A Private Little War(71)

The kid, on the other hand, was almost smiling. There was a look of sublime peace on his face, a holstered pistol under his arm and, in the background, the twisted metal of a crashed aircraft, towering flames licking at a smoke-black sky, and the silhouettes of Colonial Marines in their distinctive, bulky power armor charging toward him.

At the bottom of the picture, NRI ran the simple caption: IF NOT US, THEN WHO?

And if you looked closely, you could see the kid’s name stitched over the pocket of his black, NRI-issue jumpsuit: Carter, Kevin H.

It was Native Rights Intersystem that’d taught Carter how to fly.





In his bed, in his tent on Iaxo, Carter thought back to that day, that moment, that picture. He knew that he hadn’t had that look on his face because he was happy. He’d been shot in the neck while piloting the rescue helicopter crashed and burning in the background. He was dying. And those marines certainly weren’t headed his way to help. They were coming to arrest him. To drag him to his feet, stomp the little frog-thing he’d been holding beneath their heavy boots, popping its head like a grape; to dig their fingers cruelly into the wound in his neck until he screamed and cried for them to stop; then to beat him into unconsciousness—which, if he recalled correctly, hadn’t taken much.

Carter spent eleven years in a military prison after that, and all of NRI’s politicians and lawyers and rich members and documentary filmmakers and idealistic young followers and sympathetic supporters and soldiers and believers and faithful didn’t do a goddamn thing to get him out. He was beaten regularly in prison. Left to rot in solitary confinement, on a diet of water and thin protein gruel all full of spit and piss and worse. He was raped. Humiliated. Passed around. Starved. He was left for dead by guards more times than he could count, by men who wanted him to die because he didn’t belong. Because he was a race traitor, a tree hugger, an alien lover. Because he was an aberration, an enemy combatant imprisoned among those against whom he’d fought. For eleven years he was kept mostly in solitary because, if left to the appetites of the general population for more than five minutes, no one would’ve ever found enough pieces of him to identify his body.

To NRI, he’d served his purpose, and was forgotten but for a once-a-year care package with some cigarettes, candy, toiletries, and a form letter from the board of directors thanking him for his brave sacrifice and saying how concerned they were for his health and well-being. It was the same goddamn letter every year. That Carter remembered very clearly. None of them could even be bothered to sign it themselves. He checked every year before using the letter as toilet paper, or to smear the blood of another beating from his face.

One year they’d even sent him a T-shirt with that picture screened onto the front and the NRI logo on the back, telling him he should wear it often, “to show his continuing dedication to the cause of native rights.”

His name had been blacked out of the picture. He’d assumed it was so that no one who saw it ever asked, Hey, whatever happened to Kevin Carter?

No one ever did.





ALL OF THE INDIGS WERE EXPELLED FROM CAMP AT GUNPOINT the afternoon after the meeting with Fast Eddie. They were walked out en masse, a dozen Flyboys motivating them with hard looks, harsh language, and fingers on triggers; moving them past some invisible boundary of influence and ownership where their land ended and indig land began again, then leaving them there.

For a time, the indigs all just milled around, looking bewildered while a few of the pilots and mechanics lingered to call them wogs and monkeys and, occasionally, throw clods of dirt at them. There were more than a hundred indigs: sentries and postriders and laborers and cleaners and camp followers of all descriptions. And they were no doubt confused by this sudden and drastic turn in their fortunes. One minute, they’d been mixing with the Big Gods—doing their laundry, carrying their messages, burning their shit, and watching them while they slept. And the next, they were turned out. Cast down. Eighty-sixed from whatever weak Eden their belief system had led them to believe the pilots, the company, and their squalid little camp represented.

And they were all still standing there an hour later when Fast Eddie, looking neither left or right, stalked out to talk things over with them. Eddie didn’t speak a lot of indig, but he could say a little. More than anyone else in camp. For their part, the indigs mostly stared—standing or squatting right where they’d been left, looking at Eddie or back mutely toward the airstrips and tents and just waiting for something else to happen. Eddie brought Ted with him and Ted was in full Godly kit—black leather and shiny buckles, the whole nine yards. His job was to just stand there and look indestructible, which, conveniently, was one of the things Ted was good at.