In short, go fuck yourself and apply for the information like the rest of the public and ethics watchdogs had, sending in the correct forms and everything. Edane wasn’t nervous — he had combatant licensing, he’d signed his liability of litigation waivers. The only sticky part was whether or not his employers — the brothers running the crowdfunding — had any authority to employ him, but that was their legal responsibility, not his. Unless he deviated from their rules of engagement, of course, or if he followed rules of engagement that weren’t legal, like shooting non-combatants.
The part that wasn’t funny was what the Azeri Regime were doing inside the country.
They were taking civilians hostage. The secret police were rolling up in armored fighting vehicles with explosive reactive countermeasure pods on the sides, and hauling away one or two members from every family.
“We will deal with this disrespect for authority,” they said, seizing private electronics, searching for evidence that money had been sent to the crowdfunding addresses. When it had, they dealt with the disrespect for authority by taking whoever owned the phone to jail and bringing them back hours later, dead, in a zip-up bodybag for the family.
That wasn’t supposed to be what happened. What was supposed to happen was Edane saved the local people, and killed the bad guys — the government — and then everything would be good, and his mothers could be proud of him.
This was worse than making the family move out of their apartment so Edane could use their bedroom to shoot from. This made Edane angry. He hadn’t been angry for a long, long time. Not angry like this, anyway. He was angry enough to count the shells he and Eissen had left, and sit with a calculator working out how many he could waste killing people with before the next chance to resupply. He wasn’t angry enough to fudge the numbers based on last night’s engagement, wasn’t angry enough to say fuck it — he set just two shells aside for killing people, explosive unguided ones, and told himself he’d use them to kill the soldiers — the presidential guardsmen — doing the kidnapping.
Edane was angry, but he wasn’t angry enough to waste ammunition.
*
In the hours of daylight, heat was less of a problem. At least, the kind of heat that Edane shed — easier to camouflage it when there was sun-heated asphalt around. More brothers had arrived — Hunt-Four and Six had made it in after breaking down the northern border posts, dodging around the response to get into Baku’s northern reaches, and were in with the protest groups, talking them into abandoning the barricades one by one, getting the idiot right-wingers to put their guns down and leave instead of fighting an army with decades-old cast off weaponry.
With the civilians out, Edane’s brothers turned the protest barricades into shooting galleries, scattering terrified police who were left alone so long as they didn’t shoot back. As news of that little fact spread, the police started throwing down their arms and running the moment there was gunfire, whether it was Edane and his brothers or even just the noise of the army shooting someone.
That was good. Strategically speaking, turning an enemy combatant into an enemy non-combatant was up there with wounding one of them badly enough that they needed three or four other people to hold them together and handle medical stabilization — reducing effective manpower far more than just blowing someone’s head off would.
Better able to move in the daylight, Edane and Eissen made use of every opportunity to avoid detection. Walking over hot roads, their camouflage set to concentrate on an aerial perspective and blacking out to match what was under them instead of behind them. Moving at the same time of day civilians were, as they struggled to get out of the city or gather what they needed to survive — medicine, food, water.
Some civilians were stranded in parts of the city as the police and army clamped down, turning crossroads into sandbagged bunkers. Other civilians were outright assaulting each other — sometimes these were people who seemed exactly alike to Edane, and he couldn’t work out what their problem was. Sometimes it was obvious — foreign refugees, darker skinned ones from India and Pakistan, lighter skinned ones from China and the eastern reaches of Russia. Humans had a thing about skin colors, and in some places the refugees had been mistreated for years, and they thought it was their turn to mistreat others. More often the Azeris formed groups to march them out of the neighborhood, as if the refugees were to blame for the government — Nesimi had originally been from North Persia, not Azerbaijan. In some places where the political apparatus had fooled the locals they threw out and occasionally killed the refugees, claiming the refugees were funding the terror campaign on their city.
Edane had only shot soldiers in uniform and destroyed materiel belonging to the armed forces or police. He wasn’t a terrorist — the police and civilians were.
Eissen and Edane split with Siegen and Sieden, who decided to concentrate on local UAV and electronic resources, while Edane wanted to disrupt the civilian kidnappings. Eissen was willing, but didn’t think they could do anything. He was right.
The armed forces ran house to house searches, trying to hunt down protestors caught outside their strongholds, campaign funders, or even the locals trying to hold together their uncensored pirate wireless network. Edane put in an intel request for assistance in finding one of the broadcasting nodes, and within five minutes he got a quick verbal report from a young man with an accent he couldn’t recognize — some kind of intelligence and information support group that had been hired to help out the Liberation Fund.
It gave him a location. He and Eissen yanked the tiles out of the roofs of two neighboring buildings, making holes in the attics for firing positions, lay an old ladder between the roofs for building to building access, and set up watching one of the longest running pirate nodes.
When the army showed up in their armored fighting vehicles — the kind with explosive reactive countermeasure pods, so it was the presidential guard — Edane didn’t shoot them immediately. He waited for them to get out of their vehicles, start moving house to house.
