St Petersburg, European Federation, January 2035
Sasha Sokolov—Bruce Lee as he was called by his colleagues—squats down, nudging a bone fragment with the toe of his boot before picking it up with a gloved hand. Just in case it’s from a crab.
“Why Bruce Lee, if I may ask?” I venture.
He scoffs. “What, you so politically correct you can’t put two and two together?” He turns the bone over in his palm, inspecting it under the pale morning light.
“Nah, that one’s a deer jaw.” He tosses it aside like a piece of trash.
His job as a welder pay him well enough—I know money isn’t why he spends his Saturday mornings combing old battlefields with a metal detector and an unshakable focus despite what he says.
“Mom’s from Kyrgyzstan, Dad’s from Novgorod, a few hours from here,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “Thanks to her, the moment I stepped into the platoon room as the new guy, the older guys gave me the nickname thanks to my looks. It’s far from the worst.” He exhales smoke, offering me a cigarette for the third time in an hour.
He points across the field. “We landed over there. Forty minutes of flying and we were at Gorelovo Aerodrome. Just a few klicks from St. Petersburg International—though no one calls it that anymore. The 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment International Airport—a mouthful, huh? If you’re Russian, you just call it the 247th.” He waves his cigarette like a pointer. “They renamed it after us. How thoughtful.
“After what happened to the regiment in Ukraine, you had to be completely mad to enlist there, The ones who survived that war and hadn’t been discharged for a reason or another were as mad as they come” he mutters, sweeping his metal detector across the ground.
I don’t tiptoe around it. “Why’d you join?”
He glances at me, then shrugs. “Girlfriend got pregnant. Mom nearly killed her when she found out she was Uzbek. Her family wanted us dead, too. No job, no future. So I signed up. Enlistment bonus was half a year’s salary. And hell, we’d given NATO a bloody nose— the border battles. Thought, hey Sasha, worst has passed. Do your three years, get out with a fat paycheck. We haven’t gotten into a full war before, cooler heads prevailed! Didn’t sound so half dumb back then.”
He flicks ash off his cigarette, smiling grimly. “I liked that girl, still like her now. And I fucked up not wearing a rubber. Time to be a man. Own up. Not like the other dirtbag Moskals I used to hang with.”
He lets the silence stretch, scanning the dirt with his metal detector. Then, with a dry chuckle, he adds, “Next thing I know, I’m in that cursed Mi-17, twenty or thirty choppers flying over the crabs, five getting cut in half mid-air by those goddamn banshees. And me, just trying not to puke my guts out a second time as I saw my shitty life flash past my eyes everytime we hit turbulence.”
“It was simple. The refugee camp and the surrounding suburbs needed more time to evacuate.
We had defensive lines—hastily built, sure—but designed to stop German and American tanks. Solid enough. First line outside of the city fell but the other one just inside held. That’s what saved St. Petersburg for the entire war.
But the real reason? The crabs preferred the warmth. They did everything they could to push south. How they knew it was better there, I have no idea. But for every one that moved north, ten headed south or southeast.
At first, I thought I was lucky. I’d signed up voluntarily before everything happened. The moment one of those things set foot on Russian soil, the old leadership in Moscow had the excuse they needed—mass conscription. And I mean everyone.
Didn’t matter if you were a fifty-year-old construction worker from Chelyabinsk or a nineteen-year-old hipster from Moscow. Sure, in some places, you could pay your way out. But it got so bad they started executing recruitment officers for taking bribes.
Since I enlisted voluntarily before the war, I had already joined a better unit—more professional, less expendable despite the harsh training and absolute sociopaths in the ranks. If I hadn’t, well... someone would have dug up my body by now, just to sell my helmet or whatever was left of my gear online.”
He smirks, the sarcasm cutting through the bitter truth.
“Did they plan to get you out?” I ask.
“No, the plan was to hold the aerodrome, cause enough chaos behind enemy lines to relieve the pressure and give time for civilians to evacuate. Once that was done a counterattack from the second defensive line inside of the city limits would push all the way to the second defensive line in the outskirts, passing by us. Clearly nothing could go wrong. Not the second regiment supposed to be dropped from airplanes with more men and light fighting vehicles flying back the way they came. Not the units that were supposed to counterattack being nearly wiped out in the defence of the city itself. There reserves were north. The fucking lunatics at the army general staff we absolutely sure that the hundreds of thousands of NATO troops at the Finnish border would use this situation to invade and steal St Petersburg before the crabs took it.
