The new orders were followed. No one died. Gone were the days of just flying around like idiots and banging away at random. Everything was methodical now. Businesslike. No hunting parties, no harassment, no provocation of any sort. On Ted’s orders, no fighters were to engage any targets under any circumstances. If they were shot at, if they saw anything, if they were even looked at funny by anything on the ground, they were to call in the location to the bombers (who circled constantly at ten thousand feet, specks of dust on the lens of the sky), then get the hell out of Dodge most fucking ricky-tick.
They worked the sky in three-man teams, split squadrons, with two fighters low and a bomber high, each sortie moving them fractionally deeper into Indian country; observing, reporting, everyone checking roads and forest paths, hilltops, and their favorite hidden landmarks for signs of movement, for gun emplacements, for fortification—looking everywhere for anything. Nothing was nothing anymore, just like Ted had said.
Until better intelligence was received as to the kind of materiel support being provided by NRI, these were the new rules. It was, in most everyone’s opinion (excluding Ted’s), a chickenshit way to fight a war, but necessary. At least for the moment, there were too many unknowns on the ground. Too many questions. And if there was any consolation at all beyond the fact that, for a few days, no one died, then it was only that the other side had found an even more chickenshit way to fight: by not showing up at all. The fighters were bait, flying low to the deck, trying to draw ground fire and give the bombers a target. Only most days, the bombers came home fully loaded. Most nights, the pilots ended up the same way.
It was a new kind of boredom. One with a knife-edge of real, bright danger wavering somewhere just out of sight. Not shattering like actual combat could be, but grinding, fraying—the kind of fear-spiked and blistered boredom that ate at you hour after hour, that obsessed you even when you weren’t in it. The danger was the danger of the unknown, and the boredom was the boredom of not knowing when the boredom might, quite abruptly, end. Every moment that Carter wasn’t in it, he felt like he was preparing for it or decompressing from it. He felt, oddly, as though he didn’t have the time for anything else but it. And he was not the only one. Suddenly everybody had lucky socks and wore them all the time. Every loud noise, every minute change in the weather became a harbinger of something. Every cold, sick feeling of directionless dread in the night was a premonition. Everyone became a prophet. It wasn’t unusual at all to see a man, in the dawn or at the dusk of the day, standing at the head of one of the airstrips and trying to smell out the positions of the enemy on the wind, his eyes closed and his hands hanging slack at his sides. And after two years in the field, everyone’s internal resources were already so depleted by distance and lack and hate and nearness to death that they cracked like eggshells under the least application of pressure.
Ted spent most of his days on the radio or furtively fighting with the FTL relay like he was touching something he wasn’t supposed to. This was when he wasn’t on the field or getting in everyone’s way down in the longhouse or chasing after Eddie.
Diane watched him when she wasn’t at her post. Or when she was at her post, but with nothing going on. She watched him hunch his whole body around the machinery—arms laid flat on the table, shoulders folded in, head down. From certain angles he appeared to be hugging it, and she could never figure out who he was talking to, only that some of the news was good and some of it was bad. She’d learned to tell the difference only by the angle of the back of his neck and the weary curve of his spine.
The pop and hiss of the radio on traditional frequencies became a kind of music to Ted; the low triple-tone hum of the microwave transmitter/receiver finding nothing but dead channels a droning intonation, the Om that began and ended his every conversation with the infinite. He could close his eyes and feel the waves stretching out over alien fields emptied of friends, of support. Early, there’d been a few contacts. He’d spent part of a morning talking with a group from Healthwatch I.S.—a group of doctors who’d come to the boonies to try and help the blighted monkeys and now found themselves stranded in the mountains with a hundred displaced native women and children watching as cities burned in the distance. He’d listened in on the orderly retreat of a band of off-world engineers and their native bodyguards—the calm and collected withdrawal of forces from a half-dozen positions being casually overrun by indig infantry with flamers and explosive breaching charges. The engineers were firing all their equipment as they pulled back, destroying their Rome plows and Caterpillar tractors and workshops with white phosphorous grenades or blocks of C4 strapped to acetylene tanks; denying the enemy valuable spoils. The last thing they did before loading up into the transports was open up on their own indigs with machine guns because they were trying to force their way aboard.