The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Briefly we Live. Briefly, then die. Wherefore, I say, he who hunts a glory, he who tracks some boundless, superhuman dream, may lose his harvest in the here and now and garner death.

  —Euripides

  Civil Virtue

  15 Jevanary 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Shadowtown

  “ So how’s it going?” Butch said immediately, peering at Crispin as if he expected there to be something wrong with him.

  “What do you mean, how’s it going?”

  They were in the Officers’ Club in Cerelon. Crispin had arrived with Commandant Lennox, who had invited him for drinks at XII Base and then in town. Lennox said everyone who was anyone in the air force would be there: this was the monthly occasion when nearly all the captains and commandants got together and got drunk. The general briefing meeting the next day was known as the world’s best cure for a hangover. Crispin had tried to get out of attending the night before, but finally he had caved in to Lennox’s insistence. When they arrived at the club, Lennox had been swooped up by a crowd of colleagues, and Crispin, not knowing anyone, had felt somewhat out of things until he spotted Butch on the other side of the room.

  This was the first time he had seen Butch since leaving the Lovoshire Parallel. He hadn’t been off base for a month—he could hardly believe it now, but the days went by so fast—knocking the squadron into shape. He had not let them know it, of course, but when he first took two crews of them on an offensive mission, their shoddy formation flight and poor aim had appalled him. They had lost two men, and only managed to strafe their target—a battalion of Kirekuni ground troops—once before they had to run for home.

  “Everything’s going great guns!” he told Butch.

  Butch looked shifty and stirred his martini. “How’re you getting on with the boys?”

  “Marvelously! And you?”

  “Takes some getting used to, but now I’ve promoted Lance and Potter and Jansson to lieutenant, it’s not half-bad. Are you sure you—”

  “What’d you do with the old lieutenants?”

  “Demoted ‘em, of course,” Butch said, puzzled.

  Crispin bit back the caution that sprang to his lips. He would never have dreamed of demoting any of the lieutenants he had inherited from Jimenez. And none of the crewmen he’d brought from Lovoshire expected promotions, either. The barrier of class prevented them from even thinking about it. Potter was the only one who might have got difficult; that was why Crispin had not been sorry, in the end, to hand him over to Butch.

  “Good, no, that’s good, everything’s going swimmingly,” he repeated while he wondered what was going on in Butch’s mind.

  The Officers’ Club consisted of several small rooms for gambling, snooker, and private conversation, a supper room, a roof terrace where receptions were held in better weather, and a large indoor clubroom with a bar in the corner. In the center of the room stood a curious sculpture: a cylindrical daemon glare taller than a man, its glass smoked to soften the light, around which a crystal bead curtain fell forever downward, sparkling, throwing prismatic light through the fog of tobacco smoke. Crispin hadn’t been able to resist examining it up close. He had discovered that the “beads” were actually drops of water that slid down needle-thin rods to the base of the sculpture, and were recycled up to the top again. The ornament provided the only light in the room, although unlit daemon chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls were polished paneling. Potted trees stood here and there, between fat leather armchairs. Considering what city the club was in, considering the pasts and futures that enclosed every officer like a nacreous, impermeable shell, the atmosphere was astonishingly festive. Probably it was because they were all so drunk. Crispin had held off on the cognac, wanting to keep his head, but Lennox had been quite tipsy by the time they arrived, and from the fixed, insectile limpidity of Butch’s gaze, Crispin guessed he was pretty far gone, too.

  “Couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Butch said now, intensely. “After what I heard.”

  “What?”

  “One-thirty! It’s the worst squadron in the whole parallel. It’s got an absolutely terrible reputation.”

  “Terrible reputations seem to be my lot in life, don’t they?” Crispin knew this side of his friend. Butch was capable of fixating on an unfounded rumor or supposition and letting it consume him. “Finding out the truth behind them, I mean. I haven’t heard the rumors, but there’s nothing wrong with the men. They’re willing and competent. Their last captain was a brainless idiot, but nothing’s broken that I can’t fix. According to the record our weekly tallies are already higher than they were under Jimenez. I had a spot of trouble the first day, but that’s water under the bridge now.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “What do you think?” Crispin gave Butch a wry look.

