The Blitzkrieg

by Yuri Hamaganov

  “Exactly. Someone betrayed us—someone who knew where Antonina was located, or at least approximately knew. Another group of cyborgs was shot down near the Palace; one of them had a portable ten-kiloton nuclear charge, the key to any bunker.”

  “How many people know about this place, other than me and you?”

  “Only three.”

  “So, one of those three. We’re here.”

  Laying Clark at the broken door, Olga neatly climbs on the pile of twisted steel sheets and looks into the mine. In the darkness, she sees several spiderlike cables, and on one of these cobwebs, a massive climbing carbine is fixed. Picking up the carbine, Olga checks the battery charge—seventy-five percent, which should be enough to raise two wounded 3,800 meters.

  “Clark, don’t fall asleep! Help me out a little!”

  Clark loses consciousness, and Olga has to give him a couple of slaps.

  “Don’t you dare die, you hear? You saved me and Antonina today. To whom will I be able to turn when I find another adventure on my ass? I need you!”

  “Don’t worry; I'm ready to save your perfect ass as much as you need.”

  “That's good! We need to climb over this debris. I'll drag, and you kick off!”

  With great difficulty, perched on the broken cabin, Olga lowers the carbine.

  “So, we cling together to each other’s waists, and then the carbine will pull us up. It will be difficult for you to keep your head, so I'll support you, what—?”

  “I say—something is knocking . . . ”

  “Where? I can’t hear.”

  The heap of scrap metal under their feet falls apart with a strong push, throwing Olga and Clark in different directions.

  “What the hell?!”

  The surviving cyborg rises, dragging its broken legs and paving the way through the warped steel with powerful blows. Seeing the enemy, the girl tries to grab the gun, but the cyborg is ahead of her, causing a lightning jab breaking Olga's ribs and throwing her into the wall. Snatching a long trench knife, the cyborg crawls towards her for a finishing strike, but Clark grabs the enemy with a single hand, pulls the cyborg backwards, and they both tumble out of the mine back into the warehouse. The shattered visor flies aside, and for a split second, Olga sees the enemy's head—what was once a woman's face, unrecognizably changed by the thermal imager instead of the left eye and an ugly oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth. Having thrown off the man with a crushing elbow hit, the cyborg rolls over the side with a lightning vertical movement, stabbing Clark in the left side of the chest.

  A short burst pierces the cyborg in the hand, breaking her wrist with the knife. The woman turns to Olga, staring at the girl with hatred in her eye. The Stechkin snarls briefly, throwing all its bullets at once. The cyborg’s head explodes like a hand grenade, splashing blood, pieces of brain, and chips all around.

  Putting the gun back in her pocket, Olga sits motionless for a while, then crawls to the warehouse, clumsily handing over bloody hands. As she approaches the decapitated woman, she looks unblinkingly at the knife sticking out of Clark's chest and then stretches out her hand and starts the personal sensor on his suit, knowing the answer in advance. The sensor indicates a lack of pulse and breath, confirming a simple, obvious fact—Clark is dead; a poisoned knife in the heart leaves no chance for survival. Death was instantaneous.

  Olga looks at Clark's corpse, for a moment seriously considering a surprisingly simple, logical, clear idea: to get the Stechkin out of her pocket, recharge it, put the barrel into her mouth, and pull the trigger. But this brief moment passes like a dream, and Olga, without reaching for the gun, stays motionless, lying on the icy floor, her head down on Clark's chest.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: DRUNKEN FIST

  “Interestingly, low gravity interferes, or, perhaps on the contrary, it helps to hang,” says Captain Klimov without turning around, examining the high crossbar and the body hanging beneath it.

  From the wide steps of the city hospital, a phantasmagoric view of the huge central square is opened: dilapidated buildings, bomb funnels, warped combat machines, and, above all, a high gallows. Olga knows the little hanging traitor; she met him a couple of times when she was engaged in the installation of Antonina. He was one of Johnson’s two main assistants, who had wide access to classified information. The transfer to the enemy of the precise coordinates of the command post and the loading of the icebreaker virus into the security system, which deprived them of most of their arsenal—it was all his work.

