A Private Little War(124)

“My radio must be malfunctioning then, Jack, because I didn’t hear that. You have your orders. Come down to visual range and fuck them up. Porter and I will draw fire. You follow.”

“Roger that, Jackrabbit. A flight is rolling hot.”

Above him, Fenn watched the bombers drop like stones, making fast for attack altitude. It was lovely sometimes, diving from such height. To come crashing down upon the earth with the promise of such fantastic violence. It wasn’t Fenn’s thing, as such, but he understood it. He hoped, looking up, that Jack had the joy of it. He thought it was about time someone had some fun in this droll little war.

Fenn turned around then to face the warped air beyond his spinning prop and eased his stick forward.

“Uh, Jackrabbit?” Porter’s voice, half whispering like he was leaning over Fenn’s shoulder. “We’re gonna do what now?”





There was an instant—the interval between the first bright flash of the guns opening up and the first hiss and spanging doppler of their bullets’ arrival—when Fenn was able to think what a fantastically bad idea this was.

There was an instant to wonder whether he’d underestimated the skills of these novice gunners, rolling their pieces out for the first time, stunned (Fenn hoped) by the savagery the pilots had shown and stricken (Fenn prayed) by the slaughterhouse ambiance they’d made on the ground. An instant to wonder at their ability to hit a fast-moving target with a nearly flat approach angle, their excitement at finally being able to get their licks in—firing at the first thing that showed up in their offset gun sights even if that thing happened to be him. Smart gunners, adroit or artful gunners, would wait for the following targets lumbering down slowly upon them. They’d hold their fire for the good kill. The defensive burst. But Fenn had told himself a story about these enemies laid out before him, already sparking their cannon at him—that they would be scared and angry and anxious and bloodthirsty all at the same time and, because of this, would be less excellent than he was, and so would die. It’d been a reasonable gamble at five thousand feet. Seemed less so at five hundred.

There was an instant to think how this might be his last instant, and that one seemed to last forever, encompassing all the other instants, leaving him plenty of time to think of anything he wished. The faintly remembered touch of yellow sun on his face. A view of Iaxo from on high that might’ve been the view of any one of a dozen worlds. The dim, almost childish image of home—a geodesic over an abandoned pressure container, a boy, a mom, and a dad standing like stick figures before it, hands linked in scribbles, smiles on each round face. A conversation he and Carter had once had about toast and the simple, dumb, sweet and easy longing it’d invoked, like magic, into their hearts in place of the grief there on the day after Danny Diaz had died.

Toast, his last memory.

Danny.

Carter.

And then the instants all shattered around him, blowing back in a rooster tail of turbulence because he was through the gauntlet he’d made for himself and, behind him, all his doubts became nothing but the past as, behind him, the bombs were falling.





In the end, they’d driven the enemy back. They’d saved the day, at least for today, and then kept at it, beating the indigs not just to beat them, but to cripple them. To put the fear in them. And even after the worst of it—in those moments when the indigs had seemed to turn tail, melt into the ground, disappear into the terrain like ghosts—they’d chased them. Trying to make it so they’d be afraid to ever walk on the land again.

The pilots had attacked for a time, firing their guns dry, burning their barrels red. They’d been organized. They’d been disorganized. They’d flown in terrifying, meticulous formation and then, losing control of themselves, no human tenderness left in them, had broken, here and there, into cataclysms of rage—destructive, wasteful orgies of bombs and bullets—and flown around madly until the sky was tattered with smoke and the ground bruised by fury.

When the enemy advances had been turned back, the pilots had attempted to block avenues of retreat and counterattack. They would run back to the field for fuel, for ammunition, and then get right back in the air again—each time returning a bit more battered, holed, ripped and pocked with wounds that made their machines bleed and creep closer and closer to failure. They’d fought machine guns on the ground, hidden in stands of bush and copses of trees already shattered by bombs that would only need to be shattered again. They’d chased feints, advances that must’ve been meant as withdrawals, confused by the day when all directions went wrong—up being down and back being forward because, in the charnal house of that field, every direction was death. There was panic, some of it even from the enemy.