“What deal?”
“Money. Gold. Whatever he wanted. Mostly a chance at seeing tomorrow. The marines are inbound, and this guy didn’t feel like spending ten years in a colonial prison.”
Carter turned back to watch the ship. “I know the feeling.”
Fenn crossed his arms and looked at Ted. “What about the other two transports?”
“Going to pick up Garcia, Connelly, and his men. That crazy fucker doesn’t need to die here either.” He smiled back. It was all fake teeth and power. “Read that handbook you mentioned last night, Captain. Lots of interesting stuff in there.”
Outside, the massive transport deployed landing skids and thumped to the ground. Out of the swirling snow, shapes of men began to emerge, running from every direction. The longhouse was empty in an instant.
Carter ran beside Fenn, the two of them pounding their feet on the frozen ground, feeling their hearts already lifted, already under the press of gravities of acceleration. A long time ago, Carter had said that when their ride finally came, he would be the first man aboard, bulkhead seat, and he pushed himself to make that come true—stretching for it with Fenn just over his shoulder, matching him stride for stride until Carter felt like he was airborne already, skimming the icy earth, flying without a plane. He understood that none of them were going home. That was ridiculous. But they were leaving this world, moving on to some next one, and that, on this morning, was enough. There was nothing left here for them on this rock. Their war was over.
The gaping, black maw of the transport yawned before him—dark metals, hard angles, steaming with the furious transitions from the cold nothing of space to the inferno of atmospheric translation to this frozen dawn on Iaxo. A wall of steel and molybdenum and ceramic, ticking and groaning like a groggy animal, an assault ramp for a tongue, its mouth open and waiting to swallow them whole. Somewhere high above them, hanging like a mote in the sky, there would be a guild carrier or freighter—two hundred million tons, under delivery contract to NRI through a series of increasingly esoteric shell companies, its belly full of supplies, ships, and faithful all being pushed out into space, birthed into darkness for the long fall to the surface. Carter wondered what they’d been told this time. What inspiring words they’d been offered as they’d loaded into their transports while some man like the one Carter had once been went through the formalities of drop prep and protocol. He wondered who would be scrubbing the blood and piss and stink of fear and dying out of the cargo bay now, in his place. He thought about Oizys, Vega, where he’d dropped NRI volunteers to fight the loggers. He thought about Frogtown, where NRI had tried to throw its protestors against the Colonial Marines and Carter had been shot down, beaten, arrested, becoming an unwilling martyr for millions of little frog-baby aliens—more valuable then to his masters than he’d ever been at the stick of an aircraft.
He wondered about the pilot of this transport. Some idiot kid like he’d been, veteran of Luna, Bloemfontein, and the battle camps of Washington Free State, now having been offered the best deal he was ever going to get by Ted Prinzi: one small betrayal in exchange for gold enough to effect an escape. It was the deal Carter’d never been offered—the one he would’ve jumped and danced and killed for. One lucky break and things might’ve all turned out so differently for him.
Eddie had told them—him and Fenn—that this was their only chance. That night when they’d gotten him drunk and watched him cry. He’d said there were emergency orders, a stock of hard currency set aside for just such an unlikely eventuality. No chutes for pilots, but one big golden one for management. He’d said all they could hope for was one pilot willing to pull their asses out of the fire when it all went wrong. And then Ted had gone and found three.
Eddie and Ted were supposed to be the only ones who’d known about this fail-safe. And now there was only Ted. When Carter’d left his tent this morning, in mortal fear already that he’d been abandoned, he’d gone to the field house because the field house was where the comms equipment was and the comms equipment was supposed to be manned continuously. He’d found the door locked. Inside, he’d heard only the whistle and static of equipment—no voices, no signs of human occupation or industry.
He’d kicked the door in. Convinced now that something had gone terribly wrong while he’d slept, Carter had barged through the door, meaning to get on the gear himself and call home, call for help, call someone.
