A Private Little War(136)

They did. He tried to lift a tin coffee urn from one of the tables at the end of the mess and, when it resisted, tore it free of the wood to which it’d been bolted. His teeth were bared, his muscles full of blood.

He set the urn as close to the fire as he could get it. Inside, it was full of frozen coffee. No telling how many days old. Two, at least. With a stick of broken table, he pushed the fire up around the back of the urn and piled on more wood. When he saw that the smoke was not escaping, he climbed up atop another table and, with a knife from the kitchen, stabbed at the canvas until a tattered hole was born.

“Chimney,” he said to no one in particular, then lifted the top of the urn off with his sleeve and saw that the coffee was beginning to melt. Just a few minutes more now.

He went to find a clean mug, powdered creamer, sugar. In one of Johnny All-Around’s ice boxes, he found some native ham steaks, already cut. He stabbed one onto the end of a long barbecue fork and charred it over the flames while he waited. He ate it off the fork, pulling bites off with his teeth, burning his cheeks and his tongue. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted, and he grunted with pleasure at nearly every bite.

With a rag wrapped around his hand, he pulled the spigot on the coffeepot. Coffee poured forth. This made Fenn smile, and he jammed his mug beneath the stream. It was terrible, tasting like smoke and burning plastic and only vaguely like coffee at all. He doctored it with powdered cream and rock sugar that he’d crushed to powder with the heel of a pan, and it was the best coffee he’d ever had. He had two cups. Then he poured a third. Then, with more rags on his hands, he wiggled the urn away from the fire, lifted it, and dumped the contents onto the flames to douse them. There were still embers remaining, however. These, he pissed on—standing at attention, with his back arched and his dick in his hand, staring out one of the windows at the slowly brightening horizon.

This was how he was when he saw the first shooting star arcing across the morning sky. Then the second and the third. He put his penis away, zipped up, and stepped to the door with a warm coffee mug cradled between his palms.

“Well,” he said. “Well.”

He stepped outside into the snow, leaving virgin tracks in the oblivious whiteness. He walked a ways off across what had been the stubble field, toward the falling stars. Boots crunching the shrouded grasses, he felt the difference when he crossed onto the clipped apron of a runway, and he stopped. He sipped his coffee. He watched in silent reverence the miracles happening above and beyond him.

Silently, men gathered around him. Tommy Hill. Davey Rice, brought back from the dead. Albert Wolfe helped Porter Vaughn hobble over, one foot in a boot of plaster. Billy Stitches, walking as though everything were a dream, asked Fenn where he’d gotten that coffee. Fenn handed the cup to him and told him to drink. Max and Johnny and Emile and Lambert. Radio operators. Controllers. Mechanics. Vic drifted in from the longhouse, her glide path still having a hunting edge to it, a stiff breeze making wings of the blue quilted engine blanket she had wrapped around herself like a cape.

Kevin. He came from the tent line to stand beside Fenn and amid the coterie, the huddled remains of the Flyboy Inc. Carpenter 7 Epsilon mission. To stand and watch the gleaming traceries of fire in the sky; to watch with the same mute amalgam of horror, fascination, dread, and sickly, fatalist joy that their arrival had likely inspired in so many lesser creatures before them; to watch as the dropships spiraled down, standing on tongues of flame, and as the cargo containers, like bombs, fell and left their comet trails of smoke and brilliant friction across the bluing bowl of sky that once had been their sole preserve. No need to hide now, to muffle their shining arrival in the sun’s cloaking radiance. No fear. No shame. No time left for pussyfooting around.

They watched the bold fireworks of their impending future coming to Earth, and not a man among them wasn’t overawed by the display. Not a man didn’t shudder and cower slightly—cringing closer to the man beside or behind him—when the sky was split and the dignified silence was shattered by the shriek of jet engines overhead, a wing of aircraft flying in close formation, howling directly past them.

“CB-30 transports,” Carter said when it was possible to speak again. “Hundred men or ten thousand pounds. VTOL engines. Good application here. Smart.”

Fenn turned to look at his friend. “Kev,” he said, “what did you do before you joined the company?”

“I flew those,” he said without hesitation, without looking away—shading his eyes and turning to watch the transports recede, to drop their men and machinery somewhere behind the Flyboy encampment. “For NRI. You?”