Home at Last

by Alex Sapegin

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Then tell me, how could my daughter’s friends get their hands on a flash drive with video materials of the third group?”

  “I don’t know, Iliya, but I will do my best to find out,” the general said tiredly, rubbing his gray temples. “All this is at least strange.”

  “Strange?” Kerimov spat. “For God’s sake, look in your own office, Leonid. I’ll personally twist the guy’s head off who threw that crap on Irina.”

  “You couldn’t have forgotten it at home yourself?”

  “No! Your guys make me put my balls on the table before I go, count every tooth… they check everything! Not to mention a data storage device! How would I get it out? Like a gold watch, in the butt[S7]? Do I look like an idiot?”

  “Still, until the investigation is over, you do not have access to the sites of the second and third groups. Don’t glare at me. The order does not come from me. I, too, have bosses and commanders over me. And you thought that all this was independent and uncontrolled? I won’t deny my colleagues or try to varnish their reputations. It could be the game of certain profile structures persons or even our, as you say, ‘offices,’ and maybe even worse. N-ville and the project have so many ‘sworn friends.’ They can offer a lot of money, including six-figures. Perhaps someone took a check and is now playing against you and us to discredit the management of the facility. We’ll look into all possible versions of events.”

  “And what can I do?”

  “The first group will remain with you. Since you are now a public figure, and there is an intergovernmental agreement with the Chinese, get ready for a week-long business trip to the facilities under construction. You won’t believe it—the Chinese can surprise anyone. The pace of construction is crazy!”

  “You’re good at getting off topic. We weren’t talking about the Chinese three minutes ago.”

  “Iliya, I can’t do anything else. The decision is not mine. I cannot change it! Access to the object is suspended.”

  “What if Andy returns?”

  “Iliya, what are you, a little kid? I don’t think it’ll be for long. Nothing will change in that time!”

  * * *

  “He’s back! Mom, where’s Dad?” Olga went into her parents’ room in the middle of the night. “Andy’s back! He’s there! Where’s Dad?”

  “He went on a business trip.”

  “He left without saying a word to me?” she said, upset.

  * * *

  An hour later, a short transcript lay on the table of a man with great authority.

  He came back… The man thought for a long time. Perhaps, we should try…

  Somewhere on the outskirts of N-ville. Secret scientific research center…

  Colonel Igor Gennadievich Lantsov, head of the internal security department of the secret R&D center, stood up and pushed in his desk chair, then walked around the desk. Four measured, calm, unhurried steps, and he stopped in front of the chair where the head of the third group sat, called in to his office. The young scientist, pondering something to himself, raised a worn-out look at the Colonel and, catching the fury that swam in the depths of Lantsov’s ice-gray eyes, somehow tensed up and squeezed his knees with his fingers. Lantsov towered over the young man like a grizzly bear. In a few seconds, the long-held fury broke loose.

  “All my life I thought that in Russia there were three problems: the fools, the roads, and the fools who build the roads, but you opened my eyes to another archetype. Worse than a fool is a love-sick idiot! Tell me, Chuiko, are you aware of the concept of confidentiality? Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not aware!” he boomed. “Not one iota of awareness in your head. Do you understand that Irina’s father was the first to be framed by her actions?” Chuiko lowered his head and rested his gaze on the floor. His knuckles turned white.

  “Where are you headed with your chicken brains,” the security guard continued. “If I were Kerimov, I wouldn’t allow you within a cannon’s firing range of my eldest daughter! I do not understand how you could be appointed the leader of the third research group! Instead of brains, you have cottage cheese. Recalling the not too distant past—a chatterbox is a godsend for a spy. It’s a shame Irina Kerimov became a spy, and you turned out to be a real chatterbox. Not only did you tell her about your work, you even managed to buy into her requests to find something out about her brother.”

  This last phrase reflected Lantsov’s cunning; secret services had been leading all the employees of the center and members of their families for a long time. The acquaintance between Irina Kerimov and Paul Chuiko could not go unnoticed, especially since Kerimov himself introduced his daughter to the young man. After the lengthy conversation between father and daughter, Irina became somewhat calmer and sharply reduced her circle of friends at the institute. She stopped changing guys. Only a small list of a circle of friends remained, which included her friends from the role club, who were visiting the Kerimovs on the day Andy was transported to another world. The hairy guitarist never became a boyfriend to Irina, but the whole group did not stop being friends and meeting all together. The young people met at the birthday party of the boss of the scientific team. A small cozy restaurant was rented for the celebration, where everything happened.

  The security agencies immediately placed the promising scientist on their watch list. Love is a terrible force; it’s a weakness. There are many ways to influence a person to make him commit certain actions. Most of them were applied to Chuiko. The secret service was cautious about applying the same methods to Irina, rightly believing that her younger sister could somehow detect a trick and a threat. So, they acted through her friends, and on them through random, and not very, acquaintances. A word here, a phrase there, a whole sentence, or a contrived hypothesis; somewhere an action or an article in a newspaper slipped under someone’s line of vision at just the right moment. When several people are purposefully bombarded with indistinctly formulated, but directed information, they willingly or unwillingly begin to seek answers to questions and torment those who, in their opinion, can give explanations.

