Michael Bunker - WICK

No, Klaus von Baron was innocent when he flipped the switch that started the timer that in four minutes would silently launch a small ultralight craft, no larger than a breadbox, that carried a miniaturized “super-EMP” warhead, that would glide completely undetected through space to its designated vectors. There, when it detonated, it would change the world forever.

Klaus was innocent. At least… he was as innocent as anyone can be who gives his life and the lives of his fellow humans over to be governed and maintained by the machines.

“Checklist, item seventeen. Check.”

It will take Klaus about eight minutes to complete his historic jump into the record books, and eight minutes hence, when he stands up and raises his hands in victory on the desert of a pink, dusty New Mexico badlands, he still will not know that he has landed on a completely different world than the one he left only that morning, the one he saw from his perch twenty-four miles up in space.

He does not know, and he will not know, that the moment of his greatest triumph is the moment of humankind’s end… at least, an end to the world the way almost everyone alive has ever known it.

Perhaps it is not too much to say that Klaus von Baron’s jump was one small leap for man, but one giant leap backwards for mankind.

In Warwick, the very un-Civil War raged on. While neighbor continued to fight neighbor and ancient rivalries flared back up into contemporary reasons to kill and harm and maim, a search was on.

Sergei Dimitrivich, Vladimir Nikitch, a handful of their Youth Revolutionary Forces, and six Spetznaz soldiers were going door to door in the town looking for Vasily Romanovich Kashparov and whatever other traitors to the Revolution could be found. Truth be told, they wanted Vasily mainly so they could find out what he knew about an escape route out of Warwick.

Frankly, the Spetznaz and their Communist bosses who had sent them to Warwick in the first place could not care less about Vasily Kashparov. They wanted the oldlings, and they wanted all of them. To the Russian Special Forces operatives, capturing the oldlings was the entire reason that they were going through any of this. That was why they had parachuted into Warwick before the planned attacks on the U.S. and the West. Mikail, the Youth Forces, all of them, were just tools—useful idiots—mechanisms used to bring about a necessary end.

Their orders from their commanders in the GRU had been clear. Support and stabilize the town so that the oldlings of Warwick—the ones who had been there since the very beginning—could be intensively interrogated.

The new leaders of the New Soviet Union, after they were done brushing America and the West off the map for eternity, wanted to be able to track down every American Spy in Russia, and Warwick had been the main supplier of authentic Russian American spies since the 1960’s. Every one of those agents of capitalist America would need to be rooted out, and, within the aged minds and feeble memories of Warwick’s oldlings, those names would be stored like they were in a computer databank. Eighty of those oldlings were already being questioned in the locker rooms under the Warwick Gym. There were more out there, at least there ought to be.

Lacking any better options, the Spetznaz troops had thrown their weight behind Mikail in the battle for Warwick. That decision wasn’t turning out well, and they were beginning to have doubts about his ability to deliver on his promises, but for now their primary function took priority over their personal feelings. In addition to the large contingent of troops “manning the walls” so to speak—guarding the village to keep the people in and the rest of the world out—there were specialists involved in the interrogations in the basement of the gymnasium. There were also soldiers still involved in trying to police the town and stop the fighting. These were the units traveling with Vladimir, trying to root out all resistance and end talk of revolution or escape.

To the Russians, if this Vasily Kashparov knew a way out of the Charm School, then he would also know if any of the oldlings had already escaped, or if any more were hidden in the town’s many root cellars and basements. They wanted to find Vasily merely so they could find any oldlings hiding from this new Inquisition.

The search for Vasily, like the revolution itself, was not going well. Two of the Youth Forces, untrained and lacking in military skills and tactics, had already been killed executing the searches. That fact had angered Vladimir to no end. The young man, already a brutal sadist, became doubly efficient and intensive in his application of whatever means he deemed necessary to extract information from the people of Warwick.

A proper search, meant an everywhere search, and that meant a systematic, door-to-door examination, even while a pitched and rolling battle was taking place in the town. Warwick was not a normal, modern village. The people were Russian, and mostly agrarian. They liked to dig, and almost every house had storm cellars and basements and even vegetable larders formed of concrete, or crafted from old freezers buried in the backyards. There were a lot of places to hide and therefore, a lot of places to search, to coax the earth to give up her secrets.

Vladimir’s brutality had grated on the Spetznaz soldiers, who, though they were certainly not humanitarians or choir boys in their own right, recognized that if this young Stalin ever intended to lead people, there might need to be some people left to lead. His tactics were more akin to an extermination than a systematic search of the village. They noticed, but did not question (yet) his brutish methods, mostly because they needed him to guide them through the town and its maze-like structures.

Coldly, and violently, the team went from house to house on their mission.

In the Warwick Gymnasium, Mikail was doing his best to hold together both his crumbling coalition and his relationship with the Spetznaz soldiers who nominally had the most firepower in the town. The civil war was turning against Mikail, mainly because the splintered and fragmented opposition was starting to coalesce into a loose affiliation of those whose only unifying tenet was their opposition to Mikail and the Communists.

The tide had turned sometime during the mid-afternoon. Mikail couldn’t precisely pin down the moment his short reign in Warwick had come to an end, but he increasingly recognized the signs. Hitler had experienced such a turning point, as had Robespierre and other failed revolutionaries. In fact, almost all agitators who advocate for a takeover of power, unless their cause is backed by consent of the people or sufficient force to ignore such consent — almost all such would-be dictators in their turn come to the realization that all is lost. As a student of history, Mikail knew that there was only one avenue possible once his grip on power released, and that was… recriminations.

Recriminations. That’s a very nice word for “payback,” and such a fancy word does little to describe the awful meting out of revenge that can follow tyrants like a shadow follows a man on a sunny afternoon. Mikail knew his moment in that sun had passed as he felt the fiery orb setting over his small, troubled town.

There was a look in the eye of the Youth Revolutionary Forces, and that look began to evolve and spread, and soon a unit of Spetznaz forces approached with the inevitable official announcement that Mikail was very earnestly encouraged to meet with representatives of the coalition forces in the village. He knew this meant he would be asked to arrange his own surrender for trial.

This was how it had to be. It was destiny. History tends to impress this fact on the mind for those who care to venture into books to learn of the spiritual physics of such things. Mikail had done so, and he knew the implications.