A Private Little War (22 page)

“Ted out with them?”

Fenn pointed the pistol at his face, then set the barrel bushing, the recoil spring, and plug.

“No, actually,” he said, and, for just an instant, the barest hint of concern darkened his face. It was quick, noticeable only at all because Fenn’s was a face that Carter saw daily, altogether too much, and knew it to be rarely touched by gloom. It could’ve been something with the gun, sure. A piece mis-fit. It could’ve been some other fleeting thought entirely. But it wasn’t, and Carter knew it wasn’t, because he knew and understood Fenn’s imperturbable serenity at close range as the maddening and damn annoying thing that it was. Thus he saw even the briefest flicker of dark against the face of that tranquil spirit like a cloud blotting the sun. He took it as assurance that no one was truly as calm and placid as Fenn pretended to be, just that some could fake it better than others. It was validation of his belief that everyone was just as jangled, miserable, and spoilt as he felt most of the time.

“No,” Fenn continued. “Our dashing commander has been shacked up with Fast Eddie in the comms tent since late last night and hasn’t poked his head out once. Either they’re in love or there’s trouble, and neither sounds very appetizing, so let’s not think about it until after breakfast and possibly lunch, too, okay?”

“Deal,” Carter said. He sat up, scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands. He was badly in need of both a bath and a shave. It had been too long. “And you were kidding, right? What you said before? It’s not really Christmas.”

“No lie, G.I.” Fenn jacked the slide, dry-fired his piece, smiled beatifically at the sharp snap of the hammer falling. He pushed a loaded clip into the magazine, set the safety, and put it aside. He looked across at Carter. “It’s December twenty-fifth back home. Merry merry.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. Wow, indeed.”

“Then I need coffee to go with my Christmas cigarettes. Or something. Is there any coffee left anywhere?”

Fenn’s smile brightened even further. “Oh, we can do better than coffee, my boy.” He stood and offered Carter a hand, dragging him roughly to his feet and then putting a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Unscheduled resupply came in last night while you were off saving the world. I saved out your share while you were up, hid it down in the mess away from the grabby hands of our mates.”

And to Carter, this came off as a stunning kindness in this place that generally felt short of everything nice and long on anything mean. Standing, he wondered for one dumb second whether or not he would’ve thought to do the same for Fenn, but needed only that second to know that he probably wouldn’t have even thought of it. Stammering, he blurted out an awkward thank-you to cover his embarrassment and flushing shame.

Fenn just grinned, virtuous and cool. “Merry Christmas, Kevin.”

Toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap that smelled like lilacs and dust. Dried fruit and hard candy, squares of weatherized chocolate, manufactured cigarettes beneath their tinned meat labels, scotch and Kentucky sipping whiskey shipped in black plastic bottles with
VITAMIN SUPPLEMENT
stenciled on their sides, and vodka by the five-gallon jerry. There
were telestatic copies of pages from pornographic magazines wadded up and used as packing material in crates of medical supplies, cans of condensed milk, batteries, cereal, freeze-dried beef from real cows. Little indulgences like bottles of olives and cherries, jars of peanut butter, rock sugar, breakfast cereal, high-density data chips packed with music and magazines, news reports, movies, and ball games; letters from family for those who had them and personalized cards from the company for those, like Carter, who didn’t anymore. Pens, lighters, and vacuum-packed bricks of coffee were tucked in among smuggled cases of ammunition, spare parts, and tools.

There were big things, too. A digital projector (which arrived broken beyond repair), a new generator, tires (the planes ran through tires like crazy, banging them out of shape from always landing on stubble fields, dirt, or grass), twenty thousand gallons of high-grade aviation fuel, six fresh engines for the planes (four 250-horse Royce Eagles and two hybridized Hispano-Suiza/Daimler air-cooled thirteen-cylinder behemoths that one of the company’s engineers had designed specifically for the improved Sopwith Camels). There were structural parts, bolts of fire-retardant cloth, lots of bomb parts that came packed (alongside cases and cases of beer) inside sealed caskets stamped with biohazard trifoils and those words,
REMAINS UNVIEWABLE
, just like on the one they’d sent Danny Diaz home in. The irony of bombs in a casket, they’d all appreciated. The fact of receiving a shipment of caskets at all, none of them did.

For the medical area there was an ice machine that Carter thought was almost a joke because of the cold, but then not, because it meant that the pilots could now drink their whiskey on the rocks like gentlemen ought to, and that was like luxury beyond imagining. When he mentioned it to Fenn, his friend just smiled. “I knew you’d get the joke of it.”

All told, it’d been a sixty-ton orbital drop, wholly unexpected by any of those who claimed secret knowledge of company resupply schedules. A Christmas miracle, then, whose origin or cause no one among the pilots wanted to examine too closely lest the mistrust in their black and suspicious little hearts would somehow make it all disappear. While Carter had been asleep and dreaming, or walking maybe, or up and
in flight, it’d been delivered by a speedy blockade runner who’d done his job so well that he’d nearly flattened the machine shop with one of the armored containers. No one had even needed to leave camp to retrieve the riches. Santa Claus, it appeared, had gone high-tech now that all the good little children had become so greedy and scattered among the stars.

