A Private Little War(6)

The rain held off. Ugly gray-black clouds massed in wet clots on the horizon but then hung there as if dithering about approaching any closer to the pilots’ obvious magnificence. To pass the time, they played indig baseball—a game that’d been invented by one of the men (no one remembered who) and involved more than the usual number of bats and balls, more than the usual amount of punching the opposing team.

The pilots played on one side. The other was made up of a dozen or so of the camp followers—big, hairy, slumping indigs who’d been pulled off whatever odd jobs they were doing and drafted into playing whether they wanted to or not. They cringed a lot, muffed bare-handed catches of the men’s line drives, looked wide-eyed and terrified every time one of the pilots went streaking out into the bush to tackle one of them. They clapped their hands and bowed whenever the pilots laughed at them for their ineptitude at a game they didn’t understand and were being forced to play by men they understood even less.

Being neighborly, the pilots would always help the indigs back to their feet, give them a couple of hard punches in the arm or chest that appeared (maybe) brotherly because the hitting was always attended by a flinty smile. Then there would be more clapping, more bowing, some amount of the indig language that none of the men understood but imagined to mean Good play! or Wasn’t that fun? even if it was far more likely that it meant something closer to Why are you doing this? or Please don’t hit me again.

At one point, Jack Hawker, who was pitching for both sides, laid a nice, fat, slow ball across the plate for George Stork, who hit it like it had said something nasty about his mother. The ball climbed into the smothering sky, zipping along as pretty as anything, and seemed destined for home-run distance.

But then it suddenly faltered as though it’d hit thick air, seemed to hang a moment, and fell short of the distant tree line. One of the indigs went scrambling for it, put a hand on it, and loped into the base path between second and third, meaning to tag Stork out. But Stork was already running and he didn’t slow—just lowered his shoulder and plowed straight into the monkey like a truck. Both of them went down in the pounded dirt. Both of them got up again and even from the sidelines, the company men could hear the indig shouting. They could see it waving its arms around. Stork waved his arms, too. The indig hissed at him and bared sharp teeth. Stork calmly reached down, drew his sidearm, and shot the indig through the face.

“Well, shit,” said Carter, who’d gone out to join Jack on the mound. “Guess that’s game then.”

“Trouble with your indig,” said Jack Hawker, Carter’s squadron leader from number two, in his languid, roughneck accent, “is that he don’t understand basic sportsmanship.”

“Trouble with the indigs,” countered Stork as he walked back toward home plate, brushing dirt and grass from his pants and smudging a bit of blood from his knuckles, “is that they don’t understand baseball.”





They went up in the late afternoon. The fog had burned off, the rain never materialized, and the men were bored, so they rolled their planes out of the longhouse again, splashed some fuel into them, and went out hunting. Sightseeing, they called it. Reconnaissance in force. Carter took two squadron out into badland, and they managed to maintain formation until they crossed the twisting snake of the river that was just called the River because there was no need to name it anything else. After that, each plane just sort of wandered off on its own, spinning and looping and buzzing the tops of the alien trees because there was nothing else to do.

On the radio, David Rice was telling a long and convoluted story about his last deployment as a naval aviator, on garrison duty, flying off one of the big colonial carriers.

“It was orbit work,” he was saying. “BMF Ashland, over Balantyne. You ever been on one of the big boats, you know it’s dull as fuck, right?”

Carter had done some carrier duty, though not as a naval. BMF, that stood for Big Motherfucker. Capital-plus. Command element for an entire battle group. A ship that’d been assembled in orbit and would never, ever know gravity.

“Right, Davey,” he said. “Dull as fuck. Roger that.”

“So we fly ten hours, down for twenty. And down for twenty, that’s rough, right? Nothing to do. Like liberty every day, but it gets dull.”

“As fuck,” said Carter.

“Right…”

Davey had a friend who was a bad garrison soldier. Always in trouble. Threatening MPs, getting in fights, whatever. Spent more time under restraint than in his fighter.

“So his big thing was making rain, right? He’d get into the hangar bay, up in the lift gantries, and he’d bring, like, five gallons of water with him. Drink the water while he was up there. Just drink and drink. And then he’d spend hours pissing down on the MP posts from, what? Three hundred feet up or whatever. But the thing is, with the drive thrust, corriolis, the weird gravity, he’d have to know how to aim it just right—standing up there on the cats with his dick in his hand and—”