When she was really angry, Stasia was scarier than the spetsnaz.
Meaning the spetsnaz was about as frightening as Stasia when she was pouting—things were, you know, not ideal, but there was room to work, here.
“You assholes! What do you think you’re doing? They’re organics!” I could hear the squadron leader yelling at the top of his lungs as the muzzle of a gun poked out the window and sprayed fire into the falling snow. The voice was oddly high-pitched, and he was unusually small. He looked like a kid. A kid in body armor.
The spetsnaz with him seemed like folks who were being straitjacketed by professional ethics.
“It’s a 7.62 mm Tokarev round, Ensign Shest Rusalka.”
“‘Ensign’ will do fine, thank you.”
The voice sounded annoyed. This was clearly someone not enamored of their own name.
“A PPSh… That’s an outdated weapon,” the voice went on. “How many shot? How many killed?”
“Four shot. None killed. One immobile.”
“His circulatory system was done in. No danger of brain wave cessation, but he’s in no shape to continue the mission.”
“Damn Organ hired a halfway decent Janitor, I see.”
—Halfway decent but completely replaceable.
The order to follow them immediately went out. Then there were pounding footsteps, and I sighed.
I was clinging to the heating pipes outside the window, trying to listen as closely as I could. At times like this, that lot tended to assume their target had jumped straight down, and thus sprayed the area with bullets. A matter of seconds—a few or a few dozen—could be the difference between life and death. Like now, for example.
My opponents were down to two meatbags and only four cyborgs. Yippee! This was practically easy now.
—Yeah, right! I’m not Captain Ilya Murometz!
Spetsnaz: GRU’s secret weapon, the twin to the KGB’s Alpha unit. Each cell had seven people. I sort of assumed they had thrown the fewest number of personnel into this that they could—either it meant that this squad was strong enough to do the job, or they were letting us off with no worse than this.
Regardless, we were in a fight against time now.
I slid my hands along the pipes, working my way down to the first floor. The place was buzzing on account of the explosion, but there was no sign of the militsiya. Spetsnaz was keeping them away, I suspected. For once, I was grateful to them.
“Comrade Kragin, you’re all right!”
“Oh, hey. You’re alive.”
When I got to the parking lot, still holding my empty PPSh, I found Commissioner Tachibana huddled as small as she could make herself. Well, that was good news, at least. It meant I wouldn’t be working for free tonight.
Relieved, I kept her close to me as I gave the ZiL limousine a once-over.
“……Tsk,” I grunted. It wasn’t that anything was specifically wrong. But still, this was no good. The whole thing just felt dangerous.
When I glanced under the car, something seemed the tiniest bit off. Maybe it was just the snow that had accumulated while we were driving. Maybe it was a bomb. No way to know.
And I wasn’t interested in staking my life on something unverifiable.
“’Scuse me,” I said, and without a second thought, I raised my gun and smashed the window of the nearest car with the butt of it.
“Eek!” Miss Tachibana exclaimed.
“This is when you want a Lada Niva,” I said. They were everywhere, they were as easy to repair as they were to break, and they ran well. They were a treasure.
I reached through the broken window and undid the lock, then opened the door and slid inside. I gave the ignition lock cylinder a taste of my gun, then pulled off the cover and dragged out some cables. If I got these things connected the right way… There. We were up and running.
“Okay. All aboard, Commissioner. If you’d be so kind as to drive?”
“This is highly illegal,” she said, but she got in the driver’s seat.
I slid over into the passenger’s spot and changed the magazine on my PPSh. “That’s why you get someone whose existence you can deny,” I said.
“If and when the time comes, I’m going to say this was all your doing,” Miss Tachibana said, but then she chuckled. Soon the Lada Niva was on its way.
I guess being pulled over by the militsiya was leagues better than being a Janitor going toe-to-toe with the spetsnaz.
Which is to say, it wasn’t bad at all.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I can’t believe this,” I groaned. You wouldn’t, either, if you looked in the rearview mirror and saw something that looked like a misshapen monster.
