The bullet kicked up sand near one of the gunmen’s feet, and they all scattered into cover. Return fire began to come up the hill. The bullets sounded like firecrackers going off over Dagmar’s head.
There was excitement in being shot at, but the emotion was strangely flattened. This wasn’t as involving as a video game. A video game would have better sound effects.
Whenever she saw one of the gunmen she fired, but they were darting from cover to cover and she could never get one in her sights. She emptied her magazine and reached for her second. After that, she realized, she’d be out of bullets.
A bullet whined off the rock close to Dagmar’s hand. Her heart leaped. One of the gunman had worked his way onto her flank. She fired wildly at him, jumped to her feet, and ran back to another rock. Bullets snapped through the air near her.
She was breathless. The video game had just gone to another level of intensity. Hordes of zombies would arrive at any second.
Eventually the gunmen drove her all the way back to the yurt. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left, but she knew it wasn’t many. She dived through the door and dropped prone onto the carpet.
Üruisamoglu, still sitting on his pillow, looked at her.
“What’s going on?” he said.
It was the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “We’re trying to kill each other,” she explained, as if to a child. “You’d better get down.”
I am about to be killed by three men in ties, she thought.
Someone started firing through the felt walls of the yurt. Üruisamoglu dropped to the floor. His brown eyes were huge.
Voices cried out in Turkish. Üruisamoglu looked at Dagmar.
“They want us to surrender,” he said.
“They’re here to kill you,” Dagmar said. “But you can surrender if you want.”
“They have no reason to kill me anymore,” Üruisamoglu said. “The Internet’s back. It’s all out of my hands.”
And entirely in mine, Dagmar thought. They’d torture her to get her password.
More bullets began ripping through the felt. One whined off the pellet stove. Üruisamoglu’s maps crackled as bullets snapped through them. Dagmar reached for pillows and began to build bulwarks. The gunmen kept shouting.
At least they’re not hallucinations, she thought, and almost laughed.
The gunmen called for surrender again. They were probably not looking forward to charging in through the single door.
Dagmar didn’t answer. Another pair of shots came in. Maybe, Dagmar thought, they were running low on ammunition as well.
There was a mechanical grinding from outside, the bellowing of engines, the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires. Dagmar wondered if one of the gunmen had gone back for the car.
And then there was more shouting, very desperate sounding, and a lot of shots. A vehicle roared, and Dagmar heard wheels skidding on gravel as it came to a stop right outside the door.
There were huge booms at close range, the sound of a much larger weapon, but no bullets came into the yurt. Then there was a clanking noise, and suddenly Ismet’s voice.
“Dagmar! Are you in there? You and Slash come out—fast!”
Dagmar rose to her knees, her head spinning. Üruisamoglu looked at her blankly. She waved at him.
“Come on!” she said.
He crawled across the carpets, dragging his crutches behind him. Dagmar jumped up, ran back to his position, and grabbed his laptop. She ran to the door of the yurt and opened it.
The vehicle outside had eight huge wheels and a duck-billed ramming prow. There were hatches and periscopes and slits for viewing. Hot exhaust smoked from the engines and fouled the air. It was the armored vehicle they’d seen down in the village.
A hatch had opened between the second and the third wheels. Ismet was inside, gesturing.
“Hurry!”
Bullets cracked through the air. Dagmar dived for the hatch, clambered into the interior. It smelled of dust and stale motor oil.
Ismet leaned out, grabbed Üruisamoglu by the shoulders of his sheepskin jacket, and hauled him bodily into the vehicle. The metal crutches clanged on the metal floor. Ismet slammed the hatch shut and yelled something to the driver in the forward compartment. The engine roar increased and the vehicle lurched into reverse.
There were pinging sounds on the metal walls of the vehicle. Dagmar saw little dimples appearing on the inside of the armor. Someone was shooting at them.
