Native troops defected in the night, abandoning their lines, then leading the enemy back through the holes they’d created by their absence; leading them unerringly and silently to the bodies of their sleeping friends who would only wake when the blades were going into their skulls, at a weak point in the bone structure between the eyes. Wherever the Akaveen lines of advance were weakest, the path most narrow, Lassateirra indigs would seem to rise from the ugly ground to smash through the ranks. They came from behind, from below, from God only knew where. More than one human officer, stepping out a pace into the dark for a piss or a breath free of the stink of his own native troops, would be found, five minutes or an hour later, with his throat cut, his own dick in his mouth, and when engineers from Cavalier would try to build earthworks of loam and sod, they’d find the earth already choked with bones no matter where they dug. What had been a fight against a few became a war against thousands, tens of thousands, until no square foot of the high moors felt safe that wasn’t actively burning or already stacked with the dead.
Things got spooky. Sispetain became like a curse word, something that no one wanted to say out loud. Pieces of it took on an almost animate malice and so were given names. Diller’s Cut, the Gap, Cadillac Ridge, the Rockpile—all marks on the corporate maps, renamed by the men who killed and died there because their original, alien names were too long or ridiculous or unpronounceable.
Even the ground seemed angry and would open like a mouth in places for no good reason and swallow men whole. In the aftermath, no one had been exactly sure how it’d happened—the losing. The math had all been so solid. On paper, everyone involved should’ve already been at home, drinking whiskey and polishing their medals.
There was a saying, coined by men supposedly much smarter than Ted Prinzi, which said that every war looked perfect on paper but that true leadership was knowing what to do when your war moved off paper, out of the boardroom, and down into the mud. That was what Connelly had said to him on that night they’d first met, after the exchange of pleasantries, before Ted had kicked everyone out.
“Look,” he’d said. “You have your orders.”
“I have my orders.”
“But I have to tell you this, Commander. There’s this saying. Not mine, but I like it. And it says that while wars might be planned on paper, they are all fought down in the mud. Do you know this saying?”
“Not my war.”
“What?”
“Not. My. War,” Ted had repeated slowly, and jerked a thumb up into the air. “I don’t fight in the mud.”
Connelly had shaken his head. “You’re not understanding me. What I mean is, everything looks very nice on paper, but those papers were not written on Iaxo. This place… I don’t want to worry you or anything. I’m not trying to…” He’d struggled for just the right words, pressing his tongue against his teeth and grunting something that might have been alien talk and might’ve just been frustration. “You’re going to die here thinking like that. Leadership, this saying says, is knowing what to do when your war moves off the paper and down into the mud. And we are all here now. In the mud.”
“Not me, friend,” Ted had said. “That’s why God invented airplanes.”
In his tent, Ted laid his hand flat over the folded paper on his table. He opened his eyes and watched his own hand, as if not entirely sure what it was going to do. Whether it was going to crumple the orders, leave them, open them.
People said all sorts of things about Connelly. Bad things. Some of them probably true. Ted said lots of bad things about Connelly, too. He’d called the man every name there was. Held him up in his own head like an avatar—the embodiment of the thing he did not ever want to become.
The clock on Ted’s bedside table now read -8,041 hours. He thought about resetting it to zero, starting a new kind of countdown, but didn’t have the energy. He was so tired.
Thinking back, Ted wished he knew who’d made up that saying in the first place, about the papers and the mud. He wanted to find the man who’d first said that and kill him right fucking dead.
Carter had left the tent and Cat behind and drank his bottle walking now. He listened to the night sounds: the rustle of tent canvas moving in the frigid breeze, the scrape and jingle of hoodoo charms hung around the neck of an indig sentry pacing his watch, footsteps crunching in the frozen grass, and the snort of a native post horse, the animal hitched and asleep on all six of its feet.
Everything on Iaxo except the indigs had too many feet by some multiple of two. It was another reason why Carter didn’t like it here. Not a big one, but a reason. He took a swallow from the bottle and spit between his teeth.