  Of those in the friendly role-playing company, Irina was the one to act, and she, having received no answers from her father and younger sister, applied her whole arsenal of feminine charms to the young scientist she’d been introduced to. The girl instantly figured out that Paul was not indifferent to her, even very interested, and he did not have a single chance. In the center, he was “helped” to make the necessary decision, the right one for those who had a stake in it. A month later, leaving for the weekend in N-ville, Paul took with him a small USB flash drive with a cut of some video materials. The organizers of the intrigue couldn’t be happier with the young idiot. The successful operation gave the secret services an opportunity to put a strong leash on one of the research center’s leading experts (which they did not fail to take advantage of), and also to get a lever of influence on Kerimov through his daughter.

  Lantsov hounded the information leakage culprit for a long time. The Colonel was an excellent psychologist and knew what points to press. Paul, of course, was not a fool and quickly figured out what was going on, but his rifle could not compete with the main gun of the battleship. The Colonel needed someone he could trust, “one of our own,” and he got him, after untangling for him his web of duty, and describing the alternative with metal bars on the windows and a paltry menu.

  For the sake of clarity, Paul was shown neatly sewn sheets of paper with his signatures, where he swore at the start of collaboration to observe the regime of secrecy and stated that he fully understood all his responsibilities. As it turned out, the young man did not take full responsibility. What way out of the situation does he see for himself? Anything? Leave the guilty expression and honest eyes with a promise never to do so again in kindergarten[S8]. Here and now there were other rules and norms. If anyone decided to intercede on behalf of the renegade, he would be very much at risk. The Colonel would do so
out of the kindness of his soul and love for such remarkable person as Iliya Evgenevich. He leaned on who he had to and covered up the whole affair, but this service was not free. Covering for Kerimov (no matter how you spin it, Irina was the ultimate reason for the leak), he went against certain interested forces, and he needed a guarantee from the other participant in the informational mayhem. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Paul agreed. Under that kind of pressure, anyone would be game.

  “Well, did he bite?” the security curator of the scientific research center asked the Colonel, entering the office. Chuiko had long since left. He was in his small apartment and was on his second bottle of vodka.

  “Yes, major general.”

  “Good. But do work with him again. Find or create a few more sins. Put him on the hook so good that it’d be sticking out the other side of him. You have five days.”

  “Major gen—”

  “Quiet, Igor, I understand you perfectly.” The general rubbed his gray temples in exhaustion. “But we do not have a choice or the time to do something pivotal. That’s,” He pointed to the ceiling. “where they decided to play big. The devil take them. Is there anything to drink?” he suddenly asked his subordinate.

  The Colonel silently opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of strong spirits, a plate with a sliced lemon and two shot glasses.

  “For your nerves, Igor?”

  “I was just calming my nerves, exactly. It must be something serious if ‘Iron Aleksandr’ is looking to calm his nerves with a shot glass too?”

  “I wouldn’t say that… I just feel like the biggest scumbag on Earth for what we’ve got to do.” He took a gulp of alcohol. “Another.”

  “Are you trying to soothe your conscience? Never really saw you as the type.”

  “Hm, well, it turns out I do have a conscience, and it’s striking below the belt.” The general laid a thin folder in front of him. “Take a look. This is what you have to know. Read it now, I’ll take it with me when I go. You know, it’s probably age-related and I’m becoming an old paranoiac, but I’ve got a bad feeling. This whole thing with Kerimov won’t end well.”

  “You should quit everything and retire. It’s interesting. Wow, command’s giving the green light to ‘Operation Wanderer’ and is demanding we hold it before Kerimov gets back from China. What’s the weather like in Moscow? Someone’s really gone off his rocker,” Lantsov said in a surprised tone, having read the documents. “Who thought of the bright idea of pulling out the boy? The timing of the operation leads to interesting assumptions—why does command need the boy?”

  “That’s a good word… ‘retirement.’ Only, I’m afraid it doesn’t apply to me. My sins don’t allow me to relax. And about Iliya’s son, I have a few suggestions. Someone at the top began to stir up water; the strategists and analysts convulsively calculated all possible scenarios with our intervention. That’s gotta’ be it, Igor, no more no less, those jackals. As for the ‘kid,’ according to experts who studied the records of the massacre the younger Kerimov took part in, he could tear apart any Special Forces agent with his bare hands.” The general took a slice of lemon from the plate, sniffed it, and, gulped down the second portion of the harmful beverage, and put it back. “But the fact that we’ve been ordered to set everything in motion secretly from his father, I really don’t like.”

  “Now I understand your interest in Chuiko. Do you respect Kerimov?”

  “Yes, honestly! That’s why it’s disgusting, but orders are not discussed. Come here.” The curator took the folder. “Think about how we can attract Olga in such a way so that she doesn’t suspect anything. I warn you, the observers refused to work with her directly. They are frankly afraid of the girl.”

