A Private Little War (11 page)

This was the way the men spent their days and their nights—in jest and sinning and leisure, secretly half hoping for
something,
anything
, bad to happen to someone else just so the rest of them would have something to talk about for a while that wasn’t the boredom, the shitty weather, their lice, misery or home. It was cheap and it was awful, but it made the time go. And as they all well knew, when there wasn’t drink or poker or laughing or games or just simply staring up at the sky and pretending they weren’t calculating the distance back to more friendly suns, there was always the slaughter.

It hadn’t been an hour later that Ted had come in, counting heads, gathering up his work crew to break down the drop, and looking for someone to fly. Fenn had argued with Billy because Billy wanted to go night flying and wasn’t a man who took kindly to being told no anymore. Then he’d sold out Carter to Ted in exchange for staying safe on the ground himself. All things considered, it hadn’t been his best night. But one had to take these things philosophically. Although he’d certainly done much worse in the past year, Santa Claus had come regardless. The man’s standards for who was naughty and who was nice must really be slipping, Fenn thought, and he wondered how much more killing he would’ve had to do to tip the scales.

When the search party had come back with the gear for opening the containers, Fenn had done little more than aim them in the proper direction and let them have at it. It was Christmas, after all. That’d been true. And the way he looked at it, every bastard among them—every killer, every defiler, every eye-shooter and psychopath and machine-gun artist—ought to have something to open on Christmas morning.

There were accidents, of course. Arguments. One fistfight. Most of the men were too drunk to walk more than a dozen paces without falling down. The holidays could be difficult, Fenn knew. When no one was looking, he tucked away some of the supplies for himself—loading boxes and packages onto a bomb sledge and dragging it to the mess tent, where he hid everything poorly but well enough to fool a bunch of drunks and mental cases. When he came back, it was to uproarious laughter and men literally doubled over. In among the cases of food and bullets and medical supplies and whatever else, the boys had uncovered a brand-new ice machine. Of all the things…

Fenn had caught sight of Carter walking then, kicking his toes at the frozen dirt and making for his plane. He’d raised a hand to wave, but Carter hadn’t seen him. He’d called out—meaning to tell him about
the ice machine because Fenn knew Carter would appreciate the absurdity of it—but Carter hadn’t heard him. Lost in his own world, that man. Fenn shook his head and turned back to the task at hand which, just then, involved loading up another sledge full of commandeered supplies for his tentmate.

Vic had called Carter’s plane out of the longhouse when she’d been told to do so. She’d loaded it, muscling the gun truck over the uneven ground herself because it was cold and doing something was warmer than doing nothing. She’d topped up its tank and given it a once-around check, then rubbed a spot on the spine of its tail assembly because there was something about the join of the machines right there that felt like touching a living body, like feeling the regular points of vertebrae pushing up against taut skin. And there was something about touching it right there in order to make sure the machine came home whole.

She was not superstitious. She didn’t believe in animism or luck or anything of the sort. She liked machines because she liked rules, order, and the simple interactions of parts made to fit, and she believed in numbers—gear ratios and screw speeds and torque and cylinder synchronization—because numbers were the language of machines. She believed in touching this spot on the planes because, to date, no machine that she’d touched in such a way had ever not come home. This wasn’t superstition. This was math.

Vic rubbed the spot with her bare fingertips, feeling them bump over the swelling ribs of the plane through doped cloth and lacquer, and closed her eyes.

“Come home,” she said to the machine.

That was part of the ritual, too.

Carter found his ride waiting, primed and topped up, on the taxiway at the friendly end of A strip. He’d done a quick once-around, touching her hard skin and the wire stays between her wings, kicking the
tires. He’d shuffled, half dreaming still of hot coffee and cigarettes and imagining in the cold and quiet that he could hear alien leaves falling from alien trees onto alien soil. They blazed up here into russet autumn colors, the leaves. Same as they did at home. Everything turned yellow, red, and gold, and Carter had known dangerous, painfully blissful moments where he’d almost been able to forget where he was except for one variety of tree with leaves that turned pale blue as if suffocating in the cold and that never failed to ruin the view.

