“Nerves,” said Fenn, carefully laying down the hammer on his pistol and lowering it. “Happens.” He paused. “Not to me, of course.” And then he grinned. Charlie laughed. Tommy did the same. Carter’s head hurt, but he felt the anger whirlpooling out of him like water down a drain. Everyone was sweating. It was hot as an oven.
“Okay,” Fenn said, then repeated himself. “Okay. Now that we’ve all got that out of our systems…,” and let it hang, incomplete. Without taking his eyes off Tommy or Charlie, he laid the pistol down on his bed, on top of his book.
“It’s going to be cold up there tonight,” said Tommy. “We were just trying to get a big fire going and—”
“It’s all right, Tommy,” Carter said, reaching over and cupping the back of his head in his hand. He did it with the one he hadn’t hit the boy with. The other one hurt almost as much as his head. “Just drop it. You and Charlie feel a bit more civilized, you’re welcome to sit awhile. You’ve got some time yet.” He checked his watch. “Night flights don’t lift for another few hours.”
Charlie asked Fenn if he minded and Fenn said no, provided everyone made a solemn promise not to hit anyone else. And so they sat, the four of them, while their bruises swelled and blackened and their aches receded and the heat bloomed from the overstoked potbelly.
No one liked flying at night. It made a man strange, knowing it was coming. But in the end, Fenn and Charlie and Tommy and Jack all made their patrols and came back shaken but not dead. Carter, having finally found the knack for it, slept while they were gone, waking from a dream of flying just enough to count their engines as they passed over the tent line—one and two, three and four—then dropping back again into an exhausted slumber that seemed to last for days.
AT FIVE HUNDRED FEET, when flying at nearly two hundred miles an hour, the landscape became a very personal thing. One got to know it intimately, though not as this tree or that bush, but rather as a minute of green blur here, a few seconds of brown over there. It was like a fondness for maps—for looks, not land. It was like the distracted passion of a man who loves pornography but loathes an actual warm and real woman. The land, the pilots must’ve come to hate because they’d done so much violence to it. The topography, though, was spectacular.
Roadrunner was in the shop. Over the following three days, Carter got friendly with Li’l Red Rooster—a hinky Fokker reproduction that was both slower and less graceful, but easier to fly. Together, the two of them got to know a whole lot of terrain. Hundreds of square miles of it, crossed and recrossed and re-recrossed by defensive patrols taking off and landing nonstop, all around the clock. Artillery was their big concern. The airfield could be crippled by one solid barrage, decimated by concentrated fire. After artillery, they were concerned with troop movements, supply caravans, lone riders who might be scouts or forward observers. And after artillery, troops, caravans, and scouts, they were worried about everything else.
The new orders were followed. No one died. Gone were the days of just flying around like idiots and banging away at random. Everything was methodical now. Businesslike. No hunting parties, no harassment, no provocation of any sort. On Ted’s orders, no fighters were to engage any targets under any circumstances. If they were shot at, if they saw anything, if they were even looked at funny by anything on the ground, they were to call in the location to the bombers (who circled constantly at ten thousand feet, specks of dust on the lens of the sky), then get the hell out of Dodge most fucking ricky-tick.
They worked the sky in three-man teams, split squadrons, with two fighters low and a bomber high, each sortie moving them fractionally deeper into Indian country; observing, reporting, everyone checking roads and forest paths, hilltops, and their favorite hidden landmarks for signs of movement, for gun emplacements, for fortification—looking everywhere for anything. Nothing was nothing anymore, just like Ted had said.
Until better intelligence was received as to the kind of materiel support being provided by NRI, these were the new rules. It was, in most everyone’s opinion (excluding Ted’s), a chickenshit way to fight a war, but necessary. At least for the moment, there were too many unknowns on the ground. Too many questions. And if there was any consolation at all beyond the fact that, for a few days, no one died, then it was only that the other side had found an even more chickenshit way to fight: by not showing up at all. The fighters were bait, flying low to the deck, trying to draw ground fire and give the bombers a target. Only most days, the bombers came home fully loaded. Most nights, the pilots ended up the same way.
