A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  After that, the war had picked up again and continued on like normal. In the aftermath of Sispetain, the neighborhood was lighter on humans than it had been before. Many of the gangs and companies that’d fought there had been beaten right off-planet, had given up and gone home to cut their losses. Workman had stuck it out for a little while but vanished not long after. Connelly was reinforcing from among the native fighters. And among the pilots, each man now carried a single TCM-40 fragmentation grenade in his flight bag, just in case. For a while, they’d flown with them taped to their chests, called it “putting the Danny on.” But in time, that’d come to seem rather ridiculous. Uncomfortable, too. So now, they just carried them. Either way, no one ever wanted to end up like Danny had. He was shipped out in a steel coffin, sealed, the outside of it marked REMAINS UNVIEWABLE. Among all the many ways to get off-planet, it was roundly agreed that this was the worst. A terrible way to go home.

  So Carter hadn’t been the first to take fire in combat like Vic had said. Danny Diaz was really the first, even though his memory had been banished, his name scrubbed from the history. No one liked thinking about Danny and no one talked about it, ever. There was nothing to be learned from death by dumb, bad luck.

  On the day that Danny had come back to the Flyboy camp, Ted had shot the three prisoners in the head with his pistol, appearing out of nowhere with his sidearm drawn and walking up behind them—pop pop pop. He’d done it before any of the pilots could do worse, seen the light horse troop paid off for its efforts, and ordered his men up. All of them. On scouting patrol for twelve hours. Radio silence. Alone with their thoughts and hatred, they had nothing to do but let it all bleed away into the cold gray sky.

  After, Vic had come up behind Carter while he was walking to the field house and taken his hand in hers like a girl. That was all it took. And, later still, lying with her, feeling confused but also rather proud of himself and wrapped up in grief as much as in her, Carter would ask, “Why me?”

  He remembered Vic saying, in a completely matter-of-fact way, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Because you’re next.”

  Vic had a thing for tragedy and death. Everyone knew that. Danny hadn’t been her first love to die, or even her second or her fifth. She had a strange sense for seeing the reaper coming at great distances, people said, and was more in love with that than she’d ever been with any pilot. So Vic had been wrong about her and Carter being friends, too, because Carter, at times, wanted Vic not to exist at all or, at the very least, to be as gone from his thoughts as Danny was.

  Because you’re next. There were times when Carter felt like just another number. There were times when he felt as though he was being stalked by her—hunted, her steps just a little bit quicker than death’s. And he’d tried to forget her a hundred times, but it never took. All too often, when she wasn’t even around, he would find himself conjuring her in his head: the curve of her neck, the arch of her eyebrows, the sound of her heart pumping, her gasping breath, the tight skin on the small of her back and the close smell of her when they pulled a sheet up over their heads like two children hiding from monsters.

  He’d buried his traitorous thoughts and emotions (and other, arguably more salubrious organs) in some of the other company girls whenever opportunity and communal desire presented itself, but he always came away feeling even worse. He felt that Vic was bad for him, physically and spiritually. That she would get him killed. And he kept telling himself that, even if he would then be assailed with thoughts of the sweetness of her sweat, the tightness of her cunt, the heat of her breath in his ear when she whispered his name, and have to get up in the air and make something die just to be rid of her for a moment.

  Absently, he fooled with the three crossbow bolts she’d brought him, fingertips running down their smooth shafts, teasing the stiff plastic fletching of their flights. Finally, he tucked them carefully into his flight bag, stood, and made for the tent line. He was exhausted.

  WHEN CARTER WOKE UP, IT WAS STILL MORNING—icy, damp, and bitter. The cold season on Iaxo wasn’t bad because it was dry. Same with the hot season. It was the time between those two brief respites that got to him; when the chill and the wet seemed to sink right through the skin and gnaw at the bone. On Iaxo (which had a parabolic, 440-day rotation), it was like having an entire year of November broken only by a couple weeks of August on one end and a couple weeks of February at the other. In time, it came to bother everyone.

