"Idealist: One who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
Drip.
The only sound to be heard in the bowels of that forsaken rock, that slow, dripping noise.
Water, surely. From a broken pipe.
Yes, a broken pipe. Pipes broke. Everything broke eventually, especially here.
"Especially here..."
"Eh? What?" the other guard grunted, his face hidden beneath a Ushanka, "Did you say something?"
"Me? Me?!" the man barked back, "Say something? Say something! Me!"
The man stumbled to his feet, obviously in a stupor. Due to vodka or fatigue it was nearly impossible to tell.
"Me, say something! What is that, a joke? A joke Tovarisch, surely, eh?!"
"Calm down, you crazy svoloch'," the other guard replied, tipping his Ushanka up with a scowl, "I don't need to hear it from you again."
"Again. Again! Again the man says!"
"Past' zakroi..."
At that the stumbling man's eyes went wide with fury, and his boot sent the folding chair he'd been slumped in flying down the darkened hallway.
"You! What have you ever done, eh? Eh, Tovarisch? Oh great Tovarisch Ivan! Hero of the Coalition! Defender of the Final Victory!"
"I'll piss in your grave in a minute!"
"You'd like that, wouldn't you, wouldn't you!" the man continued, spittle finding its way between his lips as he hollered.
"Maybe I would, Petrovin, if it would shut you up!"
At the sound of his name, the rage left him. All of the pent up anger, the disappointment, the indignation, was effaced with a wave of nausea. Resigned, the man stumbled backwards against the wall before roughly sliding to the floor, bereft of the chair which he'd kicked off into the void.
Petrovin. Yes, that was a name that meant something. Just a working boy, leaving a simple family of farmers behind to ply a trade with the wonderful arms producers in orbit, building Partisans with his bare hands. And then, oh then, to be graciously admitted into the vaunted fighter corps! Yes, the military, the defenders of that glorious dream that had been so potent, indeed the meaning of all the struggle, the conclusion of which would bring...
What would it bring? All it brought so far was this.
Security guard. On a Godforsaken deck of the great Zvezdny Gorodok that had a visitor every five years, if Lady Luck happened to smile upon it.
Too conventional, they said. A liability, they said. Behind closed doors, never within earshot, but they said it. What else could they have said? Perhaps they could have said, "Be grateful you still have your life." Yes, that would have been very fitting.
What life?
At least if he were dead he wouldn't have to eat the same damnable slop they served every day, drink the same slightly-tainted water which was a poor excuse for recycled urine, walk the same route, sit in the same spot, breathe the same stifling air which probably had a broken circulatory unit...
Life. He needed a life. His life. Did he ever have a life?
He looked at his hands. Hands which had worked from the day they came out of a womb, had provided food for others, provided weapons for the same, commanded those weapons in the defense of all that he saw as right and good in the universe. His hands.
Wasted. Ignored. Denied. Spurned.
He looked at his fists. Fists? When had he clenched them?
This was wrong.
This was all terribly wrong.
And it angered him. It angered him in the deepest pit of his heart, in the most fundamental parts of his brain, in his muscles, in his bones, in the blood coursing through his veins.
"Good," Ivan continued, pulling the Ushanka back over his eyes, "Now if only you'd stay that way, you little mudak..."
And he stood up. His legs felt as if they were cast of iron, working off the rust of time as they supported what was once, and still was, a soldier.
"Because I never hear the end of your nonsense... Piz'duk..."
And his hand reached for the pocket in his coat, clenching what was once, and still was, the sum of his existence.
"Just a walking pile of govno..."
And he wrenched it out, and pointed it at the sum of his opposition.
"And a..."
The distinctive clicking noise of a firing hammer was unmistakable.
"A..."
"A what?" Konstantin replied, his voice level, full of ice.
Ivan tipped the Ushanka back up and found his scowl leave him for a look of abject horror.
At least it was. Before the bullet caved in the front of his skull.
Konstantin Petrovin pocketed the Nagant revolver and turned on a grimy boot heel, staring down the empty corridor which led to a new beginning, and a new struggle. A crusade. To get his life back.
"You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work... The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind."
Light poured from the doorway, as if he'd stepped from one world into another. The maintenance of the station was evidently very selective.
