He turned Srednoi’s head to the side. There was an entry-wound, almost lost in the mass of his fur, just over his ear. The throat-wound was an exit wound. The bullet had gone clean through Srednoi’s skull and jaw.
What the fuck was Skarlin going to say to Srednoi’s dad? Coming out here for this was just work, just getting back to their roots, it wasn’t even supposed to be dangerous — brothers with experience were doing all the point fighting, Skarlin and Srednoi were just there to operate heavy weapons, police the locals, they weren’t supposed to be getting fucking ambushed, weren’t supposed to be dying.
The armored vehicle exploded. Threw Skarlin away like a doll a kid was done playing with, left him ragged on the asphalt, a mess of pain. Pain was his friend. Pain told him he was alive and kicking. Pain was good. He tried to stand up — couldn’t. Tried again — still couldn’t. He looked down and there wasn’t anything left of him anymore, just ragged meat at the ends of his arms and blood pouring off his face onto the road surface underneath him, every part of him not wrapped up in body-armor gone — no ears, no tail, no fingers, one of his feet gone.
He tried to get up again.
And again.
And again.
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Eversen Estian.
Ereli was dead. Eversen lay belly down in the dirt gutter beside the road, bleeding into the dust and staring at Ereli, not more than ten feet away.
Dead.
They’d been talking and then the car got hit and he didn’t know who killed Ereli or how or when, but there was a lot of time to think between the CRUMP of detonations around him. Anti-armor rockets, he thought.
He gripped his rifle tighter, eyes fixed on the darkness around them, out left and right of the line and travel. Towards Ereli’s corpse and back away from it.
The last attack had finished off one of the armored vehicles up ahead. The brother who’d been huddled behind it tried getting up one last time, mess of missing limbs waving helplessly, and then all the fight left him.
Eversen grit his teeth, ducking his head.
It’d been worse than this. He’d seen worse than this. Support was coming. There hadn’t been any support in Tajikistan, in Tajikistan it’d been worse than this, the Tajik special forces had come and it’d been worse than this.
This was a cakewalk.
Ereli was dead.
This was still a cakewalk. Look at them, look at that contact there — Eversen lifted his rifle to fire — tap tap, and started pushing himself backwards along the gutter, breathing hard and fast, pain of the gunshot in his thigh close to overwhelming. That man, coming to inspect the wrecks? He hadn’t been wearing a uniform, he’d been wearing civilian clothes, carrying a rifle — not even any helmet, which was why Eversen had shot him in the head. Not even a real soldier.
Another rocket hit the asphalt nearby, the shockwave rolling through Eversen’s body like a punch — bits of rock stung his tail and side, skittered past his nose. Eversen pointed his rifle left, where the rocket had come from — thumbed the rifle’s controls the way he had as a kid, hoping whoever owned the gun had kept to the old system. They had — the scope lit up in a confused thermal blur, but there was a trail of heat left painted on the ground where the rocket’s exhaust had washed over cold grass and asphalt and along the wall of a building, and there was the point of origin, and Eversen twisted his body in the dirt and fired once, twice, three times. Ducked his head in fright at the crack of a bullet passing overhead. Pushed backward again, grinding himself into the dirt. Away from Ereli. Away from where his brothers were dying.
“Support on-station, hold tight,” a voice in his ear told him.
He huffed at the ground, trying to hide the heat of his breath with his body, for all the good that would do. Eversen held tight.
They were going to meet Panah Karimov. They were being attacked by irregulars — by un-uniformed combatants, not the Azeri army. Un-uniformed combatants like Panah commanded. Panah would’ve been able to guess the route, he’d done this, or one of his people had sold them out.
Why? Why?
Eversen and his brothers had just fucking liberated the country, dismantled a regime that’d oppressed them for decades, a regime that had been killing the people brave enough to protest, even throwing their journalists in jail. Eversen and his brothers had just killed the bad guys. Why were the civs doing this?