  “I knew it!”

  “Well, what else? Be reasonable.”

  “Cris, I was worried,” Butch said all in a rush. He was very drunk, Crispin saw now. “I heard about your squadron. The worst possible assignment you could’ve been given. One-thirty’s last captain, he was a southeasterner, right, and they said he had Lamaroon blood, too, he was curly-headed, browner than a Cypean! And you know the way regulars’ minds work! It was completely unnecessary to send you there!”

  “They must’ve thought they were fucking cursed,” Crispin said, keeping his voice light. “It’s a good thing I didn’t know that, or I’d never’ve had the guts to deal with them the way I did.”

  “You got screwed!” Butch said. “Someone—”

  “Did it deliberately. Yeah... ”

  The room was a sea of noise and smoke, the talk of the officers and Wraith girls so heavily punctuated with laughter that Crispin had a momentary flashback to the evening he’d spent in the pit of the Old Linny Music Hall in Valestock, Lovoshire. The atmosphere was the same here, except for the cultivated accents and the violence of their educated repartee, each word a bludgeon designed to bruise and wound. Even when QAF officers were off duty, they were still at war.

  A party of officers was bearing down on Crispin and Butch where they stood by the wall.

  “Someone wanted me to fuck up,” Crispin said finally. “Whoa.”

  Butch rolled his eyes. “if you’re going to start on Vee again—”

  “You bloody well told me yourself that One-thirty was the last place any reasonable commandant would’ve posted me! He’s trying to see how much I can take. He’s trying to break me.”

  “Mistakes happen,” Butch said. His eyes were wide and strange. He gulped the last of his martini. “Shouldn’t have mentioned it. Just had to find out how you were getting along, that’s all. Forget it—” He swung toward the approaching officers, holding out both hands. “Collins! Allendez! Guterman! Let me introduce you to—”

  The way the captains brushed him off was expert, Crispin thought. Their tones held just the right mixture of heartiness and indifference. Before he knew what was happening, he and Butch had been separated, and Crispin had been introduced all around and was caught up in a party of men by the bar arguing raucously over aerial strategy, and Butch was still standing by the wall, half-hidden behind a potted miniature elm, an unreadable expression on his face. He looked as if he had just bitten into a sour olive.

  Before long Crispin found himself a center of attention. It was as if now that his colleagues had decided to include him, they were going the whole hog. Vichuisse was there; Crispin felt a thread of pleasure when it became apparent that the Salzeim officers weren’t paying half as much attention to the commandant as they were to him, a lowly captain. In fact the other commandants seemed to make no secret of the fact that they found Vichuisse tiresome. If Crispin had been them, he would have felt the same, and might not have managed to conceal it as well: he had never seen Vichuisse so ingratiating, or heard his laugh so whinnying. To Crispin, the commandants’ talk or strategy was fascinating and informative. But Vichuisse kept silent when the rest were discussing the war, breaking in o
nly when the topic shifted to who had made what faux pas or been seen with what young pilot. The captains kept their faces expressionless at such times; Lennox, Figueroa, and Hawthorne maintained a semblance of weary interest.

  for the second time in his life, Crispin came close to feeling sorry for Vichuisse. The commandant was not stupid. He could not fail to be aware that he was being disrespected.

  And why were they hanging on his, Crispin’s, words, and plying him with drink? Probably it was just because he was a new face in a crowd of old ones. And maybe they hoped he could replace Captain Eastre, who had been killed earlier in the month after being a favorite of his colleagues for six years, and who had to all accounts been a fabulous wit.

  Crispin had a natural wariness of getting drunk, and he’d already had too much, really. He lit another cigarette and leaned toward Salemantle, a captain of Lennox’s who seemed more intelligent than most of them. “You were surrounded over no-man’s-land? Have to hear how you got out of that one. Never know when it might happen to me. Knock wood.”

  “Knock. See, I have these signals for my wingmen. I carry noise flares, and I set them off when things are getting bad. One for ‘every man for himself,’ two for ‘by me,’ and so on.”

  “Useful trick!”

