As-Sūq al-HurrShervanis City, Astrokaszy
11 November 3053
Jeep Eight-Eight glided along the main boulevard through town towards the palace. The thrum of the fusion plant and the gentle whine of the converters transferring power to the four wheels crunching over the cracked ferrocrete roadway was lost in the bustle of the morning rush of the capital’s grand bazaar. It was early yet; the planet’s primary still had yet to rise over the crenellated tops of the surrounding buildings. In the pink predawn light, it was still cool and the air smelled like baking
lavash or
sangak, not baking rock. Street peddlers thronged the boulevard, arguing over the same spots they had probably inhabited for a decade or two per individual, whille potential customers started to filter in from the thronged hovels outside the city center.
Acolyte XIII-ζ Randall Corse surveyed the scene through the thick windshield of the loaner vehicle he’d been given—however dispiritedly—by the operations staff. His beloved Seven-Eight was still in the shop, though he imagined she would be road-ready in a few days at most. His window was down and his pistol was resting in his lap, held loosely in his left hand. In his right was his spit-bottle.
“Ease up a little, Harry,” John Denman said over the intercom from his place in the cupola atop the vehicle. “Got a little bit of a traffic jam up ahead.”
The driver, Harry Neil, rubbed his left hand along the stubble lining his jawline and took his foot off the throttle. “Can’t see how that’s different from being stuck behind these two donkey-carts for the past fifteen mikes, Den,” he grumbled.
“Aw, quit bitching,” the gunner quipped. “I thought you liked staring at asses.”
“Hell, no,” Neil replied as Eight-Eight coasted to a stop. Reaching for a cigarette from the compartment on his left bicep, he continued around the cylinder, “I’m a breast-man myself. How ‘bout you, Jillani?”
Corse smiled despite himself, but he didn’t bother looking over his left shoulder to glance at the decidedly unmilitary man racked out across the back row of seating. Initiate VIII-η Kashif Jillani was one of the ComStar civilians assigned to the base staff’s civil affairs office. He probably had some sort of official capacity, but Corse and his squad knew him as an interpreter and liaison to the palace—and the tutor of the Caliph’s youngest daughter.
When Jillani didn’t stir, Denman nudged him with the toe of a boot. “Hey, Kash, Harry asked you a question, stud.”
“Mmmrr-umph,” the civilian mumbled without opening his eyes as he eked his way out of slumber. “Sure, sure, Neil. No problem.”
The three infantrymen chuckled to themselves.
Ten minutes later, no one aboard was laughing since they hadn’t moved more than a meter a minute and the sun was starting to peek over the buildings fronting the boulevard.
“C’mon, you blasted Krazies!” Neil called out savagely. “Make a decision and stick with it!” He slammed his palm down on the horn to punctuate the outburst.
“We gotta move, Acolyte,” Denman said over the intercom. His booted feet had been circling ceaselessly since they had come to a halt. “Been here too bloody long already…”
Corse dug the plug of tobacco out of from behind his lower lip and took a swig of water from a bottle jammed into the radio mount. He spat the water in a thin jet into his spit-bottle and reached for his carbine after holstering his pistol. “What you got, gunner?”
“Well, so far as I can tell, what started out as an argument between two of the Krazies is now more like ten, including the bastards with the carts directly ahead of us.”
Corse cursed mildly to himself. He began to swing his heavy door open. “C’mon, Jillani, you’re with me.”
“Er, Acolyte?” the interpreter replied, sounding decidedly unconvinced. “Out here? Now?”
“Time to cough up cab fare,” Neil said, frustrated, but glad for once someone else was having to do their share of the dirty work. “Nobody rides this bitch for free.”
Corse stepped out onto the street and secured his carbine to the take-up reel clipped to his body armor’s right shoulder. His eyes reflexively scanned the roof tops and street level in a complete 360 while he did so. After a few moments, the rear passenger door opened and Jillani tumbled out. The interpreter was dapper to a fault: tall, thin, and toned in a way that was different to Corse and his infantrymen, and clothed in robes that nonetheless seemed tailored. He looked woefully out of place in the crowded bazaar, amongst throngs of scruffy, coarse-robed working men and veiled housewives, nestled between smoke-colored donkeys and the lowering bulk of the gun-truck.
