The housing block was part of a row of connected buildings, roughly in the middle of a wide, open square. Good sightlines, and plenty of structure to eat up the tank shells.
Edane stripped one of his three remaining Shaped High Explosive Double-Warhead Armor Piercing shells from its magazine on his hip, drew the LAMW’s bolt lever back — thumbing the chambered solid core shell back down into its magazine before the extractor pulled it free — and manually loaded the SHED-WAP directly into the chamber.
Sokolai crabwalked in beside him, ducked down. He held out his phone, the tank’s make and model — UTR-77 — displayed along with the schematics. Two pin-lined paths marked possible points of vulnerability, one through the roof and down at an angle into the tank’s frontal optics wiring junction, and a second through the turret and into the autoloader.
Edane tapped the phone, dragging the pin-lines down, shifting their angle to better match what he had off the roof. He shook his head. “Can’t do it from here. Need to get over to the other building, or wait ‘til it gets closer.”
A shake of the head in turn, Sokolai’s teeth grit. Sokolai switched the phone’s display back to the linked stick-eye disposable cameras he’d set. One had been burned out by the tank’s targeting laser. In the feed from the other two they could make out the huddled forms of infantry. “I better get downstairs before they start trying to come up,” Sokolai said. “Help when you can?”
Edane nodded. “Yell if you need me.”
Sokolai nodded back, and pulled up his facemask — the camo inactive, reset to a murky brown-grey-black pattern. He hitched up his rifle and crawled into the narrow roof access door, back downstairs.
Edane edged back to the roof’s edge, ear perked into the grilled gap in his helmet, listening. Tanks were loud, while they were charging their batteries or running at speed, burning fuel in turbines. On electrics, though, they could creep along, silent but for the crush of their weight.
He tapped the button under the rim of his helmet for his comms, gazing into the wristwatch he’d strapped around the LAMW’s forestock. He touched the wristwatch’s little display with his forefinger, navigated it through the communications web, sent a request through to UAV operations in his city-sector. It only chimed twice before the connection was accepted. “We have tanks coming up towards the airport at Pair-Thirty-One’s position,” he said.
“Still no strike capacity available Pair-Thirty-One. Stud-Four will be on station in forty minutes.”
Not good enough. Edane grit his teeth. “Do you have any alternative capacity?”
“Alternative capacity, Thirty-One?”
“Yeah. Like a distraction. Or observation.”
A pause from the other end of the connection. “Can-do. Overwatch and a distraction in T-minus three. Hope you like countermeasure flares, Thirty-One.”
“Appreciate it, operations.”
“You’re welcome. You are now on hold, but please stay on the line.”
His earpiece chirped. Edane touched back to Sokolai’s channel. “Operations is getting us some overflight support in under three minutes.”
Sokolai’s kept his voice low. “Firepower?”
“No strike, she said, but overwatch and a distraction.”
“Distraction? What’s that supposed to… whatever. They’re stacking up to come inside downstairs. That tank’s angling to support them. Going to need you here soon.”
“I’ll try not to keep you waiting…”
Edane crept up to the roof’s sidewall. Listening. He tensed his ears, turning his head… he couldn’t be quite sure where the tank was. All he could make out was the clatter of tank treads as the tank moved, an inconsistent sound — only audible when the vehicle’s suspension flexed, otherwise the rubberized rollers deadened the sound, and tank treads moving slowly could be whisper-soft on hard surfaces. Hard to pinpoint it from sound alone, but he had a rough idea.
His earpiece chimed at him. “Feeding you oversight now, Thirty-one.”
Edane wished his goggles still worked. He had to use the wristwatch strapped to his LAMW, and the tiny screen was almost useless.
The infantry were entering the building, and the tank’s chassis was turned to present a corner of its front tread toward the building, cannon levelled in their direction. There were other white splotches of heat in the area, but the signals interpretation software and operator had tagged them as non-combatants.
“Distraction?” Edane asked.
