And they fought not only the Lassateirra. As the day wore on, cobbled-together squadrons would run after ground trucks that’d been seen whipping out in mad flanking maneuvers, around the backs of the horsemen and the infantry. For the first time, the Flyboy pilots mingled the blood of men with that of indigs—tearing up both together until they lay entangled in wet, vital solidarity. It was NRI. They knew it. And almost all of them felt that death was just exactly what they deserved. On the walls of Riverbend, they’d met rifle fire from disorganized packs of humans when they wheeled too close and, once or twice, saw the twisting columns of smoke upon which rode the hard, bright hammers of surface-to-air missiles that went corkscrewing off into uselessness or exploded low in white spiders of smoke. There was something in the fuel mix that was bad—burning sickly in the alien air and damp—but everyone knew it was a mistake the other side would not make again.
They’d flown to make recoveries of the lost. Lefty (who was easy) and then Stork (who was shot from the sky again, but lived) and Fenn, too, who’d been up longer than almost anyone and who was brought down by a failing engine, purely mechanical, but glided to a peaceful stop near a stand of squat, bluish trees and was found sitting cross-legged on the ground with his pistol in his hand. Waiting.
Fenn, they would say later. You know Fenn. Sitting there waiting on us, happy as can be. Might as well have been getting a tan or admiring the scenery Stood up when we landed, said, “Gentlemen, fancy seeing you here,” like some kind of lord or dandy.
Later, Fenn would see Carter and say that the only thing he could remember was the smell. Even in the cold, the stink was terrible. The dying had been enormous, and he’d landed in a still-warm Golgotha.
“There were brains on my tires, Kev,” he’d say. “There was no ground to land on that wasn’t full of them.”
They’d flown until they couldn’t fly any more, exhausting themselves and their machines in a spasm of violence that just wouldn’t quit until engines seized, eyes clouded over, mechanisms failed, and their guns gave forth only smoke. At the end of it, those still able had been reduced to flying low over the flood plain and assaulting the dead with harsh language. And when it was done, the pilots had blown icy breath through frozen lips and wondered where the energy had come from. They all felt so tired.
Ten hours, then they’d come down. All of them. It was night. No one would fly at night. Everyone was crazed, exhausted, deaf, shot, sick, in pain, shattered, haggard, doom-struck, and lolling. Pilots would drop in their tracks, these youngish men—healthy and well fed—just going down like they were under sniper fire, to sleep for five minutes or ten in the mud and icy grass. It was scary the first time you saw it. The second time, you just stepped over the body and shuffled on.
George Stork was shot. So were Jack Hawker and Billy. George was missing a leg before morning and could no longer fly. Only the injectors had saved him—alien clotting factors and blood-thickeners keeping him from bleeding out completely before he could put his plane on the ground. Billy, too, though Billy hadn’t even known he’d taken a bullet until somebody’d pointed it out to him—the back of his jumpsuit, tail of his jacket, even the tops of his boots all wet and sticky with blood that Billy hadn’t even known was missing from him until he saw it, then stalked, cursing, to the shattered mess-turned-medical-tent, demanding explanations, ballistics, muzzle velocities, and shedding gear like he meant to go streaking.
Charlie Voss was dead. Porter was shot, too, but lived. Ernie O’Day had been shot in the face but was saved by his helmet. Doc Edison had taped a combat dressing that still smelled of the packing case it’d sat in for two years over the gouge in his cheek, then Ernie’d gone up again, where he’d been pinned in the sky by tracer fire, exploded, and fell like a comet crashing to Earth. Raoul was burned from a lashing of fire that’d flared out of an overheated manifold when he’d touched it with aviation fuel soaking his sleeve. He wasn’t expected to survive.
Shun Le Harper was dead. She’d eaten the business end of a sidearm, but no one would say whose it’d been. She’d finished out the battle from her seat in the comms tent. She’d seen all the planes down and organized the first triage of men and equipment, coordinated all the messy taxiing of aircraft into the longhouse, and then she’d gotten up, found a gun somewhere (it wasn’t like there was any shortage), walked out toward the verge, past the stopway of C strip, put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.