They touched down with a jerk. The assault ramp boomed open, fell to the strange earth, and they all went charging out with a whoop—rifles first, ammo bearers behind, all gushing out of the ass-end of the ship in a single spasm of violence.
And then they’d faltered. All of them. The first men out wound down and stood, finally, stunned, with the rest of the mission all running up their heels.
It’d been like charging into a fairy tale. A sun-dappled glen. Tall grasses unbowing after having been pushed flat by the wash of the dropship’s turbines. Wildflowers in purples, golds, and blues, and mountains rising in the middle distance, still young and jagged. Closer, a tree line. Primordial, but sunlit and almost impossibly lovely where it formed a thick bower over the course of a river running over pebbles and flat stones.
That, Ted sometimes thought, was where it’d all gone wrong: in that first, blinking instant. They’d been infected, the lot of them. They’d breathed in, taken the sweet, honey-touched summer perfume of Iaxo into their lungs, and been lost. Like some cosmic joke, in two years here there’d never been another day so lovely. Not another hour.
The drop master had shouted everyone clear of the ramp, running them like sheep out of a pen. When they’d heard the bangs of the restraining bolts letting go and the rumble of the cargo containers rolling down the ramps, many of the men had winced. There was something defiling about the harsh noise, metals grinding on metals, and the plasticky smell of lubricating oil. Ted had wondered whether those were the loudest sounds that had ever been heard here. In the moment, it’d felt like maybe they were.
Ted had taken all the rifles away, trying not to look sheepish about it. He’d wanted to give a speech—some kind of warning, a note of caution to temper the sudden infatuation he saw in too many eyes—but couldn’t find the words. Two of the pilots were chasing butterflies, scampering across the field like children and swatting at them with their hands.
So day one, they’d had a party instead. Drinks all around. Without even unpacking, they’d blown down some trees with shaped charges made from unscrewed bomb heads and fusing wire, doused them with kerosene and lit them on fire. They’d mixed ethanol from the medical supplies with bottled water and orange drink powder and poured it into tin cups and pretended they were roughing it while the leaping fires turned midnight to noon for a hundred yards in every direction. They’d posted no security. The rifles had been mounded up in a stack, unfired. They hadn’t even uncrated the sidearms. It was a lark. A picnic. That’d been a good night, Ted recalled. Nothing yet had gone wrong. He’d laughed a lot. Slapped the backs of his young murderers. Pissed into the embers of the fire when it’d burned low. They slept as though they’d just invaded Eden and found it lacking snakes.
But everything since then had been falling back—retreat disguised as strategic maneuvering. They’d been given (granted, like it was a gift to be handed down) that one day to acclimate and then a heavy lifter had come down, unannounced, from parking orbit—spinning down through the rapidly graying atmosphere like some nightmare insect, steel legs twitching and undulating along the empty curve of its belly. It’d put a hump on all their lightweight gear, waited ten minutes for everyone to load into another cramped troop compartment—jammed in among the huge containers of aviation fuel, construction supplies, and proscribed electronics—then moved them from the wrong side of the mountains, across the moors, across a river, onto a backwater lowland plain and over the somewhat-abbreviated horizon from two walled cities, much smaller than the cities on the coast, that seemed to be the focal points of aggression in the area. Ted had gotten on the blower and asked what the fuck was going on—why they were being moved so far away from the good fight and stuck out in the boonies.
“Orders, sir,” said the pilot of the lifter. “Just doing what I’m told. I suggest you shut up and enjoy the ride, sir.”
Eight days to dig in. They’d cut airstrips in historical formation—a lopsided triangle mown into the tough, alien grasses, flattened by earthmovers from Cavalier Mechanics. Cavalier was another mercenary company, a military contractor that specialized in moving things and wrecking things and building other things in their place. They’d been contracted by the company prior to arrival and paid by Eddie Lucas, Flyboy Inc.’s Man on Iaxo, out of a private stock of hard currency he held. Paper money was worthless. Promissory notes were worse. But Fast Eddie paid in gold—everyone’s favorite color.
After that, vital structures had gone up. Machinery had gone in. Tent lines had been pegged out. The Junholdt was long gone and they were cut off—ninety days at least until their next supply drop and the first possible ride out if, for some reason, everything went terribly wrong. It’d taken two days for their own mechanics and flight engineers to assemble the first half-dozen planes once the longhouse was bolted together and raised. One afternoon for test flights. One crash. No injuries.