Of course it was. Everything was selective. The best soldiers, the best politicians, the best scapegoats. Need the list be continued?
No, in fact it ended here.
Konstantin began striding down the new corridor at a brisker pace than was understood as the "norm," whatever that happened to be. Any onlookers would assume he were on important business, and perish the thought of interrupting him. And yet he was as dirty as a tank mechanic, and had the look of a man who hadn't slept in days, if not weeks, or years.
It was close enough to the truth.
The hallway abruptly stopped and turned a corner. With a precision he had practiced in another life, Petrovin rounded it on the end of his heel and kept moving.
Drill. Perfect drill.
To promote discipline, to encourage esprit de corps by presenting a formidable image, to evoke a sense of pride and belonging. Drill.
Lost on them. All of them.
Down the way a Captain was having a discussion with a technician; doubtless a conversation of some needlessly minute maintenance concern, even as the place he'd come from was decaying into dust.
At the sight of the mangy conscript marching in his direction, the Captain dismissed his subordinate with an haughty nod and turned to face the new arrival.
Petrovin stopped a few feet from the Captain and simply stared.
And stared.
The Captain lost his bearing for a moment and shifted his weight from one foot to another before clearing his throat.
"I believe you are out of line for not-"
"You know," Konstantin interrupted, "I was a Captain once."
"I- what are you going on about?" the officer demanded with indignation.
Petrovin looked the man up and down. Typical Coalition fare, pristine uniform with a smug face hiding what he could only describe as a cowardly charlatan. Charlatans, so-called leaders with their superiors' whips lodged so far up their rear ends that they could probably be considered no better than mindless whips themselves.
Haughty cowards. Afraid. Pathetic. Despicable.
"I killed many men to wear that uniform," Petrovin continued, staring at the rank epaulettes on the officer's shoulders, "Enough that I lost count."
The Captain opened his mouth but failed to find words he deemed appropriate. Instead he opted for the sidearm at his hip, clumsily reaching in its direction and missing the safety catch.
By then the Nagant revolver had already been brought to bear on the man's chin.
Konstantin still stared, his trigger finger so still that it was hard to believe he was a man instead of a statue.
"And I'm sure you've had your share of victories, Tovarisch Captain," Petrovin said coolly, "and done many great deeds in the name of our beloved people, and their dream."
The Captain's face contorted into a fearful wince.
"Or is it really their dream?" the stone-faced man continued, gun pressed ever so harder against the Captain's jaw, "Perhaps the dream of a few, and a lie to the many?"
Speechless.
Petrovin's face finally belied emotion, with a terrible frown.
"You don't deserve to wear that uniform, Tovarisch. In fact, I doubt you're even worth considering a citizen."
With that, his finger snapped down the trigger and sent a hail of blood and bone into the ceiling along with a 7.62 round.
His face was completely unmoved.
"Coward," Petrovin hissed as he lowered his pistol and once more shoved it in a pocket.
He knelt over the hideously defaced corpse and promptly ripped the epaulettes off of its shoulders. Clad with adhesive, the epaulettes were now slapped upon Petrovin's dirty coat, and were soon coupled with the dead man's peaked cap, a bloody hole in the top. He didn't even stop to smack the gore out of it before fixing it to his head and standing up.
The gruesome effigy of a Coalition Captain continued his brisk march down the hallway.
"By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage."
Sub-lieutenant Beletsky idly flipped through windows on a datapad, feet atop the console which controlled local security systems on this deck of Star City. He had little to fear from accusations of "idleness"; if the computer detected something, it would tell him, and that would be that. Not that it ever detected much, since nobody dared lift a finger after the recent fighting resulting from the civil war.
"<Weapons discharge, Maintenance Section Theta.>"
He looked over the rim of his datapad and furrowed his brow.
"<Alert! Biosign report, Target Two One One, feed loss.>"
Impossible.
A glitch. Surely a glitch? Coalition nanobots and implants always had their quirks. It was just a mistake.
Setting the pad aside, Beletsky slapped his hands to the console and began entering commands. First on the agenda: who was tracking target Two One One? The computer instantly brought up a short dossier of a Captain Pyotr Karpol, currently assigned to oversee maintenance affairs on this deck.
