A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  He’d taxied into his spot outside the longhouse, climbed jauntily down out of the cockpit, and flipped his scarf back over his shoulder. They’d said a few words to each other, Vic and Carter, before he’d gone to the field tent and she’d gone back to the flight line. That, he knew, had probably been a mistake, too.

  Later, once he’d switched from pop-skull to coffee, from the field house to the mess, and after most of the other revelers had finally retired or simply dropped in their tracks, Vic had come in grinning. She’d stood across the table from him and laid down three stubby arrows. Having been half-asleep sitting up, still hearing the sound of engines in his head and feeling the phantom vibrations of nine cylinders cranking in his bones, he’d just blinked dumbly at her, thinking how nice it was that she’d come to visit him in bed.

  “Crossbow bolts,” she said. “Steel tip. Aluminum shaft. Imported, apparently.”

  Carter picked one up and rolled it between his palms, trying to make some kind of connection, to appear thoughtful even though he had no idea what she was on about. “Imported, apparently,” he parroted. “Apparently, apparently, apparently…” He wasn’t trying to be difficult, wasn’t mocking. He just liked the way the words sounded popping off his lips. It was a nice arrow, he supposed, but could come up with nothing particularly insightful to say about it, so he looked at her instead. He thought about how pretty she was when he was mostly asleep. He smiled at her again, thinking how he’d just done that not too long ago and that twice in one night was a lot. He looked away. One fresh glance had been enough. Like looking directly at the sun.

  “Pulled them out of your wing, champ. Your elevator. Congratulations.”

  The bolt was light, tip-heavy, and viciously sharp, nocked at the tail in a cross. The flights were hard plastic. White.

  “Congratulations for what?” he asked her, rubbing at his eyes.

  “You’re the first Flyboy to take a hit since we got here.”

  He touched a finger to the tip of the little arrow and made a face. Sharp. “Hmm,” he said. “Lucky me.”

  Vic took a step back from the table. “Jesus Christ, Kevin. We’re friends. They’re souvenirs. I saved them for you.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. Something other than the memory of the engine was roaring in his ears now. He looked down at the table, arranged all three bolts into a nice, even line, patting each into precise alignment with the palms of his hands.

  “Say thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Carter. He didn’t look up.

  It was quiet for a minute. They were the only two in the mess just then. He could feel her staring at the top of his head.

  “Prick,” she muttered, then walked out.

  What Vic had said wasn’t exactly true. Not about Carter being a prick. That was spot-on. But about the two of them being friends. They weren’t. They were something else entirely. Also, she’d been wrong about Carter being the first pilot to take fire while flying.

  When the company had first arrived on Iaxo, the indigs had shot all sorts of things at them. Sticks, rocks, spears, arrows—they’d tried it all. And the pilots had gotten quite a laugh out of it, actually, thinking the entire situation rather pathetic and silly. For a time, they’d made it into a game, scoring the abos on their bravado, their ingenuity, their aim, the amount of frustrated rage they expressed—shaking their fists, jumping around, howling at the sky. Winners lived. Sometimes they’d go out between missions with pistols, fly real low, use the natives for target practice. “Just keeping my piece lubricated,” they’d say by way of explanation or excuse. “Just to keep it working, tip-top.”

  This went on for a while. Until Danny.

  Danny Diaz. He’d been a good man, a good pilot. He had Earth-born parents but had been a natural citizen of Free Luna where he was conceived and born, and where he grew up. This made him overly tall, a bit more delicate in appearance than the full-gravity lugs, and generally ill-suited to long hours in the cramped cockpit of a Vickers or Camel.

  And maybe that’d been enough to single him out, to make him a target for part-time bullies looking to go rough on someone. Though he drank with the other pilots, flew with them, fought with them, never shirked, didn’t complain any more often or any more loudly than the rest, he was just a little quieter, a little more reserved, stuck with the effeminate cast of low-g elegance that Luna had worked into him, and that made him an easy target. Skinniest kid on the playground. Something like that. And there wasn’t a man on Iaxo who, at his best, was much better than an overgrown fourteen-year-old anyhow.

