A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Everything on Iaxo except the indigs had too many feet by some multiple of two. It was another reason why Carter didn’t like it here. Not a big one, but a reason. He took a swallow from the bottle and spit between his teeth.

  It was cold. Even in all his gear, it was cold. What he wanted was another cigarette, but there were none. He’d smoked the last of his allotment weeks ago, had won a few more gambling, then smoked those, too. The indigs all smoked stubby pipes filled with a thick, mossy black flora cut with wood shavings for flavor. It made them weird if they smoked enough of it. Weirder than normal. And lit, the mixture smelled like cedar and tasted of burning hair. Carter had tried it, of course. Everyone had. It did nothing but make him sick.

  Ted apparently had a stash of cigarettes, and Carter considered trying to find them, steal them, blame it on the natives. He contented himself by stoking the inner furnace with another pull from Fenn’s bottle instead and turning up his collar around his ears. He thought about how much of a man’s life is determined by what terrible things he chooses not to do.

  He walked south through darkness, making for the dim glow of the mess and the close-cut grass of the airfield, stepping finally off the quarter line and onto the clipped fringe of A strip. He crossed at a run out of habit, reflexively glancing skyward and listening for the grumble of a descending engine cycling down. There were lights burning in the longhouse. In the infield, generators were chugging. Once he was clear of the strip and onto the opposite apron, he slowed again, childishly kicking his toes at the frozen ground with each step, stalling as best he could while still, technically, making his way to where his presence was required.

  On the field, Fenn was organizing the unloading of the drop as best as such a thing could be organized. He’d made sure no one had been crushed by the containers coming in, had stood amid the close-pressed mass of men while they’d watched the big boxes steaming, throwing off residual heat and warming them like an invisible fire. When they were cool enough to be cracked, he’d prepared an expedition to the machine shop to fetch generators and lights and pry bars and mallets—making sure that the men were supplied with enough drink to make it there and back safely. They had, but it’d taken them almost a half hour to stagger a couple hundred yards and come back again. And they’d lost at least two men in the process who wouldn’t be found again until morning because war was hell even in the quietest of moments.

  Back in the field house, the boys had all been drinking party liquor made from dried alien fruit and antifreeze, boiled, condensed, and dripped through gas mask filters. Before Carter had left them to go and try to sleep, before Ted had come and screwed up all the fun, they’d been playing poker under the spectral glow of a halo lamp, betting with corks and shell casings or gambling away their days off and roster positions. Vic had been there for a minute. Tommy Hill and Lefty from Carter’s squadron. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3rd. Billy Stitches and Morris Ross and Wolfe and Stork and Johnny and some of the mechanics and ground crew as well. Everyone was having trouble sleeping these days. No one liked the mornings, but the nights were becoming unbearable.

  Fenn had been talking to someone and so had missed most of Carter’s departure, catching only the end of it, which had involved an overturned chair and hard words and the men all jeering him as he’d left—laughing and making jokes about missing his beauty sleep. Someone had bounced a cork off the back of Carter’s head. More laughter. Carter’d given the lot of them the one-finger salute, pushed through the door, and made for his tent without saying a word to Fenn.

  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 hom
e. 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.

  When it was done, he nodded his head once and sat back down again, sucking on his burned fingers like a child. If anyone at comms needed him, they could come find him. He was the goddamn commander, after all. No need for him to be everywhere at once.

  CARTER’S PLANE WAS CALLED ROADRUNNER AND IT WAS HIS BABY, his best girl, queen of Iaxo’s maddeningly not-quite-earthly sky. She was done up in mottled gray, black, and white night-fighter camo with laughing skulls and swords and flaming spades painted slapdash onto her doped skin of fire-retardant cloth. Childish, but severe. The natural result of drink and paint and too much time on his hands.

  She was a mutt, a Sopwith fighter with a little Spad blood dirtying up her clean lines—short in the nose like a Pup with a Camel’s forward-leaning wings, but boxy in the tail after the fashion of the elder Spads, modeled on the best notions of those primordial aeronautics hobbyists (Blériot and Saulnier; Béchereau; Herbert Smith; the Italian, Rosatelli; Camm and Fokker) who’d invented the idea of killing from the air centuries ago; with a few improvements in weight and airframe dreamed up by the generations of flight engineers who became heir to all that wicked knowledge.

  When Carter chose, she could be the fastest thing in the sky—which was to say faster than the few birds that lived here, the bugs, and the clouds shushing icily above him, which were the only competition. Only now, he did not want her to be fast. Now, they—Roadrunner and he—were moving as slowly as any unnatural creature of the air might while still remaining a creature of the air and not suddenly choking out, stalling, and becoming a creature as one with the cold, hard, and distant ground. He could feel her moving from good air to bad, could feel the slide of lift along her control surfaces. He could feel her bucking and struggling as they chugged along because she was a machine that wanted to fly, to climb; that wanted never to descend into the drab oppression of gravity. And on that one point, Roadrunner and her pilot were in absolute agreement. Neither had ever done so well with their gear on the ground as they did in the air.

  Roadrunner’s instrumentation was archaic. There was a compass (oriented for a different polar environment), dial altimeter, pitch-and-roll bubble, fuel stick, airspeed indicator, engine RPM and pressure and temperature gauges. Here, on this world, it was high-line voodoo. And the onboard computers were both more and less impressive for being less simple, more contained, and worlds stupider.

  The computers were never in complete agreement with the plane’s more elemental mechanisms. Always a difference of opinion. The digital gauges showed a redundant, simplified, and three-color view of the world; a child’s vision, all bright triangles and wavy lines and bold numbers. Between Carter’s legs, the idiot lights showed green: fuel, oil pressure, engine temp, hydraulics, prop speed. In the center of his panel, a computerized map showed hieroglyph landmarks, blinking navigational aids, distances from this and to that. But it spoke to something in the distance between the world Carter had known and the world in which he now found himself that he understood less about how Roadrunner’s analog altimeter knew his distance from the ground or the wet compass
knew the way home than he did about the workings of the FTL drive on the container ship that’d brought him to the Carpenter system or the hydrazine thrust belts on the dropship that’d deposited him on Iaxo.

  Because the company and its men couldn’t use satellite positioning (what they were doing on Iaxo was clandestine at its most polite, but mostly just plain criminal, so the satellites themselves—even the very small ones—were too conspicuous in orbit around a planet full of natives who still thought God made the lightning), and because radar was right out, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning, surface track, and radio triangulation against preset navigational markers. All of which was for shit when the difference between flying and crashing was measured in feet and inches, not miles.

  So Carter, like his mates, carried a programmable stopwatch instead, accurate to one-hundredth of a second, a handheld UV/thermal spotting scope with a pulse range finder, and a map—pen on paper—made by Billy Stitches from first squadron. Carter had his flash-taped to his thigh and, at night, flew the way a submariner once piloted: trusting his life to the inarguable tick of the clock. Billy, he trusted. The watch, the scope and the map were all he truly believed in—his trinity. For lack of any more solid theological footing, he put his faith in Billy Stitches and, thus far, Billy had never let him down.

  It didn’t mean he felt any safer, flying blind into the endless dark. And it certainly didn’t mean he didn’t pilot with a horrible, sick feeling that, at any moment, he was going to crash prop-first into an odd copse of hard alien trees, stick there like a dart, and burn. Night missions, he would always fly with the sour taste of anxious vomit in the back of his throat, squeezing and straining the eyes right out of his head looking for death oncoming at a hundred miles an hour, and then land again, hours and hours later, with a relief like waking alive from a bad dream of falling and a headache that only drink, sleep, or decapitation would cure.