A Private Little War (19 page)

It took all night, but eventually what was left of Durba’s Rifles—thirty indigs plus two of his command element—found their way back to the headquarters area five miles from the ford on the friendly side of the river. They’d carried about ten of their wounded along with them on their backs. For Durba, they’d made a travois out of rifles and shattered timber, tied with nylon belts. Antoinne had apparently spouted
scripture the whole way—raving, promising hell and damnation for those who’d laid him low—and called out for his daughter, Marie. He had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head just above his right eye and a foot-long hardwood splinter run through his guts, but he was alive when they brought him in.

Died not long after, but he was alive when they brought him in.

When Carter’d landed Roadrunner, Vic had been there to do the postflight check. He’d smiled at her (which he knew, in retrospect, had probably been unwise), lifted his goggles, and winked as if to say,
Survived another one
. Like that was something special. It was just part of the habit of being a pilot—the swagger, the arrogance, the laughing at death once death is safely in one’s slipstream. Reflex. Like running across empty airstrips or rolling through turns as if always under fire.

He’d taxied into his spot outside the longhouse, climbed jauntily down out of the cockpit, and flipped his scarf back over his shoulder. They’d said a few words to each other, Vic and Carter, before he’d gone to the field tent and she’d gone back to the flight line. That, he knew, had probably been a mistake, too.

Later, once he’d switched from pop-skull to coffee, from the field house to the mess, and after most of the other revelers had finally retired or simply dropped in their tracks, Vic had come in grinning. She’d stood across the table from him and laid down three stubby arrows. Having been half-asleep sitting up, still hearing the sound of engines in his head and feeling the phantom vibrations of nine cylinders cranking in his bones, he’d just blinked dumbly at her, thinking how nice it was that she’d come to visit him in bed.

“Crossbow bolts,” she said. “Steel tip. Aluminum shaft. Imported, apparently.”

Carter picked one up and rolled it between his palms, trying to make some kind of connection, to appear thoughtful even though he had no idea what she was on about. “Imported, apparently,” he parroted. “Apparently, apparently, apparently…” He wasn’t trying to be difficult, wasn’t mocking. He just liked the way the words sounded popping off
his lips. It was a nice arrow, he supposed, but could come up with nothing particularly insightful to say about it, so he looked at her instead. He thought about how pretty she was when he was mostly asleep. He smiled at her again, thinking how he’d just done that not too long ago and that twice in one night was a lot. He looked away. One fresh glance had been enough. Like looking directly at the sun.

“Pulled them out of your wing, champ. Your elevator. Congratulations.”

The bolt was light, tip-heavy, and viciously sharp, nocked at the tail in a cross. The flights were hard plastic. White.

“Congratulations for what?” he asked her, rubbing at his eyes.

“You’re the first Flyboy to take a hit since we got here.”

He touched a finger to the tip of the little arrow and made a face. Sharp. “Hmm,” he said. “Lucky me.”

Vic took a step back from the table. “Jesus Christ, Kevin. We’re friends. They’re souvenirs. I saved them for you.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say. Something other than the memory of the engine was roaring in his ears now. He looked down at the table, arranged all three bolts into a nice, even line, patting each into precise alignment with the palms of his hands.

“Say thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Carter. He didn’t look up.

It was quiet for a minute. They were the only two in the mess just then. He could feel her staring at the top of his head.

“Prick,” she muttered, then walked out.

What Vic had said wasn’t exactly true. Not about Carter being a prick. That was spot-on. But about the two of them being friends. They weren’t. They were something else entirely. Also, she’d been wrong about Carter being the first pilot to take fire while flying.

When the company had first arrived on Iaxo, the indigs had shot all sorts of things at them. Sticks, rocks, spears, arrows—they’d tried it all. And the pilots had gotten quite a laugh out of it, actually, thinking the entire situation rather pathetic and silly. For a time, they’d made it
into a game, scoring the abos on their bravado, their ingenuity, their aim, the amount of frustrated rage they expressed—shaking their fists, jumping around, howling at the sky. Winners lived. Sometimes they’d go out between missions with pistols, fly real low, use the natives for target practice. “Just keeping my piece lubricated,” they’d say by way of explanation or excuse. “Just to keep it working, tip-top.”

This went on for a while. Until Danny.

Danny Diaz. He’d been a good man, a good pilot. He had Earth-born parents but had been a natural citizen of Free Luna where he was conceived and born, and where he grew up. This made him overly tall, a bit more delicate in appearance than the full-gravity lugs, and generally ill-suited to long hours in the cramped cockpit of a Vickers or Camel.

And maybe that’d been enough to single him out, to make him a target for part-time bullies looking to go rough on someone. Though he drank with the other pilots, flew with them, fought with them, never shirked, didn’t complain any more often or any more loudly than the rest, he was just a little quieter, a little more reserved, stuck with the effeminate cast of low-g elegance that Luna had worked into him, and that made him an easy target. Skinniest kid on the playground. Something like that. And there wasn’t a man on Iaxo who, at his best, was much better than an overgrown fourteen-year-old anyhow.

Ted especially hadn’t liked Danny. Again, there was no particular reason that anyone knew, but Ted, of all of them, was hardest on Danny.

And if Ted was the worst, then Vic was the easiest, even shacking up with him for a time, taking special care of his favorite plane—a D.VII called Angelina—and by and large going through all the motions of actually liking him.

