He’d been flying low: twenty, maybe thirty feet off the deck up on the high moors, and Carter knew this because they’d all been doing the same thing, playing Great White Hunter, just sporting around. This was about a month after the big battles on Sispetain, but they’d caught a cavalry troop out in the open on the flatlands and were running the horsemen down. Sidearms only. Those were the rules. They’d been keeping score. And Danny’d been playing, too, though rather halfheartedly. Killing—especially the pointless, up close and personal kind like they were doing that day—had made him uncomfortable sometimes. Not something he talked about, just something everyone knew. And even still, there was nothing too strange in that. In their better moments, nearly all of the pilots would claim that the killing was appalling, exasperating, a drag and a taint on their otherwise pristine moral characters. And then, mostly, they would laugh. Carter the hardest, the longest.
Danny, though, mostly meant it. Some of the others did, too. Occasionally. And while one might wonder why, then, had Danny or any of them become fighter pilots—mercenary fighter pilots at that, where it often seemed as though the slaughter was more or less all they were about—this was an easy question to answer.
It was because Danny loved to fly, same as the rest. Simple as that. And he knew that there was no better test of himself than to do the thing he loved, the thing he was best at, under stress and all the most difficult conditions. No pilot flew as well or as often as a combat pilot. And no combat pilot had ever flown in such strange, challenging, or varied conditions as a Flyboy pilot did most days before breakfast. Danny had understood that. Danny loved to fly. And if, in the course of getting to do what he loved best of all, he had to put himself in situations where his better nature was dipped repeatedly in shit, then Danny had understood that, too. It was a popular fiction that, like their pomp and swagger, fighter pilots also possessed some strong core of combat élan—a streak of gentlemanly decency, a book of rules not held to by the dogfaces, doughboys, and mudfoot grunts of the other military professions. Danny knew better. He was not deluded. He’d been with the company long enough to have learned that if there was any such thing as gentlemanly soldiers, Flyboy had a policy against hiring them, and that all men who voluntarily made their living by the gun were, by trade, dirty fuckers and destroyers of lovely things.
But at any rate, Danny had gone down, victim of that million-to-one shot by the luckiest indig on Iaxo. The other pilots had immediately broken off their game to go and get him, figuring he had to have been just fine because even a brain-damaged chimp could’ve brought a ship in for a glide landing from thirty feet up. No one had even been worried about him, and Carter recalled being on the radio making jokes about how, if anyone was going to be brought down that way, well then of course it would be Danny fucking Diaz.
And the truth was, Danny had landed it and he had survived, though later, the pilots would all kind of wish he hadn’t.
They found the plane but no Danny. All of them had put down in the field where he’d been stunting to check things out (which had ultimately been the mistake that most of them felt made Danny’s dying their fault) and then had stood around like idiots with their fingers in their noses for a good five minutes. There’d been no blood, no body, no sign of Danny at all. Lots of hoofprints, though, which, for a couple of minutes, had seemed like nothing until, all of a sudden, it became very important indeed.
The indigs on their ridiculous horses had gotten to Danny quicker than the pilots could in their planes, and by the time the pilots had all gotten their engines cranked up again, their planes straightened out, a taxiway chosen, and themselves back into the air, those horses, those indigs, and Danny were all long gone.
They’d searched all the rest of the day and on into the night, but found nothing. Connelly had been up on the ragged skirts of the moors then (digging in the remains of his troops for what was to be the ultimately pointless defense of the cities on the river), and Durba had been camped with his riflemen not too far away. Since there were favors owed and kept, they and their men went out looking, too—on foot, raiding and killing and questioning prisoners. There’d been another fellow, a man named Workman, stretched far out on the northern flank and commanding a five-hundred-strong company of native cavalry. They were light horsemen, mostly indig but with a dozen-odd Earth-side officers, and they linked up with Durba to help. Some bored engineers from Cavalier did also, along with another gang of redneck sharpshooters who’d hired on as reavers and kept their own indig scouts chained up in pens like dogs. Together, they’d scoured the high ground for any sign of Danny. The entire war was put on hold while the humans looked for one of their own.