A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  He hated flying at night.

  It surprised Carter when he found Billy Stitches and Morris Ross up in the middle of the night. Billy was out night-flying for fun in a two-seat spotter (a rebuilt Bristol fighter, actually, with a jumped-up rotary V-8 turboprop salvaged from one of the two wrecks the company had so far suffered). Billy was sitting in the gunner’s chair, peeking downward, backward, and sideward through UV light amps while Morris flew, sketching terrain details and shouting directions in Morris’s ear. Carter had Billy on the radio periodically, making jokes, keeping him amused while he zigged and zagged his way along a broken, preset course to the ford. Carter asked Billy how he could work on his maps at night. Billy told him to shut up before Carter jinxed him. Even with night vision and a moon and a half playing tag through breaks in the clotted clouds, the world below was nothing more than the suggestion of a world to Carter. Touches of silver here and there, gilt flourishes, a sense of undulating life, and somewhere off his left wing, the river catching reflections and shattering them against its banks. They had names, those moons. Carter didn’t know them.

  Much as he disliked it, there were moments when even he felt this world deserved a poet. It had, in instants, a kind of unspoiled beauty that Carter imagined Earth once might’ve before the earth became home to humans and all their clutter. In the light, Iaxo was occasionally fantastical, something out of a fairy tale. In the night, it was intermittently magic.

  Still, it was an easier place to hate than to love. Hating was more useful, too. And for all Carter knew, Iaxo might’ve already had a poet. Might’ve had scores of them. And he felt that if he and his friends or others like his friends didn’t kill them all, perhaps someday some indig would say something lovely about this place. It was their home, after all. Carter and his kind were just visiting.

  Billy called in, saying Morris had gotten him lost.

  “How would you know?” asked Carter.

  “It’s all Zen, son,” Billy said. “The maps, the flying. The whole deal. Your problem is you are under the illusion that you actually exist.” His laughter grated like iron filings in Carter’s teeth.

  Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his face looked like a medical school cadaver’s face—a practice face on which young and untalented knife artists had attempted to hone their skills. Billy’s scars were burn scars, surgery scars, the fleshy archaeological record of meatball reconstruction in a field hospital somewhere back when he was a colonial pilot flying supersonic fighter-bombers and killing for the cause. Alternate version: Billy Stitches was called Billy Stitches because his scars were his pride, earned during a crash-and-burn on some distant hell where everything ate everything and the only safe place for those made of meat was high aloft—dropping jellied fire and chemical defoliant onto alien landscapes that looked like something out of a deep pharmaceutical nightmare.

  He’d been flying for a different company at the time, trying to tame this frontier backwater for the pioneer families already on their way. And when he’d gone in, he’d shattered the face shield of his helmet and been force-fed some of the bigger, more jagged pieces.

  Eight days he’d survived in the jungle, waiting for rescue. His wounds had rotted, become home to bugs and flies and centipedes, and his hot, sweet blood had driven even the trees into a starving frenzy. Billy was eaten, a little bit at a time, by every living thing in the jungle and would often say that what he was left with when the recovery team finally found him were only those parts that even nature had found undigestible.

  Carter said, “So long as the payroll department is under that same illusion, I think I’ll be okay, Billy. Meanwhile, I now have considerably less faith in your maps, knowing you do them blind in the middle of the night.”

  “Got to trust me, boy. I do this all the damn time. For kicks. Go out in the day with Morris blindfolded for practice!”

  “You’re going to get yourself dead,” Carter told him. Billy laughed again.

  “No one pretty as me is going to die in a place as nasty as this, friend.”

  “You know what they call that, Billy?” Carter asked. “They call that irony.”

  Billy’d left his radio open and was yelling at Morris. “Morris! Morris! Where the hell are we?” Static. “Like hell! If that’s where we are, then what’s that mountain doing there?” Static. “You’re lost, Morris. Admit it, bud. Climb out to fourteen thou and get yourself found again ’fore I slap your head.” Static. “Carter? It’ll only be irony if I actually end up dead. Till that happens, it’s just boyish enthusiasm.” Static. “West, Morris! That’s a left turn. Where the hell are you going?” Static. “Carter? I’m out, son. If I don’t come home, tell the boys it was all Morris’s fault and tell your friend Teague to kiss my ragged ass…” Laughter, high and giggling, distorted by interference and distance into a manic cackle.