  Ted especially hadn’t liked Danny. Again, there was no particular reason that anyone knew, but Ted, of all of them, was hardest on Danny.

  And if Ted was the worst, then Vic was the easiest, even shacking up with him for a time, taking special care of his favorite plane—a D.VII called Angelina—and by and large going through all the motions of actually liking him.

  All of this made it worse that Danny had to be the one of them to go—to buy it in action. Made it almost a cliché, which is a bad thing to be in any war, no matter how ridiculous. Were they ever to talk about it, most of the pilots would also say that that this all made it obvious that he was going to be the first to go. Highly superstitious, sensitive to the ironies and truisms of war, they would say of course it would’ve been Danny. Anything else would’ve just felt wrong. But then talking about it was the one thing that they’d never do. Superstition: To talk about death was to invite it close. To talk about dying was fine. That they did all the time. But death—real death—was different. The finality of it was like a curse that had to be spoken to come true.

  Old-time fliers used to call what got Danny the Golden BB, that one shot in a million, the one you never expect and never, ever see coming. It used to refer to small-arms fire—to some grunt on the ground spraying bullets up into the air at a plane flying a mile overhead at six hundred miles per and getting truly, phenomenally lucky. Hitting the jackpot. Ringing the bell. A ten-cent piece of lead alloy bringing down a multimillion-dollar aircraft.

  On Iaxo, it meant some indig with a bow and arrow who managed, somehow, to put one right through the gap in a vent panel and clip one of the radiator hoses on the D.VII’s liquid-cooled engine. Danny hadn’t even noticed it at first. Not until the engine temp gauge began to spike and he saw the long stain of scorched coolant blown back all along the flank of his plane. He’d radioed it in. He’d been laughing about it. But then his engine had seized and he’d gone down.

  He’d been flying low: twenty, maybe thirty feet off the deck up on the high moors, and Carter knew this because they’d all been doing the same thing, playing Great White Hunter, just sporting around. This was about a month after the big battles on Sispetain, but they’d caught a cavalry troop out in the open on the flatlands and were running the horsemen down. Sidearms only. Those were the rules. They’d been keeping score. And Danny’d been playing, too, though rather halfheartedly. Killing—especially the pointless, up close and personal kind like they were doing that day—had made him uncomfortable sometimes. Not something he talked about, just something everyone knew. And even still, there was nothing too strange in that. In their better moments, nearly all of the pilots would claim that the killing was appalling, exasperating, a drag and a taint on their otherwise pristine moral characters. And then, mostly, they would laugh. Carter the hardest, the longest.

  Danny, though, mostly meant it. Some of the others did, too. Occasionally. And while one might wonder why, then, had Danny or any of them become fighter pilots—mercenary fighter pilots at that, where it often seemed as though the slaughter was more or less all they were about—this was an easy question to answer.

  It was because Danny loved to fly, same as the rest. Simple as that. And he knew that there was no better test of himself than to do the thing he loved, the thing he was best at, under stress and all the most difficult conditions. No pilot flew as well or as often as a combat pilot. And no combat
pilot had ever flown in such strange, challenging, or varied conditions as a Flyboy pilot did most days before breakfast. Danny had understood that. Danny loved to fly. And if, in the course of getting to do what he loved best of all, he had to put himself in situations where his better nature was dipped repeatedly in shit, then Danny had understood that, too. It was a popular fiction that, like their pomp and swagger, fighter pilots also possessed some strong core of combat élan—a streak of gentlemanly decency, a book of rules not held to by the dogfaces, doughboys, and mudfoot grunts of the other military professions. Danny knew better. He was not deluded. He’d been with the company long enough to have learned that if there was any such thing as gentlemanly soldiers, Flyboy had a policy against hiring them, and that all men who voluntarily made their living by the gun were, by trade, dirty fuckers and destroyers of lovely things.