  “Actually, he was already dead when he was jerked up I don’t know why the locals did this: they probably followed Mussolini's example. The award found a hero. Antonina, however, strongly objected—she said that it was necessary to interrogate first and then hang; this isn’t professional.”

  By the time Olga finally got out of the warehouse, Antonina had already identified traitor, and the girl went first to him, intending to shoot him, but she was outrun. She found Papa Johnson standing over the fresh corpse, holding his famous Howdah pistol. It was impractical to shoot a dead man, so Olga remained indifferent to watching the Republicans hang the corpse on the gallows and then went to the hospital.

  The hospital was full of the wounded, but Antonina had reserved for Voronov the latest resuscitation capsule, assigning two soldiers to her so that the girl wouldn’t be thrown out of the medical device. Stopping nobody, and paying no attention to the wounded and the doctors and nurses working around the hospital, Olga drops her clothes and absolutely naked gets into the capsule, where she wakes up twelve hours later.

  Her frozen skin has been replaced by new skin, and her broken ribs have been sealed. Plus, there’s a small bonus—two new fingers replace the lost ones. Now she has no reminder of her wounds. The skin and fingers were removed from the killed female paratrooper. The size matched Olga’s perfectly; it was only necessary repaint the nails in the bright red color familiar to Olga.

  Having exited the capsule, the girl has started rummaging through the wall cabinets in search of clothes when the doors open, letting the doctor and the orderlies roll in a stretcher with two seriously wounded, whom she identifies as Supernova paratroopers.

  "Excuse me, but can you give me something to cover myself with?”

  One of the orderlies silently tosses her a white sheet and then returns to the unconscious prisoners. In the meantime, his colleagues shave the man with a broken sternum, nudging the electrodes of diagnostic devices, obeying Antonina's commands. Wrapped in the sheet, Olga comes closer, watching the events with interest.

  “Olga, since you're here, tear the clothes off this girl and put her in a capsule.”

  “Antonina, why do you need them?”

  “I'll arrange a spiritual session.”

  Walking around the first stretcher, Olga comes to the second one, where a charred girl no older than twenty lies; apparently, she fell under the shot of a flamethrower. The smell of burnt plastic and burnt flesh, combat suit and heavy boots literally caked, several tubes and life-support cables pierced the left lung, only the head suffered relatively little, except for a few burns. Probably from Latin America from the looks of her, Olga thinks, trying to unfasten the fused buckles.

  “Guys, do you have a scalpel?”

  She’ll have to cut the remainder of the spacesuit that is burnt to the body. Ignoring the disgusting smell, Voronov starts working with a scalpel, remembering her space first aid course. The unbearable pain breaks through the anesthetizing fog; the burnt girl screams, but handcuffs keep her on the stretcher.

  “Antonina, give her more painkillers. Her groans are preventing me from working.”

  “The answer is negative. If I increase the dose, the brain damage will become irreversible, and I need her brain intact. Quickly put her in the capsule!”

  The burnt girl regains consciousness for a short moment, sees Olga, and spits in her face with bloody saliva and splinters of teeth before Olga has time to close the capsule lid.

  “No gratitude!”r />
  Wiping her face, Olga turns to the orderlies, who continue to work silently at the first stretcher. Their patient, it seems, has already died, but they don’t stop—they quickly drill thin holes in his skull, introducing long transparent rods of probes. She starts to guess what Antonina is going to do.

  “It seems ready. Charge!”

  The corpse begins to move convulsively.

  “Too much heat! You need to cool him down!”

  Cooling compresses cover his head; the convulsions become weaker. Antonina reflects her actions thoughtfully.

  “Now try the top layers; twelve-hour interval.”

  On the screen, pale, moving shadows begin to appear, gradually gaining more and more clarity. Olga sits down in Seiza, trying to decipher the posthumous memories of the deceased paratrooper from these moving pictures.

