The child exploded.
Dusty tan smoke billowed across the road, alarms blazed everywhere, the air punched Edane in the lungs and shoved him against the doorframe, something stung his finger, women screamed — the screaming always came first after a detonation. That high pitched wail after the bass thud. A quarter of the opposite side of the street vanished into the smoke, the sickly-sweet bleach smell of improvised explosives invading Edane’s nose.
Falling glass bounced off the road, the cars screaming as they slewed to a halt. The few automatics on the road veered instantly to the curbside with hazard yellows flashing and warning alarms blazing.
Edane ran — stopped, dodging back as a manually driven car slashed past, its driver’s eyes white-ringed with fear. Sokolai pushed past him, yelling, “Stay down! Everyone stay down, it’s going to be alright!”
Heart hammering into his throat, his body sore from impact, left hand somehow bleeding, Edane pushed into the dirty smog, coughing even as it cleared.
A small pair of legs lay in the street, clothes stripped away. An arm. A howling Tajik man in western clothes stumbled away, the left side of his body all ragged red flesh and pockmarked skin, as if he’d been sandblasted, dust covering him. Elavarasa was sprawled in a mess of gore, his armor torn open, the lower half of his muzzle torn open, everything torn open, teeth visible through his throat.
The child had exploded. A suicide bomb? A child? Edane hadn’t seen a trigger in the boy’s hand. Remote detonated?
“EM-STAB, where’s the fucking EM-STAB?” Esparza screamed.
Sokolai helped Esparza, tying off emergency tourniquets on Elavarasa’s bleeding arms, his fingers gone.
The locals screamed, huddling in groups on the streets, running from their cars. If there was another bomb… Edane ran, breath howling through his lungs, tore the emergency stabilization kit off the back of their jeep, and tossed it down while Esparza called the Private Military Liaison Office, begging for medevac.
There was no one to shoot, no enemy, just wails of pain. Edane approached one of the wounded, the man who’d stumbled to the ground, blood pooling under him from his shredded skin.
“Let me help,” Edane said, reaching for his first aid pack.
“No, no, stay away from me!” He swiped his hand viciously, eyes wild as he saw Edane’s blood, lost his balance and fell back on the pavement, groaning.
Edane didn’t understand. He knew the Muslims thought he was dirty, that dogs were dirty, but he only wanted to help.
“Please, let me.” A younger woman, clad in the Muslim full black veil, just her eyes peeking out. She froze, hesitant, holding out her hands — which were bare.
Edane tore open the aid kit, and set it carefully in her hands.
She didn’t flinch away from touching him, though she carefully wiped his blood from the kit with her sleeve. The woman said, “Thank you,” and bent to speak with the hurt man.
Edane wanted to thank her just for speaking to him, let alone nicely, but she’d already turned away. He scratched at his right wrist, trying to work out what he should do. The bleed on his finger didn’t matter, wasn’t even something that could be triaged. It’d go away on its own. He started getting the traffic moving again, waving cars on and past, making sure the people who’d fallen over weren’t too badly hurt, getting the daytime crowd on their way home again safely.
That’s what he was there for. To get all these people home safely.
*
Four days later Edane was in the Tous Marketplace, afraid of the locals. Not physically afraid, afraid he’d have to talk to them. He was on patrol, rifle pointing at the ground, hanging off its sling, right hand on its grip, and his job was to watch them. The locals.
They were haggling over brightly colored things — be it clothes or candy or raw cuts of meat, cut out of real animals, it was all brightly colored — and passing back and forth little slips of paper that were supposed to be like money. Some of them had already spoken with him, asked him to stay away from their stalls, so he was standing away from the stalls, in a little clear patch in the crowds where people stayed away from him.
It was just his gun, he wanted to believe. But Sokolai and Esparza, a little way up at the gate, standing to either side of the big stone archway, had slung their rifles over their backs, and people were avoiding them, too. Which made Sokolai and Esparza’s job harder, they had to look at people and compare them to pictures loaded in their goggles because the Tajik censorship of the internet limited the amount of bandwidth available for connecting to facial recognition services.
