Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  Uri grinned. Sava’s humor, while black, was never short on irony.

  The village was like most in the Caucasus. The ubiquitous hovels were of a flat-roofed brick construction, a small earthquake short of complete devastation. Terraced pastures, scrubby and parched, encircled the pathetic hamlet. Uri heard the anemic bray of goats over the shuffling jump boots. The windows were shuttered and the road was empty. No signs of life. The platoon halted half a klick away and rallied.

  “You’re senior officer here, Lieutenant Uri Vitko,” Sava said. “What’s the plan?”

  With ranks decimated by Turkmenbashi, mission intelligence’s tactical role was muddled. Tired and stretched, the covert force had transformed into survivalists, day-to-day meanderings without certitude. Nobody had the energy. Uri, grouchy with hunger, tried to concentrate on a plan.

  “I count six dwellings, a barn—if you can call it that—and a feed store. According to reports,” he said, checking his data log, “Fourth Platoon came through here two months ago—” He scrolled through the report. “—and found nothing.”

  “Good. It should be easy then,” Sava said, patting his webbing for a cigarette. Mach, armed with two Turkish faggots, pulled one out, lit it, and handed it over. “Or it’s booby-trapped.”

  “Always possible. Sava, you sweep left of the road, and I’ll take a squad up the right.”

  “Got it.”

  They fanned out over the area, rifles at the ready. A skinny dog darted out from the crumbling ruins, barking in a whiny half-howl. Using stone hedgerows as cover, the squads filtered into the village and crouched at the doorways. Uri squeezed his fist to get the platoon’s attention, then pumped it to cue the raid.

  A swift boot to the door shattered it into splinters. Inside, an elderly woman cringed, her skin like a shriveled apple. The place smelled of old sweat, sour milk, and smoke, a dingy dwelling lit by a lonely lard candle. She shrieked, trembling hands held to her scarfed head. Uri kept the gun on her as the men searched the shack.

  “Anything?”

  “Unless you count a paring knife as a weapon . . . No, she’s clean . . . in so many words,” the solder joked, pinching his nose.

  “All right. Get her outside.”

  Some one yelled down the hill.

  Uri ordered his men to stay put while he dodged through the dusty alleys to investigate. Rounding a corner, he saw Mach execute a long-bearded man lying facedown in the rutted road. Sava stepped out from the oldster’s dwelling with a revolver. The weapon was an antique. Fully loaded, it could kill just the same. Uri jogged over to the scene. A single bullet hole in his sheepskin cap, Mach had killed him cleanly.

  “What’s this about?” Uri shouted. “Why did you do that?”

  “He was going for this,” Sava handed Uri the piece.

  “Christ, Sava. You had him disarmed. Why the show?” Uri was furious. Mach and Sava were too itchy, quick with prejudice. Impetuous displays did nothing but encourage more guerilla ferocity.

  “You know why,” Sava replied.

  “What was he protecting?”

  They walked inside, toppled a pinewood table, and pulled up the floorboards. Burlap sacks of barley lay underneath, along with a few bars of oxidized silver, the man’s entire treasure. Sava brought it outside and divvied the grain amongst the squad, offering a few silver ounces to Uri. He refused, then ordered the remaining villagers to assemble for inspection.

  “Old folks. That’s all that’s in these Godforsaken Azar villages. Where are the men?”

  “Where are the women? That’s what I’d like to know,” said a mercenary with a lecherous wink.

  Uri lined up the village’s twenty oldsters in the center of the village and interrogated them. The babushkas lamented, while the old men bit their lips with toothless gums. No one knew anything, the same old story. Interrogations were pointless, the Dagestani Azars beyond stoic. Alkonost could saw off their hands with rusty knives, and the highlanders would say nothing, not a whimper.

  “Let’s finish our search, then move out. They’re watching us. I know it,” he said, looking at the black crests of the mountain ridgeline.

  They started their sweep when Wilco’s radio crackled to life. Uri and Sava crowded around the radioman as he wagged his backpack’s VHF whip. He flipped his headset to speaker mode so everyone could listen. Explosions swamped the static-drowned transmission. Over the yelling, someone transmitted a distress call. Wilco sifted through the digital sideband for the broadcast location. They were somewhere east, near the main logistical road.

  “Kilo-Papa-Victor,” Wilco said. “It’s Karpov. An ambush. They’re requesting support.”