The reported location was Hallway Eight, Maintenance Section Theta.
Incredible.
Suicide, perhaps? Or a simple mistake? Perhaps the good Captain left his firearm's safety off at an inopportune time? Oh, how wonderful it would be if that was the case.
But it wasn't. He knew it wasn't. It didn't take the security camera view of a bloodied, faceless corpse to establish that. No gun at its side; so much for convenience.
No matter. A deck security team had already been dispatched to the area at the automated report of a weapons discharge. They'd clear up whoever it was with the nasty temper in short order.
---
They'd be here soon, he knew. What were they going to do, clean up the mess and call it a day? They might have, if he had been a Commissar.
What a system.
Just a system. A mind-numbing system of cold, calculated violence, intermixed with sheer malice and depravity. His removal from that system was probably, on the whole, beneficial.
Except he'd been placed in just another system with the same methods.
The team came through an entrance about twenty feet down the next hallway and immediately assumed a defensive position, hands on their holstered firearms.
"Halt!"
"Privet, Tovarischi," Petrovin said in a calm voice, "What seems to be the matter?"
"We... ah..." the young, blonde guard stuttered as he looked at the man's disheveled outfit, complete with epaulettes.
"Da?"
"Comrade Captain?" the guard asked, befuddled.
"Tovarisch Captain, if you will," Petrovin corrected, with the briefest smirk, "If you're going to serve in the Coalition I suggest you follow its worthy traditions."
"Of course, uh... Toe-var-ish Captain!" the guard said in a loud voice, snapping to attention. The two men behind him followed suit, clearly preferring their fearless leader to take any falls required.
Konstantin smiled, a shallow, superficial smile, and began walking towards them.
"I assume you're wondering about the weapons discharge?"
"Y-yes, I mean Da Comrade, I mean-"
"Check if you will, there's nothing to be concerned about. If you three will excuse me..."
Konstantin walked right past them and through the doorway they had just entered. None of the guards seemed compelled to ask any further questions.
Instead, they continued to their assigned destination.
"Did you see his uniform?" one of them nearly whispered.
"Like he was a guerilla fighter on Jiang Xi or something..."
"That's not standard at all, something's-"
"Don't even start, you know where questions lead."
"Well yeah, but..."
The trio rounded the next corner and stopped cold, inches from what was left of a face.
"What in the name of-"
Their leader twisted around, ripping the pistol out of his holster.
"Stop him!" he cried, shoving his way back through his compatriots.
"If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal."
Konstantin had been running from the moment they turned their backs on him.
Somewhere in the back of his rather dazed mind, he understood what a comical image it presented. A scraggly man running around wearing a Captain's rank insignia being chased by a trio of incompetents inside what had to be one of the most secure places in all of Sirius. Comical.
Not necessarily comical for him, but comical for onlookers, certainly.
They'd be locking down this entire deck in short order; exits to other decks would be sealed, doors would no longer respond to the neural chip embedded in his skull, Marines would show up, the works. But in terms of priority, the little gang he'd just passed was at the top of the list. He'd run past them in order to find a more advantageous position.
The synthetic rubber on his boots squealed as he skidded to a stop in front of a small room adjacent to one of the seemingly endless hallways on this deck.
This looked about right. Grates in the floor, with easy access to a maintenance vent, a single security camera in the ceiling, reinforced but not impossible to thwart, and best of all, one way in and one way out.
A grin tried to play about his face, but something suppressed it. The irony that they had trained a monster was in some ways amusing. But monsters didn't smile.
---
The security officer worked furiously at his console, calling up information, sending information, receiving information, quicker than anything he'd had to do in recent memory. Deck lock down, categories Three, Two, and One, a call for reinforcements, preferably a Marine platoon, and most importantly discerning the identity of the rogue onboard.
Beletsky had an overlay of the entire deck projected up across the wall before him. Lit triangles surrounded by circles inscribed with text represented the locations of every tracking target the computer could detect. With every Coalition citizen bugged using their neural uplinks, it wasn't difficult to use them for constant surveillance, and made situations like this much easier.
At least it should have made it easier. He still had no positive ID on the rogue, and had to sift through hundreds of contacts in attempt to find the one looking the most suspicious...
