There was a lot of money. So much of it that they had set aside a section of their temporary Midtown office just for accountants and bookkeepers to handle invoices and check funds and make the money move, which was basically easy — money shot off faster than bullets, it seemed — but keeping track of it was the hard part, couldn’t just weigh the magazine in hand and know how much had been spent, like with bullets.
Another part of the office was full of lawyers, now, most of them constantly on their phones talking with case history researchers and people overseas — none of the lawyers looked happy, but their end of the operation was more of a long term risk management thing, except when it came to negotiating for support from neighboring countries — nobody wanted to accept the next planeload of Ereli’s brothers.
Ereli didn’t see why they couldn’t just send more money to the Turkish military, bribing them again, but that idea made the lawyers very unhappy.
After talking to the lawyers for awhile, Ereli checked the project management system in the office and just to reward himself for helping the lawyers settle into the office, he assigned himself a fun job. Sourcing gear for the next plane out of the country.
They’d already raided Andercom West’s inventories for every piece of gear that’d been custom-fit to his brothers for the PMCs during the Tajikistan boom in business, and there wasn’t much left, so now Ereli had to arrange the fabrication of what they needed. He had to go to custom fabrications firms one by one, getting that guy with a circuit printer to start on EMWAR kits, this guy with the right kind of looms to start printing camouflage uniforms with chameleon circuitry specifications so they could recolor properly — that stuff was the easy part.
For every item not specifically for killing people with, there was somebody in San Iadras with an automated fabrication setup and the right kind of printers or automatic cutters and shapers to spool out the gear on demand, for a price. And since Ereli and his brothers were all the same size — give or take a few fractions of an inch, since different exercise regimes and nutrition over the intervening decades had plenty to say about bone structure no matter what their standardized genes said about it — he could order the gear mass fabricated without waiting for specific fitting measurements.
The hard part was guns. Bombs. Automatic mortars. He’d bought a license to produce forty automated mortar tubes from Hacker-Meyer-DeVilliers, but none of the fabrication shops he could find were either set up for that kind of heavy metalwork, or licensed to independently work on lethal technologies.
Some of the lawyers were working on that, but in the meanwhile, every small scale fabrications specialist he spoke to said there was one guy in the city who had the perfect rig for doing UAVs. So Ereli drove out to meet the guy.
“Saigon Salcedo,” the guy said, shaking Ereli’s hand. He looked like a rat. A literal rat, regular human sized, thin, with black fur and white hair. A clone run Ereli hadn’t met any of before, with a bunch of gold rings through both ears. “And that there is Glacier Fabrications,” Saigon said, with no small amount of pride, gesturing at his outdoor garage. “Oh, and this is my wife, Anne Treyer.”
Anne was about the same height as Saigon was, a skeptical looking human woman, close-cut hair… same set of gold rings through both ears. “I can’t believe you’re willing to do this,” she said.
Ereli blinked at her, at first thinking she was speaking to him, but no, she was talking to her husband.
Saigon flicked his tail agitatedly. “It’s all above-board, I checked, and you said we should do something to help those protestors.”
“Donate to International Human Rights or something, not make bombs.” She kept her glare fixed on Ereli.
“I’m not going to make bombs, and besides, it’s going to pay off the rest of the mortgage…”
The couple argued, and Ereli peeked into the garage.
White-shelled robotics were packed into every available space in the building, manipulator arms and tool heads, rolls of sheet metal stacked on spools, a block of what Ereli recognized as polymer printers. It was like something out of a dedicated multi-purpose fabrications plant — but Ereli hadn’t been able to get any of those to work for him, they were all booked up producing consumer goods.
After the married couple had finished their argument, short and snappy statements that ended with a kiss, Anne marched up the fire escape of the nearby four story house and into the upstairs apartment. Saigon’s energy ebbed down to nothing, watching her vanish upstairs, then the black-furred guy joined Ereli at his garage door.
