A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  “Probably not.”

  She was quiet for a minute. So was Carter.

  “We’re gonna have to leg this. Brace up the wing. Need light and some tools.”

  Carter said nothing.

  “Come with me, Kev. I need an extra set of hands.”

  And he did. They didn’t talk any more. She had to bring out the tractor to tow the generator lights. Carter walked. For an hour, they worked in silence with jacks and splints, raising the tail, getting a temporary wooden strut under the crushed straight braces of aircraft-grade aluminum, cutting away the broken skid plate and axle and putting a gimp on it. When she hooked the tractor’s tow chain to the Vickers, Carter killed the genny, waited for her to drag the half wreck into the house and then come back for him. He attached the lights and generator to the tractor and hopped up onto the foot plate for the ride back. When, in a crosswind, a bit of her hair brushed across his neck, he felt as though he’d been whipped by fire.

  Inside, Vic pulled the big sliding door shut. Together, the two of them muscled the Vickers over into one of the repair bays and got to work rebuilding everything Carter had broken. They talked a little, just hand-me-that and where’d-you-put-my-whatever. It took another hour to get a new front skid mounted, twenty minutes to leg the tail. The wing was more serious. They stood side by side staring at it and then, without any discussion, got to work with cutting torches and strutters. It was the middle of the night before they’d finished, and Carter felt empty. He felt good.

  The scramble sirens went off at thirteen o’clock, and if anyone noticed Carter arriving from the direction of Vic’s tent, no one made any mention of it. He was still warm from her skin, wet from her, drunk on her—except that he was technically sober. That’d been a first for him, coming to her without the soft armor of drunkenness and its excuse. It was different.

  The alarm had been nothing. Chasing ghosts. Vic had lain for a time, not knowing, watching the path Carter’s plane had followed at takeoff as if its motion had torn a hole of emptiness in the night that she could still see—the fading track of his passage from her and into the sky. She’d been naked, of course, and chilled by the suddenness of his absence as if something almost precious had been taken from her.

  The planes all came home and Vic, dressed now and aching, had put her boys under the whip—lighting the strip, flagging down pilots, wheeling machines into bed. She motivated them like they were under fire. Drove them, stopping only every now and then to look up into the cold, hard sky, barely lit by the shards of the double moons, to try and spot Carter’s plane. It was no good, though. Painted up for night fighting, she was as good as invisible.

  In the air, Carter was doing the same thing, trying to pick Vic out of the play of harsh shadows, the severe glare of runway lamps, and shifting beams of nightsticks. He knew she was down there somewhere in the baffling dark. He could feel her and imagined that, circling, stacked up six deep, now five, that he was circling only her. Like there was a string tethering him, its knot tied high in his throat like something he couldn’t quite swallow.

  On the ground, Vic counted three planes, then four. The accounting was in her head—the order of things, tomorrow’s busywork—but she didn’t allow much room to this collection of simple numbers, mental spreadsheets, constantly pressing against the soft walls of the movie playing behind her eyes.

  The sex hadn’t been nice. There’d been nothing friendly about it. It was rough and it was hard and that’d been fine. It’d been good because that was what he’d needed and she’d wanted and, so, what she’d taken from him. After the longhouse, he’d followed her back to her tent like a puppy—slinking, shy—and that’d been a disappointment. But once inside, behind a closed door, there’d been a moment. A spark like a starbursting short. The closing of a switch. She’d been doing something. He’d been doing something else—moving across the tent, talking some kind of nonsense. And then suddenly he’d stopped and she’d stopped, and their eyes had brushed each other and his hips had twitched around as though she’d caught him with a fishhook in the belly and pulled.

  It was all in the tilt of her head, the turning angle of his body, and the coils of barbed wire that looped along the trajectory of their gazes—into each other’s eyes, electric with the sure knowledge of what was coming next.

  Vic was there in that moment. She knew that. And then she wasn’t there because she became like a doll to him, an object to be used and bent and turned this way and that; a target on which he could spend some terrible rage.

