Polar Shift
The howl, a good half-minute long, caught Kit unprepared. He was leaning over the still lukewarm body of a dead woolly rhino calf, when the low wailing reached its crescendo.
It came from the east, spilling out of the snow-covered canyon lined with rusty mining equipment. The crooked skeletons of excavators, cranes, and hulking dump trucks were visible through the approaching whiteout, like the dead ancestors of Kit’s own polar exploration vehicle. Nicknamed the Lunohod (‘moon rover’), that demilitarized tundra crawler on 8X8 monster truck chassis, was trusted to Kit by his boss back in Norilsk.
“DIRE WOLVES,” a voice in Kit’s head murmured in English. “I TOLD THEM THE SMART BASTARDS WOULD GET OUT OF THE PLEISTO PARK.”
Kit himself didn’t speak English, but he didn’t need to. The foreign thoughts of his client, transmitted as a binary mash by a low-orbit satellite, reassembled themselves into a cocktail of meaning and emotion. The New Zealander on the other end felt mad and validated. And low-key worried for Kit.
“No wolves. That’s just the blizzard whistling. Open pits sing in the wind like that,” Kit mumbled into his scarf in Russian, while fixing a cargo hook to the tarp holding the calf. The comset crowning Kit’s bald scalp under his ski hat did the translation to the same universal language of grumpy middle-aged men.
“-better wrap up with this little piglet and head homeward-” Kit added mutely. The thought of a ‘piglet’ wasn’t precise, but he trusted Dominic to know he meant the calf.
“FOLLOW THE HERD, MAYBE. IF THE CALF IS SICK WITH PITHOVIRUS THEY MUST HAVE SOME SICK ELDERS. WE NEED ANOTHER SPECIMEN TO BE SURE. BEWARE THE WOLVES.” The New Zealander’s remote thought projection was getting choppy. Either the magnetism messing with the satellite signal or Dominic being Dominic again and going full ADHD.
“The blizzard’s coming. Lots of diesel to burn chasing after the herd,” Kit spoke. He traced the furrow left in the snow by the passing de-extincted mammals. Making sure Dominic saw it through his goggled eyes, too.
“YEAH, NAH. THE DIESEL, JUST EXPENSE IT TO ME. I WILL TALK TO MY BIG CHEESE.” Dominic’s thoughts were getting less coherent. The mere mention of his boss, ‘the Big Cheese’ from the World Health Organization, had a panic-inducing effect on the Kiwi researcher. “SHE SAYS PITHOVIRUS INVESTIGATION IS PRIORITY ONE FOR THE HEALTHIES. PICK YOUR CRYPTO, AND THEY’LL PAY UP.”
“Crypto-shripto…” Kit grinned. He still had to sit down with Nadya and have her set up a cryptowallet for him, around the Russian national firewall. Her generation understood this digital nonsense a lot better.
Inside his slipstream, an alien thought bubble popped. That was Dominic smiling to the unspoken nuance of Kit’s family dynamic.
“Fine, I’ll do it, bratan. Just for you!”
“CHUR, BRO. MANY THANKS.”
Kit slogged his way back to the polar crawler’s cargo compartment ramp. Near it, he found the Lunohod’s remote: a heavy-duty Chinese tablet insulated by Kit’s daughter in decorative tufts. The man took off his sheepskin mittens and drag-and-dropped a few commands into an executive sequence.
The vehicle spewed out a black cloud of smoke and shivered. The cable bobbin came to life inside the Lunohod’s underbelly, dragging the calf across the snow. As the half-ton corpse of a genetically modified rhino passed by him, Kit reached to fix the unraveling tarp.
“HANDS OFF, BRO!” rang out inside Kit’s head. A foreign force even reflexively pulled on his wrist, like a spasm.
“-what now-” Kit didn’t verbalize.
“WE’RE HUNTING A PREHISTORIC VIRUS HERE, AND YOU’RE ABOUT TO TOUCH A DEAD BODY. WANNA CARK IT, REALLY?”
“-i am not a rhino though-” Kit breathed at his freezing hand and put the mitten back on.
“MY FRIEND, IF THE HEALTHIES ARE RIGHT, THIS THING IS WHAT CREATED THE BLIGHTS.”
Arguing was pointless. To Kit, the Blights were just some globalist (or antiglobalist?) plot to isolate Russia – or China? – or America? – from the rest of the world. He’d seen lockdowns and travel restrictions before, for lesser pandemics than this one. Himself, Kit didn’t follow politics and had no opinion of scientists – except Dominic, a solid fellow.
“AWWE. THANK YOU, MATE.” Dominic must’ve been following Kit’s internal monologue.
“Alright. Let’s get you a second piglet, bratan.” Kit chuckled and fixed another hook over the tarp, so that the calf could make its way up the ramp without rolling. “Just don’t drag it too long. I have to be back in Norilsk by Friday.”
“WEEKEND PLANS WITH YOUR LITTLE MISSUS?”