  “Try it! It works! So I signal them to clear off up out of it. They told me later they thought I’d gone mad, but they did it. That left me alone in the middle of the lizards—”

  There was a disturbance by the door, and Crispin and Salemantle turned with the rest. A tall, thin man came in, taking off his overcoat, passing it to a servant. His hair and trouser bottoms were wet with rain. Though Crispin had never seen him smile so widely before, he recognized that face: it was Sublieutenant-Marshal James Duncan, arriving late.

  “Duncan!” Vichuisse got up and hurried toward him. “My dear man! We thought you weren’t coming!”

  Duncan cut him dead. He walked straight past him and shook the hands of the less obtrusive commandants Figueroa, Lennox, and Hawthorne.

  “Kateralbin!” Now Duncan was facing him, beaming. Crispin stood and automatically shook the sublieutenant-marshal’s hand. “I wasn’t going to come tonight, but I wanted to see you. Congratulations on your successes!”

  “Thank you, sir—it’s only been a month,” Crispin stammered. “

  Nonetheless! We all thought One-thirty Squadron was beyond redemption. And your four-shift plan is working out rather well.” Crispin glanced involuntarily at Vichuisse.

  “Tony told me the idea originated with you,” Duncan said. “Upright of him, eh? Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson plans to extend the system to the rest of the sector, and possibly the entire parallel, depending on whether tallies continue to improve. It’s a viable alternative to increasing squadron size, a measure we have been debating for some time. We have only lost one ranking officer under this system, and that was Captain Eastre; but that was nothing to do with you. In fact, if we were to blame anyone for Eastre’s death, it would have to be the officer who was flying command with him.”

  That had been Vichuisse.

  “Eastre was a man of great competence. It is regrettable. But all in all, losses are down and kills up.”

  “Thank you again, sir!” Crispin’s mind was whirling.

  Duncan turned to Vichuisse, bold-faced. “And my congratulations to you, Tony, for your shrewd choice of captains! I have heard good reports of Kateralbin, obviously, but also of Keynes. Is he here? I should like to speak with him, too.”

  Everyone watched while Duncan found Butch and congratulated him with the same effusion he had used toward Crispin. Then the sublieutenant-marshal moved on to the next man. It became apparent that he was making a point of speaking individually with every officer in the room. The knot in Crispin’s stomach loosened. He even felt a touch of pride. Duncan had approached him first! That had to be a mark of honor.

  It took the best part of an hour for the sublieutenant-marshal to make the rounds of everyone in the club, including the bargirls. By the time Duncan and Vichuisse could be seen retiring to a corner, Crispin was enjoying his third whiskey and soda, and paying less attention to the political undercurrents of the party than before. But all the same, he cringed when he saw Vichuisse practically bobbing up and down before the sublieutenant-marshal. It was obvious that Duncan was criticizing Vichuisse for his role in Eastre’s death. But still. He has no sense of self-respect! Crispin thought in disgust, not for the first time.

  He slumped back in his armchair and took a long swig of liquor. No one seemed to hold Vichuisse against him, or against Butch, Emthraze, or Burns; but he could not escape the feeling that in shaming himself, Vichuisse shamed his captains, too.

  The officers occupying the circle of armchairs they had drawn up were arguing, hotly and illogically, over the merits of screamers from different local factories. Captain Emthraze, who had been hovering near Crispin most of the evening, leaned toward him and said in an undertone, “That was quite a dressing-down Duncan gave him!”

  “I couldn’t hear. How do you know?”

  “Oh, I know Duncan! He doesn’t mince his words. But on the other hand, I don’t know Vichuisse. He was your captain; you’re far more familiar with his ways than Burns or Salemantle or I. What do you think?”

  “Of Vichuisse?”

  “Mmm.”

  Crispin narrowed his eyes at Emthraze. The intelligent dark face puckered with earnestness. Emthraze didn’t look as if he were trying to trap Crispin. But if he wasn’t, what did he want? A southerner (so it was said) from an ancient, molding aristocratic house, Emthraze had so far joined in the carousal with less gusto than the rest. In flight, he was a solid team player, lacking the competitiveness which had been Eastre’s downfall. If anyone around here knew about keeping his mouth shut, it would be Emthraze.

  And yet-

  Crispin’s loyalty to Vichuisse was stronger than he had known. It swayed him.

