“Or something like it,” Fenn added.
“Right. Something close. I don’t know, two or three times at least.”
“A half dozen easy.”
It came easier now, a flood of words—anything to delay the inevitable, to talk down and beg a moment of grace from Eddie vomiting, sure, but also from death, because Eddie had just killed them. Eddie had just drawn a hidden, secret gun and painted the stinking canvas walls with their brains.
“Worthless pilots. A bunch of drunks and fuckups. Doom and gloom from the company.”
“Heard it from Ted just yesterday.”
“Got the same thing on Proxima Three when things started going bad there.”
“Palas,” Fenn said. “Barson’s World. It’s always the same.”
But still, there was a moment. Between the snap of the hammer and the terrible impact. There was a moment when the bullet was in flight, and that moment could be forever. It could be extended, warped. Death came, but it was flexible. They were dead and they knew they were dead, but it hadn’t happened yet. The bullet was in flight. It was coming. Seven chances out of ten. They talked to expand the distance. To buy time because there were still things to say, stories to tell.
“Oh, but you were eloquent, Eddie. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, that was a good speech.”
“Top-notch.”
“But if you’ve been holding this in all this time?”
“Yeah, if you’ve been trying to, like, protect us or whatever?”
“That’s sweet of you, really, but—”
“But we’ve been written off more times than we can count.”
Eddie blinked a couple of times, his eyes clearing. “Really?” he asked.
The two pilots bobbed their heads like they were on springs. They smiled like they were being forced at gunpoint. Totally, Eddie. Absolutely, Eddie. Nothing at all to worry about, Eddie.
And Eddie folded like an envelope, collapsing forward into his own arms, his head resting on his knees as he hugged himself. And he stayed that way for a good five minutes—maybe weeping, maybe not—while Fenn and Carter had a silent, mimed argument over the back of his neck about what they were supposed to do now.
“Uh, Eddie?” Carter asked. “Now that we’ve got this little problem cleared up…”
He didn’t move.
“Eddie?” Fenn tried.
“Is he asleep?”
“No,” Eddie said. “I’m not.”
“You okay down there then?”
“Yeah.” He straightened up slowly. His eyes were red-rimmed, his nose running. Eddie was most certainly a weeper. “I’m okay. Thanks.” He smiled, and the snot trickled down like the handlebars of a mustache.
And then Carter and Fenn both said, “Good man,” and “All right,” and slapped Eddie on the shoulder like men do, but they weren’t quite finished with Fast Eddie just yet.
Seven chances out of ten.
“So, okay,” Fenn said once Eddie had repaired himself somewhat with his sleeve and a handkerchief he’d produced from somewhere and the two pilots had spent a minute silently slapping at each other, shoving each other into the honor of being the first to reopen the breach. “Now, I know what you’ve heard from the company, and Ted and I know you’ve had to do some pretty awful things recently.”
“Terrible things.”
“Just hard, terrible things and all.”
“Which is, like, rough. We know.”
“Right. And had we known what you were having to do in there, in your tent, we would’ve totally bought you a cocktail or two at the O Club.”
“Absolutely would’ve.”
“But now seriously, Eddie. What do you think the home office is really thinking. You, Eddie Lucas. What do you think?”
Carter butted in, glaring across the top of Eddie’s head at Fenn, who, in his opinion, was tromping all over the delicate approach. “Fenn means what they’re not telling you, Eddie. Knowing what you know now—like that we’ve heard all this before and how they’re really not just going to completely abandon us here. What do you think their first move will be?”