A face in the dark. Human, so Eversen shot it. He didn’t care who it was, nobody was going to kill him, nobody. Fierce heat bubbled up in his gut. Pride. Eversen was going to live and the people who had attacked him were going to die.
Support arrived — drones whining overhead, cannons blasting at the ground, pulping the earth into sprays of dust across the enemy positions, tearing men open and cutting them down as they ran.
Eversen twisted and shot as their attackers fled, grit his teeth and aimed, and fired, and ran on his shot leg toward cover even if it was only a hump of dirt, and fell into formation with his brothers, sweeping west, then north, then east again, clearing the area while the drones scythed past overhead.
They found sixteen dead human bodies, and body-bagged seven of their own after sending another eight back into Baku hooked up to Emergency Stabilization kits.
Why had they been attacked? Who the hell had they been fighting for, if not the oppressed people of Azerbaijan, like Panah Karimov? Why couldn’t there be peace?
Someone told Eversen, later, that Ereli had listed him as next of kin.
Over and over again, Eversen asked himself why.
II: Honeymoon.
::/ Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
::/ January, 2104.
::/ Edane Estian.
There was blood in the dirt yard, out behind the civilian housing row next to the security base, and Edane didn’t understand why the Muslims had done it. Why they’d killed that sheep with knives, pinning the struggling animal down, its throat slit, bleeding it out into plastic buckets.
When he’d asked one of the Private Military Contactor Liaisons about it he’d been told it was Eid-i-Kurbon, a religious festival, something about eating food with family and getting together in friendship — but that still didn’t explain why they mutilated the sheep.
It was cold, too. No matter how Edane lifted the collar of the coat he’d bought — too small for his shoulders — he couldn’t keep his nose out of the cold. So cold that in the mornings there was ice on the rare patches of grass, from the dew frozen solid. On really cold nights it even covered the dirt, a thin blanket of white, but it wasn’t snow. Edane had never seen snow. Edane had never been cold before, either, not with his whole body. He’d only touched cold things like drinks, been a little chill standing under an air conditioning vent, but never cold. Not like this.
He was far away from home and almost all of the people here had the same skin color, and even when there were differences — mostly among the refugees — they all went around in blocks of pale pink and dark pink and dusky brown, not mixing. Like there were rules here nobody talked about. None of them had genemods, none of them had even changed their skin to a new color.
The water wasn’t safe, either. All the faucets had signs warning about contaminants. Some of the signs were live and showed particulate counts, but most were just paint on aluminum with scanner codes to point phones at live warnings. All the signs warned to run the water without touching it for five minutes before using any, even in some good hotels.
Tajikistan wasn’t the same as home, but Edane understood it better.
There was always someone who said what to do, a list of objectives on the barracks board in the morning. Some of Edane’s brothers were already there, working with him — more were arriving at the PMOC base outside town every day. There were bad guys who tried to kill Edane sometimes, when he was patrolling in Dushanbe’s streets with the other mercenaries, and Edane shot back at them. Easy. But even if he understood it here, he didn’t feel like he belonged.
/> Edane lifted his rifle, shouldering it to shoot back, and lightning-strike quick Thorne slapped down the rifle’s barrel toward the ground.
“Hold fire!” he barked, just like one of the drill instructors, so Edane did, patiently watching the target pry up another stone from a gouge in the road where the old asphalt had been worn away.
The target wound back, threw it — Edane’s brother Sokolai a little further along the cordon line turned his shoulder into the strike, catching it on the dense ballistic padding of his body-armor, and started to lift his rifle. Lowered it, glancing warily along the line towards Thorne.
Edane wagged his tail the once. He liked being told what to do by Thorne. It meant he didn’t have to work it out for himself.
The target shouted something in Tajik Edane didn’t entirely understand, but amongst other words he heard the word for dog — Sag! — and the target’s tone of voice was hateful and angry. The translator on Edane’s vest didn’t say it again in English, so he couldn’t be sure, but he felt like whatever the target said had been meant hurtfully.