  “Okay, let’s move out.”

  The platoon dove for cover at a burst of rifle-fire. The villagers dropped to the road and covered their heads with frail hands. Crouched, Uri looked around, trying to echolocate the gunmen. An excited yell broke the stillness. An Alkonost mercenary stumbled out from between two crumbling huts, dragging a goat carcass by the leg.

  “Woo! Yeah, mate!” he yelled with a goofy grin. “We’re going to eat well tonight.”

  Uri stood to his feet with the rest of the platoon. “We’ve got to move out. Now!” he hollered. “There’s been an ambush a few klicks away, Karpov’s contingent.”

  “Fuck Karpov,” someone groaned.

  “But what about the goat?”

  Uri sighed, exasperated. “You’ve got five minutes to clean it and dress it.”

  “We’ll make quick work of it.” The over-eager recruit fingered his blade. “No worries.”

  “One more thing,” Uri interjected, stepping over to the mercenary. “Leave half the carcass for them,” he said, waving his rifle at the cowering villagers.

  “You’re joking, lieutenant, right?”

  “I don’t joke. Now, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Prone, Uri propped up his bipod and looked through his SVD’s telescopic sight. Three APCs were blackened, hatch covers blown, desert beige clouded with soot. Burning tires fueled the pyres as orange flames lapped at vehicles’ skirts. A roadside bomb had torn apart the lead APC’s carapace; its mechanical guts spilled over the roadway. He panned the gorge for survivors but saw none.

  “You know how a secondary ambush works. I want the perimeter swept before we investigate. They wait for us to pile in, and then . . . ” Uri smacked his fist into his open palm.

  “It’s walled in, Uri,” Sava said, gesticulating to the narrow cleft. “We’ll have to skirt the ridgeline.”

  Uri sighed, already exhausted. “Come on. Now’s better than later.”

  No one had the energy for a hill climb. Fatigue led to poor decisions, and in battle, those decisions turned deadly. To save the platoon the arduous exertion, Uri took Sava and scrambled up to the canyon for better vantage.

  Resting in stages, the officers grabbed at the dry brush to pull themselves up. Following a deer path, they stumbled across an abandoned bivouac. Sava noticed the tripod marks of a spotter scope in the sand. A few spent high-gauge shells lay in a pile. This was the triggerman’s position. Once the saboteur detonated the explosives, the sniper opened fire to cover his guerilla comrades. From the scatter of tracks in the dust, they left in a hurry.

  “Long gone by now,” Sava said, poking around the site. “They’re probably dug in like ticks.” He squinted at the surrounding mountainside. “But there’s no way to tell, eh?”

  “Give it some time. Karpov’s crew is dead; we’re not saving any lives,” Uri said, looking at the smoldering wreckage through his riflescope. “Just bodies, no movement. I have to hand it to these mountain troglodytes; they’re fucking efficient.”

  They leaned against a boulder, sat, and waited. Uri took a sip of filtered water, then handed his canteen bag to Sava. After taking a gulp, he set the canvas down and pulled out the half-smoked cigarette Mach had given him earlier. Relighting the stale fag, he bellowed his lungs, then passed it to Uri. After few puffs, Uri felt the chronic hunger subs
ide with the nicotine high.

  The sundogs were greener than usual. More methane in the atmosphere, the gas pumped up the phantom suns’ refraction intensity. As dusk settled in, haze filled the valley and obscured the stratospheric halos. Uri looked up and saw the flicker of the orbital caliphate. Like the pocked-gray Moon, it was a permanent fixture in the night’s sky. Uri accepted humanity’s presence in the celestial, almost without question, even though the sheikhdom remained a tantalizing mystery.

  “There . . . ” Uri nudged Sava, then pointed. “Do you see it?”

  “See what?”

  Like an oil bead on a horsehair, a pinprick of reflected sunlight moved up through the southern mesosphere. Both watched as it shimmered like a gemstone, twinkling with a rainbow of color.

  “It’s the elevator,” Uri explained.

  Sava gazed into the sky, mouth slack. “I didn’t think it was possible to see it.”

  “The light has to be just right to catch it,” he passed the cigarette back to Sava. “Rumor is they’re hiring professional soldiers.”

  “I heard. Remember Flight 2312, that An-26 reconnaissance plane that disappeared near Assyria?”

  Uri nodded.