He’d found Eddie’s body in a heap on the ground near the FTL relay, shot twice—once in the chest and once straight through the lovely, thousand-watt smile. Carter’d gagged, turned away, then walked out onto the field and seen the men gathering. When he’d spied the first entry flares skittering across the sky, he’d understood. He knew what was coming. He knew that his fear of being abandoned, buried here, left behind, had merely been premonition. He knew that they were all leaving together. All who were left, anyway.
Another shrieking barrage of artillery shells tore up the ground, plowing up the far cross where B and C strips touched and marching near enough that their concussion wave twisted the walls of the machine shop and blew hot, black grit rattling along the skin of the dropship with a sound like stones shaken in a tin can.
Carter slowed. His boot touched the steel tongue of the ramp. He could smell warm plastic and lubricating oil rolling out from the cargo compartment. He stopped. Fenn burst past him, boots ringing on steel, then stopped. He turned around. Shouted Carter’s name.
Carter thought of Frogtown. He thought of that sweet moment, lifting free of gravity.
Fenn darted back down the ramp to where Carter stood, one foot on steel, one in the mud. Emile pushed past him. Diane. Some mechanic he didn’t know. Fenn was shouting.
“Kevin!”
Carter looked up. “I’ve got to go back,” he said.
“No. We’re going home, Kev. Now.”
“Cat,” Carter said. “I forgot Cat.”
Fenn grabbed him by the shoulder.
“I promised Cat.”
Carter ducked the punch he knew was coming. Twisting free, he turned and ran for the tent line.
Fenn did not follow him.
Fenn had run, keeping pace behind Carter the whole way by stamping his own boots down into the prints Carter left in the melting frost. As the black bay of the transport loomed large before them, he felt the runnels of hot water—snow melt and condensing atmospheric moisture boiling on the black skin of the ship—splashing his head and shoulders. Suddenly the frost was gone and Fenn found himself running alone.
He stopped, looked back, saw Carter slowing and, doubtless, thinking of something stupid. He got this face on him when his brain was working, Carter did. This face like he was chewing the fat of a steak he was no longer interested in eating. Fenn knew this face too well. This was the face Carter was wearing now.
Fenn darted back down the ramp to the martial tune of crumping explosions that made his ears ring and the castanet rattle of tortured earth being blown against the hot skin of the ship. Carter’s foot was touching the ramp, but he was looking back over his shoulder at something. Fenn reached for him.
“None of that now, soldier,” he yelled, forcing a tone of lightness into his voice, a jocularity he did not feel. Carter appeared not to hear him. Or not to care. Bodies pushed past them. Fenn didn’t register the faces. He slapped at Carter’s shoulder and tried again. “There’s nothing out there for you!”
Nothing.
“Kevin!”
Carter looked up. “I’ve got to go back.”
“No. We’re going home, Kev. Now.”
“Cat,” Carter said. “I forgot Cat.”
Fenn grabbed him by the shoulder.
“I promised Cat,” Carter said.
In their two years of living together, Fenn and Carter had fought only once. Actually come to blows just one time. A lot of this, Fenn knew, was forbearance on his part. Kevin Carter was a difficult man not to punch most of the time.
But only once had Fenn lost c
ontrol of himself. They’d been throwing a party in their tent—a half-dozen pilots off the roster for the night, Ted, Vic. It’d been a booming good time, but Carter had gotten very drunk and very loud about his feelings about the aliens. Iaxo’s natives. Any aliens, really.
“Aliens,” he’d been saying. “Indigs, abos, anything that isn’t us. Why should I care? We kill them. It’s our business to kill them and their mothers and their babies. Like bugs. They’re a nuisance. We kill them because they’re in the way.”
Billy had argued. Ted had said no. That wasn’t it at all, and maybe Carter ought to put the bottle down and just shut up for a while.
And Carter had wheeled on him. Carter had asked what he knew about it, flying his desk in and out of combat all the time, and how long it’d been since he’d thought about how much killing they’d done since arriving here. “However many, it’s not enough!” he’d yelled, and then turning to Fenn for support, had said, “Tell him, Fenn.”