There. One was moving quickly, sprinting even, and only a hundred meters behind were the trio of guards dispatched at the first alarm. Beletsky selected the marker and was provided all the information he'd ever need.
"<Service History: Case Sensitive>"
The Sub-lieutenant gulped despite himself. It didn't take the brightest denizen of that fine political machine to figure out what something like "Case Sensitive" entailed.
But now wasn't the time.
He pulled up a local security camera and watched the disheveled man, now identified as a Private Konstantin Grigoriyich Petrovin, stop short of the next hallway and look into an open room next to him before rushing inside.
Beletsky grinned maliciously as he pulled up the appropriate camera inside and zoomed in on his target.
"Rushing into a dead end?" he said aloud to nobody in particular, alone in the security room, "Be my guest. You could have just taken a bullet, or you could have kept running until you hit a force field, but now you want to be captured and..."
Petrovin had slipped underneath the view of the camera.
Annoyed, Beletsky toggled the zoom function and reeled it back, trying to get a fix once more. The screen had barely shown the edge of a peaked cap before it went black.
"<Security Report, System Failure, camera sixty, Maintenance Section Iota.>"
"Well!" Beletsky spat, hitting buttons more furiously than ever, "You can gouge out the eye, but we still have your brain, eh?"
He called up the security team on an intra-station frequency.
"He's in a power hub, two corridors down, on your left."
"Understood," came the fuzzy reply.
"Oh," Beletsky continued, with a hint of mocking amusement, "He's locked inside, now, so take him as you will."
Just another day at the office. Maybe now he could get back to that lovely centerfold on the datapad...
---
"Move in."
The door's security system had identified the response of a friendly neural chip and slid open.
Revealing nothing.
The trio of guards walked in, sidearms already pointed and at the ready. They fanned out across the tiny room, as if they were scanning a much larger area.
The leader stopped in the center and looked up at the camera in the ceiling. A few feet down, along the wall, an access panel had been ripped from its mounting and the wires beneath had been torn to pieces.
"Are you certain he's here?" he spoke into a small microphone on his uniform collar.
"You mean you... Positive, he's... right on top of you!"
The three instinctively braced themselves and pointed their weapons at the ceiling.
The door to the hallway slid shut.
Silence.
"Control, we don't-"
A metal grate flew up from the floor, hinges screeching, and smashed one of the guards in the face. He stumbled backwards and hit the nearby wall, gun slipping from his fingers.
The leader's eyes snapped down to the grate, and saw a face that would haunt him for the rest of his decidedly short life. Before his arms could move in tandem, the crack of a gun drowned out the eruption of shouting, and a bullet found its way into the man's throat.
Like a specter, Petrovin suddenly bolted from the vent and wheeled around to fire at the third guard. His shot missed by inches, and instead send a chunk of lead ricocheting about the room. Pinging metal mixed with gurgling sounds as the third man tried to take aim, but found one of his legs cut out from under him as the bullet dug into the back of his calf.
Without skipping a beat, Petrovin lunged forward and jammed a palm into the man's neck, continuing until he hit the wall. His sounds of screaming were instantly muffled as his airway caved in.
While the two men slowly suffocated to death on opposite sides of the room, the third had regained his bearing and found himself staring at the back of his assailant. This one was fast, too fast to afford bending over to pick up the gun he'd just dropped. With caution thrown soundly to the wind, the guard cast himself over the grate and reached for the rogue's neck with both hands.
He was waiting.
The moment Petrovin had felt the clammy hands brush against the hairs on his neck, his muscles seemed to move automatically. His left elbow smashed backwards into the guard's ribcage, alone not enough to down the man, but enough to distract him for the barest moment, and cause him to lose his balance. As the guard's head came forward, Konstanin's other hand let the revolver fall and reached over to grip the neck. Using the jaw as a point of pressure, and his arm as a lift, he twisted his body in order to get the best leverage and hefted the man up and over his shoulder.
The guard smacked into the deck plating head-first, crumpling into a heap on the floor.
Trying to regain his breath, Konstanin bent down and picked up his revolver, pocketing it once again.
Yes, alive. This made him feel alive. A rush he could only receive while spilling blood, blood of those he deemed traitors, fools, cowards.
