A Private Little War(89)
He didn’t, but refusal wasn’t easy. He’d also kept from them that he’d come from privilege and private school, from engineers who’d probably designed some of the things that these people so obliquely hated. His brief commune past with Sara served him better, made his arrival more obvious and easier to explain. He was nineteen years old.
On a salvage ship called Band of Brothers, a blind former Colonial Marine commando called Applebaum taught twelve of them the delicate art of bomb making and schooled them in the less delicate theories of engineered demolition. Theirs were not the simple butane-and-nails terror bombs or the wasteful compound-4 jacket of the suicide martyr, but rather structural explosives, sabotage bombs, and complicated implosion chains that could take down entire buildings. It was fun. And while no one there pretended not to know why they were being taught all of these fascinating things, neither did anyone talk about it. Maybe someday they’d be called on to blow something up. Save a space gopher. Whatever. In the meantime, they were kept busy.
They practiced first with dummies in the few pressurized compartments that remained on the Band of Brothers, then moved into soft vacuum for the real thing; gleefully blasting huge chunks of the derelict superstructure and learning the chemical intricacies of zero-atmosphere demolition.
Carter had the knack for destruction. It was nothing more than the opposite of engineering. And he was enjoying himself right up until one of his fellow scholars—a short, fat, normally gifted chemist named Barley—made a tragic miscalculation with a concussion tamper and blew himself and his kit straight into space.
The Band of Brothers was in a constantly decaying orbit around Calisto, its tumble corrected somewhat by the explosions that would bump its trajectory, more by the transit bubbles that would always land and lift from its down-facing Calisto side. Equal and opposite force and all that. At any time, there were a dozen or so of these little single-use engines with life-support bubbles attached and glommed onto the wreck, each with a little fuel left over from its single trip out from whichever NRI transport had delivered students into the vicinity and Colonel Applebaum’s tender care. And it was to one of these that Carter charged the minute he saw Barley blown off in the general direction of Venus, several million miles away.
Long story short, he caught him. In his vac suit, Barley was able to cling to one of the bubbles’ debarking clamps while Carter got it turned around and headed back toward the Band of Brothers. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about orbital mechanics, relative velocities of bodies in space, or piloting in general at the time. After catching up to Barley, matching his velocity, maneuvering in close enough for him to grab on, getting the bubble turned and faced in the direction he’d come from, the Band of Brothers was long gone. Carter found her in the glass, rapidly receding, then made the one mistake that probably saved his life—aiming low, past her horizon, and giving one long, hard acceleration burn.
Then his bubble ran out of gas.
It took most of a Calistan day, but his ballistic trajectory eventually merged with that of the Band of Brothers, his faster relative speed and lower orbital arc allowing him to draw close enough that he could start screaming for help over the suit radio. Colonel Applebaum, having assumed them both dead of misadventure and adding them to his long mental list of the same, dispatched students with tethers to rope Carter, Barley, and their bubble in like a wayward, floating calf, and Carter, having now gotten a taste for it, was in love with flying. It was childish and instantaneous, but real. Something he knew in his blood.
When NRI got wind of Carter’s dumbass heroics, they called him back from the Band of Brothers and had him thrown into a torture cell for six days where interrogators (mostly students, one of whom fainted after putting the battery cables to him) did their best to prove that he was actually a spy sent to infiltrate their ranks by any one of a dozen colonial or federal agencies that they believed (wrongly) gave a damn about anything they did. Carter was used as a demonstration case, a live subject, and he broke under questioning a hundred times but never gave them anything that made them worry. NRI was concerned with grand conspiracies. About the motivations of the faithful and their small betrayals? They couldn’t have cared less.
On the seventh day he was cleared, his physical wounds dressed, the rest apologized for in the most bureaucratic of terms, and he was farmed out in secret to a small conglomerate of belt miners who made some side money letting rookie NRI pilots in training crash their machinery for a while. He was shifted again to an agrarian/utopian colony on Ceti Z, which alleged to grow food for starving aliens under the boot of colonial authority but actually grew gengineered drugs for sale on the black market and operated as a cover for an NRI training and development unit that flew low-g crop dusters and reconfigured rescue helicopters into and out of simulated crisis situations. Ceti Z was far out and well off the galactic plane, a distant colonial experiment that attracted only those who wanted extraordinary isolation. As such, this was where Carter got his first taste of live fire and serious indoctrination. This was where he was taught not just to fly, but to kill. There were targets first—twisted metal or rag bags. Then there were the ’phants—club-footed pachyderms that traveled in herds around the ragged edges of the terraced fields. The meat that the ’phants were turned into at the business end of the trainees’ guns was used to feed the settlers, the NRI staff, and the pilots. “No waste,” it’d been explained to him. “It wouldn’t do to waste the gift of life being offered us.”