  “Why don’t you ask Keynes? He’s over there.” Crispin jerked a thumb at the corner where Butch sat nursing a drink in silence.

  “We’ve already asked him. He seems perfectly reliable.” And weak-spirited, said the rueful smile on Emthraze’s face. “It’s you who hasn’t committed one way or the other.”

  One way or the other? “What’s that supposed to mean?” Emthraze just smiled.

  “What did Keynes say then?” Crispin tried.

  “We are all in agreement.”

  Crispin was silent. Matters political had to be communicated through manner and deference (or lack of it), not words. Anything else would have been suicide. That, of course, was why Emthraze was being so vague. But it all came down to politics in the end. The rest of the captains were banging their fists good-humoredly on their armchairs as they argued. The Wraith girls behind the bar looked exhausted. The air was sour with smoke. Emthraze regarded him with serious brown eyes.

  In his drunken state Crispin knew it would be very easy to commit himself to words he would regret later. He took a sip of his drink. “Let me ask you—what did you think of our last commandant? Elliott?”

  “Oh, Elliott... ” Emthraze shook his head. “No one could compare to him. His loss—a tragedy.” He seemed to mean it. “We were all certain Burns would get the appointment, but then... ” He let the sentence hang.

  “Burns seems capable enough,” Crispin said. “I haven’t really spoken to him. Not man to man.”

  And what can they do about Vichuisse now he’s got the commandancy? Crispin thought. Nothing. Why don’t they concentrate on scheming against the lizards, not each other? Honestly, sometimes I wish I was in the Kirekuni army—at least, according to Mickey, they respect their superiors! He drained his glass.

  “He’s appropriately named,” Emthraze said. “Burns, that is. D’you know why?”

  Flames...

  “If he’s that teed off by not getting a promotion, I daresay he didn’t deserve one in the first place,” Crispin said. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

/>   “We wouldn’t have cared which of us got the promotion,” Emthraze called softly after him. “But when it’s a question of our men’s lives, and influence, not competence, determines the hierarchy, one has to wonder if—” Emthraze broke off, as if he realized that he was getting dangerously close to treason and that people could hear. “Kateralbin, just talk to Burns! I strongly suggest it.”

  “Tomorrow, all right?” Crispin called over his shoulder. Without giving Emthraze a chance to reply, he circled the water-dripping sculpture to the corner where Butch sat alone.

  Butch looked up. Even in the half-light, Crispin could see his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Come on.”

  Butch didn’t move. Crispin took his arms and pulled him to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this fancy-ass backbiting. Enough. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Nor do I,” Butch said wonderingly.

  “Let’s get shot of this dump.”

  They made their good nights and left the Club; by common consent, they wandered out of headquarters. Cerelon after curfew was a miserable sight. The night was cold even for Jevanary, and drizzly. A fetid mist clouded the moonlight. Lacking any normalizing agency such as a comptroller’s office, Cerelon knew nothing of plumbing, running water, gas, or street cleaning. Unpaved and badly littered, the streets were really just twisting routes between the habitations which, over time, had encrusted the land between the Army HQ, the QAF HQ, the depots, and the metalworks. Few of them were wide enough to take a jeep. When they were on duty, soldiers stuck to the main thoroughfare. Off duty, they stole to the civil sectors like ferrets to a rabbit warren. The houses here were shabby, dark, and uninhabited-looking. A flash of light as a door was opened, or a burst of laughter from behind blackout shutters, betrayed the fact that Cerelon was packed as full of people as a Kingsburg slum. When Crispin drove through the city in daylight with Lennox, he had been struck by the grim tension in the air. It had taken him a few minutes to understand that there were no children in Cerelon. No one loitered, no one played in the gutters. Men and women scurried warily about their business, dead-eyed as Wraiths in Shadowtown. But even in Shadowtowns there were children. Cerelon had its Wraiths, of course, thousands of them; but except for a few madams, they did not live in the Ferupian sector. They had their own shantytowns on the outskirts. Like the Ferupians, their business was to bleed the soldiers of their temp pay. One had to wonder, Crispin thought as he and Butch passed a young Wraith woman and a private, arm in arm, where all the pay the soldiers frittered away went.