The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  But not yet, Queen, not yet!

  He flew close to the ground, jinking through lulls and blasts as the wind rushed over the hills, keeping an eye on the reflectors. The sky was as good as empty—a Ferupian patrol several miles to the north, nothing to worry about. From time to time, flames leapt up, orange and flickering, from hollows on the ground or from around the boles of trees. He was used to them—they came whenever he found himself alone—and he concentrated on ignoring them. The smell of open air braced him. Blowing from the battle lines, the wind was so cold it was spicy.

  The noon patrol hadn’t yet returned, and the runway was clear when he landed at Sarehole in the middle of the afternoon. No damage seemed to have been done to the base while he was gone. Had it only been one day? Seemed like forever. A few pilots were up and about. They greeted him with delighted salutations.

  He had gained his men’s liking as Vichuisse had never been able to. That in itself was a victory, he thought as he listened to his lieutenants’ reports later, sipping a brandy, keeping his counsel. Jones, Taft, Carnation, Kimble, and Hammersmith were all first-rate officers, and they trusted him.

  But he had half-consciously come to accept what Burns had said: that his squadron, like Butch’s and Emthraze’s, like the late Eastre’s, could never live up to potential under their current command. Burns’s prognosis seemed truer yet when Crispin learned that Lieutenant Taft had lost two of his men, and sustained damage to his own Gorgonette, in an offensive mission he’d flown in conjunction with a crew of Vichuisse’s yesterday.

  From rude darkness the hero rose; amid songs of praise, destiny chose him; in wind and dust, his three-foot sword, armor donned for the altars of the land; wings to his father, pure in civil virtue ...

  —Tu Fu

  The Shadow of the Waxwing

  23 Marout 1896 A.D. The Raw: the Kirekuni front lines: 1,500 feet

  Orange fire arched through the air, crossing and recrossing the lurid rainbows of screamers. The gusty Marout wind pulled the arcs out of shape, warping them ragged. Among them, KE’s and Gorgonettes lumbered and lifted like heavy sea beasts chasing each other through a grove of thread-fine seaweed. Death enacted its ribbon show on its own, a thousand feet above the Kirekuni Raw; the aircraft merely happened to have stumbled into the midst of it.

  Or that, at least, was how it looked to Crispin from 1,500 feet. He had made his second kill of the day and he was circling above the dogfight, out of range of the ground fire, catching his breath, trying to see who was down, who missing. The two flights of KE-111s and 122s that had intercepted Vichuisse’s strike force—though reduced from eighteen craft to twelve—darted about so fast that they seemed twice as many. But the odds were on their side. And the sky was clear. Kirekuni backups weren’t pouring out of every corner of the compass, as they usually did when the enemy encroached even a half mile into their airspace. The simultaneous attacks north and south of here must have them on the hop.

  The bunkers behind the Kirekuni lines were cracked open, burning. Antlike figures rushed to and fro on the ground. Screamers that had fallen from the air chased them like ravenous fireflies.

  Crispin took Princess Anuei down into the action, yelling, his voice lost in the wind. Triumph—all too rare a feeling—surged through him.

  It was the role of QAF officers to make their men believe every mission was the one which would decide the war. Morale was a function of hype. But work as Crispin and the rest might, the regulars had got wind of the fact that this was an unusually important strike. Last week, the infantry had lost a whole mile of ground in a defeat of unprecedented dimensions. Something had to be done to keep the rout from snowballing. The specter of losing Cerelon’s Shadowtown—everyone’s nightmare for fifty years—loomed large and solid. If Ferupe lost Cerelon, it lost the metalworks, which would probably mean the loss of the northern Raw... And that, in turn, could mean the loss of the war.

  Night-long closet sessions between QAF and Army high-ups had resulted, among other things, in this mission: two crews each of Vichuisse’s, Crispin’s, Eastre’s replacement Matheson’s, and Burns’s squadrons joining forces to stage an all-out attack on the section of the Kirekuni battle lines which the Queen’s infantry hoped to overwhelm that night. To the north and south, Lennox and Hawthorne’s men were mirroring their attack.

  Crispin circled into the fiery gap where he’d last seen Jones. Screamer ports open, he roared straight at a KE-111 and pulled up at the last moment. In his rear sights the lizard stalled and plunged.

