Dog Country

by Malcolm F. Cross

  Hands shot up around the room. The lawyer laughed. “Okay, we have volunteers, but there has to be at least one witness per signatory — how many of you are here?”

  There were far more volunteers to sign than witnesses. Witness? Fuck that. This was a chance to do something, to be responsible for something — to have a duty, and goals. And it sure as hell didn’t mean starving in an apartment, waiting for his dignity and self-respect to erode away. Ereli pushed through the clumping crowd, with the only abstainer not trying to get a piece of the action sitting in a quiet corner of the room with the human woman who owned the place — so that must have been Stolnik.

  “Okay, okay, uh. Where’s Ereli?” Jay the Lawyer asked.

  Ereli thrust himself forward, grinning. “I’m Ereli!” His brothers pushed him through the press, wrestling him forward until he was up against the kitchen counter, listening to Jay explain the incorporation document to him, waiting until they loaded the page he could sign on.

  Bit by bit, the funding total on the wallscreen jumped up. A thousand nudies here, then quiet for ten minutes, then a trickle of donations in fives and tens and hundreds, pushing up the total. Twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand…

  *

  Trying to plan out the invasion of a sovereign nation from Stolnik and Stacy’s living room grew less and less viable as the night wore on. For one thing, there wasn’t enough space to move — the living room was a crush of Ereli’s brothers. For another, it was impossible to get the privacy needed to make a simple phone call.

  “We are being overheard,” the voice on the other end of the connection said, grim and serious.

  Ereli twitched an ear, and looked back inside. He’d been forced to retreat to the apartment’s balcony, outside into the relative cool of three AM. “I understand that, Mr. Karimov, but there really wasn’t any other way to get in touch.”

  Ereli waited over the brief pause as the phone software finished translating him, listened to the brief shadow of Panah Karimov’s own words in Azeri before the English translation began. “It is not as though I have any confirmation that you are who you say you are.”

  Ereli turned his back on the others indoors, and retreated to the balcony’s furthest corner, leaning out into the night air. “Likewise. For all I know your granddaughter—” a pleasant girl studying in the political safety of neutral Georgia “—transferred my call to her politics professor, not her grandfather the opposition militia leader.”

  “Hypothetically speaking, if you are who you say you are, what do you want in exchange for this miracle of deposing Nesimi?”

  “Nothing. We’ve already been paid.”

  “By this crowdfunding?” The translator warbled, injecting an emotive hiss.

  “That’s right. We’ve received over five hundred thousand New Dollars. By the incorporation charter of the Private Azerbaijan civil protection effort, holding those funds, we are beholden to make an effort to depose Nesimi’s government.”

  A pause. “Why are you doing this?”

  “We’ve been paid to.”

  “No, why? Why Azerbaijan? Why do you even care about a country so far from your own?”

  Ereli swung his jaw left, all the way until it clicked. He cleared his throat. “Ever thrown a dart at a map, Mr. Karimov?”

  “No?”

  “It doesn’t matter where the dart lands, it’s going to land somewhere people are living, somewhere people care about.” Ereli pinched his fingers over the tip of his nose, the end of his muzzle. “You have a dictator problem, and a disaffected population willing to pay upward of five hundred thousand nudies to get rid of it. We need work. That simple.”

  “And you want us to fight a war because you started one?”

  “No, sir. We didn’t start the war. Azerbaijan’s legal citizens did by hiring us via crowdfund. And I don’t want you to fight it, either — I want to know what support you can offer a covert team inserted into Baku. I have a lot of materiel I need to move into the country, and if I can buy some of it from you that’s going to make my life a lot easier.”

  “You want guns, ammunition?”

  “Food and ammunition. We’ll be bringing our own guns, but I need to know what caliber rounds you can provide so we can get the right hardware printed up—”

  A wave of human noise rose up behind Karimov’s voice. Voices crying out in shock.

  “Something has happened,” Karimov snapped. “Please leave the connection live, I will be back.”

