A Private Little War (6 page)

“Right.” Ted had nodded. “Right… You fucking her?”

Willy had whitened. Ted had seen it in his jaw and along the back of his neck. He’d stood up from the bench.

“Just asking, son.”

McElroy’s mouth had been a bloodless line. He still had the wheel hub in his hand, and it’d looked to Ted like he might brain him with it. Throw it maybe. He was a small man, but his blood was up.

“Man to man,” Ted said.

“No.”

“No, you’re not fucking her?”

“No, I ain’t interested in your man-to-man.”

“Then just answer the question.”

“No.”

“No, you won’t answer?”

“No, I’m not…
fucking
her. She’s my friend. I have a wife. Back home.”

“Back home,” Ted repeated.

“Yes.”

“Far from home, boy. Just a question.”

“And I answered it.”

“Hmm.”

And that had been that. Personnel issues always bothered Ted. They were not his strong suit. But he was saved from having to pursue this
particular issue any further by Eddie Lucas, a company lawyer and lord of the tight-beam relay; a man in regular, high-level contact with London and sent in to do boonie time as mission manager and corporate communications liaison. He’d found Ted in the machine shop with Willy McElroy, walking straight into the middle of their conversation at the point where it’d petered out into a lopsided staring contest.

“Commander,” Eddie had said. “A minute of your time?”

Ted had been convinced enough that Willy McElroy wasn’t lying to him (not telling the truth, necessarily, but not lying either), so had nodded and turned away. He agreed to follow Eddie back to comms at his request and, going out the door, Ted had heard McElroy finally throw that wheel hub he’d been holding—the clatter of it going into the side of a toolbox with some force was unmistakable—so he supposed he had Eddie to thank for that. Another minute and it might’ve been his head.

Outside, Eddie had hurried—trotting as though afflicted with a wicked case of the shits and a long way from comfort. Ted hadn’t bothered trying to keep up until, in the air above them, he’d heard the dull, thudding booms of frantic deceleration. Of a ship making orbital translation with no notion of sticking around. The sound was like hitting a hollow plastic bucket with a hammer, only vast and echoing and distant in a way that only those who live in the sky might understand. And when Ted looked up, he saw the comet’s tail arc of something hot and fast carving its way through the upper strata.

“Supply!” Eddie had called out from the door of the comms tent, pointing skyward, then gesturing for Ted to come inside.

“What?” Ted had yelled back. They’d gotten their last supply drop months ago, dead on the schedule detailed in the corporate ops plan, and weren’t due for a re-up for some weeks yet, at right about the time they would run out of everything altogether, which was also precisely according to plan. Forced austerity was a foundational tenet of the company, worshipped like a psalm by its distant bookkeepers. Do more with less. The alternative: Die.

Now Ted broke into a jog, one eye on the sky—looking for the black-among-blackness of the insertion containers, the floating ghosts of tear-away drag chutes—and felt something in his belly twist up like cold fingers curling into a fist.
This is it,
he’d thought.
This is when it all goes bad.

When he reached the door, Eddie was holding it for him. “We aren’t scheduled for another supply drop, Eddie,” Ted said. “Why wasn’t I told?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing, Commander. I thought maybe you were keeping something from me.”

And Ted had known then for sure—the true knowledge of distant powers deciding his fate from very far away. He’d shrugged because, really, there was nothing else to do. The two of them, Eddie and Ted, stood in the doorway of the comms tent looking up silently into the nothingness of the night, the gleaming fire trail of the smuggler’s ship already just a purple stain in their eyes, fading like a memory, like a scar in fast-forward. They gawped like primitives waiting on lightning, on forces beyond their reckoning. He’d been too high, Ted had decided. If Eddie was right, if this really was an unscheduled resupply coming in hot, the pilot would have to loop out over the distant ocean, come back again to make his drop. That would take some time. Ted fought down the urge to crouch, to buckle under the weight of night and the unknown and go to ground like he was under fire. He shook off the instinct to run, kept his mouth clamped shut and slapped a hand onto the back of his own neck to keep the hairs down. It’d been Eddie who’d finally broken the strange, quiet hoodoo of the moment.

“I also have some new orders from corporate that I don’t quite understand and was hoping you might offer your… wisdom.”

Ted lowered his gaze, leveling it at Eddie like a gun. In the hesitation between
your
and
wisdom,
there would’ve been just enough space for Ted to have punched Eddie in the mouth.

Thinking about it later, sitting alone in his tent, Ted kind of wished he had.

In the comms tent, Eddie Lucas had shown Ted the new orders that had come in by burst transmission less than six hours prior, heavily fortified by encryption and translate-at-station code. Eddie had done the laborious work of number, letter, and phrase substitution by hand, hunched over his burn-before-capture code books back in his own private quarters, behind a locked door and under a pin light as if there were spies everywhere. As if the monkeys could’ve even read a billboard announcing all vile intentions of the company and its people here on Iaxo.