  He fucked her without sweetness and that, too, had been fine because he had no sweetness to offer and none that she wanted. And when it left her hot and sore and breathless and (at least temporarily) mindless of anything but his skin and his mouth and his cock and the sound of his breath in her ear, she was happy because that was what she’d wanted from him and because she knew that, as she’d been there, fully present, in that first charged instant of connection, so, too, would she be there on the other end, as what would be waiting for him on the other side.

  And she was. He hadn’t been sleeping when the scramble siren had gone off, but he was peaceful, something she knew he hadn’t been in a long time. That was her gift. What she knew she was capable of giving.

  “I know what they say about me, you know,” she’d said to him in the moments before the quiet was split by the siren’s grinding wail. “It’s not true.”

  Carter’d known exactly what she was talking about. He hadn’t lied and pretended he didn’t. She’d appreciated that.

  Eventually, Carter brought his plane down. Second to last. And when his postflight was done, he followed Vic again, back to her tent, without hesitating. He’d followed her down to the ground already. Had felt her reel him in safely, dragging him from the sky to the earth. This, then, was just more following. He hadn’t yet been cut free and didn’t fight the hook at all.

  She was taking her clothes off before even getting inside. Undoing buttons, rasping zippers. It was need, same as his. Not even desire. The bite of cold against her bare skin only served to remind her of the heat she now craved like water, like oxygen.

  And three hours later, the siren went off again. Carter brought his head up from between her legs and growled, still starving, like her. He dressed, then ran for his plane. This time, it wasn’t nothing. It was a true target. And now that it was his turn, in the wan, sad hour before dawn, he’d done like Stork, Hardman, and Vaughn had done, like Fenn before them. He killed without any dignity at all.

  They cheered him and his flight on the ground, and Carter felt disgusted by it. When he saw Vic, he went to her, but she’d stopped him—laying a hand gently on the frozen leather of his chest.

  “No. Celebrate. You need it and so do they.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Go. I’ll be here when it’s over.”

  And she was. There was nowhere else to go.

  CARTER’D HAD THIS GIRLFRIEND ONCE, BACK ON EARTH. She was pretty and young and, at the time, so was he.

  They’d met in school. He was finishing his third levels in math and physical sciences, prerequisites for the engineering school at Swan that’d already accepted him. She was on an earthbound track, something artistic and soft. Fiber crafts, maybe. Papermaking. It was hard for him to remember now. She’d been a commune kid, born and raised, so the artistic tastes had been no surprise. Her father was a laborer who painted a little—mostly other people’s houses. Her mother did something strange with pottery and was, in that world, quite well-known for it.

  Carter was the exact opposite—an engineer born of engineers and raised among engineers just outside Midland Spaceport, he’d never once had cause to question the path that’d been laid out for him since birth. His father designed solar-electric panels, his mother varial-g structural components. Their parents, Carter’s grandparents, had all been engineers. Grandpa Carter had designed light pumps for orbital stations and darkside colonials. Grandma had been heavy into food science. On the othe
r side of the family—his mother’s—the grandparents had both been architectural engineers, one on the public works side, the other in the private sector, though Carter could never recall which had been which and who’d done what.

  In any event, they were engineers who made more little engineers (Carter and his two brothers), socialized them only with other little engineers, entertained them with engineers’ toys, and saw them schooled inside primary and secondary academies where engineering was treated almost like a religion, with all the same fervor and promise of great reward. Mark, the oldest, quickly showed a flair for genes, Jacob (ironically) for aeronautics. Kevin Carter, the youngest of the three, was a bit slower, but by sixteen he had found his niche among the mechanical engineers and had flourished. He was happy. He lived a life without doubt, without the stress of wondering what he’d be doing for the rest of his life, because there was never any question of what he’d been born to do. Mark, Jacob, and he had each come out in the top five in their respective first levels, in the top three in their second levels. In turn, they’d each earned off-planet berths—valuable seats on big birds that would take them off to university programs, which would lead to further off-planet postings where they could carry on their life’s work, find girl engineers (or, in Jacob’s case, another boy), make more little engineers and so keep the cycle going. Carter was the last, but he was doing nothing more than following a course already well charted by Mark and Jacob before him.

