Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  “That’s it.”

  On the coke-peppered sand below the jetty wall, Sava assembled his men and checked gear. He put on his rucksack and adjusted its straps, clipping it into his webbing; the load was hot and cumbersome. He’d left his helmet in Baku, but the lack of bulky headgear afforded him increased situational awareness. Uri had lambasted him for it, ranting that it set a bad example. But it had no effect on Sava.

  “There’re a few dead-enders down the spit.” Mach pointed to the shoreline. The incoming shots were poorly aimed, but potentially lethal just the same.

  “Stay alert,” Sava warned, crouched in the oily sand. “We’ll mop up after Lieutenant Uri Vitko’s little rally.”

  Uri was issuing orders to his men when Sava arrived. Sava was in a hurry; having to wait for his ad-hoc field briefs irritated him. But passive-aggressive protocol was Uri’s tactic, a method to maintain control. Sava learned from Captain Zelinski that Uri’s I-and-I evaluation showed resilient moral judgment and marginal incorruptibility. And since Captain Zelinski, along with a few of the higher brass, was in on Morosov’s gray-market scheme, no one wanted to risk Uri’s battlefield meddling.

  “Lieutenant Sava Valis.” Uri bit down hard on his cigarillo. “I want you to stay in radio contact every hour, understand? In case we run into resistance . . . ”

  Uri’s mission objective was to highlight the Mi-26’s bombing corridor with radar beacons, then rendezvous with the Khan’s lieutenants in central Turkmenbashi. Sava would be south in the Awaza District. Fully infiltrated, he’d be unable to muck through the four or five klicks to quickly reinforce.

  “I can’t guarantee anything. We’ll be covert,” Sava explained.

  “A moment, lieutenant?” Uri took Sava behind a demolished pump house. “You’re trying to make a contact with The Brothers, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  “You knew that already. That’s acknowledged.”

  “Then why are the details classified?” Uri asked, frustrated.

  “It’s our methods, our tactics,” Sava lied.

  “Fine, whatever. Look. I just need a guarantee you’re not going to vanish. This place is fucking anarchy. We can’t afford to rack up MIAs, got it?”

  Sava nodded. “I’ll radio on the encrypted channel when we establish contact with them.”

  “And just one more thing, lieutenant . . . ”

  Sava lifted an eyebrow.

  “What’s with the goddamned fangs?” Uri asked, referring to Sava’s chrome incisors. “I thought you’d left all that shit back in the arena.”

  “Sometimes with these barbarians,” Sava began, stroking his chin, “I’ve found it helps to spoon-feed their own superstitions back to them, spooky bastards. Fear is a trenchant force multiplier.”

  “Fine,” Uri said, dismissing him.

  Sava gathered his squad for the long hike up the jetty. Enemy fire was light as they approached the shoreline. The nomad guerrillas were retreating back to their nests. After climbing and cutting through a barricade of metal and concertina wire, they reached No Man’s Land and enemy territory. With its disemboweled buildings, Turkmenbashi was a city in name only, its littered streets nothing more than battlefield obstacles.

  They worked their way down the garbage-strewn avenues, indistinct rot piled up with the twisted rebar and wreckage. Puddles of slime and jellied offal pooled underneath the brick heaps marking anonymous graves. The sour air was the most offensive element of Turkmenbashi, Sava realized, the marrow aftertaste impossible to rinse out.

  “It just gets worse and worse here, doesn’t it?” Mach noted, kicking through a smoldering campfire. “And we haven’t even met the locals yet.”

  “Where do you think they’re hiding?”

  Mach shrugged. “Off setting up a booby-trap, probably. Miserable fuckers.”

  The chatter of gunfire interrupted them as the squad scattered and took cover in nearby ruins. Sava powered up his Vepr and activated the millimeter radar tracker. Through the weapon’s sight, a gang of half-nude boys danced in the streets a few blocks away. With Kalashnikovs in hand, they turned and fired at Sava’s position. A tall, scrawny boy with a pigeon chest lifted his RPG but held back.

  “What in hell are they doing?” Sava whispered.

  “Don’t know, boss,” Mach replied. “Do we take them out?”

  “No . . . hold up. Maybe we just spooked them.”

