Uri shook his head. “She doesn’t want to see me again.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She told me.”
“Listen, I’ve stumbled across a few methedrine-fueled Carpi mutants in my day that I’m pretty sure no man or woman, sober or drunk, would ever want to see again. Don’t sell yourself short, comrade. What’s her name?”
Uri reached into a chest pocket and pulled out a creased photograph. “Maryska,” he said, handing it to Sava. “It was my grandmother’s name. She’s fourteen in the picture, a year before her mother left.”
“Cute girl, crazy eyes,” Sava said, handing the photo back. “Sorry, comrade. Why’d your wife leave?”
Uri shrugged. “Svet couldn’t take the long deployments, or so she said. She fed Maryska all kind of lies about me. Thousands of kilometers off on contract, I could only radio.”
Uri leaned back, relit his cigar, then continued.
“So, while I was on the Volga, Svet left Maryska and ran off, probably to Svestpol; she knew some black marketeers in the Crimea, her old crowd. I remember getting the call from a social affairs officer back in Tiraspol. We were in the middle of hail bombing—a factory siege—in New Stalingrad. Bad timing. During a break in the action, I went home on leave. An aunt tried to help out, but . . . ”
“So why does she hate you?”
“She blamed me for Svet leaving. No matter what I said, Maryska couldn’t forgive me. While I was in Moldova, she told me she was running off with some boy and never wanted to see me again.”
“Kids say stupid shit.”
“Yeah, but at least they’re honest—cruelly honest.”
Uri paused, eyes unfocused.
Sava stood and patted him on the shoulder. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Karpov’s got quite the cache of painkillers, if that bastard Mach hasn’t nicked them all.”
Uri nodded.
After reporting Karpov’s demise to Kunzach Command, the platoon was ordered to hold the position until reinforcements arrived. No one mentioned Echo-Bravo’s larders, not wanting to attract a trail of ravenous Alkonost ants. Higher brass would catch wind soon enough, and the platoon’s ‘Punishment of Tantalus’ would begin anew.
Days passed.
The auto-cannons kept the Azars at bay. The automated sentries had quickly dispatched a few guerrillas sniping from a neighboring peak. But that was the glut of it. A brief squall powdered Echo-Bravo’s aiguilles with a slushy snow. The men, like children, stormed out onto the steep cliffs to indulge. Uri just held it in his hands and smelled the clean cool, rubbing the watery crystals over his face.
Two weeks into their mountaintop duty, Kunzach radioed to inform them a new CO would be posted to Echo-Bravo, “relieving” them for reconnaissance patrol.
Uri decided it was time to go.
The threads popped free as he cut away his Alkonost patches, leaving nothing but LT U. VIKO embroidered on his chest pocket. He parsed out two hundred 7.62mm rounds into SVD-sized clips. Cumbersome, but there was little guarantee he would stumble upon more. He felt the weight of his rucksack. Topping out at twenty-five kilos, it was a full kit and then some: insta-paks, water purifier, pistol and rifle, dead zone tent—the basic necessities.
The platoon was sound asleep as Uri assembled his gear. Loading waypoints into his inertial compass, he heard boot scuffs in the control room’s doorway. Sava leaned up against the jamb and rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“So, you’re really going through with it.”
Uri didn’t answer, busy finishing the data transfer. Unfortunately, Sava was too light a sleeper. Enough field trauma—as I-and-I’s headshrinkers put it—tended to interrupt healthy sleep patterns. Everything woke him. Caught deserting in the night—Uri thought it almost cliché.
“Yep,” Uri answered, cinching up his backpack. “Are there any other takers?”
“No, comrade,” Sava said, shaking his head. “Three thousand kilometers south, toiling through the Hormuz Emirates, the Brine Sea, and the Tigris Depression . . . Hell on Earth. Soqotra is the other end of the Earth, comrade.”
“I don’t care,” Uri said without hesitation. “I want out.”
“That much is clear.” Sava shuffled in.
“You should come with me,” Uri said, climbing into his webbing. “Forget all this barbarian bullshit.”
“The ‘barbarian bullshit’ never ends, Uri.”
“Maybe not.”
After their ordeal in Turkmenbashi, Uri had bonded with Sava, despite their differences. The reformed gladiator felt like a kid brother, a fragment of family. And Sava, with an adolescent innocence, had easily forgiven Uri his cynicism, giving him more the benefit of the doubt than he rightly deserved.