“Coming up in minus thirty…”
Edane scrabbled back round onto his back, laying the LAMW down the length of his body. He planted the bipod between his feet, shoulders braced against the washing-line post immediately behind him.
“Minus twenty…”
He unlatched the magazine, stripped off the shell on top — a solid core armor-piercing round — slapped the magazine back in, and rearranged his shells like he had before, this time pushing the solid core into the chamber. First the solid core, then the SHED-WAP. He thumbed the fire selector to two-round burst.
“Minus ten…”
Edane touched in under his helmet, switching back to Sokolai’s channel. “Distraction incoming.” He set his feet against the bipod’s legs.
“Got it.”
“Three, two, one—”
A black streak cut between the buildings across the plaza and exploded in light, a roaring sound of flames accompanying pouring red curtains of fire across the buildings — the UAV dropping a trail of dozens of blindingly hot flares, like a long bouncing string of stars, before it hopped over the rooftops and vanished back over the horizon.
Edane sighted in on the tank, aimpoint in his scope guided by the oversight feed, and pulled back on the trigger. The LAMW shuddered on the bipod legs, fighting against his boots, sending painful jolts up his ankle and along both knees, cracking into his shoulder what seemed like once — the two rounds fired so close together that the hole punched by the solid core round tearing through the roof’s side-wall had barely started shedding dust before the SHED-WAP blew through in the solid core’s wake — striking the tank directly in the divot the solid core had torn out of its armor, the paired warheads working in just the same fashion as they did in larger anti-tank weaponry.
The first shaped charge was highly directional, a solid blast of force on impact, funneling hot gas, molten metal, and shockwave pressure into a tightly focused point — a point hit an instant later by the secondary charge, plummeting through the gap and smearing on impact, like a ball of clay hammered into every tiny crack the first charge had torn and melted through the armor plate. A bare instant after impact the deformed charge exploded — tearing open the gaps and shredding the armor plate, and what was behind it, to pieces.
In this case, what was behind the armor plate happened to be the tank’s loading mechanism. Something burned out in the barrel with a thump — the chambered shell going off — and the un-armed tank shell crashed through the building’s walls and tumbled out the other end of the housing block, smoke billowing up from the cannon’s end. More black smoke began to boil from the loader — the emergency hatch blew out a few heartbeats later, the pair of crewmen stumbling out and sprinting away before anything else detonated.
Tank knocked out, the infantry below were yelling at each other — a man screamed in response to a muffled thump downstairs, a grenade. Edane hauled himself up over the roof’s edge, LAMW held rifle-fashion, and he snapped off a solid core shell at the men below. It crashed through a man’s shoulder and down his left side, gouged a crater out of his leg as the shell skimmed out. The yells turned to screams, gunfire roared inside the building, a long burst that tore out of a downstairs window, spraying fragments of brick and dust. One of the soldiers threw their gun away… then another did the same, falling to the ground and covering his head.
“Four down, three surrendered — I need you down here,” Sokolai hissed.
Edane peeked over the roof’s edge again, shoulders sore. “Get down and drop
your weapons!” He yelled, translator on his vest repeating it almost as he said it.
Two soldiers looked up, from beside their maimed, bleeding comrade. Made eye contact — Edane tensed, ready to shoot… but the man on the left threw his gun aside, and the other simply looked back down to his wounded comrade, hands bloody as he tried to hold his friend together.
Fifteen minutes later, after getting downstairs with Sokolai, and disarming the enemy in groups, cuffing the men inside first with zip-ties, then the ones from outside in groups of two, they’d somehow captured all of the enemy. And the Azeris were laughing. Laughing, even though two of them were dead, and some of the others were waiting on a medevac.
“Twenty four of us. Two of them!” the officer laughed, tears in his eyes.
One man looked ready to fight, after he’d been disarmed and cuffed, but when the officers started talking like that, he slumped on his knees, relieved.
“We surrendered the platoon to two of them,” the second replied, hunching over to wipe his eyes on his shoulders. “My God, we’d have been killed if we hadn’t lost this war!”
