Hades- the Revolution, page 23
part #2 of Hadesjan Cycle Series
“No, no” we both protested.
“Come on, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“This is a boy from my brigade,” she cleared the misunderstanding. “I heard you wanted to see him?”
“Your name?”
“Pavel Tsenre,” I said immediately.
“Yes, we’ll have a word.”
“Do you want me to wait?” she asked.
“Don’t bother. You have more important things to do. But come by more often, I’ll be glad to talk to you. We see each other too seldom.”
After a quick goodbye Mathilda left me in the hands of her uncle.
“Here,” he ushered me into his office.
It was very austere inside with bare walls bearing the signs of peeled-off wall murals. In the middle stood a desk with an image generator and a touch keyboard built into the desktop. It was first class equipment. There were a few aluminum chairs under the walls. Nothing more.
We sat down. Mathilda’s uncle browsed through something. From the place where I was sitting I could only see the movement of his finger on the surface of the desk. The way the light fell made it impossible for me to see any details. Finally, he placed a small camcorder on the top and directed its lens at me.
“This is a lie detector,” he explained. “That’s the procedure. Besides, every talk is recorded.”
I nodded to show that I accepted the situation.
“Introduce yourself and say a few words about yourself,” he asked.
“Is this a formal interrogation? Am I accused of anything?” I asked.
“This is an indispensable procedure of inside verification,” he explained, although it didn’t explain anything to me. “Let’s start.”
I introduced myself then, I recited the standard formula, not venturing anywhere outside the typical info you find in every resume. He then asked a few questions about my work for the Marine Corps and Bio&Sonic. I got the impression that he was quite well informed. He asked about the Guzenkos. And then he moved on to the most important thing.
“Have you ever cooperated with the civil or military forces of the intelligence or counterintelligence of Earth? Have you ever done any activity on their behalf?” There were more questions about that.
Overall, it didn’t last long. In the end he took down the recording device, took out a packet of narco cigarettes and offered it to me.
“I don’t smoke,” I said grudgingly. After the verification I felt terribly underestimated.
“You’re not very happy about the procedure, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I’ve long been servicing the fucking Organization. Isn’t it enough for you? Why the fuck all this?”
“Don’t get too excited, young man. You don’t seem to have been listening to me. This job involves such procedures. Believe it or not, I have to go through them myself.” The old fox was giving me bullshit but it was not the right place to deny him. He seemed to take my silence as acceptance.
It crossed my mind that I could share the problem with the AI sitting in my head. I kept my mouth shut in case somebody would be willing to dig inside it. I was better off not tempting fate. I once blundered around one cunning Marine lieutenant and spilled out everything I knew, and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“I’d like you to speak to somebody,” he touched a point on his desktop. “Bring in the prisoner,” he demanded.
I looked at him suspiciously, expecting another trick. He stood up and walked to the door. When it opened, he ushered in a prisoner with a bag over his head. He helped him walk to the center of the room, where he snatched the bag off his head with one quick move. I looked straight into the eyes of a terrified Edward Watt. I jumped to my feet and couldn’t help myself. I punched him in the face and he flew onto the bare wall. He slid down to the floor quite stunned.
“I can see there are a few things you have to talk through,” Mathilda’s uncle quickly appraised the situation. “You have five minutes.”
And he left us alone. I had a mess in my head. I was looking at Ed’s bleeding lip and felt like kicking him down to the ground, ripping his suit with my bare hands and making him eat it.
“Hello Pavel,” he was the first one to speak.
“Son-of-a-bitch.”
He wiped his mouth with his hands tied at the front.
“You learned your lesson. At school it was you who always got punched,” he reminded me.
“Son-of-a-bitch.”
“You’re repeating yourself. Give me something new. Besides, you don’t have it right. It’s not my mother who screws around.”
I kicked him.
“Come on! Are you nuts?”
“Why?” I asked him. “Just tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“You did you betray me and the others?”
“It’s just business, Pavel, nothing else.”
“What the fuck are you saying, Ed? What business?” I didn’t understand anything.
“Everything around you, moron,” he explained, “this whole fucking planetary system where the spheres of influence meet. Everyone wants to get something for themselves and get all comfy. You either clinch deals with the sharks or you get eaten by them,” he spit out the words.
“You hung me out to dry,” I said and I was quite sure he did. He didn’t deny it.
“It’s all because of idealists like you and Guzenko,” he was winding up now. “Every other ordinary guy is capable of making a deal. But not you. You have your ideals. Look where they got you. It’s all your fault!”
“My fault?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Yes!” he said. “If you had struck a deal with InCorp none of this would have happened. But you preferred to play the tough guy. The company bribed your whole family, but of course you don’t give a shit about them. You don’t even get your mail. You’ve closed yourself in that cocoon of yours and you don’t see a thing. Wake up! Hello! It’s time to grow up!”
The shouting tired him and he leaned against the wall panting.
“And how was Mery Lonely guilty of anything?”
“Who?”
