A Private Little War(77)

The remnants of Durba’s Rifles—those who’d survived the artillery barrage that first night—had re-formed under one of the surviving first IRC platoon leaders, a man named Garcia. They’d reinforced their numbers by absorbing a troop of native postriders and light cavalry, becoming mounted infantry. Garcia’s Horse Rifles, they called themselves, and they had abandoned their encampment to the south of the Flyboy airfield and moved in to hold the ford for Connelly. Rather than trenches, they built a stockade this time—a half-moon wall of stout timber with firing positions for their guns and a paddock for their horses. To replace their lost equipment, Fast Eddie okayed a loan of two FI-60 field radios and, on the sly, Ted gave Tony Fong a rebuilt microwave transmitter so Garcia could keep in touch with him at the airfield and be Ted’s eyes on the front. The transmitter was the backup to the company’s primary microwave transmitter, which Ted clung to like a life preserver.

Tony had survived Durba’s worst night only because his radio post had been a ways back from the front line, but he had still managed to catch a piece of hot shrapnel in the ass running away. Tony told them that Garcia himself was simply the luckiest son of a bitch on Iaxo. He’d been right in the middle of the shelling and had somehow walked away without a scratch.

When Ted had tried to ask Tony if there were any plans for Connelly and his surviving humans to leave Iaxo, Tony had laughed.

“Where would we go?” he asked.

“All the other companies, they’re pulling out. I’ve talked to some—”

Tony’s eyes grew hard. “Quitters and cowards,” he said. “We have a job to do.”

“Has Eastbourne called in a dust-off for you?”

Tony spit in the dirt. “Quitters and cowards,” he repeated, thanked Ted for the loaner, and promised that he’d be in touch.





To the north, the Akaveen indigs pushed their lines until they were in sight of Lassateirra-held Riverbend, then called a halt—massing troops in a huge encampment on the friendly side of the river and spotting smaller, provisional units under off-world command out ten miles on the other side to cut off roads and any quick reinforcement from the south. Trouble was, there just weren’t that many human officers left. Fewer every day. So the blockade of Riverbend became the worst siege in the history of sieges, the lines full of holes and gaps that a tank division could’ve rolled through.

But organization was not the natives’ strong suit. The Akaveen militia spent their days shouting up at the walls of Riverbend while the regular army marched back and forth on their side of the river, shaking their shields and spears and making occasional one-man charges on horseback—riding their mounts into the water, splashing through the low current, and rearing the beasts up to wave their too-many feet at the city walls. Every time one of the company’s planes flew overhead, the Akaveen went nuts, whooping and cheering and waving their weapons in the air.

The prevailing wisdom in the field house was that the Akaveen must’ve thought Flyboy had done this—driving back their age-old enemies or whatever, and sending them running for the hills and the safety of their walled cities. Whether or not this was true was debatable, though not, actually, debated, save in private. The indig commanders and elders and officers dealt only with Fast Eddie because, besides Billy Stitches (who spoke a little), Eddie was the only one who spoke any indig at all. And since the pilots still believed that Fast Eddie answered to the company, which in turn depended on him (and Ted) to make sure the fight was going well and all their investments would someday pay off, no one thought Eddie was going to try very hard to convince the wogs that the pilots weren’t, in fact, the heroes they thought they were.

Thus, any display by the Akaveen indigs became cheering and adulation. Any sounds at all became utterances of love and faith and thanks and, as with the supplies, the pilots grew fat with that as well—bloated and waddling with adoration.

And they sucked it up as though starving, hoping silently that this blind presumption was right and that it would sustain them even as the Lassateirra haunted their dreams, vanished in daylight, and their own camp indigs were stealing away in the middle of the night and lighting out for badland.

Still, they told themselves that they were winners. Terrifying and impervious as stone. They told themselves that they were loved as only liberators could be loved, a boon to friends and death to their enemies. They roared low over the lines and made the indigs jump. In the mess, they circled around Morris Ross’s coffin and used it as a table for cards and drinks and breakfast. It was just a box. What was inside no longer mattered.