  “Twenty men aboard. Word is they deserted to the Al Fadah Madina. One of them was my specialist Demitri. That guy was always a bit cagey.”

  “Command’s started public beheadings in Cossack Point, a public relations campaign to stop deserters. It’s the shape of things to come, I’m afraid. Nova Byzantium is crumbling.”

  The empire’s mercenary contracts shrank as Nova Byzantium’s Pax Romana dissolved. The days of bold hegemony, like Moldova’s Operation Trajan, were no more. Nova Byzantium’s coffers dwindled without replenishment, forcing Alkonost into threadbare contracts. Dragging through poorly funded campaigns like Dagestan, Tiraspol was buckling under Nova Byzantium’s insolvency. In another century, Uri guessed, the world’s last empire would be just that.

  “I’m not so sure, lieutenant,” Sava argued. “This is a dry spell, sure, Turkmenbashi was a disaster, but Tiraspol’s been working contracts out west—outside the empire. East Anglia’s picking up work in Hibernia.”

  “Barbarian bullshit. More of this,” he said, pointing at the burnt husks below. “When Nova Byzantium falls, so will Alkonost. Without sponsorship, we’ll be no better off than these Neanderthals.”

  “I’ll never be like them,” Sava said, brow furrowed and indignant. “Not a fucking chance. I’d do this work for free.”

  In the waning light, Sava’s eyes drooped. Uri noticed he’d removed his vampire fangs and replaced them with a discolored bridge. He was hardly recognizable from the chessboard’s towering black nosferatu.

  They waited as the burnished Moon rose over the eastern ranges. Uri activated the scope’s starlight and took another look around the valley. He saw the platoon loitering a klick up the road, pixilated blobs of idle movement. Panning over to the ambush site, a white flash swamped the optical amplifiers. A second later, he heard the stutter of gunfire.

  “Is it an ammo box or something?”

  “No. There’s someone near the wreckage, shooting,” Uri replied.

  He reset the scope and looked again. Sava radioed down to the platoon and dispatched Mach and a few men to investigate. Uri watched the Alkonost approach the scene. Rifles ready, the men used the ditches for cover.

  “Let’s move.”

  Near the canyon floor, Uri heard another exchange of gunfire followed by harsh shouts. When they joined the platoon, an aureole of glow sticks encircled the rear of the APC’s remains. In the center was a man, half alive and severely burned.

  “Who is he?”

  “The lone survivor, the machine gunner; he crawled out from the wreckage and hunkered down until nightfall,” Mach explained. “He must have seen us, or heard us, and started firing. So we fired back.”

  Uri crouched next to the man. His abdomen percolated with black-purple, bleeding out, dying. Dilated eyes barely moved in the chlorophyll light. Uri lightly slapped his face.

  “Wake up. Who are you? Where’s Colonel Karpov? Was anyone taken prisoner?”

  “I’m Lipko,” he croaked. “Everyone’s dead. No prisoners.”

  “Where’s your base?” Sava said, shouldering in.

  The man pointed up the valley, his hand shaking. “Five kilometers . . . the pass . . . Echo-Bravo.”

  The medic shuffled in to attend to the dying gunner with morphine and clotting powder. The platoon dallied as the doc went about his work. The goat killer, along with his mates, sliced chunks of meat and laid them out over the APC’s sizzling scrap. Despite the reek of burning tire, the kebabs smelled amazing. Uri felt his stomach lurch.

  “He’s dead,” said the medic, putting away his kit. “That bullet did him a favor; we’re almost out of antibiotics. Those burns of his . . . infection, slow death, misery.”

  Uri shrugged, a mouth full of leg shank. “Wilco, have you found Echo-Bravo yet?”

  “Just about . . . ”

  The radioman dialed in the locator with his shortwave and decrypted the repeater’s sideband. Peering into the LCD, he read off the longitude and latitude. Uri loaded the coordinates into his inertial compass, plotting their route from Sava’s unfolded map.

  “So this is where Karpov’s been hiding,” Uri said, pointing at contours of the map’s dusty folds. “Nice digs, out of the way, good vantage.”

  “The Echo-Bravo bunker, it’s a Russian installation from the Federation Era,” Sava added.

  “Good enough place to catch some rest. Let’s move out.”

