A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  “High?” Carter offered, smiling to himself at his wit.

  “Different,” Eddie said. “They were settlers. Pioneer family. They settled three different colony worlds before I was born, helped found one of them. I was first-born at Serenity, on Challos, and the tradition was to name every first child Eden.”

  “Missionaries,” Carter said, thinking of his mother.

  “No. Mormons. A Dominionist sect. Pretty common outside Sol.”

  “Mormons don’t smoke,” Carter said.

  “Or drink,” added Fenn.

  “I took my manumission at eighteen and went to law school on Earth. London, actually. Never looked back.”

  The three of them were silent for a minute. Carter found it somewhat more difficult to dislike Eddie now that he knew something about him. Now that he knew they had something vaguely in common. He still hated him but had to work a little harder at it, which was forever the problem in getting to know the enemy.

  “Well,” Fenn finally said. “Not the kind of family secrets I was talking about, but if a man is willing to admit to a name like Eden, I think the drink has done its job.”

  “Not yet,” Eddie said. He took the bottle and tipped it in Fenn’s direction. “Here’s to damnation.” He drank deeply. Carter thought to tell him to take it easy, to be careful, but he bit his tongue. When Eddie was done, he gasped, cleared his throat loudly, and passed the bottle along to Fenn, who rolled its squat neck thoughtfully between his palms.

  Once he’d recovered the power of speech, Eddie asked, “Have you seen Connelly lately, Captain?”

  Carter thought for a second. “Not since… No. Not for a while. Months, at least.”

  “He’s gone a bit around the bend, I think. Captain Teague saw him. He can tell you.”

  “Gone bwana,” Fenn said, his eyes focused on something else. “Long gone. He was always a little bit, uh… close, you know? To his indigs. But now it’s something different.”

  “He orders the Akaveen around like dogs. ‘Sit here,’ ‘Stand there,’ and every time he gives an order, they do the clap-and-bow thing for him like he was one of their own. Like they’ve adopted him.”

  “Looks it, too,” Fenn added distantly. “Filthy. Hairy. Always lumped up in a pile of his officers. Paints up his face. Carries a big stick with all this junk hanging off—beads and batteries and shell casings and chicken bones. I don’t know.”

  Eddie nodded. “He’s big magic these days. Talks just like a native—far better than I do. He forgets himself midsentence and just starts going on. That really pissed Ted off.”

  “You were in there with them?” Carter balled up his two thin pillows behind his back and reclined as best he could. He could already feel the liquor working its evil voodoo, a warm, liquid numbness licking at the edges of all his aches, leaching the spite out of him like drawing deep splinters out of his skin.

  “For over an hour,” Eddie said. “They were—”

  Fenn held up a hand to shush him. For a second, Carter couldn’t hear anything. Then he could. It was the buzzing of another flight coming home.

  “Is that first squadron?” Carter asked.

  “Too early,” Fenn whispered. “It’s the two/three, I think. Lefty, Charlie, and Stork.”

  “They’re late.”

  Fenn nodded and all three of them waited, heads cocked as they listened for the engines to roar over the tent line so they could count them. The fire was crackling in the potbelly, the lantern light guttering. It was a slow approach and there was the sensation of the entire camp waiting, breath held, silent, until the communal exhalation—one, two, three, everyone home safe. They could breathe again, and did.

  Eddie’d waited politely, his eyes pinballing back and forth between Fenn and Carter as the drink settled into him. Fenn had gotten up and gone to the door, standing poised, waiting still—looking out into the dark and listening for the scramble siren, for raised voices, signs, omens, perturbations in the false calm of the night like vibrations in a high-tension wire. He was tall, Fenn was. With one hand resting on the scrap-wood lintel of the door, he was able to lay his forehead against his knuckles—a pose as old as worry.

  Carter silently motioned for Eddie to continue. He was waiting, too; had edged forward on the bed until his feet were on the ground again, one hand stuck inside his jacket, caught searching for another cigarette and frozen that way. Iaxo had no crickets, but Carter imagined their chirping anyway, overlaying memories of a familiar night’s silence over this wholly unnatural one.

