A Private Little War Read online

  “Personal for you,” she said.

  “Get out.”

  “But—”

  “Go. I’ll be there in one minute.”

  It took him less. As soon as Diane left, Ted hurled himself out of bed and to his feet, splashed icy water on his face from a pan that was capped with a thin skin of ice that he’d had to crack with a fist. He pulled on a clean uniform shirt, pants that he pressed carefully every night between gun cases, his boots and belt and sidearm. He scratched furiously at his scalp, took three seconds to clear his lungs (hands balled into fists, knuckles digging into his knees as he bent double), then squared himself behind the closed door of his tent before charging out into the graying dawn like a man who knew what was going on.

  The smell of fuel was thick, like breathing soup, and the air felt wet and greasy against his skin. The sky was old iron, socked in with close-hung clouds that seemed near enough to touch, to comb through with his fingers like an ashen pudding. A sodden ceiling forever crashing in toward the earth.

  The atmosphere here was strange. The light, diffuse and irrational; making dawns the color of a bruise, of sickness, of toothaches or misery. Ted had seen men cowering beneath it, crouched under a gangrene sky and looking out as though haunted. Possessed by a cold, unquantifiable fear that something was just wrong and getting wronger by the hour, here in this place where even the light was cruel.

  Ted coughed again, stamping out across the dirt in the direction of the comms tent, and saw a mess of activity out by the longhouse across the stubble field—men and machines in a tumult. The mess and chaos of a war that, sometimes, refused to be fought by anyone.

  Ted had been on Carpenter 7 Epsilon for two years. Ted, his men, his machines, the tents, Diane, the FTL relay, all of it. Two years spent trying to complete a mission that should’ve taken a week or a month. A year on the outside.

  Carpenter 7 Epsilon (known locally as Iaxo) was a footnote. The mission was a double-hush, back-burner project long-tailed into the Flyboy Inc. corporate Annual Operations Plan for eight quarters running but sick now with blown deadlines and cost overruns. Ted had been there when it was new—a fresh idea so ripe that his bosses had been wiping drool off their chins when they’d discovered it. So exciting that they couldn’t stand up too fast without snapping their dicks off at the root. In two years, there’d been successes, but not enough of them. There’d been too many mystifying failures.

  And now it’d gone sour and Ted had been waiting for this call for most of a year—a hint from a friend, a former compatriot, from someone in the organization who’d been told to carefully, quietly, gently warn Ted Prinzi that bad news was coming fast and that he’d be wise to prepare for it. Nothing official, of course. Just a nod in the direction of calamity, which was the way things were done in the back channels of the company he’d spent most of his life working for.

  Inside the comms tent it was warm—proscribed machinery bleeding heat as a consequence of information. Diane was guarding the FTL relay with crossed arms and a set jaw that radiated menace. The other controllers ignored her with a fixity that was reflexive. She was at the end of another night shift and wasn’t ever a terribly pleasant woman at the beginning of one.

  Ted made for the relay. When Diane didn’t move aside quite quickly enough, Ted pushed her without really thinking about it. Not roughly, but still. When he moved to sit down, Diane felt the place where Ted’s palm had cupped her shoulder, trailing her fingertips across it as though hunting for the dissipating warmth of his touch.

  Ted didn’t notice that either. He had eyes only for the technology. The screens were all live, but there was no picture, no telepresence. A zillion dollars in technology, and they were using it like two tin cans and a string hundreds of light-years long. He sat, put the phones on his head, coughed into his fist, and closed his eyes.

  “This is Op Chief, Carpenter 7 Epsilon, TAG 14-447 actual. Go ahead.”

  He’d guessed the call would come from Garros, deputy chief of external ops, based out of London, Earth—the ancestral Flyboy headquarters. Ted knew Garros a little and thought that the courtesy would not be completely unusual coming from his mouth. In the dark, he’d imagined the conversation a hundred different ways.