  Like Lefty Berthold’s list of Ted-isms, Carter, too, had tried to make a list once. About a year back, he’d tried to make a list of everything he hated about Iaxo. Really dig in and lay it out there. Permanently. On paper. Everything he hated, all in one place.

  He hated the land, and that, he’d felt, was a good place to start. He hated the trees that were so like other trees he had known, only different, and he hated the other ones—the blue ones—that were totally and completely alien. He hated the mud when there was mud and the ice when there was ice, and he hated the way the air tasted almost all the time. He hated the animals. Most of them. Although there weren’t that many of them around to hate. The disgusting, scabby flying rats that skulked around the edges of the tent line at night eating garbage. The heffalumps they hunted from their planes when there was nothing better to kill. The horse-things with their shovel-blade heads and too many feet. He hated the indigs, though he couldn’t say precisely why. There were a million small reasons, though all variations on a theme. The vastness had stymied him.

  He’d given up right about there. A list like that would’ve been just too massive—long like the Bible was long.

  Sometime later he’d adjusted his tactics, deciding on making a list only of the things he liked—all the good things that Iaxo had produced. This was easier, but he’d given up on it as well because it was too short. He’d been able to come up with only two things.

  One, this war, which had given him gainful employment and an excuse to fly. It was a good war, with all the necessaries of one. It was far away and exotic. There were all manner of interesting people around, either doing bad things for good money or trying to do good things for none at all. The planet itself, through a history that he didn’t comprehend, had thoughtfully provided two groups of natives angry enough to kill for reasons he’d never understood and hardly cared to investigate, and came endowed with resources enough (mostly in the form of land and promised rights thereto) to pay the company that’d sent him for his services as a combat pilot. There was little chance of him, personally, being killed, which he appreciated. And the natives treated everyone from the company like something close to gods, with a god’s perfidy and murderous flair, which was also nice. Finally, no one besides the principals involved seemed to care a rat’s dong for what happened here. It was a playground game of war, serious only to those who died of it. And in Carter’s experience, though situations like this were not all that hard to come by, it was still nice to have a good war around when you needed one.

  The second thing on his list had been Cat. Not exactly a pet. More like a mascot. Carter had fed the thing once, not long after their arrival in this place, and forever after, it’d just been around more often than it was not. When Carter’d left his tent to head for the flight line last night, Cat had been peacefully laid out asleep and wheezing in a pile of ratty blankets by the tent door. Now he could hear it rooting around somewhere beneath his bunk. And he’d often said that when the time finally came to leave this place completely, Cat would be the only thing he took with him for the big ride other than the lice.

  Cat looked something like a bug-eyed Burmese kitten swallowed to the neck by a snake. It (since the issue of he or she had never been determined as neither Carter or Fenn had ever known where to look) had a mashed-in face, pointed ears, a head the size of a fist followed southerly by a long, snaking body covered in furred scales that felt like the green on a pool table, eight stubby legs, and a docked stub of a tail like a Doberman’s. Cat was brown some of the time, o
r mottled white, or a deep and golden tan depending on the season, but furious always. It spit when angry. Like a cobra, it had a hood on its neck that would stand up when Cat was annoyed and turn a bright, angry scarlet when it was about to kill something. The flying rats that Carter hated, for example. Or Fenn.

  The three of them, Carter, Fenn, and Cat, shared their unlovely tent accommodations the way the British and the Germans had once shared the Somme, gaining and losing ground by inches, creeping around in the night to seize, here and there, tiny bits of valuable personal real estate.

  Captains Fenn and Carter got along well—a relationship substantially lubricated by drink and common misery. Carter and Cat had an understanding based on conjoined need. Cat needed Carter because Carter provided it with a warm, safe place to sleep, some measure of entertainment, company when it was desired, and the odd scrap of food when the hunting was poor. And Carter needed Cat because Cat gave him something to like about Iaxo that wasn’t all tied up with dying.

  But Fenn and Cat did not get along at all. Though Fenn’s dislike of the creature was rather diffuse and generalized, Cat’s dislike of Fenn appeared heated, passionate, and dire. For reasons beyond the ken of the tent’s two human occupants, the animal loathed Fennimore Teague more than any other thing on a planet that, in Carter’s opinion, was just full of detestable things.

