Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

Baron Lukoil-Gazprom chose that moment to enter the parlor. He glanced at the dead body, but made no comment on it. “We’ve got thirty-nine enlisted men. Plus one we nabbed on his way in. He’s drunk, of course, but a little action will sober him up fast enough.”

“It’s a start. Form them up into four squads. We can use them to raid the other whorehouses.”

Zoesophia cleared her throat. “Provided the baron agrees, of course.”

“Protocol be damned! It’s the only sensible thing to do, and the faster it’s done the better.”

The smallest of smiles blossomed on the baron’s face. It was clear that he found the notion of the two women coming close to blows amusing. But, “Good advice is good advice,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

“It wasn’t-” the general began, exasperated.

A messenger entered the room. He stopped in astonishment at the sight of the half-dressed trollops, pulled himself together, and saluted. “Ma’am. Sir. You ordered the Arsenal to send a wagonload of klashnys, along with bayonets and ammunition? It’s just arrived out front.”

“That’s just wonderful. We’ve got guns when we need soldiers.”

Yet another messenger ran into the room and saluted. “Ma’am. There’s a force of hundreds of civilians coming up Bolshaya Yakimanka. They have banners and they’re singing.”

The general spat on the floor.

“If I may make a suggestion…” Zoesophia murmured, flicking a glance at the prostitutes and hoping the baron would catch her meaning before the general could.

However, it was General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka who caught her thought on the fly and, turning to the brothel keeper, asked, “Are all your harlots as strong as the one who attacked me?”

“For tonight, I am afraid so,” the madam said apologetically. “It is this new drug, you see. It-”

“Never mind that! Your girls are under my command now. If I cannot have my soldiers, I’ll have the next best thing.”

“How many of them are there?” The baron’s mouth moved as he counted silently. “Plus the two who are disposing of the corpse. I’ll have bayonets fixed on enough klashnys for the lot of them. No ammunition, however, I should think.”

“No, of course not,” the general snapped.

Zoesophia looked thoughtfully after the baron as he went out into the street. He had not noticed that General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka had established her ascendancy over him. Which made him the only person in the room who hadn’t.

Once he was free of the drug-saturated confines of the City Below, the cold night air cleared Darger’s head wonderfully. But clarity of thought did not make him any the happier. Quite the opposite, in fact, for the seriousness of the rebuilt-cyberwolf ’s threat came home to him with full and terrifying force.

Quickly, he ran a mental thumb down the particulars of his situation. A creature that was the stuff of nightmares, yet undeniably real for all that, had promised him torture and slow death sometime in the very near future. Meanwhile, he was helplessly strapped down on an apparatus from which he, not being an escape artist, could not hope to free himself. Further, a genetic chimera engineered for strength and (to judge by appearances) controlled savagery was his own personal prison guard. Those were the negatives. Against all of which, he had no weapons, allies, or special abilities other than his own native wit.

Luckily, that would suffice.

Step one would be to get some sense of Sergeant Wojtek’s character.

“Sergeant, I fear that my wallet, being overstuffed with banknotes, is digging into my hip. I wonder if you could possibly-”

Sergeant Wojtek looked down at Darger with enormous scorn. “You don’t know much about the Royal Guard if you think that one of us can be so easily bribed as that.”

“Well, indeed, I am a foreigner and thus woefully ignorant of many important matters. Still, my situation is horribly uncomfortable. Couldn’t you let me up? I can give you my word as a gentleman that I will not attempt to escape.”

“So you can. But does that mean you’ll keep it? No, I think that, if you don’t mind, I’ll simply obey the orders I was given.”

“Your logic is impeccable,” Darger said. “And yet, this position remains most damnably painful.”

With a sigh, Sergeant Wojtek upended the gurney, folded its legs shut, and then leaned it against a nearby wall so that Darger was upright. “There. Is that better?”

Surprisingly, it was. In addition to doing much to restore his circulation, simply being upright again, after so long a time on his back, filled Darger with hope. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He mentally counted to twenty and then said, “Do you play chess?”

Sergeant Wojtek stared at him. “What kind of a question is that? I’m a Russian.”

“Then I’ll start. Pawn to d4.”

After a moment’s astonished silence, Sergeant Wojtek relaxed slightly and said, “Knight to f6.”

Which was, if not a beginning, at least an opening.

By the time the game was played through, Darger and the sergeant were, if not chums, at least on an amicable footing. “Well played, Sergeant Wojtek,” Darger said.

“You’d have had me, if it hadn’t been for that one bungled move in the endgame.”

“My attention wandered.” This was only a half-untruth, for though Darger had planned to lose from the outset, there had also been a distracting incident. “That man in the odd gray costume who walked by us. He looked exactly like-”

“Tsar Lenin. I assure you that he not only looks like Lenin, he is Lenin.”

“But how is that possible?”

“We live in strange times. Let it rest at that. Tsar Lenin has returned from the dustbin of history and by morning all Moscow will be his.”

The army of Pale Folk and Muscovites was pouring from the square, as it had been for some time. Still, the square remained crowded. Sergeant Wojtek made no move to join those leaving. Apparently he was content to bring up the rear.

“Tell me something,” Darger said. “You and your fellows have clearly switched allegiance from the current government to whoever or whatever this seemingly impossible figure from ancient history might be. But I would have thought that the Royal Guard would be programmed to be unshakably loyal to the Duke of Muscovy.”

“A common misapprehension. We are actually programmed to be loyal to Muscovy itself. It simply never occurred to anybody before now that the duke and the state might not be one and the same thing.”

“If I may ask, sir, and meaning no offense. Exactly how were you-”

“You were about to say ‘bought’-which would have been a mistake, for we were not bought but persuaded.” The sergeant splayed one paw and extended his claws, one by one, as far as they would go. Then he relaxed it. “Consider our situation. Though we do nothing now but stand guard at the center of the greatest stronghold in Russia over a ruler whom no one dare attack, the bear-guards were designed and created to be warriors. Chortenko simply pointed out to us that a war was in the best interests of Muscovy. Then he promised us one. Thus satisfying both patriotism and personal inclination.”

“Ahhh, yes. Of course.” Darger had never acquired a taste for war, but he understood that certain others-he did not call them madmen-were happiest when in its embrace.

“He also promised us real names,” Wojtek said with unexpected bitterness. “With patronymics. The names we have now are only fit for teddy bears.”

By this point, however, the square was finally beginning to clear out. “Well,” Sergeant Wojtek said. “I suppose we should move on.”

“If I may, sir,” Darger said. “I see a tavern across the way whose lanterns are lit, suggesting that its proprietor remains at his post. This gurney could not easily fit through the door, but your orders say nothing about it per se, only that I be kept bound. You could tie all but one of the straps about my body, leaving only one lower arm free, and then fashion the last strap into a kind of leash, which you could tie to your wrist to make certain that I did not escape. In that way, you would stay true to your orders, while still allowing me to buy you a drink.”