Baku by nightfall. That was his objective. He ignored everything else, and ran.
12. The Wall.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Edane Estian.
Edane limped after Siegen and Sieden, something wet gathering in his boot. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to show weakness, wanted to fight and fight and fight, but that wasn’t the responsible thing to do. Not right now.
Room clear, Eissen gestured through the flat-topped, two story building’s upper window as they neared.
Sieden stalked forward, his long assault rifle’s stock tucked partially over his shoulder, grip held tight, body turned to pull the weapon in close to himself and shorten its length relative to his body. Making their way inside with silent footsteps, sweeping slowly, looking for trouble. There wasn’t any — just a cat lying silent on a pile of rags, green eyes blazing up at Edane as he passed by. The lower floor seemed to be an office of some kind — desks and chairs, anyway — lots of storage. The upstairs was open, a long hall with working areas and weird horse-shoe shaped machines he’d never seen before, with needles. The map profile for the building, once they set up the weakest connection they dared to, was for some kind of clothing manufactory, but there weren’t any cutters or fabricators. Just the U-shaped needle machines.
Eissen thought it might be manual clothing manufacturing, but Edane, Siegen and Sieden didn’t think so — hand-made bespoke clothes were expensive, a big money business, and this place was a shithole.
Nightfall was coming. They had to prepare. Get updates, upload what they’d found, find out what had changed, set up cameras, prepare, eat, drink.
The attacks on the north border through Dagestan had gone well. Azeri army units had been pulled into skirmishes across the northern sectors of the country — grids labelled A, B, and C on the coordinated map with no regard for local provinces or borders. No deaths among Edane’s brothers so far, four hundred and five kills based on automated analysis of rifle and scope camera trigger-pull footage.
Hunt-Two had been pinged by UAVs while they were driving — two stabilized casualties, the rest of Hunt-Two were still pulling their wounded brothers in random patterns to nowhere in specific, attempting to get away from the area before the next set of UAVs came up to replace the ones shot down. Hunt-One had yet to make any kind of report at all, silent since they’d crossed the border sixty kilometers from where Edane’s Hunt-Three had.
The ultrasonic probe from the medical kit, and the doctor back home, said that Siegen had fractured both shinbones.
“How far have you run?”
Siegen checked his goggles. “One hundred eighty one kilometers, three hundred and eighty two meters, over fourteen hours, fifty-two minutes. Is that medically relevant?”
The human doctor stared at him through the screen. “No. If I tell you to take plenty of bed-rest, you won’t listen, will you?”
“Sir, no sir.”
She blinked at Siegen, confused. But Siegen had probably spent more time with his brother Sieden than humans, never really getting acclimatized to ideas like male and female.
They splinted Siegen — according to the doctor, Edane had something called an avulsion fracture. One of the tendons connected to the side of his ankle had partially ripped off a shard of bone, leaving it barely connected to the main bone mass. Had to be bandages, tight bandages, because surgery wasn’t an option. He pushed splint-bars into his boot’s straps, locking his ankle, too. Laced it real tight after cleaning the patch of skin and fur that’d been rubbed down to bloody meat by the fit of his boot — lacing it tighter didn’t make walking any less painful, but the support kept him from needing to limp. Eissen had the same thing on his knee.
None of them pretended not to be in pain, not to the doctor. They listed their problems as rapidly and efficiently as they could — she directed them to apply bandages and coagulants. Not a combat first aid specialist, but she did, at least, have a little experience with Edane and his brothers. She didn’t bother suggesting pain killers, and they didn’t ask. These weren’t those kinds of wounds, and they had work to do.
Bracing themselves with strapping under their armor, clean socks, tightened or loosened boots as required, splints and bandages, pulling out their athletic under-skin implants and jabbing in fresh ones to ease the nagging ache in their muscles to an almost pleasant burn — that would be enough. It had to be enough. They had to be ready for the night’s work.
The doctor checked their blood chemistry remotely, warned them that they were all wrecks in dire need of sleep, food, and water, and signed off to give remote treatment and advice to the next batch of brothers.
