He ground his knuckle against his eye-socket.
Crying was bullshit. It made his fur all snarled up and made his eyes sting, gave him a headache.
Her voice was tiny. “It sounds important to you.”
“It is,” he groaned. “It really fucking is.”
“Like I’m important,” she added.
“You are.”
“Like being together is important?”
“I don’t understand why, but it really is, Janine. That’s why making love with you’s okay, it makes you smile so much. That’s why I do it with you. Cuz’ you want it and ‘cuz I want you to have it, ‘cuz it’s so important to you.”
It was like he’d pulled the pin on her. She just blew up, in a tiny wet sound, as she sobbed, harder, harder, until it cut out entirely. He jerked up, staring at the phone… greeted by a ‘call muted icon’.
Irrational panic took him and squeezed Edane its fist. Was she alright? Was there a problem with the call? Was it anything other than what he’d learned, that Janine didn’t like it when people heard her cry?
She came back. “Christ. God.” Another sob. “Jesus fuck. Sweetie, that’s not why you have sex with people,” she spluttered.
“I. I don’t see any other reason to do it.”
“Sweetie. Oh my God.” She sobbed explosively down the phone. “The only reason you have sex with somebody is because it makes you smile.”
“But it does.”
“Not for the reasons it should. Not for the reasons I want you to smile when we make love, Edane.”
He twisted his face against the pillow, wiping his eyes, shaking his head. Both at once.
“I want you to be happy,” she squeaked, “and I want you to be the person you want to be. Not the kind of person I think you should be, or those soldier guys tried to make you, but the person you want to be. And I want you to be my lover, I want you to look at me and tell me I’m beautiful so I feel beautiful, I. I want to put my mouth on you and just make you glow with how beautiful the pair of us are, and. And.”
His eyes hurt the way hers must have been hurting, just then. “It’s not like it doesn’t sound nice. It sounds wonderful. I wish I could feel it like that. But…”
“But you can’t. And I don’t know how to teach you to, because.” The sound of her blowing her nose broke his heart. “I just want someone to hold me and tell me I’m beautiful, Edane. I’m not strong enough to stand and look at myself in a mirror and try and figure out what the hell I am and whether or not I’m pretty. I need someone to tell me that. And I’m not strong enough, I’m…” She halted. Struggling for her thoughts. “I’m not even brave enough to even think about what fixing our relationship really means, I just keep kinda hoping it’ll fix itself. I can’t wait for you to learn how to make me feel how I need to feel, let alone teach you. I don’t know how to teach you that.”
“You’re pretty,” he whispered against the capsule wall.
It made her cry all the worse, but she didn’t hang up. Didn’t mute the call. Just spluttered for breath until she could wheeze out curse-words. Fuck, and shit, and Christ. She eventually calmed herself back down to a whimpered, “Thank you.”
“Just not in a way I can see by looking at you,” he said. “I have to know you, I guess. I think that’s what pretty means, anyway.”
“I think you understand what pretty means a little better now,” she told him through her tears.
“I think you’re brave,” he replied, quietly. “Plenty brave.”
“Y-yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, you didn’t run away from those things, even if they hurt. Like the Drill Sergeant used to say, pain is your friend. You can’t be a brave person, and think pain is the worst thing, or even a bad thing. You have to endure that. So maybe there isn’t a solution, but you didn’t run away from trying to find one. That counts as brave, too.”
“God. I wish there was a solution. I think I understand you better too, now, Edane. And I think you want to be my friend? Like. Really close friend, like. Life partner, almost. Like. Like lovers without sex.”
He kept his eyes very, very tightly shut. “Yeah. Can’t we be that? Whatever that is?”
“God, Sweetie. God.” She sniffled over the phone. “You’re more than that to me, Sweetie. You’re… fuck. I need you more than that.”
“But I don’t have what you need me to give you.”
“You give me so much, Edane. So much. Don’t feel bad. Please. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Janine.”
