The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Both of the guards roared with laughter.

  The door slammed.

  Crispin was alone, his face burning.

  They had not taken the folding furniture. There was no room to move as he desired. He lay carefully down on the cot.

  In the barred blue square of the window, metal dragonflies danced. The screaming of the antiaircraft fire sounded disquietingly human.

  He’d been lucky. Amazingly lucky. He shouldn’t have pushed it! It would have been so easy for the kaleidoscope of regulations in Sostairs’s brain to end up forming a different, equally random pattern, which condemned Crispin as Rae had been condemned. I must have a charmed life, or something like that, he thought dizzily.

  Rae. Rae in Chressamo. Rae in Sostairs’s torture chamber. Had she been his next appointment? What had he done to her already? Remember her not emaciated and weak, but smiling and voluptuous, her skin like cream, so opaque and smooth—

  My wife. And son. He had invented the relationship between the three of them on the spur of the moment. But in memory the claim rippled back in time, back to Valestock, back to Jacithrew’s house under the ground, gaining a repellently sentimental validity.

  Crispin stared up at the window. The red beast turned around and around inside him, growling.

  In the sky, two planes collided.

  “Pilots must be lackwits,” he whispered.

  The little dark shapes did not, as he had expected, fuse together and spiral down like mating dragonflies; instead, one plane, which had been neatly severed in half, plummeted straight down, breaking into more and more pieces. The other fell far more slowly, its pilot obviously fighting a losing battle for control. White smoke streamed behind it. Crispin narrowed his eyes and saw that it was growing brighter and brighter as it fell. It was burning! The plane was no longer made of metal, but of white fire.

  He had never before known metal to burn. Melt, yes, but not burn. The temperature at which that daemon was dying must be stupendous.

  “Who would have thought. Who would ever have thought it?”

  His head ached when he tried to contemplate his luck. He was very drunk. The womanish screaming seemed now to be coming from all around: faintly from outside the tower, and, muffled, from beneath his cell.

  But he didn’t care anymore who was dying. He was alive. He always survived—didn’t he? Yes, and he would in the future, too. After all, he had to be in Kirekune in a few years. The world was going to end, and he had to be there! What a pity that she, who would have been so smug, was going to miss the grand spectacle!

  Instinct told him the future was guaranteed; but common sense told him that nothing was guaranteed in the Raw. Not even survival. His blood pounded.

  He was twenty-one, in prison, and starving hungry. Yet he was alive. He thought, I wouldn’t change places with the richest man in Kingsburg right now! Not the richest man—not—the—richest—

  He snuffled wetly. It appalled him to realize he was crying.

  ... in his mind was a picture of the heartbreaking years of squalid towns, twice-nightly performances, and the awful ever-present fear of the bird. [He] had sung long for his supper; it was no wonder that the feast choked him.

  —Josephine Tey, The Man In The Queue

  Book Four: Flight

  Tumult in the Clouds

  Novambar 1895 A.D. The Lovoshire Parallel:

  The fringe of the Wraithwaste

  About five miles into the Waste, hundreds of feet above the brown forest, Gorgonettes, Horogazis, and the Horogazis’ escort of KE-122s dived, wrangled, and spat fire and daemons at each other. The Gorgonettes were small, light monoplanes made of wood and fabric. The Horogazis were deceitfully slippy three-man bombers, constructed almost entirely of metal, as were the KE-122s, which were the lizards’ devastatingly maneuverable improvements on the ubiquitous KE-111s. The 122s carried only one man, and their resulting speediness more than made up for their lack of a rear gunner. They had been appearing in greater and greater numbers for a year now, mostly doing the “dead man’s duty” of guarding bombers on missions into enemy territory, but recently swooping in on Ferupian air bases in tightly controlled wedges of eighteen that were impossible to stop. When Crispin had heard what they did to the temp-base of 75 Squadron, ten miles to the south, his blood ran with ice and he longed vainly for a metal airplane. It was simply impossible for a Gorgonette to match a KE’s speed and twistiness.

