The Blitzkrieg

by Yuri Hamaganov

  YURI HAMAGANOV

  GROND-II: THE BLITZKRIEG

  Copyright 2018 YURI HAMAGANOV

  All right reserved

  First edition: January 2018

  Cover Design by Alexandra Brandt

  Edited by Michelle

  No part of this book may be scanned, reproduced, or distributed in any printed or electronic form.

  GROND SPACE DYSTOPIA series:

  GROND-I: THE RAVEN HIGH

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCFT4D1

  GROND-II: THE BLITZKRIEG

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078X14W2F

  GROND-III: ALL THE KING’S MEN

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ1MTGZ

  GROND-IV: A KIND WORD AND A GUN

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G2RGW6P

  TABLE OF CONTENST

  Оглавление

  CHAPTER ONE: JAILHOUSE ROCK

  CHAPTER TWO: BOLSHEVIK

  CHAPTER THREE: NUMBER TWELVE

  CHAPTER FOUR: BUSINESS ABOVE ALL

  CHAPTER FIVE: CATCHING THE BULLET

  CHAPTER SIX: FORCED STOP

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ANTONINA

  CHAPTER EIGHT: NO COUNTRY FOR LONERS

  CHAPTER NINE: WINNER

  CHAPTER TEN: TRAVELING BAND

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: GREAT SILENCE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: OLGA WAS HERE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: NAUGHTY GIRL

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MEN AT ARMS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: DRUNKEN FIST

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: DISTANT RUMBLE OF THUNDER

  PART ONE: BACK IN BUSINESS

  CHAPTER ONE: JAILHOUSE ROCK

  Six vertical scratches and the seventh on the diagonal. Another week passed. Olga Voronov hides the shard of rock in her pocket, steps back, and looks at her improvised calendar. Forty-seven weeks now.

  A very romantic way to count days, something out of an old adventure film, but Olga couldn’t think of anything better. She wants clear, physical proof of the time that she’s spent in this cell. Forty-seven weeks, almost eleven months. More than enough time to conceive and give birth to a child.

  It's time for another broadcast, internal batteries have already charged.

  “Ensign Olga Voronov, Supernova merchant fleet, personal number 294770, the place of service—the orbiting station High House-8. I was kidnapped January 2 and have been detained here for eleven months already. To everyone who hears me—inform the headquarters or the Space Security Agency, they are looking for me. At my plant, I earn a half billion a month; for my salvation, you’ll be paid any reward whatever you want. Repeat—Ensign Olga Voronov, Supernova merchant fleet, personal number 294770, the place of service—the orbital station High House-8. I was kidnapped January 2 and have been detained here for eleven months already…”

  Olga translates this message dozens of times a day in thousands of languages known to her, hoping that the directed signal will overcome the thick walls and someone will hear it. Someone will find out that she has been held here for almost a year.

  Here is a square room, three meters by three meters. The walls, floor, and ceiling a dull red stone. The rock is dark and smooth: basalt with veins of quartz and olivine, similar to a turbid glass. Olga isn’t versed enough in geology to find clues in the rock to determine where exactly on Earth she is. Carefully examining the walls on the first day, she managed with great difficulty to break off a small sharp fragment to etch her calendar. With this, her successes ended.

  A windowless steel door on robust hinges—for forty-seven weeks the door has never been opened. The ventilation grooves in the corners of the ceiling are so narrow that even mouse couldn’t get through. Twice a week, the small steel hatch on the ceiling opens and a ration package fell through. She hasn’t eaten real food or drank water once in the entire forty-seven weeks; her unknown jailers supply her with the capsules they’d kept on the High House for emergencies that Olga had tried out of curiosity but never had to rely on. But over time, she got used to them; they’re considered first-class rations for battleships crews.

  She has to swallow the ration immediately—after an hour the capsules dissolve into weightless dust. Nowhere to wash here, but twice a week, along with the ration, Olga gets hygienic napkins that she also needs to use quickly before they dissolve. Do they watch her when she strips to wipe herself down? Olga assumes that they must, that they monitor her continuously, even though she never been able to find a single tracking device.

  Beyond the walls there’s an empty folding table, a cot, a multifunctional horizontal bar, a mirror and a projection screen that Olga values as her main treasure.

  The days here last long, time dripping like viscous, dirty water. Hours on the training bar, maintaining her fitness, hours in front of the projection screen. There are no current programs, but the screen holds tens and hundreds of thousands of classic films and television programs. Olga has been surprised to find that she really likes the black and white studio films from Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as television series from the early twenty-first century, the longer the better.

  As usual, the broadcast wasn’t answered. In ten minutes it will be possible to try again. In the meantime, Olga falls onto the cot and begins to think aloud, “Olga Voronov is on the air. We begin our three hundred twenty-ninth daily episode for persons deprived of their liberty. And with yet one more day behind us, the situation hasn’t changed. I’m still in prison, but on the other hand I’m still alive. If they haven’t killed me after all this time, then we can conclude that my unknown abductors need me for one purpose or another, which means that I still have a chance to happily ever after.”

  Olga has recited this mantra for several months, but it still calms her a little. Who has imprisoned her? Why? How did she end up in the cell?

