A Private Little War(28)

But ever since then, the company’s men on Iaxo had done what they could to help the mudfoot mercenaries fighting on their side. It was guilt, a little bit. Ted’s, predominantly. Some of it was wanting to present a unified front to the indigs on both sides just in case one of these days their gravy train went all to shit.

It was widely assumed that Connelly the Coward, in command of his own fourth company, would retreat as soon as he saw the flares or heard the rifles tuning up. From the position he held, though, his avenues of escape were limited. He couldn’t cross back over the river where he was, and moving upriver toward the ford would only bring him closer to the fighting, so everyone knew he wouldn’t do that. His only choices would be to hold fast, head farther southeast down the bank or forward, deeper into unfriendly territory. No matter what he did, the friendlies on the ground would either come out equal by morning or have bought a whole new swath of land owing to Connelly’s dependable nighttime skittishness. Durba would then be free to cross the ford himself, move downriver to take Connelly’s old position (or reinforce him if he’d held). Come the dawn, five hundred indig foot soldiers under native command would move up to secure the rear.

It was a simple plan, elegant and tactically sound in that so much of tactics has to do not with the ordering of men to do what you want them to do but with knowing what they’ll do all on account of their own recklessness, stupidity, or fright, and then adapting to the inevitable. Carter had received his specific orders in-flight, by radio—one of the controllers reading to him from pages written by somebody else. On paper, it’d seemed brilliant.

Durba had a field radio. The way things were supposed to go, he would call in as soon as he heard Roadrunner overhead, light up a UV strobe to mark the front of his own lines, then act as forward observer, spotting for Carter on his run. Meanwhile, Carter would buzz over pretty as can be at three hundred feet, drop a dozen impact-trigger parachute flares, split-loop west, lay out another line to finish the cross, then say good-bye and go home for a hot breakfast and a nap, content in the knowledge that, thanks to his hard work, one fine lot of alien critters whom he’d never met and didn’t care a damn for would have the opportunity to slaughter some other lot about whom he cared even less in the middle of the night rather than having to wait a few hours for the sun to rise. Good for them, Carter figured. Luck and all. He’d sleep soundly no matter what. He mostly did.

So now he followed the river in with one eye on the stopwatch, the other glued to the optic of the spotter’s scope. He was counting down the seconds, maintaining a steady crawl speed, waiting on Durba’s call. His night vision was blown because of the scope, the light amps, the burr of swirling ultraviolet. The tree cover along the banks was too dense for him to see anything worthwhile. On UV, it was a soft, quiet kaleidoscope of green and tangles. And on thermal, Iaxo was a bad disco—all blobby reds and blues and oranges and blacks mixing and separating like oils on a plate. For love or money, he couldn’t pick out the nice clean entrenched line that Durba ought to have had laid out—one hundred native rifles plus a seven-man off-world command element, their combined body heat like a snake of fire crawling against the cold indigo nothing of the ground—and instead saw only a jumbled, seething mess of heat signatures smoldering so crazily out of proportion that, for a moment, he thought the scope had gone tits-up on him.

At twenty seconds out, Durba should’ve been able to hear Roadrunner coming. A biplane is not a quiet machine. In this place where a tree falling is cacophonous and men walking can be the loudest noise in the forest, a nine-cylinder rotary whines and clatters and roars like a cam stripping off the pivot of the world. Carter touched gloved fingers to the map on his thigh. He felt something in his chest squirm.

Fifteen seconds. Ten. Carter ought to have been right on top of them, but still nothing. In the freezing cold, the back of his neck began to sweat. Not a peep from the radio. Strange.

Walking blind in one’s own dark bedroom, there are only two sensations: perfect confidence and absolute panic. Nothing between. And one bleeds into the other so quickly. One second, you know, vaguely or precisely, just where you are and where everything is in relation to you. The next, everything comes unstuck. One wrong step, one chair out of place, and one loses one’s self completely so that all of a midnight comes crashing down in a terror of unfixedness. This was what Carter was feeling—the sickly slide into sudden dread and disorientation.

Five seconds out. This was as good as overshooting and would already require a long climb out and a new approach. So much for the element of surprise, Carter thought. At which point he was completely surprised by the sudden squawk of the radio crackling to life. The voice on the other end, though, rather than having the laconic drawl of Tony Fong, Durba’s Earthside Chinese-Texan radioman and occasional guest at the Flyboy O Club, was speaking indig—a language Carter had always thought contained far too many hisses and consonants and sounded like a wet cat being beaten with an abacus. He spoke a dozen words of it, most of them obscene. The indig on the other end of the radio wasn’t using any of those, just hissing and clattering, clicking away. Carter fumbled with the handset and the stick. Roadrunner fought to roll over on him because she was not a machine that took inattention cheerfully. He tried to focus on the details, straightening out one thing at a time.