  Or maybe it would be Jackson Chaudhary, the assistant deputy. That would be insulting, but not devastatingly so. Ted had decided long ago not to let it show in his voice if it was Chaudhary who made the call; that a courtesy was a courtesy even if it was delivered in a discourteous fashion. He would act the professional, bite his tongue, and remember to call Chaudhary sir no matter how much it pained him.

  Tallis Marks, who managed operational security, would be bad, as would anyone in his department. If the call came from the security department, it would be a flag—a warning that meant arrests were imminent, or worse—and it would be expected that he would know that. To act appropriately no matter how deep the blood got.

  Slava, Oliver, Victor Wes, that fat fuck Apostol who’d breadcrumbed his way into the CFO’s seat after Hinrik’s third stroke. It could be any of them. Loewenhardt, even, though that was probably expecting too much. Better that it wasn’t Loewenhardt, but Ted knew that so long as the call—the warning call, the one to inform him personally that the official bad news would be coming at some later date—came from someone above the line and inside the London headquarters, someone of management level or above, assistant to a deputy or higher, everything would be okay. It would be bad, but not, so to speak, fatally so. He’d won wars for his company. Bled for them. He’d spent so long in Indian country that he’d grown feathers—which was something he said now about himself because it was something that Garros had said to him once, years ago, when introducing him to a prospective client. Prinzi, come here. Gavril, this is Ted Prinzi, one of our battle captains. Where are you just in from, Ted? Doesn’t matter. Gavril, this man has spent so long in Indian country he’s growing feathers. I can’t even keep track of the fights he’s won…

  “Commander Prinzi?” said the disembodied voice on the other end of the relay. Ted didn’t recognize it. He mentally checked Garros off the list. Chaudhary. Marks. Loewenhardt, of course. Also Slava, Oliver, Wes and Apostol, Ballard, Coley, Ma, Archer. Ted ran down the Flyboy org chart in his head. He racked his brain to come up with another name. Someone else. Someone who’d maybe been promoted since he’d left. Someone new.

  “Who is this?” Ted asked.

  Diane watched as Ted seemed to receive an invisible punch in the chest. He folded, put the points of his elbows on the table in front of him, and sunk his head down until he was gripping the back of his own neck with strong hands. She could see the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Panic breaths. Sharp and shallow like silent laughter. She could hear only one side of the conversation, but she was worried that she’d woken him for no good reason even though she had orders to fetch him for any call originating from the home office, at any hour. Standing orders, given to her almost a year ago and refreshed with maddening frequency anytime it crossed Ted’s mind to do so.

  Ted said, “You’re a clerk in the accounting department…”

  Ted said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Assistant clerk. How long you been working for the company, son?”

  Ted said, “Two weeks?”

  Ted said, “That must be really exciting for you…”

  Ted said, “I’m ready. What’s the message?”

  Diane figured she was going to be yelled at. This was obviously just some bit of paperwork or some small detail that plainly didn’t rise to the level of involving the commander. Stupid, she said to herself and bit down on the inside of her cheek until the pain became sharp and clarifying. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  But when Ted disconnected a few seconds later, he said nothing. He stood, straightened his uniform, looked briefly around the room, then turned and strode purposefully toward the door without saying a word. When he walked out, a blast of cold air whipped in and, briefly, Diane luxuriated in it, feeling like she’d dodg
ed a bullet that had come almost close enough for her to hear.

  IN THE MORNING, word had come down that they would fly in the early afternoon.

  “Reconnaissance, they reckon,” Charlie’d said, and that was his idea of a joke. The pilots laughed because there was nothing else worth laughing at. The coffee was terrible and most of them were still hungover from the night before. Then Charlie threw up in the dirt next to the officers’ table in the mess tent they’d pitched two years ago and called the Flyboy O Club, and everyone laughed at that, too.

  They pulled the planes out, the pilots pitching in to help drag them into position, and they argued over who was going where and what plane needed what and when. The morning light, the false dawn, was strange and silvery and got into everyone’s heads, making tempers short and sharp. Charlie Voss and Lefty Berthold got into it outside the big sliding doors of the longhouse and almost went after each other, but a couple of the mechanics pulled them apart at the last minute.

