“No, but I think she understands why I’m out here.”
“Enlighten me,” Marianna said, unfolding a tactical pad while sagging back against the foxhole’s torn earth side.
“This is as close to a place I belong as any.” Edane started confirming the tagged targets she passed him, gesturing through them on his goggles and uniform’s cameras.
She revealed teeth in a shark-tooth grin, thin, amused… not so vicious. “Find what you were looking for out there, did you?”
“Found out it wasn’t in Azerbaijan,” he said. “Wasn’t in fighting.”
“Sounds like you found it.” Her grin eased down to a smile. “Just because they made you to be a killer, just because you are a killer, that doesn’t mean that being a killer’s all you want out of life, now is it?”
Edane touched the breast-pocket he’d put the LAMW shell casing into, from the roof in Baku. He dipped his nose to look at the bulge it made in his tactical webbing. “Doesn’t mean it’s not what I want, either.”
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t. But it means it’s not the whole story for you. Every time you walk off into the jungle on your own little la guerra, you’ll discover whole new reasons to come back to civilization. And that ain’t cowardice, or being unable to perform, it’s—”
“—Living,” Edane said. “Because they made me to do something, and I need to do it, but it isn’t living. Killing makes me happy, I’m wired for it to make me happy, but if I let that be the only reason I’m happy, I don’t walk back from la guerra, do I?”
Marianna shook her head. “You don’t. You even want it to be the only reason you’re happy? The only thing that can make you happy?”
“No.”
“Welcome back from la guerra, Edane.” She slapped his shoulder. “Now kill these targets like a good puppy and then get the fuck off my playing field before I beat your skull in. Go eat something with —” Person of interest — J “— at the snack bar. Clear?”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“Good puppy.”
The LAMW’s recoil, kicking through three magazines of guided shells in rapid succession, felt almost as warm on his shoulder as Janine did just a few minutes later.
*
“It’s amazing how fast and slow it goes, when I’m out here, really watching, instead of just keeping an eye on you at home.” Janine poked at her paper cup of snack bar coffee distrustfully with the little wooden stirrer. “It’s almost all waiting, and then something happens, and everything’s fast, then it’s all waiting again… almost peaceful. Is that weird?” She looked up at Edane, hesitant. “Calling MilSim peaceful?”
Edane leaned his head side to side thoughtfully. “Think I see what you mean. Most people think it’s going to be like an action movie, constant firefights, but some of the best matches we’ve had have hardly any shooting.”
“Not that it’s not fighting, just…” Janine waved her hand, as if she could pluck the right words out of the air. To Edane, it seemed like she almost always could.
This time, he got to give her the words, though. “It’s movement and position. Detection and evasion. Fighting for strategic advantage over tactical advantage.”
“Hmn.” She scrunched up the bridge of her snout, all the way down to her nose. “What’s the difference between them?”
“It’s not an easy line to draw, but strategy is decision-making towards a goal, tactics is executing those decisions.” He folded his hands together on the picnic table-top. “Goal: Change the regime. Strategy: Capture the president. Tactic: Bottle him up in a building he can’t escape from.”
“Mmm.” She watched him, eyes dancing across his face. “It was weird, getting those little e-mails from you, especially that first week.”
Edane glanced down at his webbing’s breast-pocket, as if he could see the shell casing inside. “Yeah,” he said. “It was nice, though. Being able to stay in touch a little.”
“It was.”
Janine turned her head, watching the other teams filing in from the field. The players hopped off golf carts that turned around and went back out to pick up others. She stared at the gate into the play area, for awhile.
“Think you’ll go back?” she asked, voice small.
Edane glanced down at his right wrist. Brushed the fur back and forth, thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said. “Probably.” He bowed his head. “But only to visit. I don’t think I want to live that life full-time.”
“Just might need to go and see if you can find a blue sky in the middle of all that, huh?”
He nodded. “It’s a good way to say it.”
“Moving back in?” she asked.
“If, uh. If you want me to.” He thought back. “If… if you’ve had your moments feeling beautiful.”