But not this man. Even as the other two twitched their way into the next life, the third was still alive, but very much dazed.
Good.
Petrovin reached inside his coat and pulled out a standard-issue vibroblade from a sheath on his belt. Flicking the activation switch, he put the humming knife to the back of his head and took a breath.
The authorities had always said that puncturing the scalp would lead to rapid blood loss, so repair of a neural chip was best left to appropriate personnel. He'd been in the Commissariat long enough to know that that was simple fear mongering. Either that, or desperation won out over reason.
He jammed it underneath the skin and grit his teeth together as the tip slid behind something solid. Suppressing a cry, Petrovin bent the knife, ripping a rectangular chunk from his head. Wires on it tugged on something deeper in his head; whatever damage that had done to his brain was beyond him, and by now it didn't seem to matter.
While the external portion of the chip handled mundane functions and was more exposed for ease of access, the wiring and probe that actually went through the skull and into the brain were essentially permanent, and obviously more difficult to tamper with.
That was why the standard "bomb" was in the probe. He'd been very familiar with it from his Commissar days, that handy little device that essentially overcharged the brain with electricity. If he recalled correctly, its victims screamed for quite some time before they were officially expired...
No sense worrying about it now. Luckily, that required a higher level of authority to activate.
He gave himself about five hours. Six at most.
Konstanin Petrovin looked down at the dazed guard and found himself smiling crookedly.
"So, you want to serve the Revolution, Tovarisch...?"
"Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will."
Well, that was quick.
Beletsky watched the display with a smirk; two of the guards' signals went dead, but it looked like they had taken the rogue down with them.
He glanced at the black display representing the camera feed and scowled. What a show it probably was! Maybe the man gave up and had a nice clean shot to the base of the spine? Maybe he fought tooth and nail, like a rabid animal, and it took entire magazines to put him down?
"Damn electronics," he spat under his breath.
He smacked the transmit button nearby and spoke into a microphone.
"Alright, good work Comrade Private, now bring the body to the nearest security checkpoint for disposal."
Nothing.
"Comrade? Come in, please."
He tapped his finger on the desk. What, was he too busy wiping the blood off of his face? Maybe. Oh how he wished he'd seen it...
Still nothing.
He called up the camera out in the hallway and checked the door. Still shut, even though the marker indicating the remaining guard was rummaging around inside.
And then the screen went black.
"<System report, Maintenance Section Iota, secondary observation systems power source unavailable.>"
Power source unavailable? Then use backups, of course!
"<System report, Maintenance Section Iota, reserve power engaged.>"
The screen remained black.
Beletsky felt a bead of sweat roll down his brow. Quickly, he punched in commands to display all security cameras, IR sensors, motion sensors, and whatever additional methods of tracking he could remember.
The vast majority of them remained dead. In fact, just about everything in Section Iota aside from the basic bug scanner was inoperable, and it wasn't because the power source had been incapacitated.
It had simply been cut off.
Beletsky's eyes darted back to the overview map and stared incredulously at the room that the rogue had tried to hide in.
Sector Power Hub.
"Comrade Private..."
Beletsky looked at the marker indicating the last guard and didn't even notice his jaw drop.
It had already moved across half the sector.
"Comrade Sub-lieutenant!" a booming voice shouted from a speaker nearby, "What in the name of Katz is going on down there?!"
"Wh- what, oh!" Beletsky yelped, jolting in his seat, "Comrade Colonel! So good to see you, I mean-"
"You blithering fool, answer me!" the irate man belted out, face turning red on a screen window.
"W-well, I, there's been a-" Beletsky stammered, tugging at his collar.
"A what?! Weapons fire, system failures, is there some war in the works that I wasn't informed of?!"
"Y-you see, Comrade Colonel, I was trying to... to... There's been a-"
---
Hefty, these new soldiers of the Dream, weren't they? Fat and bored, it seemed.
Still, they were no different than a sack of flour in the end.
Konstantin hustled down the hallways, a semi conscious Private slung over his shoulder like so much baggage. His mind was a maelstrom of disjointed thoughts, but somewhere in the insanity there reigned a cold, calculating thought process. The well-drilled thoughts of a soldier.
He needed to cut the head off of the snake. To do so for the whole station would be impossible, but perhaps he could chop off a limb?