  But at any rate, Danny had gone down, victim of that million-to-one shot by the luckiest indig on Iaxo. The other pilots had immediately broken off their game to go and get him, figuring he had to have been just fine because even a brain-damaged chimp could’ve brought a ship in for a glide landing from thirty feet up. No one had even been worried about him, and Carter recalled being on the radio making jokes about how, if anyone was going to be brought down that way, well then of course it would be Danny fucking Diaz.

  And the truth was, Danny had landed it and he had survived, though later, the pilots would all kind of wish he hadn’t.

  They found the plane but no Danny. All of them had put down in the field where he’d been stunting to check things out (which had ultimately been the mistake that most of them felt made Danny’s dying their fault) and then had stood around like idiots with their fingers in their noses for a good five minutes. There’d been no blood, no body, no sign of Danny at all. Lots of hoofprints, though, which, for a couple of minutes, had seemed like nothing until, all of a sudden, it became very important indeed.

  The indigs on their ridiculous horses had gotten to Danny quicker than the pilots could in their planes, and by the time the pilots had all gotten their engines cranked up again, their planes straightened out, a taxiway chosen, and themselves back into the air, those horses, those indigs, and Danny were all long gone.

  They’d searched all the rest of the day and on into the night, but found nothing. Connelly had been up on the ragged skirts of the moors then (digging in the remains of his troops for what was to be the ultimately pointless defense of the cities on the river), and Durba had been camped with his riflemen not too far away. Since there were favors owed and kept, they and their men went out looking, too—on foot, raiding and killing and questioning prisoners. There’d been another fellow, a man named Workman, stretched far out on the northern flank and commanding a five-hundred-strong company of native cavalry. They were light horsemen, mostly indig but with a dozen-odd Earth-side officers, and they linked up with Durba to help. Some bored engineers from Cavalier did also, along with another gang of redneck sharpshooters who’d hired on as reavers and kept their own indig scouts chained up in pens like dogs. Together, they’d scoured the high ground for any sign of Danny. The entire war was put on hold while the humans looked for one of their own.

  And this had gone on for a week, progressing with a grim sort of calculating passion. Word traveled. No cruelty or expense was spared in the searching. Men who’d never met Danny, who’d never heard his name or seen his face, poked into every hole they could think of, rode hard, marched nights, put their own lives at risk for him just because that was what men (if not always corporations) did: They took care of their own. This, they thought, was what made them better than the abos. Danny was human, and no one wanted to think what might’ve been happening to him in indig hands. No one wanted to think that his fellows would do any less if it were him in duress and them left to look.

  The pilots, of course, searched twice as hard. They were in the air around the clock, spotting and marking terrain, attacking everything that moved. They appreciated the help to the tune of owing all involved more favors than could possibly be repaid. But for all the cost, vigorous brutality, and appalling acts committed in Danny Diaz’s name, it came to nothing. After a week, the search was called off at Ted Prinzi’s insistence.

  It was a decision that made him no friends, but deep down, all the pilots knew it was the right choice. It was a big country they were covering, and one that the natives knew better than anyone. If they didn’t want something found, it generally didn’t get found.

  So Ted had grounded everyone, threatened a general confinement to quarters after some of the men got it in their heads that there must’ve been a spy among the camp wogs, and began trying their unskilled hands at interrogating the dishwashers and postriders and laundresses. Some indig huts were burnt, a couple of the locals were killed. And when those men were pulled off the indigs, they spoke about what they were doing as though it’d all been very sane, rational, even important, in words that weren’t even words, and sentences stripped of all meaning by their grief.

