“They make their pass here, directly over the strike zone, and come up clean. Right, Porter?”
Porter’s head kept nodding.
“Porter?”
“Right.” He didn’t look up.
Carter was thinking about Fenn.
You were on the top of the list, Kev.
He wondered how much of that was because of the interest Vic had taken in him, how much of it he’d brought on himself, how much was the prescience of pilots for just knowing somehow who among them was going to go. It wasn’t a measure of skill. Not about like or dislike. Rather, it was a determination of hardness, of armor. Some pilots shone with it—an aura that clung to them like skin and spoke of invulnerability. Others didn’t. Others had chinks, bits of softness that were like psychic weakness.
Carter thought about Danny Diaz.
“Breaking here. Still in formation.”
It was still a crapshoot, though. Luck, good and bad. People’s internal numbers got skewed, odds tumbled. Luck was the only real divinity of the battlefield, and it broke to no amount of praying or sacrifice. This time, the pilots’ pool had been wrong. Carter wondered where Morris had been on the list and who was profiting from his demise.
“We’ve got planes high and low. Porter and Morris descending, making a second pass.”
Of the many, many things Carter hated about this place, its people, the situation as a whole, he thought sometimes that the thing that drove him most secretly crazy was how the stupid indigs wouldn’t fight back. Couldn’t fight back, really. Not against the company and its flying machines. Because while he supposed that they tried, it was rarely to any effect. Things might be different on the ground, but from the sky, fighting the indigs was like punching a baby. It was like shooting some dumb animal chained to a post. It was safe, sure, but there was little dignity in it.
And it wasn’t like Carter cared about honor or fairness—at least not that he would ever admit to out loud—but he’d hated the indigs for the fact that they just died without having the self-respect to make him feel good about it by putting up a fight.
He squirmed in his seat while Ted talked Morris Ross closer and closer to his little death. Contrary to his standing in the pilot’s pool and his comradely offer of betting heavy on his own dying, Carter didn’t want to die. He wasn’t a suicide case. He didn’t want the filthy little indigs to kill him or Danny or Morris or anyone else, either, but sometimes—occasionally, he would say—he did want them just to hit him back.
That was all. Even in the cloister of his own mind, Carter was careful to halt his imaginings right there. No one needed to die, but there was a dark and wet and awful part of him that wanted to be hurt—that hated the indigs for being stupid and backward and powerless, for just rolling over and dying in his gun sights for the past two years; that wanted them to fill the sky with tracers and blacken it with flak and shoot him all to hell and back.
He’d dreamed of it. Not often, but some. On those nights when, if asked, he would say he’d been dreaming of nothing more than the lead-weight pressure of six gravities of acceleration and the long burn for home, he actually dreamed of the indigs punching holes in the skin of his plane and the flesh of his body. On those nights he dreamed of them burning his eyes out the way they’d done to Danny or carving into him with bullets and shrapnel as he’d done to them so many times before and making him hurt the way he’d been hurting them for so long. He dreamed of waking, bloody and screaming, in a medical tent with pieces of himself left scattered on these alien fields and to thus be granted—finally—a pure fury. A clean and justified rage. A clarity of purpose and a singularity of intent that would give him a reason to kill and maim and hate without guilt, without doing it just because he’d been told to. He wanted to love himself and his machine and the job and his weapons. He wanted the unquestioning faith in rightness that Durba’d had before he died, raving, with a hole in his head and a spike of wood through the belly. He wanted Ted’s upright coldness, Billy’s joy, Fenn’s calm. He wanted an enemy, not a victim.
Only then, on that awful morning with Morris dead and Ted droning on and all his wishes coming true, Carter still wasn’t happy. He wasn’t sad either. He wasn’t grateful and didn’t hate any more or less than his usual amount. He wasn’t even angry. If he felt anything at all, sitting there in his uncomfortable chair, watching the Ted-and-Eddie show, it was only the slow relief of an unbelievable pressure of waiting. He caught himself whispering without moving his lips. “Now,” he said. “Maybe now,” over and over again while Ted’s triangles danced around, drawing closer and closer to the kill. Carter spoke as though blowing breath onto sparks, hoping for a flame, hoping to kindle that love he’d been looking for—its heat pale and tentative and delicate.