A Private Little War(14)

“I know that, pilot. That’s why I drew for you.” From the breast pocket of his uniform blouse, Ted took two cigarettes—manufactured, filter-tip cigarettes from a private stash—and put them both in his mouth, lighting them over the smoke-blackened chimney of the lantern. He reached down and stuck one between Carter’s lips like he was planting a stake.

Ted said, “See what you get for not staying up and drinking with your mates?” And even though Ted had meant it as a good thing, it made Carter want to punch him straight in his gin blossoms, but he didn’t. He took a drag instead and felt himself grow light-headed, sinking back into his thin pillow and stinking blankets.

Ted drew back the lantern and grinned hugely, face lit in harsh angles, head round like a Halloween pumpkin with wet, sucking lips opening like a wound and pulling back into a graveyard smile. The man had teeth like ivory headstones, not one of them his.

“On the flight deck in ten, Carter,” he said, then closed the shutter on the lantern with a tinny snap. Everything went dark again. There was just the red tip of Ted’s cigarette, glowing from the middle of his face. Then the sound of the door opening. Then the sound of it closing again.





Outside the tent, Ted took a breath. Then another. He’d counted: One pilot, sober. His chest rattled and hurt from the cold air, but it felt good to be clear of the stinking closeness and claustrophobia of Carter’s quarters. He wanted to wash and looked longingly off in the direction of the shower tent, but there wasn’t time. With a grunt of disgust, he threw away the cigarette he’d lit and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers as if trying to stave off a headache that was far away yet but coming at a gallop.

Two years, he’d been on Iaxo. Nearly. It’d been seven hundred days, give or take a few hours, as measured by London, Earth. Fewer here, where a day and a night took thirty-one hours and some number of minutes annoying enough that no one bothered counting them. Seven hundred days, each counted and duly logged, marking nothing but an inexplicable and, ultimately, unforgivable failure.

His men were falling apart. Almost all of them. He’d chosen Carter to fly because Carter was the only pilot sleeping, one of the few not drunk or crazed or liable to lose it in the long reach of the night. And if, right now, Kevin Carter was the best of them, Ted knew how poorly that spoke of their situation in general, because Carter had the black cross on him and everyone knew it. Everyone except maybe Carter. He gave off the pall of death wherever he went, throwing it off like an infection so that Ted had seen other pilots refuse to sit in chairs that Carter had recently vacated or drink from bottles that he had touched. But after seven hundred days here, everyone was coming apart at the seams. Everyone was losing their stuffing.

And now this. He’d spoken to London—been passed down through the ranks to some junior clerk in the accounting department stuck working over Christmas, who’d unknowingly told him that they were being lost here, laid off. He’d received confirmation of that same thing through channels, the lethality of it buried in jargon, clotted with acronym, but none of that making it any less of a death sentence. He touched the pocket with the letter in it. He imagined it like a bullet, slowly crawling its way toward his heart. All of their hearts. Ted knew something that none of the rest of the men did. Not even Eddie. A secret that, for the time being, he would carry alone.

Fucked once again by time—stuck hundreds of light-years from home with a handful of men, a few antique airplanes, a certain number of bombs and hammers and shit-paper and beans and a supply drop coming that he alone now knew was going to be the last one, ever.

Ted had no politics. No philosophy beyond the sure knowledge that seeing the hammer coming down reduced all of life’s complications to the simplest equation: Survive or don’t. Twenty years of corporate war had taught him many lessons, but this was the one he’d taken most to heart. This was what he believed. Or what he believed that he believed, anyhow. He’d seen the hammer, so what did he have to do next? And when that was done, what came after?

There was noise coming from the infield. Raised voices, the sound of boots on cold ground, and the hiss and pop of hot metal cooling in the darkness. The drop was in. A bull’s-eye delivery right into the infield by a jock flying so high that, this time, Ted hadn’t even heard the engines. With the new supplies, his accounting was going to be all inaccurate. Fucked by largesse, not want—which was a new experience for him, to be sure, but it left things in no less of an erroneous state. He’d have to start over, do it again tomorrow or the next day. Count everything again. That was what he could do next. Not so he could know how bad things were now, but how bad they were going to become. He thought about going to supervise the unloading but didn’t. He’d given orders. They would be followed, more or less.