“I’ve given it some consideration, Uri, and I can’t. I know it’s bad here, but outside the frontier . . . ” He shook his head. “The survivability index is rock bottom.”
“Managed risk, tactical assessments, actuarial statistics—I’m well aware. But I’ve got to leave Alkonost, Sava. Call it an itch, a discomfort, instinct—call it whatever. I-and-I was spot on. Their computational alchemy knew me better than I knew myself.”
Sava said nothing.
The corners of his face drooped with worry. He’d taken the offer seriously, Uri could tell, but in the end, he just couldn’t make the break; none of the men could. Defying the tribal compulsion, Uri was his own animal, a genetic mutation weakened by migratory urge. The idea was suicidal, but he was a panicked beast and escape was everything.
Sava stepped out and returned with set of pre-pack containers. “I found some hood filters. You’re going to want as many as you can pack in the Shatt al-Arab.”
Uri thanked him as he pushed the canisters into his overstuffed kit. Heaving the pack on, he adjusted its straps and headed for the sally port. Sava helped him unseal and push out the pressure door. A cool gust rushed in.
“I never got the chance to thank you properly back in Turkmenbashi,” Uri said, stopped halfway up the steps. “I was wrong about you, and I’m sorry, Sava. I never had many friends, but . . . ”
“No bother, lieutenant,” Sava smiled, kindly interrupting the awkwardness. “Alkonost is blood; we’re brothers. You would’ve done the same, comrade.”
“I pray.” Uri held out his hand. Sava gripped it tight. “Don’t let those barbarian bastards get to you. We’re better than them. Stay strong. Vae Victus.”
“Woe to the conquered. Godspeed, brother.”
With a hiss, the door sealed behind Uri, leaving him alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
October 2163 C.E.
“Get your deacon,” Uri said through the door slit. “I’m ready to give him the codes.”
The eager Inquisitor didn’t make Uri wait long. A quarter hour and the zealot shuffled across the suspension bridge toward Montevideo’s brig. Sitting on his cot, Uri went through the plan. He got up and slid the cable restraint to the predetermined place, making sure it was laid strategically. Another scoot of the cot put him proper distance from the wall. With everything just right, he counted the seconds with glandular swallows.
The iron door swung wide as the Inquisitor and the war chief, Gregor, stepped into the cramped cell. Dangling from the Inquisitor’s hands were both his and Miriam’s consoles, their LCDs flashing “locked.” More animated than usual, Gregor’s inky eyes were alight, teeth exposed in a permanent grimace.
“You’ve decided to bait our hook, eh? You’re wiser than your bald blocky head lets on. Now, enter the codes,” the Inquisitor said, handing him the console.
Gregor pushed the tip of the crossbow’s bolt into Uri’s temple. Through the vent opposite, he saw Miriam’s forearm inch out as she reached for the Inquisitor’s robe. Making up excuses about forgetting the code, Uri bought precious seconds.
“The code! Summon your demons!”
“Now!” Uri yelled.
In a burst of horizontal gravity, the Inquisitor flew against the wall. Miriam
tugged the loose folds through the air vent and into her cell, the taut robe restraining him like a straightjacket. As Gregor pivoted, Uri swept the floor with his shackled leg and cable. The war chief tripped and fell. Forming a garrote from the cable’s slack, Uri hopped and lassoed the man’s neck with the loop, pinning him to the diamond plate. A quick stomp and the thin cable sank into his neck. Eyes wild, Gregor gagged as blood and air hemorrhaged from kinked tissue.
Uri picked up the war chief’s crossbow and fired a bolt through the chest of the thrashing Inquisitor. Miriam let go as the body crumpled. The aluminum shaft made a sucking sound as Uri wrenched it free from the wheezy near-corpse to reload. Alerted by the commotion, a jailer stepped inside but was met with the bloody bolt. Fumbling at the falling guard’s bandolier, Uri pulled a ratchet from his pocket and started to unbolt the cable tether from the floor.
“There’s two more in the hallway,” Miriam yelled.
“I know.”
Free from the anchor, Uri readied himself. As a blond head poked in, he locked his knee and kicked the cell’s heavy door until the man’s skull crunched. Clambering over the body, he met the other jailer. Metal slapped bone as Uri shattered the man’s jaw with the socket wrench. A few more steel-fisted punches silenced him
“We’ve got to be quick,” Uri said, flinging open Miriam’s door.