  Easy as scalding babies.

  He was Princess Anuei. He was her daemon. He was screaming. He was consciousness divided in twelve—single-mindedly pursuing his own prey, and at the same time keeping an eye on every man of his and Jones’s crews. Thank the Queen, none of them had been lost. Yet. He was flying. He could not have said how many minutes it was until he caught a glimpse of a signal in the corner of his eye. He twisted. It was Vichuisse’s lieutenant, Morton, performing the left-right-home. What?

  Others had noticed, too. The flowing moment eddied into confusion. To port, a man of Burns’s crew, caught off guard, was entangled in orange fire.

  High and to the east, Vichuisse’s Cerdres 500 looped the loop determinedly.

  Obey orders!

  It was so deeply ingrained that they had to do it even though the orders made no sense. The battle was by no means over. Kirekunis remained alive in the air and on the ground. The strike force had the odds in their favor—but their commandant wanted them to run for home, now.

  Crispin’s blood burned. Bastard deserves everything Burns has planned for him! he thought furiously.

  Obey orders! But he had to make a token show of defiance—foolhardy though it might be. He signaled his crew and Jones’s and took them down for a last pass over the lines. Burns picked up the cue and followed with his ten remaining kites. One after another, moving too fast to be caught in the feeble ground fire, they emptied their screamer magazines into the disarrayed Kirekuni infantry. Finally they followed the rest of the strike force into the east.

  The Cerdres 500 was a silver glint in the distance. Behind it, the wedges of Gorgonettes and Killer B-99s straggled out for miles. A good many of them, Crispin saw, had been damaged to the point where they were scarcely aloft. Burns’s Bee was wobbling badly, its rudder broken half-off. Matheson, Eastre’s successor, was gone. If a captain survived his initial dunking in the deep waters of combat, then he learned how to swim. Matheson, apparently, hadn’t even been able to tread water. Perhaps Vichuisse had been right, after all, to pull out. But still—

  In Crispin’s reflectors, the surviving Kirekunis fled into the massed clouds on the western horizon. Seven KEs. Seven enemies who should have died today. They were strung far apart, probably suspecting a pincer maneuver, unable to believe they had been allowed to escape, seven tiny monoplanes like insects against the gigantic violet cumulonimbus that had threatened storm all day.

  A dozen pilots of other squadrons who judged their planes too badly damaged to make it home, Burns among them, set down at Sarehole. After four months, Crispin was accustomed to this use of his base. He rattled off orders for accommodations to be made in the hangars without even thinking about it. Yet as he inspected the bullet holes in the wings of his men’s kites, and soothed the trembling daemons with calm, a disconnected part of his mind wondered if Burns had exaggerated the damage to his plane in order to land at Sarehole and have another go at convincing Crispin to “commit.”

  If so, he had chosen his moment well! Crispin had never been angrier with Vichuisse. Only his knowledge of Burns’s essential sneakiness made him cautious. When Crispin first met the Wraith-blooded captain, he’d thought him as honest as the day was long. Now that he knew him better—and was party to his and Emthraze’s deadly serious scheme against their commandant—he understood that although Burns did embody the virtues cherished by the QAF, honesty, bravery, patriotism, and a fighting spirit, there was not an ounce of traditional morali
ty in his makeup.

  The tension in the mess that evening was as electric as the storm-heavy air. Vichuisse’s baseless decision to pull out had cheated the pilots of the catharsis of victory or defeat that usually followed an engagement. Aggression uglified their voices. Sitting at the captain’s table, Crispin reached up to rub his neck. His body was rigid with tension. Usually when he landed after a battle he was shaking so badly he couldn’t light a cigarette; tonight he was in perfect control of his limbs, but he felt as if he were about to explode. When he opened his mouth he was not sure at any point what was going to come out—harmless small talk or a vicious indictment of the commandant. It wasn’t the first time in his two and a half years of flying with Vichuisse that such bizarre things had happened. And near-catastrophes had become far more common since they moved to Salzeim.

  The night was high and windy and dark when Crispin and Burns finally left the mess. Not a sliver of moon or one star showed through the clouds. “Something’s got to be done,” Burns said furiously, aloud. “We’ve got to act! Talk can’t avert farces like this! Talk can’t avenge Matheson! Something’s got to be done!”

