Olga knows that Klimov and Chernova have lived as husband and wife for many years, although they haven’t been formally married. No one asks why.
“For a couple of years, I had glands sticking out of my trousers, and then, when the post-war mess gradually ceased, I made myself new legs, stronger and faster than the old ones. If you want, I can do the same for you.”
“Thanks, but I'll wait for the need.”
“You won’t have to wait long in our work.”
For the first time at Cobblestone, the whole crew gathers in the saloon to listen to their captain who just finished a long communication session. With whom exactly isn’t yet clear, but it is obvious that this conversation will determine their further actions for several months ahead. Today, they will find out whether they will participate further in a protracted war on the red planet, or, having done their work, leave, leaving the conflict behind the stern.
“Amnesty.” That is the first word that Klimov utters, going down to the crew.
Another drawback of the Belomor cigarette, and the captain continues his speech. “Having successfully invested a couple of tens of thousands of rubles in information sources, I received news of amnesty. A month ago in the Supernova prisons in the Oven, a large-scale amnesty of personnel was announced, men and women equally, only criminal offenses. As you might guess, they have to work out a ticket from the Oven, so that these bandits will soon be waiting at the Mars orbit.”
There will be further details and explanations, but the main thing is clear right now: having failed to strangle the Republic in an economic blockade, Supernova decided to launch an open attack, having recruited a huge army of criminals, already heading for Mars in the holds of transport ships. And even if an ordinary person is fairly inferior in combat effectiveness to modern war robots and cyborgs, humans are still much cheaper, so the corporation wouldn’t have any problems with cannon fodder.
“The Republicans decided to continue the struggle; they have just rejected the offer to become a Supernova protectorate. I would have made an agreement with the Union if I was in their place, but they are obsessed with the idea of independence, so they have to fight alone. In any case, they are very interested in our further participation and are ready to present as evidence of their intentions a major advance, which was transferred to our accounts this afternoon. So, I think we will have a lot of work in the near future. What do you say, comrades?”
The war continues, and the Bolshevik, as before, will participate in the primary roles—so decides the council. Olga also votes in the affirmative, but this time, she knows exactly what and for whom they will fight.
* * *
“Olga . . . ”
It’s a beautiful dream: it seems that her soul is hovering above the clouds, like a feather in the wind.
“Olga!”
Someone extremely annoying is trying to wrest her from the beautiful dream, shaking her violently by the shoulders.
“What bastard is there?!”
“OLGA!”
To the nasty voice is added the sharp signal of an alarm clock. She has no choice; it’s necessary to wake up. Olga reluctantly opens her eyes . . . and sees under her the vast expanses of the Tharsis Desert, ten kilometers of falling to the red sands.
“What the hell?!”
This is definitely not a dream—she is falling swiftly to Mars, spinning randomly. Red earth and blue sky are replacing each other, and the altimeter is signaling violently—and she took it as an alarm clock. There is no time to guess who and why threw her down; right now, she needs to find out why the automatic system that was supposed to open the parachute hasn’t yet worked. Her right hand reaches for her hip with a trained movement—if the automatic system has failed, she must open the parachute manually; otherwise, she’ll have an extremely hard landing.
“Olga!”
Again this voice; through the ocean of interference, Voronov hardly recognizes Klimov.
“Don’t touch the ring. That’s an order!”
The desert is getting closer. Her speed is increasing with every second, but her ship's discipline is stronger than her instinct of self-preservation, detaining her hand at the knockout ring.
“You are being pursued by a Supernova fighter with a laser gun on board. If you brake suddenly now, he will catch up with you and burn you in a quarter of a second. We don’t have time to knock him down. Your only chance is to fall at the maximum speed and open your parachute near the ground, at Joseph’s command. He turned off the automation!”
Seven thousand two hundred and thirty-five meters to the point of landing.
“Roger.”
“Turn over your head to fall faster; he's coming!”