  But Carter liked the bug-eyed little monster, and Cat, for its part, tolerated Carter to the extent that it did not sneak into Carter’s bed at night and try to kill him as it did at least once a month with Fenn. Carter always found this hilarious—seeing his friend leap up half-naked in the middle of the night, screaming bloody murder with Cat attached at the teeth to one of his legs or the back of his neck. Fenn, needless to say, did not see the humor in it, though it was perhaps a measure of his friendship with Carter that he hadn’t yet simply put the barrel of his sidearm to the thing’s head one night while it was sleeping and blown its brains into the dirt.

  So that had been it. Carter’s entire list—the total extent of what there was in Carter’s mind to recommend Iaxo—came down to Cat and the war. Everything else could burn for all he cared. The summers were hot, dry, and short. The winters brutally cold. The drugs were revolting, the food primarily inedible, the landscapes just familiar enough that every little difference between Iaxo and Earth stuck out like a cockroach on a birthday cake. And the way Carter saw it, the battles between the two antagonistic gangs of abos that called Iaxo home had been entirely savage and Neanderthal undertakings until the company had come along to civilize them.

  And even still, they were mostly nasty affairs. Bunch of fucking monkeys poking each other with sticks and bashing each other with rocks, he would say. The indigs themselves—both sides—were dirty, simple, smelled bad, and seemed themselves possessed of only two emotions: murderous rage and adoration. As Carter would readily admit, this might have been because he’d only ever seen them in two positions—either bowing to him in passing or in the bead of a gun sight—but this didn’t make his essential belief any less true. And even if he’d never cared to know them in any other context and detested the miserable little world that’d created them in full, it had always been his proudly stated position that he was here only for their money and their blood, in that order. Nothing more.

  That was another list, of a sort. Not a nice one but, really, none of them were.

  Lying in bed, Carter coughed. He had a taste in his mouth like he’d been chewing nickels wrapped in lemon all night. He rolled over and spit into the dirt next to his rack, wishing to God he had just one cigarette. Just one. He felt the aching tightness of need in his chest, the itch in the back of his throat, the dampness of his palms from wanting. He thought to himself about the one that Ted had given him last night or yesterday or two days ago or whatever it was now. How that’d been cruel, really—just one being enough to retrigger the frantic yearning, certainly not enough to put it back to bed.

  Rolling onto his back again, he stared up at the tent canvas. He crossed his arms behind his head, then threw one over his eyes. He was cold, so he dragged his blanket higher. Looking down the length of himself, he saw the toes of his boots poking up, uncovered. He’d slept in his boots. In most of his gear. Again. Pig, he thought.

  But then, past the tips of his boots, he saw something else. On the trunk at the foot of his bed were two cartons, each about the size of two bricks, shrink-wrapped in black plastic and labeled as TINNED MEAT in large, white letters. For an instant, he thought they were a mirage, that maybe he was still dreaming.

  Quick, he told himself, just close your eyes and wish for fresh eggs, orange juice, a nice, fat beef steak, and a teenage prostitute to bring them to you, but it was no good. Tinned Meat was like abracadabra to him—powerful magic words. Tinned Meat was how cigarettes were labeled when they had to be shipped through the colonial customs blockades. And just then, he wanted tinned meat more than anything. More than love or money or a steak or real orange juice or pussy or even another breath. It was like there was a hand grown from the middle of his chest, already reaching, and dragging him along after.

  He heard Fenn laughing quietly in the bunk next to his. “So, what did you wish for for Christmas, little boy?”

  Carter said nothing but descended on the first carton with all the cool and poise of a drowning man reaching for a life preserver, scrambling the wrong way down the bed, over sheets and blankets and his own feet, one hand groping for his ankle where, in his boot, he wore a trench knife; fumbling around it, getting tangled in bed linens, fighting free, then drawing it and, slitting the plastic like a throat, tearing at the blank white cardboard to fumble out a pack, strip it open, and pry out one clean, white, and perfect filtertip cigarette with a dirty fingernail. He stuck it in his mouth, snatched away the lighter Fenn held out to him, lit it and sucked it down in an ungoverned panic as if, at any moment, he might realize that this really was a dream and wake, wanting even worse than before.

