“Got one!”
The call-in from Jack Hawker on the all-hands channel interrupted Davey’s story.
“Two squadron flight, I have a target.”
“The hell you do,” said Carter. “Illuminate and hold for confirm.”
Carter strained against the belts, trying to look everywhere at once because, really, he hadn’t been keeping close track of where his planes were. He hung an arm out over the cockpit rail and banged a gloved hand on the biplane’s skin in annoyance.
After a few seconds he saw the bright point of white light from a hand-fired magnesium signal flare and knew where Jack was, so he tuned his radio to the flight address channel and called everyone in.
“Two squadron, rally on that flare.”
Come to find, Jack really had spotted something: an armed indig supply column moving in the shade, foot-slogging along the edge of a stand of fat, bushy trees way off in the middle of Indian country. Carter dutifully called it in. At altitude, it was impossible to tell whose indigs they were. Could’ve been friendly, supplies coming in for Connelly or Durba, scouts, outriders, anything. Could’ve been decidedly unfriendly, too. They all looked the same, even up close, but there were maps, supposedly. Schedules. The controllers sometimes knew right from left.
The call came in from comms: “No friendlies reported. Guns are free.”
Carter addressed the squadron: “Tallyho, motherfuckers. Get some.”
And they did, swarming around the area and then dropping like stones from the sky on short strafing runs, hitting the line from both ends with machine guns like museum-grade antiques so the monkeys wouldn’t know which way to run, making them dance.
When the indigs on the ground finally got their shit together, they abandoned their carts and their packs and whatever else they’d been hauling and hustled back into the trees, so Carter ordered those pilots so equipped to switch to cannons. They shredded the trees for a while—splitting the stumpy trunks like balsa and blowing the ever-loving shit out of the flora. And when that had less of an effect than he’d hoped, he ordered the squadron to switch to incendiary ammunition in hopes of lighting the stand of trees on fire and smoking the little fuckers out into the open.
The planes flew around for a time crazily, like gnats disturbed in the fading sun, while the pilots strained to pop the covers on their guns, unbreech their belts of standard AP, dig out the red-tip ammo from boxes secured by shock cords and stashed under or behind seats, then reload with control sticks pinned between their knees and their wings waggling like a bunch of spastics.
Somewhere to their west, three squadron was chasing heffalumps—the native equivalent of a water buffalo, but about the size of an elephant and with glossy black skin like oil floating on water. It would sometimes take an entire belt of ammo to bring one down, screaming and kicking up the earth. And even in the cold they rotted and stank. First squadron had taken up a blocking position near the water, hoping for stragglers panicked by all the fire and flying, but they were unlucky and went home early, blue-balled and angrier and more bored than they’d been before climbing into their planes.
Down on the ground, the indigs had come to the edge of the trees again to see what was happening. They’d formed a line, and when the planes started to dive again, they loosed flights of arrows and stones.
Slings and arrows, Carter thought. Actual slings and fucking arrows… It never ceased to amaze him how persistent the dumb monkeys could be. How stupidly brave and tenacious like the clap.
In any event, firing on the planes made them bad indigs (no matter what they’d been before Carter’s squadron had opened up on them, they were bad now), so in recognition of their foolhardy monkey courage and dedication to this dumb game of war, two squadron dove and dove and killed every single one of them.
When it got too dark to play, the pilots came home and retired themselves to the field house or mess where, by lantern light, they commenced (or continued) drinking, watched movies that they’d all seen a hundred times, played cards. The camp was under radiation blackout—part of the terms of operating in this place—so there were no soft calls home to sweethearts with weeping, declarations of love, or apology for terrors committed, witnessed, or cheered; no mail, no news, no stealing of entertainment from the distant ether. Iaxo was a war without cliché, it sometimes seemed to them, and it annoyed everyone to no end.
For a time, Captain Carter chose to linger among the boys, playing a few hands of poker in the mess with cards gone soft from passing through so many fingers. At one point, he saw Vic and Willy McElroy come in, laughing over some private joke. Vic was the mission’s chief mechanic on Iaxo. Willy was one of the ground crew who did double duty on the lathe and stamping press when he wasn’t walking planes around.