Bounding through a supply room, Petrovin noticed a pair of startled technicians looking up at him, tools raised defensively.
"Medical emergency, Tovarischi," he panted, skipping over a stray box and bolting through the other exit.
"Good luck, Comrade!" one of them shouted after him.
Such good people, Coalition citizens were!
---
"A what, Sub-lieutenant?"
At that very moment, the door leading into the small security center flew open with a hydraulic hiss, and through it came first a body, and then a pistol.
Beletsky's entire career was about to be decided in the next few moments. It was up to him, he knew. And think of the reward when he was able to put down the nefarious traitor and earn a glorious medal of the Revolution!
Except the actual revolution had other plans. Before the Sub-lieutenant could spin his chair about and bring the gun from his holster, Petrovin had already fired. This time the place of impact was directly in the left eye socket.
Beletsky's illustrious career ended where it began: sitting down.
Konstantin caught a glimpse of some officer or another shouting on a screen. Most likely the Area Director.
He had a few seconds.
Letting his Nagant drop to the floor, next to the unconscious guard who was now serving as an impromptu doorstop, Petrovin ran to the console and roughly shoved Beletsky's husk out of the seat. Tense to the point of being unable to completely sit himself down, the crazed soldier began punching keys as quickly as he could find them on the board.
There was only one way he'd get off this deck. And there was only one way they could stop him.
Sure enough, the security systems were redundant; any attempt to deny access could be overridden by another station console, and any system shut down from here could be brought up from another spot. All he could count on was the time lag it took to do so.
And what better time lag than booting up the entire thing?
Even as the officer on the screen shouted to those beyond the scope of the camera, Petrovin's fingers were working with coordinated purpose. For once, in the grand scheme of things, the Coalition had been unable to predict its own problems ahead of time, and in the milliseconds it took them to compensate, the blow was struck.
The room went dark. In fact the whole deck went dark. Only the faint, red glows of emergency lights, independent of any primary system, remained.
"Boot that up, svoloch'i..."
Konstantin kicked off from the console and made a mad dash for the doorway, scooping up his precious Nagant revolver along the way.
"The natural idealism of youth is an idealism, alas, for which we do not always provide as many outlets as we should."
Had there been power, piercings alarms would be drowning out his own thoughts. But, instead, there was simply a red-tinted abyss, and at any moment some foul creature of some sort would leap from the shadows...
... Like now.
The darkness was violently broken by a barrage of gunfire and tracer rounds, as slug-throwers from a group of Coalition Marines spat metal in Petrovin's direction. He skipped around a corner and bolted; that they had missed the first salvo was nothing short of miraculous, and wouldn't happen twice.
The trek to his destination had rapidly turned into a frightful chase in the dark. Konstantin was straining his eyes in order to not run headlong into a wall or closed doorway, but it didn't always work.
Of course, the four Marines on his tail were conveniently equipped with a brand of fully encased combat suit. A purpose-built strike team. Among other things it afforded them such useful tools as Infrared sensors and body-armor on top of already burly frames and nasty firearms. They didn't have the advantage of the deck's bug-tracker, but at this rate that was inconsequential.
To his credit, door security was no longer an issue, but every closed hatch had to be pried open by hand, giving his pursuers added closure he could not afford. Sooner or later they'd have a clean line of fire down a hallway, and that would be sooner rather than later.
Petrovin, running full tilt with few alternatives, slipped into the other side of a divided corridor and smashed into a tall metal frame. Whatever it was fell to the ground with a loud clatter alongside its unfortunate victim.
He reached out and grabbed it.
A ladder. A service ladder, of course, and chances were there was...
Indeed, in the faint red din of an emergency light he could spy an opening in the ceiling, a panel displaced by a technician. Had the tech been recalled by the inevitable evacuation? There was no way to tell in the chaos.
Chaos which was catching up with him like a whirlwind.
The sounds of heavy boots banging against the decking in tandem prompted Petrovin to spring to his feet and assess what was left of his situation.
An inset doorway, a ladder, and a hole.
---
"The door's shut," a Marine grunted over the short-range radio in his helmet, "He took the other corridor."