He’d read a thing in school, which must have made the teacher who assigned it feel like a comedian, about Pavlovian conditioning and dog training. Edane had understood it immediately.
If you did something bad, you got punished. That way you associated doing bad things with being punished, so you stopped doing bad things. Do that to the soldiers and maybe they’d learn the way the police had learned, and start surrendering.
Two soldiers with electroshock batons dragged a woman out of a building, jabbing her with the ends until she fell down in the street. That was when Eissen shot them, two muddy roars of his rifle from the other building, and they fell over — the woman remained on the street, clasping at her head in terror, curling up into a tiny ball.
When another soldier picked up a baton from his vehicle, going to get her while they detonated smoke grenades, Edane shot him, with one of the explosive shells.
In front of his squadmates.
Pieces of him flew back out of the growing cloud of smoke, spattering across the vehicle’s armor, his bare arm laying loose on the vehicle’s roof like a pale length of bloodied rope.
Edane’s goggles took a feed from Eissen’s viewpoint, projecting an AugR image of his view across the smoke, bent and warped, to try and fit Edane’s perspective instead, uneven 3d shapes popping up where the person-to-person network’s image processing thought they should be.
Edane didn’t shoot the guys trying to go and find what was left of their buddy, and he didn’t shoot the one in the vehicle who was probably calling for UAVs.
He didn’t even shoot the ones returning fire, shooting at all the buildings nearby, shattering the tiles above Edane’s head. Nobody went to try and take the woman again, they left her alone to go back inside, screaming, so he didn’t shoot any of the others. That was their reward. So they’d be conditioned not to go after the civilians anymore.
Edane and Eissen left before the VTOL arrived, a gunship big enough to hold pilots, shootin
g explosive shells bigger than the LAMW’s 23 millimeter ones into the positions Edane and Eissen had used until the roofs caved in.
Eissen stared at him, when Edane explained why he’d only taken the one shot, later. Shook his head, almost disbelievingly, but he helped Edane do it again — though this time Edane shot the shell into the passenger compartment of an armored vehicle with the same serial number as one he’d seen used by soldiers who’d killed protestors on the news.
It might not have been the same soldiers inside, but it was the same unit — the presidential guard — and they had just opened the back doors after a drone overflight had buzzed by, turning camera lenses over Edane and Eissen’s spot on top of a building — but the sunlight had heated the building’s roof, and Edane and Eissen’s camouflage gear gave them the same colors, and they’d picked a low spot, pushed in against sidewalls to minimize their shadows. Nobody knew Edane was there. The presidential guard thought they were safe, just like how the local people probably had felt safe before the guard’d started kicking in doors, and then Edane had shown them that they weren’t.
None of the soldiers in the other vehicles went into the buildings to go house-to-house, looking for people to take back to the prisons, hostages to hold to try and make people stop sending Edane’s brothers money.
There was a lot of money. Which meant reinforcements, soon. On the discussion forum there were rumors about UAVs being available that night, but definite information was being filtered out in case the enemy had access to their tactical network’s lowest levels. Edane didn’t think the enemy did — the discussion forums and most of the software was the same as in MilSim, and people tried to cheat in MilSim all the time, but nobody had broken the encryption on a realtime basis yet. They’d only ever broken the encryption after the fact, long after matches were over.
Later in the day Edane and Eissen were asked to help deal with UAVs, so they found a position and Eissen fed Edane guided shells, which he fired off in bursts of five — going through a whole magazine in a single session, fin-guided munitions smashing heavy and midsized drones out of the air.
He tried hitting one of the bigger VTOLs, which apparently was piloted, but after he’d blasted a hole in the armored section that was supposed to hold the cockpit, behind blast shields that could lift to expose windows in an emergency if the cameras didn’t work, it didn’t fall out of the air — only turned and limped away.
Maybe if he’d used an explosive armor piercing round, but he was running out of those, and those were the only kind he had left that would get into a heavy drone’s armor block.
They went through most of their ammunition, killing UAVs giving the rest of their brothers trouble — there were almost forty brothers in the city, now, all of the Hunt groups except for Hunt-Two, who were still hiding in the hinterlands, waiting for pickup. The local reports, the official ones, claimed there were a division of two hundred clone dogs and offered a five hundred thousand Azeri Manat reward for information, which was about twenty thousand New Dollars.
A good day’s work. The night came again, and Edane had a chance to stop long enough to check his foot. The flesh was bleeding again, fur matted into his sock, his foot swollen into his boot so badly and painfully he didn’t even try to take it off to replace the sock, just cut out the wet part and stuffed in as much bandaging and gauze as he could before lacing it back up tightly. His collarbone and shoulders were bruised from the LAMW’s kick, worse than when playing MilSim because his MilSim gun had better hydraulic shock absorption.
For the first time, Edane felt tired.