  The turrets tracked the platoon as they snaked up the switchbacks with nervous eyes. Echo-Bravo’s robotic cannons remained armed and activated. A quick uplink to Kunzach’s modem updated the platoon’s IFF codes, allowing the mercenaries to pass through the twitchy cannon perimeter.

  Reaching the summit, Uri sighed in relief.

  The hilltop bunker was deserted. Perched on a mountain, the redoubt loomed over the pass below. Spetsnaz’s combat engineers had built the barbican to last, its rebar-packed concrete a triumph of the Pre-Shock. A quick blast from an oxy/acetylene torch broke the door’s titanium latch. Sava pulled the door wide and felt the over-pressure of filtered air. Uri shouted down the stairwell, but heard no answer. The platoon quickly filed in, anxious to get out of the predawn cold.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me?”

  “Look at this place.”

  “Colonel Karpov’s been busy.”

  Inside the labyrinth was a trove of loot stuffed into lockers and ammo closets. The food was everyone’s focus: insta-paks, cured meat, dried fruit, and yeasty bread. The men dove in, ripping apart the burlap and gorging themselves on the surplus. Stupefied, Uri took inventory. Along with the provisions, crates of purloined ammunition, medical supplies, and freshly pressed uniforms filled the bunker’s lower dormitories. So cramped and full, Echo-Bravo was a maze.

  Uri forced open the flimsy door near the generator cage and discovered a storeroom packed with rolls of Kaitag, ancient embroidered textiles. Another closet held wooden curios, palladium bars, and museum-quality Persian jewelry. Sava handed Uri a balsa box filled with Thrace cigars, only slightly dried. He sniffed it, lit one, then sat back and watched the free-for-all.

  Hours passed. Too tired to crawl into bed, Uri sat in the bunker’s command room, smoked a cigar, and sipped a bottle of exotic Glenkinchie. The men had rebuilt the bunker’s water pump, the rattling pipes filled with super-heated water. After well-deserved showers, the platoon crawled into the dormitory’s fresh-sheeted cots. It was early morning, the blast shutters filled with the yellow-green of sunrise.

  “You’re miles away,” Sava said half-drunk, doddering near Echo-Bravo’s sally port. “What’s got into you?”

  Uri refocused his blank eyes as he surfaced from his fugue. “What time is it? Was I asleep?”

  “Didn’t look like it.” Sava turned around a folding chair and sat down. “The thousand
- kilometer stare . . . You were seeing through space and time, comrade.”

  “This place . . . ” Uri said, handing Sava his whisky bottle. “It looks like we’ve identified our logistical bottleneck, eh? Fucking Karpov.”

  Sava shrugged. “His loss, our gain. It’s hard to complain now.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “Mercenaries are always working side jobs like this, Uri. Command knows it. Everyone knows it. And there’s not much they can do about it; it’s an Alkonost thing.”

  “You really don’t find all this—” Uri said, motioning to the spoil heaps. “—offensive? This son-of-a-bitch’s been thieving from us for months. We’ve been out there starving all goddamned winter, and he was just—”

  “He got what’s coming to him, didn’t he?”

  “Small comfort,” Uri said, gnawing his cigar. “I don’t know about Alkonost anymore. Civilization’s last line, slogging away in the slag, defending Nova Byzantium from the barbarian menace—that used to be the idea. But now . . . ”

  “We’re mercenaries, Uri, like the Greek hoplites of Asia Minor—one of the ‘Ten Thousand’ units—paid to fight the battles of foreign kings and all that shit. It’s the same as it’s always been. Nothing changes.” He took another swig of the single malt, admiring its sepia label. “Speaking of side jobs, Mach and I’ve got a thing going. It should pay out well when/if we get back. You interested? Might as well get your cut.”

  “No thanks,” Uri said, dismissively. “You know what we should do? Get the hell out of here.”

  “But we just got here,” Sava smirked.

  “I’m not talking about Echo-Bravo. I’m talking about Dagestan —Alkonost—the life.”

  “Desert?”

  Uri nodded.

  “That’s a bold proposition, lieutenant. Alkonost’s a dysfunctional family, sure, but they’re our family, our people, our clan and tribe. Where are you going to go? Run off with those wild-eyed Arab cosmonauts?”

  Uri lifted an eyebrow.

  “Seriously?” Sava laughed.

  “The thought’s crossed my mind.”

  “Out there in the ‘Big Empty’ huh? But I thought you had a daughter at home. You—unlike me—actually have family.”