They tested the tap water, found it to be clean of contaminants, and drank until they couldn’t. Ate their rations, rearranged their backpacks, took five minutes to check their social networks — Edane’s mothers had sent a quick video from the kitchen, just a short ‘good luck and be safe’, Janine had sent something a little longer and heartfelt in text. He responded to both as quickly as he could — the MilSim team and Marianna’s message, ‘Don’t make us look bad’, didn’t need a reply beyond a click on the thumbs-up beside it.
The sky was red again, after being blue for so very long. Soon it’d be black.
Nightfall was coming. Killing was coming.
Edane’s feet hurt, and his back hurt, and the patch over his thigh covering the second implant site was bleeding a little more than the first one had. There was satellite imagery of Azeri kill teams moving north, no doubt there would be more in the city proper — soldiers whose whole goal was simply to kill Edane.
It was, he thought, almost exactly like the car ride to Grandpa Jeff’s. Being cooped up, and helpless, and knowing that there was a huge yard waiting for him and vat-grown globs of meat for the grill in the trunk, and that Grandpa Jeff was gonna come over and ruffle Edane’s ears the second the car doors opened again. Except Edane liked being a little bit hurt, and this time when the car doors opened he was going to kill someone. It was a good feeling. He hated that it was a good feeling, but couldn’t help from smiling anyway.
Grandpa Jeff wouldn’t like it.
*
Detection was no longer the threat it was. With hundreds of buildings to use as cover, and hundreds of random heat sources to blend in with, they even walked across the roads without much fear.
There were sixteen of them in the city proper. The faster they got to work, the sooner more of them could get in.
Edane’s first position with Eissen was a rundown office block, blowing the building’s connectivity node and beating down an Azeri night watchman with more patriotism than sense, leaving him disarmed but still walking with a clear message, albeit ran through their translators. Vacate the area. There is a public emergency services building three blocks northwest, attend it for medical aid.
Fifteen minutes later Edane was cracking a hole in the upper floor’s walls with an entrenching tool, ripping out bricks to open up a shooting position, while Eissen set up grenades in the other rooms to mousehole the walls.
The streets were relatively clear in this part of Baku. The protests were happening further out where the poor lived, this was the money part of town, the part the protestors were being kept out of. The part where the army and riot police were organizing themselves and handling logistics between anti-protest actions.
Three shots. One through a police car’s engine, the LAMW leaping into Edane’s shoulder for the first time, rocking back perfectly into position on its bipod, though the hydraulic shock-absorption cylinders were squeaking — too new and unused, the seals yet to soften. A second shot through an equipment locker in the back of one of the riot police armored vehicles, throwing shreds of body-armor and broken riot shields in a conical plume across the vehicle’s interior, possibly wounding one of the drivers, but not — Edane hoped — killing him. The police weren’t for killing, they wore, until the rules of engagement were updated, the wrong ki
nd of uniform.
The right kind of uniform had cut-glass creases and a speckling of color over one shoulder, an oversized visored cap — the semi-formal wear of a desk jockey, but a desk jockey in the army and wearing a sidearm. Sadly one life was currently not worth the seventy-five nudies each armor piercing solid core shell cost, so Edane waited a few seconds until the man ran for cover behind another police car, and then shot him through it.
The desk-officer’s body fell out from behind the car in a limp two-part fall, flopping with a snap like he had a brand new hinge installed somewhere he’d never bent before.
Something about the scarlet under the street lights made Edane’s gut tighten. Made him happy, sang in his nerves — the guy was barely a combatant, barely fighting, but Edane knew it was the men behind the desks who did far more damage than he ever could. He reminded himself of that, his thoughts gloomy, his heart and gut singing.
The suppressor locked over the LAMW’s muzzle dripped steaming foam, its baffles slowly spinning down and slinging droplets across the ceiling and floors alike. It didn’t make the noise appreciably softer, but it did transform the telltale thundercrack of a LAMW’s blast into a muffled uneven roar, different every time thanks to its dynamic baffles, which could be enough to confuse triangulation software’s interpretation by altering the signature sound of a given weapon.
