A Private Little War(24)

The flags came down. His guide loped out of the way and fell down in the dark. Carter advanced the throttle to the first catch. As the ground began to run away beneath him, he gave the plane more juice, shoving hard at the power handle to open her up and listening to the tone of the engine grow from that throaty rumble into a glorious howl. When, together, they lifted clear of dirt and gravity, it was like being born all over again.

And then there was no sound at all but the roar of the air streaming past him and a distant, droning hum from forward; there was nothing to see in the perfect dark of night flying through the primeval world but the phosphorescent dials of his wet gauges and the dimly glowing iconography of the flight computer rudely hacked into the wood-and-plastic instrument panel.





Because he was looking for it, Fenn saw Carter’s plane lift and vanish like a mote into the darkness. He’d tucked away a nice load of pilfered treats for his friend and, provided Carter didn’t die, would surprise him with them when he came back home again.





Because she was waiting for it, Vic heard the clattering buzz and grumble of Carter’s liftoff. She gauged the relative health of the machine by the spectrum of noises it made as it passed by her, took to the air, and faded into distant silence. It was a good machine. Strong. Well maintained. She loved it for all its best qualities, even if they were few and simple and archaic, and she forgave it its grosser incompetencies because it couldn’t help being what it was. She was in the machine shop and decided she would wait for it to come home to her before going to bed. Just to make sure nothing bad happened to it in the night. Just for the comfort of seeing it alive and safe one more time.

She ran scarred fingers permanently blacked with grease through her dark hair and dug the hard heels of her palms into her eyes, sighing out a breath that steamed in the cold. A couple hours, she thought. If everything went smoothly. Maybe less. She could wait.





Because he was listening for it, Ted heard the cough and sputter of an engine catching down on the flight line. He listened to it settle into a growl that climbed the octaves into a keening buzz, then floated up and away into the night. In the dark, he checked the luminescent dial of his watch. Thirty minutes, a little less. Not good, considering he’d asked it to be done in ten, but not terrible either. Not insubordinate. Carter had gone, which was something. Knowing what he knew, there was a part of Ted that was surprised. He thought that maybe if it’d been him, he wouldn’t have. He would’ve said Fuck you to himself, rolled over, gone back to bed, and tried to wake up later with some kind of enthusiasm for this war.

Now he stood up, straightened his uniform, cleared his throat and spit into one corner of his tent. Tiredness had left him feeling hollow and light, like he was drifting standing still, but he needed to be at comms. When he went out the door of his tent, he left the final orders from corporate sitting on the edge of his desk, still unopened, but didn’t make it ten steps before he came rushing back, crashing through his own door, to slap them off the wood, paw through his drawers for a lighter, and then hold them over the bright flame until they caught. He held the paper until the flames ate their way to his hand, close enough to blacken his fingertips. He held it as long as he could, until the pain made him suck a breath in through his teeth, then threw the final corner up into the air—watching it drift and burn and transmute itself into black smoke and nothingness.

When it was done, he nodded his head once and sat back down again, sucking on his burned fingers like a child. If anyone at comms needed him, they could come find him. He was the goddamn commander, after all. No need for him to be everywhere at once.





CARTER’S PLANE WAS CALLED ROADRUNNER AND IT WAS HIS BABY, his best girl, queen of Iaxo’s maddeningly not-quite-earthly sky. She was done up in mottled gray, black, and white night-fighter camo with laughing skulls and swords and flaming spades painted slapdash onto her doped skin of fire-retardant cloth. Childish, but severe. The natural result of drink and paint and too much time on his hands.

She was a mutt, a Sopwith fighter with a little Spad blood dirtying up her clean lines—short in the nose like a Pup with a Camel’s forward-leaning wings, but boxy in the tail after the fashion of the elder Spads, modeled on the best notions of those primordial aeronautics hobbyists (Blériot and Saulnier; Béchereau; Herbert Smith; the Italian, Rosatelli; Camm and Fokker) who’d invented the idea of killing from the air centuries ago; with a few improvements in weight and airframe dreamed up by the generations of flight engineers who became heir to all that wicked knowledge.