It was a new kind of boredom. One with a knife-edge of real, bright danger wavering somewhere just out of sight. Not shattering like actual combat could be, but grinding, fraying—the kind of fear-spiked and blistered boredom that ate at you hour after hour, that obsessed you even when you weren’t in it. The danger was the danger of the unknown, and the boredom was the boredom of not knowing when the boredom might, quite abruptly, end. Every moment that Carter wasn’t in it, he felt like he was preparing for it or decompressing from it. He felt, oddly, as though he didn’t have the time for anything else but it. And he was not the only one. Suddenly everybody had lucky socks and wore them all the time. Every loud noise, every minute change in the weather became a harbinger of something. Every cold, sick feeling of directionless dread in the night was a premonition. Everyone became a prophet. It wasn’t unusual at all to see a man, in the dawn or at the dusk of the day, standing at the head of one of the airstrips and trying to smell out the positions of the enemy on the wind, his eyes closed and his hands hanging slack at his sides. And after two years in the field, everyone’s internal resources were already so depleted by distance and lack and hate and nearness to death that they cracked like eggshells under the least application of pressure.
Ted spent most of his days on the radio or furtively fighting with the FTL relay like he was touching something he wasn’t supposed to. This was when he wasn’t on the field or getting in everyone’s way down in the longhouse or chasing after Eddie.
Diane watched him when she wasn’t at her post. Or when she was at her post, but with nothing going on. She watched him hunch his whole body around the machinery—arms laid flat on the table, shoulders folded in, head down. From certain angles he appeared to be hugging it, and she could never figure out who he was talking to, only that some of the news was good and some of it was bad. She’d learned to tell the difference only by the angle of the back of his neck and the weary curve of his spine.
The pop and hiss of the radio on traditional frequencies became a kind of music to Ted; the low triple-tone hum of the microwave transmitter/receiver finding nothing but dead channels a droning intonation, the Om that began and ended his every conversation with the infinite. He could close his eyes and feel the waves stretching out over alien fields emptied of friends, of support. Early, there’d been a few contacts. He’d spent part of a morning talking with a group from Healthwatch I.S.—a group of doctors who’d come to the boonies to try and help the blighted monkeys and now found themselves stranded in the mountains with a hundred displaced native women and children watching as cities burned in the distance. He’d listened in on the orderly retreat of a band of off-world engineers and their native bodyguards—the calm and collected withdrawal of forces from a half-dozen positions being casually overrun by indig infantry with flamers and explosive breaching charges. The engineers were firing all their equipment as they pulled back, destroying their Rome plows and Caterpillar tractors and workshops with white phosphorous grenades or blocks of C4 strapped to acetylene tanks; denying the enemy valuable spoils. The last thing they did before loading up into the transports was open up on their own indigs with machine guns because they were trying to force their way aboard.
He’d caught a detachment of distant air cavalry from Applied Outcomes who’d been operating far to the south just as they were preparing to pull out. He’d raised their radio op late in the night and asked him what their situation was.
�
��Situation? We have no situation, man! We are gone. We’re fragging the lifters and pushing them into the sea. Dust-off is en route. What are you guys doing up there?”
“Holding fast,” Ted had said, mostly because he couldn’t bring himself to speak the truth and couldn’t yet make himself ask for the help he needed—for a ride out, offering anything and everything they had for lift weight and space for fifty-odd troopers stranded far from home.
“Holding fast? Holding fast to what, Chief? Charlie Mike is on the way, and he don’t much care for our sort.”
Charlie Mike: the Colonial Marines.
“Roger that,” Ted had said. “How are you flying out?”
“Ranger hot tails, straight from the home office. We are out, friend. Eighty-fucking-six and good-bye. Do you have exfil waiting?”
“Yeah,” Ted lied. “In orbit, but we’re sticking it out.”
“Crazy, man. I’d hate to think of you stuck here, though. We’ve got orbital flares reading north of us, maybe near you. Supply runners. You heard that Natives R Us is dropping in on this party, right?”
“I’d heard that. We’ve been getting a little action from them.”
