A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  He called in: “Control, this is Roadrunner. Radio check, copy?”

  “Copy Roadrunner. This is air control. Hold one.”

  A woman’s voice. Carter knew her but couldn’t quite remember her name. Donna? He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with the night shift.

  “Donna?” he asked.

  “Diane, Carter.”

  Shit. Of course, Diane. Short, froggish, used to go around with the men for a bit, Carter recalled, then didn’t. At which point she’d taken over the tent on night shift to keep away from the pilots entirely.

  He keyed the channel again. “Sorry, Diane. I’ve got a problem here. Can’t raise Durba.”

  Diane mumbled something cruel about males in general.

  “Repeat that, control. Didn’t quite catch it.”

  “Hold position, Carter. And shut up for a minute while we get you sorted out. Monitor this channel. Control out.”

  He climbed to five thousand feet, leveled out, and circled.

  And circled some more.

  Billy’s channel was closed. Hopefully, he clicked over to what should’ve been Durba’s, but the indig on the other end was still carrying on. Back to control, then, and silence as he eased the throttle and fuel mix down near stall and started box-waltzing the area, laying out mile-long trails broken by ninety-degree left breaks. It was at this point—exactly far too late—that Carter thought to himself how it might’ve been a good idea to have made at least a passing attempt at learning the language of the animals for whom he’d been fighting these past months. Something more than the curse words anyhow. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the time.

  He locked the stick between his knees and stretched, his back popping all in a line like a zipper. He yawned, dug the scope out of his jacket again, shed altitude until he was cruising a thousand feet off the deck, and took another look around. The forest below remained the same sea of blobby color cut through by the squirming black snake of the river. The UV light amps turned everything shimmering silver tarnished with electric verdigris. In the dark, at altitude, an ocean and a forest looked the same. Both dull. Carter closed his eyes, talked just to hear himself speaking.

  “Control, this is Roadrunner. What am I doing here, Diane?”

  “Flying ’round in circles, looks like. Just keep it up. And keep an eye out for anything unusual.”

  “Unusual like how?”

  “Unusual like unusual, Roadrunner. I don’t know. Do you see anything unusual right now?”

  “It’s nighttime. It’s dark.”

  “Which means you have nothing to report, so clear the channel.”

  “Diane, what happened to Antoinne?”

  Ted was up when Tanner, one of the other flight controllers, knocked on the door of his tent. Unable to rest and sick with a knot of worry that felt like a stone in his throat, Ted had gotten into the gun cases between which he normally pressed his shirts and trousers and had begun pulling out files and papers, maps, supply logs and repair records. He needed to make some kind of plan. On his table, the clock mocked him with every negative number. He’d removed his sidearm and put it away in a drawer.

  Ted got up and jerked open the door. Tanner stood with a hint of attention still in him. He was young, so recently out of service (which one, Ted couldn’t recall) that the tatters of discipline still clung to him like the rags of a uniform he couldn’t quite completely remove.

  “At ease, Tanner,” Ted said. “It’s the middle of the night. Why are you bothering me?”

  “Diane told me to come get you,” he said, swallowing the “sir” only with visible difficulty.

  “She have a reason?”

  “Something wrong with Captain Carter’s mission, I think.”

  Ted closed his eyes, sucking a deep breath through his nose. He suppressed the urge to cough, so choked instead, strangling on the shit in his lungs.

  “She said she needs you now.”

  “About face,” Ted croaked.

  “What?”

  “Turn the fuck around!”

  Tanner did, and Ted doubled over—half coughing, half vomiting in the dirt outside his tent with his shoulder pressed into the frame of the door. He did it quickly, coughed again, then stood, shot the cuff on his jacket, wiped the back of his mouth with his shirtsleeve, straightened his jacket, and told Tanner to turn back around.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Tell me the problem while we walk.”