Eddie had inserted the breaks. He’d printed a clean copy to puzzle over when, in final draft, the message had been so clotted with jargon, abbreviation, and nomenclature that he’d been unsure of what, precisely, he was being told to do (or not do) by calculating bosses a billion miles away.

But when he’d shoved the clean sheet under the commander’s nose, it’d taken Ted thirty seconds to read the orders twice. To him, the language was music, his native tongue. He’d understood the content of the orders before the end of the first line.

FINAL ORDERS:

Priority to Chief of Ops, Chief of Comms, Carpenter 7 Ep,

TAG 14-447

Report Key:
310B4FC4-AA127-C7EP2365

Tracking Number:
None

Attack Code:
None

Originator Group:
UNKNOWN

Updated by Group:
FALSE

SigAct:
CCIR Order

1) Please stand by for
DIVERT SUPPLY OP
by HALO delivery, your LKL, this 2400, +/- 12 hrs local. Inbound CLP as per request this 212/365, London, Earth. Scheduled CLP op of 50/365 next has been scrubbed. REPEAT: op 50/365 next
HAS BEEN SCRUBBED
per XO, London, Earth.

2)
DO NOT RETRANSMIT
. Operation Carpenter &c. is under comms/radiation
blackout 48 hrs from time of receipt, this message. Duration unknown.

3) Operation Carpenter &c. is under executive blackout upon receipt, this message,
immediate
. Duration unknown.

4)
NEW ORDERS
: Super orders of this 300/365, operation Carpenter &c. is
ZERO ENGAGE
upon receipt, this message, immediate. Duration IAW local command. Operation Carpenter &c. is
outside compromised
, source unknown ATT. Operation Carpenter &c. now
ASG/JOG IAW local command
. Duration unknown.

5) Retrieval is
NONCOMMIT
, ATT. Duration unknown.

6) SigAct 24 hrs, this message, +/- 24 hrs, for final FCOM, London, Earth. Release pending. No retry. REPEAT:
NO RETRY
.

SPEC ORDERS to follow. OP CONFIRM to follow. Further SigAct by
NONCONFIRM XO
, dts to follow.

“I have some questions,” Eddie had said when he was sure Ted was finished reading.

Ted sniffed. “You have a copy for me?” he’d asked. He tapped the single sheet with a fingertip. “This was marked CCIR—Commander’s Critical Information Requirements. That means you should have a second copy for me.”

Eddie produced one, neatly folded in thirds, from inside his jacket and handed it over. Then he repeated himself. “I have some questions.”

Ted had straightened up. He’d carefully slipped the copy into one of his own pockets and then smoothed the fabric over it with the palm of one hand. “Corporate is going to be calling you tomorrow,” he said. “Ask your questions then. It’ll be your last chance.”

And then Ted had walked out. There were things he needed to do. He had to go to the field house, organize a party to unload the
drop when it landed. He had a request outstanding from Antoinne Durba for air support, so would have to go to the longhouse and have a plane rolled out and readied for a night mission. He would have to tear through the drop, find flares (which they’d been out of, save for a few pistol-fired signal flares, for weeks), get them pulled and hung in a hurry.

Most of the rest of the camp was still or already awake, gathered either in the mess or in the field house—trying to stay warm, rubbing their hands and slapping their own arms, dancing around in the cold, drinking. It was becoming a party. Another stage of the party that’d been going on for as long as they’d been here. Somewhere in the dark, the boys were shouting at one another, running around like savages. In the dirt by the mess, Charlie Voss from three squadron, Raoul, the mechanic, and the armorer, Max, were playing chickenshit with a thumb-sized piece of explosive compound taken from a bomb head and an indistinct length of fusing wire hidden under a helmet. The game was to light the fuse and have everyone start with their hand on the helmet. First one to jerk his hand away—to turn, run for cover, panic in the face of possible grievous injury—was chickenshit and mocked roundly by his braver, stupider companions. In the end, everyone lost more than they won.

At the field house, Ted had sat alone in a corner with his copy of the final orders but did not open them. He ran his thumbnail along the creases that Eddie had put in the paper, turning the single, folded sheet over and over in his hands. Between it and the call he’d gotten, he knew exactly what was happening: They were being lost. Forgotten. No more pay, no more supplies, no more communications. The shipment currently on its way in had likely been freightered months ago and was now being dumped on them early to clear it off the corporate books. Their final pay would be banked somewhere so the lawyers could claim that the mission had been officially terminated at any point in the past three or four months—whatever was required if they were ever called to testify.