“Colonial prison,” added Emile again. “When the marines come.”
He looks half-dead already. And Fenn wondered, not for the first time, if he, too, looked as bad on the outside as Carter did.
With effort, he focused his attention back on Emile. “No,” he said. “I really hadn’t considered that.”
“Well, shouldn’t you then?” Charlie asked. “I mean, the way things are going, don’t you think they’ll come sooner or later? They’ll shut us down and, the way Emile and me were looking at it, probably shut us up in jail for a bit, at least.”
“To be completely honest, gentlemen…” Fenn paused, careful with his words and fighting to maintain the tattered curtain of nonchalance he pulled ever tighter across his throbbing heart and jittering hands, the heel of his boot tapping painfully against his shin. “I’d never truly considered prison as an outcome. Or, for that matter, the arrival of the marines.”
“So you think they’re not going to come then? Even after—”
“Even after,” said Fenn.
“So you think we’re going to be okay then, Captain?” Emile leaned forward, as though being closer to a man who he thought believed things were going to turn out all right would help him catch some bug of optimism, some invulnerability. “Because prison, you know… Charlie and me were saying that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Compared to what?” Fenn asked.
“To this,” Charlie said. He gestured, in the smallest way possible, with a tiny bob of his head, to everything and everybody in the whole, wide world.
“To what?”
“To missions. The goddamn indigs.”
“To the food. And Ted. And flying in the dark and stuff.”
“It can’t be so bad.”
“Have you ever been to prison, Emile?” Fenn asked. Emile shook his head. He asked Charlie, and Charlie, too, said no—that he’d always been just a little too fast. “Then don’t fool yourselves,” he said. “It would, in fact, be so bad. It would be worse.”
“But that don’t matter, right?” Emile asked. He was looking at Fenn’s hand on the coffee cup and Fenn made an effort to relax it. When that didn’t work, he carefully took it away and hid it in his lap. “It don’t matter because you said the marines won’t come, right? You said.”
“The Colonial Marines don’t take orders from me, Emile. They’ll come or they won’t. I just said that I hadn’t been thinking about prison.”
“Then what were you thinking about?”
Carter had disappeared again into the mess and riot of the airstrip, but Fenn stared out at the place he had been, wondering where he’d vanished to, how difficult disappearing might really be.
“Something even worse than that,” he said to Emile.
Carter couldn’t find Fenn and had stopped looking very hard. He was in the field house, maybe. Or the mess. The longhouse. Doing something other than wanting to be found, which was fine by Carter. He was tired and had lost his taste for company halfway through the looking. Now, hands in his pockets, he just walked, watching clouds scudding in and closing like a ceiling over the world.
At the far end of B strip, down by the armory and weapons lockers, Max waved him down. He was sitting, reclined against a massive pile of loose .303 belts, with a stripped Spandau-style drum-fed machine-gun body across his knees and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip.
Carter changed course and made for the sunlit corner where Max sat, grinning a gap-toothed smile and cleaning the Spandau’s fouled chamber with a black toothbrush. He was missing his four front teeth—had lost them in a fight in a transfer station spacer’s guild bar the month before they’d all shipped for the final, plunging leg of their trip to Iaxo—and was forever poking his tongue through the hole. He smelled like rotten teeth and warm gun oil.
“Hear the news, Captain?” he lisped.
Carter’s heart stalled. Three squadron’s flight was home. He’d counted all their planes. The one/two flight with Jack flying drag had been coming right in behind his patrol with no trouble reported. It couldn’t be bad news, but it’d been so long since he’d heard any good news that Carter immediately assumed the worst. It was a habit. “What news?” he asked, bracing for it.
“Monkeys moved on Riverbend this morning while you was out gallivanting. About four thousand of them. That entire northern flank.” Max removed his cigarette, spit in the dirt, and beamed maliciously. “And they got the shit blown right out of them, too. Three squadron rolled up just in time to see the little chickenshit yellow fuckers running. They never even seen the inside of the walls.”
“Did everyone come home safe?”
“Ours did. Fully loaded, too. Guns clean. No one cleared to fire a shot. Indigs probably haven’t stopped running yet.”
