A Private Little War(107)

Connelly smelled awful, like a rain-soaked carpet left in the muggy sun to dry. He wore some ragged fur draped over his shoulders, over the ruin of what had once been a fine suit of bespoke body armor aggrandized now with bits of steel, plates of scavenged plastic, and stitched hieroglyphs. He had some kind of paint or dirt caked into the creases of his skin, carried a tall, twisted staff that clattered with bits of junk and bones and garbage, and he spoke more indig than he did human of any variety. He was filthy and distracted by every little cough and whistle of his pets. Throughout their long night of negotiating, he’d regularly gotten up in the middle of some pointlessly protracted haggle over a pound of this or hundred-count of that and walked out of the field house into the dark to squat with them, bare his teeth at them, shake his magic stick, wrap a hand around the back of one of their necks and shake it like a puppy who’d just pissed on the rug, or just to stand there with them—close with them, shoulder touching shoulder, backs touching fronts—to stare up into the sky.

“What are you doing out there, man!” Ted had demanded once, after an absence of nearly an hour. “What, are your monkeys afraid of the dark, too?”

And Connelly had hissed at him, shook his stick, then grinned. “That what they say about me now, Theodore? That I’m afraid of the dark? That’s funny.”

“Funny?”

“Really more ridiculous. Telling.”

“I’ll fucking say.”

Connelly had set in to scratching then, and for a minute he had said nothing at all. He’d looked around at the lights burning in the field house, the electric lights fed by the muted chug of a generator running on aviation fuel. He’d cocked an ear to listen for the scrape and sigh of the night controller shifting in his (or her) chair on the other side of the wall—listening for the pings and beeps of condensed radio communications being beamed across the heavens, for the scratch of voices in the sea of local static.

When he looked back to Ted, his expression had been soft, almost pitying. “You know why my… indigs”—he dropped the word like something exculpatory, evidence souring on his tongue—“won’t fight in the dark?”

Ted shrugged dismissively. “Afraid of the boogeyman?”

Connelly smiled. “Because they can’t see in the dark.”

Can’t see. That was his reason. Ted had laughed at him, and then they’d gotten back to discussing terms. Ted had thought he’d won something, because Connelly started conceding points left and right when he wasn’t stepping outside to rub up against his monkeys.

Outside the mess, on the morning after, Connelly was standing too close. Their shoulders brushed and Ted shuffled a half step away.

“Stand still, Commander,” Connelly said, and moved in again. His indigs squatted in a tight knot on the other side of the door, occasionally clapping their hands together, ticking and gurgling at each other. In the infield, Connelly’s entire fourth company looked like an orgy of bearskin rugs.

“Stop climbing all over me then,” Ted snapped back.

“It makes you look untrustworthy.”

“What?”

“Pulling away. You’re making my officers nervous. Stand still.”

Connelly stepped closer.

“You gonna kiss me, too?”

“No. The Akaveen mating rituals are a bit more… aggressive than ours, if that’s the word? Energetic? A kiss, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was biting you.”

“Then they’d think I was kicking your ass shortly after.”

Connelly laughed. He bared his teeth. The two of them stood together quietly until Connelly spoke again.

“How long have you been here, Commander? On Iaxo?”

“Two years,” Ted replied, making it sound like a thousand.

“I’m amazed at how little you’ve managed to pick up in all that time.”

Ted huffed. He folded his arms. “Piece of fucking work, you are,” he said, looking skyward through squinted eyes.

Connelly shrugged. “I work for them. They expect me to provide. To negotiate with the big fliers. Bring down the manna.”

“Yeah. And understand their fuck rituals and wave your magic stick around. You’d kill at a costume party. How long have you been here?”

“Six years,” he said.

“Your company is patient,” Ted said.

“My company.” Connelly smiled and looked out, as though over some far horizon. “My company. This is my company, now. These men.”

“They’re not men.”

“Eastbourne is not patient, Theodore. Back then, we were among the first to come to Iaxo. Long before you. There were two hundred of us, dropped in with a one-year deadline. We were to infiltrate one side or the other, the Akaveen Ctirad or the Lassateirra, though neither of them had names then that we understood. Whichever side we chose, we would offer our services, off-world supply, ally with them, and negotiate a patch of four hundred thousand acres as payment. Land and mineral rights. Air and water. Everything. We had lawyers, xenobiologists, linguists, engineers. One hundred and fifty soldiers, armed to the teeth and with five hundred tons of arms and ammunition buried in the hills. We chose the Akaveen Ctirad because the Akaveen were warriors and because they were the first natives we stumbled across who didn’t immediately try to kill us. That took almost the entire year. And by then, there were about sixty of us remaining. You know what I was?”