A Private Little War(16)

“That’s me,” he’d said. “I invented this. Didn’t you know?”

No one wore the pump. No one wore the injector. There was no flak on Iaxo. There were no machine guns other than the ones they’d brought with them. And the emergency gear was bulky and annoying and clumsy and rubbed painful sores onto the arm, so everyone had lost theirs or tossed them into a box somewhere and forgotten all about them, but they still wore the collars because the collars also contained the throat mike for the radio and looked pretty cool besides.

Next came the jumpsuit—bespoke spidersilk of private manufacture, guaranteed to stop most any solid projectile. The pilots wore them like skin, with nothing beneath. Like everyone else’s, Carter’s jumpsuit smelled terrible.

Thermal knickers, black. Boots to follow, also black, knee-high, fur-lined, comfortable for about five minutes but warm forever. Jacket the same way—long and black, heavy leather with silver buttons and buckles and a high collar. It was all very nice and functional, warm in the cold sky, occasionally bulletproof, but favored mostly because the flight rig made anyone who wore it look wicked, cruel, and indestructible.

Gloves and goggles. A silk scarf—pure china-white and kept immaculately clean as a matter of pride even if nothing else was. Most paid the indigs to do that. Give them a couple of beads or bottlecaps and they’d do most anything. Laundry, fetch and carry, haul the trash, whatever. Carter was no different. He tucked the gloves into his belt and wound the scarf around his throat, leaving its tails flapping over his shoulder, fussing with them vainly until they lay just so.

Each pilot had been issued a helmet. Carter used his to hold warm water when he shaved (which was not often). No one ever actually wore them. Again, a matter of style. Hard to look so dashing and devil-may-care behind a quarter inch of bulletproof mirrored Lexan.

Hard to look so good with a bullet hole in the face, too, but that wasn’t much of a concern to the pilots. For the most part, the only bullets fired in anger were theirs. In the two years that the company had been on Iaxo, more men had been put on the sick rolls for cock-rot, cirrhosis, and misadventure (read: cracked their heads falling drunk over a tent peg) than had been injured in the line of duty. More by far.

C’est la guerre.

Once dressed, Carter had little choice but to fly, but he knew that ten minutes was ten minutes in Ted’s mind only. A mere suggestion of hurry. And to obey, he thought, would only encourage the man, stroke the armature of ego that kept him upright and stiff, and make him think people listened when he spoke. There was no reason to foster that kind of illusion.

Fenn had been kind, considerate, and thoughtless enough to leave a half-full bottle of the local pop-skull sitting in the dirt next to his cot, so Carter requisitioned it as a spoil of war, eased himself down onto the edge of his bed, and drank it. Near the door, Cat (something less than Carter’s pet, something more than just another ugly local rodent) lay curled into a ball on its pile of rags. Silently, Carter raised the bottle in a toast to the sleeping, monstrous thing. To survival, he thought, at any cost. And then Carter drank. He did not rush. Neither did he linger. There was work to do, but he’d be damned if he was going to do it sober.





Back in his own tent, Ted felt each breath like taking in a weight and exhaling only half of it. Steam rose like smoke. His mouth tasted of tar and too long between brushing. He regretted fiercely those few drags he’d taken off that cigarette while standing in Carter’s squalid quarters, but it’d been necessary. He’d wanted to bring the man a present—an apology of sorts for slights that Carter couldn’t possibly have understood—and a cigarette had seemed the least obviously cajoling. The least fraught. Ted had lit one for himself simply because it’d felt wrong to do otherwise. Appearances mattered, Ted knew. Especially when one had very little else.

He’d taken out the orders from corporate again and laid them on his desk, straightening the folded page until it was square with the corners, the edge, nudging it with his fingertips until it was perfectly aligned.

Ted thought of the coast. Gray water, sick with foam. Cities that looked to have been built from mud by giant idiot children and then abandoned halfway through. The Arkhis Mountains like sharp teeth in an angry mouth. Hills 201, 204, 218a and b, the central highlands—names on corporate maps that were all less terrible for their banality, for the refusal to call them after the awful things that’d been done there when he and his pilots had flown low and dropped fire from the sky.

The Sispetain moors. The bloody fucking moors, and the river valley below them. The city they called Riverbend, then here—the lowlands, a flood plain that never flooded. Ted drummed his fingers on the folded orders. He’d made a tour, for sure. He’d seen some things. They all had. And now it was done. Or would be soon.