Now Edane’s brothers controlled three airstrips inside the country, and reinforcements were flooding in every time they could black out the country’s air defense network. Which was becoming increasingly common, now that there were UAVs of their own in the air.
Even so, Edane didn’t risk sticking around.
He jerked the LAMW up, grimacing at the wet, hot, tight feeling in his shoulder, and lay it against his chest while he got up and left the building.
There weren’t many civilians left in this part of Baku. The streets were lifeless as he made his way out through a mousehole leading into a back alley. Even the trash seemed dead, lifeless as errant gusts blew it around.
He heard a pop, and his body tensed. Then it came, the stuttering bangs of submunitions going off, rattling the streets, shattering glass — a mortar bomb. Clouds of smoke billowed past the alley mouth and the building behind him creaked.
Fucking mortars. Edane shot them when he could — stubby pintle-mounted automatic things, installed in courtyards and on top of buildings, wired into the Azeri force network, relatively fragile if hit right — but there was always one more of them to drop ordnance on positions of suspected enemy fire.
Silence. Only one bomb had come in.
Just the one felt like an insult, but there was a lot of suspected enemy fire in Baku. The rippling roar of LSWs went off regularly, then the controlled double or triple-stutter of rifles, just like how Edane had been taught to shoot as a child. Sometimes he heard the occasional boom of a LAMW, echoing in weird ringing patterns thanks to their suppressors. The whip-crack of their shells cutting through the air were supposed to be a far cleaner, more obvious sound, though Edane hadn’t heard it yet. Didn’t hear it behind the gun, after all.
Edane limped through the alleyways, disturbing a nest of terrified cats who scattered out in all directions, so he turned back — he didn’t want to warn anyone he was coming, and a dozen disturbed cats would be more than warning enough.
He was tired. He hadn’t slept in days and days. Hadn’t seen the point in it, somehow — not since splitting up from Eissen. Edane’s whole world had closed down to mindlessly hunting and killing, and he didn’t like how proud he felt because he was able to function like that. Because he was efficient.
When the noise was quieter, and he’d found a quiet spot between buildings the mortars would have trouble hitting him, he switched on his electronics long enough to find a supply dump, and oriented himself toward it.
UAVs tore past overheard a little while later. Not enemies hunting down his signal, he thought, he hoped, but all the same he circled around and around before finally looking for a door into one of the waterfront office buildings. The first one he found was mined — he could tell because the door was closed, but the lock had been shot open. Nobody bothered shutting a door without a reason, without something to protect behind it.
Edane switched his electronics back on, no wireless except for his IFF, and moved the focal point of his helmet’s cameras across the door. The IFF pinged — there was a mine, and it was friendly, so he waited for the mine to authenticate him, and then he went through the door, shutting it carefully behind him.
Two floors down in the underground parking lot, amidst silent cars, a space heater was burning. Cans of meat hung from loops of wire just barely above the electrical filaments, their labels scorched. One of his brothers lifted a hand to him, standing up from a chair beside a bank of automatic monitors, flicking through images of the building’s surroundings.
The brother blinked, looking Edane over. “Shit. You’ve been out here since the start?”
Edane nodded. “Affirmative.”
“Well. Come on in and take a load off — welcome to Forward Base Gamma. Food’s there, there’s a tank of water down the ramp there,” his brother said, pointing at the vehicle ascent and descent ramps, “and we’ve got a field-hospital one floor under that. I’m Sipnitz.”
“Edane,” Edane said, unclipping the LAMW from his body-harness. “Armory?”
Sipnitz spread his hands in a shrug. “Hasn’t been unpacked yet. We haven’t been here long enough to need to re-arm. It’s over there if you want it.”
He pointed at a row of plastic crates, next to a rural cargo vehicle, open-backed with Azeri plates. Edane blinked at it, tiredly. “You get that vehicle on the way in?”
“Yeah.”
“Village surrounded by turrets?”