  But thankfully, right now the Kirekuni fighters were so badly outnumbered that it was impossible for them to protect both themselves and the Horogazis. Rain darkened the winter afternoon. Flying conditions were terrible. The KEs’ tracer fire spat thunderously as it arced orange through the wet. In response, the Gorgonettes loosed silent hails of screamers. Seven Kirekunis had already torn craters in the dense brown forest below. In the rain, instead of spreading, the crash fires had only burned blackened patches in the forest.

  Crispin jinked Princess Anuei out of the path of an arc of tracer fire. Wind and rain whipped past the cockpit shell; his hands were numb with cold; the daemon engine roared as he let out the whipcord and pulled back the stick, gaining height and simultaneously circling, keeping that KE-122 in his sights. The pilot was already busy trying to avoid Eakin, one of Crispin’s men. Crispin dived, opening up Princess Anuei’s screamer ports, and jewels streamed out in an arc.

  The Kirekunis had been trying for the Pye Collins screamer factory. But it was not anywhere near here. For once, 80 Squadron had managed an intercept right. Screamer and munitions factories were all built underground, like old Wraith villages, and the roads that led to them were deliberately meandering and concealed under the trees, too narrow for trucks, barely navigable by jeeps; dead pines and spruces packed together so closely that they formed perfect cover. All the same, the Kirekunis succeeded entirely too often in strafing the factories. Nothing was worse by QAF standards than letting a screamer factory be fire-strafed; but it happened all the time. And the factories were not dispensable. Nor were their resident trickster women. These women came in two sorts: those who had once been independent, who were employed in producing screamers; and the “munitions women” recruited specifically by the military to do the mindless work of capturing mote-sized daemons for aircraft and mobile-unit fuel. All were the objects of much speculation and idealization on the part of the pilots whose job it was to defend them. The flowers of Ferupian womanhood, Festhre said, and composed an extempore poem in couplets. Crispin had laughed to himself—he was probably the only pilot ever to have met a trickster woman, although the encounter had lasted only a few minutes and finished with death. Then, he had not thought much of their morals. And Orpaan’s daemon-handling skills had been far superior to theirs. But they were essential to the war effort. Their activities kept the QAF in business. Their very existence was a secret from everyone from whom it was practicable to keep it secret. A single destroyed screamer factory meant ten or fifteen air bases without ammo.

  However, this time nothing except a few trees had been burned. Crispin grinned as he swooped at another 122, pouring screamers out of Princess Anuei’s ports. Just before he must have collided with her, he pulled back on the stick and shot straight through the center of the dogfight, out into empty air. Cruising, he had the satisfaction of watching his kill stall and plunge: the screamers which had found footholds on its wings and fuselage had clawed their way into the cockpit and eaten the Kirekuni’s guts out. It was an ugly, but surprisingly unmessy, way of downing the enemy, And it left the wrecks intact. Right now, the Waste was a tangle of broken trees and broken airplanes. The metal from the wrecks would later be salvaged, but almost all of it would be shipped away to manufacture equipment for the infantry. The QAF was the vital element of the war effort the most often shortchanged on metal. But at times like this, Crispin thought they could keep going with only wooden planes forever.

  Not a single Kirekuni was still airborne. Instead of a buzzing hornet swarm, a flock of painted birds circled serenely in
the rain. They were three crews today: Crispin’s, his friend Butch’s, and that of Flight Captain Vichuisse. Crispin, flying patrol with his men, had spotted the Kirekuni strike force, so high that they were almost lost in the cloud cover. He had sent Eakin to fetch backup from Fostercy, and Butch and Vichuisse had arrived in time for all three crews to intercept the Kirekunis over the Wraithwaste before they reached Pye Collins. Victory lifted his heart like a balloon.

  He waggled his wings, signaling his men. Far off through the gloom, Butch and Vichuisse were doing the same thing. With the precision of good ballroom dancers, the swarm of kites came apart into three separate wedges. Eighty Squadron was not the mess that popular opinion had it. At least not today; their problem was that they were erratic. But Vichuisse had not managed to cause any disasters this time. Crispin led his crew down to see the wreckage of the forest. It was difficult to make out through the rain, but nothing human seemed to be moving. The bright-colored screamer imps, oblivious to the shimmer of Waste daemons pressing close around them, were brawling over the flesh of the Kirekuni airmen.

