Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No!” they squealed. “We’re not!”

  “Fucking hell,” Sava whispered.

  Mach coughed to catch Sava’s attention, his head shaking. Although concocted inside the tangle of bent minds, Sava was drawn to the concept, however lurid. The contest was no different than the gladiator arena, a mix of spectacle and blood sport. In the warped calculus of guerrilla war, to be able to dissolve the fog—to play black versus white—offered a liberating change from constant paranoia. Sava looked back and winked at Mach.

  Mach understood, patting his kit with the Illithium ampoules inside.

  “And if we agree to this, what guarantees do we have?” Sava inquired. “We would have to make a case to General Dobish, Operation Alexander’s commander, and assure him you would not renege.”

  “Let’s put it this way, what do you or the Khan really have to lose? We’re reasonable men, and we understand . . . ”

  “ . . . that if the initial terms of both side’s proposed ceasefires is unreasonable, there will be no hope of peace. And despite our piety, we wish not to become martyrs. This chess match is like . . . ”

  “ . . . a coin flip, but with more drama and theater. There’s much to gain, and we’re weary of Padshah Khan’s stubbornness. This violence is not our preferred means; we assure you. We rather prefer a battle of intellect,” they said, tapping their temples. “Surely, you Alkonost are thinking men?”

  “Of course,” Sava replied. “Even if Dobish bites, I doubt the Khan will agree to it.”

  “If I read things right, he doesn’t have a choice, does he? Without an imperial sponsor, his army . . . ”

  “ . . . will be so much dust.”

  The Brothers had a point. Padshah Khan’s men were more disciplined, but they lacked the nomads’ reckless fanaticism. Farzad and Farzam drew followers from the Karakum’s lost, an inexhaustible horde of amphetamine-addled orphans drifting from oasis to oasis. Immersed in their Nizari fundamentalism, they were zealous assassins.

  Alkonost had fought all shades of barbarians in its endless campaigns. Bled by a thousand cuts, Tiraspol had no stomach for getting stuck in an endless quagmire. Exit strategies were a must. Bizarre as the proposal was, it would be unwise for Alkonost to dismiss their lunacy. It was chess, after all, a fair game of skill and cunning.

  “I’ll relay your offer to General Dobish,” Sava said, bowing slightly. “If you could send a contingent, one of your lieutenants as emissary?”

  “Of course!”

  The smoke reeked of melted tires, the caliginous haze reducing visibility to a decameter or less. Three hours after the firebombing and No Man’s Land continued to smolder. Sava radioed Uri and informed him of their situation.

  Without friend-or-foe beacons, Jaweed and his escorts would be destroyed by auto-cannon. An Alkonost operator would have to cue the system, and the mercenaries weren’t about to idle the targeting system. Too dangerous to cross at night, they would have to linger until daybreak.

  “There’s one hood between us, and half a filter. Maybe we can all crawl underneath and hug?” Mach joked.

  Sava laughed until he surrendered to another coughing fit. He spat a wad of black mucus, provoking a gag. Most war zones had their special odors, but Turkmenbashi had a revolting taste, petrol and scorched asphalt mixed with rotting flesh and sewage.

  Jaweed and his teenage escorts had rewrapped their turbans into an Al Quds-style kafiya, mouth and nose covered to filter out the carbon particulates. They were used to it. Turkmenbashi was legendary for its retrograde dust storms, haboobs fueled by the Indian Ocean’s cyclonic super storms from the south.

  The ground floor of an empty housing block offered refuge for the night. A sheet tacked over the doorway helped to repel the inky haze, but the irritation and coughing fits persisted. At sundown, the light shifted to crimson, a mix of red sunlight and napalm. Agitated and nervy, everyone tried to relax and wait.

  The Alkonost squad picked at their insta-paks of food, while Jaweed and his men gnawed on haunches of meat. Oddly shaped bones and peculiar anthropomorphic features made Sava cringe. Camel or goat, maybe, but the awful truth persisted. He tried to ignore their mastication.

  “This chess match—” Mach said, speaking Ukrainian. “Who do you know that’s so damned good?”

  “Lieutenant Vitko. Uri. I played him once on the hood of a tank back in Baku. The lieutenant spent his whole furlough in the basement of Pobeda’s Lounge, smoking, drinking, playing the old veteran masters.”

