A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Of course, it’d taken a century. And even at the end of it, there’d been plenty of indigenous peoples left to hate the Spaniards for what they’d done. It was a messy process, and there was a lot of dying to be done before the inevitable victory. Carter imagined that a lot of those dead conquistadors went to their graves thinking that the New World wasn’t all that nice a place anyway, that maybe everyone would’ve been a whole lot happier had they all just stayed home, eaten some olives, screwed their wives, and left the New World to the people who were already there.

  And he was willing to bet that all of them, to a man, thought that burning the ships had been a really shitty idea.

  “What’s on your mind, Kev?” Fenn asked.

  Carter shook his head. “Ancient history,” he said. “So what do we do next? I feel like we should do something.”

  “Cards? There’s been a rotating game going on in Stork and Hardman’s tent for the last day or so.”

  Carter shrugged. It sounded as good to him as anything else. He figured he’d have plenty of time to sleep when he was dead, and told Fenn as much.

  “Very cheerful, Captain. Be sure to tell the boys that one. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

  Together, they stumbled off into the quiet dark. Cat waited until they were gone and carefully slunk back inside to walk in slow circles around the stove and sniff at the drunk lawyer on the floor.

  CARTER WON THIRTY DOLLARS PLAYING POKER. Vic was there. They were coldly cordial to each other, but neither of them could bluff, each knowing the other a bit too well. He took the two screamers about an hour before his next flight was due to lift, giving them time to work themselves in, swallowing them with a mouthful of cold coffee. In his condition, they hit almost immediately, and he was seized with a sudden urge to clean the tent. His, Stork’s, didn’t matter. His hands couldn’t seem to stay still.

  Dawn patrol was uneventful. He flew a two/three with Tommy Hill and Ernie O’Day. Exhausted, hungover, hyped up, and feeling poorly, he went up in the bomber, taking a little DH.2 called Scrambler out of the house and up near maximum altitude. He just hung there, glad, for a change, for the cold and the quiet and the thoughtless boredom while the boys talked about girls on the flight channel and tried to get themselves shot at. Scrambler had been refitted with a 250-horse replica Rolls-Royce Eagle and bomb grapples under its lower wing, triggered hydraulically from a finger switch on the stick. He kept all ten of his far away, not trusting his own hands not to just drop the weight wherever to make some pretty flowers.

  The cold made him ache. He’d forgotten his helmet in the tent, and the grease on his face made his skin smell like a hospital. He ducked low, curling within the body of the plane, and looked up past the top wing and into the gray-blue sky. It almost never snowed on Iaxo—it was one of the small mercies of the place. Clouds grew, darkened, fattened, but what fell, if anything, was freezing rain or a mist that seemed almost to sizzle and made the eyes sting like tear gas if one stayed out too long in it. Real snow was a rarity. On some nights, though, he longed for it simply because it felt as though it ought to snow.

  The plane flew like a brick. They were down around Southbend, still under strict orders to stay clear of the walls and outlying mud huts and tents that huddled close around the periphery. At fourteen thousand feet it looked like a scene out of antiquity—the fortified town almost like a castle, white-walled and standing at the river’s edge. Peeking over the cockpit’s side rail, Carter imagined peasants going about their daily business in the shadow of its squat, roofed towers and massive gate, and he wondered what this place must’ve been like before they’d all arrived—a Heisenberg riddle, just enough to keep his mind churning through the dull, looping repetitions of air patrol.

  Southbend was the smaller of the two towns. Dirty flags snapped from the walls. The land around it was flat, gray-black, and ugly, denuded of trees by whatever mysterious industry went on within. Gouts of smoke rose from inside the walls. Through the spotting scope, it masked all but the most massive details, but when the wind blew just right, Carter swore he could see tarps, camouflage netting. He wondered if it was his imagination. Could be thatch. Could be someone’s washing. Could be nothing at all. Every pilot reported the same thing when flying just a little closer than they were supposed to. Everyone thought the same thing.

