A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Long story short, he caught him. In his vac suit, Barley was able to cling to one of the bubbles’ debarking clamps while Carter got it turned around and headed back toward the Band of Brothers. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about orbital mechanics, relative velocities of bodies in space, or piloting in general at the time. After catching up to Barley, matching his velocity, maneuvering in close enough for him to grab on, getting the bubble turned and faced in the direction he’d come from, the Band of Brothers was long gone. Carter found her in the glass, rapidly receding, then made the one mistake that probably saved his life—aiming low, past her horizon, and giving one long, hard acceleration burn.

  Then his bubble ran out of gas.

  It took most of a Calistan day, but his ballistic trajectory eventually merged with that of the Band of Brothers, his faster relative speed and lower orbital arc allowing him to draw close enough that he could start screaming for help over the suit radio. Colonel Applebaum, having assumed them both dead of misadventure and adding them to his long mental list of the same, dispatched students with tethers to rope Carter, Barley, and their bubble in like a wayward, floating calf, and Carter, having now gotten a taste for it, was in love with flying. It was childish and instantaneous, but real. Something he knew in his blood.

  When NRI got wind of Carter’s dumbass heroics, they called him back from the Band of Brothers and had him thrown into a torture cell for six days where interrogators (mostly students, one of whom fainted after putting the battery cables to him) did their best to prove that he was actually a spy sent to infiltrate their ranks by any one of a dozen colonial or federal agencies that they believed (wrongly) gave a damn about anything they did. Carter was used as a demonstration case, a live subject, and he broke under questioning a hundred times but never gave them anything that made them worry. NRI was concerned with grand conspiracies. About the motivations of the faithful and their small betrayals? They couldn’t have cared less.

  On the seventh day he was cleared, his physical wounds dressed, the rest apologized for in the most bureaucratic of terms, and he was farmed out in secret to a small conglomerate of belt miners who made some side money letting rookie NRI pilots in training crash their machinery for a while. He was shifted again to an agrarian/utopian colony on Ceti Z, which alleged to grow food for starving aliens under the boot of colonial authority but actually grew gengineered drugs for sale on the black market and operated as a cover for an NRI training and development unit that flew low-g crop dusters and reconfigured rescue helicopters into and out of simulated crisis situations. Ceti Z was far out and well off the galactic plane, a distant colonial experiment that attracted only those who wanted extraordinary isolation. As such, this was where Carter got his first taste of live fire and serious indoctrination. This was where he was taught not just to fly, but to kill. There were targets first—twisted metal or rag bags. Then there were the ’phants—club-footed pachyderms that traveled in herds around the ragged edges of the terraced fields. The meat that the ’phants were turned into at the business end of the trainees’ guns was used to feed the settlers, the NRI staff, and the pilots. “No waste,” it’d been explained to him. “It wouldn’t do to waste the gift of life being offered us.”

  So much for the defense of species. Carter didn’t know any vegetarians on Ceti Z. The meat tasted a little like he imagined frog might taste. Or lizard. Dark and oily and rank. It tasted considerably better after smoking a little of the settlers’ product—a strain of cannabis kafiristancia that grew ferociously fast and was shipped in toward the hub in containers packed with thousand-pound bales—but it never tasted good.

  He made it back to Sol before his twenty-first birthday and took drop training on Luna, of all places. It was a commercial course for pilots looking to become orbital certified, paid for by NRI through a shell company. Carter adopted the name Tino Vasquez for the duration and spoke as little as possible. It took a week and was the most civil time he’d experienced since leaving Midland. He thought about going AWOL (if that was even the word); of vanishing, finding passage back to Earth, trying to pick up the tatters of his old life. There was a party on the first night for the eleven pilots taking the course—cold beers and real steaks, fiddle music, potato salad, and backslapping. They were staying in a surveyor’s dome—little more than an emergency shelter but compared to what Carter had become accustomed to a palace: fresh, clean oxygen, seals that didn’t leak, beds that were actually beds (not repurposed pallet decking or hammocks woven from fronds), and people who didn’t talk incessantly of the need for armed, violent insurrection against the tyranny of the colonial-industrial complex. Instead, they talked of paychecks and benefits packages, of their children and wives and husbands and families back on Earth or Mars or among the belters; of birthday parties and bad bosses and the weather. Carter missed his family terribly. When someone noticed him crying, he said it was a bad reaction to some antihistamines and went inside to lie down for a while.

  They made drops on both the light side and the dark side of Luna, practiced emergency procedures, and sat through classroom lectures in ballistics, physics, and orbital mechanics. They learned how to plot courses and calculate falling trajectories, how to make everything go right, and how to recover when everything went wrong. Then they practiced all of it and then they ate and then they slept and then they started all over again the next day.

  At the end of the week, there was another party. Everyone exchanged contact information. Carter’s was all fake, but the sentiments were real. He liked these people. He would miss them. He thought again of escape but knew there was no way. NRI had retained all his real identification. He had no money, no credit. All through the final party, he’d hung close to the center of the celebration, drinking fast and hoping that someone, anyone, would ask him what was wrong. Why he had this look in his eyes like he was drowning a little bit at a time. But no one did. He hadn’t become close enough to any of his classmates to just come out and ask for their help. NRI was his only ride out, his only refuge. And there was still a part of him that was a little curious about what they had in mind for him next.