  Carter hadn’t been involved in that, but only because he’d already voluntarily confined himself to quarters, along with Fenn, Porter Vaughn, and Billy from first squadron, in order to wake Danny—a period of mourning that had taken the form of a drinking contest and ended badly all around. Things at that point had started getting very weird. The jargon of retribution blew around the camp like bullets. And then, two days after they’d given up all hope, Danny came home. Or what was left of him did, anyway.

  It was a ratty mob of Workman’s light horsemen who brought him in. They’d found his corpse being carried in a caravan they’d raided two nights prior, far to the north, and had ridden day and night to deliver him. They’d come with prisoners as well—three of them—and through translators, the pilots learned that Danny had been picked up away from his plane as he’d been making for cover, then tortured for most of the week by indig elders and wise men.

  That much they could tell by the condition Danny’s body had been in. He’d been very systematically beaten, flayed, and brutalized. Most of his bones had been broken. He’d been primitively blinded, likely by having his eyes burnt out. His fingers and toes were missing, as well as some other bits and pieces. There was indig chicken scratch burned and cut into his graying skin, sigils that the horsemen wouldn’t even look at, let alone read aloud. And at some point, he’d been split open like a fish, throat to belly, then crudely stitched back together. That was the part that Carter’d remembered most clearly: the incision mark, in a Y, just like a body carved up for autopsy. Everyone was wondering how much of it he’d lived through and praying to their human gods that it wasn’t very much.

  In a fury, the company men had turned on the three prisoners from the caravan and demanded to know why. And how. They wanted details to justify the terrible things they all wanted to do to the prisoners, were going to do to them regardless, and were shouting—at the prisoners, at Workman’s light horsemen, at their own translators and at one another. It was madness. They learned that it wasn’t out of blind cruelty that this had been done to Danny. Neither was it in revenge or out of plain malice. The indigs who’d taken him had been curious, more than anything, and however vicious their methods, they’d had a reason for what they’d done.

  They’d wanted to know where Danny’s wings were. How he became like a bird. They’d been trying to make Danny teach them how to fly.

  Carter could still remember that morning. The strangest details had stuck with him. He remembered the day and the hour and the light. He remembered the sound of the abos all talking at once. Like stones in a can. He remembered the sweet smell of their horses, ridden half to death and washed in sweat that stank vaguely of what he imagined damp hay would smell like (as if he’d ever smelled such a thing), and a little like high-grade machine oil—plasticky and warm.

  Carter remembered the pounded mud spatters on the horses’ feet, black and thick like old blood, and thinking how he didn’t know what that part of a horse was called.
Not in the language of Iaxo, but any language. The part above the hoof but not quite the leg. Its ankles, he guessed. On a plane, it would be the shortening linkage or the torque link assembly, but horses were not planes and, really, these were not horses. He didn’t have any other name for them, though, so found himself lost in the language and, soon enough, the problems dissolved into violence anyway until, at a certain point, after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth punch or kick he’d delivered to the prisoners, he’d had to stop. He was tired, yes. His hands ached and one of his toes felt wrong inside his boot. But more than that, he’d stopped to consider what kind of line they were crossing. It wasn’t an ethical line or a moral one he was considering. In this cold and damp and occasionally blazing but mostly just scourging alien environment, any sense of morality had already been corroded out of them. Carter understood that. He wasn’t a child.

  It was something else. Another kind of line. Tactical, maybe. Certainly physical. Panting, standing bent with his hands on his knees, ceding his turn at the prisoners to someone else with fresher hands, it’d occurred to him that this was the first time he’d touched one of the indigs on purpose. The first time that he was hurting them up close. Personally. With his hands and his feet. It was the first time he’d been able to look into their heavy, wet eyes and say, “See this? This is me that’s doing this. And motherfucker, you are going to die today.”

  He didn’t much like it, truth be told. It’d taken him a while to realize it, but when he did, the intimacy of it disturbed him on a level he’d been previously unaware he possessed. After a time, he’d walked away to stand in the circle of men and watch rather than participate.

  That had felt better. Not clean, exactly. But better.