  He thought about how much difference 250 pounds of modern high explosives would make if dropped in just the right place. Trouble was, he didn’t know which place was the right one.

  He circled lower. Tommy Hill and Ernie were back along the river, trolling for action. He thought again about just buzzing the city, dropping indiscriminately, praying for fool’s luck—black smoke, secondaries, tongues of fueled flame. Lower. Closing his eyes, he imagined the perfect strike: the bloom of black and orange, action-movie style. Bodies and debris blown into the air. The whuff of tortured air.

  His hands shook. In the hours since he’d talked with Eddie, the whole thing had begun to feel unreal. How could he die? He was the hero of this story—its main and most lovable character. He had guns. He had bombs. He had a fucking airplane. And some smelly, simple, backward abo monkey with a rock or a stick was going to kill him? No. That wasn’t going to happen. Eddie had been wrong. Carter stroked the red button of the bomb release taped onto the control stick with his thumb, running it over the smooth plastic, the simple plunger mechanism.

  He rolled out then, climbed for the thin, high scratchings of the clouds, and flew awhile, sitting on his hands with the stick between his knees. Soon enough, he figured. And if not, he and Fenn would mutiny, lash Ted to a pole, raise their own air force, and blow the shit out of everything.

  By the time Carter’s two/three turned for home, around midday, Connelly’s first and second companies were on the march back from the bridge. The planes passed over them on approach and waggled their wings in greeting. Connelly’s 3rd remained in place, securing Mutter’s Ridge from any reinforcement, and the fourth had been detailed as manual labor, off-loading the supply drop that’d come in on huge parachute skids while the flight was out. Carter saw them as he came drifting down to land, packing a supply train of ponies and wagons that were chewing up the dirt of C strip.

  Postflight check was smooth. Vic was flagging planes straight into the longhouse, and she looked beautiful, standing there in pilot’s leathers over her coveralls, dark hair blowing out behind her in the mean, frigid crosswind that’d kicked up. She gave Carter a thumbs-up as he rolled past her. He smiled and saluted, something swelling in his chest, making him feel large in her regard. Like she’d been waiting just for him.

  Ted’s debriefing was the quickest yet, done in passing as Carter jogged off the flight line, looking for Fenn and some coffee.

  “Spot anything?” he asked, holding Carter by the shoulder and shouting into his ear over the roar of warming engines as the next flight due out taxied into position.

  “Nothing,” Carter shouted back.

  “Nothing?”

  “Smoke at Southbend. Trees, water, rocks. Nothing. Connelly’s first and second are on their way in.”

  “How long?”

  “Before nightfall. Couple hours maybe.”

  “Good. On your way, pilot.”

  And that was that. Ted scampered off one way, into the traffic jam of planes coming and planes going, the choking breath of oil smoke and clatter of ammunition boxes. Carter went the other, jogging the length of the longhouse flight line, looking for Fenn, and heading in the direction of the armory.

  Ted, still carrying his own terrible freight of bad news, having carried it farther and for longer than anyone else on the field, stumbled as he moved from pilot to pilot and plane to plane. He was exhausted. The bags under his eyes were dark and pouchy. His skin felt alive with something other than him. He hadn’t slept soundly in longer than he could remember because every time he lay down on his narrow cot and closed his eyes, he saw the columns of numbers that Eddie kept shoving at him every time he
asked the little rat for help. With a pillow pressed over his face, throat open in a silent, never-voiced howl, he would hear the recordings of conversations with Eddie’s friends in the Flyboy legal department that Eddie had so kindly offered him—the explanations as cold and sad and matter-of-fact as bullets. He would lie back and try to think of his perfect, clean, white place, imagining the sloping walls and gentle curves and the taste of the sterile, recycled air as his chest rattled with mud; but, in the dark, he would feel some nameless and dark thing reaching for him, slipping through the night, seeking him out. It had fingers, this thing. Arms. And it wanted him badly. In it—in his cold imagining of it—this black monster possessed some combination of comprehension and malice. It brought an understanding that had eluded him for two years, but also some dreadful knowledge.