  Laughter, then static.

  Then just static and nothing else.

  The third version of the story was that Billy’d done it all to himself one night with a trench knife or a piece of broken glass. He’d made eleven tours with the company, seen eleven different worlds. He’d been a Ted before Ted was Ted.

  And then he’d just cracked one day. Gone around the bend. The company had retired him, demoted him, sent him to therapy, to a rest home, for some miraculous psychological cure or to take the waters. He’d come back a different man—an artist and an armchair philosopher and happy in some deeply incorruptible way. When he smiled, it looked like he was dying.

  “So which story is it, Billy?” the pilots would occasionally ask.

  The third one.

  No, the first.

  The second.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Come on, Billy. Which one is it?”

  “They all are.”

  Iaxo, of course, was his first mission back. Those scars were still so fresh that he cried in the night from the pain of them. That was the version that Carter chose to believe, which, Carter thought, maybe said more about him than it did about Billy.

  Carter clacked his radio and switched to the control channel, called in his position, clicked the stopwatch and marked himself on Billy’s map as a mile and a quarter short of where the flight computer claimed he was. With his goggles pushed up, the rushing air whipped tears from the corners of his eyes, atomizing them off the tips of his ears, frozen despite the liberal application of grease. In the open cockpit, he had to hunch behind the windscreen to hear. When the call-back from the comms tent came, it confirmed that he had calculated correctly and that the computer had not, reading him short by a mile and change. Pinning the stick between his knees, he made corrections and, thirty seconds outside the drop zone, dug the spotting scope out of his jacket and tried to get a fix on the lines.

  The river ran southeasterly at this point. Durba’s rifles were supposed to be dug in along the bank on the friendly side with Connelly’s 4th in a reactionary position a quarter mile downriver on the unfriendly bank. Carter’s orders were to move in support of Durba, illuminating a cross, two miles by two miles, starting at a point a quarter mile forward of Durba’s position and immediately to Connelly’s left, because it was thought that somewhere in that area were a bunch of scheming indigs meaning to make a nuisance of themselves come morning. Durba wanted to catch them napping, give them a good scare to the tune of a few minutes’ concentrated rifle fire, and chase them off before they got any fancy ideas about trying to take back the ford.

  The ford had become important because, other than the bridge, it was the only reasonable river crossing between the fortified towns of Riverbend to the north and Southbend to the south. Obviously, these were the visitors’ names for these places. The natives called them something else, but no one much cared what. Gurgle and Mumble, Burble and Babble—something wet and dreadful and altogether alien. The bridge—itself just a pile of rocks and sticks stacked somewhat higher than the water at full flow—was solidly held now by the other side, as were the two towns and ever
ything east of the river.

  These had been the lines for months now, ever since the fight had forced everyone off the moors and high ground to the east and back across the river in battles that would’ve made Napoleon weep. Indig infantry and cavalry on their ridiculous six-legged horses had arranged into lines that’d stretched for miles, all wheeling and clashing while the company and its pilots bombed and machine-gunned them with virtual impunity. For weeks, the fighting had gone on. In some places, the stony sod of the moors had drank up so much indig blood that it turned to brackish mud deep enough to mire horses and suck down cart wheels to the hub. Carter remembered doing barrel rolls over Diller’s Cut as the forward lines being maintained by Palas collapsed for the last time, his guns chattering until they jammed, bomb garlands empty. He could close his eyes and still see entire wings of fighters diving like hawks to break columns of reinforcements pouring in from invisible strongholds in the foothills when things had gone from bad to worse.

