Considering all their advantages—their ten-century technological leap on the locals, the logistical support of a distant and powerful private military company, and negotiated aid from several other similar outfits already on the ground—a year had seemed a reasonable strategic assessment to Ted at the time. Even if his planes were museum replicas of Spads and Sopwith Camels being flown by men more accustomed to vacuum fighters and modern strike aircraft, he had the only air force for a million miles in any direction. Flyboy was going to make out well. Ted would collect a nice paycheck and bonus for making a quick and clean job of this place. A clock had been started, with a scheduled pickup in 8,760 hours, as measured in London, Earth, where the company kept their home office.
Ted had set a clock of his own and had placed it proudly on the bedside table in his tent. It’d been the last thing he’d done before going to bed that night, putting 8,500 hours and change on the display and setting it to count down. He’d felt good about things. Strong.
The two walled cities that straddled the river had been taken in short order, soon after Flyboy’s arrival in the area, and everything had looked good. The fighting had been almost comically one-sided and, on the ground, the pilots amused themselves with impressions of the combat formations of the enemy—every one of them involving turning one’s back and running as fast as possible away. On the night that Riverbend had been taken, the local mercs—the foot-sloggers and tin-hats, leading their companies of Akaveen indigs—had celebrated and accidentally burned half of it to the ground. Ted’s pilots had seen the smoke and flames from the air, thought it a counterattack, and nearly bombed the whole lot of them. Everyone had a good laugh about it the next morning, but walking the new front—boots scuffing broken cobblestones, pacing the smashed reaches of the walls along the river that had been breached by Flyboy bombs, and stepping over shattered, burnt bodies that already smelled worse in death than they had in life—Ted had seen many of the victorious merc infantry commanders down by the water scrubbing blood and hair off their body armor and greatcoats, so had always wondered how accidental that fire had really been.
The war had moved up to the high moors—the Sispetain moors, in the language of the fingernail monsters. After almost a year, just when Ted’s clock had been tickling zero, it’d advanced over the foothills until the backside of the mountains they’d seen on insertion had been in sight. His pilots had flown and fought and performed beautifully—all early timidity or anxiousness gone. It was a job and they were the men to do it. Orders came in. Orders were executed. Everyone ate steaks for dinner, sucked fire, and shit high explosives. In that first year, Ted lost three men, but not one of them to combat. There’d been a mechanic who’d had an accident (a plane had fallen on him). Another—Gottlieb, was that his name?—had caught some kind of weird infection that’d taken him down in a day and left him comatose and on a permanent antibiotic drip. And one of the controllers had drank himself half to death and just plain lost his shit. All three had been extracted by the company. All three had been alive when they’d left and probably still were today. It was strange, but Ted couldn’t remember any of them. Not really. Maybe it was because none of them were pilots. Ted’s pilots had been inviolate. Untouchable.
Sitting in his tent in the dark, with his eyes closed, his lamps extinguished, Ted thought hard about the men who’d been shipped home. One of them might’ve been called William, he thought. Or Williams. He just wasn’t sure.
A year. They’d been on track to almost making the deadline. Coming really close. Within weeks, Ted remembered thinking at the time, and had made similar promises to corporate—speaking through cutouts, to men who reported to other men who reported to other men.
The moors, where they rose and brushed against the feet of the mountains, were the last big part of the map that’d needed to be pacified before pushing on to the cities of the coast with no enemies left at their backs. The thinking was that with one last push—a combined operation utilizing all available forces in the area—the enemy could be broken there, out in the open, in the fields where the slaughter would be extraordinary.
And that was the way things had been going right up until they’d inexplicably turned and gone the other. Marie had died on the moors. Connelly lost more of his indigs than could be counted. Twenty human officers had gone out one night from the Palas FOB with a thousand native troops on a quick march to a collapsing flank position and just disappeared—none of them ever seen again. Skirmishers from Applied Outcomes would report armies massing, and by the time main body troops could be brought to position, the armies would’ve vanished and it would be nothing but ambush after ambush for miles of hard walking.