  Somewhere on the outskirts of N-ville. Secret scientific research center…

  The third group had worked a week in emergency mode. Half the power capacity of the center was aimed at providing its spatial installations. The war blazing in the north of the largest continent of the world under investigation—Ilanta—gave scientists and the military rich food for thought. In its scope, the other-worldly carnage was comparable to the First World War, but the motivating reasons for it were still shrouded in darkness. What made the tall blond northerners as a united group move from their location and collapse onto the mainland?

  The newcomers displaced nomadic tribes, which the scientists, without philosophizing slyly, called orcs. There were several unsuccessful battles in the first week of intervention—and the orcs headed south, joining other nomads whose skin also had a light greenish tinge, and attacking the rest. From Earth’s history, intelligent people know that despite the distances, news tends to spread with the speed of an avalanche, all the more so since the steel fists of the northern armies did not stop at the coastal steppes, but moved on to the interior of the continent, mercilessly destroying the greenskins.

  The troops’ speed on the march was comparable to the speed of the German fascist troops offensive in 1941. Scientists and observers from the secret service were in shock for some time. They could not understand how medieval-equivalent armies could move at such a speed and appear out of nowhere, until one day they saw this very method in action, driving everyone into an even deeper shock. Local magicians actively used the subspace. They didn’t need whole complexes of expensive equipment for that. The most they ever did was build high stone or metal arches; sometimes they installed two stelae. Most often, when they had to cover a distance of fifty or a hundred miles, there was not even that. A dozen gray-haired elders would gather, sing and chant for a few minutes, wave their hands, and a silvery haze arose in the air. Anyone who plunged into it would find himself in another place. No comments necessary.

  Three weeks later, the northerners attacked the eastern wandering nomads of the green orcs and human kingdoms, chasing a million refugees in front of them. Fierce fighting broke out in the foothills of the mountain range the locals called the Northern Rocky Ridge. Here, the tactics of the subspace shifts refused to work, and the Earthlings recognized yet another secret of the magical world—spatial shields.

  Even during the first window intelligence-gathering operation, scientists noticed stone structures reminiscent of the famous British Stonehenge, located in the spurs of the southern mountain massif, but they took them for religious buildings. They noticed them because near the buildings there was a sharp increase in the level of electricity consumption, and the window collapsed with the slightest careless action. Command decided to leave the local gods alone for the time being. As it turned out, Stonehenge had nothing to do with the cult of higher powers. Its main function was to generate jamming that blocked the construction of spatial transitions. A network of such shields was built in the north. By using shields, the defenders greatly slowed down the offensive of the armies of the invaders, who had to storm every city and fortress with a fight.

  A whole alliance of several races and kingdoms was formed against the invaders; it included humans, elves, the local analog of dwarfs, and some clans of gray orcs. The war broke out not only on the ground but also in the air. Hundreds of griffons and some rideable flying pangolins fought high above the warriors on the ground. Both sides used the magic animals like bomber and assault aircraft. In addition to the griffins, the combatants used various combat and reconnaissance golems. Other stone or iron creatures acted as tanks and were much more dangerous and deadlier, and certainly much more maneuverable and faster. The consultants from high-profile defense groups they hired licked their chops, dreaming of getting their hands on a couple of “samples.” Despite everything, the fierce defense of the mountain fortresses did little to help the Alliance. The trouble came from the other side.

  In tandem with attempts to break through the mountain passes, the northerners carried out a “cleaning” of the lands they’d seized. Dozens of punitive detachments, terrorizing the orcs, roamed in the west and east. As a result, some of the orcs who roamed in the western steppes gathered into one huge horde
, which rolled to the south-west. The kingdom locals called “Meriya” was crushed in a few days, and then the forest-dwelling elves came onto the scene. The Earthlings did not know all the vicissitudes of Alatar’s global politics and could not predict any particular events. The appearance at the walls of Orten of almost seven hundred thousand hordes with tens of thousands of human prisoners who bought life in exchange for unquestioning service to the orc magicians was for the inhabitants of the glorious city a complete surprise.

  Much later, the Snow Elves’ intelligence would learn that the “woodies” had given the “greenie” chiefs more than one pound of filthy lucre. The orcs hated the elves, but gold smoothed over the hatred. The Lordships of the Light Forest provided their green “allies” with all-around support, culminating in the construction of a big portal and the transfer of almost a million orcs to Tantre. The elves even sacrificed all their griffons for the success of the operation. King Gil’s intelligence uncovered information about an upcoming action to destroy the spacial shields, but the difficult situation in the north did not allow the monarch to allocate sufficient forces for air cover of the strategic facilities; his opponents played on that disadvantage. Four air regiments of one hundred and twenty griffons raided the spatial shields of the kingdom of Tantre.

  In two hours, the elves lost four hundred half-birds; the Forest’s air army ceased to exist, but it fulfilled the task. Tantre lost its shields from the west. In the shortest amount of time, the Lordships transferred the orcs and captured the borderlands of their eastern neighbor. At that, the elves suspended expansion, rightly believing that their opponents would be greatly weakened by the attacks of the Ariates and the “greenies,” who fell greedily upon them until they bled. Orten would come under siege; the country would be divided into two or even three parts, and the overripe apple would fall at the Lordships’ feet. They just had to wait a little. And by golly, elves know how to wait.