  Kevin Carter, captain of two squadron, was sitting on the lower wing of his biplane, forearms resting on his knees while he hummed some snatch of nonsense to himself. Fennimore Teague, captain of number three, stood near him, leaning back against the stiff, doped skin of the fuselage, watching the excitement with a careful eye. Charlie was in his squadron, Lefty in Carter’s. Neither man could be spared if one or the other got in a lucky punch.

  “Lefty’s a prick; you know that,” Fenn said.

  Carter looked up and watched the two men shoving each other—their faces twisted in sudden rage over nothing. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting at each other over the burr and cough of engines starting up, choking out, burning through idle fuel, but he knew that it didn’t matter. There was nothing of consequence anywhere on this planet; therefore the argument couldn’t be about anything of substance. About air. About breath. About blood. Plenty to go around.

  “Your Charlie is no better,” Carter said.

  “He is, though,” Fenn replied. “Much.”

  Carter considered that a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “He is. But I think Lefty could take him.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What can you bet?”

  Carter thought for a second. “Whole jar of peanut butter. What do you got?”

  “My virgin sister’s cherry.”

  Somewhere an engine caught and coughed to life. Carter sniffed. “Those are high stakes.”

  “Not when I know I’m going to win.”

  Carter watched Charlie Voss take a wild swing at Lefty and miss by a country mile. Both men were being held back now by three or four other men, and neither of them seemed to be trying too hard to break free. “If I’m not mistaken, I believe you said your sister was forty and had two kids.”

  “Yup. And you don’t have any whole jar of peanut butter.”

  “You’ve also said you didn’t have a sister.”

  “And I don’t much like peanut butter anyway.”

  Carter chuckled and eased himself to his feet. He was in all his gear. Had slept in most of it like the filthy, careless barbarian that he half wanted to be. They watched as the scrap broke up of its own heat—the offended parties spinning off across the cold field like atoms being split—and then Fenn looked away. When he saw Ted come banging out of the comms tent with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, making straight for the evacuated tent line, Fenn tracked him with squinted eyes, like he was watching an enemy coming down high out of the sun.

  “That’s bad news walking, right there,” Fenn said.

  Carter glanced in Ted’s direction, then stretched. His back was killing him and, as far as he knew, Ted Prinzi was never anything but bad news—sometimes walking, sometimes not. He just wanted to get up in the air and kill something.

  Time passed. By afternoon, a damp fog had settled in the lowlands and rain was expected—so, obviously, the planes couldn’t fly.

  The rain held off. Ugly gray-black clouds massed in wet clots on the horizon but then hung there as if dithering about approaching any closer to the pilots’ obvious magnificence. To pass the time, they played indig baseball—a game that’d been invented by one of the men (no one remembered who) and involved more than the usual number of bats and balls, more than the usual amount of punching the opposing team.

  The pilots played on one side. The other was made up of a dozen or so of the camp followers—big, hairy, slumping indigs who’d been pulled off whatever odd jobs they were doing and drafted into playing whether they wanted to or not. They cringed a lot, muffed bare-handed catches of the men’s line drives, looked wide-eyed and terrified every time one of the pilots went streaking out into the bush to tackle one of them. They clapped their hands and bowed whenever the pilots laughed at them for their ineptitude at a game they didn’t understand and were being forced to play by men they understood even less.

  Being neighborly, the pilots would always help the indigs back to their feet, give them a couple of hard punches in the arm or chest that appeared (maybe) brotherly because the hitting was always attended by a flinty smile. Then there would be more clapping, more bowing, some amount of the indig language that none of the men understood but imagined to mean Good play! or Wasn’t that fun? even if it was far more likely that it meant something closer to Why are you doing this? or Please don’t hit me again.

  At one point, Jack Hawker, who was pitching for both sides, laid a nice, fat, slow ball across the plate for George Stork, who hit it like it had said something nasty about his mother. The ball climbed into the smothering sky, zipping along as pretty as anything, and seemed destined for home-run distance.