“We headed back up there?”
Max raised a mangled eyebrow. “I got stripes on me I haven’t noticed? If you are, no one’s thought to inform me. All’s I know is all planes are in turnaround now, Ted’s orders, and I do see our fearless leader over there”—he gestured off toward the strip’s apron with his toothbrush, to where Ted stood apart from the messy throng staring up into the clouds—“watching the skies with what I would call a particular focus, if you know what I mean.”
Carter looked at Ted. He looked up and down the flight line at the planes coming and going, being pushed in and out of their berths in the longhouse; the activity had been nearly constant since flights had resumed. Watching it, he tried to weigh today’s hurry against last night’s and yesterday’s and the day before. He looked at pilots and mechanics, ground crews, planes, bomb trucks, fuel hoses, and saw them all as one body, its internal systems going through the motions of regular operation, not yet galvanized by the spark of any specific action.
He turned back to Max. “You’re the man with the guns,” Carter said. “When we’re about to go kill something, you generally know first.”
“That is true,” he said, nodding. “When’s your next flight?”
Carter checked his watch. The face of it was frosted with condensation. Its hands had stopped. “Two hours,” he said. “Two hours or so. Up to the Ridge, out and back.”
Max licked a greasy finger and held it up as if testing the quarter of the wind. He cupped a hand around his ear and pretended to listen with exaggerated concentration. “Hmm…,” he said. “If I was you?”
“Yeah, Max. If you were me.”
“I was you, I’d go look up your boyfriend in the mess. He was there at Riverbend and might know a bit of something that I don’t. And then I’d get you a hot cup of coffee and a quick piss. Have a laugh. Rest that weary trigger finger. But I wouldn’t stray too far, you read me?”
“Five-by-five, Max.”
“Things around this place have been a bit too quiet a bit too long, you know?”
“I do. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, Captain. Just taxi.”
Carter nodded and was about to say something else when Max looked skyward, squinting. “Motherfucker…,” he said, sounding pleasantly bewildered, surprised, almost happy. “Is that snow?”
Out on the field, Ted still had the radio handset gripped in his fist. He’d waited until all his planes were on the ground. He’d gotten all the intelligence he could from the pilots. He’d waited as long as he could wait, had walked off, had given it as much thought as he could, and then had given the order. He’d called in to Diane at comms, told her to hit the button, and now was just waiting for the scramble siren to sound. He felt like he was being pulled in half and stood now, his face upturned, his eyes closed. He flinched as if burned by a hot ember when the first heavy, waxy flake touched his cheek.
“Is that snow?” he asked. There was no one around to answer him.
Charlie interrupted Emile in the middle of saying something that didn’t matter a bit to anyone.
“Check that out,” he said, pointing out the mess tent’s window. “Snow.”
Carter told Max he’d see him around an
d headed for the mess tent at a quick jog. Inside, Fenn saw him break suddenly from the edge of the strip, move into the grass of the infield. The clouds were all massed behind him, rolling in. Windblown flakes of snow danced in the air between them.
He didn’t make it even halfway to the mess tent door before the scramble siren went off.
PART 3
THE LAST DAY
TEN MINUTES LATER, CARTER IS BACK IN A PLANE. Strapped down hard. Idling on the taxiway at ready-one while the rest of the flight takes up post positions behind him. He has Jack Hawker, Tommy, Lefty, Stork, and Porter Vaughn on him. Fenn wrangles the remainders, the stragglers; lining them up right-oblique at the action end of A strip. There are choking clouds of smoke, much shouting, and the flat slaps of hands beating the sides of planes like anxious jockeys whipping horses still in the paddock as Vic and Raoul and Rockwell, Willy McElroy, little Paul Meleuire and Max, and anyone else with a free hand, come charging through the swirling, waxy snow at a dead run, dragging bomb sledges and ammo boxes and helmets and gloves, bits of stray gear forgotten in the haste of siren panic. The radio is a disaster of voices.
Carter is back in Roadrunner, so fresh out of the shop she still smells of oil and love and the arc flame of the welding gun. So fresh that, when the siren had gone off and he’d gone running to her, he’d found her just coming off the crane in the longhouse and had had to help put wheels on her—the pneumatic squeal of the driver almost deafening, the first buck of it jerking the pistol-grip right out of his hand.
