When the search party had come back with the gear for opening the containers, Fenn had done little more than aim them in the proper direction and let them have at it. It was Christmas, after all. That’d been true. And the way he looked at it, every bastard among them—every killer, every defiler, every eye-shooter and psychopath and machine-gun artist—ought to have something to open on Christmas morning.
There were accidents, of course. Arguments. One fistfight. Most of the men were too drunk to walk more than a dozen paces without falling down. The holidays could be difficult, Fenn knew. When no one was looking, he tucked away some of the supplies for himself—loading boxes and packages onto a bomb sledge and dragging it to the mess tent, where he hid everything poorly but well enough to fool a bunch of drunks and mental cases. When he came back, it was to uproarious laughter and men literally doubled over. In among the cases of food and bullets and medical supplies and whatever else, the boys had uncovered a brand-new ice machine. Of all the things…
Fenn had caught sight of Carter walking then, kicking his toes at the frozen dirt and making for his plane. He’d raised a hand to wave, but Carter hadn’t seen him. He’d called out—meaning to tell him about the ice machine because Fenn knew Carter would appreciate the absurdity of it—but Carter hadn’t heard him. Lost in his own world, that man. Fenn shook his head and turned back to the task at hand which, just then, involved loading up another sledge full of commandeered supplies for his tentmate.
Vic had called Carter’s plane out of the longhouse when she’d been told to do so. She’d loaded it, muscling the gun truck over the uneven ground herself because it was cold and doing something was warmer than doing nothing. She’d topped up its tank and given it a once-around check, then rubbed a spot on the spine of its tail assembly because there was something about the join of the machines right there that felt like touching a living body, like feeling the regular points of vertebrae pushing up against taut skin. And there was something about touching it right there in order to make sure the machine came home whole.
She was not superstitious. She didn’t believe in animism or luck or anything of the sort. She liked machines because she liked rules, order, and the simple interactions of parts made to fit, and she believed in numbers—gear ratios and screw speeds and torque and cylinder synchronization—because numbers were the language of machines. She believed in touching this spot on the planes because, to date, no machine that she’d touched in such a way had ever not come home. This wasn’t superstition. This was math.
Vic rubbed the spot with her bare fingertips, feeling them bump over the swelling ribs of the plane through doped cloth and lacquer, and closed her eyes.
“Come home,” she said to the machine.
That was part of the ritual, too.
Carter found his ride waiting, primed and topped up, on the taxiway at the friendly end of A strip. He’d done a quick once-around, touching her hard skin and the wire stays between her wings, kicking the tires. He’d shuffled, half dreaming still of hot coffee and cigarettes and imagining in the cold and quiet that he could hear alien leaves falling from alien trees onto alien soil. They blazed up here into russet autumn colors, the leaves. Same as they did at home. Everything turned yellow, red, and gold, and Carter had known dangerous, painfully blissful moments where he’d almost been able to forget where he was except for one variety of tree with leaves that turned pale blue as if suffocating in the cold and that never failed to ruin the view.
He hated those fucking trees.
He’d tossed the bottle out into the grass and pulled himself into the cockpit. He’d buckled in, smeared a thumb’s worth of astringent-smelling grease onto his nose and cheeks and the shells of his ears to keep them from freezing in the cold, then blah-blah-blah’d his way through clearances. In the infield, generator-driven lights were burning, but he didn’t know why. There were more bodies moving around than should’ve normally been up and about at this hour.
It didn’t matter. With a finger, he teased the engine to life and let it warm a minute in the dark. He closed his eyes. The vibration of his machine tuned high and rumbling was like love, he thought. Like drifting off to sleep with one’s whole body pressed against the beating, blood-thrumming heart of a monster. The power of it was intoxicating. More so in this place where any power at all was overwhelming.
The chatter of the radio in his ear startled him. His orders, approach radials, altitude, target information, radio frequencies. Dull. He pulled his gloves on. The green flags came out. He throttled his plane gently forward—bouncing over the uneven ground, struggling to keep her between the pin lights that stuttered to life and lined the runway while one of the ground crew stumbled backward, leading him. Lambert, he thought. Or maybe the other one.