A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  So day one, they’d had a party instead. Drinks all around. Without even unpacking, they’d blown down some trees with shaped charges made from unscrewed bomb heads and fusing wire, doused them with kerosene and lit them on fire. They’d mixed ethanol from the medical supplies with bottled water and orange drink powder and poured it into tin cups and pretended they were roughing it while the leaping fires turned midnight to noon for a hundred yards in every direction. They’d posted no security. The rifles had been mounded up in a stack, unfired. They hadn’t even uncrated the sidearms. It was a lark. A picnic. That’d been a good night, Ted recalled. Nothing yet had gone wrong. He’d laughed a lot. Slapped the backs of his young murderers. Pissed into the embers of the fire when it’d burned low. They slept as though they’d just invaded Eden and found it lacking snakes.

  But everything since then had been falling back—retreat disguised as strategic maneuvering. They’d been given (granted, like it was a gift to be handed down) that one day to acclimate and then a heavy lifter had come down, unannounced, from parking orbit—spinning down through the rapidly graying atmosphere like some nightmare insect, steel legs twitching and undulating along the empty curve of its belly. It’d put a hump on all their lightweight gear, waited ten minutes for everyone to load into another cramped troop compartment—jammed in among the huge containers of aviation fuel, construction supplies, and proscribed electronics—then moved them from the wrong side of the mountains, across the moors, across a river, onto a backwater lowland plain and over the somewhat-abbreviated horizon from two walled cities, much smaller than the cities on the coast, that seemed to be the focal points of aggression in the area. Ted had gotten on the blower and asked what the fuck was going on—why they were being moved so far away from the good fight and stuck out in the boonies.

  “Orders, sir,” said the pilot of the lifter. “Just doing what I’m told. I suggest you shut up and enjoy the ride, sir.”

  Eight days to dig in. They’d cut airstrips in historical formation—a lopsided triangle mown into the tough, alien grasses, flattened by earthmovers from Cavalier Mechanics. Cavalier was another mercenary company, a military contractor that specialized in moving things and wrecking things and building other things in their place. They’d been contracted by the company prior to arrival and paid by Eddie Lucas, Flyboy Inc.’s Man on Iaxo, out of a private stock of hard currency he held. Paper money was worthless. Promissory notes were worse. But Fast Eddie paid in gold—everyone’s favorite color.

  After that, vital structures had gone up. Machinery had gone in. Tent lines had been pegged out. The Junholdt was long gone and they were cut off—ninety days at least until their next supply drop and the first possible ride out if, for some reason, everything went terribly wrong. It’d taken two days for their own mechanics and flight engineers to assemble the first half-dozen planes once the longhouse was bolted together and raised. One afternoon for test flights. One crash. No injuries.

  On the tenth day, Connelly (who actually worked for Eastbourne Services Group, Proxima, though it was tough to tell) had presented himself at the nascent airfield, along with Antoinne Durba and Marie, two of his other company commanders, and a handful of his indigenous officers. Connelly had been decked out in native drag: armored skirt, necklaces of chicken bones, breastplate like the seat of a wicker chair. He had a long beard that he wore tied off like links of sausage, a drooping mustache the color of rust, and had his head mostly shaved. Gone bamboo, totally, and Ted had laughed right at him, not caring a damn who he was.

  Durba wore the wreck of a military uniform, patched and tattered. Marie had been lovely, tall and narrow, with long hair blowing out behind her in a breeze, one blind eye whitened like milk, and an old scar that cupped the sharp plane of one cheekbone.

  That day was the first time that Ted had seen one of the natives up close. They were tall, dirty, lumpy, furred with something that wasn’t really fur but more like the frayed ends of an old rug, matted and overlapping, in colors from ashy gray to shit brown. Their faces appeared dumb and slow and thick, more delicately hairy, with large, heavy heads like slugs of iron pushed down into their sloping shoulders and small eyes set too far apart. Their backs curved oddly, making them appear always hunched, though, at the time, Ted had mistaken this for the exhaustion of the march. In the cups of their shoulders, the points of their elbows, the wings of their tilted hips, you could see the rubbed, bare skin beneath the fur—or not skin, exactly, but something like scales. Plates. The hair all grew from the loose edges of these, and it made Ted think of something he knew: that fingernails were really made of hair, all stuck together.

