Nothing.
“Kevin!”
Carter looked up. “I’ve got to go back.”
“No. We’re going home, Kev. Now.”
“Cat,” Carter said. “I forgot Cat.”
Fenn grabbed him by the shoulder.
“I promised Cat,” Carter said.
In their two years of living together, Fenn and Carter had fought only once. Actually come to blows just one time. A lot of this, Fenn knew, was forbearance on his part. Kevin Carter was a difficult man not to punch most of the time.
But only once had Fenn lost control of himself. They’d been throwing a party in their tent—a half-dozen pilots off the roster for the night, Ted, Vic. It’d been a booming good time, but Carter had gotten very drunk and very loud about his feelings about the aliens. Iaxo’s natives. Any aliens, really.
“Aliens,” he’d been saying. “Indigs, abos, anything that isn’t us. Why should I care? We kill them. It’s our business to kill them and their mothers and their babies. Like bugs. They’re a nuisance. We kill them because they’re in the way.”
Billy had argued. Ted had said no. That wasn’t it at all, and maybe Carter ought to put the bottle down and just shut up for a while.
And Carter had wheeled on him. Carter had asked what he knew about it, flying his desk in and out of combat all the time, and how long it’d been since he’d thought about how much killing they’d done since arriving here. “However many, it’s not enough!” he’d yelled, and then turning to Fenn for support, had said, “Tell him, Fenn.”
Nonchalantly—meaning only to cool things down—Fenn had stretched out in his chair, rolled his head on his neck, and said, “Well, I don’t know about the mothers and the babies necessarily, Kev.”
And Carter’d said, “I’ve seen you fly, you liar. You’d kill a hundred alien babies if they were in your sights. You’re just like me!”
Fenn had hit him then, uncoiling out of his chair like a spring and slamming a fist into Carter’s ear. Carter had gotten his hands up, but it didn’t matter. Fenn was strong. His punches were like thrown hammers. And he wasn’t ever sure what’d set him off, exactly. The dead babies, or that Carter thought the two of them had anything in common at all. It hadn’t mattered. Fenn had beat him down to the ground, mounted him and beat him unconscious, then beat him some more until, finally, Ted and Vic and Billy and George Stork and some others had pulled him off, pinioned his arms, held him against the horrible weight of his rage. And Fenn had wondered as he stood, gasping for breath, wanting only to kill Carter because Carter had mentioned babies to him and Fenn had already buried one baby and never wanted to think about it again, whether or not, in that moment, Carter had been right. Maybe they did have something in common after all.
Fenn swung at Carter on the ramp. He was still strong. His punches were still solid. All he wanted now was to save Carter—to knock him down, drag him aboard, belt him in. But Carter wasn’t drunk this morning. He was quick and determined. He ducked the punch and ran.
Fenn did not follow him.
Carter ran. In the smoke and haze of gray and white, he made for the tent line by dead reckoning—working off an internal compass that he hoped was still functioning.
He’d seen Cat this morning. He’d talked to Cat. He’d watched Cat tear into its bed of rags by the door and, he hoped, that was where he would still find it. Loud noises never spooked the thing. Gunshots, airplane engines—it was accustomed to furious action and loud sounds. Carter told himself that Cat would still be there. That it had to still be there. He’d made a promise, and he wasn’t leaving this place without the one thing on it that he’d never had any urge to kill. The one thing worth saving.
One thousand yards. He ran blindly through the smoke and, with artillery shells bursting behind him, saw the dark outline of tents rising up before him.
“Counting off!” Ted bellowed over the clamor of voices and rasping of belts and crying of the wounded.
Fenn hung by the door, one foot still on the ramp.
“George!” someone yelled.
“He’s here. Carried him,” someone else answered.
“Raoul?”
“Didn’t make it.”
“Who’s missing?”
“Eddie.”
“Jack? Has anyone seen Hawker?”
“Carter,” Fenn said, not loudly enough for anyone to hear.
“Captain?”
Fenn turned and saw Ted standing close to him.
“Carter’s still out there,” he said.
“Then he’d better hurry,” said Ted.
“What about Eddie? I didn’t see him come aboard.”