“We want different things and it’s close enough it could almost work, but you’d have to be someone else and I’m not who you need me to be and I need more, want more than you can give me, and…”
He whispered that it was okay at her, over and over, soothing her until she spluttered a last sorry, and hung up on him. He dragged his knuckles over his eyes, and lay back in the tiny cell of space the capsule gave him.
He’d lied. It wasn’t okay.
8. Money Men.
::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Ereli Estian.
Ereli banged on the door until Eversen opened up Stolnik and Stacy’s apartment and stuck his nose out.
“You got the stuff?”
Wordlessly, Ereli lifted up eight bags of Chinese takeout, four dangling from each hand, stinking of sauce and the wet, starchy heat of rice.
“Food’s on!” Eversen yelled, stepping back and letting Ereli bring the food to the kitchen counter in an awkward waddle — with that much shit to carry, there wasn’t anything he could do but waddle.
Eversen followed, then helped line up the bags and peel down the plastic, lifting out and restacking the steaming plastic shells of rice and beef like MREs on a shelf.
Stolnik — wearing a pair of custom dog-tags, with little pink hearts stamped in the back — broke away from the pack of brothers sitting around the coffee table first, picked up a pair of paper-wrapped chopsticks and broke them open with ease. The two lengths of wood sat easily between his fingers, as naturally as Ereli might hold a sidearm.
Stolnik opened one of the shells, and with a snap of the chopsticks was holding a scrap of beef and rice, chewing on it a moment later.
It was weird, really weird, watching himself demonstrate a skill Ereli knew he didn’t have.
Ereli gave Stolnik his bank card back, and Stolnik juggled the food expertly while pocketing it, before taking a second shell and veering off to sit with the lone human in the apartment — presumably Stacy.
Picking up the sticks, Eversen fumbled them into his hand, repositioning the one on top against his middle finger, kinda like Stolnik had held them, but every time he tried to nab a slice of beef out of his shell the tips skewed apart, beef slipping back onto its bed of rice.
Ereli didn’t even try, picking up a shell and a plastic spork, instead. “How’s the crowdfund going?”
“Five nudies or something.” Eversen frowned grimly, and tried the chopsticks again. “Hasn’t really started, we’re just setting up the accounts, but somebody already found us.”
The room wasn’t quiet, exactly, but Ereli’s brothers were more interested in the arrival of food than the crowdfunding total, even when the big numbers on the wallscreen opposite the couch bumped up by two and a half New Dollars.
“So. Where’s Scheuen? What’s the money plan?” Ereli asked, stuffing his face.
“Here, look at this.” Eversen turned and pushed through the group around the coffee table, snagged a loose pad, and walked back, dumping it on the kitchen counter in front of Ereli, open to a social networking site.
The text was unfamiliar — almost like the English alphabet, though with more accent marks and weird curly stuff on the Cs. Almost readable, but a language that looked like made up nonsense to Ereli. That was his lack of understanding talking, though — what one man ignorantly took as nonsense was another man’s culture. What he did understand were the vide
os playing in tabbed out links.
“That’s Szydlow getting killed,” Ereli murmured. “Back in Tajikistan.”
“It’s part of our advertising campaign, now,” Eversen replied. “What happened to Szydlow isn’t shown.”
The footage was grainy, mostly off governmental closed circuit surveillance, probably stolen pre-revolution before the Private Military Operations Centre was overrun.
A city street, dust rolling across the tarmac. Paint-cans slopped out of a window above a tank column, splattering over the visors and camera lenses, blinding one of them almost instantaneously. A heartbeat later a flaming car rolled out of a side street, pouring black smoke across the column’s middle — two brothers, turned blocky by the low frame rate and the speed of their motion, came in against the blinded tank, one with a four foot long crowbar, the other with a can of gasoline.
The crowbar went into the gap between the tank treads and its wheels in one stab, and a quick levering motion detracked the vehicle as it started rolling backward. A tank further back shot through the smoke, machine gun rounds splattering grey flecks all over the blinded tank’s hull, but Ereli’s brothers had already run back to cover — the gasoline burning in a roaring pool over the tank’s engine air intakes, a fiery mess under its hull.