“-i wish but no-” Kit mutely watched the beam of light getting squeezed by the closing ramp door. “-on sunday i’m chauffeuring for my own big cheese-”
Kit did his best to curate the emotions slipping through the mindstream. He rushed to the ladder leading to the Lunohod’s catwalk roof.
“YOUR BIG CHEESE? THAT NOZZLE GUY?”
Kit smiled under his scarf.
“-yes him – he’s not as polite your boss-”
He started climbing, the ladder vibrating as the vehicle engine warmed up.
“I BET. WARLORD ECONOMY ISN’T RUN ON THANK YOU’S.” Another smile from Kit. “WHY’D YOU CALL HIM THE NOZZLE?”
“-soplov is his last name – sounds almost like soplo–”
Kit liked that he didn’t need to explain Russian plays on words when hosting Dominic inside his head. The mindstream somehow made sense out of it all without translation: ‘soplo’ meant ‘nozzle’ in Russian, and the New Zealander was obviously laughing.
A gust of wind pulled Kit out of his thoughts, grainy snow prickling his cheeks.
“ALRIGHT, MR. WHALE. WHY ARE WE ON THE TRUCK’S ROOF NOW?” Dominic threw a play on words of his own. ‘Kit’ meant ‘whale’ in Russian, his old army callsign before he deserted and moved to a boomtown in the Far North.
“The rhino trail goes north-east. Still fresh,” Kit spoke. He peeked through the gray mist of the advancing blizzard, the distant hillocks crawling with blue fuzz of the taiga forest to the horizon. “If you’re scared of wolves, we’d meet them there. So, I need my rifle.”
Dominic gave a mental equivalent of a silent nod.
Holding onto the railing, Kit made his way to the transparent cupola of the spotting deck. There, he found an overturned, half-sealed thermos and, next to it, the rifle: a modified Dragunov, loaded with sleep darts big enough to take down a mature de-extincted mammoth. Or a polar bear migrating southward, away from the iceless ocean.
Kit tried to lift the weapon, to no avail. He yanked it again. And again.
“PROBLEM, MATE?”
“-look-” Kit squatted over the gun. The tea had leaked from the large thermos and froze into a proper brown glacier around the Dragunov’s stock and strap.
The wind whistled between the catwalk railing, a distant howl merging with it.
“Bratan, I’m heading home now,” Kit said. “Have to keep the Nozzle happy. Chase your rhinos after.” He took off his ski hat and tapped the wired electrodes hugging his skull like multicolored, coiled snakes. “Brain me out, friend.”
#
Nadya heard the metal door open downstairs, ice grinding on ice like the gnashing of molars. Heavy thumping echoed through the zigzagging staircase. A visitor stomping the snow off their boots.
“Batya returned,” Nadya said to herself.
It wasn’t even a guess. The central heating busted as it was, few people lived in the abandoned high-rise even before the Blight wave combed through Norilsk last fall. Now, Nadya and her dad shared the hulking, brutalist vysotka with a single family of Turkmen refugees. But they were nocturnal, working late shifts in a private smelter.
“Alright, girl. Ask batya the right question, and he’ll let you do it.” She gave her cigarette one last greedy puff, waved the smoke cloud away, and headed back into the apartment, her fuzzy slippers clapping on her heels.
On her way to the kitchen, Nadya gave one heavy kick to the shiny, India-made heat generator. Her dad’s recent loot from the Nozzle’s fizzled-out prospector project. The diesel generator cackled from the hit, shook, and returned to its normal rickety hum. It was the only thing keeping the apartment sweater-warm during winter months.
Nadya sat on a stool by the window, trying to look nonchalant. She had a warm bowl of pelmeni dumplings sitting on the table, waiting for the hungry batya. She touched the bowl. Lukewarm dumplings. Damn, she had to be extra persuasive.
The apartment door yawned.
Nadya made her move.
“Papochka, hear me out! I was pig-butchering this dum-dum from Arizona, and he started talking of his uncle who is a sovereign senator in America, and he loves big-game hunting, and he dreams of hunting some Pleistocene beef, but he can’t travel cross-border because of the lockdowns, so now I’m brainhosting him to a rhino hunt this weekend – can I please borrow your comset!?”
She inhaled.
Kit stood in the hallway, the snow melting on his black shipskin coat like sparkling diamonds. He dropped the green comset hoop on the worn-out ottoman chair, along with the messy braids of trode cords.
“Painkillers?” Nadya asked.
Kit nodded slowly. He took off his hat and rubbed the bridge of his red nose. His bald scalp had pale markings where the comset trodes were attached just a few hours ago, like large sunspots.
Nadya squeezed past him to the tiny bathroom and returned with expired generics. Batya’s head was always killing him after a long hosting. Usually, he did it for Japanese eco-tourists, but those gigs had scheduled breaks, at least.
“Can’t your Australian cut you some slack?”
