A Private Little War(91)

This went on for days. On his return trips, he would ferry the wounded and corpses back into orbit. He would clean the decking of his ship’s bay with a high-pressure hose and, under orders, spray air freshener so those in his next load wouldn’t smell the stink of blood and puke and shit and death on their way down into the grinder. The native species the NRI volunteers were allegedly protecting killed said volunteers in droves. The plants killed them. The environment killed them. It was a wonder there were any left for the human loggers and their mercenary security teams to put bullets into.

This was how NRI truly operated—a scene that would be repeated over and over again for Carter throughout the next two years. Sometimes there was more death, sometimes less. He ferried soldiers and he ferried paralegals. He delivered supplies. He made night drops on alien shores, guided in by infiltrators with IR strobe lights who, when he set down to unload whatever he was carrying, would always say something like “You didn’t see nothing here, Chief. Nothing at all. You were never here.”

Occasionally he fought, flying air cover or bombing missions in aircraft that could barely take to the air and were only craft at all by the loosest of definitions. Again, he didn’t understand how killing anything could possibly be in sync with the goals of NRI, but he never raised a fuss about it because it never particularly bothered him. He did what he did in defense of alien species and alien planets simply because no alien had ever abandoned him or beat him or tortured him or brainwashed him. No alien had ever called him pussy or faggot or traitor or terrorist. He would defend them not because he loved them more than his fellow man, but because, at that point, he hated them slightly less.

That changed, of course, but not until Gliese 581c, called Frogtown, where he was shot down, apprehended, and incarcerated. Not until the marines came for him. Not until NRI discarded him, forgot about him, and left him to suffer and rot.

It was funny, but when he was in the mood for telling himself the truth, Carter blamed it all on the girl. A bucket of paint, a chance word, a warm smile as alien to him then as the worlds he would someday see—these were the things on which his entire life had pivoted.

And he had never forgiven her. Not even a little.





CARTER WOKE LATE AND VIC WAS ALREADY GONE. He liked her tent. It was cleaner than his, smelled nice. She had no roommate, no Fenn, no real neighbors even, save the planes and the longhouse.

He rolled over onto his back and stared up at the canvas. He thought about the girl—the artist—in a variety of savage ways and then stopped when it began to make his chest hurt. He tried to think about his brothers, his mother, but had difficulty conjuring their faces. His memories of them all felt so distant, like he was trying to imagine a family he’d never quite had but had heard described once, a long time ago.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of something specific. A concrete moment. He remembered a night that his mother, who was not a drinker at all, had come home from a party a little bit drunk and the way she had kicked her shoes off, each attended by a little whoop of joy that was so unlike her that it’d made him burn with a childish kind of happiness for her. She’d been wearing a dress made of something sparkly that looked like lightning made flat.

He thought of Jacob hunched over his drafting table, drawing pictures of airplanes and rockets, pink tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. He tried to think of himself and Mark crouched in the short hallway just outside their shared room, peeking around the corner of the door, watching Jacob, and biting their lips to keep from laughing.

Kevin was twelve, maybe thirteen; Mark and Jacob both older. He and Mark had taken pages from Jacob’s drawing tablet and replaced them with pictures of penises, testicles; of naked men sprawled clumsily on beds and smiling into invisible cameras. It’d been a joke—boys being boys, pranks passing endlessly between the brothers almost like a form of currency. And Kevin and Mark waited, breathing shallowly, watching Jacob and knowing that, sooner or later, he would have to turn the page, and then…

It ended up being the day he and Mark had realized Jacob was same-sex. For the longest time, Kevin had felt guilty—as though he’d somehow turned his brother this way, having flipped a switch in him somehow with a few scraps of paper torn from bound medical journals and porn downloaded from their home terminal. But he hadn’t understood that it just didn’t work that way. Watching Jacob from the doorway, seeing him reach out so gently to touch the pictures, as if they were electrified and he expected a shock; watching him look around furtively, slowly slip them free from his tablet, and carefully fold them into one of his pockets—Mark and Kevin had stared at each other open-mouthed, wide-eyed with revelation.