“Is something wrong?!” Miss Tachibana said.
“Don’t think about it. Keep driving!”
I looked back again, hoping it had been a trick of the eye.
—Bad freakin’ news.
It was there. I heard an engine that sounded unsettlingly eager, and a bizarre vehicle came rocketing down the road toward us.
It was like an armored monster, or like they’d made a cyborg out of an oversize shrimp or crab. Spetsnaz’s Horseshoe Crab. Supposedly, the KGB had introduced them, but rumor had it that GRU was using them, too—and it looked like the rumors were true.
I could have lived without knowing that.
“I don’t suppose they just happen to be out on separate business…”
You could hope and wish for deus ex machina like that, but it was obvious our backs were to the wall. Nichego ne podelayesh’.
I decided to do something I knew was utterly hopeless: I stuck my arm out the window and opened fire on them with my PPSh.
My Tokarev bullets hit the bulletproof windshield and bounced off like snowballs. Cracks spidered through the dark glass, but it was clear nothing had gone through.
“Vot tak!” I shouted. Almost before the words were out of my mouth, a firing port popped out, and an Abakan returned fire.
A storm of heavy metal came at me. I wanted to know which jackass had officially hired someone or something with two machine guns stuck to it!
“Turn!” I yelled.
“Which way?!”
“I don’t care!”
The Lada Niva was being torn up like a piece of paper.
Miss Tachibana wrenched the steering wheel, lanes and traffic lights be damned. Nuzhda zakona ne znaiet. Necessity was the mother of not giving a shit about the law. Anyway, Moscow’s streets, as I said, had never seen a traffic jam.
With a screech of metal, the car turned down an alleyway. It was too much to hope that the others wouldn’t be able to follow us just because the space was a little tight. Because the glorious motherland had seen fit to design Moscow’s streets in such an organized, logical manner, it was easy to circle around and cut someone off.
There wasn’t much to be said for my PPSh’s smoke screen, either— although it had bought us a few seconds, so it was still worth it.
I couldn’t help noting, though, that they came after us without the slightest hesitation. Maybe it was a matter of fighting spirit?
“Can’t believe they can even see with the windshield all shot up!” I groused.
“They have cameras all over that thing!” Miss Tachibana called back.
“You need to cut Aquarium’s budget a little more!”
Whoever it was ages ago who said big folks were slow folks was a complete moron who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. You got a massive car? Just put a massive engine in it, and it’ll go plenty fast.
Our Lada Niva was huffing and puffing, and the Horseshoe Crab was catching up.
It was so noisy inside the car that I wished I could put my hands over my ears; I could hardly string two thoughts together. Was that more bullets bouncing off the chassis, or was it the cracked, battered asphalt under the wheels? No way to know.
“Wag the tail and let’s shake these guys!”
“You mean, like, swerve?!”
“Maybe?! Sounds good to me! Just do it!”
We avoided the red fang of one of the heavy metal bullets by a hair’s breadth—and by “avoided,” I mean it didn’t hit either of us. That was a product of the way the rear of the car was swinging back and forth, but of course, doing that cost us speed. And the other guys were awfully fast. This didn’t look good.
There was no point lighting them up with my PPSh. Any minute now, they were going to be on us, and then they were going to skin me and eat me alive.
Wide eyes are fearsome. That’s why you get scared. The ones who get scared and run where they think there’s an escape get chased down and die.
But then again, if you run somewhere there’s no escape, well, you get cornered…and die.
“‘If you call yourself a mushroom, get in the basket,’ huh?”
Once you decide to do something, fucking do it. So fucking do it, Danila Kragin.
I shouted: “Keep going! Straight ahead!”
“What?” cried Miss Tachibana, who was clinging to the wheel for dear life. “What?!”
“Just do it! No one in our glorious motherland works overtime!”
Miss Tachibana was about to say something, but you have to keep your eyes ahead when you drive. Not to mention, there was no time for it.
The Lada Niva, looking like a piece of raw meat, plowed into the supermarket.