  When he slept, it wasn’t sleep, only collapse. And when he collapsed, this thing came to him and tried to explain to him everything he had done wrong. It would whisper his name and tell him everything he’d done and not done, which, now, was going to get him and everyone he was responsible for killed. It sat beside him while he lay, paralyzed between sleep and not-sleep, struggling to breathe through the sludge in his chest, and it spoke to him. Told him stories about himself. Described the precise depth of the shit Ted Prinzi had gotten himself into.

  He would wake with a start and have some idea—some new plan, new tactic. He would leap up from his cot, strip, press his uniform, wash himself, brush his teeth, and shave. He would stare into his own rolling, hot eyes in the small mirror hung from the nail on the tent post and work out the details of what wisdom had been granted him—knowing, on some level, that he was going mad, losing his shit, listening to ghosts, but also knowing that no other voices were currently available than the ones in his head and that no other advice was forthcoming.

  On the field, he tripped over clods of dirt, over tufts of grass. He walked like a drunk on the downside, listing badly, and tripped over nothing at all. He thought of his wife. Ex-wife. Two ex-wives. He thought of the deal he’d tried to strike with Connelly. He thought of how much he despised the twin moons here, how one always seemed to be stalking the other across the sky. He thought about flying—as a wing captain on Forsmith, a mail pilot in the belt, as a rookie, two years washed out of civilian command school on Alpha Alexi, his first day in combat. His brain swirling, boiling with a froth of free association, all good governance blown, he thought of the children he’d never had, and missed them anyway. He thought of the places he’d never been, the places he had, the ones he’d dreamed. He thought of the boardroom of the Flyboy office on Orion Station where he’d been hired—all earthy with its hardwood and distinguished leather. He’d never seen the London headquarters. Was never important enough to be called home to the nest. He thought of a bar at Serentatis that he’d liked a lot once. He thought of munitions stockpiles, of the liquid weight of aviation fuel, the cost (including manufacturing to spec, crating, transport, and storage) of a single round of .303 ammunition: two dollars and eight cents. He thought of his men, one after another, falling like a fanned deck of cards dropped, fluttering, to the ground. He thought about winning. How easy it should have been. He knew with the surety of a fanatic that he was going to die, and soon.

  In the moments just before the worst of everything, Ted and Connelly had been standing together, side by side, at the door to the mess. After a night spent in the field house, they’d concluded their negotiations over the supply shipment now arriving courtesy of a fast, experienced smuggler who’d been supplying Connelly on the sly for years. They’d had breakfast, Ted and Connelly and a knot of Connelly’s native officers, who’d kept, first, to their own table set with tin plates and silverware, ham and powdered eggs and bread and real coffee, but then had pushed the table out of the way in a fury of clicking, growls, and throat clearing and squatted on the dirt floor instead. This had done nothing to improve Ted’s opinion of the natives, and he’d said so to Connelly, who’d laughed. He’d turned his head, clicking and croaking over his shoulder to his indigs, and they’d bared their teeth and made noises like ten men hawking before a spit.

  “That’s okay, Commander,” Connelly had said, his voice syrupy and with a faint hint of some rolling Old World accent that Ted was never able to place. “They hate you, too.”

  Oh, they do not, Ted had thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

  In the comms tent, Diane was on the tight beam, talking to Connelly’s swift blockade runner, just decelerating after translation and trying to find its parking orbit. Eddie was nowhere to be found. Unbeknownst to Ted, he was unconscious in the dirt beside Carter’s bed, sleeping the first decent sleep he’d had in a week. Having unloaded his weight of worry and sorrow on Captains Carter and Teague and having been told that the tonnage he’d thought he’d been carrying all alone was not, in fact, his alone or really all that heavy, he’d slept with a lightness and ease he’d almost forgotten existed.