All of this made it worse that Danny had to be the one of them to go—to buy it in action. Made it almost a cliché, which is a bad thing to be in any war, no matter how ridiculous. Were they ever to talk about it, most of the pilots would also say that that this all made it obvious that he was going to be the first to go. Highly superstitious, sensitive to the ironies and truisms of war, they would say
of course
it would’ve been Danny. Anything else would’ve just felt wrong. But then talking about it was the one thing that they’d never do. Superstition: To talk about death was to invite it close. To talk about
dying
was fine. That they did
all the time. But death—real death—was different. The finality of it was like a curse that had to be spoken to come true.

Old-time fliers used to call what got Danny the Golden BB, that one shot in a million, the one you never expect and never, ever see coming. It used to refer to small-arms fire—to some grunt on the ground spraying bullets up into the air at a plane flying a mile overhead at six hundred miles per and getting truly, phenomenally lucky. Hitting the jackpot. Ringing the bell. A ten-cent piece of lead alloy bringing down a multimillion-dollar aircraft.

On Iaxo, it meant some indig with a bow and arrow who managed, somehow, to put one right through the gap in a vent panel and clip one of the radiator hoses on the D.VII’s liquid-cooled engine. Danny hadn’t even noticed it at first. Not until the engine temp gauge began to spike and he saw the long stain of scorched coolant blown back all along the flank of his plane. He’d radioed it in. He’d been laughing about it. But then his engine had seized and he’d gone down.

He’d been flying low: twenty, maybe thirty feet off the deck up on the high moors, and Carter knew this because they’d all been doing the same thing, playing Great White Hunter, just sporting around. This was about a month after the big battles on Sispetain, but they’d caught a cavalry troop out in the open on the flatlands and were running the horsemen down. Sidearms only. Those were the rules. They’d been keeping score. And Danny’d been playing, too, though rather halfheartedly. Killing—especially the pointless, up close and personal kind like they were doing that day—had made him uncomfortable sometimes. Not something he talked about, just something everyone knew. And even still, there was nothing too strange in that. In their better moments, nearly all of the pilots would claim that the killing was appalling, exasperating, a drag and a taint on their otherwise pristine moral characters. And then, mostly, they would laugh. Carter the hardest, the longest.

Danny, though, mostly meant it. Some of the others did, too. Occasionally. And while one might wonder why, then, had Danny or any of them become fighter pilots—
mercenary
fighter pilots at that, where it often seemed as though the slaughter was more or less all they were about—this was an easy question to answer.

It was because Danny loved to fly, same as the rest. Simple as that. And he knew that there was no better test of himself than to do the thing he loved, the thing he was best at, under stress and all the most difficult conditions. No pilot flew as well or as often as a combat pilot. And no combat pilot had ever flown in such strange, challenging, or varied conditions as a Flyboy pilot did most days before breakfast. Danny had understood that. Danny loved to fly. And if, in the course of getting to do what he loved best of all, he had to put himself in situations where his better nature was dipped repeatedly in shit, then Danny had understood that, too. It was a popular fiction that, like their pomp and swagger, fighter pilots also possessed some strong core of combat élan—a streak of gentlemanly decency, a book of rules not held to by the dogfaces, doughboys, and mudfoot grunts of the other military professions. Danny knew better. He was not deluded. He’d been with the company long enough to have learned that if there was any such thing as gentlemanly soldiers, Flyboy had a policy against hiring them, and that all men who voluntarily made their living by the gun were, by trade, dirty fuckers and destroyers of lovely things.

But at any rate, Danny had gone down, victim of that million-to-one shot by the luckiest indig on Iaxo. The other pilots had immediately broken off their game to go and get him, figuring he had to have been just fine because even a brain-damaged chimp could’ve brought a ship in for a glide landing from thirty feet up. No one had even been worried about him, and Carter recalled being on the radio making jokes about how, if anyone was going to be brought down that way, well then
of course
it would be Danny fucking Diaz.

And the truth was, Danny had landed it and he had survived, though later, the pilots would all kind of wish he hadn’t.

They found the plane but no Danny. All of them had put down in the field where he’d been stunting to check things out (which had ultimately been the mistake that most of them felt made Danny’s dying their fault) and then had stood around like idiots with their fingers in their noses for a good five minutes. There’d been no blood, no body, no sign of Danny at all. Lots of hoofprints, though, which, for a couple of minutes, had seemed like nothing until, all of a sudden, it became very important indeed.

The indigs on their ridiculous horses had gotten to Danny quicker than the pilots could in their planes, and by the time the pilots had all gotten their engines cranked up again, their planes straightened out, a taxiway chosen, and themselves back into the air, those horses, those indigs, and Danny were all long gone.

They’d searched all the rest of the day and on into the night, but found nothing. Connelly had been up on the ragged skirts of the moors then (digging in the remains of his troops for what was to be the ultimately pointless defense of the cities on the river), and Durba had been camped with his riflemen not too far away. Since there were favors owed and kept, they and their men went out looking, too—on foot, raiding and killing and questioning prisoners. There’d been another fellow, a man named Workman, stretched far out on the northern flank and commanding a five-hundred-strong company of native cavalry. They were light horsemen, mostly indig but with a dozen-odd Earth-side officers, and they linked up with Durba to help. Some bored engineers from Cavalier did also, along with another gang of redneck sharpshooters who’d hired on as reavers and kept their own indig scouts chained up in pens like dogs. Together, they’d scoured the high ground for any sign of Danny. The entire war was put on hold while the humans looked for one of their own.