A world where your body was your own. That was what the Miach I had known as a child wanted. A body that was hers, not beholden to a society or its rules.
“So, what can we do about this?” Prime asked.
“Who’s the agent in charge of monitoring life-issues between Chechnya and Russia?”
“That’s…Inspector Uwe Vol.”
“Then can you direct him to aid my investigation once I arrive?”
“Very well.” Stauffenberg went to cut our connection, then her hand stopped. “The fate of the world is resting on your shoulders, Inspector Kirie. Good luck.”
Words of personal encouragement were about the last thing I had expected from my typically venomous boss. This whole thing had started as a personal matter, and if anything, it had only gotten more personal as I went. Frankly, even with all the riots and mass suicide going on, I hadn’t been worried about the world at all. All I wanted to do was find Miach Mihie—who had killed Cian, and probably my father as well—and somehow get some closure from her. That was the only thing keeping me moving, the only thing I really felt.
I went off-line, feeling jumpy in the pit of my stomach. I asked the flight attendant for some caffeine. Something shamefully strong, I added. I was no longer worried about appearances, and it had been a while since I had gotten a good night’s sleep, so I needed the boost.
Uwe would be with the Chechen armistice monitoring group. That was where I was headed.
02
Pretty much everyone in the world knew that Russia’s only real concern in the region was control of the pipeline. It was a thorn in the side of every admedistration in the world, I was sure, that we hadn’t completely rid ourselves of the decidedly environmentally unaware oil economy. Fossil fuels
<list:item>
<i: produce carbon dioxide.>
<i: produce heat.>
<i: pollute the land and the atmosphere.>
<i: are all-around nasty stuff.>
</list>
Unclean, unsafe, uncool.
Still, there were classic engines around that wouldn’t run without oil, and products made from oil. Compared to a hundred years earlier when the world had been in the grip of the black gold, oil had lost much of its allure, though it still clung to a vital position in the global market.
As Dubai had become an economic center thanks to the performance of the oil sector, Baghdad had vaulted to its current status as an economic powerhouse on the shoulders of the medical conglomerates. As the saying goes, trust in Allah, but be sure to tie up your camel. The Middle East had gone through a chaotic period of runaway fundamentalism before emerging into a more practical, tie-up-your-camel age. The smarter governments in the region had already begun uprooting their stakes in oil.
The old-style government of Russia remained the largest single system among the clustered admedistrations that controlled Eurasia, though this hadn’t kept the admedistrations from roundly criticizing their oversized neighbor’s policies when it came to control of the oil pipeline. Not a few admedistration commissioners had wondered openly why Geneva Convention forces had been pulled in to help Russia enforce its claims of ownership.
Russia, the nation, wanted war with Chechnya. Russia, the collection of admedistrations, each wanted to save the Chechens from their own unhealthy ways, and they each had different ideas as to how best to achieve their goal. This meant that Uwe was dealing with far more than just armed Chechen groups, the Chechen government, and the Russian government. There were over a hundred different admedistrations within Russia, and all of them had something to say, and all of them said it to him. Russia, eager to generate international support, had invited the Helix Inspection Agency in to investigate, whereupon they found that the Chechen people were not living sufficiently lifeist, healthy lives, which gave Russia a sufficient pretext to call in the Geneva Convention troops.
Oddly enough, for the last several days Uwe’s work had been relatively tranquil. The mass suicides and the declaration and the possible second coming of the Maelstrom had kept the people who were responsible for sending him multi-gigabyte reports detailing their specific demands busy—either killing someone or hiding in their houses or summer cottages.
“Uwe? Duty calls.”
The Helix Inspection Agency office within the Chechnya Armistice Monitoring Group camp had been built in the ruins of an old city hall. I pressed my finger to the door to give my ID and let myself in. Uwe was asleep at his desk amid a mountain of printouts.
“Wakey, wakey,” I said, giving him a slap on the back.
He blinked and looked befuddled for a second before his WatchMe kicked in and stimulated him to full alert mode. “Oh, hey, Tuan. Heard you were coming from Prime. She didn’t deign to tell me why, though.”
“Quite the office you got here. Isn’t all this paper a fire hazard?”
“Meh. ThingList + NoTime = WhyClean?”
“Another victim of ThingList, huh? That seems to be going around.”
Uwe shrugged his shoulders and cleared a teetering pile of papers from his desk onto the floor with a sigh.
“Have you been briefed on my current strategic action?”
Uwe raised an eyebrow. “Strategic action? I heard you were leading a one-woman idiot brigade, Miss Senior Inspector Tuan Kirie.”
“Well let’s make it two idiots then. I need your help.”
“Let me guess. This has something to do with the six thousand suicides and the enforced murder dictate,” Uwe said, though his expression told me that he really didn’t know why I was here.
“That’s right. You’re familiar with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front?”
“Very. I arrange police protection for their negotiations—we’ve had a few with them already. Been trying to get them to agree to a lifestyle survey. They’re one of Russia’s top worries, but those of us wearing this symbol have to at least pretend to be neutral parties.” He tapped the entwined serpents around the staff on his shirt.
“What makes them a top worry?”
“They’re real good at moving around through the mountains. Guerrilla warfare at its finest. With all the cliffs and ravines up there, you can’t even get a WarDog or WarDoll into play, so surrogate combat is completely out. Russia’s been hiring every military resource supplier they can find to hit them where it hurts…and every single one has come running back down the mountain with their tails between their legs. What they really need is an elite squad—which the Russian national army has, but they’re very reluctant to put actual soldiers into combat situations. I mean, hey, they might die for real. Not very popular with the folks back home. We spend all this tax money on robots, so why do you go sending people in to die? That sort of thing. It’s a waste of human resources, and all that.”
So Russia had gotten her fingers burned by the Freedom Front, and most of their people were probably in Moscow and St. Petersburg anyway, trying to keep the recent chaos in check. This meant that troops would be light on the ground out here on the front lines. I couldn’t have picked a better time to contact the resistance.
“You still have an open channel with the Freedom Front?” I asked, suddenly recalling Vashlov’s face as he said those words with his dying breaths.
“’Course. That’s my job, after all.”
“I need to get in contact with them. Right now.”
Uwe’s eyes went from narrow with suspicion to wide open. Boy he’s easy to read.
“You kidding? It’s way too dangerous. Whenever we hold negotiations we have to set a meeting place days in advance and arrange for contracted security. It’s not something that can happen right now or even forty-eight hours from now.”