“Then what were you thinking about?”
Carter had disappeared again into the mess and riot of the airstrip, but Fenn stared out at the place he had been, wondering where he’d vanished to, how difficult disappearing might really be.
“Something even worse than that,” he said to Emile.
Carter couldn’t find Fenn and had stopped looking very hard. He was in the field house, maybe. Or the mess. The longhouse. Doing something other than wanting to be found, which was fine by Carter. He was tired and had lost his taste for company halfway through the looking. Now, hands in his pockets, he just walked, watching clouds scudding in and closing like a ceiling over the world.
At the far end of B strip, down by the armory and weapons lockers, Max waved him down. He was sitting, reclined against a massive pile of loose .303 belts, with a stripped Spandau-style drum-fed machine-gun body across his knees and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip.
Carter changed course and made for the sunlit corner where Max sat, grinning a gap-toothed smile and cleaning the Spandau’s fouled chamber with a black toothbrush. He was missing his four front teeth—had lost them in a fight in a transfer station spacer’s guild bar the month before they’d all shipped for the final, plunging leg of their trip to Iaxo—and was forever poking his tongue through the hole. He smelled like rotten teeth and warm gun oil.
“Hear the news, Captain?” he lisped.
Carter’s heart stalled. Three squadron’s flight was home. He’d counted all their planes. The one/two flight with Jack flying drag had been coming right in behind his patrol with no trouble reported. It couldn’t be bad news, but it’d been so long since he’d heard any good news that Carter immediately assumed the worst. It was a habit. “What news?” he asked, bracing for it.
“Monkeys moved on Riverbend this morning while you was out gallivanting. About four thousand of them. That entire northern flank.” Max removed his cigarette, spit in the dirt, and beamed maliciously. “And they got the shit blown right out of them, too. Three squadron rolled up just in time to see the little chickenshit yellow fuckers running. They never even seen the inside of the walls.”
“Did everyone come home safe?”
“Ours did. Fully loaded, too. Guns clean. No one cleared to fire a shot. Indigs probably haven’t stopped running yet.”
“We headed back up there?”
Max raised a mangled eyebrow. “I got stripes on me I haven’t noticed? If you are, no one’s thought to inform me. All’s I know is all planes are in turnaround now, Ted’s orders, and I do see our fearless leader over there”—he gestured off toward the strip’s apron with his toothbrush, to where Ted stood apart from the messy throng staring up into the clouds—“watching the skies with what I would call a particular focus, if you know what I mean.”
Carter looked at Ted. He looked up and down the flight line at the planes coming and going, being pushed in and out of their berths in the longhouse; the activity had been nearly constant since flights had resumed. Watching it, he tried to weigh today’s hurry against last night’s and yesterday’s and the day before. He looked at pilots and mechanics, ground crews, planes, bomb trucks, fuel hoses, and saw them all as one body, its internal systems going through the motions of regular operation, not yet galvanized by the spark of any specific action.
He turned back to Max. “You’re the man with the guns,” Carter said. “When we’re about to go kill something, you generally know first.”
“That is true,” he said, nodding. “When’s your next flight?”
Carter checked his watch. The face of it was frosted with condensation. Its hands had stopped. “Two hours,” he said. “Two hours or so. Up to the Ridge, out and back.”
Max licked a greasy finger and held it up as if testing the quarter of the wind. He cupped a hand around his ear and pretended to listen with exaggerated concentration. “Hmm…,” he said. “If I was you?”
“Yeah, Max. If you were me.”
“I was you, I’d go look up your boyfriend in the mess. He was there at Riverbend and might know a bit of something that I don’t. And then I’d get you a hot cup of coffee and a quick piss. Have a laugh. Rest that weary trigger finger. But I wouldn’t stray too far, you read me?”
“Five-by-five, Max.”
“Things around this place have been a bit too quiet a bit too long, you know?”
“I do. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, Captain. Just taxi.”
Carter nodded and was about to say something else when Max looked skyward, squinting. “Motherfucker…,” he said, sounding pleasantly bewildered, surprised, almost happy. “Is that snow?”