A Private Little War(19)
On the tenth day, Connelly (who actually worked for Eastbourne Services Group, Proxima, though it was tough to tell) had presented himself at the nascent airfield, along with Antoinne Durba and Marie, two of his other company commanders, and a handful of his indigenous officers. Connelly had been decked out in native drag: armored skirt, necklaces of chicken bones, breastplate like the seat of a wicker chair. He had a long beard that he wore tied off like links of sausage, a drooping mustache the color of rust, and had his head mostly shaved. Gone bamboo, totally, and Ted had laughed right at him, not caring a damn who he was.
Durba wore the wreck of a military uniform, patched and tattered. Marie had been lovely, tall and narrow, with long hair blowing out behind her in a breeze, one blind eye whitened like milk, and an old scar that cupped the sharp plane of one cheekbone.
That day was the first time that Ted had seen one of the natives up close. They were tall, dirty, lumpy, furred with something that wasn’t really fur but more like the frayed ends of an old rug, matted and overlapping, in colors from ashy gray to shit brown. Their faces appeared dumb and slow and thick, more delicately hairy, with large, heavy heads like slugs of iron pushed down into their sloping shoulders and small eyes set too far apart. Their backs curved oddly, making them appear always hunched, though, at the time, Ted had mistaken this for the exhaustion of the march. In the cups of their shoulders, the points of their elbows, the wings of their tilted hips, you could see the rubbed, bare skin beneath the fur—or not skin, exactly, but something like scales. Plates. The hair all grew from the loose edges of these, and it made Ted think of something he knew: that fingernails were really made of hair, all stuck together.
After that, he couldn’t think of anything but that they were talking monsters covered in shredding fingernails. When one of them (a lieutenant, Connelly had said, without the slightest hint of humor) extended a hand for an awkward shake (a thing which, it was plain, was a learned response, uncommon and unfamiliar), Ted had to force himself to take the offered appendage. Three fingers and a thumb, all of them too long. When he’d touched it, the thing’s hand was so hot it made him ache. For a day afterward, his fingers smelled like he’d been scratching an old dog—the stink of the aliens warm and soupy and thick.
There’d been other officers there. A representative from Applied Outcomes, another from Cavalier, another from Palas Risk Management. It’d been arranged, he was made to understand—a friendly welcome to the neighborhood by those already doing business there and a dignified exchange of radio frequencies and call signs. Something about it made Ted think of John Company middle managers standing deep in the bush in their mildewed broadcloth suits and pith helmets, trading business cards gone limp in the wet, heavy air.
Like a good manager, Ted had memorized names and faces. He’d shaken hands and mouthed meaningless words about cooperation and mutual concern, showed his guests to a flattened patch of grass in the infield where, eventually, the field house would rise, and then excused himself as quickly as he could, sniffing his fingers as he went. It didn’t escape his notice that most of the other professionals shied away from Connelly and his officers, his natives. That they seemed to walk on different earth and breathe different air.
The tight-beam FTL relay had gone live late that same night, and while the commanders and liaisons from all the local merc companies slept rough in the weed-choked infield, Ted had his first conversation with Flyboy corporate, received his standing orders and, come morning, had politely kicked all the other contractors off his field with the explanation that any further combined ops would be planned through the Flyboy Inc. strategic services department. There was a number, a coordinate set. Ted had handed it around as a form of good-bye.
Most of the men had shrugged. Veterans, they knew how corporate wars were fought and understood the clean, distant appeal of office chairs, whiteboards, boardroom politics and proper hierarchies of command. No one ever died of paperwork.
Back in his tent, Ted flicked a corner of the orders on his desk with a clean, trimmed fingernail.
On that morning two years ago, while the other men were gathering up their things and their escorts, Connelly had tried to protest. Standing his ground with his aliens behind him, he’d tried to explain something that Ted wasn’t hearing—so new yet to this place that he hadn’t grown the necessary ears.
“I have my orders, gentlemen,” he’d said, and showed them, as they say, the door.
That had been the first of his serious mistakes. Ted understood that now. But corporate math at the time had predicted completion and cleanup of the Iaxo contract, with minimal to no casualties, at one year, Zulu time. They were here to put down an insurrection, to exploit the ancient enmities of an indigenous, tribal society to aid in the securing of 110 million acres of mixed terrain, and to kill the hell out of one group of natives (called the Lassateirra faction, though Ted didn’t know whether that was what they called themselves or what they were being called by those who prepared the paperwork) so that other, different kinds of mercenaries and widow-makers (lawyers, mostly, like Eddie) could follow on after them and negotiate with the other, surviving group (called the Akaveen Ctirad), who were apparently less hostile to the notion of handing over vast swaths of their land to developers who would settle it, clear-cut it, mine it raw, and just generally ass-rape the fuck out of it because Iaxo was a vaguely Earthlike planet and while such things weren’t exactly rare, they were still extraordinarily valuable. Too valuable to leave to a bunch of fingernail monsters, that was for sure. A bunch of walking rag rugs with pointed sticks and body odor.