A Private Little War (35 page)

The day went on, and then the night, and then another day. And Ted, haunting the comms tent now like some kind of unquiet spirit, pacing the length of the longhouse or the aprons of the airstrips all day and all night, acting as unofficial flight coordinator whenever he wasn’t on the board as official flight controller, always said yes.

“Up!” he’d yell, jerking two thumbs to the sky. “Gas it and go!” And then a string of map coordinates, a sector to advance, some mystical schedule of ground coverage that existed, organized, in the scrambled-egg mush of his sleep-deprived mind alone. On one day, Lefty Berthold from Carter’s second squadron saw what he swore was an entire copse of trees moving across the horizon. Ted scrambled a bomb run (he’d had to fly one of the DH9s himself, being short on pilots) and blew it to matchsticks. It was nothing. Just trees. They’d only been moving in Lefty’s overheated imagination.

“Nothing is nothing,” Ted said—his new motto. And anyway, defoliation was denying the enemy valuable cover.

Eight hours later, Albert Wolfe, against orders, machine-gunned a rock that’d looked a little like a tank from a thousand feet up and in just the right light. To be safe, Ted ordered Wolfe home and had the rock bombed, inflicting casualties only on the surrounding flora and whatever fauna might’ve been unfortunate enough to have chosen that particular outcropping on which to warm itself in the thin, inconstant sunlight.

“Nothing is nothing.”

The men began to wonder whether Ted was losing it. Knowing that they were afraid of
something
(even if that something had no specific name), they began to wonder what had him so scared. What he knew that he wasn’t telling them.

Fenn got lucky. He was the first to receive the clearance, to be loosed against a positive target in badland, and to vent some of his fear and fury through the chattering breech of his guns.

He was flying close to the river, had spotted six wagons and thirty horses running across open ground for the cover of trees just on the
other side. They’d no doubt heard his engine too late and gotten caught out.

He was flying Jackrabbit. Was loaded with incendiary rounds. Had plenty of fuel and a solid identification, support from the rest of his wing, and about fifteen minutes of daylight left. The situation was perfect for an engagement. It wouldn’t get any better. The closest bomber was ten minutes away, minimum—having been called out to bomb Wolfe’s tank rock—and in less than five, the caravan would’ve reached the cover of a heavy wood less than a mile from them. There was an almost subconscious sense among the pilots listening in on their radios that if Ted didn’t release Fenn on this target, then there was something more to his reticence than plain caution, something more than a sudden unwillingness to allow his fighters to engage ground targets or spend them against anything more dangerous than the landscape.

There was a pause—a gap of silence between Fenn’s lackadaisical request for free-fire clearance and the response. A gap of doubt, perhaps, into which everyone poured their worry that Ted had gone soft, gone insane. Everyone silently hoped it was a gap of somber, calculated, and bloodthirsty thought.

Then the call came back from Diane, fresh on her shift, sitting in the radio chair and with the scent of Ted Prinzi all over her voice. “Jackrabbit, control. Order is engage. Repeat: Engage, engage, engage.”

It was over in less than a minute. Three close passes. Three hundred rounds of ammunition from Fenn’s twin Spandaus. He hit everything that moved and then, to be sure, hit everything that didn’t move. The phosphorous rounds burned blue in the air, sparked as they hit the ground, bounced, and danced. The wagons caught fire. All observers reported secondary explosions. And then it was done.

In the tent, Diane had gotten the call from Captain Teague. Ted was already there. It’d been him who’d sent Ernie O’Day in to bomb that rock. Coughing, red-eyed, drinking coffee from a filthy tin cup, Ted had checked the maps, the computer projections. He’d leaned close, putting a hand on Diane’s shoulder that’d made her want to recoil, partly. Partly
wanting to lean into it. He squeezed, probably without thinking about it. His breath was awful.

Then he’d stood back, as if to get a long view, as if this were momentous. Jimmy McCudden was there. He’d been afraid to leave the comms tent for days and had set up a disgusting little nest in the ready room. Tanner, the backup radioman, was there. Shun Le, the second controller, watching the split flight of three squadron over the near-south sector. They all watched him. Diane looked up at him, something pleading in her eyes, her own sweet breath coming low and rough.

All Ted had done was nod once sharply. Then he immediately turned and left the tent.

“Jackrabbit, control,” Diane had said, something like a butterfly beating its wings against the cage of her ribs. “Order is engage. Repeat: Engage, engage, engage.”

But what she’d really been saying was kill.
Kill, kill, kill.