  “They’re cutting a deal,” Eddie said, voice low, almost conspiratorial. “Ted and Connelly. You didn’t hear right in the tent that night, Captain. Not completely. It’s not just me trying to get us out of here. The commander,” he said, singing the word mockingly, “is convinced that we’re going to be overrun any minute and wants to be able to defend the airfield.” He started picking at the filters of the cigarettes he’d stuck back into his pack, inexpertly trying to extract one. Carter, his hand breaking free of its entropic ice, took the pack from him, slapped it against his knee, and took out two cigarettes. He handed one to Eddie, who placed it delicately between his lips with all the grace of someone for whom the action still felt somewhat awkward. He nodded his thanks and began fussing with a Zippo lighter. “Not that I blame him, actually,” he added awkwardly, around the filtertip in his mouth. “He’s probably right, too.”

  “We’re going to be overrun?” Fenn asked from the door. The wind blowing in around him was positively frigid, seeming to suck the blasting heat right out of the stove glowing in the center of the tent.

  Eddie leaned forward, blinking away the smoke that curled directly into his eyes. “Actually, if the Lassateirra really want this place, they can pretty much take it whenever they want. What’ve we got to stop them, really?”

  “Ten thousand friendlies and forty miles between them and us,” Carter said. He thought about Ted in the mess tent. Gas the fuckers and go home.

  “And nine thousand nine hundred of them armed with sticks and stones, concentrated mostly on the flanks of the line, who’ll run away the minute someone comes at them shooting. And with Garcia moved out, once the Lassateirra cross the river, there’s nothing at all between them and us but us. Fourteen planes if we put every pilot in the air at once. The fight would be over in a day. Maybe less. And we’d lose. Bet on it.” Eddie grinned with a sudden, dark humor that didn’t suit him and looked, in fact, almost like a soldier’s—albeit a different sort of soldier. “Matters of consequence, right? I know because I did the calculations for Loewenhardt at corporate. I gave us a thirty percent chance of holding out at this location for another month if the Lassateirra are being supplied now through foreign contractors. And I was being optimistic. Assuming every best possible break in our favor. Past thirty days, our odds drop off rather precipitously.”

  “They have, what? Actuarial tables for this kind of thing?”

  Eddie nodded. “I wrote them.”

  Carter and Fenn lapsed into another silence then. Eddie smoked inexpertly and, for the moment, Carter decided to forgive him for what he’d first seen as a pretender’s affectation toward toughness. Those were rough numbers. Heavy dope that Eddie’d been carrying around alone, in his head, and, in them, there was death the same as in any bomb or machine gun. Worse, they described his own life and possible fate as accurately as they did the pilots’. They did not discriminate between the pilot in his plane, the controller in the tent, the lawyer behind his desk. It occurred to Carter that the actual difference here was that Eddie had already fought their battles for them, seen them (and himself) lose seven times out of ten. He’d seen himself die in a pie chart, on a table, as a statistical abstract.

  Carter hoped Eddie was bad at his job, but probably he wasn’t. If there was one thing Flyboy was good at, it was hiring damnably competent men. But because he didn’t know, he asked.

  “Eddie, are you bad at your job?”

  “You know, it’s funny. I’
ve been asking myself that same thing all day.”

  Quiet returned to the night. Down on the field, engines died with a sputter. The dark swallowed voices. Carter thought again about home and remembered, all in an instant, the lay of his childhood and his house and his brothers’ rooms and how it felt to walk in the night through a place he’d known since birth, to be warm and safe and protected on all sides, and to feel the comforting wisdom of knowing every step before he took it. He thought about what he’d traded for that. What he’d lost in the exchange.

  “Well,” said Fenn from the doorway. “Well.”

  “Sorry,” Eddie said. “You wanted the family secrets.”

  “Sobering thought.” Carter stood and started working his way out of his gear, fumbling with the buckles, his fingers gone stupid with shock.

  “Poor choice of words.” Fenn stepped away from the door, and it blew shut with a bang, loud in the hushed gloom. “Should we be expecting any help from on high?”