  “Is that what he saw in the twelve-hour period before his death? I can’t figure out what anything is,” she says disappointedly.

  “Elementary, Watson. It's not just a reflection on the retina; those are images already processed by his mind, past a kind of editing and frequency coding in the brain. It will take some time to figure out what they are, practically telepathy with the deceased—a tricky thing. An ordinary paratrooper couldn’t know much about the operation, but perhaps I will be able to find something useful. If your toasted girlfriend survives the next twelve hours, I will talk to her personally.”

  Olga rises to her feet.

  “If there is no movie, then I, perhaps, will go. If it's not too difficult, give me some clothes and let me go to the city. I have things to do.”

  “Sorry, but you have to wait. Your superiors are calling you to Johnson."

  “Then at least give me some panties.”

  * * *

  “Cleverly invented, very clever.”

  The First Chief throws a sheet of heavy paper on his once beautiful rosewood table, now burned and covered with deep scratches. His luxurious office has also changed, and not for the better: in the ceiling are holes with melted edges, part of the collection has been crushed, and on the white sheepskin carpet are brown spots of blood—it was here that Johnson finished off the traitor. Although the holes are sealed and the atmosphere has been restored, Olga and the First Chief are in spacesuits with open helmets—it's safer. Klimov and Severov don’t need spacesuits; they are present only as holograms.

  “They have chosen an original way of delivering the message, apparently for the sake of secrecy—via a messenger robot. At first we thought that it was another bomb or that the paper was toxic, but Antonina checked and didn’t confirm the threat. However, I would prefer toxins. Here, listen.”

  Papa Johnson picks up a paper and starts slowly, without visible interest, to read an ultimatum.

  “Dissolve the Republic’s government and recognize the new administration, demobilize and disarm the army, and transfer the fleet to the new authorities in thirty-two hours—otherwise, we will face a massive meteorite bombardment. No declaration of war—just on the Valleys, as if accidentally, forty-eight cobblestones ten to thirty meters in size crash at once, the impact of which will resemble a massive nuclear strike. The observatory and space telescopes have confirmed the approach of this meteor shower; the first asteroids will enter the upper atmosphere in thirty-two hours and seventeen minutes. If we accept their terms, they promise to change the course of the asteroids and throw them into the desert, where they won’t harm anyone. If not—Alamo and the other major cities will be destroyed . . . ”

  “What does the general staff say?”

  Johnson strikes a match on the table, sets the ultimatum on fire, watching how the expensive stamped paper flares up, and then lits a cigar.

  “It's impossible to repulse this attack with our own forces. As far as Antonina is concerned, you two can’t do it .”

  Olga presents a meteor shower, now approaching Mars. Nothing even close with a garbage swarm, many years ago, almost ruined the High House. And these aren’t small harmless pebbles, brightly burning in the upper atmosphere for the delight of stargazers—they are hefty blocks of pressed dust and frozen gases, weighing several thousand or even tens of thousands of tons. Whatever comes in their way—the released energy will be equal to the explosion of the hydrogen bomb. Many millions of years ago, a similar phenomenon destroyed the previous hosts of Earth—dinosaurs—freeing up space for mammals. And now the asteroid danger threatens to destroy the young Republic, sending it to the dustbin of history.

  “Natasha, from the navigator's point of view, what do you say?”

  “Judging by the speed and trajectory, I can assume that the meteorites were not launched yesterday, nor were they launched the day before yesterday. They have been flying to Mars for eight or nine months; they were set in motion about the same time that we left for Jupiter. Not the most difficult work, if there are powerful engines and the right amount of fuel—you just have to make a couple of orbit corrections at the initial stage of the flight. I think so, at least.”

  Olga appreciated the words of the navigator. There was someone very prudent in Supernova headquarters, who foresaw the possibility of successfully passing the convoy and the failure of the subsequent intervention and insured in advance for this case. And now the insurance has been put into action. Why is this threat only being announced now?

  “Igor?”

