“Oh, yeah. Seven.” Elwood shrugged.
“I’ve got four bricks of AGX,” Sokolai replied. “And he’s got a LAMW.”
“It ain’t enough to stop an armored column,” Edane pointed out.
“No, but it is enough to slow it down while we blow the bridge.” Elwood pulled down his mask, teeth exposed in a feral grin.
“With eleven pounds of AGX?”
“Hell, just one pound is more than enough to light off the munitions in those tanks…”
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Ereli Estian.
Ereli got put in a microwave. The dial turned over to eleven. It didn’t burn, not directly — the radiowaves hit and shook molecules. Atoms. Pushed energy into the circuits he carried. Fired off nerve impulses, made phantom noises buzz through his ears, lights flash in his eyes, made pain scythe him off his feet and onto his knees and—
It was over. Light UAVs dropped out of the air, crunching into the ground, smashing into the hotel ahead.
All around him brethren swore, getting back up. Camouflage — those who had active camouflage of some kind — frozen. “HERF!” Some yelled, when others didn’t get it, shuddered where they stood.
But the exterior of the Nesimi Hotel wasn’t a good place to freeze up, even if the Azeri soldiers had been hit just as hard.
The dogs recovered faster than the humans. Their gunfire ripped across the rear garden and pool area — the Azeri return fire, when it came, beat through the pool chairs and tilted umbrellas, spewing plastic shards in all directions, wrenching back and forth over the concrete paving and tearing out the brickwork.
It looked impressive. It was impressive. But the dogs’ hiccoughing double and triple-taps weren’t aimed to suppress, force people into cover, or throw off the enemy’s fire — weren’t there to intimidate, but to kill.
Somebody got taken in the throat to Ereli’s left — staggered on his feet, and while steadily bleeding all over his camos calmly limped into cover behind the poolside bar while returning fire. The brother hit the floor like a sack of bricks the moment he was out of the line of fire, another sprinting up and skidding to a halt while ripping an EMSTAB kit off his pack before vanishing in a boil of smoke cover and chaff ribbons.
An Azeri officer yelled orders to his men — he fell over, two holes drilled in under his exposed chin, helmet ballooning out behind him.
The door was too much trouble. So to get inside, one of them blew open the spa complex’s walls and doors with an anti-tank weapon. They pushed into the hotel through burning hair salons, even as Azeri reinforcements began to arrive — Ereli spotted the whining hull of an active UAV, shot at it — missed, shot again, again… led the target, shot, and the thing came apart mid-air, its rotors tearing itself apart.
The popping noise of APSGMs overhead was accompanied by a scream of warning, and Eversen and the others lagging behind charged through smashed windows and into the hotel barely in time to avoid getting killed, the missiles scything down both on the few brothers left out in the open, and the Azeri forces.
There were more of the Azeris than of the dogs. A lot more of the Azeris, all with their IFF burnt out.
Ereli glanced over his shoulder, wondering who’d had the bright idea to send the APSGMs down on that mess, spotted Eversen behind him, and joined the flow of attack pushing through the luxury center’s corridors and into the ornate lobby.
Just as they began rising up the cavernous marble-floored and gilt lobby’s stairways, the building shook, smoke pillowing out of a brand new crater torn through the upper floors. The mezzanined catwalks high above the main lobby came tumbling down.
“Armor!” A brother screamed, running from his place at the reception desk seconds before a burst of machine gun fire lanced through the glass facade and into the wall behind the desk, showering chips of stone across the floor.
Someone stopped in the middle of the lobby floor, on the glossy stone between the walkway’s crumpled rubble, and lifted a rocket launcher. He stared over the sights, aiming it near-blind with the thing’s electronics dead — but the purely mechanical firing mechanism worked just fine, hitting the rocket motor in the back and sending it spinning through the air, wobbling without its internal guidance.
