop-whipped hair out of her face—an image he’d take to bed with him later that night and up into the air again the next day.

  It’d been another solid kill, he learned—a maneuver element moving under cover of darkness on the extreme edge of the engagement zone, deep in Indian country, target approved by Ted. Vaughn had estimated a file of a hundred indigs, passing through a three-mile-wide gap in the siege lines, humping big packs, and making for Riverbend, double time. Machine guns, cannon, and ten-pound white phosphorous bombs had settled them. They’d left nothing standing. Carter watched McCudden pour whiskey straight into Hardman’s open mouth. He heard someone say, “All that hair, they burn like goddamn candles.” Cheers all around.

  Carter’d walked off, avoiding the hot glare of celebration like tiptoeing around the glow of a lamp in the dark. He’d wandered the tent line and found himself at Ted’s, with light burning inside and spilling out through the windows in a way that seemed, after the worries of the past few days, almost obscene.

  He heard Eddie talking in low, angry tones while still in the lee of the walls, standing with his hands in his pockets, in the shadows.

  “You can’t do this, Commander. The blackout was put in place for a reason, and you breaking it is not helping our cause with the home office.”

  “We have no cause. No one is coming, Eddie.”

  “They will. We just have to hold out. You just have to let me do my work and not be sabotaging it every time I look away.”

  Ted coughed violently. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strained. “Your work? What work have you done? Have you called in one of the other companies before they’re all gone? Found us some smuggler that’ll take us out of here?”

  “No. Absolutely not. There are channels, Ted. There are ways that these things are done.”

  Carter crept closer. Hunched down below the bottom edge of one of the flap windows, he peeked inside the tent and saw the wreck of Ted’s quarters—maps and papers covering every surface, his bed a mess of tangled blankets and odd bits of gear. It was the room of someone who was still at war, and Ted sat in the middle of it with Eddie hovering over him, both of their backs to the window. Eddie had his hands balled into pale fists, the muscles of his jaw standing out like iron cables. And Ted did nothing but stare at a clock on his bedside table, seeming to mouth out the seconds as they ticked past.

  Carter’d tried to sleep. Failed. Done dawn patrol. Landed. He was angry at everything, bored, so tired, coiled up inside from impotently waiting (there’d been no action that morning, none that he could even invent), and knotted with stress. He had a sick, empty cramp low in his belly that felt like sexual frustration and was, though for a different kind of intercourse entirely—wanting so badly just to fuck something up. The thing with Ted and Eddie last night had put him on edge. It’d put in his head the thought that there really was something more wrong than he understood. Since he did not know, his imagination had filled in the blanks with a hundred worst scenarios, all of them corrosive, eating away at him slowly until all he wanted was to go up in the air and destroy everything he was afraid of—to kill this place before it killed him.

  But there’d been nothing. Just sky and earth and nothing between. And when he’d come down, he’d almost been doubled over with the pain of it—violent blue balls cramping him into a ferocious thing, crippled with aching, directionless, frightened fury.

  On the ground, Vic saw all of that in him. She watched him surreptitiously, from distances—pacing a perimeter the way he’d walked the edge of the light last night. Carter could see her. And when he couldn’t see her, he could feel her. The weight of her attention like a hand on the back of his neck. She circled him like a carrion bird, waiting.

  For lack of anything better to do, Carter went up again. Extracurricular. He cobbled together a three/two/one reconaissance party with Charlie, Wolfe, and Tommy Hill and made straight for the river. Three D.VIIs and him in the Vickers with no one in the second seat, freezing half to death in the draw from the pusher-mount prop, the carriage garlanded with fragmentation bombs and jellied kerosene napalm with magnesium contact igniters. They found nothing. Six hours in the air. Absolutely fuck-all.

  The ground crews were wasted. There were fewer of them than there were pilots, so with all the pilots going up and coming down all the time, it meant that they didn’t get any rest, any sleep, any time away. Machinists were conscripted onto the flight line, controllers on their downtime. Even still, when Carter brought his flight home, circling low and lazily in cover position while Charlie, Wolfe, and Tommy brought their machines thumpingly back to Earth—there was no one there to meet them.

  They’d rolled, on ground once again frozen stiff with the chill of winter rolling down out of the mountains, edging their planes onto the sidelines of the strip, goosing their engines, and trying to give Carter room enough to land the clumsy, overloaded, skid-foot Vickers.

  But something had seized hold of him—all his rage and frustration compounded by the lack of a ground crew, by his wasted day, wasted hours aloft. Compounded by nothing worth killing. Compounded by the image of Vic tossing her hair, of Vic smiling, Vic stalking him through the tumult of the field, that’d kept fogging his vision all day, insinuating itself into his view across the Vickers’ sloped nose until he was periodically blind from it; jerking his head back and forth like he was trying to get his bearing around the hazy edges of his own traitorous memory or just shake it free from his brain like a burr.

  So he’d slammed the Vickers down into the close grass, dead center of the strip, doing a forced combat descent the overloaded antique had never been built for. He hadn’t been thinking about the bombs he carried. Hundreds of pounds of fused explosive wrapped in brittle aluminum ribbon and fragile shells of home-brew napalm. He hadn’t been thinking about the death that, in the instant he touched down, brushed perilously close.

  He felt something in the skid assembly snap when he hit, pulling up out of the sharp dive, belly flopping the plane. She’d tried to catapult on him, end over end, but carried most of her weight in her middle and had enough forward velocity left that Carter was able to bog her front skids and slap her tail back down, burying the rear-end gear, slewing off to the right, clipping the ground with her lower wing, and crumpling the straight braces. The wheels at the back end of the skids were twisted on their short axles; Carter and the Vickers limped to a halt ten feet short of where Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie sat frantically scrabbling at their safety belts, trying to get themselves untangled from their own planes lest Carter be unable to prevent himself from smashing straight into them.

  He didn’t, though. And once the machine was down and stopped, he pulled the emergency release, hopped out of the cockpit, and walked away, turning his back on the plane as though he’d never seen it before.

  Vic had been in the longhouse. She’d seen the flight come down, seen Carter’s landing. She’d rounded up Rockwell and Meleuire, woken tw
o of her other mechanics (asleep in the grease pits, heads pillowed on bolts of patch cloth) to act as crew, and helped Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie push their planes through the doors and into the house.

  Carter’d stomped off, twenty feet maybe—clear of the smell of aviation fuel, the stink of hot oil. He stared silently past the southern end of B strip, attempting to compose himself, clear his head, control his breathing. When he thought about how close he’d come to killing himself, he had to fight not to laugh. He lit a cigarette, coughed until his eyes teared. He tried to think of nothing.

  After a while, he could hear Vic behind him, looking the Vickers over, banging on this, shoving at that. He wouldn’t turn around. He heard her curse at it once. The sun was almost down. It was dark and getting cold. B strip was quiet. Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie had retired, backing away from Carter without a word, like he was a wounded animal, although one of them had thrown a helmet at him and missed by a mile. Vic’s mechanics had gone back to the house. It was just her and Carter, but he still wouldn’t turn around.

  “Something wrong with your plane, Captain,” she finally said, her voice conversational.

  “Yeah. It’s broke,” Carter said.

  “Was it broke before you landed it?”