  They waited. A few minutes later and the boys grew bored, drifting out of sight into a nearby alley. Sava pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted. He could feel the sweat drip from his eyebrows as he tried to think. Killing children was out-of-scope. But these were boy soldiers, combatants, and if it came down to it, he wouldn’t hesitate.

  “We’ll skirt the perimeter and launch a hummingbird, got it?”

  His men nodded.

  “All right, follow me.”

  The adolescent rabble grew louder when the squad entered an adjacent gutted factory. Shafts of mote-filled light spilled in through rips in the corrugated metal roof, highlighting the shadows. A pathetic moan came from the opposite end of the building, from somewhere amongst the junk.

  “What the hell is that?”

  They crept toward the sound, through a narrow lane between a row of chemical generators and an assembly line of rust-frozen robots. Sava turned on his shoulder lamp and panned it around. Something moved. Weapons drawn, the squad continued their approach. Plastic straps, cinched tight, pinioned the captive’s elbows behind his back. His forearms were gangrenous, covered with seeping wounds. His skin looked like paper, desiccated from dehydration.

  “Christ, how long as he been here?”

  “Filthy bastards.”

  “Look,” Sava said, flashing his torch on the boy, “he’s dislocated his left shoulder.”

  “He’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet,” Mach added.

  “I say we bust out of here and kill the dogs, now,” one of the younger recruits blurted.

  “Hold tight!” Sava ordered.

  “What do we do with this poor son-of-a-bitch? We can’t just leave him,” Mach said.

  Sava pulled out his sidearm and attached its silencer. A quick double-tap ended the debate. No one spoke as they drifted away to investigate the rest of the factory. Sava paused for a moment, bewitched by the tortured body.

  Maybe it was immaturity combined with fecund imaginations, but a child’s cruelty was unparalleled. The loss of innocence didn’t bother Sava so much—he couldn’t care less about the miserable shits—it was something else, a nascent jealousy. To be capable of such barbarity—the empathy knob turned to zero—it was preternatural, almost godlike and magical. Ruthless and savage, children could be brutal and should never be underestimated.

  “Over here.”

  Stacks of wire cages stood against the far wall. Inside were the folded bodies of other prisoners, long dead.

  “The cages are padlocked. They died like this, all crammed in like chickens in the coop. What the hell, lieutenant?”

  “You read the briefs on Turkmenbashi, this shouldn’t be a shock,” Sava said. “Mach. I’m going to prep a hummingbird.”

  Sava took a small drone from his pack and unfolded its composite wings. A flip of a switch and the motors buzzed to life. Toggling his console, he put it in hover mode and calibrated the pitch and yaw controls. A detachable screen provided a multi-spectrum view. Sava engaged the hummingbird’s whisper-mode to mute its buzz.

  “There’s a hole in the roof there,” Mach pointed.

  Sava guided the drone up, out of the factory and over to the adjoining lot where the boys were gathered. He piloted the drone to the east and lowered the hummingbird into the morning sun for camouflage and to improve the image resolution.

  “They’ve got somebody tied to a post. A woman or a girl, she’s wearing a black abaya. But it’s hard to tell,” Sava relayed.

  “An execution?”

  “Maybe.”

  The boys were dressed in brass codpieces
held together by hemp rope and colorful turbans flourished with peacock feathers. The older boys were smoking amphetamines using a butane torch and a scrap of metal. They staggered into each other, eyes fluttering in trance. A few broke out in prayer with their hands cupped to the sky as they begged strength from Allah. The oldest, maybe eighteen, sharpened a scimitar with a whetstone.

  “One’s got a sword.”

  “Shit! He’s going to kill her.”

  “Hold on!” Sava barked. “Mach, how close are we to the rendezvous?”

  Mach scrolled through his console, holding up the locator antenna to catch more of the signal. “Very close, less than half a klick. Who’s our contact?”

  “Not sure. Cranked up and tweaked—I doubt this crowd’s much for parley.”

  Sava tracked the feral youths as his comrades crowded around the remote’s palm-sized screen. The boy with the scimitar strutted towards the abaya-draped figure and began a Koranic chant in colloquial Arabic. The other boys cheered him on until he held the sword up and started to swing.

  “No!” A recruit named Burian shouted.

  “Quiet!” Sava roared, turning around.