The new engine is like a boy’s heart put into an old man’s body. Its rhythm—the sound of it—is different. To Carter, it sounds like his plane’s voice has changed, her expression, mood, temper, all wrong. He is wearing combat restraints, a six-point harness, all his gear, his helmet, collar, injectors. He has no map. There’d been no time. His flight electronics have been repaired, recalibrated. The airspeed indicator is new. The pedals are stiff.
All over the field, electric ignitions bring engines choking and banging to life. The pilots yell, “Contact!” anyhow, just because it feels good. There is no time to drag or wheel planes into position, so the pilots drive them onto the trim of the strip, wiggle and inch them into place. Wheels are chocked and unchocked as the snow falls and sticks to goggles and windscreens or is blasted by prop wash. Flags wave. They go staggered: Carter getting the first green, then Fenn crossing behind him, then Jack and Tommy together crossing behind him, then Charlie Voss and Billy, and on like that until everyone is airborne; Fokkers and Camels crisscrossing, straightening course; mean, wicked slashings of color across the tumbling clouds as paint jobs whip into the sky, roll, curl and climb, clawing for the close, claustrophobic ceiling of the clouds even before the throbbing headset chatter of a dozen simultaneous shouting, cheering, cursing voices expends itself into breathless silence.
Ted is on the command channel: “Flight leaders, make course for Riverbend. You are free-fire cleared.”
Carter has to force Roadrunner to climb, feeling as though he ought to get out and push. He’d needed the full length of the runway before feeling the bite and lift of the air beneath him. The new engine is heavy. Powerful. Big like a god is big, but ponderously, murderously heavy. It needs a pull that it doesn’t have while climbing until he cautiously opens the throttle a little further, then further, listening for the point where the roar will become a scream, a shriek, then silence, seize, stall, and death. There is a sweet spot. He just has to find it. The two of them, he and his plane, will learn together or they won’t. There is no safety net. No one on Iaxo wears parachutes.
He’ll get it, he thinks. The two of them, Carter and his plane, will learn each other’s quirks and tolerances, or they will die. And as he gives the throttle another nudge, he suddenly feels a sense of almost bottomless power in her, a reserve of strength that is massive, dangerous, and comforting. He throttles up again, and the engine barely changes its tone as, suddenly, the balance shifts and he squirts skyward like a jet, cleaving a path, his flight following in the messy chaos of his prop wash.
“Correction.” Ted again. “Course now below Riverbend, far side of the river. Intercepting a large and moving force, numbers unknown. Hold.”
A pause. Chatter from ground control. Chatter from the pilots. The confusion of the rapid deployment resolves itself after a single turn over the airfield and the flights fall into staggered lines, drifting apart, making space.
Ted: “Our indigs are wearing their asses for hats.”
Brief conversation between Carter and Fenn. Voices upon voices upon voices. They call out their wings, break right and left and, with a mile of space between them, form up into terrible flying wedges, which, to the Lassateirra indigs, must seem the sign of vilest evil; of angry gods, roused to wrath, and bringing nothing but pain.
In a moment, they are at maximum throttle, the fastest machines dragging the slowest, engines howling. The sweetest sound in the world is the metallic clack of a magazine going into the centerline cannon. Carter knows this. The sweetest sound is the skatch-skatch of belt-fed machine guns being primed. It is the whip of air across cowlings, the howling of it in the stays, moaning as though he travels with an honor guard of ghosts.
He bounces the palm of his gloved hand over the aluminum fins of the bombs he has hanging in the shotgun loops and calls for a gun check while his flight is still in the clear. Rounds sing by his flanks, gleaming phosphorescent tracers streaking the sky, and he lovingly strokes his own trigger. Death, death, death.
At nearly 200 mph, they are baying down on the river in minutes. Horrifying creatures, raining down fury from on high. Finally, they have been released to do what they do best. Finally. And Carter thinks that, someday, many centuries from now, the indigs on Iaxo will tell stories of dragons that belched fire and smoke, of monsters that flew and murdered and consumed whole towns with their rage.
