He would get home, strip out of his ready blues, shower. He would pick a restaurant at which to eat, because there were forty or fifty different messes on the carrier and each was different, nicknamed something like Lucky Louie’s or the Eggery, good at some stuff, bad at the rest. Just like real restaurants. He’d hop a train. He’d eat. Maybe he’d see some Flyboys out, maybe not. He’d decide: Did he want drinks? A movie? Company? A quiet cycle at home? He could go to the gym, the simulators. If he wanted some action, he knew where to find it. Sometimes he’d find a girl. Sometimes not. There were 12,344 people living and working aboard the TEF Alabama. Navals, contractors, families, officers and enlisted men and women. A man could get swallowed up in that, easy. When he was tired, he’d go to sleep, wake up, make his call time, fly, do it all again. One sortie per thirty hours, no more than five sorties in any seven-day stretch. It was a job. Like working in an office, except that Carter’s office could fly and kill you from a thousand miles away.
Strapped into the acceleration couch of his ship (a pure space fighter, no gear for making atmospheric translation), he’d had more electronics in his helmet than the company had shipped, in total, down to Iaxo. If he thought hard and closed his eyes, he could still remember what that kind of boredom had been like. Totally different. He could remember his call sign, his radio protocols. Alabama-indy seven-oh-one calling home: Boxing one thousand and coming back to formation. Nothing to report. He could remember the thrill of exo-atmospheric maneuvering, the different skill set, the isolation of being one ship in a thousand square miles of space, and the blood scent of catching the reentry burn of a blockade runner from one hundred degrees of arc away. Alabama-indy seven-oh-one to Alabama actual: Target acquired making entry. Permission to engage.
Permission granted, Alabama-indy. Weapons clear for free fire.
And then the rush of falling, throttles open, nosing down toward the death that the atmosphere represented (the same as falling toward the earth); skipping like a stone across the hard halo of firming gasses and reaching fingers of gravitation; following a ballistic arc described for him by the targeting computers, rushing to make a firing solution against a closing angle of arc.
Finally, the sweet tone of a positive lock, in range. One button: weapons away. Maneuver engines blowing clouds of vaporizing LOx as he pulled up and out in a backspin spiral, eighty self-tracking darts of molybdenum-alloy flaring outward toward a distant point of convergence, to slam into the body of a blockade runner at a velocity of ten thousand feet per second. One touch was lethal; could punch an inch-wide hole in a ship’s heat shielding, knock a tile loose. When they died, the ships flared like shooting stars. It was instantaneous.
Then home. He carried only one weapon, one offensive package, one shot. After a kill, five days off. A reward. He’d watch movies, sleep late, eat well. After five days, it was back to the grind.
It was strange, the entire experience. There was always this moment of odd domesticity, like wanting to brag about a good, successful day at the office. Signed the contract. Sealed the deal. Made a kill. There’d been a deep sense of accomplishment in it. All the waiting, the flying, the training, the endless patrols—all of it, paying off in that gratifying chug the ship would take as the kinetic weapon detached and went screwing off through space toward the inevitable. Once the siege had done its job, the carrier had dropped its complement of Colonial Marines onto the surface: one brigade, plus support elements. It took them one day to organize on the surface, one day to crush the opposition government’s forces. When they came back, the marines had seemed hardly out of breath. There was a small ceremony, a banner in the carrier’s assembly area that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Carter and the rest of the Flyboys were paid off and stayed aboard to catch a ride back to the nearest station.
It was a job, Carter knew. Like this one. But it was different. And if he knew how, he’d explain it to himself—sit himself down and clarify—but he didn’t. He couldn’t understand it at all.
Ted was no longer flying with his squadron at all, leaving them two men short after losing Morris and, technically, three short since Danny Diaz had flown with the 1st until he died and didn’t anymore. Bad luck to be in Ted’s flight, it seemed. He refused to make any transfers on the roster because the 1st had been overweighted by one pilot to begin with (originally having six men rather than five, with Ted holding the commander’s slot) and because they’d been operating as support for most of the tour anyhow. He wanted two full combat squadrons on hand no matter what, and was running split flights on the roster—short three/one and two/one combinations—so that there would always be five pilots at the field and ready to fly should anything requiring their immediate attentions pop up. Carter thought he had a screw loose—perhaps more than one.