  “Vichuisse didn’t kill Matheson,” Crispin said, though he had no particular desire to defend their commandant. “Man just wasn’t good enough to cut it.”

  Burns snorted. “Think you? He deliberately assigned him first place in the attack. That’s as good as telling a green captain to commit suicide.”

  “All the evidence in the world isn’t going to get him indicted. Don’t bother.”

  “Fuck that! How can you not be angry?” Lines of weariness showed on the Wraith half-breed’s face as he lit a Belize cigarette. The wind blew several lucifers out and he cursed explosively before succeeding on the fourth try.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Crispin said.

  “Let’s go to your quarters and get drunk!”

  “You want to talk treason with my men listening through the walls?”

  Burns started to retort angrily, but then he shook his head. Side by side, they walked away from the mess hall, between the hangars where chinks of light around the big doors told them that 130 Squadron’s riggers were working overtime on the damaged kites, into the grassy open. Behind them, the base lay invisible in the night, blacked out. The ground was wet, treacherous. Clods gave way to muddy sinkholes.

  “Been talking to Sade,” Burns said now in a confiding undertone. “Been talking to Lennox. I got an audience with Duncan last time I was in Cerelon. He gave us the go-ahead. Not in so many words of course. But what it comes down to is, even if they know what happened, even if someone, though I can’t imagine who, kicks up a fuss—Thraxsson won’t beef. Duncan promised me that.”

  “You trust him?”

  Burns was silent for a moment. “He’s a bit too good to be true, isn’t he?” he said at last. “But we don’t have much choice.”

  We. Us. The unspoken assumption of a shared purpose irked Crispin, although it should not have. “Why do you keep saying we?”

  “I thought you were with us! Shit!”

  “Look, of course I’m with you! I trusted you before you trusted me, remember?”

  “The fuck is your problem then?”

  “My question is, exactly who is we? Now that Matheson’s gone, and Figueroa, is it just you, me, Keynes, and Emthraze? And who are we to take the law into our own hands?” Crispin had to force out the rational objection: the red beast wanted Vichuisse’s blood, wanted him to burn. Three lieutenants had died since Crispin took over 130 Squadron—all of them flying with Vichuisse when they went down. Taft. Kimble. Hammersmith. Crispin missed them sorely, but that wasn’t the real reason he wished Vichuisse erased from the world. Three years of compelled gratitude and swallowed indignity could not find expression in words.

  “Look,” Burns said. “What good is the law if it gives us a commandant like him? The law is corrupt! The law is made in Kingsburg! This is war—and in war the insulted strike back! That’s what it’s all about! Would you rather have the law or your life? Because that’s what it’s going to come to sooner or later.” He paused, then said more softly: “And besides, what has any Ferupian law ever done for you, Lamaroon?”

  So that was the shape of it! Crispin had suspected it, but knowing nothing of Burns’s past, had never asked. “If it comes to that,” he said, “what has the law ever done for you, Wraith?”

  “Ohhh,” Burns said, his voice soft and terrifying the way Jacithrew Humdroner’s had been when he called his daemons. “I’m not going to forget that.” He made a hissing noise that could have been laughter, or not. “You’d better believe I won’t forget that.”

  Crispin shrugged. It was what he had suspected. But what he wondered now was whether Burns had inherited that daemon-calling gift from one of his parents; Crispin had assumed he had it, and that that was why he’d survived so long in combat, but now he doubted it was true. Ferupian law would in one way or another have prevented a man with that gift, (Orpaan’s gift, Jacithrew’s gift, the trickster woman’s gift a hundred times distilled) from getting anywhere near a QAF captaincy. If they had known about Crispin’s resistance to gravity—which gave him a tiny but appreciable edge in combat, in that he could make up the weight with screamers—he probably would not have got his captaincy, either. He probably wouldn’t even have got his wings. Princess Anuei.