“Yeah. We cleared that out and told the civilians to evac. No idea if they did, but they let us buy a couple of their cars.”
Edane set the LAMW down, and more than just the weapon’s weight left his shoulders.
*
He didn’t wind up unpacking the armory, but Edane did visit the field hospital. It was a full telepresence rig, the doctor back home who treated him tutting as he cleaned out the athletic implants in Edane’s thighs, washing them out before gluing the points shut. “No more of those,” the guy said, manipulating Edane’s limbs with the surgery arms, running multiple ultrasounds of his feet. “Your muscles are getting beaten to putty — you’re so swollen up and tight because the tissue’s torn itself to shreds. Needs time to heal.”
“Right,” Edane murmured.
“See that bone?” The doctor asked, the screen filled with his face shifted to a rotating view of Edane’s innards. “Dislocated. And that Avulsion fracture’s much worse than it was in the last file on record for you, it’s caused some bleeding and swelling.”
“Need surgery?”
“Not immediately. For now I’m going to print out a custom brace for you. It should fit under your boots, but if it doesn’t just get it printed into a new boot.” The rig spat a square of smartpaper out at him. “Take this to the pharmaceuticals supply locker and dose yourself as directed. That’ll help your feet and your shoulder. As for the rest of the damage you’ve done to yourself, rest and corticosteroids are your best option. Please put everything back where you found it when you’re done.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Edane liked this doctor. Not so squeamish. He went and got the drugs, carefully following the directions on the smartpaper to open the right coded drawers, and made his way up the parking ramps, getting water on the way to drink it all down with.
When he got back to the heater he discovered it wasn’t just Sipnitz in the base, along with the two brothers he hadn’t met on guard duty in the building above the parking lot. Now another patrol had arrived back.
The patrol had newly arrived in-country, and were tired. One’s ear was almost torn off, the blood staunched with coagulant foam. His helmet, hanging off the back of his armored vest, had a white-streaked furrow down the side and over the ear-gap, a bullet wedged at the end of the furrow. A hell of a close thing.
Edane lifted one of the cans of meat on its wire from over the heater, dunked it into water to cool off, then carefully hooked another can by its key to replace the one he’d taken, and sat down to eat on the bench seats that they’d torn out of cars left in storage down here. His uniform — old, and beaten up by days of activity — was immediately commented on.
“Here’s a guy who’s been in country for awhile.”
“Uh huh.” Edane snapped the key off his can of meat, jabbed it into the little notch, and began turning it to get the thing open. “Hiked in, even.”
“Nice. Would’ve liked to do that myself. We got in this morning — been clearing the riot police out of the protest areas. They’re shoot to kill now, you heard that?” His brother smiled. “They put out an announcement — anyone doing violence to civilians is shoot on sight, and that’s the riot cops. They’ve got fuck-all for firepower, but the army show up real fast when they start screaming.”
Edane nodded vaguely. “That’s good,” he murmured. “Violence against the civs needs to stop.”
“Yeah. I’m Enzow,” the talkative one said, leaning back to show off the grey text on the front of his camouflage. “That there’s Scartho,” he went on, pointing at a brother hunched u
p over his meal, ears flat down, almost cringing, lost in his own world, “and that’s Sokolai next to you.”
“Sokolai?!” Edane twisted to the side, blinking. “I’m Edane!”
Sokolai looked up, amazed. “Jesus.”
“You two know each other?” Enzow asked, grin fading a little.
“Fuck yes. We were in Dushanbe together—”
“—This guy held me together after I got hit. I didn’t know you were still working—”
“—Where the hell did you get a new arm?” Sokolai laughed, breathlessly.
“Got it on loan. It’s good to see you, Sokolai.”
Sokolai did it first — put his can of meat down, and reached out. Edane reciprocated, hugging him, tight. A bear-hug of a clasp, squeezing so hard and fast it was like hitting him, before releasing, just staring at each other.
