He’d buried his traitorous thoughts and emotions (and other, arguably more salubrious organs) in some of the other company girls whenever opportunity and communal desire presented itself, but he always came away feeling even worse. He felt that Vic was bad for him, physically and spiritually. That she would get him killed. And he kept telling himself that, even if he would then be assailed with thoughts of the sweetness of her sweat, the tightness of her cunt, the heat of her breath in his ear when she whispered his name, and have to get up in the air and make something die just to be rid of her for a moment.
Absently, he fooled with the three crossbow bolts she’d brought him, fingertips running down their smooth shafts, teasing the stiff plastic fletching of their flights. Finally, he tucked them carefully into his flight bag, stood, and made for the tent line. He was exhausted.
WHEN CARTER WOKE UP, IT WAS STILL MORNING—icy, damp, and bitter. The cold season on Iaxo wasn’t bad because it was dry. Same with the hot season. It was the time between those two brief respites that got to him; when the chill and the wet seemed to sink right through the skin and gnaw at the bone. On Iaxo (which had a parabolic, 440-day rotation), it was like having an entire year of November broken only by a couple weeks of August on one end and a couple weeks of February at the other. In time, it came to bother everyone.
Like Lefty Berthold’s list of Ted-isms, Carter, too, had tried to make a list once. About a year back, he’d tried to make a list of everything he hated about Iaxo. Really dig in and lay it out there. Permanently. On paper. Everything he hated, all in one place.
He hated the land, and that, he’d felt, was a good place to start. He hated the trees that were so like other trees he had known, only different, and he hated the other ones—the blue ones—that were totally and completely alien. He hated the mud when there was mud and the ice when there was ice, and he hated the way the air tasted almost all the time. He hated the animals. Most of them. Although there weren’t that many of them around to hate. The disgusting, scabby flying rats that skulked around the edges of the tent line at night eating garbage. The heffalumps they hunted from their planes when there was nothing better to kill. The horse-things with their shovel-blade heads and too many feet. He hated the indigs, though he couldn’t say precisely why. There were a million small reasons, though all variations on a theme. The vastness had stymied him.
He’d given up right about there. A list like that would’ve been just too massive—long like the Bible was long.
Sometime later he’d adjusted his tactics, deciding on making a list only of the things he liked—all the good things that Iaxo had produced. This was easier, but he’d given up on it as well because it was too short. He’d been able to come up with only two things.
One, this war, which had given him gainful employment and an excuse to fly. It was a good war, with all the necessaries of one. It was far away and exotic. There were all manner of interesting people around, either doing bad things for good money or trying to do good things for none at all. The planet itself, through a history that he didn’t comprehend, had thoughtfully provided two groups of natives angry enough to kill for reasons he’d never understood and hardly cared to investigate, and came endowed with resources enough (mostly in the form of land and promised rights thereto) to pay the company that’d sent him for his services as a combat pilot. There was little chance of him, personally, being killed, which he appreciated. And the natives treated everyone from the company like something close to gods, with a god’s perfidy and murderous flair, which was also nice. Finally, no one besides the principals involved seemed to care a rat’s dong for what happened here. It was a playground game of war, serious only to those who died of it. And in Carter’s experience, though situations like this were not all that hard to come by, it was still nice to have a good war around when you needed one.
The second thing on his list had been Cat. Not exactly a pet. More like a mascot. Carter had fed the thing once, not long after their arrival in this place, and forever after, it’d just been around more often than it was not. When Carter’d left his tent to head for the flight line last night, Cat had been peacefully laid out asleep and wheezing in a pile of ratty blankets by the tent door. Now he could hear it rooting around somewhere beneath his bunk. And he’d often said that when the time finally came to leave this place completely, Cat would be the only thing he took with him for the big ride other than the lice.
Cat looked something like a bug-eyed Burmese kitten swallowed to the neck by a snake. It (since the issue of he or she had never been determined as neither Carter or Fenn had ever known where to look) had a mashed-in face, pointed ears, a head the size of a fist followed southerly by a long, snaking body covered in furred scales that felt like the green on a pool table, eight stubby legs, and a docked stub of a tail like a Doberman’s. Cat was brown some of the time, or mottled white, or a deep and golden tan depending on the season, but furious always. It spit when angry. Like a cobra, it had a hood on its neck that would stand up when Cat was annoyed and turn a bright, angry scarlet when it was about to kill something. The flying rats that Carter hated, for example. Or Fenn.