The squad leader shouldered his way through the morass until he got to the scene of the disturbance. By the time he got there, the itch between his shoulder blades had grown into a sharp ache. It was okay to walk around this town, but ever since the other night…
He trusted Denman to keep a sharp overwatch, but he was still uncomfortable to be out here alone in the midst of a crowd of agitated locals. Anything was possible now and—as he suspected—the roadway to the tantalizingly close palace was mostly clear past the clot of jumbled people and carts. The people around him crowded him only until they saw who—what really—he was. Then they shifted away like oil on a hot griddle. Their clearing a space only increased the lizard part of brain’s detached anxiety.
“Okay, Jillani,” he said, stopping between the two bearded men he had identified as the focal point of the disturbance without needing to be directed by Denman back atop the truck. “What do we have here?”
The interpreter let out a string of the local dialect as fast as a machine gun. Corse had sleep-learned the local tongue, but it didn’t work too great out on the street, where the locals used a particularly horrible patois of Arabic, English, and what might have once been Italian or even Farsi. Like so much else on this blasted dirtball, even the language was a disaster.
Jillani turned to the squad leader. His reticence at entering the developing crowd from moments earlier was gone now that he had a clearly defined duty to perform. “Apparently, these two gentlemen were trying to occupy the same stall at the same time.” He pointed to the carts that had become inexplicably joined at the axles when their wheels had become interlocked.
Corse raised an eyebrow. “And?”
Jillani returned the gesture, more quizzically. “And now they’re stuck.”
Corse eyed the two carts as if they were a nail he was about to drive home. As a matter of fact, he could simply clear the roadway and have Denman chop the spindly carts into kindling with the heavy machine gun. He couldn’t imagine the local constabulary, such as it was, would mind or even consider a substantially different course of action.
But then he’d have to write a report. And talk to Vannek. Be
debriefed by Vannek.
Instead, Corse ducked his right shoulder downwards and to the left, swiftly, so that his carbine swung over his back, muzzle-down. “Get as many of these bastards ringing us to lend a hand, will you, Jillani?” he said. “Thanks.”
The interpreter started haranguing the onlookers, gesturing then with pointed looks or hands to come forward. Once Corse estimated he had enough help, he smiled at the lined, bearded faces staring back at him.
“Okay, get these mothers in two groups,” he said loudly while he surveyed his dragooned helpers, but speaking to Jillani. “One group will be with me; we will lift this cart here as high as we can go while the second group pushes the first cart out from underneath it. Any questions?”
Jillani responded with a string of auditory abuse that went on much longer than Corse’s simple instructions. The hand gestures were tenfold as well. His helpers turned to him with the uncomfortable smiles of people who don’t completely understand or believe in a task they are nevertheless about to perform.
“Okay, on three,” Corse said, bracing himself at the rear of the cart after positioning the two clots of helpers as best he could. “
Waheed,
ithnaan,
thalaatha!”
Surprisingly, it worked on the first try. The two street peddlers swore good naturedly at each other while ignoring the squad leader. Neil brought the gun truck up to the dismounted members as the road cleared.
“You done standing around, Acolyte?” he said when Corse opened his door.
Corse gave him the finger.
Neil continued on through the rest of the town toward their objective. Once they cleared the bazaar proper, it was smooth going. Before long, they were turning into the palace grounds. A high, thick wall surrounded the palace itself, but the grounds given over to it were several times greater than that encompassed within the protective enclosure.
The truck rolled slowly past the checkpoint in the palace’s outer wall after the guard passed them through. Given the proclivities of the average Astrokaszian, allowing an armed and armored truck into the presidential compound didn’t seem odd at all. Still, security at the palace seemed a little lax in Corse’s eyes—but that in itself was a cultural construct, or at least a concomitant of social mores.
For all the weaponry that the average citizen flaunted on a daily basis, no one was going to murder the sitting caliph in his bed, or knife him in the halls of his own palace—or detonate a truck bomb in the courtyard. Instead, they would assault the city conventionally, and let history attend to itself if they won. For all that, the present caliph’s wife had been shot down by an assassin some years before, or so the official record went.
Maybe snipers—even piss-poor ones—got a free pass. Who knew on Astro-Krazy?
Neil guided Eight-Eight towards the service entrance instead of the grand entrance with its steps and vaults and pillars. The members of the ComStar station and garrison were treated well, but no one on either side of the equation wanted to make these frequent visits official state business. Which is what they would necessarily would have to be if the public entrance and its greeters and fancy-uniformed guards were used.
Jillani had his door open even before the truck had coasted to a complete halt.
“Easy, killer,” the driver said. “Careful now.”
“How long is this session?” Corse asked the interpreter, meaning,
when should we be back? “No more than two hours,” Jillani replied, pushing his door shut and stepping forward to look the squad leader in the eye. “Normal.”
