Thorne laughed, turning to look at Dushanbe, misty and blurred in the falling, poisonous rain. “Well, there is that.”
“Did I do it right?”
“Hm?”
“Lifting a corner. Derailing the conversation with something funny. I do it right?”
Thorne looked back up at him, and the corners of his eyes crinkled the right way, like he was happy. “That you did, son. That you did.”
*
Edane didn’t manage to do it again. The locals just stared at him, even when he tried to tell the jokes in Tajik instead of English, so he gave up and let the translator do the talking for him. His Tajik wasn’t all that good, anyway.
The Private Military Contractor Liaison gave out different jobs in the weeks and months that followed Thorne’s departure. Instead of just handling checkpoints like before, and going on patrol with Thorne and the other Europeans, now Edane and his brothers had to do the city patrols by themselves. It was harder, after the police strike in Kuktosh wound down with the government giving in.
In response almost all the police started striking, or starting go-slows, doing the bare minimum of work in protest. Sitting back and letting local militants scream and riot, leaving Edane and his brothers to hold them back from the parts of the city that the government wanted kept safe — which were almost always the only parts the rioters wanted to wreck. It got bad, really bad, when some of the rioters started trying to take over, declare themselves the de facto authorities. The dissidents, the ones being backed by Uzbekistan, they even tried rolling into a disputed town with tanks during one of the riots. Three of Edane’s brothers had died there, but the government was still barely in control.
Barely in control wasn’t the same as in control.
There had been nobody to stop it when rioters and protestors swarmed into the eastern camps, where the Chinese refugees lived after the Eurasian War. It didn’t matter that they helped farm and run the city, like everybody else, it didn’t matter that they were citizens too, nobody stopped it when the dissidents crying out for revolution lynched a dozen refugees over street lamps. Nobody ordered Edane to intervene, nobody did anything except wait for it to happen again.
The only time Edane got ordered to do anything was when a relative of a government official got shot, and then he had to go door to door in downtown Dushanbe to try and find witnesses, as if he was a police officer, because the police weren’t doing anything.
At least it was dry, again. Dust boiled up into the road as the street’s potholes took another car’s tire, rocking the vehicle like it’d been hit by a mine.
Edane and Sokolai were taking one side of the street, Esparza and Elavarasa the other. Edane had been talking all day, and getting angrily stared at, so he didn’t want to be the one to talk to the people behind the next doorway, but Sokolai had talked to the last ones, so it was Edane’s turn. He hesitated as long as he reasonably could, sipping water from his pouch, getting his mouth wet before moving on.
The local people dodged around him, left a clear space around him and Sokolai as they went about their business. Things were busy, today, but a little kid up on the sidewalk caught Edane’s eye. Walking back and forth in a big thick woolen coat that was wrong for the weather, stepping out into the road on his own before ducking back onto the sidewalk when a car or truck or something roared by.
“He’s going to get himself run over,” Sokolai muttered.
“Wonder where the parents are.” Edane glanced around, hoping to spot some worried looking women, or maybe men — men could be parents too, he reminded himself. Nobody. “Sometimes kids are out alone,” he said.
“Yeah, in the rural villages.” Sokolai shook his head. “Ain’t seen it in town so far.”
The little boy wandered up the road, checking on the traffic, looking for a place to cross. Edane watched him a little longer, then pushed the drinking tube back into the pouch pocket. “Okay. Let’s do the next door.”
“Right.”
Edane tried to put the little kid out of his mind, and Esparza and Elavarasa across the road too, and brought up his rifle’s stock to bang on the next door. It was a little alleyway, a dim little corridor. A man had opened the door, women were looking out. “We’re looking for witnesses to the murder in the street yesterday,” he said.
By the time the translator finished saying it all over again in Tajik, the people were arguing with each other, yelling. Edane sighed, and lifted his rifle to bang against the doorframe for their attention.
Somewhere behind him, the little boy searched for a way across the road.
11. Born Killers.
::/ Saatly Farmlands, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Edane Estian.
The sky wasn’t blue, but red, scarred by the sunrise.
Edane, Eissen, Sieden and Siegen. On the march. A hundred and ten kilometers as the crow flew, thirty of those down in six hours, with forty-five actually covered on the ground thanks to the terrain’s realities. The air was blessedly cool, astonishingly crisp and clean. Edane’s feet hurt.
They’d been shipped on a charter flight to Turkey. A big fat bribe had bought them the run of a military airfield — that was the way to fight a war, with bribery, but the crowdfunding couldn’t rustle up enough to simply pay off the old government and get them to fuck off.
Eissen and Edane had met Sieden and Siegen on the flight, between cat-napping and coordinating with the others. Self-organizing into fireteams. Sieden and Siegen were a sequential pair — Cyan Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six — who managed to be adopted together after the Emancipation. Neither spoke very much, but they didn’t need to. Nods and agreement got them further.
Most of their gear was stock — leftovers from Tajikistan and work in Bolivia, bought off Andercom and the subsidiary PMCs that’d closed down. The uniforms all fit, the camouflage still cycled, but it felt strange to be wearing someone else’s uniform. So Edane had blacked over the name strip with a marker and written his own name and production serial number into the uniform’s lining.
