A Private Little War(57)

“You’re not shouting.”

Ted turned off the lamp. He folded the thick stacks of paper and shoved them into his pockets.

“We were observers,” he said. “Subcontractors, unrelated to the company, who came here and decided to fight a war without the company’s knowledge. That’s how it’ll sound. In court, I mean. Later.”

“Not if we say different.”

Ted tilted his head. He took the two coffee cups by their handles, looping a finger through each of them, and looked at Eddie quizzically. “How would we do that?” he asked. “We’re all going to be dead.”





After that, Ted had gone out and gotten drunk. He’d burned the papers full of plans he’d taken from comms and then tried to burn the coffee cups, too. After that, Ted had found Eddie in his tent, sitting with his head down, forehead touching stacks of other papers piled into high palisades around him. Ted had walked right in. Things had been thrown. Things had been broken. Ted told Eddie to not say anything to the pilots. Not now. Maybe not ever.

“This isn’t over yet,” he’d said, and slapped Eddie hard on the shoulder. “Not yet.”

Then he’d staggered out into the dawn and, in doing so, couldn’t recall whether Eddie had been awake. He turned around. He pushed through the door again. Eddie was lying on the floor, curled up and weeping. Ted nodded once, sharply. That, he thought, was a man finally coming to terms with his situation.

The sun was coming up. Or would at some point. He’d gathered pilots. He’d broken planes out of the longhouse. With a powerful urge to do some damage, he’d organized a dawn patrol with the idea of, beginning now—beginning right fucking now—taking over the whole of the planet for himself. Becoming King for Life of this wet and backward shit hole and ruling Iaxo like a despot. Teach these monkeys a little something about civilization right quick, he thought. With his planes, his pilots, he could do it. Maybe talk to Connelly, too. See what he thought about being queen.

They flew the Vickers and Billy’s Bristol. Albert Wolfe from first squadron went up in Carter’s Roadrunner. Max, the armorer, had wisely stripped the planes and locked the armory as soon as he’d seen the bottles come out, and then had locked himself inside with the key for safekeeping. Having no guns or bombs, they’d headed out looking for trouble with their sidearms, the pockets of their flight rigs stuffed with beers just like in the good old days before Danny Diaz. They went up with empty glass and clay bottles and rocks, with bows and arrows stolen from their own indig guards at gunpoint, and a few Molotov cocktails made out of aviation fuel siphoned off the fresh tanks at the field.

They spotted an indig supply caravan well north of the river, moving contentedly through badland and in the lee of a low rise of hills. This, they went after with some vigor, banging away with pistols, throwing the rocks and bottles and then the bows and arrows, too, when it became clear that one couldn’t properly operate them while in flight and sitting. They started a good-sized grass fire with the Molotovs, but it sizzled out too quickly, and Ted even managed to piss over the side of the Bristol and onto the heads of the column from a hundred feet up. He’d stood with one foot wedged behind the gunner’s seat, the other braced in the empty Foster mount, and let go over the side while holding one-handed to the top wing. Lots of style, little effect. But when Carter heard about this stunt later, it would make him like Ted a little bit more.

The planes went up. The planes came down. It was an inauspicious start to the reign of King Ted. When he landed, he went to see Eddie. Eddie was in the comms tent again. Eddie was waging his own private war. A lawyer war. He had more papers—new papers, stacks of them. He had memos and orders and a pen in his teeth. When Eddie heard Ted come in, he’d looked up and the two men had stared into each other’s eyes and maybe saw a little too much madness there, a little too much sudden kinship. The reflections were jarring.

“Call them in,” Eddie had said. “We need to have a meeting.”

“Who?”

“The pilots. Officers and squadron leaders. We need to talk.”

“We don’t have anything to tell them,” Ted said.

“I do. You’re not the only one who has old friends back home.”

“Eddie, we can’t tell them…”

“Call the meeting, Ted. Gather them up. Dig them out. I don’t care. I have information now. We need to talk.”





IT WAS THE SOUND OF THE DAWN PATROL LANDING that woke Carter and triggered the instant onset of a brutal hangover that made him wish he’d never been born. A just punishment, perhaps, for the previous evening’s indiscretions. But still, it was mean.