  Re-education. Cold tofu and protein porridge. An iron bunk welded to the bulkhead of a poorly pressurized cargo hold where he and two thousand other quote/unquote volunteers sweated out the wait before their ship could make the translation to Alpha Lyrae. Everyone was sick. Everyone had raging ear infections, bleeding from the sinuses, lung problems, DCS skin rashes, and seizures.

  Carter cut his teeth in the Alamora campaign, Lyrae, on a planet called Oizys in eccentric orbit around Vega. A bare twenty-five light-years from Sol, it was a rather close thing—a jungle hell of greens and poison being logged naked by competing resource interests, none of which had any patience for one another or for NRI.

  Carter flew—fast-insertion boats full of bewildered volunteers and cadre leaders and commandos and commissars, launched from orbit and falling like shooting stars through the heavy, dense atmosphere. The dropship was one of the favored transports of NRI because it allowed them to unload hundreds of protestors or soldiers or lawyers into anywhere with all the speedy shock and surprise of an orbital bombardment. And this was exactly what Carter did, delivering his human cargoes to programmed coordinates where they were hustled out, down the combat ramps in some semblance of military order, to confront the loggers and their machines with cameras rolling. Under cover of the frenzied, panicked, choking volunteers being herded by the commissars, the commandos would slip away to sabotage machinery and burn fuel dumps. The cadre leaders would take groups of volunteers in riotous charges toward armed loggers or instruct them to chain themselves to trees standing before the onrushing clear-cutting apparatus. Meanwhile, Carter would lift, return to orbit, take on another cargo and some fuel, then do it all again.

  This went on for days. On his return trips, he would ferry the wounded and corpses back into orbit. He would clean the decking of his ship’s bay with a high-pressure hose and, under orders, spray air fre
shener so those in his next load wouldn’t smell the stink of blood and puke and shit and death on their way down into the grinder. The native species the NRI volunteers were allegedly protecting killed said volunteers in droves. The plants killed them. The environment killed them. It was a wonder there were any left for the human loggers and their mercenary security teams to put bullets into.

  This was how NRI truly operated—a scene that would be repeated over and over again for Carter throughout the next two years. Sometimes there was more death, sometimes less. He ferried soldiers and he ferried paralegals. He delivered supplies. He made night drops on alien shores, guided in by infiltrators with IR strobe lights who, when he set down to unload whatever he was carrying, would always say something like “You didn’t see nothing here, Chief. Nothing at all. You were never here.”

  Occasionally he fought, flying air cover or bombing missions in aircraft that could barely take to the air and were only craft at all by the loosest of definitions. Again, he didn’t understand how killing anything could possibly be in sync with the goals of NRI, but he never raised a fuss about it because it never particularly bothered him. He did what he did in defense of alien species and alien planets simply because no alien had ever abandoned him or beat him or tortured him or brainwashed him. No alien had ever called him pussy or faggot or traitor or terrorist. He would defend them not because he loved them more than his fellow man, but because, at that point, he hated them slightly less.

  That changed, of course, but not until Gliese 581c, called Frogtown, where he was shot down, apprehended, and incarcerated. Not until the marines came for him. Not until NRI discarded him, forgot about him, and left him to suffer and rot.

  It was funny, but when he was in the mood for telling himself the truth, Carter blamed it all on the girl. A bucket of paint, a chance word, a warm smile as alien to him then as the worlds he would someday see—these were the things on which his entire life had pivoted.

  And he had never forgiven her. Not even a little.

  CARTER WOKE LATE AND VIC WAS ALREADY GONE. He liked her tent. It was cleaner than his, smelled nice. She had no roommate, no Fenn, no real neighbors even, save the planes and the longhouse.

  He rolled over onto his back and stared up at the canvas. He thought about the girl—the artist—in a variety of savage ways and then stopped when it began to make his chest hurt. He tried to think about his brothers, his mother, but had difficulty conjuring their faces. His memories of them all felt so distant, like he was trying to imagine a family he’d never quite had but had heard described once, a long time ago.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think of something specific. A concrete moment. He remembered a night that his mother, who was not a drinker at all, had come home from a party a little bit drunk and the way she had kicked her shoes off, each attended by a little whoop of joy that was so unlike her that it’d made him burn with a childish kind of happiness for her. She’d been wearing a dress made of something sparkly that looked like lightning made flat.

  He thought of Jacob hunched over his drafting table, drawing pictures of airplanes and rockets, pink tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. He tried to think of himself and Mark crouched in the short hallway just outside their shared room, peeking around the corner of the door, watching Jacob, and biting their lips to keep from laughing.