From Turkey they’d been dropped by a swing-jet VTOL plane, ten kilometers short of Azerbaijan’s southern border with North Persia. Other teams had been put down north, in Dagestan — still others were working their way up the southern coast.
Edane’s group — code-tagged as Hunt-Three — had drawn the short straw. They had the smallest distance to cover, the most direct route, no significant border fortifications… instead of one of the wire-framed collapsible cars some of the other teams had gotten, Edane got spiked with a needle in either thigh.
There had been only so much space on the charter plane, and the wide-gauge needles were a whole lot smaller and lighter than collapsible cars. They contained strings of slow-release corticosteroids, some kind of glucose mix that was supposed to keep his muscles fueled for six or seven hours, an enzymatic release implant specifically banned for use in athletics, and a woven chemical mat unfurling under his skin that was seeping new drugs into his system depending on the metabolic markers it detected.
Edane’s feet hurt. They weren’t supposed to, and his boots were strapped right, but there was fuck-all he could do about it. Just keep moving under the weight of the LAMW over his back, following Sieden and Siegen. The two were bouncing over the terrain at a pace that varied between a jog and a sprint, never slowing for longer than it took to flick their goggles on and off to check the sky before running on.
Now, as dawn broke, even Sieden and Siegen stopped in place and pulled their goggles up onto their helmets, blinking out at the sky and farmland before them.
The crop was young, a lake of rippling green stalks stretching up to their knees. The crop tenders were silhouetted against the changing sky. Black staves sixty feet tall, their mirrory heads turned to face first light like mechanical sunflowers. The tenders moved slowly. They were colossally tall and slender robots, braced on long arms that almost seemed rooted to the ground, swaying in the breeze, stretching and bending
, pumping fluid through their limbs with the pressure of the wind.
Black spikes against the horizon, as far as Edane could see. An endless thinly scattered forest. Their mirror-heads twitched, flexing to collect the sunlight and reflect it down at the ground, bobbing points of focused light skimming between the narrow rows of the crops. Each one focused on a weed, or tracked after a bug — sometimes sweeping over the scuffs left in Hunt-Three’s wake.
The crop tenders were basically mindless automata. Built to do one thing and one thing alone — kill. They did it slowly, or quickly, in an ecologically friendly way. Using sunlight to burn out individual crop pests, slowly scorching the leaves of weeds until they died, like a swarm of kids going after individual ants with magnifying glasses.
On his way past one, curious, Edane slowed down and shoved at its trunk with the stock of his LAMW. The tender swayed, the EMWAR gear Sieden was carrying registering not even a gnat’s-fart of a transmission from the telephone-pole beasts. Edane ducked under one of its thin side-limbs, and glanced back at it as it mindlessly used the dawn’s light to focus on a lost seedling, determined to kill it no matter how long it took.
Edane wondered what corporation built the robots, and whether or not he and it had shared any designers. If some reference in the crop tender’s engineering specifications pointed to the same references in Edane’s project documentation.
His feet hurt. He ran anyway. They hurt no more, and no less, kilometers later when the team encountered their first real piece of resistance. A black-topped road.
Siegen knelt beside it, while Sieden checked the feed from the plastic-cased panel antenna on his back.
“Solar charged smart-road,” Sieden announced. “Part of Baku’s road network. Pressure-sensitive. No idea if it’s networked into military intelligence.”
The light was clear, but Edane couldn’t see a fucking thing on the horizon yet. No skyscrapers, no sign of life, just dry hills and irrigated green patches broken up with more and more rolls of dusty earth the further he looked in their direction of travel.
Eissen remained silent, sipping his water. Bricks of ammunition strapped to every part of his body, the magazines black under the camouflaged strapping holding it all together.
Eissen was carrying slightly more weight than Edane, but better distributed over his body. The LAMW Edane had been given was an unfamiliar mass pulling at either his right or left shoulder, depending on how he shifted it on the body-strapping. He’d had enough time on the plane to get familiar with it, some German design he’d never met, and the basic mechanical principles behind the loading and firing mechanism were comprehensible enough. Even so, it threw off his stride and he hadn’t tried firing it yet. An unfamiliar weapon, even though he’d locked his MilSim LAMW’s scope to it and burned in new hardstate software chips with the fabricator on the plane.
The LAMW wouldn’t be much good against the road surface, though.
Siegen pulled down the cloth of his facemask, panting into the air — his mouth visible this close as a blot of erroneous heat marked up in Edane’s goggles with an outlined overlay. He didn’t speak, just gestured.
Query — move around obstacle.
His brother Sieden covered his goggles with a hand, blanking out the world so he could check the map in virtual space without distraction. “Bridge five-and-a-half kay east. Might be able to get under the road there.”
Eissen looked left, right — up at the real threat, the sky above. “If we ping the road, what’s going to make us look different to civvie foot traffic?”
Nearest contact — settlement — four kilometers — follow linear landmark, Sieden responded in four snaps of his hands, pointing alongside the road.