  After that, he couldn’t think of anything but that they were talking monsters covered in shredding fingernails. When one of them (a lieutenant, Connelly had said, without the slightest hint of humor) extended a hand for an awkward shake (a thing which, it was plain, was a learned response, uncommon and unfamiliar), Ted had to force himself to take the offered appendage. Three fingers and a thumb, all of them too long. When he’d touched it, the thing’s hand was so hot it made him ache. For a day afterward, his fingers smelled like he’d been scratching an old dog—the stink of the aliens warm and soupy and thick.

  There’d been other officers there. A representative from Applied Outcomes, another from Cavalier, another from Palas Risk Management. It’d been arranged, he was made to understand—a friendly welcome to the neighborhood by those already doing business there and a dignified exchange of radio frequencies and call signs. Something about it made Ted think of John Company middle managers standing deep in the bush in their mildewed broadcloth suits and pith helmets, trading business cards gone limp in the wet, heavy air.

  Like a good manager, Ted had memorized names and faces. He’d shaken hands and mouthed meaningless words about cooperation and mutual concern, showed his guests to a flattened patch of grass in the infield where, eventually, the field house would rise, and then excused himself as quickly as he could, sniffing his fingers as he went. It didn’t escape his notice that most of the other professionals shied away from Connelly and his officers, his natives. That they seemed to walk on different earth and breathe different air.

  The tight-beam FTL relay had gone live late that same night, and while the commanders and liaisons from all the local merc companies slept rough in the weed-choked infield, Ted had his first conversation with Flyboy corporate, received his standing orders and, come morning, had politely kicked all the other contractors off his field with the explanation that any further combined ops would be planned through the Flyboy Inc. strategic services department. There was a number, a coordinate set. Ted had handed it around as a form of good-bye.

  Most of the men had shrugged. Veterans, they knew how corporate wars were fought and understood the clean, distant appeal of office chairs, whiteboards, boardroom politics and proper hierarchies of command. No one ever died of paperwork.

  Back in his tent, Ted flicked a corner of the orders on his desk with a clean, trimmed fingernail.

  On that morning two years ago, while the other men were gathering up their things and their escorts, Connelly had tried to protest. Standing his ground with his aliens behind him, he’d tried to explain something that Ted wasn’t hearing—so new yet to this place that he hadn’t grown the necessary ears.

  “I have my orders, gentlemen,” he’d said, and showed them, as they say, the door.

  That had been the first of his serious mistakes. Ted understood that now. But corporate math at the time had predicted completion and cleanup of the Iaxo contract, with minimal to no casualties, at one year, Zulu time. They were here to put down an insurrection, to exploit the ancient enmities of an indigenous, tribal society to aid in the securing of 110 million acres of mixed terrain, and to kill the hell out of one group of natives (called the Lassateirra faction, though Ted didn’t know whether that was what they called themselves or what they were being called by those who prepared the paperwork) so that other, different kinds of mercenarie
s and widow-makers (lawyers, mostly, like Eddie) could follow on after them and negotiate with the other, surviving group (called the Akaveen Ctirad), who were apparently less hostile to the notion of handing over vast swaths of their land to developers who would settle it, clear-cut it, mine it raw, and just generally ass-rape the fuck out of it because Iaxo was a vaguely Earthlike planet and while such things weren’t exactly rare, they were still extraordinarily valuable. Too valuable to leave to a bunch of fingernail monsters, that was for sure. A bunch of walking rag rugs with pointed sticks and body odor.