  Higher up, Vichuisse peeled his crew off toward home. Crispin quickly led his men up to follow. When Vichuisse pulled out, you pulled out—a necessity of the hierarchy which had contributed a good deal to 80 Squadron’s reputation as a band of shirkers.

  A show of independence would have been even more dangerous for Crispin, who owed Vichuisse his whole life, than for the others. The three crews strung out over the Waste, flying slowly to conserve their daemons’ energy. The din of Princess Anuei’s engine slackened. Crispin flexed his stiff fingers and squinted through the rain-slicked windshield. He allowed himself a brief surge of pride as he saw that none of his five crewmen was too badly shot up. But Butch had lost one man. He thought it was Francke—a new, talented young pilot. Surprising that he had gone down. Vichuisse had lost two. But Vichuisse always lost men. A transfer to his crew was unofficially known as the death sentence.

  If only Crispin did not owe so much to him! He was conscious of his indebtedness every waking moment, except perhaps during battle, when exhilaration blotted out the tangled web of obligations and friendships that he had to follow through if he was ever to find his way to any sort of future.

  If only! He knew he could do a far better job of commanding this squadron than any arrogant northern squire! So could Butch. So could Keinze, or Redmanhey. So could even Festhre, probably.

  Crispin smiled at the thought of his friends. The twilight roared around his Gorgonette. He signaled his crew that it was time to watch out for the flares that would go up to mark the runway when the ground crew at Fostercy heard the mission returning.

  Triumphant. For once.

  But no matter how many Kirekunis they, and the rest of the squadron, and the pilots of all the other squadrons in the Lovoshire Parallel and the Thrazen and the Galashire and the Weschess and the Salzeim and the Lynche and the Teilsche and the Sudeland Parallels, brought down, it was not enough. It was never enough. Are we winning? Are we losing? Nobody knew which to think. Patriotic phrases were on everyone’s lips, and nobody dared to voice their secret guesses that with captains like Vichuisse all over the Raw, one could not possibly win any glory, let alone one’s pension, let alone a war.

  Fostercy Base lay in the arm of a low, scrub-covered hill about ten miles behind the front lines. When you went to the latrines at night you could see the screamers going up at the horizon: tiny, bright-colored shooting stars. But the distance silenced them. And during the daylight hours, the wind carried away the sound of gunfire. If a skirmish was in progress at the front, the clamor reached such a pitch that when the wind dropped for a second, a man standing in the open could hear a noise like a far-off earthquake. At such times motorbikes and jeeps could be seen in the distance, bouncing over the plain from the front lines to the command posts near Shadowtown. During skirmishes, almost all of 80 Squadron was in the air, providing assistance to the beleaguered infantry at the front. That was when being in a defensive unit was no longer a relatively cushy assignment. You landed, handed in your report to Vichuisse if you were a lieutenant, fell into your bunk, got shaken awake a few hours later, scrambled into your flight suit, and were in the air again before you’d rubbed the sand out of your eyes.

  But clashes at the front occurred no more often than once a month. The rest of the time it was only when they were airborne that the pilots of Fostercy saw anything of the war. It was nearly always quiet on base: most of the pilots were constantly worn-out from the daemon handler’s curse of weariness, and spent all their meager downtime either sleeping or eating. Right now, Festhre’s, Redmanhey’s, and Keinze’s crews, the other half of the squadron, were either asleep or out on patrol. The men who had just returned pressed tightly around the fire that roared in the center of the mess, scooping up soup with the biscuits that constituted the greater part of their diet. Even indoors, it was too cold to take off their flight jackets, and the wet leather steamed, reeking. The firelight splashed up the rough plank walls. Carrie, the lurcher dog, moaned softly in her place by the embers. Crispin rolled his shoulders, wincing as pain stabbed through his muscles.

  When he first arrived in 80 Squadron as a lowly rigger, he had thought the pilots’ habitual silence, in contrast to the riggers’ loquacity, weirdly primitive. Here were the hunters, huddling together about the campfire after returning from the kill. They meditated; and outside, the hunting beasts were rubbed down and fed by the tribe’s inferior members. But that fancy was misleading. There was a hierarchy, of course—but there was no initiative on anyone’s part, not even Vichuisse’s. Everything was done by the book and on orders. The system might have served to preclude resentment between pilots and ground crews, lieutenants and regulars. But living on his wits in Valestock and in the Wraithwaste had rendered Crispin unable to accept anything on face value: and very shortly after his arrival in 80 Squadron, keeping his eyes and ears open, he had realized that there was resentment—plenty of it. It was just kept under wraps, and confined, in its most corrosive manifestations, to the lieutenants—the only men, apart from Vichuisse’s own crew, who had direct contact with the captain.