“Mostly I, uhm. I do custom robotics for enthusiasts. That’s my specialty — scientific probes, recreational remote flyers, that kind of thing…” He wrung his hands together, awkwardly.
“I ain’t ever met any of you before,” Ereli said, blinking into the interior of the garage, before looking back at Saigon. “Rats?”
“Mice.” Saigon corrected.
“Mice,” Ereli repeated. “Well. I think you know what I’m looking for.”
“I can’t do guns,” Saigon said, spreading his hands. “Not licensed for that, but I can fabricate observation drones — I’ve got a construction cage I can set up, for assembling things that are bigger than the garage…”
“Can you show me this thing in operation? Get it to turn something out? Demonstration piece, just to show me the fabricator’s running smoothly.”
“Oh! Sure.” Saigon leaned in, pulling a pad from a niche in the garage’s inside wall, and flicked through it. Pulled down the garage door, before things swung into motion. “Gotta run it with the doors shut, local noise pollution issue,” he explained, and hit the button.
“How much did you want to charge?” Ereli asked, leaning in to peer through the door’s observation window.
“Depends on the pieces. Materials plus three hundred and fifty an hour? This is rush work, and I have loans to pay…” he swayed side to side, smiling nervously. Ears up, flared out.
The interior of the garage turned into an insectile birthing chamber rendered in sterile white. Pneumatic rams struck at the steel — the noise reduced to a muffled thud by the door and walls. Whirling arms tore and stripped, a blower fan shot the cutting swarf and metal splinters away with a blasts of air from the back of the garage.
“We don’t mind paying a rush rate. How much is the loan for?”
Saigon hesitated. “I don’t know that I should discuss finances…”
“We need armed UAVs,” Ereli said, bending down to pull open the garage door as the arms fell silent inside. He pointed at of the metalwork arms, the one with the pneumatic rams. “That thing can handle hardened alloys?”
“Uhm, yes,” Saigon murmured, “but like I said, I’m not licensed for lethal technologies…”
“We’ll buy you,” Ereli said. He reached in and picked up the demonstration workpiece. It was an interlocking set of metallic slats, with numbers etched into it. Six inches long, maybe. The middle slat came out when he tugged on it. Looked kind of like a schoolyard ruler.
Saigon stared at him. “Buy me?”
“Yeah. Hey, what is this thing?” Ereli asked, sliding the middle slat back in, turning the thing over.
“It’s a slide rule. Kind of an antique mechanical calculator. Now what do you mean buy me?”
“Yeah.” Ereli squinted at the numbers, trying to figure out how to make the slide rule work — he couldn’t. Must have been some trick to it — he put it back down. “Our lawyers set up a procedure for it. We buy out your loan, buy your business, then we run you under our license for lethal technologies. There’s a buyback clause, and we’ll sell your loan to whatever bank you want afterward, but in the meanwhile we’re happy to employ you on a contract basis. Three hundred fifty an hour is fine.”
Saigon stuttered something, blinking. Cleared his throat. “That, uh. That sounds kind of complicated…”
“Yeah, our lawyers made me memorize all that.” Ereli got out his phone, and wallet, and offered out the contract. �
��Here’s the contract they drew up, and here’s fifty nudies to hire yourself an hour or so of legal aid to make sure it’s legitimate. All good?”
Saigon the Mouse looked down at his pad, loading the contract up, and got out his wallet to accept the payment. “Uhm. Yeah, I’ll… I’ll call your people?”
“You do that.” Ereli slapped his shoulder, though not too hard. “I have another dozen fabrication guys to talk to by lunch — war on, and all that. Oh, and if it helps any, you can tell the wife that you’re working for those protest groups. They’re the ones paying for this.”
“Uh. I’ll, uhm. I’ll try that on her. Thanks.”
*
“What am I supposed to tell them?”