The explosion tore through the active-camouflaged tank’s forward tread, burning the asphalt-black covering its armor to a crisp ash white. Ereli ran for higher ground — so did the rest of them. At the best of times a stand-up firefight was the last thing any of them would want, preferring to shoot and retreat then shoot again, but against a tank pulling back took even more urgent priority.
Outside the hotel, more armor was rolling up the mainland road towards the biggest of the bridges onto the islands. Two tanks, three, four, six — Ereli barely registered counting them as he got a glimpse running past shattered windows, and before he had time to finish the count two of them exploded simultaneously on the bridge itself, throwing smoke in tight plumes through each and every porthole, then tongues of fire jetting through the gaps as the internal fuel reserves began to burn…
He spotted two camouflaged figures dropping off the side of the bridge into the water, and a heartbeat later the tanks’ munitions stores went — the tanks’ full stock of APSGMs, explosive shells and reactive armor going off in a single rippling sympathetic detonation.
The bridge lurched under the tanks’ weight, folded, and an instant later the Azeri reinforcements on the mainland were cut off as the bridge crumpled entirely, throwing up white plumes as the rubble hit the water below.
An infantry carrier, stopping to disgorge its passengers, exploded the instant it opened up — the next to open its doors did too, exploding shells blasting into their interiors with the muffled, drawn-out thud of a LAMW firing.
Okay. Someone else was handling the armor. Ereli nodded to Eversen, and they returned to their objective, running for the stairwells — the building’s elevators were down.
Seventy-five fucking floors of stairs later, and thirteen bodyguards, two Azeri soldiers, and two pistol rounds lodged in Ereli’s armored chestpiece, they burst in on an empty luxury suite. One of the chairs was overturned. Bottles of wine and vodka, a jar of caviar, all left open and abandoned on the tables.
“Some party,” Eversen murmured.
“The fuck did the president go?” Ereli snapped. He stepped out, looked both ways — a stairwell down? But no, brothers were pouring up out of all of them, panting for breath, aim steady as they checked left, right.
Ereli yanked his mask down and sniffed the air. Tried to follow the traces of vodka and food out into the corridor — lost it. Found it again. His nose wasn’t that good, ability to scent close to human — in the genetic tweaking that’d made him he’d lost olfactory acuity in favor of the visual, but that was okay.
Couldn’t smell a goddamn sign on the wall with exit directions no matter how good your nose was.
“There’s a helipad — five floors up!” Ereli yelled. “Do not let that bastard get away!”
The word was passed up and down the ranks, and Ereli charged back up the nearest emergency stairwell, hot on Eversen’s heels. They burst out into the hallways, stalked down them at a jog, guns leading the way.
Someone was saying something in Azeri behind a heavy set of double-doors — Ereli gestured at it. Prepare to breach.
Brothers he didn’t recognize stacked up on both sides of it — he kicked through and they swarmed in around him, behind him.
A glass waiting room, leading out to a helipad anchored to the side of the hotel. Men in suits — bodyguards. Pull trigger, pull trigger — no, not at that guy, his uniform too ornate, no sidearm — him? No, he’s already been shot…
Ereli froze, the only sound the after-echo of gunfire.
The guards and soldiers were dead, in slowly growing pools of blood. Three old men stood just outside the helipad door, the wind blowing past them and inside.
“Don’t move!” A brother behind him ye
lled. “Don’t fucking move!”
Ilhaim Nesimi, the man who clawed control of Azerbaijan from its previous, marginally less corrupt ruler for life, stood red-faced and desperate, his gray hair blowing around his skull in tight whips as a helicopter approached.
The helicopter’s hull leaned backward as it slowed to land.
Nesimi tensed, as if readying to run. The military officer beside him in the big hat, just as old and too highly ranked to be armed, stepped out in front of him, shielding him. The other official, another old man, cringed away, clapping his hands over his head.
The helicopter edged up to the pad, Nesimi stepped toward it — someone barked a warning, but Nesimi went on, hand outstretched.