He thinks that, when they do, they will be talking about him.
Ted once more: “Indig siege force was rolled up forty-five minutes ago by explosives and rifle fire, type unknown. The A.O. is considered hot. I’ve got a comms intercept saying hand grenades and land mines at least. Gunfire in the trees. Automatic rifles possible. The Riverbend Lassateirra have moved out of the city and are chasing the friendly retreat, moving toward the bridge and northeast on the high flank under tree cover. Enemy in the open near the river and on the ridgeline. Tallyho, gentlemen. Send them the fuck home.”
They cross the river south of the advance in a blink, come north, power down, split-loop out to get their bearings. Carter calls Fenn.
“Fenn, Carter. Play you high-low?”
“Done, Captain,” Fenn calls back. “B flight has the high side.”
“A flight has low then.”
“Happy hunting, Kev. I’ll meet you in the middle.”
Carter switches over to the flight channel and releases his fighters like dogs slipping a chain. “A flight, this is flight leader. Enemy in the open along the river, south of Riverbend. We are free-fire and hot. All fighters, break and attack. Let’s tear ’em up.”
The battle would go on for ten hours.
On their first pass, Carter’s flight descended in formation, swooping down on the vanguard of the pursuing force in a wedge and chewing great, bloody channels into the ranks before rolling out, pulling tight turns, and coming back for another run. And another. And another. They killed, at first, with the wild abandon of animals turned loose from their bonds; out of rage and frustration and anger at having been pent up so long. They killed sloppily, occasionally joyously, sometimes stupidly as though they were very, very parched and only killing could slake their desperate thirst. Before a quarter of an hour had passed, two of Carter’s flight—Lefty Berthold and Porter Vaughn—had to turn for the field because they’d burned the barrels out of their machine guns, dropped all of their bombs, jammed the mechanisms of their weapons beyond all simple repair. On the radio, one of them was sobbing as he turned for home. Crying or laugh
ing so hard that it was almost the same thing. Carter never figured out which it was.
With two men gone, Carter re-formed his diminished flight—turning out high and rallying the remainder of his planes for a precision-bombing run with whatever they had left. The intention was to lay down a stick of hell just forward of the advancing Lassateirra vanguard (mostly light horse) in the hopes of hobbling them, tripping them up, blowing the legs out from underneath the animals, whatever. The planes dropped from the sky like bombs themselves, in hard dives, screaming across the front rank of horses at fifty feet off the deck and dropping their ordinance right where it belonged.
The result was horrific. Smoke and dust and clouds of debris fortunately hid the worst of the details of the carnage, but they still left visible just enough to catch Carter’s eye like a burr and sink deep into his brain: horses cut off at the legs, squirming on the tortured, icy earth; indigs catapulted from their mounts and torn by shrapnel; indigs then trampled by following lines of horsemen trying to control mounts blowing bloody foam, bleeding from the eyes and ears. These images would give him nightmares, he knew. Provided he lived long enough.
The precision application of explosives slowed the pursuit briefly but did not stop it. The enemy was determined. Or perhaps crazed. With two years of practice, of knowing what waited for them whenever they crossed open ground, they absorbed the casualties like scratches to the body and just kept coming. At that point, the indigs were roughly thirty-five miles from the Flyboy encampment and closing fast.
Carter signaled for his flight to re-form on him, took them up to five thousand feet, and ordered his remaining planes back to the field for reloading. He would remain on station until Jack Hawker returned to take his place, allowing him, then, to go home, rearm, reload, come back. The flight could not maintain the consistent, withering, demoralizing fire that Carter would like because they simply could not carry enough bullets and bombs and cannon rounds to keep up the fight for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. Carter crossed the center of the moving battlefield, tangling briefly with B flight’s pattern, then rolled out to get a look at the larger picture and prime his cannon. In the strange, hanging gravity of the combat dive, he tried to place his shots with care, aiming for standard bearers or large concentrations of horses; but following the first pass by the fighters, the enemy had immediately spread itself out, lessening the ratio of shots to kills, to wounds, to cripplings and maimings and terrible slow, cold death.
A Private Little War Page 31