The laughter was infectious. Even Edane and Sokolai were laughing, by the time the contactors arrived with emergency medical kits for the soldiers, bringing the news that the airport was still secure, that the last of the Ministry of State Security’s facilities in the city had been successfully raided and prisoners, from the protests of days before, freed.
“War’s over,” Sokolai murmured, tears in his eyes — not just from the laughter. “We don’t have to shoot anyone else.”
Edane perked his ears, tense. “You crying?” he asked.
Sokolai thumbed at his eyes, startled, looked down at the wet on his ruddy fur. “Yeah. Maybe.” He blinked, hard. “I’m just glad this is over.”
18. Moving on.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ April, 2106.
::/ Ereli Estian.
The plan was to head north, to meet with one of the opposition leaders. Panah Karimov, formerly of the pre-Eurasian war’s state sponsored media. An old man now, he’d spent the decades since Nesimi’s coup dodging the regime’s arrest warrants while holding together what amounted to the country’s only political opposition — which, given Nesimi’s crackdowns, had become an armed militia out of necessity.
Ereli tapped through the dossier on the man, still bearing Andercom West’s branding on each document. He tilted the pad around to get a better full view of one of the photographs. Karimov and the Aliyevs — family members of the previous regime — in Baku, summer of 2045. City was nicer then, a little flatter. In the picture he was a dark-haired young adult, beaming on the arm of a cosmetic-surgery and genetweak beautiful woman — if they even had genetweaking back then. The Caspian sea was deeper, and there weren’t quite so many oil derricks out on the water — certainly not the forests of steel they’d dodged on the way in to the Khazar Islands. He held the pad out to Eversen across the interior of the armored vehicle — the interior was scarred, and it reeked of wet paint, even on the move. “Here’s the last publicly available photo of the guy we’re meeting.”
Eversen took it, showed it to the brother beside him — Srednoi — and passed the pad down the line. “It’s a little out of date.”
“Sixty years out of date.” One of the brothers laughed.
Waiting for the pad to make it back around to him, Ereli sat back. “Man’s our link to getting ahold of local manpower, though. An intermediary said he could get us upwards of ten thousand potential recruits for the intermediary police.”
“Trained, or untrained?”
Ereli shrugged. “If it is trained, it’s going to be of the three months in boot camp variety.”
Eversen shook his head. “We were barely getting started, with five years of training.”
“Funny. Most humans I talk to don’t remember as much out of their childhoods as we do. Certainly not so much that sticks.”
A shrug in turn, while Eversen considered that, swinging his jaw side to side. “Not like forgetting something’s going to make them harder to sell. Human kids don’t get trained like we do, they’re people, not products.”
“True. Not most of them, anyway.”
“You know a human trained from childhood as a product?”
Ereli gestured vaguely back the way they’d come. “Some of the young political activists I met around the city seem like they’ve been raised for this, almost. Waiting for this day… lots of ideas about how they want to run things.”
“I kinda like the crowdfunding and voting thing. Needs some work, though,” Eversen said. “Everybody wants to pay for hospitals, nobody wants to pay for roads.”
“Yeah, well, when people need a hospital they notice it’s not there, when they need roads they forget—”
The world tilted ninety degrees, then ninety degrees again. Ereli’s ears rang. Shockwave concussion beat his chest to mush. He hung from the webbing of his seat — his rifle fell away from his lap and clattered to the roof above with a dozen others. There was a bulge in the sidewall, something screeching, a sensation of motion as the vehicle skidded on its roof — the enclosed space suddenly felt very hot, very tight, all the blood was in his head, his legs dangling uselessly in space as he hung upside down.
He saw a brother deeper in the suddenly dark passenger compartment banging at the seat webbing’s buckle with the palm of his hand. Tore it open only to plummet down. Something smelled like burning, Ereli couldn’t hear clearly — he couldn’t lift the catch on the buckle. Too small for his fingers, somehow. Ereli yanked his knife from his belt and jammed it into the catch — twisted. The knifeblade’s point snapped off — did it again. The catch gave and he slipped down, clinging to the webbing, falling onto his feet. Grabbed Eversen — cut open the shoulder-strap, the hip-strap, helped him to his feet.