  Carter just happened to be looking over the side of the plane—out past the forward edge of the lower wing—when the world ended. He was squinting down into the big black nothing below him, comparing it in his head to the big black nothings in front of him and to either side, trying to make it resolve into some kind of answer by force of exasperated will alone when, quite unexpectedly, it did.

  For just an instant, as the first bright blooms of the explosions flared blindingly below him, Carter thought that somehow he had done this: that his hatred of this place and its people had suddenly been made impossibly manifest in scourging fire from his eyes. He watched, dumbstruck and gawping like a yokel, frantically touching hands to all of his controls, wondering, in a panic, if he’d accidentally triggered a bomb drop even though he wasn’t carrying bombs and none of the planes here were capable of carrying anything large enough to look like Alfred Nobel’s wrath from a mile up.

  And then, suddenly, Carter’s fracture experience—last vestige of the peace of the ignorant and all-powerful—is ripped from him, carried away on the rising energy of the shock wave that lifts them up, the man and his plane, and carries them briefly free of gravity and airflow and elevator control; lifting them as if on top of a bubble, expanding the sky around them into a torrent of disturbed molecules that, if they had a color, would be like the halo around an angel’s head. A shade of preternatural grace and fury.

  Together, they billow straight upward, then are dropped like something vile. Carter stomps and throttles Roadrunner into a wide, falling inside bank and flies straight into the collapsing bubble of a second wave that swats them toward the ground with the weight of atmospheres righting themselves. Air cascades onto them like a waterfall, rushing down to fill the pressure void. Carter doesn’t even realize he is yelling until he splits back east, comes out of the mess, and feels the control surfaces find some traction.

  He levels out into a choppy glide. His throat hurts. His mouth is dry as bone. Ducking behind the windscreen, he pulls his goggles down, says a brief thanks to the man who invented the condom catheter, and then pants like a dog until he gets his breath back.

  The radio squawks. Carter’d never closed the channel. Diane was probably deaf now, he thinks. Maybe it served her right.

  The flight computer is out, screen black and cold as a dead eye, and Carter is lost, bubble altimeter holding at eight hundred feet, compass nosing east-nor’east. His stopwatch rattles around somewhere by his feet and the radio is clacking now—squelch, squelch, squelch. Distress sign. Diane asking if he is dead or dying or knocked brainless or what.

  But Carter just breathes, holds the stick in fingers gone numb with shock, keeps his feet away from the pedals because his legs are shaking so badly. He looks out at the night. All around him, the peace of darkness has returned. It is like nothing ever happened at all.

  In the comms tent, Diane cranes her neck and looks toward the door. “Did someone go to get the commander?” she asks. “Because we need him in here. Now.”

  Artillery.

  From above, the explosions unfold like flowers—crimson and sharp at the center, then fluffing outward to pale yellow, gray, then black. They blossom, open, then collapse back in on themselves as the laws of physics, momentarily brutalized, reassert themselves. Flames die, waves calm, vacuums are filled, shock stills, and gravity pulls all that dust and debris and death back down to the ground where it belongs. It’s fast, yet still appears to happen all in one long, slow motion. This is the difference between bombs and high-explosive artillery shells. Bombs are quick all throu
gh. They flare and are gone. Exploding shells, though, do that strange trick of seeming slow. That’s how one can tell the difference. See it enough and it’s a hard thing to forget.