  “But he has to agree to it, though. What’re the chances?”

  “It’s possible. He’s an uptight bastard, but Dobish could order him to play.”

  “If you’re wrong about Uri, that guy over there,” Mach said pointing at Jaweed, “will put a bullet through your skull. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m well aware. I’ve been there before, Mach, remember?” Sava said.

  “The gladiator arena? But there you had a bit of free will, at least. Here, you’re literally Uri’s pawn. If he falls to checkmate, that’s it,” Mach mimed a gun with a forefinger to his temple.

  “Well, at least if I die, in that brief instant, I’ll know it wasn’t me who fucked up,” Sava chuckled.

  “You’re crazy.” Mach shook his head. “You never fought ‘without release,’ did you?”

  “Sine missione? A few matches, knives, and such . . . in the early days after Moldova. I was in the right mindset then.”

  “You never told me.”

  “They were illegal, Mach. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Brutal shit, that. “

  “Just a few scars for my troubles,” Sava smirked.

  “So you’re going to put your life in Uri’s hands, eh? He’s suspicious of you; I can tell. He knows you’re up to something.”

  “Can you blame him?” Sava paused. “ Look, Uri’s honor bound to his men. His moral compass isn’t as warped as the rest of us miserable bastards. It’s in his eyes, a weird forlorn optimism; I don’t get it, but . . . ”

  “What do you mean, optimism?”

  “He hasn’t given up on the world like you and me. I can respect that, I guess. He’ll give it a go for Old Justinian,” Sava said, pumping his arm.

  Mach nodded.

  “Anyway,” Sava said, nodding towards Jaweed. “Speaking of warped moral compasses . . . shall we?”

  “Yeah, we best get to it.”

  After their meal, Mach lit a chemical lamp; the concrete room filled with an eerie green light. Sava opened Mach’s rucksack and sorted the medical kit. Finding the two placebo vials—oxygen-doping serums for hypoxia—he loaded the syringe and calibrated its catheter. He tried to catch Jaweed’s attention, infusing the ritual with jittery eagerness.

  He handed the actuator to Mach and knelt to expose the back of his neck. Mach swabbed the grimy skin with iodine, and then with the confident hands of a surgeon inserted the long needle in between his cervical vertebrae. The automated pump evacuated the ampoule into Sava’s neck. He let out a pleasure-filled moan for effect, his eyes quivering in faux ecstasy.

  “All right, my turn,” Mach said greedily, handing the syringe to Sava.

  He was about to load the other placebo when Jaweed interrupted, his chemical urges overpowering. All the Nizari nomads were junkies; it was almost too easy, Sava thought. Back in Baku, he had to pay the local priests a stack of shekels to implant the teenage “witch” they were going to put to the pyre. It was more costly than he would have liked, but Morosov was offering a lot in exchange.

  “You’re curious, aren’t you?”

  Jaweed crept over and sat cross-legged next to Sava. “What does it do?”

  Sava shook his head, waving the curious Turkmen away. “I don’t know. It’s really strong shit. You won’t be able to handle it.”

  “Try me.”

  Sava gave him an embellished pitch about the placebo’s battle drug potential, nonsense about invincibility and foresight
, heightened reflex, etcetera. Mach found it difficult not to roll his eyes. Despite the overdone sales pitch, this was sensitive business, and much was at stake. They had to stick to the script. Swapping in one of the Illithium ampoules into the syringe, Mach swabbed a patch on Jaweed’s neck.

  He activated the plunger and watched the nano-machinery’s red serum disappear into Jaweed’s spinal fluid. It would take three days before the synaptic network would grow sufficiently to broadcast.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Jaweed said.

  “You will. Just wait.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  March 2164 C.E.

  The tent smelled of anti-microbial detergent, reminding him of a hospital. Sava checked the bivvy sack’s vestibule and hood adaptor to ensure the seal was intact. Inching down into his sleeping bag, the blocky LEDs of his console flashed 05:00, another hour before the sun’s fog lamp crawled topside. Shivering in his thermals, paranoid thoughts competed with grogginess.