Ereli pushed past a hanging rack of body armor, the suits heavy on their frame, and struggled between the too-close together desks with a grimace. “I don’t know, Juan. Maybe tell them to get on schedule.”
Juan didn’t have as much trouble following, clutching his pad as he dodged the swinging armor before stepping between the desks with ease. Being small made the difference in a crowded office, Ereli supposed. “There isn’t a schedule,” he complained.
“It’s an expression.” Ereli sighed. “Have you got the intelligence contractors on the mission network?”
“Yes, but they want to know who to talk to. Who’s in command.”
Fucking humans. No initiative. Ereli grimaced, and turned to loom over him. “Congratulations, Juan — you are in command. Order them to find and respond to requests for intel assistance on the mission network as efficiently as possible. Okay?”
“Me?” Juan squeaked, backing up a step, two. “I’m just an admin temp.”
“You have a management qualification, right?”
“Yes…”
“So manage. Each field request for intel assistance needs to be responded to, make sure everybody gets some help. Teams in active conflict get more help, and teams resting or taking down-time can be delayed, okay?” Ereli chopped his hand out at the bank of desktops and screens across the office. “Go do it. If you have trouble, ask for help — don’t rush it and fuck it up, do it as slow as you have to so you get it done right.”
“Okay.” Juan squeaked out a breath. “Slow and right. Slow and right,” he repeated to himself, veering away between the desks.
Most desks were still unoccupied, but there were clumps of life. The lawyers, the bookkeepers — and now the liaisons, like Juan, managing contact with the hired contractors.
They’d opened accounts with Andercom’s intelligence services, UAV programmers and operators, and the brother-owned Private Military Companies that weren’t already involved. One of the other incorporation signatories like Ereli was already negotiating with some of the European PMC conglomerates, who had a lot more experience with peacekeeping.
The office felt like a madhouse to Ereli, but that was only because their employees still had no idea how to tell the difference between he and his brothers. If they had a problem, they grabbed whichever brother was closest.
He found Eversen in the office’s meeting room, where a group of their brothers were crowded around the wallscreen for a briefing — nobody cared about the pretty boardroom table, the map on the screen was all that mattered.
“After monitoring social media failed to produce meaningful results — too many Azeris are losing connectivity to their social media — we managed to set up a polling system through the comments attached to crowdfunding donations themselves,” a brother with unfamiliar dog tags — possibly Stelborn — explained. “The Azeri regime are more afraid of the banks seizing their personal assets out of the country than they are of us right now, so, the banking systems are still wide open. By using analysis on the pledging notes with each crowdfunding transaction we’ve identified support for these specific goals…”
An automatically generated bar chart popped up, notation tacked to it. Ereli could see that ending President Nesimi’s rule was high in demand, but so were things like protecting the protesters and halting the regime’s kidnappings — they’d started taking hostages to try and halt the flow of donation money. Rescuing specific loved ones, securing specific areas, those were popular too — but everyone had a different loved one, and everyone lived in a different neighborhood.
“As you can see, there’s a very large divide between the amount of money pledged, and the number of people pledging,” Stelborn said, switching between graphing it on a dollars donated basis, then showed it by a count of each person making a donation. A ton of money was tied into requests for locking down the parts of Baku the rich people lived, but far, far more individual people had pledged with requests for protection in the poorer areas, swept off to the sides of the highways and infrastructures.
“How we’re going to prioritize this, I don’t know — thankfully we don’t have any contractual requirements to alter the operational budget or our deployment specifically based on pledging requests, but I think we need to integrate these objectives onto the network.”
“Can we link it in like squad support requests?” “If you do that the regime might send us a million pledges just to flood the support objectives system.” “Maybe we can get a software guy to write filters…” Brothers began to babble, searching for good solutions.
Meanwhile, Eversen collared Ereli, drawing him out to the edge of the briefing. “You get us our assignment?”