Olga folds her arms over her chest, bends her legs into her lap, and, with the transfer of body weight, stops the rotation. She is now falling vertically, upside down, like a bomb. She already sees a large impact crater, surrounded by high hills, at the foot of which she will fall. In the rays of the setting sun, a thin line gleams—the railway. The wind whistles, and the altimeter counts the remaining seconds of the flight.
“Olga, get ready to open the parachute at a quarter of a kilometer, no earlier!”
Two thousand one hundred meters—the hills are rapidly approaching, and a bright blue mark appears on the screen—“Landing Point.” Her fingers grip the ring. The figures in the altimeter change with the speed of a machine gun.
“Uncle Joe!”
“It's still too early; the fighter is very close.”
“Get him off my tail!”
“Wait!”
Eight hundred and ten meters.
“Wait!”
Five hundred meters—the alarm turns into an uninterrupted trumpet howl.
“Wait!”
Two hundred and fifty meters—small boulders are visible on the slopes of the hills.
“Now!”
Olga pulls out the ring at around 195, and the dome of the Martian parachute blocks out the sun. Her speed instantly drops to two meters per second, as she sways on the lines. The girl is counting the time remaining before the landing when the alarm turns on—the parachute has been rapidly destroyed, torn apart and set on fire by a laser. She pulls the second ring, and the burning parachute is carried away. She’ll fly the rest of the way independently. Twenty-five meters to the ground—Olga falls from the height of a five-story house, at the last moment having straightened and slightly bent her legs in the knees.
“Height—zero!”
Heavy boots hit the red sand; despite the weak gravity, the blow is crushing. Olga rolls over her head and breaks down from the crest of the hill. Tumbling and bouncing on every hummock, descending in a small sand avalanche, the girl rolls down a couple of hundred meters until she hits her head on a boulder with sharp jagged edges, which causes the helmet glass to split. The suit slams loudly, and the air escapes, leaving Olga alone with the Martian atmosphere. At least the descent has stopped.
Exhausting all the air from her lungs and without opening her eyes, Voronov slowly turns over on her back, tears off her heavy gloves, and then takes out small cubes of broken glass from the cracked helmet, carefully so as not to damage her eyes. In her mouth is the salty taste of blood, cold bites the skin and her ears are buzzing with the sharp drop in pressure. Having thrown out the last fragments, Olga clumsily sits down and quickly removes her helmet, then gets a portable oxygen mask from her breast pocket. From the lack of air, blood knocks in the temples, she spits bloody saliva on the sand, swallowing the slightly unfit atmosphere. Martian air tastes like a weak mixture of pepper and cinnamon. The mask closes over her nose and mouth. Air is flowing, but it's too early to breathe in full; there are more important things to worry about than the risk of suffocation.
Now it’s necessary to deal with the pressure drop; otherwise, the nitrogen boiling in her blood will begin to destroy her blood vessels. Besides, she’s freezing more and more. Opened her belt, Olga finds a disposable syringe with a two-component adaptive mixture, especi
ally for the situation of explosive decompression.
Having pulled out the hard collar, the girl brings a needle to her neck. A dithering signal sounds like Morse code; the syringe is looking for the most suitable point for injection. Slowly raising the needle, Olga listens as the signal gets more frequent, turning into a high whistle, then presses the button.
The needle pierces her throat with the force of a hammer. Voronov sits motionless for a few seconds, feeling the adaptive mixture thrown into the carotid artery spreading throughout her body. So, now it starts; the girl throws the syringe and squeezes the glove in her teeth, so as not to bite off her tongue.
Her body is constricted by a severe cramp; she falls to her side, shuddering in convulsions, her fingers grabbing sand and small stones. This lasts about forty seconds, and then the cramps recede as suddenly as they appeared. The pressing pain in her ears disappears; she no longer feels cold, and her tongue is intact—the adaptation is over.
“Olga, come in. Olga!”
“Wait, please . . . ”
With great difficulty, she again sits down, Olga connects to Chernova on short wave.