Ismet reached for the shotgun on a metal bench seat, thrust it through one of the ports, and fired. The sound in the small metal compartment was enormous.
The big vehicle lurched off. Dagmar and Üruisamoglu clutched at the metal seats in an attempt to stabilize themselves. Dagmar eventually hauled herself into one of the seats, and she looked out through one of the view slits just as one of Ismet’s shots caught a gunman in the shoulder, spinning him around.
Then the vehicle dropped nose-first onto the narrow road leading to the Kyzyl Kum, and Ismet lost his footing and crashed to the floor on top of Üruisamoglu.
Ismet scrambled into one of the metal seats and then pulled Üruisamoglu into another. The vehicle swayed and crashed. The engine sound was deafening. The passenger compartment smelled of auto exhaust and cordite.
“This is Shemazar!” Ismet pointed to the driver. “He owns this APC.”
Shemazar—a man in late middle age, thin and lined—turned and waved a hand.
“Hi, lady!” he said.
Hi, lady, Dagmar thought. This guy must have apprenticed as a New York cabbie.
The APC jounced to the floor of the desert. Ismet shouted instructions. Shemazar waved, shifted into a lower gear, and deliberately drove the APC over the assassins’ sedan, leaving it a wreck at the foot of the bluff.
Dagmar looked through one of the slits and saw the man in the light-colored suit. He made no attempt to run away but stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the catastrophe with a disgusted look on his face. Though she doubted he could see her, Dagmar waved at him through the port.
Good-bye, Kronsteen, she thought. Just think of it as revolution creep. And then the armored car rolled on.
In a few minutes, they were in the oasis. The Niva waited at Shemazar’s house, much the same except for some bullet holes in the hatchback.
“I led them off as far as I could,” Ismet said. “Their car was faster, but I had four-wheel drive, so whenever they started to catch me I moved into the open desert, and they couldn’t move so fast there. But eventually they realized they weren’t going to get me, so they went back to the yurt. I went cross-country to the village, because I thought I might be able to rent this vehicle.” He patted the armored side. “We’re out another five hundred pounds. Sorry I didn’t return your call, but I was in the middle of negotiations.”
“You keep saving me,” Dagmar said.
He gave her a deadpan look.
“Well,” he said, “you keep running into trouble.”
In the village they transferred to the Niva. Shemazar cackled and insisted on hugging Dagmar multiple times and kissing her on both cheeks. His lips were excessively moist. Under the circumstances, Dagmar felt, she could scarcely object.
“What about the killers?” Dagmar asked as they pulled away. “What if they catch us again?”
“Not likely,” Ismet judged. “We just smashed their car. They’re on foot with a wounded man. Nobody in the village is going to give them a car, because the crazy old guy in the armored car isn’t going to let them. So I’d say they’re walking to Zarafshan.”
Unless, Dagmar thought, they could hook up with Ulugbek and his camels.
Lamprey’s Appendage Sucks on Ale
Ismet got behind the wheel of the Niva and they left the oasis behind. Dagmar called Helmuth and tried to catch up with events in Turkey.
“Turkey’s got Internet again,” Helmuth said. “Everything we’re hearing says that it’s true that the commander of the Second Army go
t deposed—by his own officers. They’ve declared for the revolution and they’re ready to march on Ankara.”
“The Second Army is in the Kurdish provinces,” Ismet said. “The general would have been one of Bozbeyli’s most loyal subordinates—he was the one who had to keep an eye on the heroin trade. So it’s significant that his own people put him under arrest.”
As they jounced toward Zarafshan on the highway, as the silver high-tension towers marched past like a long row of saluting soldiers, they heard of the cascade of events that spelled the collapse of Bozbeyli’s regime. Other generals—the ones Lincoln had complained were sitting on the fence—began to eye their own subordinates with distrust and to consider that perhaps their choices had been limited to declaring for the rebels or being deposed by their own men.