  Eddie opened his little mouth, then shut it again with a snap. For a moment, he seemed to be considering his answer, which, to Carter, meant debating whether or not to lie. Carter unstrapped the pump from his arm and bent his elbow back and forth, running his fingers over the sore places. He unbuckled his belt and dropped it, clattering, onto the bed.

  “Do you really want to know this?” Eddie finally asked, his voice having taken on something of a plaintive tone. And he held up a hand to stall off the obvious response. “I mean, I know. I have to know. It’s my job. Ted knows and, Captain Carter, you’ve seen what it’s done to him. But you don’t have to know.”

  Fenn looked at Carter. He dropped his jacket on the bed behind him and rolled his shoulders. “We had a moment,” Carter said to him, shaking his head and remembering Ted’s eyes in the mess, the way he’d jinked his face in front of Carter’s every time Carter’d tried to look away. Gas the fuckers. Let ’em choke. “There was never a good time to tell you about it. Anyway, it was nothing.”

  “Nothing’s nothing, pilot.”

  Carter shook his head again. Redheaded Irene and solitaire with a deck missing an ace. An unwinnable game. “Let it go.”

  “You don’t have to know,” Eddie continued. “It’s like flipping ahead in a book and reading the last page. Knowing doesn’t change anything. The story still goes the same way.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, he looked almost pleadingly now at Fenn, stepping carefully across the floor toward the stove, now at Carter, standing in front of him. “You can do your jobs perfectly well without knowing, is all I’m saying.”

  He squirmed a little. Fenn stared at him unblinkingly. Carter did the same, pinning him there on the bed like a bug.

  “We can talk about something else.” His cigarette was burned out, forgotten, between his fingers. “Anything else.”

  Because in war stories, that’s what men do. Pictures of sweethearts, stories of home. Carter unclipped his dog collar, pulled his shirt off over his head. He had no sweetheart. This was his home. The whole time he’d been in prison, no one had visited. His parents had never written once. Neither had his brothers. He imagined their thoughts, how, as far as they were concerned, he’d died on a poster somewhere. In a photograph. On the news. An embarrassment and a failure and now, hardly even a memory. It’d been twenty years.

  Eddie looked from Fenn to the door to Carter to the door to Fenn again. “Eden, right? What a ridiculous name.” He laughed weakly.

  “So, Eden,” Fenn said slowly, “should we be expecting any help from on high?”

  Eddie’s face hardened. “I know what you all think of me,” he said. “I mean, I’m not stupid.”

  Carter sighed and sat down beside him. He started working on his boots. “Eddie, none of us have really thought about you much at all.”

  And Eddie laughed—one short, sharp bark. “None,” he said. “No help. And no ride home.” He slapped his hands down onto the mattress, palms flat, dust and hair and dead skin puffing up around them. “Is that what you want to know? Two years we’ve been here, you fucking idiots. More. And what have you done? Drank, smoked, walked around like arrogant pricks in your uniforms. We had native support, and you chased them off. We had will on our side, and you squandered it. You had planes, bombs, machine guns, computers, everything. Everything the company could give you. And what did you do with it all? You lost! To a bunch of cavemen! This mission should’ve been over in three months, but what? You were all having too much fun, weren’t you? Playing soldier. Acting like all of this was so awful, so hard on you because you didn’t have the right movies or climate control or whores and ice cubes for your drinks? You are all fucking embarrassments! I’ve spent every day—every goddamn day for two years—talking to corporate, telling them how well we’ve been doing, how we’re worshipped by the natives, how we’re winning every day. But you have accomplished nothing.”

  “Hey, Eddie…” Fenn started forward, a calming hand extended. Carter sat frozen, hunched over, his boot half-off. Fast Eddie was coming unstuck right in front of him. He found it fascinating.