He hated those fucking trees.

He’d tossed the bottle out into the grass and pulled himself into the cockpit. He’d buckled in, smeared a thumb’s worth of astringent-smelling grease onto his nose and cheeks and the shells of his ears to keep them from freezing in the cold, then blah-blah-blah’d his way through clearances. In the infield, generator-driven lights were burning, but he didn’t know why. There were more bodies moving around than should’ve normally been up and about at this hour.

It didn’t matter. With a finger, he teased the engine to life and let it warm a minute in the dark. He closed his eyes. The vibration of his machine tuned high and rumbling was like love, he thought. Like drifting off to sleep with one’s whole body pressed against the beating, blood-thrumming heart of a monster. The power of it was intoxicating. More so in this place where any power at all was overwhelming.

The chatter of the radio in his ear startled him. His orders, approach radials, altitude, target information, radio frequencies. Dull. He pulled his gloves on. The green flags came out. He throttled his plane gently forward—bouncing over the uneven ground, struggling to keep her between the pin lights that stuttered to life and lined the runway while one of the ground crew stumbled backward, leading him. Lambert, he thought. Or maybe the other one.

The flags came down. His guide loped out of the way and fell down in the dark. Carter advanced the throttle to the first catch. As the ground began to run away beneath him, he gave the plane more juice, shoving hard at the power handle to open her up and listening to the tone of the engine grow from that throaty rumble into a glorious howl. When, together, they lifted clear of dirt and gravity, it was like being born all over again.

And then there was no sound at all but the roar of the air streaming past him and a distant, droning hum from forward; there was nothing to see in the perfect dark of night flying through the primeval world but the phosphorescent dials of his wet gauges and the dimly glowing iconography of the flight computer rudely hacked into the wood-and-plastic instrument panel.

Because he was looking for it, Fenn saw Carter’s plane lift and vanish like a mote into the darkness. He’d tucked away a nice load of pilfered treats for his friend and, provided Carter didn’t die, would surprise him with them when he came back home again.

Because she was waiting for it, Vic heard the clattering buzz and grumble of Carter’s liftoff. She gauged the relative health of the machine by the spectrum of noises it made as it passed by her, took to the air, and faded into distant silence. It was a good machine. Strong. Well maintained. She loved it for all its best qualities, even if they were few and simple and archaic, and she forgave it its grosser incompetencies because it couldn’t help being what it was. She was in the machine shop and decided she would wait for it to come home to her before going to bed. Just to make sure nothing bad happened to it in the night. Just for the comfort of seeing it alive and safe one more time.

She ran scarred fingers permanently blacked with grease through her dark hair and dug the hard heels of her palms into her eyes, sighing out a breath that steamed in the cold. A couple hours, she thought. If everything went smoothly. Maybe less. She could wait.

Because he was listening for it, Ted heard the cough and sputter of an engine catching down on the flight line. He listened to it settle into a growl that climbed the octaves into a keening buzz, then floated up and
away into the night. In the dark, he checked the luminescent dial of his watch. Thirty minutes, a little less. Not good, considering he’d asked it to be done in ten, but not terrible either. Not insubordinate. Carter had gone, which was something. Knowing what he knew, there was a part of Ted that was surprised. He thought that maybe if it’d been him, he wouldn’t have. He would’ve said
Fuck you
to himself, rolled over, gone back to bed, and tried to wake up later with some kind of enthusiasm for this war.

Now he stood up, straightened his uniform, cleared his throat and spit into one corner of his tent. Tiredness had left him feeling hollow and light, like he was drifting standing still, but he needed to be at comms. When he went out the door of his tent, he left the final orders from corporate sitting on the edge of his desk, still unopened, but didn’t make it ten steps before he came rushing back, crashing through his own door, to slap them off the wood, paw through his drawers for a lighter, and then hold them over the bright flame until they caught. He held the paper until the flames ate their way to his hand, close enough to blacken his fingertips. He held it as long as he could, until the pain made him suck a breath in through his teeth, then threw the final corner up into the air—watching it drift and burn and transmute itself into black smoke and nothingness.