She smiled. A complex curve of her lips. Not happy, not pretending to be… bittersweet, like she’d bitten into one of those awful-tasting lemon candy liqueur things she liked. “Might need a few more,” she said. “But I’d prefer it if we could find a way to make that work. I still get to come back home to you, after, and we’re all happy.”
He ducked his head, a sort of nod, ears lifted. “We can give it a try.”
“We can,” she agreed, and her smile’s sinful enjoyment of the sour turned soft as she reached for his hand. His right hand.
It was scarred, now. New scars. His scars.
Edane and Janine stayed for the announcement of the spring season’s final standings, but what was unusual was that everyone else did, too.
Players, friends and family were waiting around the judging tents, to the left of the two off-field controller office tents. The off-field players were filing out, slinging their cold coffee in wide sprays out over the grass between the tents before vanishing back inside for refills, while team leaders shuffled in and out.
When Marianna returned from her session with the desk jockeys, her expression was grim, but it didn’t have anything to do with the after-match post-mortem. Salzach was the target of her aggression, purely because he was the first one she reached, kneeing him along the picnic bench and into Dahl with an angry grunt before slumping down.
“Trouble?” Erlnicht asked, mildly.
Dahl and Kacey were to either side of Erlnicht, Kacey having stuck around to watch the match even though she’d stepped aside for Edane to rejoin the team. Across from them, Svarstad sat with his LSW’s recoil engine’s innards in oily pieces on a paper picnic plate. Eberstetten, Ellis, then Edane and Janine. The whole team, bar Eissen. A crowded table, but the others were worse — strangers sitting and standing on them to get a look at the still empty podium outside the judging tent.
Marianna shook her head, lips drawn in over her teeth. “Nothing confirmed, yet.”
“But?” Edane asked. “What’s going on?”
She glared at him squintily, then turned to the rest of the table. “Did none of you tell Edane?”
Ellis, wisely, got up and out arm’s reach — even if Marianna didn’t have her helmet with her. “I figured he knew.”
“Well?” Edane asked, leaning back.
“Kennis-Purcelle Combat Games tabled a league policy addendum, signed off by their sponsored teams and three out of last year’s top five.” Ellis spread his hands, circling away from the growling Marianna. “They’re calling it gene-doping, and guess whose performance they used in their charts to prove it?”
Marianna’s growling grew rose, slouching forward over the table.
“Fuck,” Edane murmured.
“Yeah. Dobson’s warming up the crowd to it,” Ellis said, flicking his head towards the judging tents. Dobson was the team captain of the KPC-Rush. Edane knew him. Everybody knew him.
Edane craned his head around, trying to see. Dobson, in his neon blue and green cap was standing out front, like he was one of the judges addressing the crowd…
“Shit,” Edane murmured. “Janine, I gotta…” He hesitated, untangling his legs from the picnic bench, while she blinked up at him. “Is, uh. Is this one of t
hose things where I kiss your cheek before I run off? Like in movies?”
“Maybe?” She ventured, glancing off at Dobson in confusion.
He kissed Janine’s cheek. “This right?”
She hunched up, smiling, embarrassed, looking around at the team. “Uhm. Maybe.”
Dahl laughed, shaking his head.
“Where do you think you’re going, knucklehead?” Marianna asked, though didn’t protest when Edane pushed through the crowd.
He ducked around a genemod two inches shorter than him, the woman glaring icy daggers up at him, but only — he hoped — because he was pushing rudely by.
“Sorry!” He tried. “Gotta go talk to Dobson.”
The offended player, one of the Chevaliers, Edane thought, lifted an eyebrow in surprise.
Getting through the crowd was easy, doing it without bruising anybody… That was another thing.
“See, it’s not about discrimination. It’s about this being a sport. It’s not that they’re doing anything intentionally to cheat,” Dobson said, “they’re just victims of circumstance, but we can’t have a fair playing field with them on it. That’s all there is to it. Our hands are tied, really.”
