КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

26. SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

(Location: Highway «Scandinavia». 15 km from the border. Camp of the NATO joint task force «Nordic Shield».)

Captain Jansen, commander of a company of Norwegian «Telemarks», lowered his binoculars. He had a maddening desire to rub his eyes and pinch his ear hard. The lenses fogged up from his ragged, uneven breathing, but what he saw was definitely not an optical illusion.

His hands in tactical gloves were shaking. The thermal underwear reliably protected against any frosts inherent to this latitude, so the cold clearly had nothing to do with it. It was the instinctive, primal shiver of a frightened animal, preserved in the genetic code probably since the time of the Neanderthals. It is the fear of an animal that has scented a predator not described in any biology textbook, a predator many times superior to the prey in strength and bloodthirstiness.

An icy sweat broke out on the captain, rushing down his spine in treacherous cold centipedes. Jansen felt a sticky, paralyzing terror.

— «HQ, this is ‘Viking-1’. Code Red. I repeat, Code Red.»

— «‘Viking’, this is HQ. Specify the nature of the threat. Creatures?» — the operator’s voice sounded irritatingly calm. There, in the warm concrete bunkers under Oslo, the generals naively believed that this was a routine «cleanup of the infected».

— «No,» — Jansen exhaled, swallowing dry saliva. — «People. Russians.»

— «Confirm. The Russian army? Regular units?»

— «Negative. This is… I don’t know what is approaching.»

Through the optical sight, he observed a gray, faceless mass of many thousands pouring out of the snow-covered forest right onto the highway. They were not marching in formation, not using the terrain features for cover. It seemed they were moving like viscous lava.

— «They are advancing without armored support. They… Merciful God…» — Jansen again swallowed the tickling lump in his throat and almost choked. — «They are armed with knives and entrenching tools!»

The enemy soldiers, clearly dressed inappropriately for the weather in identical gray prison robes under which outgrowths of black, seemingly organic armor could be guessed, moved in a monolithic mass, smoothly flowing around abandoned civilian cars. They had no helmets. Their faces looked identical, pale spots in the advancing Karelian twilight.

They weren’t yelling «Hurrah!». They weren’t shooting on the move. They simply rolled like a silent wave of death straight onto the fortified machine-gun nests with terrifying, inhuman speed.

— «Open fire!» — Jansen yelled into the radio, tearing his vocal cords. — «All crews! Suppressing fire!»

The NATO defense line erupted with a deafening roar. Three heavy «CV90» IFVs struck from 30-millimeter automatic cannons, plowing the earth and asphalt. Heavy «Browning» machine guns began to spit death, turning the frosty air into a leaden storm. Automatic grenade launchers blanketed the highway with a series of clustered explosions.

Tracers plunged thickly into the crowd. Jansen expected to see a bloody mush. He sincerely believed that this mad, suicidal attack would choke in the very first seconds, turning the highway into a mountain of bleeding, shredded corpses. But he saw a living nightmare.

The Russians did indeed fall, torn apart by high-explosive fragmentation shells, but those running behind didn’t even think to slow down. They didn’t trip over the bodies of their fallen comrades. They vaulted over the corpses — or over the mess that remained of them — with the grace of professional gymnasts. Their movements remained fluid and absolutely synchronous, as if this whole herd was controlled by a single collective brain.

And those who were merely wounded…

Jansen saw through his eyepiece a soldier whose left arm had been completely blown off up to the elbow by a heavy-caliber bullet. An ordinary person would have instantly collapsed in pain shock. This mutant didn’t even break his breathing rhythm. Right on the run, he scooped up his own severed limb with his healthy hand.

— «What the…» — the Norwegian whispered in pure terror.

The soldier in the gray robe hurled the piece of his flesh with full force toward the nearest machine-gun pillbox. And…

The arm exploded. Bone, muscle, and blood detonated with the power of a heavy high-explosive artillery shell, packed with dark, purple energy unknown to Jansen. The pillbox simply ceased to exist, disappearing in a cloud of roaring fire and debris.