  Before they could stop him, the recruit ran for the doorway, his weapon drawn.

  “Burian! Goddamn it!”

  They were too late. Looking through the hummingbird’s pixilated camera image, Sava saw the boy decapitate the girl—or what he thought to be a girl. The blade sliced to the post, but there was no blood. The body slid rigidly to the side and fell over to reveal a store mannequin underneath black georgette. The boys roared with laughter as the oldest continued to hack at its foam limbs.

  “Stay here!” Sava commanded the remaining four. “Don’t go after him. It’ll give away our position.”

  Burian appeared onscreen, firing his Vepr into the group. He cut down three of the younger boys, while the others gathered up their Kalishnikovs to return fire. Their rifles were shiny and gilded, crudely spray-painted with metallic gold and silver. Burian was outnumbered. With little weight to counteract the recoil, the boys fired erratically. But so close to their target, a few of the AK-47’s 7.62mm rounds hit home. Burian dropped, one of the bullets hitting him in the forehead.

  The mob descended like vultures, kicking and dragging the dead mercenary around the dusty asphalt. The boy with the scimitar turned his hacking on Burian’s corpse, struggling to sever his limbs, as another fired off a magazine into his pulverized cranium. Sava’s men grew restless, thirsting for revenge.

  “Come on, lieutenant! Are you just going to stand by and watch this?” a specialist begged.

  “Do you want to end up like Burian?”

  “But we can take these little bastards out.”

  “And stir up Awaza’s hornet nest? If you run out there now, I swear to God I’ll shoot you myself, understand?”

  A quarter-hour passed, and the defilement continued. The hummingbird’s charge was running low, the remote’s power meter glowing a steady orange. Near midday, a group of older Nizaris approached, coming to inspect. Much more reserved in their dandyisms than the boys, their faces were hardened and stoic. They put a halt to the boys’ macabre desecration to inspect Burian, rifling through his webbing and kit for a clue to his identity.

  Taking a chance, Sava lowered the hummingbird to eye level and flashed its LED array. The men backed up and aimed their weapons at the drone but held fire.

  “What are you doing?” Mach asked.

  “Trying to parley,” Sava replied.

  He activated the hummingbird’s tinny speaker and addressed the nomads in his best Russian. Curious, the boys crowded around the hovering drone, grimy hands reaching up to touch it. But the older Nizaris, wary, stepped back.

  “I am Lieutenant Sava Valis, do you understand me?”

  The leader, a tall bearded Turkmen with a skullcap and bandolier, tilted his head curiously, then nodded. Strapped to his back was an impressive sniper rifle, its scope the size of a vodka bottle.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The men huddled to discuss the matter, shooing the younger boys away. The leader turned and spoke.

  “We know who you are. Imam Farzad and Farzam have been expecting you, Alkonost man. But we do not talk to fairies,” he said brushing away the underpowered hummingbird. “Show yourself.”

  Sava nodded to his men, and they filed out of the dark factory into the street. Weapons down, they approached cautiously. The boys, high on mind-altering drugs, were hallucinating, trigger fingers itchy. The squad was careful not to make any sudden movements. Sava walked ahead and extended his hand to the leader.

  “I am Jaweed,” the man said, returning the handshake. “Brigade leader for Farzad’s Jund al-Samaa, the ‘Soldiers of Heaven.’ You Alkonost men fight for our enemy Padshah Khan . . . why?”

  “Because Nova Byzantium pays us.”

  “You fight for money?”

  Sava shrugged. “Is there any other reason?”

  Jaweed opened his mouth but said nothing.

  “Look, Jaweed. Alkonost wants to end this conflict as quickly and cheaply as possible. If your imam and Alkonost’s generals come to an agreement with the Khan, we’ll gladly extricate ourselves. If you could kindly arrange a meeting with The Brothers, we’d be most appreciative.”

  “I’ll see what can be done.”

  The mosque’s turquoise dome rose above the neighboring hovels. Cratered and pocked by strafing, daylight filtered through its onion cupola in dusty shafts. This was the court of the Nizari kings, the brothers Farzad and Farzam. Near the Qibla, they sat facing each other and played a game of chess. Both had boyish looks and svelte bodies that hinted at androgyny or ambiguous gender. Their flamboyant turbans and peacock feathers dispelled any notions of grizzled Karakum warriors. Whether they actually shared blood or gender was dubious.