“I am so fucking glad to see you in one piece. I thought you might have died.” Sokolai squeezed Edane’s shoulder. His right shoulder.
“Still here,” Edane said. “After all, I’m just as tough as you are.”
Sokolai gave up on his current assignment by the time they’d finished their meat. Enzow had laughed, shrugged it off easily. It wasn’t anything like when Eissen left — no, there was a reason for Sokolai’s departure, and a good one.
They formed a new unit then and there, registering it as Pair-Thirty-One, and caught up with each others’ lives. Apparently Sokolai hadn’t been doing too well — bad experience in Tajikistan, during the revolution. Edane felt bad for not being there, for having been medevaced, but Sokolai didn’t blame him. From what little Sokolai said, he blamed himself.
Just like how Edane blamed himself, for most things. But Sokolai was interested in the MilSim — said he’d have to check that out, maybe subscribe to it. Was pleasantly surprised to hear that Edane was seeing someone, apparently Sokolai wasn’t in a relationship himself, but lived with some people, could kind of understand the impulse. No sex for Sokolai either, though.
After the armory was unpacked, and Edane put in an order for it to manufacture new shells for him overnight, he picked up his new brace — which barely fit into his boot — and went off with Sokolai to find a place to sleep.
In the end they lay together, back to back, warm and safe in a niche between a concrete pillar and a wall, two more levels underground, tails wagging against each other until sleep came, guns in their arms.
It felt good having his brother, here with him. Knowing that after they slept they could get up and fight, side by side. Edane snugged down, warm, and pushed his nose against his armpit, eyes shut.
Tomorrow would be better. So much better.
15. Check, mate.
::/ Erzurum, Turkey.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Ereli Estian.
After the plane’s dark interior, the light outside was blinding. The sunlight was a whole different color here — when Ereli had left San Iadras it had been raw and yellow. Here, hours later in the back-end of Turkey, it was cold and white.
Their rented hypersonic commercial airliner still had its Haversham logos on the tail, though the dynamically colored parts of its hull had been greyed out, removing its arty paintjob and helping it fit in with the other planes lined up on the military airstrip.
Most of the planes were commercial, since those were the air cargo shipping options that could be hired on a same-day basis. But commercial was good. They were fish-gut style transports, planes whose flight frame — nose, wings, engines, ribs — lifted off its cargo fuselage, leaving the cargo in place while the rest of the plane’s frame picked itself up to fly back with hardshell canvas covering the gaps in its frame. Typically they were used by tycoons, delivering their manually driven sports cars somewhere for the weekend, but they were just as good at hauling shipping containers on short notice.
The airstrip had an antique style tower, and an emergency relief aircraft was sitting in its shadow, belly-open, insectile fabrication gear churning out last minute gear and custom weight-bearing webbing for brothers stepping out of the planes. Two cargo containers were propped up on stilts, forming a lean-to over their contents — a row of metal fabrication shops, caged up with plasma arcs blazing, spitting out and crating missile engines for building a payload for the delta-wing UAVs parked on a taxiway, the crated engines immediately being picked up and loaded back into the other end of the fabrication shops by the engineers, already starting to fit them to warheads.
“Where’re our guns?” Eversen asked, turning around and around, while engines roared from every side.
Ereli checked his pad. There was a logistics map of the airstrip’s layout, even though they were due to clear out by that evening — ship it all into Azerbaijan, assuming Ereli and Eversen could install man portable air defense turrets around the captured airstrips, ensure a safe place to land their gear. He navigated himself and Eversen through the tangle and to a machine shop where brothers were already lined up, checking the printed tags on racked guns fresh from the printer.
“Eversen and Ereli!” Eversen yelled, fighting forward. “Our orders up yet?”
A group of eight brothers at the front of the queue looked up, faces sprayed with colored dye, and checked the tags rapidly. White passed Eversen his rifle, Pink gave Ereli his.