“Yeah, that was our sign to bug out. If I’d wanted a fair fight, I would’ve joined the army.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hey, you know Connelly? That ape from Eastbourne Services? He’s staying, too. You should call him and try to talk him into hitching a ride with you when you go.”
Ted had cut the connection after that. He couldn’t take it anymore. Hour by hour, day by day, the radios were growing more quiet, the planet of Iaxo slowly being returned to those who’d had the misfortune of being born here. He kept the planes flying, kept the patrols going, but he would not commit to any engagement—afraid of what might be waiting for his men, his planes. If he was going to be abandoned here, left all alone, then he needed to conserve them. Husband his resources. Wait for his company to come to their senses, call him, say that all was forgiven and a ride was on the way.
He was afraid. With the Om in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, he could see everyone leaving him behind—the bright sparks of transport freighters maneuvering in distant, high orbit, and the shuttles, the hot tails, climbing for them atop pillars of fire.
Too late, he had fluttered his fingers at the radio, trying to call back the radio op from Applied Outcomes. He would ask him for a ride, offer him anything, admit that he’d lied—that his company was abandoning him here to death or prison or worse, and that there was no exfil waiting for them in the sky. No ride. Nothing.
He’d beg if he had to. Promise anything. He’d punched in the frequency and waited.
“Hello? Alpha Oscar radio op, this is Ted, do you read? This is Commander Prinzi. Do you copy?”
But there was nothing. The frequency was cold and dead. And slowly, the silence grew.
In the longhouse, planes were rotated in and out for refitting and maintenance. Engines were tuned up for combat, guns were changed out, broken down, cleaned, and tested. Any machine showing stress from two years of inconstant use was put through a thorough overhaul, and that work alone was enough to keep the lights on day and night. Blackout curtains had been hung to keep that light where it belonged—inside, and not spilling out into the darkness where it might give away the airfield’s position to any sneaky indig with a howitzer in his horse cart.
The Akaveen indigs—the ones on whose side the company was currently not fighting—took the opportunity to pour troops across the ford and into what was previously enemy territory. From the sky, the pilots watched long, snaking files of them tramping across the lowland plains and dreamed of strafing them just because there was nothing else to do; they dreamed of attack angles, the hard hammering of machine guns, and the sweet release of weight as undercarriage bombs were let go.
Infantry, archers, gangs of cavalry, and long, shuddering supply trains moved into positions that stretched for miles up and down both banks of the river and ten miles deep into the other side. To the south, the bridge was taken with surprisingly little effort by a mixed force of local indig light infantry—raggedy-ass militia armed with spears, pikes, clubs and farm implements. They’d been the vanguard of a larger sweep downriver and held the position until help arrived in the form of heavy, organized infantry and native engineers who cleared the area and set about lazily building muddy fortifications.
The remnants of Durba’s Rifles—those who’d survived the artillery barrage that first night—had re-formed under one of the surviving first IRC platoon leaders, a man named Garcia. They’d reinforced their numbers by absorbing a troop of native postriders and light cavalry, becoming mounted infantry. Garcia’s Horse Rifles, they called themselves, and they had abandoned their encampment to the south of the Flyboy airfield and moved in to hold the ford for Connelly. Rather than trenches, they built a stockade this time—a half-moon wall of stout timber with firing positions for their guns and a paddock for their horses. To replace their lost equipment, Fast Eddie okayed a loan of two FI-60 field radios and, on the sly, Ted gave Tony Fong a rebuilt microwave transmitter so Garcia could keep in touch with him at the airfield and be Ted’s eyes on the front. The transmitter was the backup to the company’s primary microwave transmitter, which Ted clung to like a life preserver.
Tony had survived Durba’s worst night only because his radio post had been a ways back from the front line, but he had still managed to catch a piece of hot shrapnel in the ass running away. Tony told them that Garcia himself was simply the luckiest son of a bitch on Iaxo. He’d been right in the middle of the shelling and had somehow walked away without a scratch.
When Ted had tried to ask Tony if there were any plans for Connelly and his surviving humans to leave Iaxo, Tony had laughed.