The civilians were protesting, and the PMC Liaisons had sent Edane and his brothers to help reinforce the cordon around the square. Ordinarily the police would do it, but the police were on strike and rioting in Kuktosh — a remote district of Dushanbe to the south-east.
Thorne leaned forward, his lined face marked out by a dusting of grey stubble under his jaw. “Hold fire! Safe weapons and leave them—”
Edane was already dry-firing his rifle at the dirt between his feet, magazine removed after throwing back the bolt to drop the chambered round, by the time the clacking of weaponry up and down the cordon line had caught Thorne’s attention.
The old man stared at Edane beside him, thumping the magazine back into place — weapon safe and uncocked, unless he chose to yank on the cocking handle. Edane blinked back, neutrally.
“So they didn’t just make you lot to shoot down protestors at the drop of a hat, eh?”
Edane hesitated. “Sir, no sir.” He held his rifle in front of his chest, fingertip curled over the trigger guard, well away from the trigger itself. “That man made himself a belligerent — he was armed.”
“The boy’s younger than you are, and it’s a stone.” Thorne gazed at the crowd ahead of them, its ragged near edge made up of people chanting in Tajik, waving signs. Some carried tools — shovels, the handles for pick-axes — but Thorne had explained that this didn’t qualify them as armed belligerents until they actually tried to start hitting Edane and the others with them. “Not a reasonable threat.”
Edane had been trained to kill with stones. Not by throwing them, and with larger stones than that, but improvised weapon training had taught him that stones were reasonable weapons. He didn’t correct Thorne, though — the old Brit didn’t like it when he did that.
“They send filthy animals to oppress us! Foreigners, instead of our own countrymen! Why? The government does not have the support of the people, because our own countrymen would never bar our way — they would join us and march!”
The speaker was impassioned, raw. Edane hadn’t seen anything like it outside of social studies class in high school, even if the translator’s flat tones deadened the impact of what the guy was saying. He was a wild-haired man, the black curls falling into an arrowhead around his face. No little religious skullcap on his head, like a lot of the other men, and he was cleanshaven. Young.
Thorne wagged his finger across Edane’s face, commanding attention, more for the benefit of Edane and his brothers than his own men — the other European mercenaries in the cordon line already knew what Thorne wanted. “Stay in place. If they start throwing things, step out of line to dodge them. You do not shoot at anyone unless they’re pointing a gun at you.”
“Sir, yes…” Edane tensed. None of the other mercenaries were responding. Just staring silently ahead — one or two separating out Edane’s brothers. Keeping them calm, as Thorne had explained, earlier. Making sure that Edane and the others had an example to follow in the soldiers at their sides. “… sir,” Edane finished lamely.
Thorne shouldered his way out of the cordon, and slung his rifle back, holding up his hand. “Excuse me!” He waved sharply at the wild-haired man — Thorne didn’t bother to use the translator as he approached, speaking in Tajik.
“You see? They send the foreigners and their dogs to hold us back from liberating ourselves, rob us of our livelihoods—”
Thorne pushed his fingers into his mouth and whistled — a harsh, attention-getting screech.
Silence fell for a moment. Even the wild-haired man was staring at Thorne now.
“Excuse me!” he repeated. “You would prefer to be policed by your own countrymen? The citizens policed by themselves — that will give you safe streets?”
“Of course!” the man hurled back at Thorne, waving a fist.
The ragged front of the protest crowd stared on, falling into the slow gibbering whisper of many people speaking to each other in low tones.
Thorne stepped back, gesturing past the cordon line at the jeeps the mercenaries were using as transport. “Well, would you like me to drive you to Kuktosh? It’s only an hour away, and your countrymen, the police, are making the streets very safe for the citizenry there.” He paused. There was laughter — nervous, not from the ragged front edge of the crowd, those waving their weapons, but from those further back — the ones simply bearing signs. Thorne went on. “They’re breaking into shops and people’s homes — not marching against the government like you. Are you so very sure you would prefer your countrymen to police you?”
