A Private Little War (54 page)

There was an instant—the interval between the first bright flash of the guns opening up and the first hiss and spanging doppler of their bullets’ arrival—when Fenn was able to think what a fantastically bad idea this was.

There was an instant to wonder whether he’d underestimated the skills of these novice gunners, rolling their pieces out for the first time, stunned (Fenn hoped) by the savagery the pilots had shown and stricken (Fenn prayed) by the slaughterhouse ambiance they’d made on the ground. An instant to wonder at their ability to hit a fast-moving target with a nearly flat approach angle, their excitement at finally being able to get their licks in—firing at the first thing that showed up in their offset gun sights even if that thing happened to be him. Smart gunners, adroit or artful gunners, would wait for the following targets lumbering down slowly upon them. They’d hold their fire for the good kill. The defensive burst. But Fenn had told himself a story about these enemies laid out before him, already sparking their cannon at him—that they would be scared and angry and anxious and bloodthirsty all at the same time and, because of this, would be less excellent than he was, and so would die. It’d been a reasonable gamble at five thousand feet. Seemed less so at five hundred.

There was an instant to think how this might be his last instant, and that one seemed to last forever, encompassing all the other instants, leaving him plenty of time to think of anything he wished. The faintly remembered touch of yellow sun on his face. A view of Iaxo from on high that might’ve been the view of any one of a dozen worlds. The dim, almost childish image of home—a geodesic over an abandoned pressure container, a boy, a mom, and a dad standing like stick figures before it, hands linked in scribbles, smiles on each round face. A conversation he and Carter had once had about toast and the simple, dumb, sweet and easy longing it’d invoked, like magic, into their hearts in place of the grief there on the day after Danny Diaz had died.

Toast, his last memory.

Danny.

Carter.

And then the instants all shattered around him, blowing back in a rooster tail of turbulence because he was through the gauntlet he’d made for himself and, behind him, all his doubts became nothing but the past as, behind him, the bombs were falling.

In the end, they’d driven the enemy back. They’d saved the day, at least for today, and then kept at it, beating the indigs not just to beat them, but to cripple them. To put the fear in them. And even after the worst of it—in those moments when the indigs had seemed to turn tail, melt into the ground, disappear into the terrain like ghosts—they’d chased them. Trying to make it so they’d be afraid to ever walk on the land again.

The pilots had attacked for a time, firing their guns dry, burning their barrels red. They’d been organized. They’d been disorganized. They’d flown in terrifying, meticulous formation and then, losing control of themselves, no human tenderness left in them, had broken, here and there, into cataclysms of rage—destructive, wasteful orgies of bombs and bullets—and flown around madly until the sky was tattered with smoke and the ground bruised by fury.

When the enemy advances had been turned back, the pilots had attempted to block avenues of retreat and counterattack. They would run back to the field for fuel, for ammunition, and then get right back in the air again—each time returning a bit more battered, holed, ripped and pocked with wounds that made their machines bleed and creep closer and closer to failure. They’d fought machine guns on the ground, hidden in stands of bush and copses of trees already shattered by bombs that would only need to be shattered again. They’d chased feints, advances that must’ve been meant as withdrawals, confused by the day when all directions went wrong—up being down and back being forward because, in the charnal house of that field, every direction was death. There was panic, some of it even from the enemy.

And they fought not only the Lassateirra. As the day wore on, cobbled-together squadrons would run after ground trucks that’d been
seen whipping out in mad flanking maneuvers, around the backs of the horsemen and the infantry. For the first time, the Flyboy pilots mingled the blood of men with that of indigs—tearing up both together until they lay entangled in wet, vital solidarity. It was NRI. They knew it. And almost all of them felt that death was just exactly what they deserved. On the walls of Riverbend, they’d met rifle fire from disorganized packs of humans when they wheeled too close and, once or twice, saw the twisting columns of smoke upon which rode the hard, bright hammers of surface-to-air missiles that went corkscrewing off into uselessness or exploded low in white spiders of smoke. There was something in the fuel mix that was bad—burning sickly in the alien air and damp—but everyone knew it was a mistake the other side would not make again.

They’d flown to make recoveries of the lost. Lefty (who was easy) and then Stork (who was shot from the sky again, but lived) and Fenn, too, who’d been up longer than almost anyone and who was brought down by a failing engine, purely mechanical, but glided to a peaceful stop near a stand of squat, bluish trees and was found sitting cross-legged on the ground with his pistol in his hand. Waiting.

Fenn
, they would say later.
You know Fenn. Sitting there waiting on us, happy as can be. Might as well have been getting a tan or admiring the scenery Stood up when we landed, said, “Gentlemen, fancy seeing you here,” like some kind of lord or dandy.

Later, Fenn would see Carter and say that the only thing he could remember was the smell. Even in the cold, the stink was terrible. The dying had been enormous, and he’d landed in a still-warm Golgotha.

“There were brains on my tires, Kev,” he’d say. “There was no ground to land on that wasn’t full of them.”