Ted had gone directly to the strip and stood there, unmoving, watching the sky until every plane touched down safe and sound.

After that, the action came easier for a time.

AT TELLER S-2,
during the guild troubles, Carter’d flown missions off a naval carrier. It was a huge thing, like a city in orbit. He’d fly—mostly defensive patrols, guarding the carrier and other blockade ships against a terrestrial splinter government that had no space fleet—and then he’d come home, back to his steel and plastic apartment near the center of the massive ship. He had better accommodations than any navvie below command grade could’ve dreamed of. He lived alone. Two rooms. Private bath. Murphy bed and an entertainment center. It was just him and fifty Flyboy mercenaries, only nominally under the authority of the Colonial Council, the Terran navy, and spacers guild, and they were generally left to their own devices. It would take him most of an hour to get from hangar seven where his squadron was berthed to the tier where he was quartered. It was like commuting. There was a train—two trains, actually—and a lot of walking involved.

He would get home, strip out of his ready blues, shower. He would pick a restaurant at which to eat, because there were forty or fifty different messes on the carrier and each was different, nicknamed something like Lucky Louie’s or the Eggery, good at some stuff, bad at the rest. Just like real restaurants. He’d hop a train. He’d eat. Maybe he’d see some Flyboys out, maybe not. He’d decide: Did he want drinks? A movie?
Company? A quiet cycle at home? He could go to the gym, the simulators. If he wanted some action, he knew where to find it. Sometimes he’d find a girl. Sometimes not. There were 12,344 people living and working aboard the
TEF Alabama
. Navals, contractors, families, officers and enlisted men and women. A man could get swallowed up in that, easy. When he was tired, he’d go to sleep, wake up, make his call time, fly, do it all again. One sortie per thirty hours, no more than five sorties in any seven-day stretch. It was a job. Like working in an office, except that Carter’s office could fly and kill you from a thousand miles away.

Strapped into the acceleration couch of his ship (a pure space fighter, no gear for making atmospheric translation), he’d had more electronics in his helmet than the company had shipped, in total, down to Iaxo. If he thought hard and closed his eyes, he could still remember what that kind of boredom had been like. Totally different. He could remember his call sign, his radio protocols.
Alabama-indy seven-oh-one calling home: Boxing one thousand and coming back to formation. Nothing to report.
He could remember the thrill of exo-atmospheric maneuvering, the different skill set, the isolation of being one ship in a thousand square miles of space, and the blood scent of catching the reentry burn of a blockade runner from one hundred degrees of arc away.
Alabama-indy seven-oh-one to Alabama actual: Target acquired making entry. Permission to engage.

Permission granted, Alabama-indy. Weapons clear for free fire.

And then the rush of falling, throttles open, nosing down toward the death that the atmosphere represented (the same as falling toward the earth); skipping like a stone across the hard halo of firming gasses and reaching fingers of gravitation; following a ballistic arc described for him by the targeting computers, rushing to make a firing solution against a closing angle of arc.

Finally, the sweet tone of a positive lock, in range. One button: weapons away. Maneuver engines blowing clouds of vaporizing LOx as he pulled up and out in a backspin spiral, eighty self-tracking darts of molybdenum-alloy flaring outward toward a distant point of convergence, to slam into the body of a blockade runner at a velocity of ten thousand feet per second. One touch was lethal; could punch an inch-wide hole in a ship’s heat shielding, knock a tile loose. When they died, the ships flared like shooting stars. It was instantaneous.

Then home. He carried only one weapon, one offensive package, one shot. After a kill, five days off. A reward. He’d watch movies, sleep late, eat well. After five days, it was back to the grind.

It was strange, the entire experience. There was always this moment of odd domesticity, like wanting to brag about a good, successful day at the office. Signed the contract. Sealed the deal. Made a kill. There’d been a deep sense of accomplishment in it. All the waiting, the flying, the training, the endless patrols—all of it, paying off in that gratifying chug the ship would take as the kinetic weapon detached and went screwing off through space toward the inevitable. Once the siege had done its job, the carrier had dropped its complement of Colonial Marines onto the surface: one brigade, plus support elements. It took them one day to organize on the surface, one day to crush the opposition government’s forces. When they came back, the marines had seemed hardly out of breath. There was a small ceremony, a banner in the carrier’s assembly area that said
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
. Carter and the rest of the Flyboys were paid off and stayed aboard to catch a ride back to the nearest station.

It was a job, Carter knew. Like this one. But it was different. And if he knew how, he’d explain it to himself—sit himself down and clarify—but he didn’t. He couldn’t understand it at all.