Carter remembered the pounded mud spatters on the horses’ feet, black and thick like old blood, and thinking how he didn’t know what that part of a horse was called. Not in the language of Iaxo, but any language. The part above the hoof but not quite the leg. Its ankles, he guessed. On a plane, it would be the shortening linkage or the torque link assembly, but horses were not planes and, really, these were not horses. He didn’t have any other name for them, though, so found himself lost in the language and, soon enough, the problems dissolved into violence anyway until, at a certain point, after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth punch or kick he’d delivered to the prisoners, he’d had to stop. He was tired, yes. His hands ached and one of his toes felt wrong inside his boot. But more than that, he’d stopped to consider what kind of line they were crossing. It wasn’t an ethical line or a moral one he was considering. In this cold and damp and occasionally blazing but mostly just scourging alien environment, any sense of morality had already been corroded out of them. Carter understood that. He wasn’t a child.
It was something else. Another kind of line. Tactical, maybe. Certainly physical. Panting, standing bent with his hands on his knees, ceding his turn at the prisoners to someone else with fresher hands, it’d occurred to him that this was the first time he’d touched one of the indigs on purpose. The first time that he was hurting them up close. Personally. With his hands and his feet. It was the first time he’d been able to look into their heavy, wet eyes and say, “See this? This is me that’s doing this. And motherfucker, you are going to die today.”
He didn’t much like it, truth be told. It’d taken him a while to realize it, but when he did, the intimacy of it disturbed him on a level he’d been previously unaware he possessed. After a time, he’d walked away to stand in the circle of men and watch rather than participate.
That had felt better. Not clean, exactly. But better.
After that, the war had picked up again and continued on like normal. In the aftermath of Sispetain, the neighborhood was lighter on humans than it had been before. Many of the gangs and companies that’d fought there had been beaten right off-planet, had given up and gone home to cut their losses. Workman had stuck it out for a little while but vanished not long after. Connelly was reinforcing from among the native fighters. And among the pilots, each man now carried a single TCM-40 fragmentation grenade in his flight bag, just in case. For a while, they’d flown with them taped to their chests, called it “putting the Danny on.” But in time, that’d come to seem rather ridiculous. Uncomfortable, too. So now, they just carried them. Either way, no one ever wanted to end up like Danny had. He was shipped out in a steel coffin, sealed, the outside of it marked REMAINS UNVIEWABLE. Among all the many ways to get off-planet, it was roundly agreed that this was the worst. A terrible way to go home.
So Carter hadn’t been the first to take fire in combat like Vic had said. Danny Diaz was really the first, even though his memory had been banished, his name scrubbed from the history. No one liked thinking about Danny and no one talked about it, ever. There was nothing to be learned from death by dumb, bad luck.
On the day that Danny had come back to the Flyboy camp, Ted had shot the three prisoners in the head with his pistol, appearing out of nowhere with his sidearm drawn and walking up behind them—pop pop pop. He’d done it before any of the pilots could do worse, seen the light horse troop paid off for its efforts, and ordered his men up. All of them. On scouting patrol for twelve hours. Radio silence. Alone with their thoughts and hatred, they had nothing to do but let it all bleed away into the cold gray sky.
After, Vic had come up behind Carter while he was walking to the field house and taken his hand in hers like a girl. That was all it took. And, later still, lying with her, feeling confused but also rather proud of himself and wrapped up in grief as much as in her, Carter would ask, “Why me?”
He remembered Vic saying, in a completely matter-of-fact way, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Because you’re next.”
Vic had a thing for tragedy and death. Everyone knew that. Danny hadn’t been her first love to die, or even her second or her fifth. She had a strange sense for seeing the reaper coming at great distances, people said, and was more in love with that than she’d ever been with any pilot. So Vic had been wrong about her and Carter being friends, too, because Carter, at times, wanted Vic not to exist at all or, at the very least, to be as gone from his thoughts as Danny was.
Because you’re next. There were times when Carter felt like just another number. There were times when he felt as though he was being stalked by her—hunted, her steps just a little bit quicker than death’s. And he’d tried to forget her a hundred times, but it never took. All too often, when she wasn’t even around, he would find himself conjuring her in his head: the curve of her neck, the arch of her eyebrows, the sound of her heart pumping, her gasping breath, the tight skin on the small of her back and the close smell of her when they pulled a sheet up over their heads like two children hiding from monsters.