A Private Little War(3)

Ted was sleeping when Diane came for him. Asleep and dreaming of cool whiteness in his tent that smelled of must and mold and smoke, under canvas the color of rot, of sickness, on his straight iron cot that squeaked when he moved, beneath piles of blankets that scratched like steel wool and stank of sweat, skin, hair, breath, feet and him.

She must’ve knocked on the wood frame of the door, but Ted hadn’t heard her. She must’ve called his name. She was polite like that, if politeness was the right word.

When Ted swam up out of whiteness, she was standing over him, reaching out a hand that she drew back quickly when she saw his eyes pop open, terror-bright. She pulled the hand back and held it pressed between her small, boyish breasts, cupped by her other hand as if Ted had bitten her.

“Call for you,” she said.

“What?”

“Call.”

Ted was wearing his jumpsuit. Two pairs of socks. He dug his hands into a pocket of warmth beneath the curve of his back and closed his eyes again. He could hear voices outside, the buzz of engines. It was day, barely, and still the cold chewed at his face, smelling vaguely of ammonia.

“Ted.”

“Don’t, Diane,” Ted said. He thought that maybe he could recapture the dream if he tried. He could feel the wisps of it still trailing through his mind.

“The call…”

“Get Eddie. Take it yourself. I don’t care.”

“It’s the company.”

Ted coughed. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut, until whiteness exploded behind his lids, willing himself to sleep, ordering himself to dream. “Who else would it be?”

“No, I mean the company company. Direct from the offices.”

Ted opened his eyes. The engine sounds were cycling, getting louder and softer. There was shouting.

“Personal for you,” she said.

“Get out.”

“But—”

“Go. I’ll be there in one minute.”

It took him less. As soon as Diane left, Ted hurled himself out of bed and to his feet, splashed icy water on his face from a pan that was capped with a thin skin of ice that he’d had to crack with a fist. He pulled on a clean uniform shirt, pants that he pressed carefully every night between gun cases, his boots and belt and sidearm. He scratched furiously at his scalp, took three seconds to clear his lungs (hands balled into fists, knuckles digging into his knees as he bent double), then squared himself behind the closed door of his tent before charging out into the graying dawn like a man who knew what was going on.





The smell of fuel was thick, like breathing soup, and the air felt wet and greasy against his skin. The sky was old iron, socked in with close-hung clouds that seemed near enough to touch, to comb through with his fingers like an ashen pudding. A sodden ceiling forever crashing in toward the earth.

The atmosphere here was strange. The light, diffuse and irrational; making dawns the color of a bruise, of sickness, of toothaches or misery. Ted had seen men cowering beneath it, crouched under a gangrene sky and looking out as though haunted. Possessed by a cold, unquantifiable fear that something was just wrong and getting wronger by the hour, here in this place where even the light was cruel.

Ted coughed again, stamping out across the dirt in the direction of the comms tent, and saw a mess of activity out by the longhouse across the stubble field—men and machines in a tumult. The mess and chaos of a war that, sometimes, refused to be fought by anyone.

Ted had been on Carpenter 7 Epsilon for two years. Ted, his men, his machines, the tents, Diane, the FTL relay, all of it. Two years spent trying to complete a mission that should’ve taken a week or a month. A year on the outside.

Carpenter 7 Epsilon (known locally as Iaxo) was a footnote. The mission was a double-hush, back-burner project long-tailed into the Flyboy Inc. corporate Annual Operations Plan for eight quarters running but sick now with blown deadlines and cost overruns. Ted had been there when it was new—a fresh idea so ripe that his bosses had been wiping drool off their chins when they’d discovered it. So exciting that they couldn’t stand up too fast without snapping their dicks off at the root. In two years, there’d been successes, but not enough of them. There’d been too many mystifying failures.

And now it’d gone sour and Ted had been waiting for this call for most of a year—a hint from a friend, a former compatriot, from someone in the organization who’d been told to carefully, quietly, gently warn Ted Prinzi that bad news was coming fast and that he’d be wise to prepare for it. Nothing official, of course. Just a nod in the direction of calamity, which was the way things were done in the back channels of the company he’d spent most of his life working for.