The Azeri government would have to have some fairly intensive search algorithms running on their road network to pick up and tag their footsteps as questionable, but the risk wasn’t worth it — Andercom’s EMWAR people would have set up custom AIs to look for exactly that kind of anomalous foot traffic within two hours, and the Azeris had a head start of nearly two days.
Hunt-Three had no commanding officer, no set leader, but Edane and his brothers set off in perfect coordination after discussing the problem for a couple of minutes.
The road was an anomaly in the landscape. Beautifully made, eating light to power itself and store energy for the contactless vehicle chargers along its length, probably lain at a cost of millions of nudies a mile. And the first crossroads leading onto this beautiful road was a dirt track cut out of the earth with spades, leading through a farm fence and alongside a neglected field laying fallow.
The second crossroads was almost worse — cracked asphalt that’d gone without maintenance so long it was really just lumps of flat stone, rather than a single contiguous surface. It was a side-road leading into the settlement Sieden had mentioned, a village, its main street patched over with tar and concrete, but still obviously neglected when they checked it over through the bulky matte lenses on their rifles.
The village’s name on Sieden’s map didn’t match the one on the beat up sign, and Edane wasn’t sure how to pronounce either of them. Perhaps the name had changed and the map hadn’t updated, or maybe there had never been the money to replace the sign — it didn’t look like there’d been the money for anything. The only reason the road looked like that was because it was part of the network leading to Baku. The place had been left to rot by the government, right next to a road that’d cost more in public works funds than had been spent on the town in its entire history, Edane guessed. Hell, even the automatic turrets laying siege to the village were cheaper than the road.
There were four turrets that they’d seen and tagged — a pair on each of the two roads leading out of town. No dead people in the streets, but the occasional flash of heat in windows revealed an uncovered face, and the buildings were warm enough that at least some of them were currently being heated. Trails of smoke rose from their chimneys, as though Edane had stepped back into an exclusively fossil-fuel burning society.
Four turrets, holding twenty times that many people hostage, keeping them bottled up instead of protesting, or running for the border. Not a nice thing to do, but efficient, even Edane had to admit.
“We can’t just leave them,” Eissen muttered.
“I can nail all four turrets from here if I have to,” Edane replied, head ducked to the glass part of his LAMW’s scope, not just watching its feed in his goggles. “We can clear it, take one of the local’s cars to make up lost time.”
“Like the plan,” Sieden murmured. “Me too,” Siegen added.
None of them did a thing except think about it. Muse on it. Oh, they all wanted to be heroes. Edane could feel the need churning in his gut — but none of the people besieged in their own homes were in imminent danger. There wasn’t any efficient way to deal with the problem they could come up with between the four of them, even if there were dozens of emotionally satisfying options.
If they took action, the turrets would lose their connections to whatever network they were on. Sieden’s EMWAR kit could theoretically link up with home for someone to remotely set up a man in the middle attack — replacing the downed turrets’ signals with a falsified one, telling the Azeri Regime’s network that everything was just fine while Edane and the others destroyed the turrets, but that would both eat time and open themselves up to signal interception by the enemy. And if it went wrong — there was a good chance it would — the Azeris would be able to send a few overflight drones to search for them. Detection was the major threat. They were even communicating vocally — voices didn’t carry nearly as far as radio waves, and couldn’t be picked up with EMWAR gear. As for the car to make up for the time they lost… that’d have monitors built in, and show up on aerial imaging much too clearly.
Something flashed red in the town, and a loud warning played — toned like an industrial hazard message, barking a few short words Edane didn’t understand over and over. Someone down in the town, who’d dared take a
step out of their own front door. A disposable monitor stood in the middle of the street, its warning lights whirling around and round.
The civilian, a grey-haired old man, backed up and shut his front door.
This wasn’t the mission. The mission was to run another sixty kilometers and get into position to move on Baku by nightfall. Infiltrate the city, tie up the Azeri army in time-wasting guerrilla harassment.
Edane uploaded the contact coordinates to their electronic person-to-person networked map — murmured commentary to it. Eissen had already flagged the town with a brief overview of the situation, Edane added his opinion that the place needed urgent relief and bumped it to high priority.
“Can you guys mark it too?” he asked, packing up the LAMW. “If we all mark it, it’ll Receive higher priority on the system if it’s just one of us. That way the system will flag it for attention sooner, once we update with the rest of the task force.”
Sieden and Siegen did it together — they’d never used a MilSim style coordination map before. “Like that?” One of them asked.
Edane checked, nodded, and folded in the LAMW’s bipod, slinging it back over his shoulder.
They cut around the village and found the short bridge keeping the road level over a fold in the land, kind of like an oversized culvert. They had to belly-crawl underneath, but got through, and set off running directly cross-country toward Baku instead of following the road’s curve towards the coast highway.
One of the follow-up teams would get rid of the turrets. Maybe a UAV, if any could be brought up. The village would be helped, in time.
Edane glanced back, once, to spot the white glare of one of the village’s buildings, then powered down his uniform’s electronics other than those required to keep his camouflage updated, and turned his back on them.
It wasn’t a good feeling, abandoning those people. Worse than the ache in his feet by far, but Edane ignored the guilt as easily as he ignored the pain.
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