  Considering all their advantages—their ten-century technological leap on the locals, the logistical support of a distant and powerful private military company, and negotiated aid from several other similar outfits already on the ground—a year had seemed a reasonable strategic assessment to Ted at the time. Even if his planes were museum replicas of Spads and Sopwith Camels being flown by men more accustomed to vacuum fighters and modern strike aircraft, he had the only air force for a million miles in any direction. Flyboy was going to make out well. Ted would collect a nice paycheck and bonus for making a quick and clean job of this place. A clock had been started, with a scheduled pickup in 8,760 hours, as measured in London, Earth, where the company kept their home office.

  Ted had set a clock of his own and had placed it proudly on the bedside table in his tent. It’d been the last thing he’d done before going to bed that night, putting 8,500 hours and change on the display and setting it to count down. He’d felt good about things. Strong.

  The two walled cities that straddled the river had been taken in short order, soon after Flyboy’s arrival in the area, and everything had looked good. The fighting had been almost comically one-sided and, on the ground, the pilots amused themselves with impressions of the combat formations of the enemy—every one of them involving turning one’s back and running as fast as possible away. On the night that Riverbend had been taken, the local mercs—the foot-sloggers and tin-hats, leading their companies of Akaveen indigs—had celebrated and accidentally burned half of it to the ground. Ted’s pilots had seen the smoke and flames from the air, thought it a counterattack, and nearly bombed the whole lot of them. Everyone had a good laugh about it the next morning, but walking the new front—boots scuffing broken cobblestones, pacing the smashed reaches of the walls along the river that had been breached by Flyboy bombs, and stepping over shattered, burnt bodies that already smelled worse in death than they had in life—Ted had seen many of the victorious merc infantry commanders down by the water scrubbing blood and hair off their body armor and greatcoats, so had always wondered how accidental that fire had really been.

  The war had moved up to the high moors—the Sispetain moors, in the language of the fingernail monsters. After almost a year, just when Ted’s clock had been tickling zero, it’d advanced over the foothills until the backside of the mountains they’d seen on insertion had been in sight. His pilots had flown and fought and performed beautifully—all early timidity or anxiousness gone. It was a job and they were the men to do it. Orders came in. Orders were executed. Everyone ate steaks for dinner, sucked fire, and shit high explosives. In that first year, Ted lost three men, but not one of them to combat. There’d been a mechanic who’d had an accident (a plane had fallen on him). Another—Gottlieb, was that his name?—had caught some kind of weird infection that’d taken him down in a day and left him comatose and on a permanent antibiotic drip. And one of the controllers had drank himself half to death and just plain lost his shit. All three had been extracted by the company. All three had been alive when they’d left and probably still were today. It was strange, but Ted couldn’t remember any of them. Not really. Maybe it was because none of them were pilots. Ted’s pilots had been inviolate. Untouchable.

  Sitting in his tent in the dark, with his eyes closed, his lamps extinguished, Ted thought hard about the men who’d been shipped home. One of them might’ve been called William, he thought. Or Williams. He just wasn’t sure.

  A year. They’d been on track to almost making the deadline. Coming really close. Within weeks, Ted remembered thinking at the time, and had made similar promises to corporate—speaking through cutouts, to men who reported to other men who reported to other men.

  The moors, where they rose and brushed against the feet of the mountains, were the last big part of the map that’d needed to be pacified before pushing on to the cities of the coast with no enemies left at their backs. The thinking was that with one last push—a combined operation utilizing all available forces in the area—the enemy could be broken there, out in the open, in the fields where the slaughter would be extraordinary.

  And that was the way things had been going right up until they’d inexplicably turned and gone the other. Marie had died on the moors. Connelly lost more of his indigs than could be counted. Twenty human officers had gone out one night from the Palas FOB with a thousand native troops on a quick march to a collapsing flank position and just disappeared—none of them ever seen again. Skirmishers from Applied Outcomes would report armies massing, and by the time main body troops could be brought to position, the armies would’ve vanished and it would be nothing but ambush after ambush for miles of hard walking.