“S’cuse me,” Edane said, grabbing one of the players up front by the shoulder and shoving them aside. This one… this one Edane didn’t care about offending, because he’d been nodding and smiling to Dobson’s line of chatter.
Dobson blinked up at Edane from under the brim of his cap, eyes wide. “Problem?” He wore a self-satisfied smirk, as if Edane’s mere height proved his point for him.
Edane shouldered up past the man to his left, a half foot shorter than him, and stood in the front row of players, clasping his hands in front of himself, gazing down on Dobson. “Sorry, I was just real interested in hearing what you had to say, Dobson. I’m Edane? Fireteam Eight-Eight-Zero, unofficially the Hallman Hairtrigger Hounds? I’m sorry, I ain’t heard much about this — just got back from Azerbaijan today.”
The players around him looked at him again, and differently, when he said that. He couldn’t help but smile, a dark little feeling of satisfaction in his gut. Teams with actual military experience had a mystique in MilSim, and Dobson, good as he and his crew were, had never been on the wrong side of a schoolyard scuffle, let alone a rapid assault team.
Dobson flicked his lower lip under his foreteeth, made a sucking sound, and nodded. “Yeah. We were just discussing the situation, with the tabled addendum? I guess you heard about that.”
“Yeah,” Edane replied. “You were saying how me and my brothers are victims of circumstances?”
“Exactly. It’s not like any of you intended to get yourselves an unfair advantage, now was it?”
“Sir, no sir,” Edane said, smiling back down at him. “We all just got mugged by a gang of genetic engineers with a bodybuilding fetish. Their fault, right?”
People laughed. Not many, but enough. An unfamiliar, blissful sound of spasming breath.
Dobson, though. Dobson wasn’t laughing. “That’s right,” he said, teeth grit. “Not your fault at all.”
Edane spread his hands. “Wanna arm wrestle?”
“What?” Dobson stepped back.
“You heard me. Wanna arm wrestle? That’s your point, isn’t it? The one you’re trying to make to everybody?” Edane gestured around in a sweep, stepping out of the front of the crowd. Just like he’d seen Thorne do a dozen times.
“No,” Dobson said. “I think everyone here already knows you guys are pretty strong.”
Edane laughed, his best fake laugh, his best lying smile, and nodded, as friendly as he never was. “Yeah? You sure? I think you could take me on. You sure you don’t want to?”
Dobson stepped back, hands up, placating as Edane advanced on him. “We don’t need an incident here, Edane…”
“Incident?” Edane laughed properly, this time. That was funny. “So you don’t want to arm wrestle me because I’m bigger than you? That make you scared, Dobson?”
Crowds loved seeing blood. Oh, it didn’t matter if it was a pack of old ladies trying to get to mosque or the MACP’s MilSim players, they all wanted to see it. They all fell silent, staring expectantly.
But Dobson wasn’t the kind of man to admit he was scared. He just glared up, and smoothly said, “I think you’re making my point for me, Edane.”
Edane nodded enthusiastically. “Okay. Kacey! Get out here.”
She leapt down off the picnic table where she’d been standing, where the rest of the team was standing, staring at him over the crowd’s heads. Grinning, Kacey waded through the crowd, people stepping back for her, blinking at her. In a moment she popped out the crowd’s front ranks and came out to stand in front of Edane, his hands on her shoulders — her five feet nothing to his six and a half, Kacey shorter than even Janine.
Edane grinned. Shark-toothed, but friendly. “Wanna arm-wrestle my friend Kacey instead, Dobson? She was covering my spot on the team while I was gone. Don’t worry, no gengineers mugged her, so you don’t have to be scared of her, right?”
Dobson’s upper lip stiffened, mouth flat lining. “That isn’t the same.”
But nobody heard him. Because when Kacey lifted up her slender, almost elfin arm, offering it out to Dobson, the crowd erupted into blazing laughter. One or two people even had their phones out for pictures. Nobody had much liked the ruling, it seemed, but none of them had been willing to speak up. And now the ice was broken, just about everyone was talking about it — just not listening to Dobson.