  Crispin had not dreamed when he first arrived at Pilkinson’s Air Base II that before long, he would become a lieutenant, and come to hate Vichuisse worse than any of them.

  But everything was temporary. If two and a half years in the military had taught him a lesson, it was that nothing lasted.

  The wind crept in through the cracks in the walls of the mess, and the men shrugged their collars up around their necks. Crispin glanced sideways at Butch, who was shoveling soup intently into his mouth. He had not spoken since they landed. His long, thin, serious face was pale orange in the firelight. Most people let the weakness apparent in that face blind them to the real Butch Keynes, who was a mercurial man capable of destructive anger and self-destructive misery, too goodhearted ever to be truly ambitious. It was Butch who had taught Crispin to read and write, after Vichuisse convinced him he ought to be literate. Education—and social class, which in the QAF almost always came hand in hand—were the hallmarks of a ranking officer. And Crispin was not going to be the odd one out. Millsy had been wrong, after all.

  He nudged Butch. “Sorry you lost Francke. He had promise.”

  Butch stopped eating and turned burning eyes on Crispin. “He did. And do you want to know the worst thing? It wasn’t his fault. He was slicing through ‘em.”

  “What happened then?” Crispin shifted a bit closer on the bench so that the regulars wouldn’t hear. “Tangled with his own screamers?”

  “It was the Kirekuni.” Butch spat the word out as if it tasted bad. Crispin knew instantly who he meant; not any of the Kirekunis whom they had shot down today, but the Kirekuni who served on Butch’s own crew.

  “What’d he do? Turn tail? Francke try to cover him?”

  “No, he bloody well scored an own goal! It was right after we engaged them. Francke had his sights on this Horogazi. Showering
him with screamers. Then the Kirekuni gets into the mix. He’s about twenty feet off Francke’s starboard wing, aiming to cross above him, cutting it real close, and he misjudges his margin. Fuckin’ pathetic. And Francke sees they’re gonna clash. So he has to lose height.” Butch balanced his bowl on his knee and shoved an imaginary stick forward. “But things are crazy up there. And one of Vichuisse’s boys is coming up right under the Horogazi, and Francke doesn’t want to hit him. And first his propellers tap the Horogazi’s undercarriage, and then he tangles with her.”

  Crispin grimaced. “What a way to go. At least he took the Horogazi down with him.”

  “She was screamer-infested already. And what makes it sick is that I saw it happen, and the Queen-damned Kirekuni got off scot-free. Made two kills after that. Totaling three for the afternoon,” Butch said spitefully.

  “Where is he anyway?” Crispin glanced around. The men were beginning to drift out of the mess. “Gone to earth?”

  “Naw. See, he’s got to learn—I dunno what!” Butch shook his head in frustration. “Stupid lizard always manages to save his own skin, even when he fucks the rest of us up! But after this long, we can’t fairly suspect him of—of not being on our side. What’s his kill tally? Ninety-something? Could be over a hundred. Kirekunis. How does he do it, Cris? He’s been here as long as I have.” Butch thumped his chest. Now that their men were gone he was speaking more loudly. “Three years. Same week I arrived from flight training, he arrived from Chressamo, and Vichuisse assigned him to my crew the same day. Worst piece of luck I’ve ever had!”

  Crispin pulled a sympathetic face. He felt sorry for Butch, who, in addition to having to contend with a Kirekuni on his crew, had no feeling for what things looked like from the viewpoint of a regular: like most lieutenants, he had received his commission immediately on being posted to the front as a result of his background. He was the third son of a Dewisson Domain squire, one of that class for whom the army had been an honored profession even before there was a war. He had probably known he was going to be in the military before he was old enough to talk, Crispin thought, finishing his soup, and wondered, not for the first time, how it had been to grow up under that shadow, hoping and praying that the conflict would end before the time came for him to take part in it.