“Mery. She died during the pirate attack.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” he denied.
“And my container blowing up was also an accident? And the Guzenko family? Don’t you have a guilty conscience? Don’t you dream about Nadia Guzenko at night? You know, the one who had us once for dinner. She had this sweet daughter, what’s her name, Viera.”
His head dropped and he didn’t say a word.
“It was me who had to put her body into the bag,” I added.
“Shut up!” he shouted. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“You will listen whether you want it or not! You have the blood of innocent people on your hands. Do you feel good about that?”
“I didn’t know things would get so fucked up. I was just supposed to check where you lived, that’s all,” he confessed.
“Did you plant the bomb in my place too?”
“No! I just left the locator. They never said what for. I thought somebody would talk sense into you and that they would ask you to come back. Nobody mentioned using violence!”
“Ed, we’ve known each other for many years. Why?”
My buddy looked up. It was the first time we looked each other in the eye. I was wondering what he would say.
“My father made me.”
“Don’t bullshit me that your father made you. Did you listen to him?”
“I had no way out. He said the family had financial problems. We had lost loads of money on the stock exchange. You know I have younger sisters and I had to take care of them.”
“Selling yourself to InCorp? You’re calling me stupid, but you’re not much better than that.”
“I stick with the stronger kind and you stick with the terrorists,” he said. “Sooner or later you’ll all be blown to pieces.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. So far it’s been Uroboros that’s getting the walloping.”
“You still believe in fairy tales,” he mocked me. “You’ve only tickled the octopus, nothing more. Even if you take over the whole system, what about the others? The company will step back, lie low for some time, then gather their forces and strike back, and the government of Earth will applaud or even send in the Marines.”
“Bullshit.” I couldn’t accept his view of the situation.
“The huge concerns have split the influence spheres among each other,” he went on explaining. “We live in the time of great changes. Sooner or later, technocratic political entities will rise, and in the face of revolutionary movements they will surely unite and wipe you off the planet. Pavel, you’re on the losers’ side. You’ve picked the wrong team.”
“But I don’t have the blood of the innocent on my hands.”
“It’s semantics,” he said. He lost interest in or conversation and began to whistle a tune fixing his stare at the ceiling.
I realized there was no way for me to get through to him with my argumentation. We went very separate ways and had to carry the burden of responsibility for these choices. I wasn’t surprised that at that very moment the uncle entered the room. It was obvious that every word was still being recorded.
“Enough of the conversation,” he said, sitting behind his desk. “Let’s get down to business.”
He quickly wrote something on the top of his desk and validated it with a touch of his thumb.
“I have a proposition for you,” he said looking at Ed. “There’s a lot on your conscience, but how about you cooperate with the Revolutionary Committee?”
“You want me to turn?”
“You’ve already done that. You’re the worst kind of traitor,” the uncle was saying these words confidently. “I’m in charge of a counter intelligence unit and I have collected quite a file on you. You have two options. The role of a double agent is one of them.”
“And the other one?”
The officer shrugged his shoulders.
“And what do you think?”
“You want to kill him?” I asked.
“We have to,” he nodded. “There is one thing he might be right about. At any moment we can expect an attack of the counter-revolutionaries. We can’t afford to keep hostages, especially guys like him. We’re operating under combat conditions. Every officer has the right to make independent decisions, even the most difficult ones.”
I felt my pulse racing. In response to the reaction of my organism Ingrid materialized behind the uncle. Of course I was the only one who could see her.
“He’s right, dear,” she said. “I saw him place the bug in your container.”
This couldn’t be true.
“Ed, come on, say yes,” I tried to reason with him.
“I can’t,” he said. “They’ll kill my whole family. I can’t take the risk.”
“Did you take Durofen?” the uncle asked him.
“I did.”
“That would explain things,” the officer pressed the button of a printer and a sheet of paper slid out of the edge of the desk.
“What is Durofen? What do you mean?”
“Durofen is a drug that influences the brain. It reinforces a psychological stance. In other words, your friend had treated himself to a brainwash. He became the faithful dog of Uroboros,” he explained.
I wanted to ask another question but Ingrid already had the answer.
“The process is irreversible. For Edward Watt the company has become God. I’m sorry.”
I grabbed my buddy off his feet and shook him vigorously.
“Don’t act a hero. Fuck everybody – you’re the tough guy!”
He didn’t react. Something made a knock behind me. It was a stamp that the uncle made on the paper, which he was now signing. He stood upright and slowly read it out.
“On behalf of the Revolutionary Committee, citizen Edward Watt is hereby sentenced to death for treason. The verdict is to be executed immediately.” And that was it. Absolute silence fell but was soon broken by a squeal. The officer looked at the side panel. “What moron decided that verdicts are supposed to be printed on real paper? Where am I supposed to find a ream now?”
Ed accepted the verdict calmly. I didn’t recognize him. A guy who was afraid of everything was acting like a hero in a flophouse performance at a moment like that.