By the time the judges came out and announced that Edane and his brothers, along with Marianna and her sisters, were banned from play in the next season, there were already four petitions circling the crowd to overturn the ruling. A boycott against play that people had been talking about for weeks gathered so many pledges in the next half hour that it looked like the league might have to call off the next season, because they wouldn’t have enough players.
“Wow. What was that all about?” Janine asked, after all the noise died down and he found her again at the picnic table, small in his arms — though bigger than Kacey.
Edane shrugged, and smiled. “Just lifting a corner, is all.”
24. Game Theory.
::/ Baku, Azerbaijan.
::/ May, 2106.
::/ Eversen Estian.
Eversen signed off from the tactical network for the first time since arriving in-country. He’d seen some brothers do it — medical leave, a day’s break, dead — but he hadn’t. His location and status had been logged and recorded constantly, and now it wasn’t.
He looked down at the folded sheaf of smartpaper in his hand, flicking the edge to tap through the documents he’d offloaded from the network. The transcripts of confessions from the Bautino warlord’s men. A dossier on the warlord himself, Abbasov, and his links with the Aliyev family and its heirs. Details on the amount of money the neo-Aliyevs were pouring into the Citizen’s Democracy Party now that the Nesimi regime had fallen, decades of old oil money and out of country investments coming home to roost. Malik Najafov’s mother’s birth certificate, naming her as Yasaman Aliyeva — the Azeri language specifying that women feminized their last names with an ‘a’ on the end.
The report also detailed the voter’s pledges that’d been sent in to the Transitionary Authority’s parliamentary electoral committee, registering the CDP and Malik Najafov as one of their candidates. There had been groundswell of support over the first week of campaigning, the slick election campaign run out of a London advertising company’s office.
The pre-election polls predicted that Malik would get fifty to sixty percent of the vote to form a government, and the old oligarch’s family web were pouring more and more money into the CDP’s audited accounts. God alone knew how much the neo-Aliyevs were passing the CDP under the table.
General Abbasov was the stick, ready to come home at a moment’s notice now that Nesimi was gone. Abbasov came with guns, firearms, even biological weapons of mass
destruction scavenged and bred from the Eurasian war’s biowar fallout. The CDP already had the carrot of Malik’s easy smile. Eversen understood how that game worked.
“Malik Bey will see you now,” one of his suited cousins said, stepping from the restored glassy front of Malik’s building. “Please, follow me.”
Eversen tucked the smartpaper into his uniform jacket — camouflage off and hanging loosely around his chest, leaving him feeling naked without his armor.
They didn’t go in through the front. He was led through side-door into the parking area, where the cars took themselves to get off the streets. There weren’t even any stairs for people, they had to walk down the ramps to the basement passenger pickup area where old red carpet was lain over the driving surface, just outside the elevator lobbies.
The limousine waiting there looked like an antique, but it obviously wasn’t one. The faux-driver’s compartment, separate from the front, hidden behind the dark windshield, actually contained a self-dispensing bar installation. Racks of drinks and glasses and spindly arms awaiting instruction. The rest of the long stretch cabin was lined in something that looked like suede, and the old-style doors were entirely faux, their hinges and half the side of the car lifting up on a gull-wing to reveal the interior.
Malik sat spider-like on the rose-petal red upholstery of the back seat, bottle of high-end Russian vodka and a plate of caviar and wafer-thin bread in a niche to his right, a map of the country’s political support on a district-by-district basis displayed to his left.
He smiled, all bone white teeth, and gestured to the bench seat opposite. “Please, sit down.”
Deactivated camouflage didn’t quite look right in the limousine, sitting across from Malik’s suit, even to Eversen, but he didn’t say anything. Just sat down, and the limousine closed around them, leaving them alone but for Najafov’s cousin waiting outside.
“So tell me,” Malik said. “How are you? Well, I trust? Out of that wheelchair — it must be most enjoyable to walk along our streets, now that they’re quiet and peaceful.”
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