  They came to one of the small, sluggish streams that trickled across the expanses of the Raw. The water gurgled between grassy banks, as black as the sky, gleaming only slightly. Burns lit another cigarette. The wind blew the smoke into Crispin’s face. “Queen, I wish we hadn’t lost Matheson,” Burns exploded. “He’d agreed to do it. Did you know that? I persuaded him. Sure, the giggling little fool would have agreed to anything in order to get connections—if Vichuisse had asked him to assassinate me, he would’ve agreed just as fast, I bet—stupid snot just wanted to be in with someone so he’d make commandant—but no matter! He’d agreed! And then he has to go and fucking die on me!”

  “Your persuasive powers are admirable,” Crispin said drily. The sarcasm was lost on Burns, who was in full flow.

  “I’d do it myself, I could even have done it today, and believe me I was burning to, but too many of those regulars didn’t have a clue, they would’ve reported me faster than you can say toady. And it’s not as if I’ll have another chance. Vichuisse never assigns me to fly with him, I wouldn’t even have been on the strike force today if he had drawn up the lists, but Thraxsson did it at HQ because of this situation we’re in. Vichuisse must have been shitting his pants! He isn’t stupid, he knows something’s afoot, and he guesses it has to do with me, because I don’t pretend to like him—I’ve never been any good at that kind of fakery—”

  “Too fucking true!”

  “Now you—he likes you—”

  Crispin closed his eyes. He dug his nails into his palms.

  “I’ve never understood that.” Burns took a deep drag on his cigarette and cocked his head inquiringly. “Were you? At one point?”

  “No! Queen, no!” Crispin spat into the stream, nauseated by the very idea.

  “No need to jump down my throat. I’ve never seen you with a girl.”

  “That’s because there was only ever one for me, and she’s dead.”

  Cris, I’m not happy here! Please come and get me! I can’t believe you’ve forgotten about me... For a moment the howling night rang with her voice. In the west, thunder growled like rocks moving.

  “I’m sorry,” Burns said.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “And you haven’t since?” Burns laughed. “Queen.”

  For some reason, though it had nothing to do with the question, Crispin thought of the night he had spent at Air Base XV, the night he and Butch had sworn eternal friendship. Try as he might to forget it in the intervening months, it kept popping back into memory at the oddest moments. That night had been the beginning of the end of their friendship. He regretted Butch right now more tha
n ever.

  “Damn! You’ve got harder balls than I do!” Burns laughed so hard he coughed. He must have noticed Crispin’s silence then, for he stopped and said in a completely different tone, “So? Are you willing?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, tch, tch, your gutter mind!” Burns laughed again, but it was gentle. “You youngsters! If only I weren’t so fucking transparent to him, I’d do it myself. I’ve always hated that about myself: that I can’t hide my thoughts. Sade Emthraze is the same, or he would do it, too. But he suspects us both. It’s got to be you or Keynes. You were his men, he won’t see it coming until he’s being eaten alive by your screamers. And though I hate to admit it, both of you are more popular with your squadrons than Sade and me are with ours. You’ll have a better chance of swearing them to silence.”

  “Have you asked Butch?” Crispin stared at the stream. How could water so black be so visibly in motion? Lightning flashed far to the west. The wind skirled a few drops of rain into their faces.

  Burns made an “ugh” noise and pulled his muffler up round his ears. “Yes. But he’s... I’m sorry, Crispin. But he’s a liver lily. His teeth chattered—I swear to the Queen he nearly jumped out of his skin when I asked. Even if we did manage to pressure him into it, he’d probably fuck up or back down at the last minute and create a shambles we’d never hear the last of. It’s got to be you. I truly am sorry.”

  “I... I can’t.” Embarrassment at his own weakness heated Crispin’s face. He looked full at Burns. “It’s my luck. I’m afraid—David—if it turns—”

  Even in the darkness, he could see the harsh lines appearing oh Burns’s face. “I never took you for a coward!”

  Shame and pride filled Crispin. He knew exactly what Burns was doing, and yet he could not resist. Burns embodied the pragmatic, diplomatically skilled, and yet hot-blooded ideal of a QAF officer, where Vichuisse embodied the reality: the death of the soul, paranoia, the foolish aristocrat’s pride, the incompetence and stubbornness that had kept this war dragging out and dragging and dragging well beyond its allotted life span. Crispin wanted to kill Vichuisse, wanted to see him spiral down out of control into no-man’s-land. And Burns knew that.