“I have my last request,” he said.
“I don’t know if I can make it possible,” the officer remarked. “Our means are limited.”
“This one should not be a problem.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like Pavel to carry out the execution.” What he said hit me like a thunderbolt. Ed turned to me saying, “Let’s see if you’re brave enough to get your hands dirty.”
“I don’t see why not,” the officer decided.
Ed didn’t resist when the guards grabbed him by the arms. We went to a bathroom which had been adapted for execution purposes. The tiles had been covered with mattresses so that nobody got injured unnecessarily. Pools of blood were flushed down a drain in the floor. There was characteristic sweet smell in the air.
My buddy stood against the wall. He refused to wear a blindfold. He turned our way to face us. The executioner handed me a loaded gun.
“It’s full.”
I stood in front of Ed. We looked each other straight in the eye.
“If you do it, there’s no going back,” Ingrid said waiting for my decision. She was standing next to me in her long black dress.
I remembered the massacred bodies of Viera and Nadia Guzenko. They were black and burned to the bone. I raised the gun to his head.
“Pavel,” he said quietly, “if you win, take care of my sisters, promise?”
I answered with his favorite school motto.
“We have a deal. And this is just business.”
Chapter XVIII
The Second Planet of the System of Hades.
The terrain of the shooting range of the Eighth Battalion was being ploughed through by a series of mortar explosions. Hundreds of shrapnels were flying around in search of human meat. They reached their targets here and there, spearing through the bodies of the hiding soldiers.
“Heads low, motherfuckers!” screamed Sergeant Major Andy Gall, crouching in his personal trench.
A metal shard hit the side of the armor on his shoulder and ricocheted with a loud whiz. Gall squatted in an embryonic position, awaiting another series of bullets. But they didn’t come.
“Get ready to fight off the enemy.” The soldiers who remained alive heard in their headsets the voice of Captain Nemov, their current commander.
“Have you heard the Captain? Check your equipment.” Gall removed the magazine, tapped it a few times against his helmet to get rid of sand and pushed it in again. “To your positions!”
He crawled out of his hole and looked over the edge of the trench. As soon as he did that the sand jumped up a yard away from his position. He ducked back. He had already managed to spot the figures of the attackers running from behind the tree line. They were treading over the bodies of the comrades who had fallen in earlier attacks.
“Attention! Now!” The defenders pointed the barrels of their guns towards the runners and welcomed them with a steel curtain.
Andy targeted the figure that was issuing commands. He adjusted his sights and gently, almost tenderly, pressed the trigger. The victim grabbed his throat, the only place not protected by the armor. Others, even though they had been hit, didn’t give up, trying to cross the unimpressive and provisional defense line no matter what. Once again they were unsuccessful. They kept falling like mowed grass. The attack subsided.
Andy Gall turned around to assess the situation on the opposite ridge, which formed a quadrangle around the shooting range. Before his very eyes an attacker ran between the positions until he reached a lone-standing shed, which served as a medical station. The injured stretched out their arms to stop the desperate man, but in vain. A ball of fire blew up the corrugated iron and threw it into the air.
Another suicide man was stopped outside the rampart. The explosion overturned his escort, who was then finished off by the defenders.
The defense line was broken in yet another place, at a gate which had been provisionally blocked with an old lorry. The attacker crawled between the wheels and blew fire from a launcher. A whole section of the rampart was suddenly ablaze. A dozen figures jumped out, frantically trying to save it. The only soldier who ran in front of them with an extinguisher got shot by another enemy, who had found shelter behind one of the wheels of the lorry, from which he fired a whole magazine into the backs of the soldiers.
In response the cannon of their only LAV sounded. The vehicle stood in the middle of the area that was being defended. It was their command post, their ammunition storage, and their last resort. The fragmentation grenade blew away the light lorry, together with its shooter and fireman. And that was the end of the fourth attack launched over the last couple of hours.
“We beat them real bad, didn’t we, Sergeant?” Andy heard a private lying next to him ask. The boy raised his head and was watching the foreground.
“Lower your head, idiot,” he said, but it was too late. A bullet crashed the visor of the man’s helmet and together with the white mass flew through his head. A delayed echo of a shot came from the top of a hill on which the roof of an administration building was burning.
“Everybody hide! We have a sniper to look out for!” he sent his order through the general channel.
The soldiers obediently hid in their ditches.
“Andy?” Stevens, the First Sergeant of Company B, could be heard over the command channel.
“What is it, Mark?”
“I guess their last attack was conducted with all their remaining strength. They didn’t do very well.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Isn’t there anything you could do with that fucking sniper? We’re all sitting ducks for him. I’ve already lost a dozen people to him. There’s nowhere we can hide.”
It was true that Company B was situated on top of a rampart open to gunfire from a remote hill. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any shooters with skills equaling those of the enemy. A frontal attack would end up in slaughter. The enemy had already fired a lot of ammo into the terrain and, more and more confident in his impunity, didn’t plan to change the perfect position.
