A Private Little War(36)

Second, a biplane was cheap. The necessary components for building, arming, and outfitting a replica Fokker D.VII or Sopwith Camel could be had for about the same price as one lightly used cruise missile. Wood, titanium, rubber, linen, machine parts—none of that was even illegal. It was cheap as sand. The pieces could be fabricated anywhere, then shipped and assembled like a toy model somewhere else by three monkeys with a torque wrench. The engine was generally the only piece that was difficult to come by since, in an age of orbital-velocity scramjets and LOx-burners, high-range valence motors, and FTL drives no bigger than the average skyscraper, it could be somewhat tricky finding someone with the proper archaic expertise and talking them into scratch-building a 400-horsepower petro-rotary. Tricky, but far from impossible. Some people had the strangest affection for antiques.





“Control, Roadrunner.”

Diane, exasperated: “Five minutes, Roadrunner.”





Third, prior to the arrival of Flyboy and their old-timey flying machines on Iaxo, air superiority could’ve been had by a child with a kite. The ramping up of technology was a function of technology itself: Least application of force was often the most effective application of force—a motto that Flyboy Inc. had both lived and profited by for a century. Fourth, it was fun. Most of the time it was fun. For the pilots, Iaxo had all the excitement of being in a real war with all the danger of a carnival midway.

Carter felt as though he’d been up for days and nights already. In reality, it’d only been an hour and a little, all told. Night flying tore him up, a certain knot of muscles in his back always bunched like a fist, waiting for the surprising crash and bang—flying blind into the side of a mountain. There was a joke: What’s the last thing that goes through a pilot’s mind in the instant of a crash? The tail of his plane.

His flight computer had twinkled briefly to life a minute ago before dying again with a terrible groaning sound. The cockpit was dark. He’d taped his pocket flashlight to the panel just so he could see his instruments and gauges and was struggling through lazy, slow circles now at ten thousand feet, wallowing like a drunken bumblebee. He thought to himself how none of the constellations here was right. There was no North Star or Big Dipper or Orion and his dog. He could forget sometimes how many things about Iaxo pissed him off, but never for very long. That was just one more.





“Diane?”

“Carter, just don’t.”





There was still another reason why Flyboy had chosen the technological apex of 1918 as its model for combat operations on Iaxo rather than, say, just wiping the natives off the face of their planet with thermobaric bombs and orbital kinetic weapons. As always, there was the Colonial Council.

As was generally the case with fun things, what the company was doing on Iaxo was completely illegal. It was wrong, morally and ethically, and completely against the law as dictated by the council, which stated that bringing advanced technologies to the savages (even advanced technologies that were centuries old by the reckoning of those bringing them) was a big no-no. Chewing gum and transistor radios would get a man tossed in the pokey for twenty years. Getting the poor boondock aliens hooked on Coca-Cola and setting up a fried-chicken franchise? That was worse. And once one strapped on a gun and started picking sides? They called that something like treason, and it would get a man shipped out fast for some fetid hole somewhere for a lifetime of hard labor if he was lucky. Executed if he was not.

But then, a man had to be caught first. A man (or a company) had to be found, prosecuted, proven guilty beyond doubt. And in the end, there were a lot of planets out there in the great, wide whatever and not so many people around who cared too much about what went on anywhere but on their own.

So the Colonial Council—underfunded, undermanned, universally disliked and overly fond of sticking its bureaucratic nose in other people’s business—was out there trying to keep watch over the million little flyspeck nothings in the sky; trying to make sure that companies like Flyboy, Cavalier, Eastbourne, and men like Carter, Ted, Durba, and Connelly didn’t go around botching up developing cultures with their ray guns, litter, and bad habits.

But as dim and bumbling and near-sighted as the council was generally assumed to be, though, it did have at its disposal the whole of the navy and fifty-six divisions of Colonial Marines who, for the most part, just sat around waiting for an excuse to kill things. That was no small threat. And so, everyone simply tried to avoid the attention of the council and its muscle because they were the law and the law was best avoided whenever possible.