“Well,” Eddie said, straightening up and slipping a little blearily back into good-time-lawyer mode. “I mean, with that in mind. With that good news—and it really is good news. Good, good news. And I can’t tell you just how good and great and…”
Eddie’s wheels were spinning. Fresh tears hung from his pretty eyelashes like ripe fruit. “My daughter, you know? It’s going to be…” He coughed, reached up, and screwed his small fists into his eyes, cursed at himself, and rallied. “Okay… Okay, look. I know they’re not sending any more supplies. These new complications…” He coughed again, and Carter lit him a fresh cigarette out of Eddie’s own pack, which he’d already pocketed while Eddie was resting and crying. “This new information we have—the foreign supplies and lack of success we’ve had thus far—means two things for sure. First, the company is not going to spend more money shipping more worthless equipment to what is beginning to look, to them, like a lost-cause mission. And two, they’re certainly not going to pay to have all this antique junk pulled out of here. Easier to just lose us, you know? Like, on paper. To let NRI and the marines wipe away any trace that we were ever here. Deny that we were operating on behalf of the company.” He shrugged. “Ted’s been screaming at me for everything from a wing of A-40 Scorpions to nerve gas, as you well know, Captain.” He winked at Carter, which was just weird. “And I’ve done all the rationalizing and begging I can do. It’s just not going to happen. This last supply drop, on Christmas? That was scheduled and paid for six months ago. It arrived early, but it will be the last. That much I know for sure. The numbers just don’t add up any other way. Ted and I received final orders from corporate ops that same night—the communications blackout, the news that there was no recovery mission planned. And then there was a confirmation a day later where we were told, like… I don’t know. Sit here and play with ourselves.”
“Okay,” Carter said. “So tell me why we don’t just throw in the towel and pull out now?”
Fenn answered for Eddie. “Because there’s still a thirty percent chance things might go our way, isn’t there? According to Mr. Fast Eddie’s calculations. And a thirty percent chance is better than a guaranteed loss any day.”
“Captain Teague is correct,” Eddie said, making a gun out of his fingers and firing a round at Fenn, making a popping sound with his lips. He was slurring now, just enough to be noticeable. And his eyes seemed to have come unstuck in their sockets, rolling slowly skyward whenever Eddie wasn’t paying close attention. “That’s what I’ve been able to determine since then, talking with some people. The company cannot afford to get itself involved in a fight with NRI or the Colonial Council, so they’ve made it look like we’re operating here without corporate control. If we all die here, there’s nothing that’ll make them legally liable. But there is still a chance that things could swing our way. And then we’d be heroes. ‘Heroes, Eddie.’ That’s what one of them said to me. Someone from somewhere… Because with no other military contractors operating here, most of the continent would be Flyboy’s for the taking. It puts our negotiators in a very strong position. It really is as simple as that.”
“Right,” said Carter. “Simple.”
“The only thing we’ve got going for us,” Eddie continued, “is that the Lassateirra would have to fight their way across the river, then march forty miles from there to here while being shot up and bombed by everything we’ve got the whole way. I figure that gives us maybe two days, two and a half, from the moment we know the Lassateirra have begun to move against us until the end actually comes. If it all goes bad. So that’s two days for a smuggler or a blockade runner, a transport to get here, transition, land and pull us out. That is if there’s one in range, if he or she can be talked into doing it. If, if, if… I make our odds on that long but not impossible.”
“How long?” Carter asked.
Eddie lost control of his
eyes again, pupils running for his perfect hairline. For a minute, he said nothing. His tongue, stained purple from the wine, poked from the corner of his mouth. Fenn and Carter had another frantic, silent conference—all pointing and eyebrows and mouthed obscenities.
“Ten-to-one,” Eddie finally said. “But that’s just a round… uh…”
“Guess?”
“A round guess. Exactly. I have certain, uh… Under extraordinary circumstances, I have certain powers and freedoms to make executive decisions. Ted and me together. There are orders and abilities, yes, to call in a recovery mission and to pay for it out of a fund. Gold or something. I have orders. But anyway, like you guys said, it doesn’t matter, right? The company will come for us. You guys have never been abandoned before, right? Because you said. You said they’re not going to just bury us here.”
Sure, they said. Absolutely, Eddie. Nothing at all to worry yourself over, Eddie. Happens all the time.
And then, as quickly as the words had come to them, they dried up. Silence rushed back in to fill the vacuum. Carter touched his throat. Fenn brought a hand up to touch his forehead, to scratch an itch just below his hairline. He seemed surprised when his fingers didn’t come back bloody. They were dead. Everything else was just waiting.