— «They are bombs!» — Jansen frantically bawled over the airwaves, perfectly understanding that HQ would definitely think him insane. — «They explode on their own! Lord…»

Meanwhile, the Gray Wave hit the forward NATO positions with full force. And the battle ceased momentarily. Because…

A methodical absorption began.

Black figures jumped onto the frontal armor of the «Leopard» main battle tanks. They popped open the battened-down steel hatches with their bare hands — their fingers, turned into obsidian claws, tore the tank armor like wet cardboard. The panic-stricken crews screamed inside the steel boxes, but the wails of the doomed were cut short suspiciously fast.

One of the attackers vaulted over the snow parapet right in front of Jansen. The captain reflexively threw up his assault rifle and emptied a short burst at point-blank range. The 5.56 caliber bullets struck the monster right in the forehead. They should have blown the attacker’s skull to pieces. But the lead simply ricocheted, leaving only light scratches on the gray, seemingly petrified skin.

The monster stopped, tilting his head to the side. On his chest, a faded tag with the number «ZK-402» [Inmate-402] was clearly legible. A convict of yesterday. A murderer. But today he had been reborn into something absolutely different. He smiled broadly. His seemingly obsidian teeth gleamed dully in the rapidly fading evening light.

— Are you in pain? — the monster asked in pure Norwegian, but with the dead, flat intonation of a machine translator. — Give us your pain.

Jansen jerked toward his pistol holster, but realized with terrifying clarity that he was catastrophically out of time to draw his weapon. Driven into a hopeless corner, his body capitulated: his sphincters relaxed, filling the captain’s pants with warm and liquid shame. «ZK-402» winced squeamishly and grinned even wider.

In the next instant, Captain Jansen felt a monstrous blow that crunchingly drove his ribs deep into his lungs. The world blurred into a bloody streak, and then faded completely and forever.

Ten minutes later, it was all over. The NATO armored vehicles were burning, belching thick, black smoke. The shooting died down, giving way to the numerous groans of the wounded.

The NATO soldiers — the few who survived the initial assault — sat herded into a tight cluster in the center of the routed camp. Some were kneeling in the dirty snow, disarmed, shivering from the cold and shock, looking hunted at their conquerors, frozen around them like silent gray statues.

A giant approached them unhurriedly, with a heavy, earth-crushing tread. Colonel Krotov. His organic armor, generously splattered with foreign blood, did not have a single scratch. He slowly took off his helmet.

The Norwegians and Finns recoiled in horror, crushing each other. They saw his face — the visage of a martyr scorched in hellfire. And his terrifying eyes — two bottomless black holes, deep within which dead purple galaxies slowly rotated.

Krotov bent down and squeamishly picked up the radio of a dead NATO radioman from the ground. A continuous hiss came from the speaker, interspersed with the irritated voice of a signalman — HQ in Oslo was hysterically demanding an immediate report. Krotov pressed the push-to-talk button with a massive finger.

— This is the Legion, — he pronounced in perfect Norwegian. His voice, amplified by a terrifying internal vibration, echoed boomingly over the corpse-strewn battlefield and went out over the airwaves on the alliance’s frequency. — We have not come to kill. We have come to save you. — He slowly swept his gaze over the prisoners. — Do not resist. Accept our Gift.

Then he simply crushed the radio in his fist, turning the impact-resistant plastic and microchips into fine crumbs. Then this giant turned to the prisoners. Behind him, from the forest, with a deafening crackle, breaking pine trunks, crawled a giant mobile «Aegis» installation. Its black spire had already begun to unfold predatorily, pulsating with indigo hunger, anticipating a hearty portion of fresh Angonium.

Krotov pointed his sledgehammer-hand at the approaching monstrous machine.

— Inside, — he commanded meekly, almost affectionately. — You will become the first sturdy bricks in the wall that will protect Europe from the blight.

The crowd of broken, paralyzed-by-fear prisoners didn’t even stir. Krotov turned around and cast a brief glance at the convict-legionnaire silently frozen behind his back. — «Help them.»