  Kevin was twelve, maybe thirteen; Mark and Jacob both older. He and Mark had taken pages from Jacob’s drawing tablet and replaced them with pictures of penises, testicles; of naked men sprawled clumsily on beds and smiling into invisible cameras. It’d been a joke—boys being boys, pranks passing endlessly between the brothers almost like a form of currency. And Kevin and Mark waited, breathing shallowly, watching Jacob and knowing that, sooner or later, he would have to turn the page, and then…

  It ended up being the day he and Mark had realized Jacob was same-sex. For the longest time, Kevin had felt guilty—as though he’d somehow turned his brother this way, having flipped a switch in him somehow with a few scraps of paper torn from bound medical journals and porn downloaded from their home terminal. But he hadn’t understood that it just didn’t work that way. Watching Jacob from the doorway, seeing him reach out so gently to touch the pictures, as if they were electrified and he expected a shock; watching him look around furtively, slowly slip them free from his tablet, and carefully fold them into one of his pockets—Mark and Kevin had stared at each other open-mouthed, wide-eyed with revelation.

  The next day they’d caught Jacob in the room alone and beaten him for not telling them earlier—smiling and laughing and offering their congratulations, only slightly tinged with jealousy. His life was going to be so much easier than theirs, they knew. So much less complicated, even if he became a carrier for the next generation.

  And then, just like that, Carter had them again—his mother in her party dress, his brothers’ faces. It was that moment that’d triggered the recall: the memory of him and Mark grabbing Jacob by the arms and shaking him, pounding him on the back, and Jacob’s bewildered expression at the sudden, violent attention. He smiled in the perfumed quiet of Vic’s tent, Vic’s bed. He started to laugh, remembering Jacob’s sputtering denials being subsumed by giggles, his fluttering hands, his finally bouncing up and down in place like he was dancing. He’d been happy, too. He’d refused to give back the pictures.

  Carter’s eyes teared. He squeezed his lips together. He finally had to pull one of the crumpled pillows from behind his head and press it over his face, at which point he was washed in the scent of Vic’s hair, Vic’s skin, and, like changing gears, his brain suddenly went in a completely different direction.

  Raised voices outside, on the flight line, interrupted him. He got dressed quickly and went to see what the clamor was all about.

  It was nothing. Or anyway, not much. Lefty Berthold and Lambert rolling around on the ground in front of an audience, planes scattered on the apron. Everyone was getting a little hinky from the stress, the drink, the lack of sleep. It manifested itself in strange ways. Carter watched while Emile Hardman flicked a cigarette at the two men knotted on the ground. Someone else slapped Lambert on the ass. No one moved to break the two men up until Ted was sighted striding in the direction of the flight line and then, all of a sudden, everyone did.

  No one was hurt. No one could even remember what it’d been about. Carter had seen Vic from across the field and she had seen him, too. Their eyes had met and there was a jolt as from a low-grade electric shock—not as powerful as last night, but still there. They’d spent some of their charge on each other, and what they’d gotten back was less than what they’d put out.

  That’d been the point, Carter thought. But he wasn’t sure.

  Carter flew. Carter landed. Carter flew again. Roadrunner was released from the shop after a complete overhaul and refit. Roadrunner was put back into the shop under specific orders from Ted that one of the new engines be put in her. A massive fifteen-cylinder monstrosity with turbochargers like corded muscle. Without even laying a hand on the stick, without even seeing her, Carter knew what the results would be. Slow to climb, hard to lift, wicked through the turns and screaming hell in a dive. Also, he thought, it would probably kill him. It was an experimental engine, and though the Flyboy engineers were good, “experimental” often meant recalcitrant, temperamental, explosive, or worse. The airframe had originally been designed for a few hundred horsepower, stabilized somewhat against the pull of the rotary. This new monstrosity would put out almost a thousand and torque enough to twist the entire plane into a giant’s corkscrew.

  In his off hours, Carter would try to sleep. He would read. He and Fenn would talk about nothing or just lie, in silence, and stare at the fluttering canvas, though the two of them seeing each other was rare now, one or the other of them always being up with their squadron. He’d tried once to tell Fenn about what he’d heard outside Ted’s tent that night—about Ted and Eddie, the nerve gas, the conversation he’d overheard in the tent and how
Ted was still fighting, still in it, counting the seconds on that clock of his like he was just waiting for Eddie to be out of his hair. It’d sounded to him like Eddie was ready to chuck it all and pull out. To run like a coward now, just when things were getting interesting. Carter’d tried to bring it up, but the moment was just never right.

  He would see Vic or he wouldn’t, depending on variables too complex to calculate. One day they had coffee together like two normal people, sitting across from each other at a steel mess table, holding tin cups in their hands, and smiling like they were somewhere else. Carter told her the story about him and Mark and Jacob and the penises, and she’d laughed—the sound of it seeming to push outward and form a bubble around them where nothing could go wrong. Later, they’d carried that bubble with them to bed and rolled around in it, on musty sheets in need of laundering. Vic lay with her head buried in a pillow to muffle the rough noises she made, her dark hair spread like a fan across the pale skin of her back. Carter had shoved a crate against the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted. They weren’t fooling anyone, but it didn’t matter. They kept it up until the warmth of the two of them together beat back the cold and the damp and the war, and then they lay side by side, faceup and facedown, one of his legs thrown across one of hers, and listened to the sounds of things falling apart.

  In the strange moment between dark and dawn, they were awakened by a dull, hollow booming that seemed to rattle the sky.