“Illumination seems in short supply here, Commander.” Fenn smiled like someone had stuck fishhooks in his cheeks and pulled—a false, dead thing.
“Was going to do it with signal flares, but now we’ve got something better. Supply is coming in. And we need friends at the front.”
“Tonight?”
“An hour, maybe less. It’s inbound right now.”
“That’s unexpected.”
“Not completely.”
“Largesse from our corporate masters. Presents from on high…”
“Something like that.”
“Gifts from wise men.”
“Just love hearing yourself talk, don’t you, Captain.”
“It’s Christmas, Commander. I’m getting in the spirit.”
Ted straightened up, jerking back just a little from Fenn and eyeing him carefully, trying to ferret out the lie in him. “It is not.”
“Is,” said Fenn. “Back home. I just enjoy the irony is all.”
“Well…”
Ted had found himself at a momentary loss for words. He cursed. That explained the twenty-four-hour delay in the confirmation of the final orders, he supposed. The junior accountant on the phone. Beside him, Fenn was humming something. It was “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and Ted had to turn away for a second to stop from laughing, more bubbles of sick mirth rising in him and tasting of rot and vomit.
“Look,” he said, after recovering himself. “I have to be at comms. Someone needs to fly. Someone else needs to run the off-loading. Which guy do you want to be?”
Fenn had clucked his tongue, tilted his head just so. “Cruel,” he said. “Very, very cruel.” He was one of those people who had total control over his face. An actor’s control. A high-functioning sociopath’s. He was handsome and knew it, had cutting blue eyes and wheat-straw hair like an overgrown boy with an ancient, cunning old man inside pulling his strings. He used the planes and angles of his face like a second language, with a deliberation that made a person feel like there was always a joke being told that he didn’t quite understand and that was, maybe, being told at his expense.
Ted saw none of this, though. Never had. “Just the way of things,” he said. “So which is it going to be?”
“Kevin’s at home, in the tent. Sleeping, I think. Alone.”
“Wise choice,” Ted had said. “Everyone’s staying put back at the house until the load comes in. Round them up, oversee the off-loading. I’ll have someone get Carter’s plane ready.”
“Vic is around somewhere,” Fenn had said. “I’m sure she’d be happy to do it.” There’d been a coldness in his voice that, again, completely failed to impress Ted.
He’d gone to wake Carter.
It was dark. Carter was asleep and, like a child, dreaming of soaring without a plane. Of flying, which he loved, and of a place that wasn’t this place, which he hated in many lusciously complicated, well-chewed-over ways.
In his sleep Carter didn’t hear Ted Prinzi come through the door. He didn’t hear Ted approach his cot and, for just a moment, stand and watch him sleeping with a careful eye. He didn’t see Ted tighten down his lips as though doing difficult math in his head, looking around at the cramped, despicable shadows of looming filth and clutter in the tent, or square his shoulders or squint down at him in the dark. It wasn’t until Ted cleared his throat wetly and began to speak that Carter was jerked suddenly out into rude, unwelcome consciousness.
“On your feet, pilot. Time to earn a paycheck.”
Carter stirred, throwing an arm across his face and screwing himself deeper down into the coarse blankets.
“You drunk, Carter?” Ted barked, though he knew full well that Carter was not. He lashed out with a foot and kicked one of the legs of Carter’s cot in a way that he felt was comradely but really wasn’t at all. “Liquid rations for dinner again, yeah?”
Carter opened his eyes. He saw Ted standing over his cot with a blackout lantern in his hand, playing its shuttered beam across his face. “Go fuck yourself, Ted,” he said.
“Orders, pilot. Orders is orders.”
“It’s dark. We don’t fly in the dark.”
Ted chuckled damply, a sound like mud cliffs giving way to gravity. Carter knew he’d had a trench cough for months that he couldn’t quite shake.
“We do tonight, sweetheart,” he said. “Illumination mission. The indigs want some light to kill each other by. You drew the short straw.”
Carter sat up with a grunt, rubbed at his eyes, coughed, scratched himself. Fucking lice, he thought. “I didn’t draw any straw, Ted. I was sleeping, in case you didn’t notice.”