Nonchalantly—meaning only to cool things down—Fenn had stretched out in his chair, rolled his head on his neck, and said, “Well, I don’t know about the mothers and the babies necessarily, Kev.”
And Carter’d said, “I’ve seen you fly, you liar. You’d kill a hundred alien babies if they were in your sights. You’re just like me!”
Fenn had hit him then, uncoiling out of his chair like a spring and slamming a fist into Carter’s ear. Carter had gotten his hands up, but it didn’t matter. Fenn was strong. His punches were like thrown hammers. And he wasn’t ever sure what’d set him off, exactly. The dead babies, or that Carter thought the two of them had anything in common at all. It hadn’t mattered. Fenn had beat him down to the ground, mounted him and beat him unconscious, then beat him some more until, finally, Ted and Vic and Billy and George Stork and some others had pulled him off, pinioned his arms, held him against the horrible weight of his rage. And Fenn had wondered as he stood, gasping for breath, wanting only to kill Carter because Carter had mentioned babies to him and Fenn had already buried one baby and never wanted to think about it again, whether or not, in that moment, Carter had been right. Maybe they did have something in common after all.
Fenn swung at Carter on the ramp. He was still strong. His punches were still solid. All he wanted now was to save Carter—to knock him down, drag him aboard, belt him in. But Carter wasn’t drunk this morning. He was quick and determined. He ducked the punch and ran.
Fenn did not follow him.
Carter ran. In the smoke and haze of gray and white, he made for the tent line by dead reckoning—working off an internal compass that he hoped was still functioning.
He’d seen Cat this morning. He’d talked to Cat. He’d watched Cat tear into its bed of rags by the door and, he hoped, that was where he would still find it. Loud noises never spooked the thing. Gunshots, airplane engines—it was accustomed to furious action and loud sounds. Carter told himself that Cat would still be there. That it had to still be there. He’d made a promise, and he wasn’t leaving this place without the one thing on it that he’d never had any urge to kill. The one thing worth saving.
One thousand yards. He ran blindly through the smoke and, with artillery shells bursting behind him, saw the dark outline of tents rising up before him.
“Counting off!” Ted bellowed over the clamor of voices and rasping of belts and crying of the wounded.
Fenn hung by the door, one foot still on the ramp.
“George!” someone yelled.
“He’s here. Carried him,” someone else answered.
“Raoul?”
“Didn’t make it.”
“Who’s missing?”
“Eddie.”
“Jack? Has anyone seen Hawker?”
“Carter,” Fenn said, not loudly enough for anyone to hear.
“Captain?”
Fenn turned and saw Ted standing close to him.
“Carter’s still out there,” he said.
“Then he’d better hurry,” said Ted.
“What about Eddie? I didn’t see him come aboard.”
“He died valiantly defending the FTL relay from the enemy,” Ted said with a shrug. “Brave man.”
“I’m sure he was,” said Fenn.
Vic pushed her way to the open door and shouted, “Pilot is getting nervous. There’s infantry headed this way. Where’s Kevin?”
“Coming,” said Fenn. “He had to do something.”
“Do what?” Vic still wore an engine blanket around her shoulders. She looked haunted by something worse than dying.
“I’m not sure if he knew.”
When she tried to bolt, Fenn caught her. When she screamed, he just pretended he couldn’t hear.
Carter came through the door of the tent like a spy—quietly and carefully, not wanting to spook Cat with sudden movement. He had a plan, if he could find the little monster. He snapped a blanket from his bed and kicked through Cat’s nest. He found a sock balled up on the floor, threw it into a corner, and shouted, “Get it, Cat! Kill it!”
Cat had been hiding under the cold potbelly stove. Carter saw only the streak of movement headed for the corner, but he leaped after it, holding the blanket out like a net. When he hit the dirt, he heard Cat howl and felt the thing scrambling in sudden blindness.