  She remembers absolutely nothing after the rescues team arrived at her space station, High House Eight. It seems that she was making a report to the commander of the rescue ship and then the world seemed to fade and regained its brightness only here, in the prison cell. How much time passed between these two moments is impossible to say; her internal clock dropped to zero and started up again only after she woke up.

  On that first day, Olga lay for hours on the floor, pressing her ear to the stone, trying to hear footsteps, machinery or underground water, but there was only silence. A couple of times earthquakes shook the cell, but that was all.

  In the first days and weeks, Olga was afraid that the door would swing open at any time, and prison guards would lead her out to some dead end and shoot her in the back of the head. But that fear has long passed, dissolved in a long line of identical days. Now she is afraid that she will stay here until she goes mad.

  Is she being held here because she was accused of a crime? It’s possible that she could be accused of the murder of Electra Donovan and her friends who attacked the High House on January 3, 2092, under the guise of a ship in distress. Children of the elite determined to wipe out the majority of the human race that had despoiled and polluted the planet, they were sought to destroy the High Houses that manufactured the purification agents that could restore the world’s water supply. Olga Voronov, sole administrator of High House Eight from the age of three months, was not yet twelve on the day of the attack. Presumably as the youngest of the High Houses masters, they chose her plant believing that they could easily handle her.

  The events of the following hours proved their estimation wrong. Olga killed them all and saved her orbital factory besides.

  In her report to the headquarters on Earth, Olga detailed the incident and her actions, lying in just one detail. She didn’t disclose that it had been Doc, her robotic first mate, who’d killed Electra before disabling himself in a fit of grief. She didn’t want the Corporation’s e
ngineers to restore him and find out exactly how Doc could bypass the First Law because if one robot could succeed, then others could also kill, at least in extraordinary circumstances. So she took Electra’s death on herself, claiming that she’d killed the daughter of the president in hand-to-hand combat, and how the ship robot died in battle, rewriting the remnants of his memory for to confirm her story.

  She fulfilled her duty, defending the priceless station in a desperate fight. So how did it happen that the reward for the victory was a free trip to prison for almost a year?

  Perhaps this was the doing of Electra’s father, who valued the life of his daughter over the wildly expensive High House. That would explain why she had never been brought in front of a tribunal, where the whole truth of Electra’s terrorism would have come out. But why not just kill her? Life in a comfortable cell doesn’t seem like a terrible punishment—minus the absence of something worthwhile to do, it was not unlike living in the High House after her nanny died. Or perhaps the fun is yet to come.

  What if it’s not revenge? What if she was sent to prison for some other reason? For what? Money? Her knowledge and skills cost billions, but without a plant they are useless. There is no work here beyond exercise, watching old serials and consuming expensive rations.

  The absence of work seems stranger than the absence of a court. The days when the criminals just sat in the cells had passed long before her birth. Space prisons are labor camps where prisoners have to work hard for a grub, water, and daily limit of oxygen. Work and bring a stable profit to the owners of the enterprises, compete in efficiency with the machines.

  Olga remembers every episode of her favorite childhood series, The Oven, which was about the hard life of a female correctional colony at the northern pole of Venus. She was enraptured by the adventures of brave heroines who opposed the hellish conditions and the cruelty of the prison system. When she mentioned the show to her handler Petrov, who had helped escort the prisoners to Venus himself, she learned that her favorite TV series was a beautiful fairy tale, that the reality of servitude on prison colonies is much more severe. Created capital seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, or be pushed through an airlock.

  And she’s been sitting here for eleven months and hasn’t earned a single ruble? How can this be, when a year ago Olga made a profit of one and a half billion a month? Even without a factory, for Changed of her level there would always be another job. In any prison on Earth and beyond, Olga would have been put to work on the very first day—a prisoner must make money, and Olga certainly knows how to do that. But here she sits idly waiting for unknown.

  In the first days and weeks, she tried to play on her captors’ financial interest. Turning to the walls and ceiling Olga gave well thought-out speeches, offering work in exchange for a little more freedom. There was never a reply…

  Olga changed tactics and tried to threaten the jailers with suicide if they didn’t let her talk with the management. She raved about smashing her head against the wall, hanging herself on her exercise bar, or cutting herself with a shard of rock. It was a cheap bluff, and the kidnappers naturally didn’t believe her. Surely, they read her psychological profile; she also read this document and found it very interesting…

  Excerpts from Olga Voronov personal file: Ensign Voronov is disciplined, calm and polite to others, observes subordination, is capable of compromises and knows how to take into account the interests of others. But behind this lies the desire to use others for personal purposes. Selfish, cynical and inclined to aggression, but skillfully hides these traits, trying, if possible, to impress the simple, responsive girl. She is extremely prudent, with an increased instinct for self-preservation, for the sake of achieving her goal she’ll go for everything.

  Selfish, extremely prudent, with an increased instinct for self-preservation. Does such girl break her head against the wall? No chances, the characteristic of the best psychologists are not lying. But the characteristic also doesn’t lie in the other thing—for the sake of achieving her goal she’ll go for everything.