“Roger,” Corse said. “Good luck.”
Neil let the vehicle coast forward before applying power to the wheels. “Don’t let the bed-bugs bite!” he caroled as they rolled away, back towards the gate they had entered.
In Corse’s wing-mirror, Jillani’s thin form turned stiffly away.
* * *
“So, what, you think pretty boy is schtupping you-know-who?” Denman said smilingly with the tiny mug of thick coffee held before his lips.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Harry Neil replied, hands splayed in mock contrition from the opposite, driver’s, side of the gun-truck’s hood. “I’m sure its true love and all of that. You know.”
Corse pretended not to hear his troopers’ byplay from where he leaned up against the nose of Eight-Eight. The truck itself was parked beside the little
kafyh just off a side street from the main drag. The central minaret of the palace was easily visible over the eastern rooftops. The little mug of coffee was still blazingly hot in his hands, but its remarkably sweet bitterness was refreshing despite its warmth bolstering the rising heat of the day.
But they weren’t exactly making it easy…“Maybe let’s not worry about things that will get everyone shot if the right words reach the wrong people, m’kay?”
Denman and Neil cleared their throats. “Sure thing,” Neil said.
“Sorry, Acolyte,” Denman responded.
Corse let it pass.
“So, what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day, Acolyte?” Denman pressed. “We got some wonderful mission, or we get some downtime with the rest of the squad?”
“Everything is subject to change,” Corse started.
“Of course,” Neil interjected.
“—But it should be stand-by and cool down,” Corse continued with only a mildly brief glance towards his present driver.
If any of the trio was planning on saying anything more, they were forestalled by the local jitney crunching to a halt next to their truck. Corse was ready to toss his mug at the driver’s door in a dual effort to give the other bastard something to worry about in the split-second he needed to clear his gun-hand. Neil already had his hand on his own carbine’s pistol grip and Denman was obviously thinking about dropping to the ground if any of his squad mates made an iota more of movement—
“Friendly coming out,” a voice said over the clatter of the local engine; but the thing was louder than normal only because the engine itself had been bored out past what its original designers had likely thought possible.
But then, they hadn’t met Acolyte XIII-ζ Jason Craig, either.
“Damnation, Chief, we almost sent you to hang out with that harem of virgins the Krazies are always nattering on about,” Neil sputtered. “What’s the big idea?”
Craig was wearing his duty coveralls. Stained with five different types of oil, at least two of coolant, and the grime of a man who cannot stay out of the maintenance bays, he fit right in with half the people still wandering the streets even with the heat of the day beginning to press down.
Corse turned around fully and reached out a friendly hand to the maintenance chief. “Shitfire, snake,” he said when the balding man took his grip firmly. “I thought things were about to get real there for a second.”
Craig smiled as he nudged his goggles onto his bare forehead. “Great,” he exclaimed. “Then you can buy me one of those and apologize profusely.”
“And they let you off post all by your lonesome?” Denman wondered aloud.
Core sized up his friend and thumbed the other two back inside the
kafyh. “Go get us another round, boys. We got some time left yet.”
When they were alone on the street, Craig took a moment to ease up next to the Corse. “I was just kidding about the coffee, you know.”
Corse shrugged. “S’all good. Vannek’s paying for it anyways.”
Craig looked over at him; Corse shrugged. “I got my ways,” he half-explained. “And it’s not like the bastard don’t owe me—us—anyhow.”
Corse had figured out early on there was a slush fund on the post’s books, in the operating budget. He figured certain people audited it, but they were likely looking for inaccuracies within reporting of those authorized to use it. Bureaucracies were like that, sometimes. This post was worse than most in that regard. Well, most regards…
“So, I was just out and about to pick up some hardware for some aircon repair I have to make later today,” Craig said without further preamble. “What about you?”
Corse crossed his arms, but managed to thumb towards the palace. “Out taking pretty-boy for a ride. The usual.” He paused thoughtfully. “Say, how’s my truck doing anyhow?”
Craig sniffed. “My truck, for the time-being,” he said haughtily. “But she’ll be yours again soon. Maybe a couple days, then she’ll be ready for a test drive, or a mission.”
“That soon, huh?” Corse breathed. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his troopers emerging from the gloom of the coffee-shop.
“Well, it mighta been sooner,” the mechanic admitted. “But that last piece of the puzzle we’ve been waiting on is about to show up, probably sometime tomorrow.”
“You don’t say,” Corse said wistfully. “Well, I’m glad it’s finally coming together.” He paused. “Shitfire. It’ll be good to be back home.”