“A New Zealander.” Kit swept the trodes from the ottoman and crashed onto it. “Water?”
Nadya returned with a glass of freshly melted snow. “Papa. Can I do it?”
Her batya swallowed and tried to kick off one shoe. Nadya kneeled to help him.
“Hosting an American? Not afraid of any trouble with the Nozzle’s goons?”
“He deals with foreigners all the time!”
“Chinese. Those are different.”
Nadya assisted him out of the heavy coat, the belt buckle clinking.
“Batya. It pays so well.” Nadya helped her dad up. “Listen, with how much they promised, we’d be able to leave this shithole for… Brazil, I dunno.”
“Big-game hunting, huh?” On his way to the kitchen, Kit kicked the generator for a good measure. At last, he took a seat at a tiny square of a table, nestled between a fridge and an ancient laptop serving as a TV.
“Pelmeni?” Nadya pushed the bowl to him and put a tea kettle on the stove. She needed to be a good girl for just one last squeeze.
Kit picked up the fork, his chin hanging low over the meal.
“Do you know how to set up a cryptowallet?” he asked.
“Papa, how do you think I do pig-butchering?”
“Dominic asked for a favor. Need to snatch some diesel from the Nozzle. Better replace it before he finds out.”
Nadya ground her teeth and sighed. Kit put a cluster of three stuck dumplings into his mouth and started to slowly chew.
“Batya. Can I use your comset?”
Kit looked his daughter in the eye. She was formidable, like her mat’. No one but Blight could break that woman.
“Fine. Use mom’s. It’s cleaner, newer.”
Nadya jumped in her seat and hugged her dad, dodging the fork with a dumpling impaled on it.
“You’ll need a lift?” Kit asked.
“Yes, papochka. To the winter cottage. I know the deer need culling, too.”
“Sure. Just leave the guns clean. When is the hunt?”
“Sunday.”
Kit stopped the fork, a dumpling half-way into his mouth.
“This Sunday?”
Nadya nodded.
“Can’t. I’m taking the Nozzle whoring around.”
“Batya, listen…”
“His business partner is here. Some warlord ass from Saratov. He’s doing a sauna with girls aboard the Lunohod again.”
The kettle started to whistle.
“Can’t they do some stationary whoring, for a change?”
“Kiddo, it’s his shtick. Good for deal-making.” His appetite back, Kit was now chewing more dumplings than his cheeks could fit. “His nickel business has been slow lately. After those Chinese hucksters from Hezhou—”
The kettle was hysterical now.
“Batya, come on. Just sneak us out in the cargo compartment. We’ll be quiet, unarmed. We’ll jump off near the hunting cabin, it has the barrels.”
Kit stopped chewing. “Us? We?”
“Yes – us, we,” Nadya turned off the stove, as if twisting a chicken’s neck. “This senator has two buddies. I found two other hosts. They have their comsets.”
“Hold the fuck on. Other hosts?”
“Yes, two solid guys—”
“Two guys!? You know what some perverts can do with you while you’re hosting? There’s a bodily override—”
“I know, I know—”
“Nadya, that’s not safe. A girl like you—”
“Batya—”
“They can do all sorts of shameful things with you if—”
“And what. Do you think. I’ve been doing. With mom’s comset this entire time?” She punctuated it with a slap on the table.
Kit dropped the fork into the bowl.
Nadya sat on the stool next to him. Her shoulders felt stiff and her arms heavy.
“Every week. When you go on these expeditions of yours,” she managed. “It pays well. I’ve saved a good stash, in crypto. All diversified.”
Their eyes met.
“Papa. I want this one last gig.” Nadya got up and headed out of the kitchen, hugging herself. “It’s gotta get me out of here. Far, far away.”
She gave one last kick to the shivering generator. “Please, don’t fuck it up.”
#
The river valley, flanked by the taiga forest, was gleaming in the sunlight reflected from the freshly fallen snow. Usually, Kit didn’t like taking the Lunohod offroading on ice, thick as it was mid-winter. But Mr. Soplov insisted on a picturesque route.
That was a good sign: the Saratov warlord the Nozzle was hosting must’ve given him cover from those Chinese party men the boss’d fallen out with. The onboard orgy was promising to be a drunken mess, with lots of surfaces for Kit to clean afterward, but also a free hand for him to enjoy for the rest of the month. More time to work with Dominic or those eco-tourists. Less arms trafficking and shady one-way trips for local journalists.
That wasn’t the biggest thing on Kit’s mind, though. Slouching over the giant steering wheel, he anxiously checked his smartphone, worried he’d see Nadya’s agreed-upon distress signal: a ‘face with tongue’ emoji. Their message chat had nothing since last November.
Sighing, Kit turned to a tablet resting atop the rug-covered dashboard. There, an infrared security camera feed was showing the cargo compartment in its frigid, claustrophobic glory. The woolly rhino calf was still there, wrapped in tarp and frozen solid. In a corner by the trapdoor, three figures in military surplus arctic gear squatted next to a pile of rucksacks.