  When the first was half-done and slobbered into limp wetness, he chain-lit a second off the stump, threw the first aside into the dirt, and fell back down amid his thin blankets, musty sheets, worn canvas, and two lumpy pillows, feeling as plump and luxurious as a pasha, done in by the effort and a little high. He smiled stupidly. “My God…,” he said softly. “Oh my God.”

  “You know, I’d had this thought.” Fenn was sitting up in bed cross-legged, a cloth spread in his lap laid with the disassembled pieces of his sidearm. “I’d had this thought that it would be funny to get two actual cases of tinned meat and set them there for you to see. Would that have been too cruel?”

  “I would’ve killed you,” Carter said.

  “Yeah, that would’ve been too far. Pushing it too far. But still, I thought about it. I think it would’ve been hilarious.”

  “Maybe. To someone else. Not to me.”

  “I’ve never seen your eyes as big as when you first saw those cartons, Kev. And watching you drool all over that first one? It was really rather disgusting.”

  Carter shrugged dreamily, feeling etherized by the sumptuousness of lying there watching coils of pure white smoke twisting up toward the roof of the tent. “So don’t watch. I haven’t many vices left, Captain. Let me enjoy those I have.”

  Fenn scratched in mocking thoughtfulness at the grown-out shag of a blond crewcut. “Not many vices, dear? Now let us see… There’re cigarettes, apparently. Whiskey, wine…” He counted on his fingers.

  “Count those two together. For simplicity’s sake. Drunkenness.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Women, lechery, gluttony, sloth.” Carter counted them on his fingers.

  “Those are sins, not vices.”

  “Same thing, darling. They’re sins if you feel bad about them. They’re vices if you keep doing them anyway. Trust me, I know from sin.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. Add covetousness, too. I coveted that bottle you left by your bed last night. Then I drank it to remove me
from temptation.”

  “Thievery then as well, you shit.” Fenn eased the barrel assembly into the slide and pushed it back into its seating. “That’s quite a list. Anything else we’d like to get off our narrow, bony little chest?”

  “Killing,” Carter said. He reached over the side of his rack and tapped ash into the dirt.

  Fenn chuckled. “Ah, yes… Manly recreation.” He set the recoil guide, fitted the pistol’s slide onto the frame rails, and pushed until the barrel linkage clicked. “Speaking of which, young William is out flying reconnaissance and damage assessment with first squadron. They should be back in an hour or so.” Carter could smell peppermint on Fenn’s breath when he spoke. “Care to join me for breakfast, Captain? We can meet Billy on the field when they come back in.”

  “Ted out with them?”

  Fenn pointed the pistol at his face, then set the barrel bushing, the recoil spring, and plug.

  “No, actually,” he said, and, for just an instant, the barest hint of concern darkened his face. It was quick, noticeable only at all because Fenn’s was a face that Carter saw daily, altogether too much, and knew it to be rarely touched by gloom. It could’ve been something with the gun, sure. A piece mis-fit. It could’ve been some other fleeting thought entirely. But it wasn’t, and Carter knew it wasn’t, because he knew and understood Fenn’s imperturbable serenity at close range as the maddening and damn annoying thing that it was. Thus he saw even the briefest flicker of dark against the face of that tranquil spirit like a cloud blotting the sun. He took it as assurance that no one was truly as calm and placid as Fenn pretended to be, just that some could fake it better than others. It was validation of his belief that everyone was just as jangled, miserable, and spoilt as he felt most of the time.

  “No,” Fenn continued. “Our dashing commander has been shacked up with Fast Eddie in the comms tent since late last night and hasn’t poked his head out once. Either they’re in love or there’s trouble, and neither sounds very appetizing, so let’s not think about it until after breakfast and possibly lunch, too, okay?”