  The loss of life, among the indigs, anyway, had been phenomenal, unbelievable, enormous—the kind of war a man dreams about at his most perverse and fervent. A sweaty, sickening kind of bloodlust; fathomless like dying of thirst on the ocean. Though since none of that incredible loss had been among the company’s pilots, they’d all found it great fun and talked of it like a vacation that’d come just in the nick of time.

  Connelly, though, had suffered on the moors. Durba had suffered, losing his daughter toward the end of things when, almost impossibly, losing had become a foregone conclusion, then an actual reality. There were other contractors working on Iaxo prior to the Sispetain campaign, and they’d all suffered, too, Carter knew. Ambushes, desertions, human officers being murdered by their own native troops. And once the opposition had gotten themselves organized and started throwing thousands of bodies into the grinder—cavalry charges crashing against fortified machine-gun positions, Lassateirra infantry with iron knives and spears appearing out of nowhere, behind previously secure lines, to rush sleeping encampments of Akaveen and their human officers or moving columns of troops, slaughtering everything in sight, stealing everything they could grab, then vanishing—the fronts had all collapsed. It became a retreat. Then a rout. And everyone down in the mud and the blood and the filth had suffered save the princes of the air with their exclusive contract and flying machines.

  But ever since then, the company’s men on Iaxo had done what they could to help the mudfoot mercenaries fighting on their side. It was guilt, a little bit. Ted’s, predominantly. Some of it was wanting to present a unified front to the indigs on both sides just in case one of these days their gravy train went all to shit.

  It was widely assumed that Connelly the Coward, in command of his own fourth company, would retreat as soon as he saw the flares or heard the rifles tuning up. From the position he held, though, his avenues of escape were limited. He couldn’t cross back over the river where he was, and moving upriver toward the ford would only bring him closer to the fighting, so everyone knew he wouldn’t do that. His only choices would be to hold fast, head farther southeast down the bank or forward, deeper into unfriendly territory. No matter what he did, the friendlies on the ground would either come out equal by morning or have bought a whole new swath of land owing to Connelly’s dependable nighttime skittishness. Durba would then be free to cross the ford himself, move downriver to take Connelly’s old position (or reinforce him if he’d held). Come the dawn, five hundred indig foot soldiers under native command would move up to secure the rear.

  It was a simple plan, elegant and tactically sound in that so much of tactics has to do not with the ordering of men to do what you want them to do but with knowing what they’ll do all on account of their own recklessness, stupidity, or fright, and then adapting to the inevitable. Carter had received his specific orders in-flight, by radio—one of the controllers reading to him from pages written by somebody else. On paper, it’d seemed brilliant.

  Durba had a field radio. The way things were supposed to go, he would call in as soon as he heard Roadrunner overhead, light up a UV strobe to mark the front of his own lines, then act as forward observer, spotting for Carter on his run. Meanwhile, Carter would buzz over pretty as can be at three hundred feet, drop a dozen impact-trigger parachute flares, split-loop west, lay out another line to finish the cross, then say good-bye and go home for a hot breakfast and a nap, content in the knowledge that, thanks to his hard work, one fine lot of alien critters whom he’d never met and didn’t care a damn for would have the opportunity to slaughter some other lot about whom he cared even less in the middle of the night rather than having to wait a few hours for the sun to rise. Good for them, Carter figured. Luck and all. He’d sleep soundly no matter what. He mostly did.

  So now he followed the river in with one eye on the stopwatch, the other glued to the optic of the spotter’s scope. He was counting down the seconds, maintaining a steady crawl speed, waiting on Durba’s call. His night vision was blown because of the scope, the light amps, the burr of swirling ultraviolet. The tree cover along the banks was too dense for him to see anything worthwhile. On UV, it was a soft, quiet kaleidoscope of green and tangles. And on thermal, Iaxo was a bad disco—all blobby reds and blues and oranges and blacks mixing and separating like oils on a plate. For love or money, he couldn’t pick out the nice clean entrenched line that Durba ought to have had laid out—one hundred native rifles plus a seven-man off-world command element, their combined body heat like a snake of fire crawling against the cold indigo nothing of the ground—and instead saw only a jumbled, seething mess of heat signatures smoldering so crazily out of proportion that, for a moment, he thought the scope had gone tits-up on him.

