A Private Little War(111)

“We were talking…”

“No good will ever come of that,” Fenn interrupted.

“Hilarious,” said Charlie, and Fenn gave him a wink, squeezing his hand tighter on his coffee cup, and sighing with what he hoped sounded like collected peace.

“So we were talking about going to prison, right?”

Fenn nodded.

“Because we figure, Charlie and me, that that’s where we’re going to end up.”

“In prison?”

“Right.”

“Like, just eventually? Or were you planning on doing something specifically illegal?”

And the two of them sat a moment, confused by the complex twists and turns of Fenn’s logic before grinning together and breaking out laughing.

“You’re joking,” said Emile.

“Joking, right?” asked Charlie.

“No, gentlemen. Really, I’m not. Why would you be talking about going to prison?”

“For what we’re doing here,” said Emile.

“When the marines come,” said Charlie.

“Oh,” said Fenn. “The marines. Prison.” He had to remind himself that the boys knew nothing of what he now knew. That he carried with him the specific and terrible knowledge of their own ending here and was one of only four who did, the weight of it enough to warp his every thought down toward the hard, cold center of fact: that they were going to die here, and likely soon. NRI, the natives, they would settle this and do the company’s dirty work of eliminating all witnesses long before the marines arrived. And even if they didn’t—even if, by some miracle, the Flyboy Inc. Carpenter mission survived the coming battle and won through by some impossible turn of fate—then when the marines did arrive, none of them would be going to jail. Of that, Fenn was positive. And short of flying an open cockpit biplane across hundreds of light-years to land on Victoria Street in London, at the front doors of the home office, Fenn didn’t know how any of them would ever get home.

Through one of the windows in the mess, he spotted Carter walking the flight line, looking dazed by all the action surrounding him, and a little lost. A boy, he thought. Lost among a tribe of boys.

“Colonial prison,” added Emile again. “When the marines come.”

He looks half-dead already. And Fenn wondered, not for the first time, if he, too, looked as bad on the outside as Carter did.

With effort, he focused his attention back on Emile. “No,” he said. “I really hadn’t considered that.”

“Well, shouldn’t you then?” Charlie asked. “I mean, the way things are going, don’t you think they’ll come sooner or later? They’ll shut us down and, the way Emile and me were looking at it, probably shut us up in jail for a bit, at least.”

“To be completely honest, gentlemen…” Fenn paused, careful with his words and fighting to maintain the tattered curtain of nonchalance he pulled ever tighter across his throbbing heart and jittering hands, the heel of his boot tapping painfully against his shin. “I’d never truly considered prison as an outcome. Or, for that matter, the arrival of the marines.”

“So you think they’re not going to come then? Even after—”

“Even after,” said Fenn.

“So you think we’re going to be okay then, Captain?” Emile leaned forward, as though being closer to a man who he thought believed things were going to turn out all right would help him catch some bug of optimism, some invulnerability. “Because prison, you know… Charlie and me were saying that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Compared to what?” Fenn asked.

“To this,” Charlie said. He gestured, in the smallest way possible, with a tiny bob of his head, to everything and everybody in the whole, wide world.

“To what?”

“To missions. The goddamn indigs.”

“To the food. And Ted. And flying in the dark and stuff.”

“It can’t be so bad.”

“Have you ever been to prison, Emile?” Fenn asked. Emile shook his head. He asked Charlie, and Charlie, too, said no—that he’d always been just a little too fast. “Then don’t fool yourselves,” he said. “It would, in fact, be so bad. It would be worse.”

“But that don’t matter, right?” Emile asked. He was looking at Fenn’s hand on the coffee cup and Fenn made an effort to relax it. When that didn’t work, he carefully took it away and hid it in his lap. “It don’t matter because you said the marines won’t come, right? You said.”

“The Colonial Marines don’t take orders from me, Emile. They’ll come or they won’t. I just said that I hadn’t been thinking about prison.”