  “No,” he said, pointing a finger at Fenn, which was not a smart thing to do under the best of circumstances. “You wanted to hear this, Captain. Now you’re going to hear it. Every other military contractor has been pulled out on this continent. All of them. If the Akaveen lines collapse, which they will, or if the Lassateirra break through at some point and come our way, the company is looking at a one hundred percent material loss. It’s already been written off in the next quarter’s projections—materials, death benefits, legal, everything. And it’s not like we’re talking about a lot of materials or anything. A bunch of antique planes, a few engines, a few guns—that’s nothing. The comms equipment and flight control are worth a few dollars. So is the equipment in the longhouse and the machine shop. But even with everything put together, the company has spent ten times more shipping everything here than all the stuff is actually worth. Subtract two years of depreciation, factor in a nice, fat insurance bond payout, outstanding costs amortized, and the seven years it will take before any personal compensations are paid to your next-of-kin because none of us will actually die on paper, just be listed as missing, pending investigation. In the next shareholder report, Flyboy will take a small financial hit, which it will spread over several quarters, passing along any losses to its investors and future clients, while we are all forgotten as quickly and completely as possible. Buried. Carter thinks I’m such a coward, but he hasn’t had to watch the commander listening in on the radios as everyone else has left. We’re under communications blackout, but Carter hasn’t had to try and stop Ted from calling up the company every night and screaming at them for nerve gas or new planes or a recovery mission. Ted has lost his mind, Captain. It’s mush. Gone. He finds me in my tent and demands cruise missiles, for God’s sake! A boat! He asked me for a boat! He’s the one that’s been trying to find us a ride off-planet with one of the other companies, but he couldn’t manage it. He is useless! And we are now officially a lost cause because you pilots couldn’t turn a thousand-year technological advantage into a victory. And do you know what I spent last night doing?”

  Eddie looked around. No one said a word.

  “Writing letters to your families, describing the unfortunate circumstances of your deaths in our employment. Apologizing on behalf of the company for your tragic losses. Saying how brave and hardworking you all were and explaining how all benefits would be withheld until the conclusion of a standard investigation. But you know what the real kick was? I got to write my own, too. Addressed to my wife and daughter. You smart bastards killed me the same as you did yourselves.” He dropped his cigarette, crushed it under his heel. “Nice work. Any more questions? No? Good.” He shot to his feet, none too steadily. Neither Fenn nor Carter moved to help him. “I think I’m leaving now. Thanks for the hospitality, Captains. This was just what I needed, you know? Drinks with some friends. First time in two years you could be bothered to ask. Instead of me… you know… i
n my tent with everything.”

  Eddie made no move to leave. Carter and Fenn made no moves at all.

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “I’m going to sit back down for a minute.”

  He did, and heavily.

  “Jesus, that wine packs a punch.”

  “Yeah,” said Fenn, approaching gingerly, like Eddie was a wounded animal, a ticking bomb. “It’ll get right up on you if you’re not careful.”

  Carter quickly kicked off his boots and moved clear of the area of effect in case Mormon Eddie decided to blow. He stripped off his jumpsuit to the waist, pulled off the catheter and (empty) bag, reached beneath his bed for a filthy rollneck sweater and put it on.

  “Sorry, guys,” Eddie said. “I’d leave if I could, but I can’t feel my legs. I just need a minute.”

  Fenn looked at Carter behind Eddie’s head and Carter shrugged, wide-eyed. He didn’t know what to do with him. He certainly didn’t want Eddie puking in his bed. This night was turning into something quite different than what he’d expected.

  “Uh, that’s fine, Eddie. Just…” Don’t puke; don’t puke; don’t puke. “Just take it easy, all right?” Carter looked up again and growled at Fenn, jerked his head in Eddie’s direction as if to say, Do something! What, he had no clue.

  Fenn shook his head. He stepped close, laid a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, crouched down, asked if he could get him anything.

  “You’re not going to hit me, are you?” Eddie asked.

  “Why would I hit you?”

  “Because of what I said?”

  Fenn laughed. Carter laughed because Fenn laughed. Eddie looked up with unfocused eyes and an expression strung out somewhere between misery and mystification. “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “Family secrets,” Fenn said, picking his words like he was choosing his steps through a minefield. “The thing with them is, they’re never really secret.” He looked across at Carter and motioned for him to speak, opening and closing his thumb and fingers like a duck quacking.

  “Yeah,” Carter said, still looking at Fenn. “Right. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever had my worth spelled out for me quite that way, but I’ve heard that speech…”