  So, the bargaining and blackmail didn’t lead to the result, the unknown enemy didn’t show any interest to her, and Olga abandoned her attempts, but didn’t abandon the intention. If no one is going to release her from here, then it will come out itself, no matter how hard it was.

  Having carefully studied the cell in the first two days, Olga came to a disappointing conclusion—the dungeon was built by professionals, especially to keep inside Changed like her as long as you please.

  The only way out is through the armored door. She can’t knock it out or take off the hinges; Olga understood this at first sight. If she had a body of a Changed soldier, then maybe she could break through the armor with her bare hands, but Olga was created for a job that doesn’t require exorbitant physical efforts. As her dread that the door would open to guards ready to frog-march her to her death faded to an acceptance it would never open, she started to hope that it would. Perhaps she could overpower the guards, take their weapons, and escape. She wouldn’t get far in unfamiliar territory, of course, and she had always proven an indomitable will to survive, but as the months trudged by even a doomed rush for freedom seemed better than this dreary limbo.

  Maybe she could use improvise some cunning picklock, but there is nothing to work with. Just a screen, table, cot, horizontal bar, walls, door. Even the ration packages degrade into dust.

  Also she has some clothes. The dark gray thin socks, sneakers, underwear, and tracksuit she was wearing when she woke up here. The composition of the inert synthetic fabric is unclear, no matter how closely she studies it under the maximum magnification that her eyes are capable of, and at every wavelength from ultraviolet to infrared. It’s impossible make of this fabric something useful for the escape; the clothes are specially sewn with such purpose.

  So, she has just one tool here—the potential of her body and her brain.

  The first thing after waking up is a full self-diagnosis, which shows that everything is in order with her except for the malfunctioning of her internal clock. Previously, Olga always knew how much time had passed from this or that event down to a thousandth of a second. Her clock had been reset to zero, and counted only the time that she has spent in the cell, as if Olga were born here.

  All the regular functions are in order, the databases seemingly intact. Naturally, Olga tried to contact or hears someone outside the cell, tried to connect through the Matrix to any useful device. All attempts failure, the cell is perfectly shielded. But Olga doesn’t stop regularly sending a distress signal at all frequencies, offering huge money for her salvation—if she doesn’t hear anyone, it doesn’t mean that they don’t hear her.

  Perhaps the most worrisome thing is that Olga can’t be certain that her memories haven’t been deleted or changed. Diagnosis asserts that everything is in order and there is nothing to worry about, that her whole previous life is all in the palm of her hand, but she knows perfectly well how illusory information can be.

  Olga has never been a coward; all her training was directed to ensure that she could overcome any fear and act correctly in the most challenging and dangerous situations. But what if that training, even her whole previous life was a lie? That there was no High House, no Arina, Petrov, Doc, or even Elektra? What if there was no Olga Voronov? What if she’s lived in this cell from birth?

  This line of thought continued until she forbade herself from thinking about it, deciding that there was no need to invent a whole false life for her only in order to be held her in a cell. Her captors want something from her, and eventually it will be clear.

  The greatest danger is the memories of the last two years, when Arina’s comrades contacted Olga. She had committed a very serious crime when she conspired with one of the most wanted criminal gangs of the solar system, whose very existence was prescribed. Olga carefully hid her memories of those meetings at an American cafe in the very depths of her genetic code under a thick protective layer of
misinformation. And even if someone managed to get to the secret data, the most important thing isn’t there; there are no coordinates for the path that the rocket carrying its precious cargo took.

  Olga was created for work and if there is no work here, then she had to create some herself. As it often had, art came to the aid. Although dismissive of her acting skills, while developing Olga’s side talents her nanny Arina had noted Olga’s ability to write and to make music.

  Previously, Olga didn’t have time for all her talents, so she focused on music, achieving a lucrative career in the Matrix as a rock singer. Now, lacking any tools but her intellect and her memory, she composed songs, designed clothes, and drafted buildings (judging herself a much better architect than a fashion designer). She even wrote romantic poems, remembering her Wordsworth and Coleridge, but her verse was less reminiscent of the Lake Poets than Petrov’s bawdy naval songs.

  But she considered her prose a complete success—Olga wrote a dozen of sequels to her favorite books, from Harry Potter to the Dark Tower and the Three-Body Problem. She invented her own series of dystopian novels about the Earth of the forty-fifth century and the incredible adventures of brave heroes on that radically changed planet. She finished the final chapter just yesterday.

  After pull-up a thousand times, Olga jumps off the horizontal bar and approaches the mirror, from where a tall, thin girl looks at her disapprovingly. The mane of disobedient silvery hair frames a beautiful narrow face; attentive gray eyes shine with cold, calculating anger.

  “Hi, beauty!”

  Today, the beauty doesn’t look the best; many days of fatigue begins to take effect. It is becoming more difficult for her to keep fit; it is becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that everything is in order. A month ago, a thousand exercises on the bar was her usual norm, but now Olga almost falls from fatigue, the energy balance is not in her favor. And she can’t give up physical education, it will cause suspicion. So, a little more rest, and she needs to pump the press, hoping that the bulging ribs will not be visible under the jacket. It's good today is Friday—in the evening, she’ll get a ration.