  Native troops defected in the night, abandoning their lines, then leading the enemy back through the holes they’d created by their absence; leading them unerringly and silently to the bodies of their sleeping friends who would only wake when the blades were going into their skulls, at a weak point in the bone structure between the eyes. Wherever the Akaveen lines of advance were weakest, the path most narrow, Lassateirra indigs would seem to rise from the ugly ground to smash through the ranks. They came from behind, from below, from God only knew where. More than one human officer, stepping out a pace into the dark for a piss or a breath free of the stink of his own native troops, would be found, five minutes or an hour later, with his throat cut, his own dick in his mouth, and when engineers from Cavalier would try to build earthworks of loam and sod, they’d find the earth already choked with bones no matter where they dug. What had been a fight against a few became a war against thousands, tens of thousands, until no square foot of the high moors felt safe that wasn’t actively burning or already stacked with the dead.

  Things got spooky. Sispetain became like a curse word, something that no one wanted to say out loud. Pieces of it took on an almost animate malice and so were given names. Diller’s Cut, the Gap, Cadillac Ridge, the Rockpile—all marks on the corporate maps, renamed by the men who killed and died there because their original, alien names were too long or ridiculous or unpronounceable.

  Even the ground seemed angry and would open like a mouth in places for no good reason and swallow men whole. In the aftermath, no one had been exactly sure how it’d happened—the losing. The math had all been so solid. On paper, everyone involved should’ve already been at home, drinking whiskey and polishing their medals.

  There was a saying, coined by men supposedly much smarter than Ted Prinzi, which said that every war looked perfect on paper but that true leadership was knowing what to do when your war moved off paper, out of the boardroom, and down into the mud. That was what Connelly had said to him on that night they’d first met, after the exchange of pleasantries, before Ted had kicked everyone out.

  “Look,” he’d said. “You have your orders.”

  “I have my orders.”

  “But I have to tell you this, Commander. There’s this saying. Not mine, but I like it. And it says that while wars might be planned on paper, they are all fought down in the mud. Do you know this saying?”

  “Not my war.”

  “What?”

  “Not. My. War,” Ted had repeated slowly, and jerked a thumb up into the air. “I don’t fight in the mud.”

  Connelly had shaken his head. “You’re not understanding me. What I mean is, everything looks very nice on paper, but those papers were not written on Iaxo. This place… I don’t want to worry you or anything. I’m
not trying to…” He’d struggled for just the right words, pressing his tongue against his teeth and grunting something that might have been alien talk and might’ve just been frustration. “You’re going to die here thinking like that. Leadership, this saying says, is knowing what to do when your war moves off the paper and down into the mud. And we are all here now. In the mud.”

  “Not me, friend,” Ted had said. “That’s why God invented airplanes.”

  In his tent, Ted laid his hand flat over the folded paper on his table. He opened his eyes and watched his own hand, as if not entirely sure what it was going to do. Whether it was going to crumple the orders, leave them, open them.

  People said all sorts of things about Connelly. Bad things. Some of them probably true. Ted said lots of bad things about Connelly, too. He’d called the man every name there was. Held him up in his own head like an avatar—the embodiment of the thing he did not ever want to become.

  The clock on Ted’s bedside table now read -8,041 hours. He thought about resetting it to zero, starting a new kind of countdown, but didn’t have the energy. He was so tired.

  Thinking back, Ted wished he knew who’d made up that saying in the first place, about the papers and the mud. He wanted to find the man who’d first said that and kill him right fucking dead.

  Carter had left the tent and Cat behind and drank his bottle walking now. He listened to the night sounds: the rustle of tent canvas moving in the frigid breeze, the scrape and jingle of hoodoo charms hung around the neck of an indig sentry pacing his watch, footsteps crunching in the frozen grass, and the snort of a native post horse, the animal hitched and asleep on all six of its feet.