Carter scooped Cat into his arms, wadding up blankets around it, trying to protect it and himself at the same time. He tried to speak comfortingly but found that everything came out as a scream. Explosions made the earth move beneath him and made the tent’s poles bow above him. He existed now in a bubble of violence—the sweet candy center of a world going entirely to shit. He struggled to his feet, gathering up folds of blanket like trying to scoop water with his hands. Cat’s head popped out the top of the bundle and snapped at Carter’s throat.
“You’re coming home with me,” he said. “We’re going now.”
And then he ran—out of the tent, off in the direction of the infield where the transport had been. Over the ringing in his ears and the thudding of walking artillery shells, he heard big, vectored thrust engines roaring up a scale that seemed to have no crescendo. The pilot, he knew, was warming for lift, cycling up those massive alcohol-fueled engines, anticipating takeoff. He wondered if everyone else was aboard yet. It did not occur to him that they would not wait.
With Cat clutched tight to him like a baby, arms folded protectively around it as it squirmed, Carter retraced his steps. The smoke and dust swirled around him, seemed to acquire some organizing principle, then were suddenly sucked to tatters as Carter heard the gearshift thunk of engines being locked into place.
He ran faster, in a panic now. The engine noise plateaued in a scream like the world ending, and as the fog was torn from the ground, he saw the wreck that things had become.
The airstrips had been obliterated. The longhouse was twisted, burst in the middle, and it spilled broken, burning planes like toys left scattered by an inattentive giant’s child. One of the shipping containers that had been left in the infield was upended, stuck into the dirt like a dart and curled like a broken finger. The field house, final resting place of Eden Lucas, was burning. The mess—the Flyboy O Club—had been blown over, and the tables and gear now sat naked and tumbled in the grass. And above it all hung the sleek body of the dropship—like a black eagle sitting on the columns of its jet wash, a huge, dark god come to settle the messy affairs of its mischievous offspring.
“There!” Vic shouted. “He’s right there! Tell him to bring it down!”
Billy, still half in a daze of painkillers, jerked for the radio switch and slurred at the pilot to bring it around and down. Their last man had been spotted. In the open door, Fenn held on to Vic with one arm wrapped around her, his other hand holding the safety bar. Ted stood like an officiant behind them. Inside the compartment, the lights went red. The pilot had just enough time to say, “Hold on!” over the PA.
Carter didn’t hear the explosion that flattened him. It was that close. One instant he was loo
king up, raising one hand to Vic and Fenn and Ted standing by the still-open loading door and hanging ramp. The next, his vision had acquired an entirely new angle and a red haze of blood.
The transport was yawing. The shell hadn’t hit it, but it had impacted on the ground beside Carter and close enough that there was now something wrong with the starboard engine. It was blowing black smoke, having sucked too much shrapnel and dirt and fire into the intake. From his back, he watched it twisting in the sky—wounded but still airborne. He watched it bow to him, dipping a stubby wing, and rotate so that he could see Vic standing in the doorway, an engine blanket around her shoulders, whipped in the wash from the engines until it looked like wings spreading above and behind her. She reached out a hand for him as the pilot frantically tried to recover his craft and put on altitude.
And Carter, still clutching Cat to him inside the blanket, opened his mouth to say something—to say, Stay, to say, Go, to say, Come back, please. Don’t leave me. I’m sorry.
All that came out was blood.
EPILOGUE
AFTER ACTION REPORT:
TAG 14-447
Report Key: FINAL 744B4RC3-AA001-C7EP3365
Tracking Number: 33-447aaa
Attack Code: None
Originator Group: FBLE-NODISPERSE
Updated by Group: FALSE
SigAct: PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL, EYES ONLY, MGMT.
DO NOT COPY. DO NOT DISPERSE.
NAME/STATUS:
Acevedo, Simon P.
Missing, Presumed Dead
Anquiano, Edison M.
Missing, Presumed Dead
Ballinger, Patrice M.
Missing, Presumed Dead
Berthold, Louis H.
A Private Little War Page 38