“There are two workers near the bridge unloading pallets. But that’s it,” Miriam relayed as Uri unbolted her tether. “It’s early yet, most of the kraal is still asleep.”
The Inquisitor was shorter than Uri, but from a few hundred meters, no one would notice the robe’s hiked hem. Using a little water, Miriam recycled the dead man’s eye paint and fingered it into Uri’s sockets to complete the ruse. He reloaded the crossbows, each with two bolts apiece. They searched the other cells looking for the three Alkonost crewmen. In the shadowed filth, frail hands reached out for the door, the souls inside wracked by malaria. They whispered to the occupants but only heard Vandal garble.
“No Alkonost. Probably dead,” Uri said, following Miriam down the stairwell to suspension bridge.
With one crossbow aimed at her back and the other held at his side, Uri marched Miriam out onto the swaying sky-bridge. She wore a set of unlocked shackles and play-acted the prisoner. Apart from the cussing crows and the whine of mosquitoes, everything was quiet; they’d avoided an alarm. Uri escorted her to the Port Center’s landing as rehearsed. Loitering on the crane’s cargo platform, two confused dockworkers stared on as they stepped off the bridge. The barbarians asked them an intelligible question. Uri, silent, walked on.
The Vandals’ suspicion was quickly answered with action. Uri threw Miriam the free crossbow. He lifted his weapon and pulled the trigger release sending a bolt through the taller brute’s left eye. Miriam shook the cuffs free, grabbed the weapon, aimed, and fired. With a gurgled yelp, the other Vandal grabbed at the bolt lodged in his windpipe. They both caught the teetering bodies and hauled the dead under the platform’s rain awning, out of sight.
“Anyone below?”
“Nothing,” Miriam said, glancing down at the garrison quay.
Shedding the disguise, Uri pulled out the two cyanide capsules and climbed out to the yurt’s umbilical. With a slice from the bolt’s tip, he ripped open the corrugated hose and carefully cracked the poison ampoules, dropping them into the oxygen chute. Reeling from vertigo, Uri inched back to the platform.
“A few minutes and the hydrogen cyanide will fill the garrison’s exchangers.”
“There’s only one worker in the warehouse. The duffel and my rifle are on the same rack undisturbed. No one’s touched them,” Miriam said, peeking under the rolling door.
Another bolt dropped the unarmed warehousemen. Weakened from his incarceration, the strain of the duffel was close to unmanageable as Uri heaved Zliva and Pravo over his shoulders. Miriam checked her sniper rifle’s counter: ten rounds left. The Vandals—ignorant of the weapon’s mechanics—had left it unmolested.
“Any more gear?”
Miriam, with obvious surprise, grabbed the last item from the shelf—her console—and stuffed it in a pocket. “That’s it.”
Without enrichment hoods, escape from the Rhine Delta would be impossible. Oxygen-starved, Uri guessed they had a half-day to clear the dead zone.
There was panic below. Two Vandals stumbled out from the floating yurt and fumbled with their oxygen cowlings as their trapped brethren succumbed to the deadly gas inside. Miriam steadied herself on a ledge rail and fired. A dead eye, she removed the floundering duo’s skullcaps like soft-boiled eggs. Eight rounds left.
The construction crane was in the down position, its thick oily cables a few feet from the platform edge. Miriam tore free strips of cloth from the Inquisitor’s robe and wrapped both hers and Uri’s palms.
“I’ll go first. If I slip and fall with these—” Uri said, elbowing Zliva and Pravo, “—I won’t crush you on the way down.”
Grabbing the crane line, Uri swung into space. The weight of his load pulled him down, the greased braid whirring in his hand. Lacking the wrist strength, he fought to entangle his ankles and self-arrest. Alarmed shouts and klaxons echoed between the towers. On cue, unseen bowmen rained missiles down from the upper tiers.
A serrated razor tip tore through his triceps. He let go. Above, Miriam watched helplessly as he splashed into the brackish Rhine. Sinking like a stone, Uri fought through entangling lily pads, but the weight of the nuclear duffel was too much. With a thump, he sank onto the rusted hood of a corroded Citroen. Shaking the straps free, he abandoned his payload to the silt.