  Then Carter’d met Sara—the girl, the fabric artist or painter or whatever she was. She’d been at the school doing a contract art installation: some mural of glorious engineers doing glorious things like building bridges, DNA helixes, the skeleton frames of spacecraft with classical geometric and physical formulae wreathing their bulk like halos of pure math. It was hideous, but fairly standard—social realism being the only artistic tenet that engineers embraced that couldn’t be expressed as a neat equation or theorem—and Carter had known enough not to blame the artists for the brutish heavy-handedness of the thing. They were artists. They did what they were told or they didn’t eat.

  Sara had been there, along with her father and six or seven other apprentices from the commune. And Carter remembered exactly how they’d gotten to talking: She’d spilled a bucket of paint on him. Not exactly subtle. And though she always swore that it’d been accidental, she always swore it with a mocking grin.

  It took less than three months for Sara to undo Carter completely, to lift him free from the path of his onrushing future and show him, for lack of a better word, options. One of the reasons he’d been so content in his course was that he’d never known anyone who’d done anything different. He’d never known anyone who wasn’t an engineer or an engineer in training. For the life of him, he couldn’t have understood then why anyone would’ve wanted to be anything but an engineer. He felt proud, fortunate, blessed, even, that he’d been lucky enough to have been born into exactly the right family that could allow him to become exactly what he’d always wanted to be.

  He learned different on the commune. When he would sneak out of the academy dorms to go see Sara, he would see people who couldn’t describe the physical action of a lever or read the point stress of a T-beam if their lives depended on it. Yet they seemed happy. Or at least they pretended very well. They cared about things that he had never considered. Valued things that he thought of as superfluous, if at all. Something in that freedom had appealed greatly to Carter and, completely against his wishes, he’d fallen in love with the girl.

  When he missed his flight out to Swan Station where he was to meet with the dean of the mechanical engineering school there, his parents became concerned, but by then it was far too late. He and Sara were already on a rather different flight: terrestrial, just a little ways south to Matagorda Island and the Villachez Spaceport, where seats were waiting for them on a commuter jump out to Unity Station (anti-motion-sickness Therazine caps and anti-emetics pressed into their hands as they rushed to the gate at the last moment, the standard effects-of-high-and-low-g safety lecture abbreviated by their late arrival) and then a ride on a small guild cruiser to Mars. Sara was outbound, headed for the university at Chryse, and Carter was more than happy just to tag along. Their liberal arts program was second to none.

  For a few months, everything was wonderful. They lived together in a tiny capsule apartment under the dome—on the cheap side, but not far from the university. Sara attended classes in art and design. Carter even audited a couple, though he quickly lost interest and took a job on campus instead, using all of his years of careful education and cloistered study to patch seals and polish pipeworks at the Chryse water-generation plant. At Sara’s insistence, he avoided all attempts at contact from his brothers and his parents. They wouldn’t understand, she told him. All they wanted was for him to come back and build their stupid spaceships again. Curled together like quotation marks on their apartment’s narrow bed, they convinced each other that this was the start of their great adventure together, that everything was going to work out fine.

  And when Sara eventually broke Carter’s heart for the most banal of reasons and saw him thrown out of their combined quarters and his job at the campus plant to boot, he found himself suddenly at loose ends. Gone was the security of the groove cut by his time as an engineer’s brat. Gone was the heady rush and careless bravery of rebelling against all that for what he’d thought was true love. With two brothers, a strong family unit, and years of boarding school, he’d never experienced aloneness before. He’d never faced down a day without knowing the purpose meant to be fulfilled at the end of it. It’d scared the crap out of him.