  The call blanked to hold, and Ereli was left staring at the phone’s connection icon.

  “All you had to do was confirm whether or not you guys use seven-six-two like everybody else over there…”

  Shutting down his phone’s interface, so it’d buzz at him when Karimov was ready to talk again, Ereli tiredly stretched out his shoulders and opened the balcony’s sliding glass door to get back inside.

  The room was quiet, at least. Which you’d expect of someone’s living room at just past three. But not when it was this crowded.

  “The fuck is going on?” he asked, edging in beside Eversen.

  The number on the wallscreen, linked directly to the crowdfund, had bugged out or something. It kept failing to refresh, the number cutting off mid-update and flicking its way up.

  Eversen shook his head silently, clicking his muzzle’s jaw side to side.

  It’d been five hundred and ten thousand or so when Ereli had stepped outside to call Panah Karimov. It was flickering its way up to eight hundred thousand, now.

  “Eversen?”

  “Shh. Elwood’s on the phone.”

  Elwood was one of the brothers up front, head bowed, nodding silently to whoever was on the other end of the line. He paused, gestured at the screen to flip channels, and stepped back.

  The jarring orchestral sting of a newsfeed’s headlines sang into life, talking heads appearing immediately after the logo.

  “In this hour on Eastern Interests — Northern Persian warlords deny seeking biowarfare agents, Tibetan farming co-op displaced by storm, and Azerbaijan’s growing dissident crackdown.”

  “Fast forward the feed, man,” one of his brothers demanded. “I can’t, it’s live,” another snapped. “Is it the same footage? Has anyone found the pirate feed they’re talking about?” “I found an old recording of one, but it’s not whatever’s happened…”

  Bullshit about the various autonomous territories in Northern Persia flashed by — wild eyed guys like darker Tajiks talking in subtitles crawling across the screen. Tibetans and refugees from India hiding in nomadic tents as contaminated rain lashed down, while the news anchor talked about biowarfare fallout from the Eurasian War. Then there was the inside of what looked like a large restaurant that’d been rented out, people dancing like out of a retro dinner party, half in western clothes and half not — darker haired than most white people, their skin not much darker, more Mediterranean, but different facial features to Italians and Greeks. It was some kind of wedding.

  The bride was in a green dress with a veil, completely out of place — kinda Muslim looking. The groom wore a formal western suit with one of the lacy, hand-embroidered skullcaps kids used to sell on the streets of Dushanbe. But this wasn’t footage of Dushanbe, it was Baku — Azerbaijan.

  Then a guy in a suit that screamed secret police thug walked up and broke the groom’s nose, another tore off the bride’s veil to reveal streaked mascara and misery.

  It was about then that Stolnik took Stacy — Ereli had been properly introduced — to another room, and Eichardt had the pirate feed open on his PDA lain out on the coffee table, with its screen stretched out as big as it’d go. Some watched it over brothers’ shoulders from behind the couch, others leaned in next to Eichardt — Ereli had to lay across his brother’s knees to get a glimpse.

  None of them were watching the wallscreen’s newsfeed anymore. They were watching the pirate feed’s raw footage, that’d been chopped up into news-sanitary segments.

  The wedd
ing in Azerbaijan, the party having gotten started in the middle of the afternoon — a couple of hours ago. Apparently the internet was censored inside the country, and while the banking system was run by external Swiss interests and allowed for money to be moved with minimal government oversight — making the crowdfunding possible — the actual news about the crowdfunding campaign hadn’t spread very quickly.

  The way the crowdfunding page had been set up was so that a version of it could be spread phone to phone, with direct file transfer and on pages loaded into chips. And the biggest points of transfer turned out to be social gatherings — apparently the Azeris liked big dinner parties and weddings and things.

  So did the Ministry of State Security: Azerbaijan’s equivalent to the Tajik Ministry of Internal Security. A nice name for spies and thugs and black ops types, all aimed at their own population. Secret police.

