Portions of each man’s pay were delivered. A small percentage, and only in company scrip, but that was fine. It wasn’t like there was anything to buy with it, but it was enough to make the card games more interesting for a time.
Promotion reports, wage adjustments, a company stock report, and mission summary were delivered as well, in a sealed bag keyed to Ted Prinzi’s greasy fingerprints. Copies were already tacked to the walls in the field house. Not everything, but the important stuff. Carter had received a 1.72 percent pay raise. Billy Stitches was given the rank of flight lieutenant. Some of the reports were old but, to them on Iaxo, everything coming from the real world arrived old. Time and travel. Distance. Carelessness. It didn’t matter. News that was new to them was new news, and they devoured it like it wasn’t due to happen till tomorrow. Flyboy Inc. stock was doing well and, through their negotiators, the company had haggled up its stake on Iaxo to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred million acres in exchange for services. They owned (or would own, eventually) a sizable fraction of the total continental land mass, one entire ocean, and someday—once the place was civilized—the company could then sell that off to developers, mining conglomerates, real estate speculators, and land rapists of every stripe. Put in a casino, some strip mines, chain restaurants, a whorehouse, level the mountains, take out all the trees, drain the rivers. Show the indigs what modernity really meant. At that point, each of the mercenaries (mercenary pilots, mercenary mechanics, mercenary cooks and computer operators and lawyers) would get a piece of the profits, and the indigs on both sides, if there were any left at that point, would get screwed all over again. It was the company man’s retirement plan, so to speak. And it wasn’t a bad deal at all, provided you weren’t an indig.
Carter and Fenn had themselves a huge and leisurely breakfast of local bread with grape jelly manufactured a hundred light-years away, powdered eggs (because every army everywhere has had to eat powdered eggs for breakfast since the day some jerk had first come up with the notion that such a thing as powdering an egg was a good idea), condensed-milk sandwiches with ground sugar, and slabs of the native equivalent of ham steak, which was, in actuality, nothing like a ham steak at all except that it came salty from the cure and cooked up the proper color. It came from an animal that looked something like a fat, legless rabbit, like a fluffy slug with big, floppy ears, and not the kind of thing anyone wanted to picture while eating. Tasty, though. And they were so dumb, they could be hunted with a hammer.
Most important, they had coffee. Gallons of coffee. They drank coffee until the entire tent smelled like the inside of a grinder and Carter felt like he would burst. Coffee sweetened with condensed milk and bourbon whiskey, and made sweeter still by the fact that they hadn’t had anything but instant in nearly two months and had even begun running short on that in the last week.
So they drank coffee. They sat with their boys from second and third squadrons who straggled in, bleary with sleep, dragged forward like zombies by the smell of fresh joe and frying slug-bunnies. Everyone helped themselves to the supplies. There were no arguments, only munificence and sweetness and men who, some days, acted as though they couldn’t stand the sight or sound or stink of one another, heaping one another’s plates with food and lighting one another’s cigarettes. They smoked, laughed, joked, swore, and kept wishing one another a merry motherfucking Christmas until the air inside the mess tent was warm, close, blue and foggy with smoke. It was, in Carter’s memory, the greatest Christmas party he’d ever been to until Fenn, reaching over behind the back of Jack Hawker, punched him in the shoulder and pointed out one of the plastic windows at the blurry form of Ted Prinzi stalking purposefully across the compound, headed in their direction.
Fenn grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him back and out of the general melee of conversation. “Here we go, Kev,” he said. “I’ve seen this coming for a year.” This struck Carter as strange because he had no idea what his friend could’ve seen coming or why he wouldn’t have told him about it if there’d been anything about anything he’d suspected for a whole year. They’d had entire conversations about their feet, the two of them; they’d spent hours talking about tent canvas or toast because they’d run out of meaningful things to say to each other so long ago. Suddenly Carter felt as though Fenn had been holding out on him and would’ve said something cross about it except that inside the overcrowded tent, a couple of people had seen Captain Fenn point. A few more saw them looking out the window and, before long—in the space of a breath or two or three—their fine and blasphemous Christmas party had gone from cheerfully effusive, piggish, and juvenile to sepulchural. Half the pilots were on their feet and seemingly ready to make a dash before Ted even stepped through the door—the idea being to put a bit of running distance between themselves and whatever ill tidings Ted eternally bore. Raoul, one of Vic’s mechanics, had Lori Bishop, a flight controller, on his lap, and they’d frozen together like that, a tableau of holiday merriment with her arms thrown around his neck and his hands creeping high along her hips. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3rd had his eyes squeezed shut and was muttering curses under his breath. Beside Carter, Jack Hawker, his squadron leader from the second and not at all a religious man, appeared to be praying.