Maybe there was a reason the locals hated them so much. Maybe they were doing something wrong. Edane didn’t understand it, didn’t understand why one person would use religious insult-words and a woman dressed piously would calmly say thank you to him. He didn’t understand why some of the little kids would pull faces and hide behind their parents, or why some of the little kids would explode.
He just didn’t understand.
“That fucking Journalist is back. What’s his name? Gul? Bul?” Esparza grimaced, watching a man leaving the market place.
“Don’t know,” Sokolai replied, tone tired even through the limited bandwidth of their squad comms.
Esparza growled briefly, a low rumble, and Edane wondered why his brother hated the locals.
Then again, Edane thought, he knew why. It’d be easy to hate, to view them all as targets, part of the opfor, the tangos, the bad guys. Friendlies weren’t supposed to spit on you, friendlies weren’t supposed to call you names, friendlies were supposed to be friendly.
Maybe he hadn’t done the right thing coming to Tajikistan. Edane had thought it’d be the right thing, it looked like the right thing from the inside of his Mothers’ apartment. It sounded so much better than trying to struggle through another year of college, where everyone knew the answers and Edane struggled to understand why anyone would care enough about high school to want to do it all over again as an adult with a different syllabus.
Mind wandering, his eyes flicked up. A hint of motion — he understood motion, understood reacting to it. The sky was blue above him, and in the time it took to swivel his eyes up the tiny fleck of motion blossomed out into a huge black cloud of smoke, thin trails lancing down at the marketplace.
Edane understood that too, that was a mortar shell airbursting at medium altitude to fire submunitions, and something pinged off the paving in front of him and he started turning away from the bouncing black submunition pod, twisting his right shoulder forward, and then everything hurt, and there was noise, and the mortar’s submunition explosion kicked Edane away like a piece of trash.
6. Winning Play.
::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.
::/ February, 2106.
::/ Edane Estian.
“Six, make it go away.” Marianna flicked her hand at the horizon, a blade chopping down on the distant target.
Edane pushed his shoulder down against the LAMW’s padded back, and levered the weapon around on its bipod. The bipod under the muzzle acted like a lever’s fulcrum, turning each fractional shiver of his right hand and shoulder at the stock — less of a problem now, after Janine had taken the time to refine her massage routine over the break between the fall and spring seasons — into irrelevantly small shifts of the aim point. The strike indicator wobbled fractionally over the target, a UAV buzzing over the roof of the nature park’s museum. Edane thumbed the lock control, the reticule blinked red, and the LAMW’s pyrotechnic driven recoil engine rocketed backward into his shoulder.
The LAMW didn’t actually fire anything, but so far as the MilSim’s AugR was concerned, a 23 millimeter fin-stabilized shell was in flight, an almost invisible blur streaking out at the UAV. The UAV was jinking — a standard random pattern — but the shell was semi-guided, thin and wire-like metallic fins contracting and curling under electric current to curve through the air, eating up the miles in one second, two seconds—
In AugR and through the LAMW’s scope the impact was much more impressive, a tail of fire suddenly ripping through the UAV, shattered parts scattering, but in reality the drone’s hull gently drifted down to a powered landing, even if it was wreathed in augmented reality flame effects.
“Strike,” Edane murmured back. “Relocating.”
Eissen was up first — unencumbered with anything more than his rifle, and forty spare rounds of the LAMW’s oversize shells in eight brick-size magazines on his back — and beat through the brush beside the trail, opening a path.
Tearing the LAMW up off its bipod, Edane was up and after Eissen immediately, his arm shuddering familiarly under the weapon’s weight as he twisted it under his arm, letting the body-straps carry most of the LAMW’s weight. A dozen seconds later, the spot in the dirt torn up by the bipod’s clawed feet exploded, a thudding barrage of mortar-fire locked on the precise location the LAMW’s thunderclap muzzle blast had come from.
