КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

25. THE SHEPHERD

(Location: Republic of Karelia. Vicinity of base «Ark-North». Sometime later)

The snow had turned black. Not from spring slush. From corrosive, greasy soot.

The ventilation pipes of the underground «Ark» complex smoked around the clock, spewing thick, sweetish smoke into the cold sky. The air was soaked through with the smell of processed biomass. It stank of Angonium.

General Voronov towered on the turret of a modernized T-90 tank, surveying his creation. In a few weeks, they had accomplished the impossible. They had «cleansed» all prisons within a three-hundred-kilometer radius. Maximum security colonies, pre-trial detention centers, even closed institutions for the violently mentally ill.

Seven thousand people. Seven thousand broken lives, melted down by machines into a single, perfect weapon. Now they stood silently frozen before him, Andrey Voronov, on the parade ground. The frost did not affect these creatures, encased in light synthetic armor grown by «Aegis» right over their deathly-gray skin. They didn’t shift from foot to foot. Didn’t cough. Didn’t blink. They stood absolutely motionless, resembling a terrifying terracotta army of an emperor from the underworld.

The Legion was born. The Legion stood. The Legion was silent, and the Legion thirsted for his command.

In the first rank towered Colonel Krotov — in the recent past, a suicidal private. Now his height exceeded two meters and twenty centimeters, and his face resembled the visage of a saint from an icon that had been held over an open flame for a long time: beautiful, predatory, and terrifying in its symmetry.

— «The flock is ready, Shepherd,» — his doubled voice boomed without the slightest help from a megaphone.

— They are magnificent, Dad, — Katya whispered, comfortably settled on the cold barrel of the tank gun.

This time she was clad in a military uniform, tailored to the strict fashion of the forties, but instead of the usual red stars, purple runes burned on her epaulettes.

«…She looks… — a clear, enthusiastic definition flashed in Voronov’s head, — …She looks regal. She is my princess! I serve her…»

— Look how they shine. Each of them is an open door, — Katya pronounced in her angelic, intoxicating little voice. The general was ready to listen to his princess for an eternity.

Voronov nodded fervently. Not so much from the meaning of her words, but from their heavenly sound. However, he grasped the essence extremely clearly as well. He knew the truth. Or firmly believed that he knew this truth.

«Aegis» didn’t just grant them, these creatures, physical strength. It replaced their souls. The transformed bodies of yesterday’s murderers, psychopaths, and rapists were now inhabited by something else. Cold, calculating, cosmic. Alien. Absolutely incomprehensible to human imperfection.

«I released demons so they could devour sinners,» General Andrey Voronov mentally justified himself. «That’s probably a fair, equitable exchange.»

He raised his hand imperiously. Seven thousand pairs of eyes — deep, black, gleaming dully like crude oil — stared at him synchronously.

— «Brothers!» — Voronov shouted rollingly. — «Our world is mortally ill. Our world is rotting alive. In Moscow, in Brussels, in Washington, pathetic cowards who decided to wait out the end of the world in deep, concrete burrows are trembling. They have abandoned their peoples to be eaten by the Fog!»

The Legion kept a tomb-like silence. They didn’t need political slogans. They only needed a command… An order from Her. From their true Mistress.

— «But we bring the Cure!» — Voronov pointed back to the cyclopean gates, from which giant machines were driving out with a strained howl.

Mobile «Aegis» installations. They resembled gigantic drilling rigs placed on the wide tracked chassis of heavy missile prime movers. Black spires, pulsating with thick indigo light, pierced the gray, oppressive sky of Karelia.

Harvesters. As Katya called them. Mobile gatherers of the bloody crop.

— «We are marching West!» — the general continued. — «We are marching to the very border. There, in Imatra, the False King has entrenched himself. The System Traitor +Azvel. We will burn his nest to the ground. We will erect our Main Tower there!»

Katya leaned gracefully right to her father’s ear:

— And not only +Azvel, Dad. Look.

With a careless wave of her hand, she unrolled a holographic map right in the frosty air. Ten kilometers to the south, right on the snow-covered «Scandinavia» highway, bright red dots flickered.

— NATO. Forward reconnaissance battalion. Norwegians and Finnish jaegers. They crossed the border to find out why the Fog disappeared in this sector.

— «What are their objectives?» — Voronov hissed through his teeth.

— They are preparing a massive strike. They classify us as an illegal armed formation, as terrorists. They plan to destroy the ‘Ark’.

The general’s face instantly turned to stone, becoming a lifeless mask.

— «They want to destroy humanity’s only hope?!»

— They are blind, Dad. They know not what they do. Save them.

— «How?»

— Free them from their physical bodies. They don’t know how to use them properly anyway…

Voronov closed his eyes. For a brief fraction of a second, the old, true combat general stirred in his chest, the one who once took an oath to protect people, to protect his country at the cost of his own life.

But then memory obligingly tossed up the betrayal of his old friend — the loyal «Gorynych». The President’s icy face came to mind. He remembered that pit and the sniper bullet fired by «his own» guys right at his head.

The general suddenly understood. Outsiders, whoever they might be — they are now his foremost enemies. And his family — is his daughter Katya, his princess. And also… his loyal Legion.

— «Colonel Krotov!» — he barked into the freezing air.

— «Awaiting orders!» — Krotov clicked his heels with a deafening clank.

— «Target: NATO Recon Battalion. Objective: Total assimilation.»

— «Take no prisoners?» — the giant clarified in a passionless, vibrating voice.

— «Prisoners are cancelled, Colonel,» — Voronov cut off, thinking of the perpetually hungry Adaptation Capsules standing in the hangar behind his back. — «Feed our friends to their fill. Tear out their pain. Bring it to me!»

— For the glory of Aegis! — the seven-thousand-strong formation roared in a single, crushing chorus.

The frozen earth shuddered tangibly. The Legion broke into a run. They didn’t march. They ran. With terrifying, inhuman speed, absolutely silently, like a giant pack of shadows. And behind them, shaking the ground, clanking tracks and breaking century-old pines into splinters, crawled the black gigantic harvester machines, thrusting their shining spires into the sky.

Voronov watched them go with rapture.

— «It has begun,» — he whispered with parched lips.

— This is only the beginning, Dad, — the sweet-sounding Katya smiled affectionately at him. — Soon we will weave a whole web. And then… the sky will become solid.