The smuggled passengers didn’t talk and barely exchanged glances. Kit liked it that way – no flirting with his girl, no stupid energy. One, a middle-aged Azerbaijani, was quietly adjusting the comset trodes under his parka hood. The other one, a war vet with a deadman’s gleam inside his deeply set, tired eyes, was treating his hangover with cheap vodka.
That vet could be trouble, Kit thought. He remembered meeting him and the Azerbaijani in the pale early morning just after paying off the Nozzle’s security guard to let them in. Nadya had been already waiting for them inside the cargo compartment. After a thorough body search for weapons (there were none allowed), the guard waved them aboard. To be extra safe, Kit flatly lied to the two mindstreamers that his daughter had AIDS and a pithovirus, a word he’d only just learned from Dominic.
Kit’s angst got rudely interrupted as the Lunohod’s giant wheel drove over a volcanic rock, a signal that the valley was turning into a shallow creek. If Nadya and her hunting buddies were going to make it up the hill to Kit’s hunting cabin, they had to jump off now.
With a sigh, Kit poked an instruction sequence into the Lunohod’s remote control tablet. The cargo compartment illuminated with a red light of a single neon ‘noodle’ leading to the exit. The trapdoor started sliding open. Kit slowed down the vehicle and zoomed in his security camera. Nadya was tapping her temple, activating the comset through her fuzzy ushanka hat.
#
She always welcomed the moment before the mindstream kicked in. Her shame and anxiety erased, Nadya would seemingly separate with her flesh in a short, but liberating out-of-body experience. Better than the glue she’d inhaled as a teenager to get high.
When she returned to her body, something felt off. The client she was hosting was there as a usual phantom presence, sure. But instead of a vague stream of invasive thoughts, the mindstreaming felt like a pulse of a high-voltage power grid.
The man in front of her – the war vet who’d introduced himself simply as Vova – gave her a mesmerized look, a string of saliva frozen in his beard. In the red gloom of a single neon light, he barked something that sounded like an idle motorcycle engine. Uncannily, Nadya understood his foreign tongue: “Shame. My meatbag’s all hammered.” Or, rather, the person inside her head understood it for her.
“-what language was that?-” she mentally asked her own client.
“CANTONESE. SHUT IT, ONE-OFF,” the foreign voice responded.
This was no Arizona senator. Nadya reached for her smartphone. The pulsation in the back of her mind grew, slowing down her movement and guiding her hands along predetermined paths – away from the pocket where her smartphone sat.
Vova the war vet spit out another phrase in poorly pronounced (but somehow understandable) Cantonese. “Shit, the soldier guy was supposed to be our shooter.” His eyes bewildered, he crushed his plastic vodka bottle, like possessed by a spirit. “Now what?”
Uncle Fazil, the Azerbaijani family man Nadya recruited from a job-search forum, shrugged off his parka. “This one’s good enough for bullet-soaking,” he spoke in a language his lips weren’t used to. Fazil looked at Nadya with horror in his eyes and babbled in his accented Russian, “Who’s in us?”
Nadya tried to reach for his exposed trodes, hoping to tear them off. The same eerie force froze her hand and clenched it in a white-knuckled fist.
“THIS BITCH IS GUNFIGHTING-READY,” the voice inside her head spoke. Immediately, the pulsating force made her repeat it in a tongue she didn’t know, like a puppet moving her tongue and facial muscles. “ONLY HUNTING REFLEXES, BUT SHE’S MALLEABLE. JUST GET HER A GUN, I’LL MICROMANAGE HER.”
Nadya touched her chest in a spooked ‘who – me?’ gesture. And again, the force lowered her hand and stood her at attention.
The men frozen in front of her both nodded and rushed to the second hatch hiding in the cargo section’s darker corner. Nadya knew it led to the tundra crawler’s crew quarters.
When Vova and Fazil, straining their shoulders, unscrewed the frozen hatch lock open, a beam of warm light and a mist of steamy air washed over their pale, mask-like faces. Uncle Fazil had tears on his cheeks, but his burly body moved with angular confidence of a videogame character – up the ladder and into the mist. Vova followed shortly.
Nadya felt that her handler briefly lost his focus. A sequence of images flipped through her subconscious: the same middle-aged Slavic man, under different angles, in different lighting. Smiling, grinning, deadly serious.
That was Mr. Soplov, the Nozzle. With a wave of panic, Nadya realized her rider was memorizing the face of his supposed victim. She was a hitman’s weapon.
Nadya had an opening for a single, quick move. Jump off outside? Or tear off a couple of trodes? Or text that ‘face with tongue’ emoji to her dad?
The pulsating dark matter inside Nadya’s skull came back to fill her like a vessel.
Just before she lost control completely, Nadya managed to find the blinking red light of a security camera in the darkness. Her lips trembled when she stuck out her tongue and squealed.