Edane didn’t mind his arm shivering so much, anymore. It’d been bad during the first half of the fall season, last year — he’d needed full guided shells, complete with internal maneuvering gyros and explosive redirectional charges — but the numb spots in his palm had started disappearing around then. By the end of the fall season the only numb patches were streaks under his arm and over his bicep, and during the between-season break, over December and January, they’d been getting smaller and smaller under Janine’s hands and the electrical stimulators. He almost had full use now, at the start of the new spring season, but the right side of his body still tired faster than the left. The LAMW weighed about two thirds of what Janine did, and that was still a little much for him to haul around for hours and hours without getting cramps and shivers. The body-sling helped, though.
Marianna looked up from her cover as they approached. She was further down the trail path and inside an irrigation trench, or stream-bed or whatever the map called it. Eissen got there first, skidding to a halt, and Edane bounded in over the trench’s lip moments later, panting so hard his tongue flopped.
“Kacey?” she asked. “Any more targets?”
Kacey wasn’t a member of the team — she played with the Merodeadores, a pro team with a sport ethic who insisted on wearing narrow neon strips on their gear, like cyclists or something. She was a little mixed-race woman, smaller than Janine, and also the only survivor of the Merodeadores’ second fire team after they’d gotten ambushed. Handily, Kacey was the one with the high grade EM detection kit.
She touched a control on her kit’s board, making one of the box-mesh antennae further along the irrigation ditch wiggle. (It couldn’t be just a ditch, Edane thought — why put goldfish and ornamental rocks in an irrigation ditch crossed back and forth with wooden bridges?) Kacey scrutinized the results, briefly checking a display strapped to the inside of her left wrist. “Nada, but there’s a lot of Hedgemaze interference I can’t filter out.”
Hedgemaze was an EMWAR jamming system — artillery shells that dumped clusters of trailing wire antennae across the field and pumped random encrypted noise broadband over the air-waves, faking every kind of battlefield electronic transmission possible, making it that much harder to pick out legitimate electromagnetic radiance targets.
With only the vaguest flick of the chin as acknowledgement, Marianna edged up to the top lip of the trench, grabbing hold of the walking path’s fence at the trailside, glancing left and right. “Four, why aren’t you reporting target destruction?”
Svarstad and Erlnicht were set up about a mile away, in the map-segment marked ‘Floral Gardens’, flat on their bellies after having crawled around to the opposite side of the park with minimal electronics, doing it old fashioned, heads down and mud and camouflage.
“We’ve had no strike,” Svarstad replied, voice low. “The automatic mortar installation is still operational.”
“Fuck. I’ll put in another support request,” Marianna snarled.
This wasn’t the first time. Off-field support was spotty, always had been, but some games… some games it felt like the team were being denied assistance deliberately.
It seemed like there were some players who just didn’t like Edane and his siblings, especially now that they were playing under Marianna’s rules. Out were the standard man-portable UAVs and turrets every commentator on the game agreed were essential for a fireteam’s equipment budget, and in was the paradigm they’d been made to fight by.
When Edane had been little, really little, he’d thought of it as pack-drill. Running, shooting, fighting, before there were really words to explain it with and everything was just barking — parroted phrases he hadn’t understood were words. Sir-yes-sir, contact-down, relocate, hostile-sighted, all-clear, cease-fire, open-fire… People — the furless — the officers — hadn’t spoken much to him, when he’d been that little. When he’d been White-Six.
He’d learned how to use and strip all kinds of guns — Matsushitas, Robhams, Kalashnikovs — before he’d been able to clearly read. He’d been part of White pack, one of thirty-two brothers from White-One to White-Thirty-Two, and even though they all crosstrained and took turns doing different things, ready to take up any role necessary, Edane had a special purpose.
To carry the Light Anti-Materiel Weapon.
The downsized training mock-up he’d carried as a child wasn’t a real one, he’d known that — the real kind were taller than he was, that long ago. He passed it down the line every time the firing range instructor ordered them to trade weapons, crosstraining was important, but at the start of each training session Edane carried one of the two LAMWs from the armory along with White-Fourteen, and even if one of his brothers had taken a turn cleaning it, he’d always been the one to put it back.