“Not yet, but I have a line on some support work in the backyard…” Getting shipped into Azerbaijan was on a mission specific basis, and right now brothers, or teams of brothers, had to put in bids on missions towards specific objectives. As a signatory Ereli had access to money, a lot of money, but it wasn’t money he could spend on getting him and Eversen onto a plane. “The popular stuff is getting a lot of interest, a ton of bids from the PMC teams. Very well organized, we want them in there more than us. Best bet for getting us in-country is to take work going in to talk to the locals, get equipment where it’s supposed to be… same as the office shit around here, but on the ground out there.”
“That ain’t shooting,” Eversen complained, though with more amusement than bitterness.
Ereli got out his pad — well, one of the office’s pads he’d assigned himself, and showed Eversen. “All needs doing,” Ereli said. “And it gets us on the ground with guns. Once we’ve completed the mission profile we can find different objectives to take.”
“Just so long as we ain’t stuck in this office for the duration of conflict, I’m happy.”
The image on the wallscreen changed — a different brother pushed his way forward. Apparently some consensus having been reached on the pledging problem. “Okay, so, next topic. Tactically and strategically we’re getting somewhere, but we need to start talking about the actual long term goal here. Getting the cops collared and the civilians safe are secondary objectives, even if they’re important — our actual stated objective, and the one that matters, is seizing political power and dismantling then replacing the current regime.
“The lawyers want us to talk to opposition parties, find one of them to use as a replacement, but we’re already getting some hefty bribe offers from factions I’ve never even heard of, and I don’t feel right handing power over to these guys even if it’s clear that we’re going to have to accept corruption for now and beef up our slush funds. Now, since it’s not like we give a shit about international law anyway, I want to put forward the possibility that after we seize power we set up a transitionary authority based on polling via crowdfunding pledges until a better solution comes into play. It’s already a system we’ve seen that works in a military context — we just got hired to achieve a military goal — so we just need to set up a new crowdfund for policing, a hospital fund, a street lighting fund, all those civil services, then let the people figure out what they want for themselves until things shake out…”
“That couldn’t work, could it?” Ereli asked Eversen, squinting, ears flat. “Voluntary taxation?”
Evers
en shrugged, ears perked. “Be nice if it did…”
14. Home Cooking.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Edane Estian.
The picture in Edane’s sights was fuzzy. All of his electronics were off, everything stone dead. He couldn’t afford to be detected. Carefully, fingers trembling, he adjusted the tiny focus knob in the scope’s open manual panel. The view through the sight sharpened.
A pane of broken glass, a thousand hairline cracks.
Behind the spiderwebbed glass window, in a building’s interior three quarters of a kilometer away, Azeri soldiers. The dinner-plate sized crucifixes of short range reconnaissance UAVs were lined up on a table.
Edane leaned left, right. Pivoting on the LAMW’s bipod. His crosshairs passed over the corner of a workstation — he could see the screen’s glow turning one of the soldier’s faces an acidic blue-white.
Left a bit, left a bit more. Crosshairs on the brick wall, just in front of where the control station must have been behind it.
He pulled the trigger.
The wall shattered, brick fragments blown out to all sides in an expanding ring of grey dust, the broken glass in the windows fell away — plastic shards exploded out of the control station inside the room, the operator was screaming, waving a hand missing fingers, the UAV one of them was working with picked itself up and started circling the room’s interior like a bee without a brain.
Foam sloshed out of the end of the LAMW’s suppressor, boiling steam as it bubbled up.
Edane’s ears rang.
His foot hurt even worse, now.
He’d spent what felt like days alone, hunting equipment, network gear. Killing EMWAR operators while destroying their kit, steadily working toward completing his assigned objectives as coldly and cleanly as possible, without giving in to the urge to cause mayhem, simply to kill, as had been acceptable in the first few nights.
The first night’s objective — to force the Azeri army into overdeploying, stretching thin, running itself ragged to deal with a threat perceived to be much, much larger than the hunt groups — had been achieved.
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