#
A sunroof-covered greenhouse room separated the Lunohod’s driver’s cabin from the crew quarters. Still clenching the tablet, Kit rushed through the narrow passage between the raised soil beds. Potato plants slapped his waist with their branches as he ran past, the thawed water from ceiling sprinklers spraying Kit’s panicked face.
He stopped by the sealed door to the living quarters. Back at the wheel, when he saw Nadya’s grimace in the security camera – the ‘face with tongue’ he couldn’t shake off, – Kit had no time to think it through. What would he say to Mr. Soplov? “I skirted your rules, and now my daughter is in trouble?”
What sort of trouble, Kit didn’t know himself.
He checked his smartphone again. There were no answers from Nadya after his four panicked messages. The security camera on his tablet showed only the dead woolly rhino.
“Damn Americans!” Kit grit his teeth and knocked on the door. Twice.
The lock clinked, and the door swung open. Standing in the doorway was the Nozzle’s bodyguard Kit had bribed earlier: a wide-shouldered, tall fellow nicknamed Berlin.
“Kit? Whatcha doing here?” Berlin grumbled.
“Listen, bratan. Something’s up with my girl, she—”
Kit didn’t finish, because Berlin rammed his fist into his solar plexus. Weak on his knees and awash in cold sweat, Kit stumbled backward into the greenhouse.
Berlin shook his head and reached to shut the door. Before he did, another voice stopped him. “Hold it. Bring in this bloke.”
Berlin gave Kit one raging look of ‘you ratted us out.’ Still gasping for air, Kit dragged his feet over the threshold and past the fuming Berlin.
The living quarters were taken up by a massive banquet table crawling with delicacies and dotted by towering cathedrals of fancy vodka bottles. The observation room with a panoramic screen on the vehicle’s left side was apparently still locked: the Nozzle didn’t end up using the only part that made their tundra cruise unique. The vehicle’s right side was taken by the sauna, and that’s where the party was at. Through the steaming crack under the sauna door, Kit heard a loud drumbeat of Europop and EBM, along with rhythmic groaning of multiple women.
“What’d ya say about your girl?” said the same voice.
Kit could focus his eyes on the people now. Besides the neatly groomed and suited-up Berlin, there were two other armed men standing around. Both were athletic skinheads, dressed in unbuttoned military fatigues. Their faces and chests gleamed with drunken sweat.
“Berlin?” one of them, the warlord’s apparent bodyguard, said after Kit failed to respond. “Who is he and why have we stopped?” The man had a witch-burning tattooed on his chest.
Before Berlin answered, the observation room door clanked open. A jacketless, stout man rushed into the room, his movement precise like that of a mime. Kit recognized that Azerbaijani family guy, his eyes bulging and his bald head topped with a messy entanglement of comset trodes. One Saratovite bodyguard pulled his handgun and opened fire with no warning. Bullets buried themselves into the possessed man’s stomach, painting his green sweater dark brown. Unfazed by the pain, the Azerbaijani sped up and tackled the bodyguard in one fearless leap.
The man with a witch hunt on his chest rushed to help his partner, but Nadya’s veteran friend barged in next. With an inhuman force, he threw his hiking backpack at the bodyguard, before zigzagging away from a gunshot, picking a steak knife from the table, and repeatedly stabbing the Saratovite between the ribs with the speed of a sewing machine.
When Nadya appeared in the doorway, Berlin trained his pistol at her. Gasping, Kit body-slammed the man just before a gunshot rang out next to his ear. The bullet went ricocheting around the room. A moment later, Kit found himself on the floor, his nose broken – the work of Berlin’s elbow.
Kit started crawling – not sure where to, but away from the massacre. There were more gunshots and screaming behind. He didn’t hear Nadya’s voice, only her heavy, rhythmic breathing.
“Run, kiddo!” he yelled, half-sure she couldn’t even if she wanted to. Behind him, there were more gunshots, cracking of boots on the glass, and Berlin’s long scream. Kit expected to feel a hot sting of a bullet wound any moment, but none came.
When he felt cold water sprayed over his head and back, Kit realized he was in the greenhouse. He picked himself up from the floor and rushed to close the door behind himself. The last thing he saw before slamming it shut was Nadya – alive and slouching over Berlin’s bloodied body, his pistol in her hands.
“Sorry, papa,” she whimpered, her gums bleeding, before pointing the gun at him and shooting twice.
#
Nadya had tears running down her cheeks, even though her handler didn’t let her blink throughout the entire massacre. Now, her eyes itched, her knees and hands trembled, and the adrenalin withdrawal was crushing.
The only good news was her batya’s escape. After her shots missed (not without her self-sabotage), Vova chased ‘the damn driver’ to the steering cabin. By the time the vet broke through the locked door, Nadya’s dad was gone, his jacket discarded and a porthole window open. Vova’s operator decided to focus on the assassination.