He didn’t know how he’d explain to his mothers what he’d done over the course of the day. Hunting soldiers, not just trying to stop them, but trying to scare them.
He decided not to — instead he told them, and Janine, that he wasn’t hurt, and that things were okay. Technically speaking this was something called a white lie, which Edane had learned to be important sometimes, but it was true, really. He wasn’t hurt in a way that would threaten his health, only in ways that made him uncomfortable and in pain.
He hadn’t slept in almost two days. He didn’t have proper reinforcements yet, but they were coming.
He had a fight with Eissen. Not a big one, no snarling, but some shouting.
“We didn’t fucking achieve anything, Edane!” Eissen showed him his pad. The satellite imagery. A view from above of the woven wire fences lain out in a grid of cages, each grid square full of people — full of civilians. “They still took hostages — they still executed fifty people today. We could have been hitting their EMWAR antennas, taking down more of their UAVS—”
“We shot down thirty UAVs,” Edane snapped back.
“And we spent four hours on scaring the presidential guard. Twice. It didn’t stop them rounding up sons and daughters out of every fucking neighborhood outside of the protest barriers!”
Edane kept his teeth grit. So did Eissen. Glaring at each other in the basement they’d stopped in to patch themselves up.
“Someone has to make them stop,” Edane murmured.
“We don’t have the manpower to hit the Ministry of State Security buildings. So maybe we should fucking accept we can’t do shit about that, and help break their networks, hit their short range UAV refueling stations.”
Edane didn’t want to admit he’d been wrong. Didn’t want to admit he’d been angry, had let that guide his choice of objectives, didn’t want to admit he’d wasted time, didn’t want to admit he’d killed soldiers who hadn’t even known to fight back.
He didn’t want to, but saying it was the responsible thing. So he did. “I got it wrong.”
“Affirmative,” Eissen snapped — but he didn’t rub it in any more than that.
They sat in silence, eating ration bars, because they hadn’t found any food.
Eissen flicked through the pad’s screens. “I want to move to capture/kill work,” he said, at last. “Deal with Persons of Interest.”
“The LAMW’s no good for that,” Edane said, stating the obvious. “I don’t have the munitions to waste on individual personnel.”
Eissen glared up at him, and Edane looked away. He should’ve saved those two explosive shells for equipment, for setting off stored munitions or fuel instead of killing people. But he hadn’t been short of munitions for achieving support requests by other Hunt teams in the area, so far.
“I know,” Eissen said, and started unpacking the webbing holding the spare magazines to his body. He didn’t have to check them — could feel their weight, unlike in MilSim. Set the full ones down on the floor carefully, dropped the empties where he stood.
“You abandoning me?” Edane asked, blinking at the piles of ammunition.
“I’m taking a different objective. If you can find someone to trade the LAMW with for a rifle, I’d prefer to stick with you, but…”
Edane hugged the weapon’s bulk to himself, disturbed by the very idea. “No, no,” he murmured. “I’m keeping the LAMW.”
Unloading the half-full magazines one by one, Eissen set the shells down carefully in neat rows, keeping the color-coded tips together. Explosive, guided, unguided. “You don’t really need a spotter. All I’m really doing is hauling your ammunition for you, and we’ve gotten through most of it.”
“Yeah,” Edane replied, laying a hand on his belly. It felt weird, even through his armor. Cold or twisty or something.
“What are you going to do?” Eissen asked, picking up another magazine.
Edane slipped on his goggles, gestured through to the requested objectives screen. He cleared his selection — red checks indicating completed objectives vanishing along with the grey circles showing uncompleted ones. Picked through the priority list. “Anti-UAV cover, I guess,” he said tiredly. “Shooting down enemy eyes is still a popular request.”
“You’ll be okay alone?” Eissen asked.
Edane nodded. “For tonight, anyway.”
Eissen picked up his pad, thumbed around… and in Ed
ane’s goggles his IFF marked Eissen as a member of Hunt-Adhoc-2, along with four other brothers. “Maybe check with Sieden and Siegen,” Eissen suggested. “They’ll probably want help.”
“Probably.”
After finishing their meals, and getting the magazines topped up with the shells that were left, Eissen went upstairs and out into the darkness of the night. Edane sat by himself for a little, hugging his LAMW.
He’d done the right thing, he thought. Not because he’d actually done the right thing, but because when he’d been a child the trainers said that if he ever felt compunctions, whatever those were, he should remind himself that he was doing the right thing until the feeling went away.
It didn’t take very long for his worries to vanish, and Edane was certain that Grandpa Jeff would have yelled at him about that.
13. Hostile Takeover.
::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Ereli Estian.
By the time Ereli got back into the office the first commercial plane taking brothers into Azerbaijan — the Hunt groups — was still a half hour away from Turkey, where bribed Turkish military airlift assets were waiting to deploy them at the borders.
Ereli had never realized money could buy so much. It was like with money, and the right contacts, a battlefield became easier to fight on by an order of magnitude tied to how much money there was to spend.
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