  Carter had seen it enough. Not here. Elsewhere. Other jobs in other places. He’d been caught once in a similar pressure wave, flying low over the trench and bunker lines on a planet called Feldike way out on the rim. Gravity was different there, harder and heavier, the atmosphere thick and poison. The company’d been flying for the cause then, too—Marxist revolt among the miners who’d decided that they deserved a piece of all the money being burned and cut and melted from the planet’s guts. Maybe not entirely Marxist, actually, but that didn’t matter. Those miners could pay up front, would pay an additional fortune when they won. And they were grateful for the help. Until the arrival of the flying circus (sixteen Flyboy squadrons, plus nearly five hundred command, control, and support personnel) the battles on Feldike had been fought mostly with the mining equipment—enormous rolling ore mills the size of an office block, tunneling machines like nightmare millipedes as long and large as bloated, rock-muddled skyscrapers laid on their sides. The machines could take a phenomenal amount of punishment but carried tools able to dish out phenomenal damage: massive stone grinders, lasers meant for cutting rock, jackhammers and rock drills, atomics. On the ground, they fought in environment suits, loader bodies, whatever was available—men like ants scaling the sides of the massive machines and planting demolition charges meant for blowing tunnel mouths, always going for the track linkages, articulated joints, the heat sinks or pilot’s compartments that sat behind six-inch-thick bubbles of shatterproof diamondoid but could be popped like a zit by a determined enemy.

  The company’s arrival had changed the dynamics of the war. The machines still in the hands of management were slow, large targets and could be pummeled from afar by sheaf rockets, laser-guided smart munitions, and bombs meant for cracking mountains. Up close, they could be eviscerated by chain guns firing deuterium-tipped rounds, six thousand per minute, or thermite rockets. They could be crippled by high explosives and then killed by the miners who swarmed over them. On nights off, camped out in the top floors of seized company offices, the pilots would stand with their noses pressed against the diamond glass, watching the distant action like a fireworks show. The best entertainment in town.

  The planes they’d flown there had been strange tractor/jet mutants, sucking in the poison atmosphere from a scoop in the nose, accelerating it through the length of the dart-like body and then spitting it out the back end as turbine thrust. They were slow, flew with all the elegance of a brick, fell from the toxic sky like killed birds almost every day from wear and corrosion and just plain orneriness. They’d been custom engineered for the environment just like the biplanes they flew now had been for Iaxo, but Feldike’s was an environment that was hostile to everything. There was no native life there. Just humans who’d come for the stones.

  The mining company had been almost beaten, had resorted to desperation tactics to dislodge the miners, when Carter’d had his accident. They’d begun employing the magnetic accelerators, once used to fling things into orbit, like primitive mortars, dialing the charge way down and throwing all kinds of things into them, blind-firing in the direction of the trench lines that had, at that point, been dug within fifty miles of the corporate headquarters and port facilities. One thing the miners were very good at was digging. The war was going to be over within a week.

  It was a mining charge that’d erupted below Carter’s jet on Feldike. Smallish. A couple of kilotons, maybe. Enough to rip a fifty-meter crater in the terrible earth and pop Carter’s jet up like a cork, knock it clean into a flip—nose over jet and ass over teakettle. The vacuum caused the turbine to sputter and fail. It’d refused to restart, and Carter had hit the switch, punching out just five hundred feet above the surface, briefly riding a hydrogen peroxide charge clear of the tumbling jet body, then watching the barrage as he descended, sealed cockpit hanging below three drag chutes and heading to ground fast. The explosions then had looked the same as the explosions on Iaxo—weird, slo-mo blooms making umbrellas rather than mushrooms in the heavy gravity but unfolding with the same peculiar indolence.

  He’d fallen hard, finally, right in the path of one of the advancing ore mills. The treads rose a hundred feet high, clanking iron links rumbling like the end of the world. Around him, the explosions were still going off, blasting black gashes in the red-brown stone and dirt—the jerry-rigged mortar operators having found their range. He’d been rescued in plenty of time by a recovery team flying a heavy lifter, but he would never forget the image of those treads grinding down on him, his own hands pressed to the cockpit glass, staring past them at the mill pilot in his bubble, the two of them watching each other, waiting to see what would happen next.

  EVEN IN HIS PANIC, Carter’d been able to count the explosions blossoming below him on Iaxo. There’d been four of them, walking in a line. And then four more, oblique to him, off his right wing, opening outward and upward and, at a distance—too far away to hurt him—really rather beautiful. Down on the ground, he knew, it would seem like something different entirely.