The four slipped into the other side of the divided corridor and stopped in front of a tall metal frame. Service ladder, with an open access panel in the roof above.
Along with a heat signature.
"Light it up."
With a sound akin to an artillery battery discharge, the four Marines unloaded dozens of slugs into the ceiling, up and down the length of the hallway. Anything inside was surely shredded into bits suitable for disposal.
"Check it."
A Marine bounded up the ladder and shoved his head, and rifle, up into the hole in the roof.
"Dead?"
"Not the right target, it's-"
Before the Marine could inform the rest of his squad of the unfortunate mishap, the ladder was violently kicked out from under his feet, sending the bulky figure tumbling.
Out of the darkened crevice that was an inset doorway on the side came a thin figure which rounded the falling behemoth and wrapped an arm around the neck of one of its compatriots. Petrovin's other hand slapped onto the Marine's trigger finger and wrenched it back, sending a hail of metal into the rest of the squad, including the man who had ended up on the floor.
He found it clever, bypassing the security clearance on their guns by using their own fingers. How very clever.
Not that it stopped the unwilling Marine from elbowing him in the chest. The blow had such a force that it knocked the wind out of his lungs and sent him flying backwards, tumbling along the floor. Blood red from emergency lights whirled in a pattern he couldn't stomach, and in conjunction with the blow he felt ready to wretch his guts out onto the floor.
Except vomiting was something only the living could afford; by the time he'd stopped his roll and ended up on hands and feet, the Marine had already whirled around and was bringing his rifle to bear.
Moments. Mere moments would determine the course of this fiasco that he had inexplicably felt compelled to undertake. To have it end in some dark hallway by "the Marine that got away" had an awfully pathetic ring to it. What was he to do, a quickdraw with his revolver, necessitating a perfect shot in the neck or eye socket? Freeze and die like a dog, forever resigned to ignominy and disgrace in his own, short-lived opinion?
In fact, there was nothing left but rage.
Pure, mindless rage, brought on by a mind so broken that it knew not the difference between right and wrong, foolishness and courage, life and death.
So he rushed.
He bolted from his position like a track runner and let out the loudest scream he could muster, hoarse by dryness and excitement. He even began pulling out the vibroblade at his belt for emphasis, not that he could draw it in time to stop the inevitable chunk of metal which would slice through his body.
But he rushed anyway. He threw himself into the fray like his forefathers before him, motivated only by that one common feeling that every human felt when surrounded by insanity and injustice.
Rage.
And for a moment, the Marine's mental programming failed him, and in its place reigned that one common feeling that every human felt when faced with an enemy who simply defied all logic and refused to succumb to the influences of everything else around him.
Fear.
The Marine took a step back onto the spread-out corpse of his comrade in arms, his boot slipping over the unexpected surface and compromising his balance. His finger kept true to the original plan and pulled the trigger, but the shot went wide, into the ceiling, as he fell backwards to the ground. Recognizing the error after the fact, he let go of the trigger to stop the needless waste of ammunition.
Before he could realize his next error, Petrovin was already on top of him, with a humming vibroblade.
Primal, vicious, screaming, he brought it down square onto the Marine's forehead. The best personal armor in Sirius was no match for a blade that was capable of piercing solid steel. Vibrating at ultrasonic speeds, the blade slid through the man's helmet and into his brain as if it were a sheath.
Dismayed at how clean it had been, Petrovin wrenched the blade back up and stabbed the Marine's face again.
And again. And again.
Droplets of blood were flung from the blade at high speeds, spraying it across his face, arms and torso like a fine rain.
With one last anguished cry, Petrovin pulled the blade out and rolled over onto his back next to the corpse he'd just brutally hacked to pieces. There he laid, dazed and twitching, as the better parts of his mind tried to regain control now that the crisis had passed.
He stared idly at the ceiling and thought of what was left of the technician in the rafters.
"Thanks, Tovarisch," he managed to mutter with a crazed smile.
Aching, bleeding, Petrovin leaned up and got to his feet. They probably heard what he'd just done for kilometers; there was no time for rest here.
Turning around, he wobbled down the hallway at an uneasy pace and stopped to pry open the next door.
Without warning, what was left of his lunch went spraying onto the floor; by this point the burning bile in his throat simply added insult to injury.