Rick Partlow - Honor Bound

“Then here’s to Colonel D’mitry Podbyrin.” O’Keefe raised his glass again. “He died doing the right thing.”

Colonel D’mitry Grigor’yevich Podbyrin sat quietly in a dark corner of the bar, half-watching the NewsNet broadcast of the awards ceremony in Reagan Plaza and half listening to the scattered murmurings from customers nursing their drinks.

It was so strange to hear Russian once again. He hadn’t been back to Earth since the War, but he would have thought it a dead language now: and it was, except for a few places. It so happened that Alaska was one of those places. Many Russian immigrants who had fled the Rodina during or after the War had settled here, and every city had a large minority population of Russian-speaking citizens.

It was fortuitous that his lifepod had landed on the bare tundra, and even more fortuitous that the first people he had come across after two days of wandering through the wilderness were Russian immigrants. Or perhaps it was fate…

Either way, Fairbanks was much more homelike than Loki had been.

Podbyrin saw the man approaching his booth and slid aside to give him room. Yuri was an older man, his face weathered and strong and his eyes as blue and cold as the Arctic sea.

“I have contacted our friends,” Yuri told him quietly. “They have sunk the lifepod in the ocean. There will be nothing to connect any of us to it, and they will never know you were on it.”

“I thank you for your help,” Podbyrin said earnestly. “I truly did not wish to return to exile. But I wonder… you do not do this just because I am Russian?”

“There are few enough of us left,” Yuri said, grinning frostily, “that we help whoever needs it. But yes, there is a special interest in you, particularly among the bratva .”

Podbyrin felt a chill run down his neck. Bratva … the brotherhood: it was a term used for various families in the Russian mafia back in his day. Apparently, the language wasn’t the only thing that had survived the War here.

“And why would they be interested in me?” he wanted to know. Or perhaps he didn’t, he wasn’t really certain.

“We are interested in certain information you might have,” Yuri said. Ah. “We” are interested, Podbyrin noted. That settled what Yuri’s stake in this was.

“Any information I have,” D’mitry Podbyrin pointed out, “the Republic military already has. They questioned me chemically and quite thoroughly.”

” Tovarisch ,” Yuri assured him, patting him on the shoulder in friendly fashion, “there are things that you know that you don’t even know you know. Things that could be very useful to the General.”

“The General is dead,” Podbyrin said, taking a gulp of his drink to stave off a feeling that the room was closing in on him.

“No, my brother,” Yuri said, the look in his eyes utterly terrifying. “The General lives.”