Two holes punched straight through the helicopter’s cockpit, trailing broken glass and shredded metal behind the shells as they exited with a glossy red wake of the pilot’s gore. A third shell slammed into the midsection, tearing into its engine — no exit wound, but the helicopter screamed, tilting as it lost power, finally clipping the end of the helipad with a squeal of metal before falling away into open air.
Three distant roars of a LAMW washed past them a few heartbeats later, the shells having reached their target long before the sound of the gunshots arrived.
Finger on the trigger of his rifle, back of his left wrist supporting the barrel with a set of zip-tie cuffs clutched in his hand, Ereli stepped closer. “Lay on the ground!” No helpful repeat, following a moment later. The translator on his vest was dead, too. “Fucking dammit. Can someone translate that for me?”
Apparently the three old men understood English. In the face of the rifles pointed at him, the military official got to his knees, then down on the floor.
President Nesimi turned his head, looking longingly beyond the lip of the Helipad, at the open space so very, very near at hand. “How is this possible?” he asked, voice rough. “How is it possible you have done this to me?”
“Eighty-seven million New Dollars of donations make a lot of things possible. Lay down on the ground — you’re being taken under custody by the Private Azerbaijan Civil Protection Effort as an unarmed belligerent pursuant to section five of the AD-MACP private military operations guidelines.”
Nesimi bowed his head, holding his wrists out behind his back. “Everything I did, I did for my country. I am a patriot.”
“Yeah?” Ereli grunted, cuffing him. “I’m sure the oil money didn’t mean shit to you.”
16. Partial Stability.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Ereli Estian.
Smoke pillared up into the sky above Baku. Fires, raging helplessly out of control. They’d been burning all day, but as night neared, it was finally possible to do something about them.
Dark-skinned North American contractors from Detroit were patrolling with the emergency services — two planeloads of them had been waiting in Germany for the signal to fly across, and with the commercial airport taken over, more manpower was arriving every hour to help out. The streets were mostly empty, but the flashing lights and sirens of fire engines were blazing through anyway, chased by captured armored vehicles with their sides splashed in white and neon yellow paint.
“You don’t think that’s going to be an issue?” Eversen asked, watching the fourth team of contractor-peacekeepers pull out, rolling across the now secure highway towards the coast and the Khazar Islands.
“Hm?”
“The dark skin. Most of the locals here, even the refugees, are light skinned.” Eversen shrugged uncomfortably. “Humans can be funny about that.”
Ereli flattened his ears, and grimaced — the hole in the side of his muzzle aching where the skinbonds pulled at the raw flesh. “I figured they’d like it better than us. Muslims don’t like dogs.”
Eversen took a step forward into the shattered glass of the street. Empty, now. The only echoes of gunfire coming from the far east of the city at the moment — although there was an enemy push in the makings on the main commercial airport out west, it hadn’t started yet.
“I haven’t gotten much of that, out here,” Eversen said. “None of the people terrified of touching me thing. Maybe the dog thing was about Tajikistan, not about Muslims.”
“Maybe. But you haven’t seen all that many civilians, either.”
“No. That’s true. Been busy.”
Ereli patted Eversen’s shoulder, and moved past him, heading down the street towards the nearest checkpoint. He’d been able to rechip most of his gear, though the displays in his goggles were still fried after the HERF. Had to lodge a transit request with a pad, instead. And a low priority request, since they weren’t in combat.
They waved as they approached the checkpoint and the fire team of North American mercenaries waved back — not like Ereli and his brothers really needed to be IFF checked. The checkpoint itself was made up of some overturned cars, sandbags filled with rubble, and an automatic turret sitting on the pedestrian crossing island at the road junction.
“How’s it going? You good?” the contractors’ front-man asked.
“We’re good.” Eversen smiled, just as naturally as the human had.
“Yeah. Just waiting on a pick-up,” Ereli added.