  But then it suddenly faltered as though it’d hit thick air, seemed to hang a moment, and fell short of the distant tree line. One of the indigs went scrambling for it, put a hand on it, and loped into the base path between second and third, meaning to tag Stork out. But Stork was already running and he didn’t slow—just lowered his shoulder and plowed straight into the monkey like a truck. Both of them went down in the pounded dirt. Both of them got up again and even from the sidelines, the company men could hear the indig shouting. They could see it waving its arms around. Stork waved his arms, too. The indig hissed at him and bared sharp teeth. Stork calmly reached down, drew his sidearm, and shot the indig through the face.

  “Well, shit,” said Carter, who’d gone out to join Jack on the mound. “Guess that’s game then.”

  “Trouble with your indig,” said Jack Hawker, Carter’s squadron leader from number two, in his languid, roughneck accent, “is that he don’t understand basic sportsmanship.”

  “Trouble with the indigs,” countered Stork as he walked back toward home plate, brushing dirt and grass from his pants and smudging a bit of blood from his knuckles, “is that they don’t understand baseball.”

  They went up in the late afternoon. The fog had burned off, the rain never materialized, and the men were bored, so they rolled their planes out of the longhouse again, splashed some fuel into them, and went out hunting. Sightseeing, they called it. Reconnaissance in force. Carter took two squadron out into badland, and they managed to maintain formation until they crossed the twisting snake of the river that was just called the River because there was no need to name it anything else. After that, each plane just sort of wandered off on its own, spinning and looping and buzzing the tops of the alien trees because there was nothing else to do.

  On the radio, David Rice was telling a long and convoluted story about his last deployment as a naval aviator, on garrison duty, flying off one of the big colonial carriers.

  “It was orbit work,” he was saying. “BMF Ashland, over Balantyne. You ever been on one of the big boats, you know it’s dull as fuck, right?”

  Carter had done some carrier duty, though not as a naval. BMF, that stood for Big Motherfucker. Capital-plus. Command element for an entire battle group. A ship that’d been assembled in orbit and would never, ever know gravity.

  “
Right, Davey,” he said. “Dull as fuck. Roger that.”

  “So we fly ten hours, down for twenty. And down for twenty, that’s rough, right? Nothing to do. Like liberty every day, but it gets dull.”

  “As fuck,” said Carter.

  “Right…”

  Davey had a friend who was a bad garrison soldier. Always in trouble. Threatening MPs, getting in fights, whatever. Spent more time under restraint than in his fighter.

  “So his big thing was making rain, right? He’d get into the hangar bay, up in the lift gantries, and he’d bring, like, five gallons of water with him. Drink the water while he was up there. Just drink and drink. And then he’d spend hours pissing down on the MP posts from, what? Three hundred feet up or whatever. But the thing is, with the drive thrust, corriolis, the weird gravity, he’d have to know how to aim it just right—standing up there on the cats with his dick in his hand and—”

  “Got one!”

  The call-in from Jack Hawker on the all-hands channel interrupted Davey’s story.

  “Two squadron flight, I have a target.”

  “The hell you do,” said Carter. “Illuminate and hold for confirm.”

  Carter strained against the belts, trying to look everywhere at once because, really, he hadn’t been keeping close track of where his planes were. He hung an arm out over the cockpit rail and banged a gloved hand on the biplane’s skin in annoyance.

  After a few seconds he saw the bright point of white light from a hand-fired magnesium signal flare and knew where Jack was, so he tuned his radio to the flight address channel and called everyone in.

  “Two squadron, rally on that flare.”

  Come to find, Jack really had spotted something: an armed indig supply column moving in the shade, foot-slogging along the edge of a stand of fat, bushy trees way off in the middle of Indian country. Carter dutifully called it in. At altitude, it was impossible to tell whose indigs they were. Could’ve been friendly, supplies coming in for Connelly or Durba, scouts, outriders, anything. Could’ve been decidedly unfriendly, too. They all looked the same, even up close, but there were maps, supposedly. Schedules. The controllers sometimes knew right from left.