The First Army commander in Istanbul declared for the rebels, and the Third Army on the Iraq border seemed in chaos, with some units declaring one way and some the other. Only the forces on Cyprus stayed loyal, and they were unable to move to the mainland.
By the time Zarafshan was in sight, it was over. Bozbeyli and the others in his administration had abdicated and flown to Azerbaijan.
“And not only that,” Dagmar said. “It turns out I own the Internet. It all belongs to me.”
Ismet looked at her. Üruisamoglu pointedly did not.
“It’s true,” she said. “Though maybe I’ll give it back.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe. Wouldn’t want to leave it in the wrong hands.”
She reached for her handheld.
“I’m going to call Attila,” she said. “He should know that his triumphant entry into Istanbul is imminent.”
“He should be happy about that,” Ismet said.
“I don’t know. It means he can’t hog the headlines any longer.”
“Tell him to have the jet ready.”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Only this time, we don’t file a flight plan.”
Before she could call her phone gave a chirp, and she found that she had a pair of text messages. She called up the first.
Briana love you forever Chatsworth.
A pleasant warmth kindled in the vicinity of her heart. Manipulative old bastard, she thought with affection.
“Lv U2,” she replied.
Dagmar turned to the second message and saw it was much longer. Richard must have typed it on a keyboard, because it had none of the slang and abbreviations you’d expect in a message thumbed onto a phone pad.
“I have been having problems with my printer,” the employee told Dagmar. “Even though the printer was cabled properly to the computer and the driver was installed, and even though the printer responded when it was sent a file, the printer refused to print a document.
“I checked the cable again, and I then uninstalled the printer driver, then reinstalled it. The printer still would not print. Therefore I updated the driver, but the printer still would not function. I swapped out the cables, with no success. I cycled the power on the printer, but still the printer would not print.
“Finally, out of desperation, I uninstalled the operating system, and reinstalled the OS from scratch. And then the printer worked as if nothing had ever been wrong.
“Dagmar, my solution made no sense and was completely inelegant. What am I to understand from this adventure?”
“Persistence,” said Dagmar, “also has merit.”
She looked at the last line and gave a weary laugh. She read it aloud to Ismet and Üruisamoglu, and they both thought it was funny.
CONSTANTINOPLE1453, she thought. She was going to have to change that, and soon.
She opened a can of beluga, and they ate caviar and hard-boiled eggs all the way to the airport, where the Gulfstream waited, glowing in the sun as if it were made of precious metal, its engines already turning over.
The Niva drew up to the stair that waited in front of the Gulfstream’s door. The two cabin attendants were visible at the top of the stairs, waiting with identical white smiles on their faces. The man from customs was in his Honda, and Babür stood waiting for his hundred-pound notes.
Peace oot, Dagmar thought, and reached for her passport.
extras
meet the author
Walter Jon Williams
WALTER JON WILLIAMS has been nominated repeatedly for every major SF award, including Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for his novel City on Fire. His most recent books are The Sundering, The Praxis, Destiny’s Way, The Rift, and This Is Not a Game. He lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife. Find out more about the author at www.walterjonwilliams.net.
By Walter Jon Williams
This Is Not a Game
Deep State
Ambassador of Progress
Knight Moves
Hardwired
Voice of the Whirlwind
The Crown Jewels
House of Shards
Angel Station
Facets (collection)
Elegy for Angels and Dogs
Days of Atonement
Frankensteins and Foreign Devils (collection)
Aristoi
Metropolitan
Rock of Ages
Ten Points for Style
City on Fire
Destiny’s Way
Implied Spaces
DREAD EMPIRE’S FALL
The Praxis
The Sundering
Conventions of War
WRITING AS WALTER J. WILLIAMS
The Rift
WRITING AS JON WILLIAMS
The Privateer
The Yankee
The Raider
The Macedonian
Cat Island
introducing
If you enjoyed
DEEP STATE,
look out for
THE FOURTH WALL
by Walter Jon Williams
I come out of the darkness of the tunnel into the brilliant light and the whole arena erupts with a huge, hollow roaring made by thousands of enthusiastic drunken American males. Whooooooo. I’m stunned. I haven’t heard anything that enthusiastic in ages. Certainly not for me.