  Joining NRI was what Carter’d done to replace all that he’d lost. In them, he saw a sort of salvation. They had goals, discipline, plans for the future—all that he felt he lacked in his moment of weakness. They were doing good on a galactic scale, fighting for a cause they believed in. There was other stuff, too. He couldn’t remember what, exactly, but he could remember Sara having several NRI posters on rotation on the media wall of their small container apartment, each blazing with vaguely inspirational slogans. And those slogans must’ve burned in deep enough that Carter was able to recognize the NRI logo when he saw it a couple of days later, hung over the door of a recruiting office just off campus. Looking back now, Carter knew he might just as well have walked in with Fresh Meat tattooed across his forehead. They took him in like they’d been looking for him for ages.

  The NRI training camps were unpleasant places. He liked that about them. At first, being there felt like vague punishment for sins he barely understood having committed. Earthside, they had one in the Han Republic, what used to be far northern China, which was austere to the point of invisibility; another in South Africa, which existed by dint of a look-away agreement with the local government and had, as its main feature, an urban bombing range laid over what used to be Bloemfontein; a third in Washington Free State, not far from Seattle, which was where Carter first visited.

  There, under the mystifying greenness of an old-growth canopy forest, he learned small-unit ground tactics, the strategies of protest, both nonviolent and active, how to deal with tear gas, riot police, stun batons, and fast-insertion. The basics of escape and evasion he picked up fast, trying to avoid the come-ons of the aggressive, militant omnisexuals who felt that the standard boy/girl-girl/girl-boy/boy modes of intimate expression were just another form of gender oppression that could be lifted only by the consumption of potent, homegrown hallucinogens and frequent participation in their creepy forced gang bangs. He also sat for interminable hours on a tree stump being harangued by various extremist commissars of the movement, told how the human race was made up of ruthless conquistadors, cultural rapists, and murderers on a genocidal scale. He was told how his presence here among the wise trees, giant slugs, and moldy assault courses wasn’t nearly enough and that he should also be willing to give up all known banking codes his family used so that their wealth might be “equitably redistributed
for the defense of all native species.”

  He didn’t, but refusal wasn’t easy. He’d also kept from them that he’d come from privilege and private school, from engineers who’d probably designed some of the things that these people so obliquely hated. His brief commune past with Sara served him better, made his arrival more obvious and easier to explain. He was nineteen years old.

  On a salvage ship called Band of Brothers, a blind former Colonial Marine commando called Applebaum taught twelve of them the delicate art of bomb making and schooled them in the less delicate theories of engineered demolition. Theirs were not the simple butane-and-nails terror bombs or the wasteful compound-4 jacket of the suicide martyr, but rather structural explosives, sabotage bombs, and complicated implosion chains that could take down entire buildings. It was fun. And while no one there pretended not to know why they were being taught all of these fascinating things, neither did anyone talk about it. Maybe someday they’d be called on to blow something up. Save a space gopher. Whatever. In the meantime, they were kept busy.

  They practiced first with dummies in the few pressurized compartments that remained on the Band of Brothers, then moved into soft vacuum for the real thing; gleefully blasting huge chunks of the derelict superstructure and learning the chemical intricacies of zero-atmosphere demolition.

  Carter had the knack for destruction. It was nothing more than the opposite of engineering. And he was enjoying himself right up until one of his fellow scholars—a short, fat, normally gifted chemist named Barley—made a tragic miscalculation with a concussion tamper and blew himself and his kit straight into space.

  The Band of Brothers was in a constantly decaying orbit around Calisto, its tumble corrected somewhat by the explosions that would bump its trajectory, more by the transit bubbles that would always land and lift from its down-facing Calisto side. Equal and opposite force and all that. At any time, there were a dozen or so of these little single-use engines with life-support bubbles attached and glommed onto the wreck, each with a little fuel left over from its single trip out from whichever NRI transport had delivered students into the vicinity and Colonel Applebaum’s tender care. And it was to one of these that Carter charged the minute he saw Barley blown off in the general direction of Venus, several million miles away.