“This one’s alive!” standing atop the banquet table, Vova spoke in Cantonese. He jumped down and kicked a camo-wearing bodyguard that Fazil had choked to unconsciousness before bleeding white himself. “Lay flat, purchase time for yourself.” Vova spoke to the bodyguard in awkwardly translated (but perfectly pronounced) Russian. “We have a purpose for you.”
Pinned under Fazil’s body, the security man groaned and threw up.
Rapidly, Vova took away the bodyguards’ firearms. Three pistols and two assault rifles were arranged on the Persian floor carpet soaked in blood. Nadya picked an AK-12 and trained it on the sauna door, her movement economic and precise, all orchestrated by her rider.
“Meatbag Three is negative,” Vova kicked Fazil’s body next. “And mine is expiring fast.” He raised his left arm. His armpit was bleeding, a bright red blot spreading over the white arctic camouflage. Glancing at Vova’s purple, trembling lips, Nadya could only imagine the pain he silently endured and his captors ignored.
Nadya forced herself to swallow, feeling her chipped teeth under her tongue.
“-please – get it over with-” she pleaded to her captor. For some reason, she wanted to imagine her as a woman.
Her rider spoke back to Vova through her lips. “The sauna door is breakable. How do we storm?”
Before Vova replied, a male voice boomed at them from the sauna in Russian. “Do you know who you’re tickling, you dumb peckers!?” The man continued yelling and swearing, now less coherently. At last, he punctuated his statement with a gunshot. Several women screamed inside the sauna. One started to cry.
Nadya could tell it wasn’t the Nozzle, who she’d seen on TV before. The dark matter picked that thought straight from her slipstream.
Her captor made her yell in Russian. “You’re a business partner of Mr. Soplov? The Hezhou Committee has no hostility to you. We only want him.”
She barely finished, when another shot rang out inside the sauna. There was a lot more female screaming this time.
“He won’t be helping you anymore.” This was the Nozzle’s voice this time. “Tell the Committee to shove my nickel up their asses.”
Pale like death, Vova turned to Nadya. “Is the target alone there? Let’s rush him before my meatbag is gone.”
“There’s two guns in the sauna. We’ll need another bullet-soaker.” Nadya replied. The words spoken through her mouth gave her a panic attack.
Vova nodded and started plucking the entangled trodes off of uncle Fazil’s scalp.
“Hey you, bald skull,” he said in Russian to the surviving bodyguard. “Good news. You’re a vessel ready to be filled.”
And he smacked the first red trode sticker to the moaning skinhead’s forehead.
#
Dominic felt under the weather. The wine tasting his wife took him to was in a bayside patio, and by the date’s end he was both tipsy and shivering. Worse yet, on his way home he received a message from Kit to urgently come online and brain into his departed wife’s comset, a passcode attached. That was rude and weird.
Luckily, Jess was a lightweight, so Dom kissed her good night, made himself some Earl Gray and ventured into the basement. There, he donned his WHO-provided mindcasting comset – a sleek transparent helmet decorated with Viking horns – and casually turned on his gaming machine. Dom liked playing city-builders when riding Kit across the Siberian wilderness. Living in a simple man’s mind was not as exciting as commercials would make you believe.
After a longer-than-usual tremor of warm-up signals, something flickered in Dom’s vision, like a descending curtain of a daydream. The comset he was calling was probably a downmarket model, grainier and slower than Kit’s usual piece, not fit for any complex work. Dom was going to ask “Mr. Whale” how his family weekend was going and maybe discuss some invoicing shenanigans. What else could he possibly–
Panting. Feral rage. Freezing cold. Stinging pain in the right hip. Swollen, numb face. And agony of separation – from who?
Kit’s mindstream hit Dominic like a whip. The Kiwi flailed, knocking the tea onto the fuzzy carpet. “BRO, WHAT’S HAPPENING!?”
“-woe – need help-” Kit’s thoughts were militarily snappy and forceful.
Through the Russian’s eyes, Dom saw the sprawling river valley. Kit was in a spotting booth atop his tundra crawler, a tuft-covered tablet in one hand and something scorching hot in another.
“-my girl needs help – they’re riding her to death-”
“WHO RIDES WHO?” Dominic was so agitated, he was mumbling his projected thoughts out loud. Upstairs, Jess complained in her sleep.
The hot object in Kit’s hand was a large Styrofoam cup of ramen, the broth dripping over the man’s red hands. The Russian leaned over the Dragunov rifle he’d left in the spotting booth on Friday, encased in ice. His fingers shaking, Kit poured the broth, along with the hot noodles, over that mini-glacier. He kicked the melting icicle twice, before finally cracking the ice and yanking the rifle free.
“WHAT DO YOU NEED FROM ME, BRO?” Dom’s socks were now wet from the tea, but he stayed in his seat, gripping the elbow rests.