Back on the surface, the anoxic mist starved his frantic lungs. Miriam reached out from the pier and pulled him in. Like a fish, he flopped onto the floating deck and grabbed his bruised deltoid. Through a barrage of arrows, they clambered across the floating dock into the lee of the Yurt. The wound was full of blood but shallow. Miriam took the greasy cloth from her hand and slid it under his armpit for a tourniquet.
“Start an airboat,” Uri gasped. “I’ve got to dive down.”
“No way. We’ve got to go.” She pulled a set of oxygen masks and tank from the poisoned guards then handed him a unit.
“I can’t, Miriam.”
She paused. “If you’re not up in half a minute . . . ”
He breathed from the rubber mask and gave her the thumbs up.
She tied a tether line around his ankle. Inhaling oxygen until dizzy, Uri dove into the weedy river. The glint of falling arrows shimmered like perch through the murk as he dropped to his duffel. Grabbing hold of the Citroen’s oxidized carcass, he crawled to the bulky duffel and wound its strap around his wrist.
Uri heard the liquid whir of the airboat. He threw the strap over his shoulder and frantically pulled himself up the line to the surface. Engulfed by the boat’s hurricane of prop wash, the rope tightened around his ankle as Miriam dragged him behind the boat. He fought the slipstream turbulence and the duffel’s entangling strap as he bounced along the flooded wreckage of an ancient parking lot. Half a kilometer out and the engine mercifully downshifted. Miriam yanked him, thrashing and choking, up to the gunwale.
“Goddamn it, Miriam!” Uri gargled. “What happened to ‘half-a-minute’?”
“The arrows,” she said, helping him onto the swim step. “No time.”
Out of range, they bobbed in the Rhine, the plops of arrows falling impotently a few meters away. Like a disturbed anthill, the towers crawled with bellicose warriors, their wild howls filled with revenge. The Port Center’s crane was in motion as it lowered a clutch of screaming bowmen to the dock. In a few minutes, airboats would be in pursuit.
Uri heaved Zliva and Pravo onto the flat-bottomed hull and breathed from an oxygen mask. Re-oxygenated, his eyes grew bright. Miriam climbed up to the pilot seat and choked the manifold to boost the intake’s enricher. With a yank of the stick, she gunned the ethanol engine as the fan rudders swung the skiff around.
Past t
he hulk of a listing cruise ship, Uri grabbed at Miriam’s throttle foot to stop her. The airboat skimmed to a halt, adrift under a copse of moss-heavy palms.
“What’re you doing?” Miriam yelled.
Uri pointed back to the Montevideo tower.
Crucified to its side were the three Alkonost mercenaries. Uri grabbed Miriam’s sniper rifle and activated the sight zoom. The Vandals had riveted the men to the superstructure’s exposed I-beams like ancient ships’ figureheads. In horror, Uri watched as one of the men, the youngest recruit, lifted his head, pale and panting. They were still alive, but barely.
“Miserable fucking bastards!”
“What is it?” Miriam said, squinting. “Uri, we’ve got to leave.”
“It’s them—the men.” Uri handed her the rifle.
The Vandals had nailed them up near the waterline below the oxycline to asphyxiate, a slow and agonizing death. The mercenaries had been there for days, no doubt since their capture. Crude and sickening, the exhibition was intended as a totem to deter King Espen and his mad son’s enemies. More Stone Age cretinism; Uri bristled with revulsion.
“We can’t go back.”
“I know. Do your worst,” Uri said, nodding at her rifle.
“I-I can’t.”
“My range isn’t that good. Do them the favor. They’re a kilometer away, and you’re a dead shot.”
Miriam stepped down from the pilot’s seat. Her eyes a cold fire as she checked the weapon’s breach. Lying prone on the bow, she activated the rifle’s gyrostabilizers. The electromagnets vibrated to life as the sight’s tracker zeroed a target.
Airboat fantails streaked towards them as ill-aimed arrows flew ahead of the fleet. Not much time. Uri grew anxious but bit his lip as he waited for Miriam to take the shot.
With grace and ease, she fired off three rounds, the ejected casings hissing in the languid water. Each bullet ridded a man of his misery. No misses, her efficiency was robotic. Tears streaked her cheek as she cleared the chamber and shoved the rifle into Uri’s hands. Climbing back into the pilot seat, she fired up the fan engine.
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