The front-man flashed a nervous thumbs-up. Ereli returned it. A couple of the group — North Americans were a lot more socially forward than Ereli was expecting — came up, making small talk, clearly very interested in the brothers, in trying to get their heads around working without a commanding officer. Well, the contractors had a commanding officer — part of their internal chain of command, all of them employed by Huxton Security — but that Ereli and his brothers didn’t even have officers blew their minds, even when Ereli showed them how the tactical software worked.
“Taking over a city’s a relatively simple task,” Ereli said. “What we did was be selective about where we struck. Keeping an eye on the enemy is more to keep out of their way than to find targets. Engage, attack, melt away.”
“And it’s been what, four days?” Specialist Verge — an Anglo-African American, he’d been quick to correct Ereli, not a Mestizo or Mulatto — seemed amazed.
“Six,” Ereli said. “About five since our spearhead entered the city — six since this whole thing started.”
“Wonders of that MACP neo-capitalist service economy,” one of the others joked. “Just click express delivery, pay up, and you can have whatever you want, even regime change, right now.”
They all laughed at that one.
With the regime beheaded the next step was cracking the ministries — work already underway, now that the Azeri governmental networks were infiltrated. The more civil-works oriented ministries — law and justice and street cleaning types — only needed a team of Ereli’s brothers to show up. Stuff like the Ministry of State Security, that still needed brothers to break in, throwing out the army forces holding the buildings, free the civilian hostages the regime had taken. Most of the army were starting to surrender, though if that was because their president had been captured or because their battle networks were fucked, Ereli couldn’t tell.
The situation outside of Baku was worse, militarily speaking — infantry and armor bedding down in the hinterlands so they’d be impossible to dislodge, UAV airstrips found to be empty when strikes were called down — but Baku was the major population center, where most of the money was coming from, and thankfully there were relatively few reports of the military taking its aggression out on the local population outside of the city’s center.
“You going to stick around, mop up the ministries?” Ereli asked Eversen, when their transportation arrived — a patrol of their brothers in a pair of pre-fab buggies, happy to give them a lift back to Forward Base Gamma. “Or you wanna come help me arm the interim police force?”
That’d been Ereli’s idea — shipping in non-lethal weapons to arm the locals with, put together a temporary force so the people could police themselves. It was popular on the crowdfunding polls
, and one of the political opposition militias — that Panah Karimov guy they’d failed to buy ammo from — had volunteered to help recruit for it.
Eversen glanced back, over his shoulder at one of the plumes of smoke eating into the early sunset. “Yeah, I think I’m done with fighting for now,” he said. “Let’s go make peace instead.”
17. Mopping Up.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Edane Estian.
Edane and Sokolai were getting good at their entry routine. Edane took down the door with a shell — there were plenty of shells, now that all the armories were running. Sokolai took down the rest of the door, kicking or shouldering it down. Edane followed him in, occasionally needing to fire off a second shot from the LAMW to help clear the room.
It felt good. Real. Cleared out his nose and let him get the scent of explosives and death and rubble deep into himself.
They were running with about two thirds of their electronics functional — they’d had time to rechip and replace what they could — he’d had to throw away his old scope and get a new one — but the printers in-country were swamped with orders, they didn’t have everything they needed. A flight was due in tomorrow morning with basic replacements, but for now there wasn’t anything to do but soldier on.
“Armor, north-east, second intersection,” Sokolai hissed from behind Edane.
Edane picked up the LAMW, and turned, edging across the housing block’s flat roof, between drying lines for clothes. He lifted the weapon awkwardly and rolled to his back, bench pressing the LAMW up until its scope got a peek over the sidewall.
The LAMW’s barrel was hot to the touch. The suppressor was long dry, its outer casing heat-cracked. They’d been fighting a long time.
Edane lowered the LAMW and looked into the scope’s viewfinder, playing the scope footage back. He found the tank, marked it in the playback — the viewfinder showed him a tag where the vehicle was. About a half-kilometer away.
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