One night Fenn invited Eddie over to the tent for drinks just to get him out of Ted’s gun sights for a couple of hours. Carter was out on a flight—he and Jack sortieing; just play-fighting, turning barrels, and climbing rolls to stay awake and keep the blood flowing in unusual directions while Tommy Hill clattered and clunked along above them in one of the horrible DH.9s. They found nothing in six hours, having done a grid-pattern search of twenty square miles above the river, then turning (against orders) toward the walls of Riverbend just before the sun went down. They’d wanted a peek was all, so took one—almost daring each other to drift closer and closer at the apex of lazy, slipping turns.
Even then, there was nothing much other than stone. In the failing light the shadows played tricks. Riverbend could’ve been sheltering an entire armored division and they wouldn’t have been able to see it. And even if it wasn’t, the quietness of it and its forbidden essence frayed their nerve until, boasting and saying how they hadn’t really wanted to get any closer anyway, the three of them started for home. Below them, there was nothing but dirt, bare deciduous trees looking like skeletons reaching up for them with clacking, bony fingers, and slick patches of ice where the murky groundwater was beginning to freeze. The pilots had all started greasing up their faces against the chill slipstreams, caking on petroleum jelly along their cheekbones, their foreheads, and under their eyes. ChapStick was becoming as valuable as gold. Doc Edison had given an impromptu lecture on the dangers of frostbite one morning in the mess—a word-perfect recitation of one he’d given last year at the same time. And when it’d become plain to him that no one was listening, he’d broken off midsentence, retired to the medical tent, and etherized himself into a long slumber just for fun. He’d used starting fluid to do it—priming spray borrowed from the mechanics. He certainly had personal access to more advanced narcotics, but Edison had always had a streak of the romantic in him.
On the ground, it was brisk. Chilly. Freezing only occasionally. Up in the air, it was bone-breaking cold all the time, miserable and painful and dull, which Carter knew was the way most wars were most of the time, everywhere but in war stories.
When he came down again, Ted debriefed him.
“Anything?”
“No.”
“Map grid?”
Carter rattled it off. Ted nodded.
“Sleep. You’re up again in six hours.”
And that was that. Carter wanted nothing more than a hot bath, a couple of large drinks, and a quick lie-down before his next turn in the rotation. He had a couple screamers in his jacket pocket—little orange pills cadged from the medical box in the field house—and he knew those would get him up and keep him that way for the duration of the six-hour dawn patrol, but he was tired now and could feel the need for sleep prickling his skin and tying weights to the nerves behind his eyes. Even the walk from the flight line to the tent line seemed impossibly long, his legs heavy and numb, his head aching. And when he finally made it, he found a lawyer in his bed, sharing a bottle with his best friend.
“Negotiating our divorce, Fenn?” he asked, pushing through the door and then shutting it tight against drafts behind him. “After all our years together?”
“Yes, Kev. I’m sorry. Your feet stink, the house is a mess, and you haven’t cooked me a warm meal in months. Eddie and I were just discussing who gets custody of this bottle.” He raised a half-empty jug of the local delight and shook it at Carter.
“Wait a minute,” Carter said. “How’d I end up the woman here? You’re lying around, sitting on your pilot’s license, and drinking with Eddie while I’m out there, slaving over a hot machine gun, trying to make the galaxy safe for human exploitation. Fuck you. You’re the woman. Give me that bottle.”
He tossed his helmet on the bed next to Eddie. Everyone had started wearing them again. Most of the time, anyway. And he wasn’t trying to hit Eddie with it, but he wasn’t exactly not trying to either. In any event, it bounced off his back and Carter didn’t feel bad about it. The lawyer wriggled over a few inches and Carter sat down hard beside him. He pushed his shoulder and Eddie moved a few more inches, until he was pressing his hip against the bed’s foot rail. Carter felt like pushing him again but didn’t—only because what he really wanted was something else to hit him with but could find neither the appropriate object nor the energy.
Eddie just grinned—charmed, Carter thought, by all this authentic, careless, vaguely homoerotic pilots’ banter. Or maybe he was just drunk. Carter also didn’t have the energy to care. The talk was all crap anyhow—variations on a theme, a riff he and Fenn had kept going for as long as Carter could remember, the thing they did with their mouths when there was nothing else worth saying. It was easier to talk than not, better than lapsing into resentful silences or just complaining all the time. It was a show. A put-on for an audience of none. Reality was nothing more than a sore back, dead legs, numb hands, aching eyes and a wicked headache that no amount of bitching would ever cure.