Picked up a rifle off the floor, any rifle, even if it wasn’t his. Shouldered his way out after the brother who got the passenger hatch open. Couldn’t breathe properly — air was too thick, too hot. Fires lit the road, smoke everywhere.
The armored vehicle was on its roof, the other four of the convoy were ahead and behind — the one furthest back was nothing but scrap, the car up front burning but on its wheels, hatches open.
“Where?” Someone yelled. “Who—”
Tracers cut through the early-evening dark, bullets ripped a brother off his feet and onto the asphalt. Ereli shot back, quick double-taps at the origin of the tracers, at the flash between the buildings on the hillside out left.
“Under attack, this location, immediate support required, multiple wounded.” “Contact north-east.” “Contact west.” “Contact north — Contact down, relocating.”
Who the hell was shooting at them? The army? The army wasn’t out here. It didn’t make any sense, this area was supposedly under control of Karimov and his supporters.
There wasn’t any cover except the armored vehicles. He ran up against the burning hulk’s side, right where some kind of ordnance had smashed in the sidewall — that made sense. He was afraid for a second, that he’d be in the line of fire, but it made sense. The armored vehicle was on its roof, it was upside down — the impact site was facing away from the direction of attack.
He lifted the rifle — not his rifle. The rifle’s electronics were confused about his location, but he sighted in north, then north-east. West was behind him — west was the open field behind him. He turned, found a target, shot — shot — started moving after the second recoil against his shoulder, not bothering to check his hits, looking for more cover, looking for something to shield him from both the north-east and the west, from both forward-left and the right, but there wasn’t anything so he ran for the gutter where the road’s paving ended and the dirt next to it began but the tracers lanced straight through him, pain complete and utter as his own guts fogged the air and he crumpled onto the ground, all the muscles in his belly giving up at once. He hit the road, clawing at it, dragging himself an inch at
a time for the gutter.
It was right there and his body hitched again, spasming, and Ereli just had to get into the six inches of cover it’d give him, had to find cover then shoot then move to the next bit of cover and he’d be okay, that was how firefights worked, you shot and you took cover and you shot, he just needed to get to cover, just had to get over whatever it was he was leaving on the ground and everything was slick with blood now and fuck them, he’d get to the gutter he could reach it just a little bit further, just a little bit further, just—
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Srednoi Estian.
“There! Fucking there!” Srednoi pointed again, just as the machine gun somewhere out to the right opened up again, scattering chips of asphalt and blasting through the poor bastard stuck on the asphalt.
His brother Skarlin didn’t respond, hiking up the grenade launcher to his shoulder. Pam, Pam, Pam, the thing made muffled thuds of noise launching one grenade after another — they flashed as directional charges blew mid-air, flinging them further up the hillside, between the buildings the enemy were using for cover. Explosions thundered out as each grenade found a target, the gunfire stopped. But the enemy were also behind them, there were targets out west and—
*
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ Skarlin Estian.
“Srednoi? Srednoi! Man down!” Skarlin dropped the grenade launcher and grabbed Srednoi’s armor carry-loop, dragged him in behind the blown out vehicle as fast as he could. Brothers were spreading out to all sides, gunfire lancing out in every direction. “Hold on, Srednoi, hold on…”
He crawled in behind the armored vehicle’s wheel, pulled Srednoi’s limp weight just a few feet more, then stopped to assess the wound.
Had to do triage, had to follow the procedure. Fuck. Fuck. He hadn’t done this since he was seven years old. Bleeding. Had to check on the bleeding first. Srednoi was bleeding from the throat. Big, messy wound. Skarlin pushed down on it, tried to apply pressure, stop the flow — there wasn’t a flow. “Shit, shit…”
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