  Jaweed walked forward and prostrated himself before the two, saying nothing. The Brothers acknowledged the yeoman with annoyed glances and audible sighs. Sava looked at Mach and shrugged.

  “So these are the men who’ve . . . ”

  “ . . . decided to make war on our dominion,” The Brothers said in Russian, finishing each other’s sentences with nary a pause.

  “We want to avoid war. That’s why we’re here,” Sava spoke. “We’re emissary proxies of Nova Byzantium, hoping to secure a ceasefire with your enemy, Padshah Khan.”

  “Oh?” both replied.

  “Of course terms would have to be drawn up and mutually agreed upon. But Alkonost is eager to see this conflict resolved in an expedient manner,” Sava continued.

  “I’m sure you would. It would be . . . ”

  “ . . . much cheaper, and it’s very difficult to pump oil from burning derricks. We’ve seen your expeditionary army, very impressive. All that machinery, it must be expensive to field . . . ”

  “ . . . in such a salty climate.”

  “Look, Farzad, Farzam . . . ” Sava began.

  “You will address the Imams properly!” Jaweed admonished sharply, still prostrated.

  “And how is that exactly?” Sava said, exasperated.

  “Holy Leaders of the Nizari Jun Al-Samaa, The Mighty and the Gracious, Khans of the Merv and its Realm,” Jaweed intoned.

  Sava rolled his eyes then continued. “Do you hear that?” A low rumble rippled through the building, dust flumes pouring from crevices in the roof’s chipped mosaics. “An Mi-26 Halo bomber escorted by two Mi-24 gunships, Alkonost is blasting a half-kilometer corridor across Awaza to separate your territory from Padshah Khan’s. A few auto-cannon batteries, and you’ll be cut off from the northern sector. Impotent.”

  Stopping their chess clock, The Brothers turned to look at Sava. He’d struck a nerve. They batted their eyes, heavily accented with kohl and green malachite. Both were thinking, telecommunicating between their minds with a fraternal sixth sense. The gut-roiling explosions had stirred a salient fear, masquerading as quirky eccentricity. Both stood and approached Sava, the boy-soldier cou
rtesans parting to encircle the squad.

  “We both recognize the diplomatic impasses that will result from . . . ”

  “ . . . such a contentious territorial dispute as we have here. A ceasefire both sides will accept may pose a conundrum. There must be a contest both sides will . . . ”

  “ . . . agree to, the winner reaping the spoils of their offered accord. It’s only civilized,” Farzad and Farzad said, their identities indistinguishable to Sava.

  “And what’s the contest?” Sava asked.

  “A game of kings and queens,” they said, cracking sinister smiles.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In this confusion, we find it refreshing to settle scores in gentlemanly fashion, black . . . ”

  “ . . . versus white, clear winners defined by the succinct rules of the game board. So Mr. . . . ”

  “Valis, Lieutenant Sava Valis,” Sava interjected.

  “So lieutenant, will you play Alkonost’s king?”

  “I don’t play much chess. But there’s a lieutenant I know who is exceptional, a highly rated player who—” Sava paused.

  The Brothers shook their head in effeminate shame. Arms crossed, they glared at Sava with faux incredulity. Some of the older teenagers and young men giggled, hands girlishly covering their mouths.

  After the crowd quieted, The Brothers spoke. “You misunderstand. You will play the game piece itself, one of the sixteen. Jaweed here will be our king.”

  Jaweed’s jaw fell open in shock.

  “He is quite the deadeye and a most skilled shot with a rifle. How is your aim, lieutenant?”

  “Better than most,” Sava replied, confused.

  “Good. Good. You’ll do the dirty work of your designated champion. There’s an arcade near the front line, a hotel called the Grand Turkmen. Turkmenbashi himself, the Great Uniter, built a chessboard cloister there, fifty meters by fifty meters . . .

  “ . . . sixteen soldiers per side, thirty-two total. And you, lieutenant, will be our enemy king. We insist! When your champion—whoever you choose—takes a piece, you must eliminate that piece with your rifle. And the winner declares checkmate.” Both laughed, their howls eerily synchronized. Sava’s brow furrowed. “It looks like you’re catching on.”