A Private Little War(106)

When he slept, it wasn’t sleep, only collapse. And when he collapsed, this thing came to him and tried to explain to him everything he had done wrong. It would whisper his name and tell him everything he’d done and not done, which, now, was going to get him and everyone he was responsible for killed. It sat beside him while he lay, paralyzed between sleep and not-sleep, struggling to breathe through the sludge in his chest, and it spoke to him. Told him stories about himself. Described the precise depth of the shit Ted Prinzi had gotten himself into.

He would wake with a start and have some idea—some new plan, new tactic. He would leap up from his cot, strip, press his uniform, wash himself, brush his teeth, and shave. He would stare into his own rolling, hot eyes in the small mirror hung from the nail on the tent post and work out the details of what wisdom had been granted him—knowing, on some level, that he was going mad, losing his shit, listening to ghosts, but also knowing that no other voices were currently available than the ones in his head and that no other advice was forthcoming.

On the field, he tripped over clods of dirt, over tufts of grass. He walked like a drunk on the downside, listing badly, and tripped over nothing at all. He thought of his wife. Ex-wife. Two ex-wives. He thought of the deal he’d tried to strike with Connelly. He thought of how much he despised the twin moons here, how one always seemed to be stalking the other across the sky. He thought about flying—as a wing captain on Forsmith, a mail pilot in the belt, as a rookie, two years washed out of civilian command school on Alpha Alexi, his first day in combat. His brain swirling, boiling with a froth of free association, all good governance blown, he thought of the children he’d never had, and missed them anyway. He thought of the places he’d never been, the places he had, the ones he’d dreamed. He thought of the boardroom of the Flyboy office on Orion Station where he’d been hired—all earthy with its hardwood and distinguished leather. He’d never seen the London headquarters. Was never important enough to be called home to the nest. He thought of a bar at Serentatis that he’d liked a lot once. He thought of munitions stockpiles, of the liquid weight of aviation fuel, the cost (including manufacturing to spec, crating, transport, and storage) of a single round of .303 ammunition: two dollars and eight cents. He thought of his men, one after another, falling like a fanned deck of cards dropped, fluttering, to the ground. He thought about winning. How easy it should have been. He knew with the surety of a fanatic that he was going to die, and soon.

In the moments just before the worst of everything, Ted and Connelly had been standing together, side by side, at the door to the mess. After a night spent in the field house, they’d concluded their negotiations over the supply shipment now arriving courtesy of a fast, experienced smuggler who’d been supplying Connelly on the sly for years. They’d had breakfast, Ted and Connelly and a knot of Connelly’s native officers, who’d kept, first, to their own table set with tin plates and silverware, ham and powdered eggs and bread and real coffee, but then had pushed the table out of the way in a fury of clicking, growls, and throat clearing and squatted on the dirt floor instead. This had done nothing to improve Ted’s opinion of the natives, and he’d said so to Connelly, who’d laughed. He’d turned his head, clicking and croaking over his shoulder to his indigs, and they’d bared their teeth and made noises like ten men hawking before a spit.

“That’s okay, Commander,” Connelly had said, his voice syrupy and with a faint hint of some rolling Old World accent that Ted was never able to place. “They hate you, too.”

Oh, they do not, Ted had thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

In the comms tent, Diane was on the tight beam, talking to Connelly’s swift blockade runner, just decelerating after translation and trying to find its parking orbit. Eddie was nowhere to be found. Unbeknownst to Ted, he was unconscious in the dirt beside Carter’s bed, sleeping the first decent sleep he’d had in a week. Having unloaded his weight of worry and sorrow on Captains Carter and Teague and having been told that the tonnage he’d thought he’d been carrying all alone was not, in fact, his alone or really all that heavy, he’d slept with a lightness and ease he’d almost forgotten existed.

In any event, Eddie was absent—had been absent for hours—which Ted had taken as tacit permission to do precisely as he pleased for most of the night and on, now, into the morning: To sit with Connelly and make his deals absent any legal muffling, soldier to soldier. To use the proscribed transmitter to arrange for the drop, a nice piece of which he’d talked Connelly into handing over to him. Twenty percent was where they’d settled, plus providing a security force for the airfield in case of a determined advance on their position, in exchange for the use of Flyboy turf as a receiving area and the help of his pilots when the time came to take back the fortified towns along the river. Two patrols had been out right then, observing. Captain Teague was covering Riverbend, Captain Carter was watching Southbend. Ted had told Connelly that when they came back, plans could be made for taking the towns. An hour, two at the most. And in the meantime, the longhouse, aprons, and stubblefield were all active, and Ted found himself in the unenviable position of making small talk with a man who, now that their business was concluded, he could barely look at as a man.