The third one.
No, the first.
The second.
“Does it matter?”
“Come on, Billy. Which one is it?”
“They all are.”
Iaxo, of course, was his first mission back. Those scars were still so fresh that he cried in the night from the pain of them. That was the version that Carter chose to believe, which, Carter thought, maybe said more about him than it did about Billy.
Carter clacked his radio and switched to the control channel, called in his position, clicked the stopwatch and marked himself on Billy’s map as a mile and a quarter short of where the flight computer claimed he was. With his goggles pushed up, the rushing air whipped tears from the corners of his eyes, atomizing them off the tips of his ears, frozen despite the liberal application of grease. In the open cockpit, he had to hunch behind the windscreen to hear. When the call-back from the comms tent came, it confirmed that he had calculated correctly and that the computer had not, reading him short by a mile and change. Pinning the stick between his knees, he made corrections and, thirty seconds outside the drop zone, dug the spotting scope out of his jacket and tried to get a fix on the lines.
The river ran southeasterly at this point. Durba’s rifles were supposed to be dug in along the bank on the friendly side with Connelly’s 4th in a reactionary position a quarter mile downriver on the unfriendly bank. Carter’s orders were to move in support of Durba, illuminating a cross, two miles by two miles, starting at a point a quarter mile forward of Durba’s position and immediately to Connelly’s left, because it was thought that somewhere in that area were a bunch of scheming indigs meaning to make a nuisance of themselves come morning. Durba wanted to catch them napping, give them a good scare to the tune of a few minutes’ concentrated rifle fire, and chase them off before they got any fancy ideas about trying to take back the ford.
The ford had become important because, other than the bridge, it was the only reasonable river crossing between the fortified towns of Riverbend to the north and Southbend to the south. Obviously, these were the visitors’ names for these places. The natives called them something else, but no one much cared what. Gurgle and Mumble, Burble and Babble—something wet and dreadful and altogether alien. The bridge—itself just a pile of rocks and sticks stacked somewhat higher than the water at full flow—was solidly held now by the other side, as were the two towns and everything east of the river.
These had been the lines for months now, ever since the fight had forced everyone off the moors and high ground to the east and back across the river in battles that would’ve made Napoleon weep. Indig infantry and cavalry on their ridiculous six-legged horses had arranged into lines that’d stretched for miles, all wheeling and clashing while the company and its pilots bombed and machine-gunned them with virtual impunity. For weeks, the fighting had gone on. In some places, the stony sod of the moors had drank up so much indig blood that it turned to brackish mud deep enough to mire horses and suck down cart wheels to the hub. Carter remembered doing barrel rolls over Diller’s Cut as the forward lines being maintained by Palas collapsed for the last time, his guns chattering until they jammed, bomb garlands empty. He could close his eyes and still see entire wings of fighters diving like hawks to break columns of reinforcements pouring in from invisible strongholds in the foothills when things had gone from bad to worse.
The loss of life, among the indigs, anyway, had been phenomenal, unbelievable, enormous—the kind of war a man dreams about at his most perverse and fervent. A sweaty, sickening kind of bloodlust; fathomless like dying of thirst on the ocean. Though since none of that incredible loss had been among the company’s pilots, they’d all found it great fun and talked of it like a vacation that’d come just in the nick of time.
Connelly, though, had suffered on the moors. Durba had suffered, losing his daughter toward the end of things when, almost impossibly, losing had become a foregone conclusion, then an actual reality. There were other contractors working on Iaxo prior to the Sispetain campaign, and they’d all suffered, too, Carter knew. Ambushes, desertions, human officers being murdered by their own native troops. And once the opposition had gotten themselves organized and started throwing thousands of bodies into the grinder—cavalry charges crashing against fortified machine-gun positions, Lassateirra infantry with iron knives and spears appearing out of nowhere, behind previously secure lines, to rush sleeping encampments of Akaveen and their human officers or moving columns of troops, slaughtering everything in sight, stealing everything they could grab, then vanishing—the fronts had all collapsed. It became a retreat. Then a rout. And everyone down in the mud and the blood and the filth had suffered save the princes of the air with their exclusive contract and flying machines.