They’d flown until they couldn’t fly any more, exhausting themselves and their machines in a spasm of violence that just wouldn’t quit until engines seized, eyes clouded over, mechanisms failed, and their guns gave forth only smoke. At the end of it, those still able had been reduced to flying low over the flood plain and assaulting the dead with harsh language. And when it was done, the pilots had blown icy breath through
frozen lips and wondered where the energy had come from. They all felt so tired.

Ten hours, then they’d come down. All of them. It was night. No one would fly at night. Everyone was crazed, exhausted, deaf, shot, sick, in pain, shattered, haggard, doom-struck, and lolling. Pilots would drop in their tracks, these youngish men—healthy and well fed—just going down like they were under sniper fire, to sleep for five minutes or ten in the mud and icy grass. It was scary the first time you saw it. The second time, you just stepped over the body and shuffled on.

George Stork was shot. So were Jack Hawker and Billy. George was missing a leg before morning and could no longer fly. Only the injectors had saved him—alien clotting factors and blood-thickeners keeping him from bleeding out completely before he could put his plane on the ground. Billy, too, though Billy hadn’t even known he’d taken a bullet until somebody’d pointed it out to him—the back of his jumpsuit, tail of his jacket, even the tops of his boots all wet and sticky with blood that Billy hadn’t even known was missing from him until he saw it, then stalked, cursing, to the shattered mess-turned-medical-tent, demanding explanations, ballistics, muzzle velocities, and shedding gear like he meant to go streaking.

Charlie Voss was dead. Porter was shot, too, but lived. Ernie O’Day had been shot in the face but was saved by his helmet. Doc Edison had taped a combat dressing that still smelled of the packing case it’d sat in for two years over the gouge in his cheek, then Ernie’d gone up again, where he’d been pinned in the sky by tracer fire, exploded, and fell like a comet crashing to Earth. Raoul was burned from a lashing of fire that’d flared out of an overheated manifold when he’d touched it with aviation fuel soaking his sleeve. He wasn’t expected to survive.

Shun Le Harper was dead. She’d eaten the business end of a sidearm, but no one would say whose it’d been. She’d finished out the battle from her seat in the comms tent. She’d seen all the planes down and organized the first triage of men and equipment, coordinated all the
messy taxiing of aircraft into the longhouse, and then she’d gotten up, found a gun somewhere (it wasn’t like there was any shortage), walked out toward the verge, past the stopway of C strip, put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Among the pilots, the question of whether or not she’d been loving Lefty on the sly seemed settled by this one determined act. By the fine spray of blood frozen into the grass like a pointillistic rendering of some hot, exotic flower and the shroud of snow she was wearing when found. There was a lovely storybook finality to it. An ordered progression of grief that, in its way, was comforting to those being fucked around by uncontrollable circumstance.

Diane was not so sure. True, Shun Le had been sleeping with Lefty Berthold. They lived together, the two women. It wasn’t something Diane could not know. But sitting on her bed, in their tent, beginning the process of going through Shun Le’s things and stealing anything she thought might be useful or valuable, Diane told herself that because she knew Shun Le, she knew Lefty wasn’t the reason.

Diane had a theory that those who listen—controllers, radio ops, relay specialists—began like empty vessels of varying size, some large, some small. Over time, they began to fill up with the terrible things they had to hear. Last words. Final breaths. Bad orders. Fear. Worse, joyous slaughter. Eventually, everyone reached their maximum volume and the terrible things began to spill over. Some controllers went crazy. Some turned to drinking or drugs or began fucking everything that moved or started killing people. Diane had seen many variations. All of them were, to her eyes, attempts by those afflicted to either enlarge their internal vessel or to drain off some of the horror it contained. The trick of it was, it couldn’t ever work. The vessel was the vessel and the voices were the voices. They never went away. Both the size of the vessel and the things it contained were immutable. Permanent.

So the way Diane saw it, Shun Le had simply reached her maximum volume. And because she was the way she was—so quiet and proper—she’d killed herself before she did anything embarassing or untoward. She’d done it because it was the quiet, polite thing, and she’d done it away from everything and everyone so as not to leave an uncomfortable mess. It was the overfull-vessel thing, for sure.

Johnny All-Around had tried to kill Ted. Ted, for most of the night, was suspiciously absent. Porter Vaughn was found, stunned, silently weeping in the cockpit of his Camel when the crews had come to wheel it into the longhouse; the floor awash with congealing blood and a hole in his foot big enough to stick a thumb into. Davey Rice had been missing most of the day and part of the night. When he’d come walking back into camp hours later minus one biplane, no one saw him but Emile Hardman, who, thinking he was a ghost or, worse, a hallucination, had almost shot him.

Emile went weird after that. And later, when asked what’d happened, Davey said he’d been forced down by ground fire that’d holed his tail, shattered the tip of one wing like bone, damaged his engine, and destroyed his radio. When no one came for him, he’d walked home—miles over the ground that’d so long been his enemy. He said there was nothing like it. Nothing ever. And then he’d popped the clip out of his pistol, ejected three rounds from it with his thumb, and dropped everything in the mud. He’d lifted that day with his sidearm and forty rounds. Those three bullets were all he had left. He didn’t want to talk about where the other thirty-seven had gone.