A Private Little War(137)
“I buried my wife and son,” Fenn said.
Carter nodded. He said nothing in reply. One of the CB-30s was altering its flight path, executing a long, screaming hook a hundred feet above tree level, skittering across the brightening sky, then standing in the air, reorienting. Carter turned full around to watch it, setting his jaw and staring daggers at it as its blunt, black nose seemed to search for him, sniffing for his scent on the frozen air.
“Fuck you,” he said under his breath. “Come get me.”
The scramble siren started to blow. The men standing, watching, tensed at the sound, but they did not run. They’d lost the want, but not the reflex. Behind them, in among the tents, there was some action. Bodies moving. Sounds of activity. The camp waking to a new reality.
Ted appeared around the corner of the mess tent, stalking toward the knot of men in his perfectly pressed uniform blues, cleanly shaved, his eyes hard as flint. After finally getting around to some long-overdue business last night, he’d slept like a baby—not long, but deeply and with peace like a stone. His dreams had not been haunted. He’d done the things he needed to do. And when he’d woken, the entire world had taken on the cold, pure aspect of his imaginary white room. That was his gift. When he shouted, his voice carried the entire length of the field.
“You all gone deaf? That’s the fucking siren.”
No one moved. As Ted drew closer, they could see that he was smiling. Among certain of the men, this inspired more panic than anything else on that strange morning.
“Into the longhouse. Everyone. Now.”
No one moved. The lingering CB-30 began to make a slow approach toward the infield of the Flyboy camp. Prowling. In the distance, booming could be heard. Followed shortly by whistling that became shrieking. Followed shortly by the beautiful, perfect, frozen ground some distance from the standing men and their ramshackle tents and misery erupting as though being vomited upward explosively.
“Longhouse!”
Now, the men moved. The CB-30 dropped its nose and laid on speed. The pilots, the mechanics, the controllers, and Ted all ran. Fenn ran. Carter ran. It became a race between them. By the end of it, they were laughing, and together they both slapped hands to the corrugated skin of the longhouse.
“We’re bugging out,” Ted shouted. “We’re going home.”
The transport was bucking up, its nose rising, engines howling, its assault ramps dropping even before it began to settle to the earth. More explosions shook the ground. They were closer, but still not close.
“Those guns are ranging,” Ted said.
“Whose guns?” someone asked.
“Does it matter? Everyone pick a friend. No one gets forgotten. No one gets left behind. The minute that bird touches ground, we get on.”
Carter grabbed Ted’s sleeve. “That’s an NRI transport,” he shouted.
Ted pushed Carter away. He stumbled back but did not fall. “No, idiot. That’s a mercenary transport that just happens to be under contract to NRI. I offered him a better deal.”
“What deal?”
“Money. Gold. Whatever he wanted. Mostly a chance at seeing tomorrow. The marines are inbound, and this guy didn’t feel like spending ten years in a colonial prison.”
Carter turned back to watch the ship. “I know the feeling.”
Fenn crossed his arms and looked at Ted. “What about the other two transports?”
“Going to pick up Garcia, Connelly, and his men. That crazy fucker doesn’t need to die here either.” He smiled back. It was all fake teeth and power. “Read that handbook you mentioned last night, Captain. Lots of interesting stuff in there.”
Outside, the massive transport deployed landing skids and thumped to the ground. Out of the swirling snow, shapes of men began to emerge, running from every direction. The longhouse was empty in an instant.
Carter ran beside Fenn, the two of them pounding their feet on the frozen ground, feeling their hearts already lifted, already under the press of gravities of acceleration. A long time ago, Carter had said that when their ride finally came, he would be the first man aboard, bulkhead seat, and he pushed himself to make that come true—stretching for it with Fenn just over his shoulder, matching him stride for stride until Carter felt like he was airborne already, skimming the icy earth, flying without a plane. He understood that none of them were going home. That was ridiculous. But they were leaving this world, moving on to some next one, and that, on this morning, was enough. There was nothing left here for them on this rock. Their war was over.
The gaping, black maw of the transport yawned before him—dark metals, hard angles, steaming with the furious transitions from the cold nothing of space to the inferno of atmospheric translation to this frozen dawn on Iaxo. A wall of steel and molybdenum and ceramic, ticking and groaning like a groggy animal, an assault ramp for a tongue, its mouth open and waiting to swallow them whole. Somewhere high above them, hanging like a mote in the sky, there would be a guild carrier or freighter—two hundred million tons, under delivery contract to NRI through a series of increasingly esoteric shell companies, its belly full of supplies, ships, and faithful all being pushed out into space, birthed into darkness for the long fall to the surface. Carter wondered what they’d been told this time. What inspiring words they’d been offered as they’d loaded into their transports while some man like the one Carter had once been went through the formalities of drop prep and protocol. He wondered who would be scrubbing the blood and piss and stink of fear and dying out of the cargo bay now, in his place. He thought about Oizys, Vega, where he’d dropped NRI volunteers to fight the loggers. He thought about Frogtown, where NRI had tried to throw its protestors against the Colonial Marines and Carter had been shot down, beaten, arrested, becoming an unwilling martyr for millions of little frog-baby aliens—more valuable then to his masters than he’d ever been at the stick of an aircraft.