That hadn’t been the run Szydlow had been killed on — that happened later, from what little Ereli remembered of the panicked communications traffic that day. Tanks had crossed over the Tajik border from Uzbekistan, supporting an insurgent push. Ereli’s brothers only had riot gear to fight with, expecting a protest. They’d had to improvise.
A few moments later the footage cut to another view, flames and smoke boiling around the detracked tank while it spun in a helpless circle, slamming back into the burning car and forward into a building, all its traction on one side lost, unable to escape the inferno. The instant that one of the tank’s hatches opened up, one of his brothers marched up, muzzle wrapped in wet rags, tearing the fleeing crewman out of the hatch and bodily throwing him off the vehicle before reaching in and pulling out fistfuls of electronics. Meanwhile the tank driver was beaten to the ground by another brother with the stock of a shotgun, then a bottle with a burning wick was passed out of cover and smashed over the open hatch, spilling flame everywhere…
About a dozen of Ereli’s brothers, and some locals brave enough to put down the grievances they were protesting over long enough to protect their little northern town, had disabled and destroyed four of the six tanks that had attacked in hopes of taking control. The other two vehicles had retreated.
The lesson seemed obvious to Ereli — don’t take tanks into crowded urban centers without specialist infantry assistance, especially not main battle tanks built to snipe at each other from kilometers away. Built up areas were ruled by unmanned ground vehicles, deployed automatic turrets, and infantry, not heavy armor. But the mistake the Uzbek-supported factions made seemed to be teaching the people of Azerbaijan a different lesson.
Five New Dollars popped up on the wallscreen, added to the total — thirty-five in total, now. The comment that scrolled under the transaction was simple and to the point: ‘Nesimi’s police killed my son. I have no hope.’
Ten nudies and a few cents more brought the words, ‘Is this real? Can the capitalists really fight like that?’
Ereli thumbed around on the pad for a translation, and the whole crowdfunding information page flashed into English for him.
‘Your government is built to protect one man’s interests. Ilhaim Nesimi has been lining his pockets with your nation’s money since he led the post-Eurasian War coup d’état and took power in 2074, and he thinks he is safe from justice. He and his family spent more on foreign investments in 2105 than was being spent on food, education, and healthcare over 2105, 2104, and 2103 combined. With your help, he and the government he put in place will fall within the month.’
Ereli looked up at Eversen, ears flat back. “This is really happening? Azerbaijan?”
“Yup.”
“Who the hell figured we could do it in a month?”
Eversen pointed across at some of the brothers on a couch in the corner. “Scheuen and one of the guys from the Kennel. Based on our battle-plan.”
“Our plan is a guess. It’s a spec-ops raid to murder a dictator for a hundred thousand nudies. Any dictator, we weren’t specific.”
“That’s where we start. It has to begin with a low key covert insertion — like starting a guerrilla war by invading a city.”
Ereli set down his shell of rice, closing the lid, and picked up the pad. “That’s been done once or twice. But we’ll need to support our teams on the ground — that kind of operation could last weeks. They’ll need ammunition, food. Can’t rely on the locals to provide it, either.”
“Not without a consensus, but once Nesimi’s gone…”
“Revolution should pick up speed by itself. You think revolutionaries would feed us?” Ereli frowned down at the pad uncomfortably.
“Just because one set of revolutionaries hated us doesn’t mean others won’t like us.”
Ereli didn’t answer that.
The revolutionaries, back in Tajikistan? They’d spent a lot of time trying to kill Ereli and Eversen. Even though Azerbaijan’s would be a completely different set of people, people who’d hopefully be friendly, calling them revolutionaries still sounded bad.
More brothers arrived with each passing hour. The total on the wallscreen rose up to six hundred, edged its way to two thousand. By the time it hit two thousand five hundred, the lawyers and executives showed up.