  He thought of the Morse note and its message of doom, of being stranded, abandoned, left for dead . . . The Crown had a full year of rations. By then, if things got desperate they could resurrect one of Jan Mayen’s beached ships or flag down a wayward salvager hopefully. However, humans rarely ventured this far out into the “survivoshpere.” Nova Byzantium was the civilized campfire humanity huddled around, feral dogs scavenging the empires’ table scraps. Sava’s mind wandered to starvation. Would they end up like barbarians, cannibals feeding on their own? Worry was an addictive drug.

  They’d gotten a late start from the Crown the day previous. The men struggled. The trek up the cliffs to Jan Mayen’s Moon Mountains sounded like an oldster’s day-trip: it was slow and complaint-filled. Packing twenty kilos of gear, but crippled with a nascent arthritis, the men only managed a few klicks before nightfall. Bivouacked under a comb of lichen-coated rock, their campsite faced eastward to the sickly flanks of Beerenberg.

  Sava wrestled himself into damp fatigues and unzipped the vestibule. Half a kilometer up, the air was oxygenated, the tent’s enrichment adaptor only a precaution. He slouched against a boulder and crumbled off pieces of protein cake. The yellowed bones of a polar bear lay jumbled nearby. Setting his breakfast down, he picked up the ursine skull and gazed into its bleached sockets like Hamlet meditating on Yorick’s remains. Long extinct, the beast had walked to Jan Mayen on floats of ice centuries ago. Sava fingered its massive canines and gently set the skull down. Groans and coughs came from the other tents; the men were waking up.

  Mach caught up with him on the trail to deliver a message. Their radioman, Wilco, had linked with the short-wave modem at East Anglia to check the mystery man’s ARIN number. Decommissioned seven years prior, the identity had been erased or deceased—as was Alkonost custom.

  “Does Wilco have any other leads?” Sava asked.

  “Wilco, anything else?” Mach said, tapping his earpiece and nodding his head to the inaudible voice.

  “He’s not a deserter,” Sava interjected.

  “Hold on, Sava’s saying something,” Mach radioed back. “He says the guy’s probably not a deserter.”

  “Tiraspol keeps them on file for prosecution purposes,” Sava continued.

  Mach, annoyed by the simultaneous conversations, removed his earpiece. “You say he’s not a deserter, boss?”

  “I’m not sure who this guy is. Could be anybody. The ARIN number’s probably a fake.”

  “Why would someone make up a message like that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Nothing makes any sense.”

  They reached the northern cliffs. Like a chess piece, the concrete lighthouse rose from a flooded reef just offshore. The jury rig was failing, the lantern room’s lamp just a fizzling flash. Cursing the ankle-rolling ruts, the men shuffled painfully down the guano-splattered switchbacks to the shoreline. One of the recruits knelt to identify a set of footprints, combat boots but not Alkonost issue. Wading into the knee-deep tidal wash, they trudged over and climbed up a rebar ladder sunk into the landing.

  Like a medieval rampart, the lighthouse’s foundation was a wide rotunda of cracked concrete perforated by gloomy windows. The outbuildings and foghorns were consolidated into the construction, diaphones and storm halyards frozen by corrosion. Above the tower’s sun-bleached red-and-white painted stripes were the rusted lampworks. Faded signage warned of the radioactive hazard, they presumed. English and Norwegian were barbarian languages, no longer written.

  A stint guarding the Odessa shipyards gave Sava a rudimentary understanding of radiation safety. A quick search of a contaminated sight would bring minimal exposure, he estimated. As a precaution, Sava instructed the men to put on their hoods and not inhale or ingest the deadlier alpha emitters.

  “We need to form teams. Mach, check out the lower house. Take Yakiv. The others and I will head up and investigate the lantern room. Check your corners and maintain radio chatter, understand?” Sava said, loading a clip into his Vepr.

  Reaching the top of the iron stairwell, they heard the lethargic whirr of clockwork straining against oxidized gears. This was where the deserter—if he was a deserter—had camped. A metal bucket filled with burnt rubbish was fashioned into a makeshift stove, a midden of slimy auk and iguana bones strewn about. In an alcove off the circular room, they found the radio equipment and the LORAN’s transmitter. A power cable, spliced from the stairwell’s central pole, fed the juice from the mini-reactor to the radio’s oscillator through a rack of electronics.