  What the newsfeed had called ‘plainclothes policemen’, and what Ereli thought of as fuckers who attacked non-combatants, lined the wedding’s guests up outside the dinner party hall. Later in the afternoon, by the angle of the light.

  That’s when Ereli thought a firing squad would show up, but no. Mobile cranes, the block and tackle looped back on itself, were used to haul the partygoers up by the neck. First singly — the groom and bride left struggling, kicking out to reach the ground a bare six inches under their feet — and then in twos and threes and fours, guests forced back to back, then lynched around the necks together and dragged up, their own combined weight digging the metal cable in under their chins until their skin broke.

  It took these people a long, long time to die. Most of it was filmed from a nearby building, by young women continually ducking down out of sight and gibbering in fear in their own language, one Ereli didn’t understand, but he didn’t have to. The tone in how a person said something meant a lot more than the words — that was something he’d learned as a child, when the same bark of sound produced two different ways meant very different things.

  Pirate internet wireless in Azerbaijan was pretty efficient, especially when they didn’t mind losing a few nodes by letting them broadcast long enough for the government to find them.

  The government was killing its own people to try and keep word from spreading that maybe, maybe there was a way out from under their oppression.

  Apparently the government’s efforts weren’t working, because the crowdfunding total hit a million New Dollars and kept climbing like there wasn’t any tomorrow.

  For a lot of people, there wouldn’t be.

  *

  Crisp, aristocratic tones spoke on the newsfeed behind them. “Well, Chris, it’s clearly terrible, and the United Kingdom is at the forefront of demands to impose sanctions on Azerbaijan now.”

  “But don’t we need more than just sanctions? Don’t we need action?”

  The official, some cut-glass accented government PR drone, was just as much a copy-and-paste nobody built to fit his role as the Andercom lawyers had been, or as Ereli was. There were five hundred and eighty-two clones who could fit Ereli’s role exactly, and he didn’t doubt the same was true of the talking head on the screen.

  The guy smiled. “Well, Chris,” he said, “the situation very much does need action, and the international community is already sending a very firm message to Nesimi’s government that this crackdown will not be tolerated through the use of economic sanctions and boycotting.”

  It didn’t matter how often the interviewer butted heads with the guy — the official was a pro, knew that his role was to spit out the same meaningless nonsense over and over and over.

  Kind of like Stolnik, except Stolnik’s role was to get them back on track, over and over and over.

  “All we need are drone strikes here, here, and here. We can take them down in no time at all—”

  “This isn’t tactical planning,” Stolnik yapped again, like a broken record. “We need a plan, we need a concrete strategic plan to organize ourselves, how we handle the tactical situation is easy for us.”

  One of their brothers started talking about rifles — Stolnik cut him off. “This is officer level shit. Not holding the guns, planning.”

  “I understand you. I wasn’t trained for that,” the brother who’d spoken up — Eichardt — replied.

  “None of us were,” Stolnik muttered. “Look, it’s simpler if you slow down. Stop thinking about how you make the kill — think about what you need for it, where that’s going to come from. How you’re going to wind up holding a gun in the place you need to be, how you’re going to get fed on the way there and back…”

  “Food’s on the Ammule, everyone knows that,” Elwood cut in, a sarcastic edge on his voice.

  Stolnik smiled, but didn’t laugh. “I guess if we can get enough Ammules to follow us around, then we don’t need a plan, do we?”

  Ereli did laugh. Most of the time, with an Ammule following you around — a four or six legged cargo bot loaded up with supplies — you didn’t have to think about where ammo or food was coming from, just fight.

  “Look,” Eversen said, voice serious, “the regime is attacking its own people. That’s nothing new, but they’re doing it because of the crowdfunding campaign — what’s the total at?”

  Ereli glanced away from the map for an instant. “Eight million.”

  “The regime knows we’re coming. You understand that? We just launched a crowdfunding campaign with the stated goal of putting the regime’s decision makers in chains or in the ground. We just declared war. They’re probably putting up automatic turrets in Baku, and we don’t even have a toe in the country.”