“Telemetry is telling me that your heart is still beating and your brain is fine. How are you doing?”
Olga doesn’t answer immediately, trying to focus her eyes on her trembling fingers.
“I landed relatively well, but the suit was broken. I went through an emergency adaptation and wait for further instructions.”
“You didn’t meet the standard time for adaptation, the next time moved faster. But overall, your condition is normal; nothing is broken, and your lungs and heart are functioning, so you can go. This is now the most important thing—you can’t stay there, so get up and go, as Comrade Christ said.”
Olga wants to ask Elena how she got here, but the need for questions disappears. Now she remembers the last unsuccessful flight in all its details.
An hour ago, she was at the Enterprise station. The Bolshevik urgently needed to depart, and she received a personal order to go down to Alamo, because Antonina needed another upgrade. There was no time to call the Red Star, and Olga decided to fly on a local shuttle, bringing down several civilian experts. The last thing she remembers is the alarm signal almost immediately after the start.
“Your shuttle was shot down at a height of thirty-five kilometers by a link of robot fighters. You were thrown overboard after a hard hit against the bulkhead.”
“Did anyone else survive?”
“No. The rest opened their parachutes immediately after the disaster, and they were shot in the air, so thank Joseph for turning off your automation. You're the only one so lucky.”
“Foolish girls are lucky. I was almost fried near the ground; I don’t understand why the fighter didn’t cut me in two.”
“Turn your head to the right.”
She looked to the right. The slope of the hill, the sand, the pebbles, the boulders—everything looks normal. The only unusual thing is the bright yellow fragments of metal and plastic, scattered by a small crater, clearly fresh. That's why she stayed alive.
“We were far away and had to change course urgently to support you with fire power. We were able to knock down this robot at the last moment, about a second before it would have burned you. Okay, enough talking about what happened; let's get to the point. In azimuth 340, do you see two hills resembling large women's breasts?”
“Yeah, I've always dreamed of tits like those.”
“Get up and go in the direction of those hills. Behind the hills is a railway—see it?”
During her fall, Olga got a good look at the road leading from Alamo to one of the free cities in the north. Clark said that it was no longer used because of a series of sabotages.
“There is a derailed train there; the Republic military will pick you up there.”
“Good. Listen, while I’m going, can I eat? I'm just dying of hunger.”
“Stay hungry, girl. If you eat now, your metabolism will accelerate, your pressure will jump again, and you’ll become more vulnerable to cold. So, forget about the ration; you can drink a couple of sips of water—nothing more. Switch off the walkie-talkie. There may be enemy reconnaissance groups nearby. You have three and a half hours before sunset; at night, the temperature will drop to negative 110 degrees. Even with the adaptive mixture, you will be slightly cool, so hurry.”
“Roger.”
Clumsily climbing to her feet, Olga realizes how tough her landing was. Chernova said that there were no fractures, but the girl’s body seems to have turned into one giant bruise. Her muscles are burning with the fire of a large dose of painkillers and antishock drugs.
With a piteous moan, she examines the contents of her pockets. Before landing in the shuttle, she was given a gun, and it may come in handy if she meets with the Supernova commandos, at least to shoot herself, but rummaging around her waist, Olga discovers that she lost her holster. She nabs the protective glasses, pulls on the gloves again, and tries to put on the broken helmet but quickly removes it and finally throws it away—the helmet with the broken glass no longer warms her, and wearing an oxygen mask beneath it is uncomfortable. If she had used her habitual combat suit, no depressurization would have occurred, but before the flight, Olga decided to change into a more comfortable local civilian model, and now she is paying for her love of comfort.
She has not had a walk like this before, although the Martians regularly arrange such voyages outside to unite with nature, as they say. This is a rare opportunity to understand what Mars really is, without being separated from it by the shell of the spacesuit. The fourth planet meets her in the early evening with silence and primeval grandeur.