“Anything else worth shooting?” Eissen asked mildly.
Edane handsignalled negative and pulled up the LAMW. Eissen blew the grenades, and the room filled with smoke and dust, hot even through Edane’s facemask. A hole grenade-blasted into the stairwell got them downstairs without entering the hallway. They marched over broken desks and computers to get at the mousehole the next grenade had torn through the exterior wall. Eissen kicked brickwork and boards out at the edges before slithering through — Edane unclipped the LAMW and passed it outside before following, the first buzz of UAVs in the air already.
Edane heard the uneven stutter of a rifle somewhere to his left — could only make out Siegen by the IFF querymark that popped up when Edane focused in his direction. Siegen adjusted his point of aim, fired again, the buzzing of UAV engines turned into the grinding of dying lift fans, and then the other half of Hunt-Three was moving. Edane stopped in an alley to haul the cooling net in his facemask back up, cooling each inhalation and exhalation through a grid of capillaried fibers that sweated water chilled by a chemical pack, both to help hide the heat of his breath and to cool him down as he ran with his brothers, leaving the shoot site behind them.
Edane struggled with the feeling of having killed someone for the fourth time in his life, because this was the first time he’d killed someone who hadn’t shot at him first. But that was the LAMW’s role. His role. That’s what he’d done on the MilSim field thousands of times.
The fifth time was barely half an hour later, backed up in someone’s bedroom.
The locals had been aware something was happening when their building’s internal network went down, and their commercial electronics lost their signal thanks to Sieden’s portable EMWAR unit and a remote connection to an EMWAR server back home, providing falsified signals to feed into Baku’s city network. Even so, they hadn’t expected having the dogs start beating down their doors. They hadn’t wanted to leave — who the hell wanted to leave their home? Many of them didn’t understand, the children especially.
“We paid for you to save us, we paid for you to save us,” a particularly young one cried at him, caught up in his or her mother’s arms. They were too young for Edane to figure out their gender, and he didn’t understand if the clothes and their colors meant girl or boy over here.
“This city is a war zone,” Edane told them through his vest translator. “The fighting is here now, you need to leave safely. The government will fire on this building now, you need to evacuate.”
Not all of them did, and not all of them supported what was being done. At least one of them, Edane figured, would call up the local police when they got out from under Sieden’s EMWAR jamming.
He did his best to find a room as far away as possible from anywhere occupied, far from where the people who couldn’t bear to leave, who didn’t want to leave, were barricading themselves up in their bathrooms. It turned out to be someone’s bedroom, a big double bed with pictures beside it of two Azeri people, a man and a woman. There was an ‘I love you’ cat meme picture on the wallscreen’s powered-off desktop. A hardcopy book, maybe the Koran, was open on the dresser — but the man was cleanshaven, and in none of the pictures on their walls did the woman wear a headscarf.
None of the people they’d asked to leave the building had spat on him because he was a dog. Some of them had called him that, dog, look at the dog, the dog says we must leave, but never in a way that made it sound like an insult.
Edane had thought all Muslims hated dogs. That’s what it’d been like in Tajikistan. Why not here? Was it the western clothes? They dressed like people dressed at home, their apartment wasn’t all that different, though every bathroom Edane had seen had a kind of bidet on a hose, or something similar for washing, not just toilet paper.
A perfectly normal family had lived in the apartment that was now his shooting position. Their skin was a pinkish color that was a little different than what Edane was used to in white people at home, and their hair was pretty dark, and some of their things were different, but they were a normal family and Edane and his brothers had thrown them out, and in case they had to come back here to fight later Siegen and Sieden were hacking mouseholes in their home’s walls for better room-to-room access, but without setting up any boobytraps — they’d agreed that would be wrong with so many civilians still around. One of them might try to get home.