The weight in his hands was a relief. The boxy device was exactly what he’d asked for on the plane — telescoping stock, double-lensed above and below the barrel for easy binocular rangefinding, socketed and railed in case he needed to stick more gear on it. Eversen’s was solid-stocked, longer barreled, fed off helix magazines instead of boxes, almost a Light Support Weapon.
Ereli pulled one of the empty magazines off the print-sprue taped to his new gun’s foregrip, gave the spring a push, and slid it home in the gun’s magazine well. He looked up to find Eversen had racked one of his helical magazines, too, and was already dry firing the weapon at the ground between his feet.
Eversen grinned. Ereli grinned back.
“Let’s find bullets,” Eversen yapped excitedly. “And then armor! And let’s find that air-defense shit we’re installing and get in-country.”
“You get the bullets, I’ll get the armor. We’ll meet at the shipping stand and find the crates we need to baby into the country. Okay?”
“Affirmative.” Eversen turned, and started hunting down the small arms armory.
Behind the chain link border fence, the Turkish air force guards stared disbelievingly at Ereli and his brothers over their moustaches.
What. Had they never seen kids given free run of a candy store?
Giddy, Ereli ran for the armor racks.
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Eissen Estian.
The clock was ticking. Eissen bowed his head again, gaze-flicking through his goggles’ menus to reconfigure his camouflage for the sixteenth time. It fluoresced everywhere shadow fell on him, gave him the same even blend of color as the wall behind him, but he had to keep manually adjusting the expected enemy viewpoint instead of letting it use one of the automated profiles defined by the direction he was looking in.
Somewhere, someone screamed. Not unusual for this part of the city over the past few days — the war had mostly dodged these moneyed districts, but pent up aggression and dissatisfaction with the gap between rich and poor, combined with the complete disappearance of the police, had made for more than a few horror stories as people marched into the rich part of town and took what they thought belonged to them.
Eissen didn’t have time to deal with every instance of looting and pillage. There was only one horror story he was interested in now. Scharschow, across the roadway, flashed a thumbs up, and ducked around the street corner, backing up to one of the stone sections of the skyscraper behind him, melting into the grey. Their gear wasn’t good enough to provide camouflage against the reflective windows that were the fashion everywhere in this part of the city — the area put together like a cheaper, run down mimicry of San Iadras’
s Downtown and Uptown skyscrapers with the city streets dead and flat.
Eissen waited patiently.
The convoy purred silently out of the skyscraper’s shadows, swerving around a dead cat’s body on the asphalt — as though one of the feral animals infesting the streets could be dangerous — and continued on around the corner.
The road was wide here — six lanes. Impossible for pedestrians to cross, but the roads weren’t for pedestrian benefit — anybody who was anybody in this town had a personal car.
Ismayil Nesimi, president Nesimi’s only son and presumptive heir, had three limousines and a presidential guard armored fighting vehicle running escort, just to sweeten the deal.
The limousines were gaudy, snub-nosed things, long and thin and low to the ground, armored windows black, wheels all turning independently to grip the road as the silent electric things navigated the streets.
Eissen focused on the front car, heart thundering in his chest — he was practically out in the open, at one end of an open cross-walk between skyscraper lobbies. A hostile UAV hissed above the scene, a black speck in the narrow slice of sky between the towers.
Eissen waited, waited. The rough, almost familiar voice of one of Marianna’s sisters — Malinka — purred through his earbuds. “Stud-five and Stud-seven, incoming. We go on the strike.”
He huffed once. Twice. Harder, pushing air through his mouth, boiling the heat on his tongue away through his filtered camo facemask. Tensed, relaxed, tensed, relaxed —
The drone above them vanished in a scattering of grey mist and components, blast reaching Eissen’s ears a moment later, the cars slewing to a halt. The armored vehicle’s turret popped up, started tracking the sky. A delta-wing UAV jack-knifed around a corner, hovering on its own thrust for an instant before it fell like a bird coming down off its perch, missiles streaking from its upturned belly.
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