An early spring reigns in these lands, now negative thirty-six on the thermometer—quite comfortable weather by local standards. As long as the adaptive mixture works, Olga isn’t at risk of dying from hypothermia or frostbite, but this can’t go on forever. The local air is absolutely dry and unprecedentedly transparent, providing excellent visibility for many kilometers. The faint smell of pepper and cinnamon hasn’t disappeared, apparently, so the sand smells beneath her feet. The low gravity does its job; it's easy to walk, despite the aching muscles at each step. A light breeze that seems to never stop pleasantly waves her blond hair, so the walk could almost be called romantic.
“And it's not so bad, especially if you don’t crack your neck at the first contact.”
In an hour, she overcomes most of the descent. The sun is rolling lower and lower into the hills, and in the sky are two bright stars—the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos are clearly visible. High, weather-beaten rocks cast dark shadows; in front, behind a small hill, lies a long winding valley, on the bottom of which there is a railway.
Clumsily climbing the hillock, Olga stands motionless for a while, just breathing: she realized that if she breathes too fast, the pressure immediately jumps, and this must be avoided in every possible way. Using a forced pause for visual reconnaissance, Olga looks around the valley, which was long ago the channel of a deep river. This is no longer a wild territory; it is a land of man: windmill towers, an endless ribbon of a single-track narrow-gauge railway going from the south to the north, a low bridge across a deep gorge, a chaotic heap of warped wagons at the crash site. The girl thinks about turning on the emergency beacon, but then realizes that this isn’t the best idea and starts to descend into the valley, moving to the broken train.
From a close distance, the scale of the catastrophe is clearly visible—the track was blown up at a sharp turn, so the freight train left the rail at full speed. The broken electric locomotive and crushed wagons were dropped under the escarpment. Judging by the numerous tracks of caterpillars and heavy wheels, most of the surviving containers were taken away in an unknown direction, although quite a few are left—packages and boxes with a wide variety of cargo lie everywhere, among them enormous wheel axes.
Olga decides to wait for rescuers here, staying as long as possible on the sunny side. Examining t
he broken containers, the girl is looking for a large piece of thermal insulation to make a sleeping bag when her attention is attracted by a sunny beam that briefly flashes on the hill. She drops to the sand a split second ahead of the shot, and in the container’s lid appears a small neat hole—only then does she hear a loud click. Olga nimbly creeps away, finding shelter under an overturned wagon. Bullets knock around her for another minute, and then the shooting ceases.
Having lost the target, her unknown enemies will try something else: a mortar fire, perhaps, or chasing her to take her alive. Since the enemy already knows her whereabouts, Olga turns on the emergency beacon and throws it as far as possible, then promptly starts to dig a small shelter under the wagon.
Hiding in her created trench and covering herself with a camouflage net, Olga waits for the shelling, which never begins—apparently, they have no mortar. So, they’ll soon be here, and she needs to urgently do something about this. The girl starts randomly opening bags and finds in the fourth a balloon with a synthetic low-temperature solvent. Arina Rodionovna's chemistry lessons weren’t in vain; Olga remembers that this chemical ignites at ninety-two degrees Celsius and can burn without oxygen.
“Now we’ll do disgusting deeds!”
In addition to pemmican and chocolate, she has a cup of high-calorie soup: it will now come in handy, but not for a snack. Removing the lid, the girl grabs the jelly-like contents, releasing the heating element, and then gently pours the solvent into the cup, wincing at the pungent smell, which breaks through the mask. She fills the cup two-thirds of the way and then slowly, one by one, drops into the colorless liquid two dozen small nuts that she finds scattered around.
In the distance, she hears footsteps. After screwing on the lid, Olga reads the inscription on the bottom—“Guaranteed heating to one hundred degrees in five seconds!”
The steps are approaching. There is a short burst, and a swarm of small caliber bullets ring on metal—an invisible pursuer is looking for her in the wagons. In the rarefied air, a tiny unmanned scout buzzes. She is in no real danger: under the camouflage net that merges with the sand, the drone won’t see her.
The Blitzkrieg Page 22