“This is probably why no one invites insurance adjusters to nice parties,” Fenn said under his breath. Eddie laughed wetly. Carter didn’t at all. He asked about Ted and Connelly—what they’d been talking about, why they were meeting. This had been the original topic of conversation before they’d become sidetracked by the scrying of actuaries, the pie-chart war in poor Eddie’s head.
“A trade,” Eddie said, chin bobbing and lips bubbling wetly as he spoke. His eyes were like fat glass beads now, pushed into a doughy face. When he closed them, he looked like a waxwork, something from the lawyer museum. “His help at what he’s good at for ours at what we do…” He faded for a moment, lips pursed, pecking kisses at the air, but he pulled up again. “Connelly is smart, you know? Dumb but smart. He sees this whole whatever same as Ted and me. The lines—unbalanced in the middle, going to fold at the first sign of trouble. Connelly wants to go in and take Southbend now. Immediately. Before things get worse. Says that drops are coming in on the moors. Delivery. Off-world. We don’t know because we can’t see, but Connelly has scouts. Spies. The Akaveen… They want Riverbend worse. They’re massing there, leaving Connelly with just his natives and a small holding force to the south, but he wants to make a move anyway, under air cover. Bombers to breach the walls. Ted, though. Ted is just, whoo…” Eddie laughed and buzzed the palm of his hand over his head, eyes blowing out wide like valves opening straight into his skull. “Ted wants some defense on the ground. He wants something standing in front of him when the bad guys arrive. They’re making a deal. Us in the air for Connelly’s second company here as a security force. Also, Connelly wants a safe place to receive an orbital drop. Ted’s offering the airfield in exchange for a cut. Just arguing over how big a share. That’s what they were doing when the captain here…” Eddie pointed to the stove. “Here.” He corrected, pointing to the door. “Came to my rescue with your tricky custody battle to resolve.” He smiled softly then, and Carter felt as though he could almost see the weeks of worry vaporizing through the pickets of his teeth. Rage spent, fears allayed. Now Eddie was just shitfaced. “Hope my services were beneficial to you guys. Okay if I take a nap here?”
“Not in my bed, counselor,” Carter said.
“Good enough.” In a gentlemanly fashion, Fast Eddie Lucas stood, dipped from the waist in a sketched bow, then fell over—asleep before he hit the dirt.
“Christ,” Fenn said. “Now everyone’s going to think we killed him.”
Their laughter was loud enough to wake the dead. The drunk, however, slept on undisturbed.
This was later. A few minutes. An hour.
“So,” Fenn said, leaning back against the door frame. He’d put his jacket on, collar turned up, his cheeks buried in its fur. The cold was bitter. “What do you think?”
“It’s not good,” Carter said. He hugged himself, hands buried in his armpits, rollneck sweater pulled to his nose, muffling his words.
“Not good at all.”
“No.”
Inside, they’d banked the fire. Carter had taken a musty blanket from his foot locker and thrown it over poor, inebriated Eddie, then grabbed Cat from its pile of rags by the door—catching the little monster by the back of the neck while it was still half-asleep—and had tried to hold it, balled up in his sweater for warmth and to keep Cat from murdering Eddie.
Cat was having none of it, though, and had clawed free, hit the ground spitting, and bolted for the door. It huddled ten feet off and stared at Carter and Fenn in the cold, just waiting to be allowed back inside. He and Fenn had followed Cat outside for a breath of air and to clear their own heads. Carter’d kept the lawyer’s cigarettes and was smoking them now through a hole in the neck of his sweater, one after another.
“I think we shouldn’t tell anyone just yet.”
“Agreed.”
“I would desert if I thought there was anywhere to go.”
“I think that’s all part of the plan.” Fenn plucked the cigarette from Carter’s mouth-hole, took a drag, planted it back amid the cabled wool. When he spoke, he exhaled thunderheads. “Leaving us with no options but to soldier.”
“Damn sneaky if you ask me.”
Fenn nodded.
“So, was any of what you told Eddie true?”
