On the fourth day of the new patrol schedule, Connelly’s 1st (now Garcia’s Horse Rifles) and 2nd companies were pulled forward to the bridge, his 3rd moved across the ford and up to the base of Mutter’s Ridge where the artillery position had been, while his 4th—which had seen the most action recently—fell back all the way to just east of the airfield, now a good thirty or forty miles to the rear of the new front lines.
And the pilots flew. They flew constantly. Once Connelly’s 4th moved in, they burned lights on the field without fear of being spotted because there was nothing that could approach their position under cover of darkness without being spotted itself, nothing that could come in range of them without being utterly destroyed.
Carter looked at the maps. He knew that the Akaveen Something-or-Others were solidly in control of nearly eighty miles of river now, including the bridge and the ford. They had troops covering the forests on the far side all the way up to Mutter’s Ridge, cavalry patrolling the two cut roads that ran through the area, and their forces were in sight of Riverbend to the north and just a day’s hard march from Southbend to the south. Those two fortified towns were the anchors of the other side’s presence in the area, and if they fell, or were taken, the river would open back up again for three hundred miles. The fight would then move back up to the high ground east of the river again, back onto Sispetain. From the moors, it would be on to the plains beyond, then the mountains beyond that, the cities that crouched at their feet, the far coast, which none of them had seen except briefly when they’d arrived from orbit.
Conversations of tactics obsessed the pilots now. Miniature Trenchards and Hoeppners, they crouched in the dirt and drew pictures with sticks, pounded their fists on tables, jiggling the saltshakers and glasses of whiskey they used to denote fallback positions and axes of advance. They would move here, of course, then set up a secondary field there. They imagined turning Immelmans over the fortified walls of Riverbend, the shriek of twenty-five-pound bombs being dropped from a height. Everything looked simple to them from here on out: They had only to take the towns, take the moors, take the high plains, jump over the mountains, and then fall on the coastal cities. Two years, they’d been wasting their time out here in the back of beyond. The coast was where the action was, where this thing would be decided. It was like they’d spent all their days bombing and machine-gunning a bunch of farmers, furry hillbillies with pointed sticks and poor personal hygiene, while the lights of an alien Manhattan burned, just out of sight, over the distant horizon.
So fuck the NRI. Fuck the off-worlders sticking their noses in at this late date. Fuck everyone but, most important, fuck the Lassateirra and the Akaveen and all the indigs, whatever they called themselves. The pilots were going to take this goddamn planet if they had to bomb every inch of it into submission. And it was all starting now. It was all going well now.
Except for one thing, which was the nagging refusal of the other side to show up to the fight. The pilots—some of them—were beginning to take this whole God thing to heart, Carter thought. Because, to look at the situation another way, Riverbend and Southbend were the two opposing jaws of the vise that the entire friendly indig army had just charged headlong into, and the next time any of them saw the glittering cities of the east and that coastline would be from orbit again, in chains, in the brig of the Colonial Marine transport shipping them all off to prison.
That was what Carter thought. It was a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty kind of thing and, for the most part, he kept his speculation to himself. The important thing was, for several days, nobody died and all of their planes came home whole.
Five days passed. Six. Things were growing frantic. The no-contact missions, the no-fire policy—it was eating at everyone. On top of this, there was Ted’s sudden, desperate need to keep every square inch of ground under constant surveillance. In daylight, it was all big talk and victory and men shooting each other vicious smiles as they made Vs with their fingers. But in the dark, the pilots granted mystical powers to the enemy indigs. They could vanish and appear at will. They could move faster than Superman. They had networks of tunnels under the ground through which they traveled like moles. In the morning, the men mocked them the same as they always had, but when the sun went down and the moons rose, it was different, malicious, spooky. Sometimes they spoke of the enemy in tones of reverence or respect for the amount of punishment they’d endured from their heretofore untouchable tormentors. Sometimes it was plain fear. Sometimes it was more. “The wogs,” Carter’d heard David Rice say one night, his voice full of awe after returning from another night flight where nothing had been seen and nothing had been killed. “They’ve gone imaginary. The wogs understand it all.”