  “It's a fool’s mate, Captain: everything is clear, and nothing can be done. Fragment shells against these cobblestones are useless, and we don’t have a super-powerful laser for planetary defense. A nuclear projectile can split such an asteroid, but we only have two special charges for forty-eight targets.”

  “What if we put solid-fuel accelerators on the asteroids and change the course?”

  Klimov grins, but Voronov doesn’t find anything funny in his smile.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Johnson, you aren’t an astronaut. The accelerator idea is just grasping for straws. This operation requires a lot of equipment and trained crews and takes considerable time, not less than four weeks. Far more than the thirty-two hours that we have. I’ll say it plainly—I don’t know what can be done here, except to turn to the Union for help. Even if Antonina and Joseph don’t know . . . ”

  Olga isn’t happy to hear the pause after the captain’s last word—she is afraid that someone will ask her opinion, and she has nothing to say. No one asks. Johnson continues.

  “Actually, Antonina knows. At my request, she developed a plan of action; I think you should hear it.”

  Over the charred rosewood appears the globe of Mars.

  “Their promise to change course means one certain fact—they can control the asteroids that they’ve turned into super-heavy guided bombs. We know where the controlling signal comes from; we know where the control point is located. Antonina found it.”

  On the opposite hemisphere, a small blue star lights up.

  “Here, they have an old cosmodrome; it’s rarely used now. The asteroids are being controlled from a local observatory. We’ll take over the observatory, take charge of the cobblestones, change their course, and drop the asteroids into the desert.”

  Klimov and Severov exchange glances.

  “This is Supernova territory.”

  “Martian geography is well known to me.”

  “Then you know what the attack will mean?”

  “With all due respect, Comrade Klimov, you aren’t a Martian. You are forgiven for not knowing our principles. For the past two days, we have lost nearly ten thousand people in combat. It isn’t customary for us to forgive such insults, and for this reason, we’ll attack them; it is time to repay the debt and show that no one can bomb our cities and kill our people. This isn’t my personal decision; the heads of other Houses have already given their consent. This is the will of the people, what we call “democracy”—that old, battered word.

  “It's suicide.”

  An hour later, when the meeting ends, Olga turns to Klimov.

  “Comrade Cap
tain, I really need a leave to resolve a couple of personal business matters.”

  “You have seven hours. Without delay, comrade.”

  “Roger.”

  Waiting until the senior officers disconnect, the girl calls Antonina.

  “I know that you have a lot of work and a lack of materials and machines, but I need your help, so don’t you dare say no, okay?!”

  “I'm listening.”

  “Give me a jeep, a set of tools, and thirty liters of hydrogen fuel. There is no need for company.”

  “Go to the fifth depot.”

  * * *

  A semitransparent silver liquid flows from the canister, leaving a pale smoky trace: Olga watches as the fuel is instantly absorbed by sand and porous stones. Having emptied the last canister, the girl steps back and evaluate the result of her work.

  “It's done.”

  She didn’t hesitate choosing a place for the ceremony—only this one unnamed rock on the top of the canyon, to which she was led by Clark. Here, they flew on paragliders; here, they spent those last beautiful hours before she left Mars. And here, a fire will be lit.

  After stopping the jeep at the foot of the rock, Olga takes a set of sapper tools and goes upstairs. Having marked a small area, she begins, silently and intently raking sand, and then smashes a small boulder with a pick. Two hours left for this job, then she will bring cans.

  “Now.”

  Olga returns to the jeep, stands silently for a while, and then unzips the white bag, releasing Clark from this ridiculous receptacle.

  “Come on, comrade.”

  Having loaded the corpse on her back, the girl slowly moves up the path. Going to the top, Olga gently lowers Clark, takes a breath, and heads to the funeral pyre, opening the thermite flask. Accurately scattering the incendiary compound on the sand soaked in fuel, the girl covers the fire with a blanket. The sun, meanwhile, is bending lower and lower over the distant horizon, throwing dull rays on the boundless space of the canyon.