  He poked a shaky finger at the radio, clacking it twice, and adjusted his headset and collar. “Control, this is Roadrunner. Do you copy?”

  “Roadrunner, this is control. We copy.” Diane still, her professional voice unfazed, even by the screaming. “What is your status?”

  “I’m five-by-five. Just shook up, but still in flight and on-target. My flight electronics are out. Can you see where I am?”

  “We’re trying to reboot you from here, Roadrunner, but I’ve got you smooth and level at ten-two-five off the deck, heading thirty-eight degrees east by double north, west of target six-point-five miles, closing angle.” A pause. “Also, biologicals show you pissed yourself. Nice going there, hotshot.”

  Bloom of shame in Carter’s cheeks not at all unlike the bloom of artillery shells in the distance. “You want to come up here and try flying for me, Diane?” Everyone pisses themselves on night missions, Carter thought. Everyone. “Jesus Christ, like I need this from some dumb—”

  Diane interrupted. “Roadrunner, control. Hold for the commander. Diane out.”

  Historically speaking, hearing Ted’s voice almost never meant one was about to receive good news. All the pilots knew this, discussed it at length sometimes when there was nothing else worth talking about. Bearer of shit and ill tidings was Ted Prinzi. Like Fenn had said, bad news walking.

  “Carter?”

  “Ted. What the f—”

  “Stand down, Captain.”

  “Artillery, Ted.”

  “You’ve got one of Billy’s maps with you, Carter, yeah?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Map, Carter. Have one?”

  “Artillery.”

  “Map, Captain.”

  “Artillery, goddammit. Artillery!”

  “Map.”

  Carter took a breath. “Yeah, map. Why?”

  “Good. There’s a series of hills then, should be on your nose almost. North-nor’east of the ford a few thousand yards, dead west twenty-two miles from Southbend. Elevation near two hundred ten, ranging about four miles. See it?”

  With his flight electronics out, there was no light to see by, so Carter had to fish a mini flashlight out of his jacket one-handed. When he found it, he stuck it in his mouth, then checked the map taped to his thigh, tracing Ted’s directions with his finger and finding the hills—the first line of them rising just beyond the reach of the forested bank of the river.

  “Got it,” he said, keeping the place with his finger, free hand juggling the stick, and speaking around the light held in his teeth. “Why?”

  “Because we think the natives have just discovered artillery.”

  “Didn’t I just tell you that?”

  “No, I’m telling you, Captain. Right now. It’s nothing fancy, we don’t think.”

  “Nothing
fancy,” Carter repeated.

  “That’s what we think.”

  “We? Who else you got in there with you, Ted? I’m telling you right now. Durba’s position was just hit by artillery fire. Saw it myself.”

  “Right,” Ted continued, and it suddenly occurred to Carter that Ted was working off some kind of honcho-in-crisis script, something issued by corporate, kept in a locked drawer in a yellow folder, To be opened in the event of… Or maybe it was just in his head; a thing he’d practiced, that he’d been cooking up for months.

  “As I said, we don’t think it’s anything fancy. Field cannon and the like. Simple howitzers. But that’s a rather precocious leap, technologically speaking, from bows and fucking arrows, don’t you think?”

  A script. He’d rehearsed it, alone at night in his one-man commander’s tent, standing balls-out naked in front of a full-length mirror and standing in his uniform. Cleaning his fake teeth in the morning, mumbling snatches of it into the cold air. Lying in his bed at night, straight as a board, mouthing it like talking dirty to a lover in the dark. Sound tough, make hard jokes, be confident, be strong, act like a man, like the worst actor of all time.

  “Carter, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Ted. I do,” Carter said. You crazy fucker, he didn’t say. No fucking bullshit indig monkey suddenly smacked two rocks together and invented what happened down there, he didn’t say. “Though I bet Durba found it more shocking than you do.”

  “Right,” Ted said, cleared his throat into the mike—an incredibly annoying habit—and moved on to page two. “We don’t know how many there are, but—”