Three men and one woman, all human — probably all mildly genetweaked to fit into their roles in life. Thin suits for all of them, the men cleanshaven even though it was a little past midnight, each of them alert with glinting eyes that flashed to their wristwatches and phones as often as other people’s faces. Their bodyguards came too — one of them was an old-model dog, one of the female production run that’d been decanted ten years before Ereli. She didn’t speak much, though she did exchange a brief handshake with a brother named Elwood.
They were all from Andercom West. Here to advise by the request of the private military companies they had help found.
The executives, a guy and the gal, were shortly discussing the legalities of what they were doing, which was in effect asking people to pay for a glorified assassination/kidnapping contract. That conversation swallowed up Eversen, while Ereli joined in with a group talking about regime change with one of the lawyers specializing in international treaties — what it would take for other global governments to recognize whoever stepped up to replace Nesimi’s regime as the legitimate government of Azerbaijan.
Apparently it wasn’t an issue that came up very often, because, “Generally speaking, when a regime’s overthrown it’s because another national power’s installed a new one. The backing national power ensures international recognition.”
“But we don’t have a backer on this,” Elwood said. “The only money in this is out of Azerbaijan, right? On the other side of the room they were saying we need to limit donations to Azeri citizens only or we’d have no fucking chance of having this called legal.”
“I don’t think this situation’s come up before,” the lawyer sipped from a paper cup of delivered coffee one of the bodyguards had brought up when they’d arrived. “Occasionally — especially in some of the Northern Persian autonomous territories — an ethnic diaspora backs action and calls in foreign fighters, either calling for aid on shared religious grounds or purely in an attempt to reclaim a homeland. But no one like that’s asked you to come in, you’re… offering services, as it were.”
Ereli leaned in, dipping his ears back uncertainly. “Can’t whoever steps up just do what the MACP did? Sit down, bang out some treaties?”
The lawyer paused at that. Smiled, thinly, his dark red-brown skin tightening around the eyes. “When the Middle American Corporate Preserve formed up in the fifties and entered into treaty nego
tiations, it did so backed with about six and a half trillion New Dollars in business assets.”
“Azerbaijan’s got oil money,” Ereli pointed out. “We shoot the guys who own it, nationalize the industry. Then they can bring something to the negotiating table, right? Oil money’s why nobody gives a fuck about removing this guy, isn’t it?”
The lawyer’s smile broadened. “I like you. Who are you?”
“Ereli.” He shoved his hand out.
The lawyer shook it. “Jay Narang. The Azeri oilfields have been giving their last gasp for a long time now — they were thought to be dry until the recent fracking run — but it’s possible. That’s how the old post-soviet dictators did it, oil and caviar. And the price of fossil petrochemicals is rising considerably now that the Sub-Saharan and Western African Treaty Organization has legislated a ten percent land area limit on its biofuel agriculture…”
Apparently, negotiating shared more than a little with fighting. Except the ammunition — law and money and all that bullshit — was about as much fun as a bottle rocket. Give Ereli a SHED-WAP tipped missile any day.
A cry went up around the coffee table, the group at the screen hollering over each other in excitement. “Twenty thousand! Finally fucking hit twenty thousand!” “We hit the twenty-kay mark.” “Twenty thousand — we need to incorporate now, or the bank’s going to freeze the fundraising.”
The incorporation paperwork was complicated, even for Andercom’s lawyers to hash out, and they’d come prepared with a private chipcase server full of case law to run search algorithms across. Loopholes were closed, references made to some fishing rights dispute and how ownership was resolved for a tiny island off South-East Asia that was mediated by the UN, documents got drawn up, and by the time Ereli was into his second shell of rice the fund was at forty-five thousand New Dollars and the call went up.
“We need a minimum of six signatories to incorporate the fund, as a signatory you’re going to be legally responsible — and culpable — for the receipt of and use of any money generated through crowdfunding. Any volunteers—”
Dog Country Page 10
