A Private Little War(72)

Carter didn’t know what Eddie said to them, but after a few minutes, the indigs all came filing back in and went right back to their business with no trouble and without a word.

Having been unable to find sleep no matter how hard he looked, Carter’d been watching most of the excitement from the tent line—sitting wrapped in his warm coat, campaign blanket across his lap, in a chair he’d dragged over for a better view of the proceedings. He had a jug of coffee with him, spiked with vitamin supplement, and a tin cup, some cigarettes. It was better than television, except that he couldn’t really hear anything. But he sat and made hard jokes along with Tommy Hill (“You look like a grandma,” Tommy had said. “All you need are glasses and forty cats.”) and Jack, who was looking significantly less spooked now, and had been one of the gang who’d marched the indigs out in the first place. Oddly, he couldn’t seem to remember quite why it’d been a good idea. When Carter asked him about it, he claimed it was something about spies, about traitors. “Didn’t much matter once the guns came out,” he said. “It was something to do.”

Seeing the indigs come back, Carter wondered how much doubt had been sown in the hearts of their ostensible comrades by that little misunderstanding. He wondered what happened to a people when their strong, alien gods and saviors were suddenly proven fallible, mortal—proven merely human, for lack of a better word. What happened when that façade of all-powerful omnipotence abruptly began to show cracks?

Nothing, to look at them. And Carter thought how maybe that wasn’t so surprising. His mother was a born-again Christian, having drifted late in life into a sect of severe Pentecostal believers. She had, for a time, tried to instill a similar whiplash faith in the magic of Jesus and the Resurrection in Carter and his brothers. It never really took, but he remembered the way she’d believed so unquestioningly in everything. God didn’t make mistakes. And even when it was apparent that God had made a mistake, God still didn’t make mistakes. It was all part of a divine plan, the details of which mere mortals were not privy to. It was all intended.

Convictions like that could make things very easy for the faithful, and Carter thought that maybe it was the same thing here. So long as they killed for the indigs, beat down their age-old enemies from on high, and spilled blood for their cause, maybe they didn’t care much what else happened.

So when it was done—once all the indigs had stepped back across that invisible boundary and back into camp—Carter had continued watching, curious about what would come next until nothing did and, eventually, he grew bored.

Carter thought that maybe the indigs felt they’d done something to anger the flying gods and that it was only a god’s infinite mercy for the chosen that allowed them back into their good graces. Believers, he knew, were big on that self-flagellation thing. The children of the Big Gods always seemed to believe that wrongness dwelt exclusively in them. That the objects of their devotion were made of stainless steel. At the time, he figured that must’ve just been the nature of the thing. He figured it was over.





When they had their service for Morris Ross that night after dinner, many of the indigs crowded around to watch. They stood silently, just outside the ring of light cast by the hooded lamps the humans used to illuminate their mourning, and stared with big, damp eyes as the pilots, in turn, stood with their heads down, in full battle dress, and listened to Ted eulogize Morris. His coffin was already closed and sealed. When Ted was finished, each of the pilots approached and signed his name to the outside of the box with a laser etcher, and that was that. They’d done the same for Danny once. With Morris, it became a tradition.

It took all of a half hour, the ceremony. But as it ended and they all turned to walk away, Carter noticed that the indigs had vanished. Not just from the area, but from the whole camp. It was very quiet and very dark and suddenly spooky in the way that a house, abandoned in haste, can sometimes be—the setting grown suddenly cold in the absence of living things.





That night, they all heard explosions in the distance—artillery, almost definitely.

Carter and Fenn lay awake in their racks, smoking and listening to the faraway cacophony. For a long time, neither of them said a word.

It was only a few shells, and they never figured out who was shooting at whom. But that didn’t matter. The fact that someone had been shooting at all was enough. And when it was done, someone had come and stood a moment just outside the flap of their tent. Didn’t knock. Didn’t come in. Just stood there for a few long seconds, then was gone. It was too dark to see who it was, but Carter knew.