  At twenty seconds out, Durba should’ve been able to hear Roadrunner coming. A biplane is not a quiet machine. In this place where a tree falling is cacophonous and men walking can be the loudest noise in the forest, a nine-cylinder rotary whines and clatters and roars like a cam stripping off the pivot of the world. Carter touched gloved fingers to the map on his thigh. He felt something in his chest squirm.

  Fifteen seconds. Ten. Carter ought to have been right on top of them, but still nothing. In the freezing cold, the back of his neck began to sweat. Not a peep from the radio. Strange.

  Walking blind in one’s own dark bedroom, there are only two sensations: perfect confidence and absolute panic. Nothing between. And one bleeds into the other so quickly. One second, you know, vaguely or precisely, just where you are and where everything is in relation to you. The next, everything comes unstuck. One wrong step, one chair out of place, and one loses one’s self completely so that all of a midnight comes crashing down in a terror of unfixedness. This was what Carter was feeling—the sickly slide into sudden dread and disorientation.

  Five seconds out. This was as good as overshooting and would already require a long climb out and a new approach. So much for the element of surprise, Carter thought. At which point he was completely surprised by the sudden squawk of the radio crackling to life. The voice on the other end, though, rather than having the laconic drawl of Tony Fong, Durba’s Earthside Chinese-Texan radioman and occasional guest at the Flyboy O Club, was speaking indig—a language Carter had always thought contained far too many hisses and consonants and sounded like a wet cat being beaten with an abacus. He spoke a dozen words of it, most of them obscene. The indig on the other end of the radio wasn’t using any of those, just hissing and clattering, clicking away. Carter fumbled with the handset and the stick. Roadrunner fought to roll over on him because she was not a machine that took inattention cheerfully. He tried to focus on the details, straightening out one thing at a time.

  Carter was having a fracture experience—a moment of unconscious denial of the obvious owing to a lack of belief in the potentiality of change. A quick sum: Take one hundred rifles in the hands of one hundred native infantrymen, add seven mercenary officers well versed in the intricacies of commanding indigenous forces and one dark night on foreign shores. Su
btract one radio contact. What is left?

  Disaster. With Durba himself, a first sergeant, three lieutenants (one of whom owed Carter money), a medic, and Tony Fong all on the ground, all human and all English-speakers, that meant that either one large catastrophe or seven individual and highly unlikely catastrophes must have occurred in order to leave an indig holding the radio. But Carter simply could not imagine any event or series of events that would’ve seen all seven of these men incapacitated at the critical moment. Because while the other side was fighting with bows and arrows, pointy sticks, and rocks, Antoinne Durba had goddamn rifles. Granted, they weren’t anything fancy. One hundred reproduction Martini-Henry, lever-action 11 mm long rifles and three museum-piece compressor-driven light machine guns. But still: rifles. Ask the American Indians what kind of difference a few white men with boom sticks had made in their lives, he thought.

  Carter’s mind raced. He was breathing heavy. He fiddled with the radio dials. Put a knee into the bottom of the flight computer, hoping to jog its microchips into making this all better.

  Fracture experience. All evidence to the contrary, his first thought was that Tony must’ve been out having a piss or something. Meanwhile, all around him people were silently moving the furniture in his darkened bedroom. Everything was about to change.

  Carter passed clear over what should’ve been Durba’s position, clicked the stopwatch, slammed the throttle forward and laid Roadrunner over into a steep, spiraling climb. On the other end of the radio, the indig voice was still chittering away. Tough to tell when those fellows were in a panic, Carter knew. Everything they said sounded like a death rattle. But he heard no gunfire in the background, no sounds of distress. Was the indig in his ear begging, crying, praying for him to smite down his enemies from the sky? A bored, disconnected, and indifferent god, Carter switched his radio back over to the command frequency, pointed his prop toward the clouds, and let the altimeter spin.