Portions of each man’s pay were delivered. A small percentage, and only in company scrip, but that was fine. It wasn’t like there was anything to buy with it, but it was enough to make the card games more interesting for a time.

Promotion reports, wage adjustments, a company stock report, and mission summary were delivered as well, in a sealed bag keyed to Ted Prinzi’s greasy fingerprints. Copies were already tacked to the walls in the field house. Not everything, but the important stuff. Carter had received a 1.72 percent pay raise. Billy Stitches was given the rank of flight lieutenant. Some of the reports were old but, to them on Iaxo, everything coming from the real world arrived old. Time and travel. Distance. Carelessness. It didn’t matter. News that was new to them was new news, and they devoured it like it wasn’t due to happen till tomorrow. Flyboy Inc. stock was doing well and, through their negotiators, the company had haggled up its stake on Iaxo to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred million acres in exchange for services. They owned (or
would
own, eventually) a sizable fraction of the total continental land mass, one entire ocean, and someday—once the place was civilized—the company could then sell that off to developers, mining conglomerates, real estate speculators, and land rapists of every stripe. Put in a casino, some strip mines, chain restaurants, a whorehouse, level the mountains, take out all the trees, drain the rivers. Show the indigs what modernity really meant. At that point, each of the mercenaries (mercenary pilots, mercenary mechanics, mercenary cooks and computer operators and lawyers) would get a piece of the profits, and the indigs on both sides, if there were any left at that point, would get screwed all over again. It was the company man’s retirement plan, so to speak. And it wasn’t a bad deal at all, provided you weren’t an indig.

Carter and Fenn had themselves a huge and leisurely breakfast of local bread with grape jelly manufactured a hundred light-years away, powdered eggs (because every army everywhere has had to eat powdered eggs for breakfast since the day some jerk had first come up with the notion that such a thing as powdering an egg was a good idea), condensed-milk sandwiches with ground sugar, and slabs of the native equivalent of ham steak, which was, in actuality, nothing like a ham steak at all except that it came salty from the cure and cooked up the proper color. It came from an animal that looked something like a fat, legless rabbit, like a fluffy slug with big, floppy ears, and not the kind of thing anyone wanted to picture while eating. Tasty, though. And they were so dumb, they could be hunted with a hammer.

Most important, they had coffee. Gallons of coffee. They drank coffee until the entire tent smelled like the inside of a grinder and Carter felt like he would burst. Coffee sweetened with condensed milk and bourbon whiskey, and made sweeter still by the fact that they hadn’t had anything but instant in nearly two months and had even begun running short on that in the last week.

So they drank coffee. They sat with their boys from second and third squadrons who straggled in, bleary with sleep, dragged forward like zombies by the smell of fresh joe and frying slug-bunnies. Everyone helped themselves to the supplies. There were no arguments, only munificence and sweetness and men who, some days, acted as though they couldn’t stand the sight or sound or stink of one another, heaping one another’s plates with food and lighting one another’s cigarettes. They smoked, laughed, joked, swore, and kept wishing one another a merry motherfucking Christmas until the air inside the mess tent was warm, close, blue and foggy with smoke. It was, in Carter’s memory, the greatest Christmas party he’d ever been to until Fenn, reaching over behind the back of Jack Hawker, punched him in the shoulder and pointed out one of the plastic windows at the blurry form of Ted Prinzi stalking purposefully across the compound, headed in their direction.

Fenn grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him back and out of the general melee of conversation. “Here we go, Kev,” he said. “I’ve seen this coming for a year.” This struck Carter as strange because he had no idea what his friend could’ve seen coming or why he wouldn’t have told
him about it if there’d been anything about anything he’d suspected for a whole year. They’d had entire conversations about their feet, the two of them; they’d spent hours talking about tent canvas or toast because they’d run out of meaningful things to say to each other so long ago. Suddenly Carter felt as though Fenn had been holding out on him and would’ve said something cross about it except that inside the overcrowded tent, a couple of people had seen Captain Fenn point. A few more saw them looking out the window and, before long—in the space of a breath or two or three—their fine and blasphemous Christmas party had gone from cheerfully effusive, piggish, and juvenile to sepulchural. Half the pilots were on their feet and seemingly ready to make a dash before Ted even stepped through the door—the idea being to put a bit of running distance between themselves and whatever ill tidings Ted eternally bore. Raoul, one of Vic’s mechanics, had Lori Bishop, a flight controller, on his lap, and they’d frozen together like that, a tableau of holiday merriment with her arms thrown around his neck and his hands creeping high along her hips. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3
^rd
had his eyes squeezed shut and was muttering curses under his breath. Beside Carter, Jack Hawker, his squadron leader from the second and not at all a religious man, appeared to be praying.