“You mean…”
Carter nodded.
“God, no. We won at Palas and on Barson’s World. I shipped home with everyone else, sitting on my bonus payout. You?”
Carter shook his head. “Proxima was a wash after we switched sides. Spent six months plastering the place from a transorbital bomber, flew home on an Argo-Stanislav freighter after the truce. This is bad, though.”
“True enough.”
“Could still go our way. If Connelly attacks, diverts the Lassateirra. If NRI supplies don’t make it into the field fast enough. If the marines stay away or the council ignores the NRI request. It could go our way.”
Heroes, Eddie…
“Could,” Fenn agreed.
“But it won’t.”
Fenn shook his head. “No.”
Carter thought about the ships he’d seen the other night. The hooks of light on the horizon. He’d meant to tell Fenn about them, but hadn’t. Everyone had seen something similar anyway. He’d meant to tell Fenn about NRI. About what they would do when they got here in force. The shock. The death. Cameras rolling while poor scared kids came tumbling out the back of dropships and veterans pressed grenades and pulse rifles into the hands of every native who reached. But he hadn’t. No time. Or something.
“Look, I’ve been told by plenty of bosses what a fuckup I am,” Carter said. “None have ever conspired to leave me for dead before. Eddie’s got to be wrong.”
Except that wasn’t true either.
“Don’t start believing your own propaganda, Kev. That’s dangerous business. It’s a lot of money on the line. A lot of legal troubles and bad press. I can see Eddie’s point. It would be a lot simpler for all concerned if the whole bunch of us just disappeared one day.”
“Well, not all concerned. I’d be pretty pissed about it.”
“It’s about the money, Captain. I think maybe it’s cheaper for the company just to let us die.”
“Bright and shiny, Fenn. Love the way you think. Really.”
Fenn shrugged. Coming out of the dark, they heard the crunching of a native post horse approaching, its big, clubby feet crackling on the scrim of ice that’d formed, like walking over broken glass. They watched as it came on down the line of tents and crossed right before them, its rider upright in the saddle, reins held loosely, eyes like black pools—wet and reflective.
It watched them as its horse picked its way along, head down, swaying slightly. Fenn noted the loop of char
ms around its wrist—shell casings, buttons, a braided wire, a battery—and the way it seemed made of a single creature, the horse and its rider, each perfectly suited to the other. Carter saw the rifle in its scabbard of stitched plastic sheeting, the scraps of ballistic cloth sewn into a pathetic barding for the horse’s barrel chest, and himself reflected in the absolute dispassion of the indig’s gaze as it went by. The creature did not bow or scrape. It did not smile or move to clap its hands or look away. It simply watched, as though the captains were stones or clouds or something less, and only once it was past them did it make a sound—a breathy hiss in the back of its throat that might’ve been a command to the horse or might’ve not.
“That one of ours?” asked Carter, once horse and rider had vanished again into the swallowing dark.
“Oh, good,” said Fenn. “You saw it, too.”
Carter thought of a question he’d never asked Fenn before. Same as a question Fenn had never asked him.
“Fenn, what did you do before you joined the company?”
Fenn smiled and stared off in the general direction of the horizon. “Nothing at all. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Funny how that works, huh? None of us did anything before, I guess.”
“I guess.”
For a minute, neither man spoke. Neither man looked at the other.
Carter remembered reading somewhere once how the captains of Spanish galleons, after sailing their load of conquistadors halfway around the earth to the New World, would burn their ships in the bay, giving their men a very showy lesson in commitment and dedication to a cause. With their ships in flames, a point was succinctly made: No one was ever going home again. There was no retreat. No surrender. Win or die.
And Carter seemed to recall that it’d worked. The conquistadors—with their guns and steel and armor and horses and big, ridiculous hats—had decimated entire populations, had killed millions of indigenous peoples, murdering them with gunpowder, with swords, with plagues and starvation and, eventually, had installed themselves as rulers of a hot, sticky, smelly, and dangerous place, as alien to them as this place was to him even now.
A Private Little War Page 28