I’m so taken aback that I almost stumble, but my cornerman, Master Pak, keeps me going with steady pressure to my shoulder blades. My eyes are dazzled by camera flashes. People are reaching into the aisles to touch me or to offer high fives. I look to my right and see a whole row of bare-chested guys pumping their fists in the air and barking. They’re wearing weird alien bald heads, and their beer bellies are painted baby blue. Oogh-oogh-oogh-oogh.
Is that supposed to be my head? I think. These are my fans?
I blink and they’re gone, vanished back into the crowd as I advance.
Whoooooo. The sound seems to pick me up and levitate me toward the sky. My heart pounds. My veins are ablaze with adrenaline.
This is what it’s like to be a rock star. This is what it’s like to own an arena full of people.
Ahead the ring is like a silver crown gleaming in a pillar of light. Outlined in the shining floods, I can see the referee, an enormous 240-pound bodybuilder crammed into a white shirt and bow tie. He wears surgical gloves in the event that I decide to bleed on him. And then an anomaly catches my eye, and I think, Why is the ref wearing waders?
When I hop up the stairs to the ring, I find out why.
This is the point where, in my mind’s ear, I can hear the television announcer: “This is where the contestant realizes that, without telling him, we’ve filled the ring with eight inches of cottage cheese!”
Oh yeah, I think. I am so pwned.
The ring is actually ring shaped, a circle thirty feet across. It’s walled off from the rest of the arena by a six-foot curtain of chain link. Overhead, against the rows of floods, I can see automated cameras swooping back and forth on guy wires.
My other corner guy, Ricardo, opens a gate on the chain-link wall, and I step gingerly into the cottage cheese. It’s very cold, and it squelches up over my bare feet. I stomp around a bit. The cheese is very slippe
ry. It clings to my feet like buckets of concrete.
Pwned, I think. Totally pwned.
The ring announcer, who is wearing a rather smart pair of jackboots with his tux, fills the air with hype as I consider my situation. I have these freakishly long legs and arms, which constitute about my only advantage in a martial arts context. For the last four weeks, Master Pak has been drilling me on stick-and-run maneuvers—when my opponent charges me, I’m supposed to stop his attack with a stomping kick to the thigh or jab him in the face as I shift left or right.
But I’m hardly going to be able to kick at all, not if I have to scoop my feet out of the muck. Even if I get the kick off, I might slip and fall. And I’m going to have a hard time maneuvering in any case.
I look at Master Pak for help. He’s just staring down at the cottage cheese with a stony expression. He has a tae kwon do background, and for him it’s all really about the kicking, which is something I suddenly can’t do.
I don’t know what I can manage in the upcoming fight except stand there and get run down.
Whoooooo. That roaring noise rises again, and I blink off into the darkness and see my opponent and his entourage coming down the aisle from the tunnel.
He’s named Jimmy Blogjoy. When he was a kid actor he was Jimmy Morrison, and he starred in a third-rate knockoff of Family Tree, but as his career went into decline he renamed himself after his Web log. This happened at roughly the time that everyone on the planet stopped reading blogs. They particularly stopped reading Jimmy’s, which gets even fewer hits than mine. You don’t want to do the self-revealing thing when all you’ve got to reveal is the vacuum between your ears.
Jimmy appears in the gate to the ring and looks down at the cottage cheese, which is as much a surprise to him as it was to me. He’s redheaded and stocky and short, and there’s a mat of rust-colored fur on his chest.
Jimmy looks over at me and snarls. His fists are clenched. He’s really angry. Like it’s my fault he has to step into the cottage cheese.
I snarl back at him. Fucking asshole.
Deep State Page 38