Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

On the third night the snow came again, a silent softness of feathers thickening the air. She had collected nothing. Her food bag was empty. She broke open the door of an empty house on the edge of the firing zone, drank the last of her water bottle, lit a fire in the grate, laid herself out on the floor and slept.

She was woken by someone kicking her leg. The dazzle of a flashlight in her eyes.

‘Stand up! I said stand up!’

Two young men were looking down at her. Well fed bare-headed boys. Waist-length pea coats. Black trousers and heavy black boots. Elena knew what they were. They were the Boots, and they were the worst. She had always known that one day she would be too tired, too hungry, not careful enough, and it would be finished. But she stood up to face them.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What?’

Rizhin had co-opted the semi-organised, semi-militarised thugs of the Mirgorod Youth and Student Brigade to support the militia in the war against defeatists, hoarders, looters, racketeers, saboteurs and spies. They were kept fed and left to do as they would. Autonomy without discipline. And what they did was rob and torture and rape and kill. People said that even the VKBD found the Boots excessive. Repellent. Elena had heard the Boots roamed the places near the fighting, but she had been too tired to remember.

The Boots were holding rifles. Bayonets fixed to the muzzles. The one with the flashlight turned it off and put it on the floor. The light from the fire was enough.

‘Take off your scarf,’ he said. ‘Let’s see your face.’ His friend was grinning.

Elena let the scarf drop to the floor.

‘Now the coat.’

She unbuttoned the heavy greatcoat and let it fall.

‘And the sweater.’

The two boys were both staring at her now. Not grinning any more. Focused. Eager. Elena saw one of them swallow hard.

‘Take off the shirt,’ he said.

‘And the trousers. Turn around.’

‘Go on. Don’t stop. Show us. Let’s see what you’ve got. Let’s see it all.’

The Boots had laid down their rifles and were opening their own clothing. Fumbling with their belts and flies.

‘No,’ said Elena. She stopped, her right hand behind her back. She was trembling. Her hands were shaking. ‘No.’

‘Bitch.’

One of the Boots lunged forward to push her down, his trousers open and falling round his thighs. Elena pulled out the kitchen knife she kept tucked in the back of her trousers and shoved it into his belly. The boy gasped and stopped in surprise, looking down at his stomach. Disbelieving. Elena took a step back, pulled out the knife, swept it upwards and sliced the blade laterally under his chin. Blood spilled out and splashed to the floor. The boy stared at her. He made a small gurgle in his opened throat.

The other one was scrabbling for his rifle.

‘Drop it. Now.’

The Boot swung round. A VKBD officer was standing in the doorway, a pistol in his hand.

‘Piss off, Brosz,’ said the Boot and raised the rifle muzzle, pointing the bayonet towards him. The officer shot him in the knee and he fell, screaming.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said the officer. ‘You’re such a fucking pair of pigs.’

He walked over to the screaming boy and shot him again. In the face.

The other boy, the one Elena had cut, was still standing in the middle of the room. He was cupping his throat with one hand, trying to catch the blood. The other hand was pressed against the wound in his belly. He was weeping.

The officer raised his pistol at arm’s length and fired. An execution shot.

‘This your place?’ he said to Elena. She was standing half-undressed in the firelight, the kitchen knife in her hand, held low at her side.

‘No.’

‘Then you’re looting.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a hanging crime.’

‘Yes.’

The VKBD officer studied her for a moment.

‘How long have you been scavenging?’

‘Always.’

He nodded.

‘And you’re still alive. More than that, you’re still strong. And a good fighter.’

‘If you’re not going to shoot me,’ said Elena Cornelius, ‘I’m going to put my coat back on.’

‘Ever used a rifle?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Come with me. We’ll teach you. You’ll be more use than a roomful of these pigs.’

‘I’m better off on my own.’

‘It isn’t a choice. It’s that, or I string you up in the morning.’

Conscripts to the Forward Defence Units got a day’s firearm training and, if they were fortunate, a weapon. Elena Cornelius turned out to have an aptitude for marksmanship. The sergeant took her aside.

‘You. You will be a sniper,’ he said. ‘A woman is good for sniping. You are small. You are flexible. You stand the cold better than a man.’

She was issued with felt overboots, a thick tunic, a fur shapka, the kind with flaps for the ears. A printed booklet with tables that set out how to adjust the aiming point to take account of the ballistic effects of freezing air. And a bolt-action 7.62mm Sergei-Leon rifle with a side-mounted 3.5x Gaussler scope, the one with two turrets, one for elevation and one for windage: effective range 1,000 yards with optics. The modified Sergei-Leon was exclusive to the VKBD; the regular army never had the funds for such precision firearms.

‘You learn by doing,’ the sergeant said. ‘We send you out with someone who knows what they’re doing.’

Elena was paired with a woman called Rosa, a student of history until the Archipelago came.

‘I volunteered,’ said Rosa. ‘I was a good shot already. I used to hunt with my father on Lake Lazhka. Wildfowl are harder to hit than soldiers.’ Rosa already had seventeen confirmed kills. ‘We’ll go in the afternoon,’ she said. ‘Firing into the east, you don’t want to shoot in the morning.’

Rosa led to the way a place near a machine-gun post on the roof of a factory. The enemy were only three hundred yards away.

‘Shoot when the machine gun is shooting,’ she said. ‘They won’t even know we’re here, never mind spot us.’

They were up there for nine hours. When they had finished and returned to the barracks, Elena Cornelius packed her things into a kitbag, slung her rifle over her shoulder and walked away, back into the city to look for her girls.

Alone in her private carriage in the dark hours after midnight, Lavrentina Chazia lay, fully clothed and sleepless on her bunk, listening to the rumble of the train wheels on the track. She was exhausted, but she knew she would not sleep: she rarely slept any more, the ants under her skin made it impossible, with their creeping and crawling and the sting of their tiny bites. The patches of angel stuff on her arms and face itched and burned.

After a fruitless day attempting to break through the shell of the Pollandore using various mechanisms of her own devising, she had spent the evening with the Shaumian woman, and even for Chazia, who was hardened to such things, the experience had not been pleasant. Frustrated by the lack of progress, she had concluded it was time to abandon the subtle approach in favour of more direct methods. Maroussia Shaumian was stubborn to the point of stupidity, and after their last talk she had become even more recalcitrant, almost confident. Chazia sensed that something had changed, but she didn’t know what and she didn’t care: it was a matter of breaking the girl’s will, and she knew how to do that. She had decided against using the worm, for fear of doing some damage to the girl’s mind that would prevent her doing whatever needed to be done with the Pollandore, so the work had been noisy and messy.

The process was still not complete, but Chazia had grown tired and faintly disgusted, so she’d left the girl to the professional interrogators and withdrawn to her compartment. She needed to find rest: her mind lacked edge and speed, and her spirits were low. She was bored, restless and above all frustrated. The power of the Vlast was within reach, but she had not yet quite grasped it: still there was Fohn, and the feeble Khazar. The power of the Pollandore was within reach but she could not get there, she didn’t know how to use it and the Shaumian woman was giving her nothing. Chazia was coming to doubt she had anything to give. And the living angel, the greatest power of all, had never come to her again. All she heard was silence.