“-before i escaped i sent you a link – a tunnel for the lunohod’s controllers-” Kit was now filling the large front pocket of his bib pants with sleep darts. “-nadya set it up for me – i didn’t think i’d ever need it – login and password is my nickname-”
Dom pulled out of the mindstream, rubbed his sweating face, and quickly checked the messenger on his computer. A click on the link opened a remote desktop. The same interface Dom usually saw on Kit’s tablet was now taking up his PC screen. All buttons had Russian words spelled in Latin characters.
Dom slapped his comset back on. “YOU WANT ME TO CONTROL THE CRAWLER FOR YOU?”
“-override the interior settings – be my guardian angel dominic-” Kit had one sleep dart cracked open. “-and i’ll try to be one for nadya-”
The Russian carefully emptied most of the tranquilizer capsule, before fixing it closed and placing the special dart in a side pocket.
#
From all the hunting trips with batya, Nadya was used to staying still, her scoped rifle tracing the wild game. But her current task – of holding the sauna door at gunpoint against a breakout by the survivors – was making her neck shake from tension. She had already wetted her pants twice.
Vova’s handler still worked on hosting the third rider inside the skinhead bodyguard, when the crawler started acting up. The light in the living quarters changed the ambiance to soft green. The central heating abruptly switched for a chill breeze, before dying off completely. As the sauna cooled, its door got covered in condensation.
At last, the skinhead stopped moaning and got up with the same robotic precision that uncle Fazil had earlier. His left eye was completely covered by a massive swelling, and an ear was missing, painting a hemisphere of messy trodework brown-red.
Tattoos dancing on his muscular back, the new puppet approached the sauna door with a crowbar, a handgun behind his belt. Nadya and Vova both took positions at both sides of the door, assault rifles at the ready. Nadya felt her lips purse against her will – the rider muffling all the noise.
The breach started with no warning, no tactical gestures. Their Cantonese handlers must’ve been coordinating offline between themselves. With a heave, the skinhead discharged several pistol rounds at the lock, before dropping the gun and violently prying the door open with the crowbar. Over his head, Vova lifted his AK-12 and fired several rounds into the gap.
A woman cried out inside in a short, broken kind of way. Then came the returning fire, two pistol shots grating the door and plopping into the skinhead’s torso. Still, the crowbar kept on working, the man’s muscular shoulders gleaming with sweat.
Suddenly, the ambient lighting went out completely. Inside the sauna, shower water started running from all showerheads at once. Boiling hot, if Nadya could guess by the Nozzle’s scream and by how quickly the door gap started steaming again.
The gunfire stopped, both sides blinded.
The silence didn’t last. Ukrainian techno started playing from the central speakers. Nothing could surprise Nadya anymore.
The skinhead was gargling blood with every heaving breath, the arterial blood, black in the semi-darkness, gushing rhythmically from each entry wound. He leaned backward like a boxer in a knockdown, about to pass out from a shock, but the devil riding him whipped his limbs into one last rush of power.
At last, the door lock banged loose. The skinhead tried to push the door open, but some heavy, soft object blocked its way. “The dead mobster!” the skinhead yelled in Cantonese, before choking on his own blood.
Something metallic clanged out in the observation room, but Nadya’s rider didn’t let her check her peripherals.
Before the bullet-soaker collapsed, Vova yanked him away from the door by his comset trodes. “Quicksilver!” Vova’s rider commanded.
Nadya didn’t know what that meant – but her handler did. Her limbs came into action. She dropped her assault rifle. As Vova kept firing into the gap, she pushed the door ever so open, before squeezing through into the sauna, only a handgun with her.
In a flash of Vova’s gunfire, she briefly saw a barrel-chested, middle-aged man standing in the sweatroom’s entrance, his human shield a skinny woman with a witch-hunt tattoo on her sternum. The man aimed his pistol at Nadya and pulled the trigger, the longest short moment in Nadya’s life.
Before the barrel flash blinded her, a sudden tremor yanked the floor from under their feet. The missing bullets ricocheting, the entire crawler violently jerked forward. There were sounds of crashing furniture everywhere. Screaming – of Soplov and that pleasure woman he held. And two brief, loud bangs of a different gun in the banquet room. Batya’s Dragunov.
Nadya found herself on the chopped tile floor, the hot water with a metallic smell of blood washing over her face. As the Lunohod stopped, the limp body of the Saratovite warlord bumped into her, sliding in the puddle.
For a second, no commands came. Her rider was lost, more than her. While he waited, Nadya fired her gun blindly at the steamroom entrance and dashed to the cover of the shattered, chipped Jacuzzi hot tub, the water leaking through the cracks.
Still surrounded by darkness, Nadya heard rushed, wet steps on the tile floor. The Nozzle was dashing for the exit. This awakened her rider. Her shaking hands clutched the gun and aimed at the moving sound source.
Suddenly, the lights came online, a throbbing nightclub sequence of pink, blue, and bright green.
In the doorway, stood her dad, reloading his Dragunov. At his feet, Vova was convulsing atop the skinhead’s still body. Two large, megafauna sleep darts stuck out of Vova’s camouflaged back like blooming flowers over the white snow.