  The deserter was adept. A soldering station fabricated from the guts of a high-amperage diode and improvised transformer sat on a rickety workbench near the railed landing. A flywheel, attached to a battery-driven screwdriver, was notched with the Morse message. LORAN transmitters weren’t equipped with modulators, so the deserter had used the carved notches to pulse the radio’s test mode, syncing every thirty seconds with the lamp’s rotator mechanism.

  “This guy’s resourceful. He knew what he was doing,” Sava admitted.

  “He was at this awhile,” added a recruit.

  Sava unplugged the power from the lamp’s sputtering diodes. Short circuits sizzled with black smoke. Despite the ancient facility, the polished glass of the Fresnel lens gleamed like new, a jewel on the island’s rusted crown. He removed his hood and stepped through a shattered storm pane to have a quick cigarette outside. Fog had pushed in from the north, the sour mist muting the morning light.

  “It appears the deserter has deserted.”

  “Where do you think he went?” asked a recruit.

  “I’d guess he was here a week or so, setting this all up. Not much to eat though. Starving and thirsty, he probably went off to scavenge.”

  “Are we going to wait for him?”

  Sava shook his head. “I want to get back before nightfall. This place gives me the fucking creeps.”

  Mach radioed from the basement. They’d found nothing. Sava’s team descended to regroup. They entered the rank-smelling reactor room from a stairwell, a mix of sour iron and ammonia. The chamber was dim, a small window and Mach’s torch barely able to chase away the shadows.

  Seawater flooded the floor. The reactor’s heat fins half-submerged. The ionized water swelled the metalwork with orange powder streaking the lighthouse’s turquoise wainscoting. Sava alerted Mach to the radiation hazard and warned him to step out of the brackish water.

  “That thing’s hotter than a pistol,” Mach exclaimed.

  The refrigerator-sized reactor heated the chamber like a sauna woodstove. Beads of water fell from the cracked cement ceiling, the plops like a cavern’s stalactite drip.

  “This guy was here long enough to repair the terminals on the thermal generator and junction box. Look,” Mach said, panning his lamp.

  Sava heard a heavy static—the hiss of radiation. He felt it in his bones and hair, an electrical shimmer.

  “We’re getting the hell out of here,” Sava said. “Now.”

  “But there’re a few mor
e rooms I’d like to check out down here,” Mach said.

  “I don’t care. Something’s not right.”

  “An ambush?”

  “I don’t know. Just a strange feeling, that’s all.”

  “Can you be a little more specific, Sava? This place wasn’t easy to get to,” Mach argued, his hood puffing in shouts. “This guy could still be lurking around, for all we know. Don’t you think it’s worth a few more minutes?”

  “Enough!” Sava yelled. “We’re heading out now, Goddammit. That’s an order, Mach.”

  They passed on their borscht insta-paks for a brief nibble of protein bars as they walked. Water was in short supply, and it would take a good hour to purify any. Despite a steady chorus of dissent, Sava forced the men to march on. His stomach churned with agoraphobia and anxiety. An urge to hustle back and escape the island gloom quickened his step. He felt vulnerable and exposed.

  They reached the island’s central ridge by afternoon and stopped for a rest. The fog shrank their world to less than fifty meters, requiring Sava to expend precious minutes to gain bearings. Mount Beerenberg—Jan Mayen’s de facto landmark—was shrouded behind a curtain of cloud. Without any visual cues, orienteering was instrument only.

  “No offense, sir. But what’s the rush?”

  “We need to get back,” Sava said, curtly.

  “For what?” Mach asked.

  Sava looked at him but said nothing. He brushed past the men’s shoulders and walked ahead; the break was over. After a scramble down the Moon Mountains’ tiered escarpments, Sava paused at the edge of a boulder field. A shift in the winds brought denser clouds to the highlands, the sun’s silver disc wholly obscured. The cold breeze wicked the sweat from the men’s fatigues and they shivered. Sava was having problems getting a heading. Another hour hiking south and they would reach the southern sea cliffs and the Crown. They would run out of island eventually; they had to.

  “Where’s Mach?” some one asked.

  “I just saw him. He was right behind me,” Yakiv replied.

  A quick count tallied four heads. No Mach.