  In any event, Eddie was absent—had been absent for hours—which Ted had taken as tacit permission to do precisely as he pleased for most of the night and on, now, into the morning: To sit with Connelly and make his deals absent any legal muffling, soldier to soldier. To use the proscribed transmitter to arrange for the drop, a nice piece of which he’d talked Connelly into handing over to him. Twenty percent was where they’d settled, plus providing a security force for the airfield in case of a determined advance on their position, in exchange for the use of Flyboy turf as a receiving area and the help of his pilots when the time came to take back the fortified towns along the river. Two patrols had been out right then, observing. Captain Teague was covering Riverbend, Captain Carter was watching Southbend. Ted had told Connelly that when they came back, plans could be made for taking the towns. An hour, two at the most. And in the meantime, the longhouse, aprons, and stubblefield were all active, and Ted found himself in the unenviable position of making small talk with a man who, now that their business was concluded, he could barely look at as a man.

  Connelly smelled awful, like a rain-soaked carpet left in the muggy sun to dry. He wore some ragged fur draped over his shoulders, over the ruin of what had once been a fine suit of bespoke body armor aggrandized now with bits of steel, plates of scavenged plastic, and stitched hieroglyphs. He had some kind of paint or dirt caked into the creases of his skin, carried a tall, twisted staff that clattered with bits of junk and bones and garbage, and he spoke more indig than he did human of any variety. He was filthy and distracted by every little cough and whistle of his pets. Throughout their long night of negotiating, he’d regularly gotten up in the middle of some pointlessly protracted haggle over a pound of this or hundred-count of that and walked out of the field house into the dark to squat with them, bare his teeth at them, shake his magic stick, wrap a hand around the back of one of their necks and shake it like a puppy who’d just pissed on the rug, or just to stand there with them—close with them, shoulder touching shoulder, backs touching fronts—to stare up into the sky.

  “What are you doing out there, man!” Ted had demanded once, after an absence of nearly an hour. “What, are your monkeys afraid of the dark, too?”

  And Connelly had hissed at him, shook his stick, then grinned. “That what they say about me now, Theodore? That I’m afraid of the dark? That’s funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “Really more ridiculous. Telling.”

  “I’ll fucking say.”

  Connelly had set in to scratching then, and for a minute he had said nothing at all. He’d looked around at the lights burning in the field house, the electric lights fed by the muted chug of a generator running on aviation fuel. He’d cocked an ear to listen for the scrape and sigh of the night controller shifting in his (or her) chair on the other side of the wall—listening for the pings and beeps of condensed radio communications being beamed across the heavens, for the scratch of voices in the sea of local static.

  When he looked back to Ted, his expression had been soft, almo
st pitying. “You know why my… indigs”—he dropped the word like something exculpatory, evidence souring on his tongue—“won’t fight in the dark?”

  Ted shrugged dismissively. “Afraid of the boogeyman?”

  Connelly smiled. “Because they can’t see in the dark.”

  Can’t see. That was his reason. Ted had laughed at him, and then they’d gotten back to discussing terms. Ted had thought he’d won something, because Connelly started conceding points left and right when he wasn’t stepping outside to rub up against his monkeys.

  Outside the mess, on the morning after, Connelly was standing too close. Their shoulders brushed and Ted shuffled a half step away.

  “Stand still, Commander,” Connelly said, and moved in again. His indigs squatted in a tight knot on the other side of the door, occasionally clapping their hands together, ticking and gurgling at each other. In the infield, Connelly’s entire fourth company looked like an orgy of bearskin rugs.

  “Stop climbing all over me then,” Ted snapped back.

  “It makes you look untrustworthy.”

  “What?”

  “Pulling away. You’re making my officers nervous. Stand still.”

  Connelly stepped closer.

  “You gonna kiss me, too?”

  “No. The Akaveen mating rituals are a bit more… aggressive than ours, if that’s the word? Energetic? A kiss, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was biting you.”

  “Then they’d think I was kicking your ass shortly after.”

  Connelly laughed. He bared his teeth. The two of them stood together quietly until Connelly spoke again.

  “How long have you been here, Commander? On Iaxo?”

  “Two years,” Ted replied, making it sound like a thousand.