“Where would we go?” he asked.
“All the other companies, they’re pulling out. I’ve talked to some—”
Tony’s eyes grew hard. “Quitters and cowards,” he said. “We have a job to do.”
“Has Eastbourne called in a dust-off for you?”
Tony spit in the dirt. “Quitters and cowards,” he repeated, thanked Ted for the loaner, and promised that he’d be in touch.
To the north, the Akaveen indigs pushed their lines until they were in sight of Lassateirra-held Riverbend, then called a halt—massing troops in a huge encampment on the friendly side of the river and spotting smaller, provisional units under off-world command out ten miles on the other side to cut off roads and any quick reinforcement from the south. Trouble was, there just weren’t that many human officers left. Fewer every day. So the blockade of Riverbend became the worst siege in the history of sieges, the lines full of holes and gaps that a tank division could’ve rolled through.
But organization was not the natives’ strong suit. The Akaveen militia spent their days shouting up at the walls of Riverbend while the regular army marched back and forth on their side of the river, shaking their shields and spears and making occasional one-man charges on horseback—riding their mounts into the water, splashing through the low current, and rearing the beasts up to wave their too-many feet at the city walls. Every time one of the company’s planes flew overhead, the Akaveen went nuts, whooping and cheering and waving their weapons in the air.
The prevailing wisdom in the field house was that the Akaveen must’ve thought Flyboy had done this—driving back their age-old enemies or whatever, and sending them running for the hills and the safety of their walled cities. Whether or not this was true was debatable, though not, actually, debated, save in private. The indig commanders and elders and officers dealt only with Fast Eddie because, besides Billy Stitches (who spoke a little), Eddie was the only one who spoke any indig at all. And since the pilots still believed that Fast Eddie answered to the company, which in turn depended on him (and Ted) to make sure the fight was going well and all their investments would someday pay off, no one thought Eddie was going to try very hard to convince the wogs that the pilots w
eren’t, in fact, the heroes they thought they were.
Thus, any display by the Akaveen indigs became cheering and adulation. Any sounds at all became utterances of love and faith and thanks and, as with the supplies, the pilots grew fat with that as well—bloated and waddling with adoration.
And they sucked it up as though starving, hoping silently that this blind presumption was right and that it would sustain them even as the Lassateirra haunted their dreams, vanished in daylight, and their own camp indigs were stealing away in the middle of the night and lighting out for badland.
Still, they told themselves that they were winners. Terrifying and impervious as stone. They told themselves that they were loved as only liberators could be loved, a boon to friends and death to their enemies. They roared low over the lines and made the indigs jump. In the mess, they circled around Morris Ross’s coffin and used it as a table for cards and drinks and breakfast. It was just a box. What was inside no longer mattered.
On the fourth day of the new patrol schedule, Connelly’s 1st (now Garcia’s Horse Rifles) and 2nd companies were pulled forward to the bridge, his 3rd moved across the ford and up to the base of Mutter’s Ridge where the artillery position had been, while his 4th—which had seen the most action recently—fell back all the way to just east of the airfield, now a good thirty or forty miles to the rear of the new front lines.
And the pilots flew. They flew constantly. Once Connelly’s 4th moved in, they burned lights on the field without fear of being spotted because there was nothing that could approach their position under cover of darkness without being spotted itself, nothing that could come in range of them without being utterly destroyed.
Carter looked at the maps. He knew that the Akaveen Something-or-Others were solidly in control of nearly eighty miles of river now, including the bridge and the ford. They had troops covering the forests on the far side all the way up to Mutter’s Ridge, cavalry patrolling the two cut roads that ran through the area, and their forces were in sight of Riverbend to the north and just a day’s hard march from Southbend to the south. Those two fortified towns were the anchors of the other side’s presence in the area, and if they fell, or were taken, the river would open back up again for three hundred miles. The fight would then move back up to the high ground east of the river again, back onto Sispetain. From the moors, it would be on to the plains beyond, then the mountains beyond that, the cities that crouched at their feet, the far coast, which none of them had seen except briefly when they’d arrived from orbit.
A Private Little War Page 21