“Davai, davai, davai, davai,” I muttered, sweltering under my balaclava. I was in a hotel suite, and the source of my discomfort was a heater more luxurious than anything I’d ever seen, belching hot air right beside me.
In the darkened room, I was cooking like bacon.
Power outages were nothing new in Moscow. It was the snow—power lines would give under the weight of it and snap.
Kind of like life sometimes, I thought. Or work.
But this wasn’t that sort of time. This was their job, and mine.
I wanted to reach through the eye holes of my balaclava and scratch my cheeks, but I suppressed the urge.
At the same time, I had the feeling risking it would be wasted effort. But then again, being wasteful was a luxury. And luxury brought peace of mind.
There was someone standing smack in the middle of the room, and someone else crouched by the heater. I didn’t know how the thermal imaging from the PNV could make them out, but it could.
This sure beat doing nothing, though. My life was practically made from an accumulation of useless gestures.
—At least, it has been until now.
All I could do was, well, what I could. As usual, it didn’t really get me anywhere.
“…Tsk.”
I heard seven sets of footsteps. Didn’t like that number. There was bad luck, and then there was bad luck.
Seven was the standard squad size of a group of commandos—any Janitor knew that. A fifteen-year-old shitkicker might not have been aware of it, but twenty-four-year-old Danila Kragin knew.
I heard five sets of heavy footsteps, two others light. Not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but the situation could have been worse. Nice of them to include a couple of meatbags instead of making the entire squad mechanized. So there was still room for this to go further south.
At length, the footsteps came to a halt directly in front of the door. I sucked in a breath and kept my finger tense on the trigger. I was holding an old submachine gun—a weapon I was very used to. I kept the muzzle aimed directly at the doorway.
The doorknob clacked. Davai. No ambush in here, boys.
The hinges gave slightly. The door opened. There was the tiniest slit. I saw white body armor peek through, and a helmet that looked like a skull.
“Sobaka! I told you it’d be spetsnaz!”
I squeezed the trigger and sprayed bullets like water from a hose.
Kill, PPSh! Kill! Kill! Kill them dead enough that they can’t stick around to resent me for it.
“Ghhk?!”
“Argh!”
Sparks and screams flew through the darkness. I saw lubricating oil erupt from the body armor of someone on our side. And I saw a metal egg roll from his hand with a sharp hiss.
“Janitors!”
“Bliad’ <Fuck>!” I cursed despite not having the time for it, then started running so fast I almost tumbled. Toward the window, of course.
“Idti, idti, idti!”
✦ ✦ ✦
There was a tremendous noise from behind me, accompanied by a gout of flame. The Abakan spat heavy metal like it was going out of style. It was a beast of a gun whose recoil would have torn off the arms of any pure organic who tried to fire it, but cyborgs were a different story.
While the weapon reduced the gorgeous furnishings and lovely heater to splinters, much more the sort of scenery to which I was accustomed, I kicked through the window. It was easy—I hadn’t been stupid enough to lock it.
“See you in hell, comrades!” I shouted, and an instant later, the RGD-5 grenade that had gone rolling along the thick carpet exploded. I leaped into the Moscow night.
The air was sharp and cold enough to cut. It was even worse wearing hole-riddled body armor.
—I’ll have to get this thing fixed.
It would be tough asking Stasia to do that, though. Frankly, an angry Stasia was scarier than any spetsnaz squad.