Blackish-yellow plumes of smoke were coiling into the sky on the horizon, the protest barricades lighting up the smoke from beneath. Armored fighting vehicles — army, this time, not police — were rolling jerkily across a square about half a kilometer away, their dismounted infantry peering into storefronts with flashlights — not goggles. Edane wasn’t sure whether it was because they didn’t have adaptive night vision that would let a user peer into the shadows without the city’s illumination washing out the rest of their vision, or if the flashlights on the ends of their rifles were supposed to be scary to the civilians, but all the flashlights did was turn them into targets.
Edane spotted the soldier wearing an EMWAR kit only because the panel antenna wasn’t strapped to his armor, the way it should have been, like Sieden’s, but riding high on top of his backpack instead. Edane destroyed it, and killed him — hitting him so hard between the shoulders that his head broke off when he hit the ground. The LAMW shell cut through someone behind the EMWAR soldier too, but non-fatally, tearing through the leg before blowing a crater into the street surface further back still. Eissen let rip with his heavy rifle, killing five more in one stutter of gunfire, leaving a trail of bodies over the street.
Now the family that lived here’s window was broken, and an automatic turret on one of the passing armored fighting vehicles was spitting chains of lead over their building’s facade, breaking through windows and chewing into brick, uncertain exactly where the shots had been fired from but knowing which half of the building it had been.
Edane hoped the people who had stayed behind had gotten sufficiently low to the floor. That the people who had gone down to the ground floor had piled enough furniture against the walls, were sitting under their tables and in their doorframes, like waiting for an earthquake, in case the building got hit with something heavier than a machine gun.
Again, they left.
Hunt-Three struck again and again, at a tempo of around one engagement every forty minutes because of the time it took to clear out civilians and cut holes for exfiltration. But it worked.
The human soldiers were either asleep on their feet or buzzing on stay-awake drugs, chasing Edane and his brothers, forced to send out more and more patrols, wasting their resources on trying to hold
the city instead of hitting the protest barricades. UAVs buzzed over the city all night, getting plinked down one after the other by Siegen and Sieden, shooting so much they had to top up their suppressors twice with the water-polymer gunk that helped distort the noise and prevent automated triangulation.
His foot hurt, and all his joints were swollen. There was something wrong with his left hand, for a change, making it click funny when he bent it all the way back — so he didn’t.
Edane didn’t sleep, either. When daylight came the job didn’t stop, the objectives changed.
*
Edane ate a leisurely breakfast at ten-forty five AM, gathered with Eissen and Siegen and Sieden in a partly looted supermarket, while everything else changed, too. The news on the local pirate wireless, and even on the official channels, was going crazy.
Edane and the rest of his brothers in the city had been branded terrorists, a screaming man was bawling at the UN to sanction not Azerbaijan, but the government-backed terrorists now on their soil, blaming everybody — the Norteamericanos, the Western Europeans, the MACP, everybody.
Edane washed out his water pouch, and left one of his used up chemical coolant packs to cook in a microwave with the first sachet of the three chemical additives needed to reset it. Ate a sandwich he made from stolen food — cold canned fish gunk and rice cakes, choice limited by what had been left by the looters. Watched the clipped down news reports from the uncensored internet that had been highlighted as ‘worth five minutes’ and loaded on the operation’s chat forum.
It was hilarious, watching this Nesimi guy talk. Like he lived in some kind of bizarre alternate universe where his regime hadn’t just been executing protestors in the streets, hadn’t been grabbing people out of their homes. The UN promised a full investigation into the matter, which meant they’d get to it in a few months when everything was over, the uninvolved governments promised full cooperation, and the MACP sent one of the Tri-Corporate Special Interest Group PR people to explain to Azerbaijan’s government, patiently, that the Tri-Corp’s charters did not allow it to interrupt legitimate commercial activities, and that all persons recorded as leaving the MACP with firearms were duly accredited and certified, and that their identities and further details could be applied for in a freedom of information request which would be processed after ninety days due to one of the trade secrets protection acts.
Dog Country Page 16