In the strange moment between dark and dawn, they were awakened by a dull, hollow booming that seemed to rattle the sky.
“Artillery?” Vic asked, rising up against the heaviness of Carter’s arms and struggling free of his attempt to hold her.
“No,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
Carter nodded sleepily. “Orbital insertion. Supply drop, or a decelerating dropship. They’re sonic booms.”
“How do you know?”
“Just do.”
“But you’re sure?”
“I’m sure. It’s not something you forget.”
She settled down against him again, but stiffly. When Carter moved to spread her legs, she wouldn’t be budged.
“No,” she said. “Not now. Just…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Okay.”
They lay with their eyes open, staring at nothing, while around them the stars fell.
Eight days had passed since Ted’s new orders had gone into effect. Or nine. Or ten. Carter could no longer keep track and no longer cared to. He came home guns-hot or guns-cold, heavy or light. Rumors careened down the tent line like ball lightning. All talk became hard talk, and every shooting star in the night sky became an orbital drop coming in, rock-solid proof of a landing-in-force by whatever organization encompassed one’s worst nightmare scenario.
One evening just on the sweet side of dusk, passing between his tent and Vic’s, or maybe the flight line and the field house, Carter had stopped to watch the scything course of a ship making orbital translation. It was low to the horizon, fifteen degrees above the plane maybe, and traveling in a retrograde arc that made it appear to be fishhooking in the sky.
He caught himself counting off the cadence of insertion in his head, the sequence he’d learned from NRI and practiced a thousand-thousand times. Angle lock, deorbit burn, reaction engines prime, lock surfaces, go-for-react, primary roll… His hands twitched as though wanting to find again the controls to which he’d first trusted his life.
The ship on the horizon was a fast-insertion boat going through its first or second roll, one of the long S curves that would bleed off the fantastic speed it’d built up during translation. Standing there in the frozen mud, Carter tilted his head, catching a sudden phantom whiff of superheated plastics and vomit—the hundred kids in the back of his dropship all losing their lunches simultaneously as he rolled her over to eighty degrees, dropped flaps, and executed a deceleration turn at six g’s, burning like an impossible comet across the sky of Oizys, Sparta, Ananke, Gliese.
Carter did a little fast math in his head to estimate a landing point and guessed at something like eighty statute miles from its current point of incidence. Close. He spit into the dirt and, silently, almost guiltily, wished the kid behind the stick a little luck.
“Don’t die, you fucker,” he whispered. “There’s so much worse to come.”
And while he spoke to the night and the sky, he saw a second bright slash mimicking the course of the first. Then a third.
Once he’d counted ten, he closed his eyes, turned, and walked away. Behind him, unseen, he could feel the lights popping like tiny fireworks all along the horizon.
Ted had begun to flake like flint—every glancing contact on the ground splintering off sharp and razor-edged pieces. Fenn grew quiet. When Roadrunner made her second trip to the shop, Carter’d joined her briefly, thinking to help, but Vic eventually chased him out. That was her world again, alone, so he’d waited. After a certain point, Carter could barely speak without growling, something feral and wanting in his chest rising into his throat and finding no words with which to express itself. Eventually, his plane was done, and Carter found Vic again that night and wrapped himself in her, falling into a place where no words were necessary.
Stork got shot. He was wearing his gear, so it turned out okay. Later, on the ground, he picked the crumpled slugs out of his silk and arranged them on a shelf beside his bed with what Ernie O’Day, his roommate, described as way too much care. He stared at them for hours. The gun that’d tagged him got away—first failure of many to come.
Ted and Eddie fought like they were married. They fought like they wanted to kill each other and, Carter thought, they probably did.
It was all over supplies, contingencies, plans for the future. They tried to fight in private (like parents hiding dire news from the children who couldn’t ever understand), but the Flyboy camp was a small place and word got around. It actually got so rough that some of the pilots started feeling bad for Eddie. Not Carter, necessarily. He’d chosen his side and on some level appreciated the viciousness with which Ted pursued his chosen enemy. But there were some who felt otherwise.