“No,” Fenn continued. “Our dashing commander has been shacked up with Fast Eddie in the comms tent since late last night and hasn’t poked his head out once. Either they’re in love or there’s trouble, and neither sounds very appetizing, so let’s not think about it until after breakfast and possibly lunch, too, okay?”
“Deal,” Carter said. He sat up, scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands. He was badly in need of both a bath and a shave. It had been too long. “And you were kidding, right? What you said before? It’s not really Christmas.”
“No lie, G.I.” Fenn jacked the slide, dry-fired his piece, smiled beatifically at the sharp snap of the hammer falling. He pushed a loaded clip into the magazine, set the safety, and put it aside. He looked across at Carter. “It’s December twenty-fifth back home. Merry merry.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. Wow, indeed.”
“Then I need coffee to go with my Christmas cigarettes. Or something. Is there any coffee left anywhere?”
Fenn’s smile brightened even further. “Oh, we can do better than coffee, my boy.” He stood and offered Carter a hand, dragging him roughly to his feet and then putting a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Unscheduled resupply came in last night while you were off saving the world. I saved out your share while you were up, hid it down in the mess away from the grabby hands of our mates.”
And to Carter, this came off as a stunning kindness in this place that generally felt short of everything nice and long on anything mean. Standing, he wondered for one dumb second whether or not he would’ve thought to do the same for Fenn, but needed only that second to know that he probably wouldn’t have even thought of it. Stammering, he blurted out an awkward thank-you to cover his embarrassment and flushing shame.
Fenn just grinned, virtuous and cool. “Merry Christmas, Kevin.”
Toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap that smelled like lilacs and dust. Dried fruit and hard candy, squares of weatherized chocolate, manufactured cigarettes beneath their tinned meat labels, scotch and Kentucky sipping whiskey shipped in black plastic bottles with VITAMIN SUPPLEMENT stenciled on their sides, and vodka by the five-gallon jerry. There were telestatic copies of pages from pornographic magazines wadded up and used as packing material in crates of medical supplies, cans of condensed milk, batteries, cereal, freeze-dried beef from real cows. Little indulgences like bottles of olives and cherries, jars of peanut butter, rock sugar, breakfast cereal, high-density data chips packed with music and magazines, news reports, movies, and ball games; letters from family for those who had them and personalized cards from the company for those, like Carter, who didn’t anymore. Pens, lighters, and vacuum-packed bricks of coffee were tucked in among smuggled cases of ammunition, spare parts, and tools.
There were big things, too. A digital projector (which arrived broken beyond repair), a new generator, tires (the planes ran through tires like crazy, banging them out of shape from always landing on stubble fields, dirt, or grass), twenty thousand gallons of high-grade aviation fuel, six fresh engines for the planes (four 250-horse Royce Eagles and two hybridized Hispano-Suiza/Daimler air-cooled thirteen-cylinder behemoths that one of the company’s engineers had designed specifically for the improved Sopwith Camels). There were structural parts, bolts of fire-retardant cloth, lots of bomb parts that came packed (alongside cases and cases of beer) inside sealed caskets stamped with biohazard trifoils and those words, REMAINS UNVIEWABLE, just like on the one they’d sent Danny Diaz home in. The irony of bombs in a casket, they’d all appreciated. The fact of receiving a shipment of caskets at all, none of them did.
For the medical area there was an ice machine that Carter thought was almost a joke because of the cold, but then not, because it meant that the pilots could now drink their whiskey on the rocks like gentlemen ought to, and that was like luxury beyond imagining. When he mentioned it to Fenn, his friend just smiled. “I knew you’d get the joke of it.”
All told, it’d been a sixty-ton orbital drop, wholly unexpected by any of those who claimed secret knowledge of company resupply schedules. A Christmas miracle, then, whose origin or cause no one among the pilots wanted to examine too closely lest the mistrust in their black and suspicious little hearts would somehow make it all disappear. While Carter had been asleep and dreaming, or walking maybe, or up and in flight, it’d been delivered by a speedy blockade runner who’d done his job so well that he’d nearly flattened the machine shop with one of the armored containers. No one had even needed to leave camp to retrieve the riches. Santa Claus, it appeared, had gone high-tech now that all the good little children had become so greedy and scattered among the stars.