The wild-haired man turned back to his supporters, calling for their attention. “Don’t listen to him, our brothers in Kuktosh are fighting oppression, it is only government propaganda—”
“I can drive you to Kuktosh right now. Maybe we better do that if you’re so eager to join in. Edane, restrain him,” Thorne called back.
Edane slung his rifle, marching forward, tearing one of the zip-tie handcuffs from his belt pouch, marching on the protestor — the man backed away in fear, fell to his knees. “No! Leave me, I do not want to go to Kuktosh, leave me be!”
Thorne waited long enough for Edane to get close before whistling again, sharp. “Edane! Halt.” The old man turned to the crowd, spreading his hands. He smiled, with teeth. “Oh, so he doesn’t want to go to Kuktosh?”
Some of the angry protestors stayed angry, some were frightened… some laughed at the wild-haired man as he got to his feet, stepping away from Edane, swearing at him — calling him a tool of Satan and a dozen other things, friends of his coming through the crowd and pulling him back through it.
The laughter got a little louder. While Thorne rejoined the cordon line, the protestors in the thick of the crowd started trying to get a chant going again, waving their signs in an unfamiliar alphabet Edane couldn’t read, a mixture of Cyrillic letters and Arabic swirls. Nobody was listening to the wild-haired man anymore. The boys throwing stones were skulking at the back of the crowd, not so bold, now.
Edane rejoined the line beside Thorne, rubbing at his wrist. Picking through his fur uncomfortably. He didn’t like being called a tool of Satan, even if people had laughed at it.
“Something on your mind, son?” Thorne asked.
“I don’t understand what just happened.”
“Lifting a corner, that’s all. Easier to flip something over on its head if you find a corner to lift.”
Edane looked down at Thorne worriedly, and brought his rifle back around to his stomach. “Corner to lift?”
“Make people laugh and they stop thinking. Halts their train of thought. Make a man look ridiculous, and even if what he was saying had being taken seriously moments before, he’s a laughing stock now — nobody will listen no matter how legitimate his argument.” Thorne hissed between his teeth, shaking his teeth. “Poor sod’s right. Mercenaries should not bloody well be policing this crowd, that’s for sure.”
Edane twi
tched an ear.
“You don’t quite follow me, do you, son?” Thorne smiled strangely up at Edane.
“Sir, no sir.” Edane looked down at his feet for a moment, then up at the quieter crowd, the signs moving in unison as they chanted their complaints — almost musical.
Edane liked music, a bit. His mothers played it all the time.
“I’d like to learn, though,” he added. “How to lift a corner.” It seemed like a way to deal with belligerents that Grandpa Jeff would’ve liked.
Thorne’s smile changed. Crinkled the corners of his eyes, now. “Well. Perhaps it’s not too late to teach an old dog a new trick, eh, son?”
“Sir?”
“That was a joke, son. You’re what, twenty? That’s ancient for a dog.”
“Twenty-one.” Edane paused. “I don’t understand that joke, sir.”
“Call me Thorne, son.” The old man gazed levelly at the crowd.
“Thorne, yes Thorne. Would learning to speak Tajik help?”
Thorne’s expression got crinklier. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
19. Fixing Potholes.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ May, 2106.
::/ Eversen Estian.
Dead bodies didn’t smell right, and Eversen couldn’t work out why.
They couldn’t find a morgue that could take all the dead — the city’s morgues were already overflowing with the dead, civilian and combatant alike. Instead, they’d cleared out a tiled restaurant kitchen, a big block of a room, fittings torn out with refrigerant equipment piled against the walls, door covered with tacked up plastic sheeting.
Sixteen sheet-covered corpses on the floor to the left, seven on the right.
Was it because they were old dead? No, Eversen had smelled that before, the start of decay and rot, worse. But these corpses were being held at low temperatures, their decomposition held back. The sewage-and-blood scent of bodies, always mingling with the perversely food-like scent of raw, torn flesh. Yes, there was that, but… was it the sweat, maybe?
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