The Nozzle dropped the pistol and froze just before batya, thinking him another remote assassin.
Batya kicked Soplov in his beer belly, sending him flying away from the doorway. Nadya fired twice, only grazing the lucky Nozzle.
She felt the fountain of rage deep inside – not her own, but her handler’s. The inner force picked her off the floor and sent her limping for the banquet room. Her winter hunting gear was soaked and heavy, and she felt several trode stickers coming off under her wet ushanka hat. Nadya’s face felt free of the rider’s control.
Still, the force kept her slogging after the escaping warlord. But first, her rider wanted to shoot her dad. As she pointed her pistol at batya across the room, Nadya closed her eyes – and refused to open them. The force still squeezed the trigger, but the gunshots just ricocheted off the metal walls.
“Go snack on some crushed glass, you sucker!” she screamed. “You hear, you fucking imp inside me!?”
Batya’s Dragunov popped again, and something stabbed her thigh. Still, Nadya refused to open her eyes.
“PEEL IT! NOW!” The force inside her mind felt like a rabid dog gnawing on its cage.
“Do your dirty job yourself, you maggot!” she couldn’t stop screaming. Maybe, now she’d never stop.
“FINE. TUCKING LOOSE ENDS NOW,” the voice said. “STUBBORN BITCH. WE ALMOST GOT HIM!”
With it, her arm, still obedient to her rider, lifted the handgun to her temple. Wincing, crying, Nadya didn’t budge and kept her eyes closed. “Papa, I lov—”
She didn’t finish. Her dad tackled her to the ground just before she pulled the trigger. Stunned and gasping for air, Nadya’s body kept struggling against batya’s steel grip, pushing his hands away from the remaining trodework, poking the gun blindly and firing, firing, firing.
The techno music stopped playing. Nadya felt batya’s chapped lips on her forehead. She realized her body had been feeling pleasantly numb for the past few seconds.
Before she fell asleep, Nadya heard her dad sing her a lullaby. Or was he singing in English?
#
Dominic’s fingers were shaking, and his jaw hurt.
He looked at Kit’s daughter through her dad’s eyes. He felt his calloused fingers brushing her bloodied, wet hair. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but in Kit’s eyes, she might as well be Princess Diana herself.
When Kit asked Dom to help him with an appropriate song, Dom panicked and started belting Imagine by John Lennon. Jess swore upstairs.
Back on the crawler’s roof, he’d thought even the reduced dosage would kill Nadya. But now, with the girl breathing healthily in her dad’s arms, Dom sensed a happy ending. He was teary-eyed. The damn Russian wrestled with it for a second, but eventually Kit, too, started sobbing.
When the dad’s crying turned ugly, Dominic gave him some privacy and tapped out of the comset.
His temples were still throbbing with the brainwave aftersignal. Dom was about to go outside – mostly just to scream at the moon like a madman, but also to go get utterly wasted – when he remembered about one bit of unfinished business.
He quickly scanned through his crawler controls. His desktop was a chessboard of multiple screens and dashboards by now, the entire Lunohod mapped out in a two-dimensional mess.
“Where’s our Mr. Nozzle?” Dom mumbled.
He turned on the lights across all compartments. Set the AC to a comfortable twenty four degrees. Stopped the shower water. Unlike his first, awkward attempts to tame the beast, this pass was almost effortless.
At last, Dom decided to check the cargo compartment.
There, in the red light of a single neon lamp, something was steaming under the tarp covering the dead calf. Dom turned on the normal lighting and muttered, “wakie-wakie” into the microphone.
And there he was. Mr. Nozzle himself, climbing from his hideout, butt-naked and shivering.
With a grin, Dominic plugged himself back into Kit’s slipstream.
“MY FRIEND. NEVER MIND OUR PITHOVIRUS MISSION,” he projected into the Russian. “WE HAVE A PERFECT TEST SUBJECT NOW.”
On the cargo compartment screen, the burly man was dancing to warm up now. He still had a strand of the woolly rhino hair stuck to his back.
“I’M CALLING MY BIG CHEESE ABOUT SOPLOV’S EXTRACTION.” Dominic looked at Nadya drooling into her dad’s sweater and added, “AND I’LL MAKE SURE THE EXTRACTORS SAVE TWO EMPTY SEATS FOR YOU. NIGHT NIGHT.”
Born and raised in Eastern Siberia, Oleg started his writing quest when he came to the US to study fiction writing under the founder of the Story Workshop method John Schultz in Columbia College Chicago. Since then, he has won the Writers of the Future award with his science fiction story Long Jump, as well as had several publications of his literary and historical short pieces. His story themes tend to explore the overlap of technology and human condition in extreme social settings, which allows him to reflect on his own youth in the 1990s Russia.
When he doesn’t write, Oleg runs corporate as a technologist. He’s married and has two daughters. Find him at Chicago-based SF conventions (Capricon and Windycon) if you want to say hi.