  Ereli clicked his jaw side to side. “He’s going to run. Someplace he feels safe.”

  “Maybe he’s got bunkers somewhere, but he’s also got like a gazillion mansions in Baku, owns half the hotels himself. Chances are at least some of them are fortified. Safe and comfortable,” Eversen replied.

  Elwood flattened his hands on the map, pulling its focus around to Baku. “It’s like they tried building San Iadras, but without a decent plan. Look at this mess.”

  “That’s about what they did,” Stolnik murmured. “Lots of oil money, so build all the pretty skyscrapers. But they didn’t think about what the buildings were for, they just threw that shit up because it looked good and fed their egos. Then the Eurasian war fucked them up and they did it all over again.”

  “They can boobytrap this place to hell and back,” Ereli muttered. “Nesimi and his guard unit can just sit there as long as they want, get prepared specifically to kill us. I don’t know that inserting covert teams will be enough. We need proper information on where the hell Nesimi is, we need high level access to their internal tactical network.”

  “We’re not all coming back from this,” Eichardt murmured.

  “None of us have to die if we do our job right,” Stolnik replied sharply.

  “Unless the other side does their job right.”

  Stolnik bowed his head, growled at the edge of hearing — a deep, bassy rumble. “Every time in your lives you’ve felt fucked up and wrong because you were different, because office work doesn’t feel right, because society is too hard to understand?” He slapped the counter, hard. “That’s them, the regime, right now. They’re the ones who’re confused and ignorant. We’re the ones who were made for this — us. None of us have to die.

  “We’re going to do this right. And we have to do it now, because the people we’ve been hired to protect are being attacked, and we’re on the wrong side of the world. We can put teams on the ground now, not to neutralize Nesimi, but buy the rest of us time to move on him in force. So let’s figure this shit out without whining about how difficult it is, and get organized to go show Nesimi that his people are voting him out of office to the tune of eight million nudies.”

  “Nine and a half, now,” Ereli said.

  “To the tune of nine and a half million nudies,” Stolnik corrected himself. He straightened up, glancing at the screen. “Fuck. How much ar
e these people going to spend?”

  “Oh man. If we hit the stretch goals, the regime is in such deep shit.”

  9. Strategy Session.

  ::/ San Iadras, Middle American Corporate Preserve.

  ::/ April, 2106.

  ::/ Ereli Estian.

  It wasn’t that luck was a key ingredient in war, but beneficial circumstances helped. Ereli had been in the right place at the right time, spoken to Jay Narang the lawyer, made a good impression, had been made signatory to the incorporation for what was ‘Private Azerbaijan civil protection effort’ on paper, and was now ‘The Liberation Fund’ on the news feeds that were giving coverage. A good start, so far as Ereli was concerned.

  He wasn’t a leader — they didn’t have time for leaders — but he was one of the first users of the tactical bulletin board, mapper, and operations organizer one of Elwood’s guys set up, as if they were playing MilSim. Turned out to be the same planning software package, just the actual military edition. After getting set up and discussing it with the others, he got three approvals from the other signatories — a group of fourteen brothers — and added his own for the four signatory agreements required to start signing off funds to pay Andercom a thousand five hundred nudies an hour, letting Ereli rent time on Andercom’s hardened Low Earth Orbit observation and communication satellites.

  The Azeri army was in motion. It took an hour and a half’s work for Andercom’s image interpretation staff, included with the hourly rental, to find and identify all of the known Azeri tanks — forty of them rusting in a yard a hundred miles west of Baku, and the rest split between an operation heading West, to their Armenian border, and East, into Baku itself. The tanks were vanishing between the skyscrapers, hidden from view until a satellite’s orbit brought it into alignment with the messy street grids.

  Infantry was on the march, Azeri riot police holding back crowds of protestors, grounded passenger aircraft blazing white in the sun at the airport.