He’d been White-Six. He’d carried the LAMW. That was who and what he’d been, and who he was again.
It was like he’d been searching for who he was all his life, and then Marianna had handed it to him, wrapped up in grease paper and so freshly fabricated the grips still had printer’s resin on them. Even if it was a MilSim toy, it was a LAMW. It was Edane’s, and Edane knew who he was.
His brothers must have felt the same way — Svarstad and Eberstetten still carried LSWs, but now instead of a standard belt-fed light support weapon it was an eight-millimeter caliber heavy-barreled monster fed off two helical magazines, one stacked over the barrel and the other slotted in under the carry-rail. Ellis, who’d been an Eighteen, which was the same as a Two, hauled the specialist grenade launcher most games, although he switched with Marianna once in awhile. The rest all carried heavy rifles, same caliber as the LSWs, better at range than the usual five-five-six, six-five-nil and seven-six-two calibers most MilSim rifles represented.
They spaced themselves out wide, with or without electronics and comms, running in coordinated pairs more than a mile apart. They supported each other at extreme range, melted away from contact almost as soon as they were seen, moved smooth as a glassy razor over the terrain, slipping through the enemy deployment. The idea wasn’t to use their brute force to resolve a conflict — their gear was heavy, though other than the LAMW and grenade launcher they had no anti-armor options — but to fight in short snaps of activity before disengaging, seeking to gather information, pinpoint the enemy, find targets for heavier guns and off-site support assets, and bring down UAVs and EMWAR assets while working with electronics off.
Their only real opposition during the fall season had been MA-Company, a pro level fireteam who wore dye in their fur while playing, made up of eight of Edane’s brothers from a private military company, but MA-Company had specialized in dealing with Person Of Interest targets. That meant they bunched up while escorting the volunteers playing the role of generic non-combatants, hostages or VIPs depending on how you looked at the scenario, but MA-Company understood the dynamic, knew how to spread out thin and hunt Edane’s team down.
It was exciting, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, exhilarating, the best game to play. Trouble was
, not everybody wanted to play it. Nearly half of the dozen most popular commentators ignored Edane’s team except to point out when they fouled up, or highlight one of their plays as ‘unfair’, not within the spirit of the game.
After a couple of matches where the scenario organizers had randomly placed MA-Company and Edane’s team together, those were the same commentators who’d complained of collusion. Of course they’d colluded with MA-Company, they’d been put in the same faction — Marianna had obviously spoken to MA’s fireteam lead, Eisenach, and putting themselves into a double-stacked line three miles wide and a mile deep was efficient, not unfair. That they’d held an entire sector with only sixteen players was amazing.
After the second time it happened more of the commentators began to grumble, and by the end of the fall season it seemed like there was something fishy with the team assignments — MA-Company had been placed with Edane’s team in six matches out of eight in a three week period, despite Marianna and Eisenach putting in an official request to the league to be placed on opposing factions instead.
MA-Company hadn’t registered for the new spring season, though. They’d dropped out, and at one of Marianna’s occasional barbecues they’d all shared meat and the occasional beer, talking about how shitty it was, but in the end MA-Company decided to bow out for a couple of seasons, try to find some private military work instead and open up the field, try and give the adverse commentators less material to use against Edane’s group.
It wasn’t fair. All the old stupid high-school slurs had come back out — commentators calling them the dogshit brigade, or skunkfuckers, which Edane really didn’t understand.
And now the off-field guys in their tent out by the parking lot weren’t responding to support requests.
They needed off-site firepower to function, and it wasn’t like Marianna wasn’t busting her ass cooperating with the ad-hoc plan the off-site coordinators had put together. But, of course, a team marking a target for off-site weaponry got points for that, and they’d barely edged their way up to a tie for tenth on the top-ten list at the end of fall season last year. It wouldn’t take much to knock them back off it, with the spring season starting like this.
Dog Country Page 7