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But honestly, we were too worried about our current predicament to care about that. I still remember the nasty fall I had as I dropped from the helicopter. The stock of my AK12 hitting my jaw. I was one of the first men out and despite all the training I hadn’t realized the helicopter had landed and for some reason flew up a meter again as if it didn’t want to stay on the ground.
It was a sight do. About twenty or so helicopters all arriving in unison. A regiment worth of men filling the tarmac. We were glad we didn’t have any of the crabs in close. As I layed down and covered my sector I saw the first crab shoulders raise far away. They were confused. Probably didn’t expect us to be this suicidal but they didn’t attack. They just stared at us before going back to their occupations. If they weren’t fighting or walking they were digging themselves in the dirt. Be it the small crabs or the towering beetles. That’s all they told us in the briefing. That they needed to regulate their temperature. That they’d die of cold if they weren’t active with their body. They needed to be dug in to heat the earth or mud around them to get some rest.
Someone panicked. We hadn’t received the order to fire—our officers were just as dumbstruck as the crabs—but then, out of nowhere, a single potshot rang out. And that was it. A storm of bullets erupted, flying from our landing area in every direction. The few KA-52s we had as escorts kicked into action, tearing into the treeline and buildings with rockets and gunfire.
We were fast. I was fast. Even with my body armor, all my gear, and a damn rocket launcher strapped to my back, I ran like hell when they gave the order to move toward one of the hangars. I didn’t hesitate. I sprinted so fast my squad leader was cursing behind me, yelling that I’d end up so far ahead I might get mistaken for a crab myself. I didn’t care. No way in hell was I staying in the middle of a wide-open tarmac if those things started firing back.
We took our positions—inside the buildings, the hangar, and the houses just outside the perimeter.
“Did you meet any resistance?” I asked, watching him examine a fragment of skull on the ground.
“Look at this.” He held up the piece. “Part of a beetle. See those trenches inside, like veins? That’s to help blood flow in the heat.” He casually dropped it into an empty dog poop bag and stuffed it in his backpack.
“Some scattered crabs,” he continued. “Ones that strayed too far from the pack, so to speak. The first few hours were quiet—too quiet. Like they knew our reinforcements, the BMD-4s and armored regiments, weren’t coming. Cowards didn’t want to risk landing aircraft on the strip after we secured it. A sick joke.
“For once, something had gone our way. But of course, there was no one to seize the opportunity. The old guard—the ones who came before us, the ones they sent to the meat grinder in Ukraine—had faced constant artillery, special forces, tanks, and airstrikes. Back then, the Ukrainians had blocked Hostomel’s tarmac with wrecked trucks to stop their planes from landing. And now? Now we were here, dealing with nothing but a handful of crabs, staring blankly like junior officers. There were so few of them at first that we actually started thinking about leaving the airport and attacking their flanks in St. Petersburg.”
Sasha switched on his metal detector, glancing at the screen before continuing.
“We never got the chance to make that call. They attacked from the south first. Not even the ones from the city—just fresh sea shells for the grinder. The guys held them off for a while, but when their scattered numbers turned into hundreds, our KA-52s stepped in. They flew so low you could see the pilots' expressions. Had to, because the banshees couldn’t tell the difference between buildings and helicopters. Would’ve been nice if someone had told us that before we lost 35 men on the way in.”
He lit a cigarette, gaze fixed on something distant.
“Then came the ones from the north. Like the southern crabs had called for backup. I didn’t see them myself—I was on the roof of a hangar with three others, manning a Kornet ATGM launcher.”
“What was your task?” I asked.
Sasha exhaled, slow and deliberate.
“Tripods. Fuck them and everything they stood for. Most people feared the beetles, and for good reason. But if you had experience, you knew—spot one, take it out from a distance. Immobilize it. Never let it close the gap. If you failed, you moved. Either fall back or shift a few hundred meters left or right. No sense in dying like a Pole.”
He caught my reaction to that last part.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” he added. “We admired them—for what they did, for how they bought time for their civilians at the cost of nearly their entire army. But so did we. Eight divisions—our entire Western Army Group—decimated in weeks. And still, the drunks and oligarchs in charge thought we should keep men stationed at the Finnish, Ukrainian, and Chinese borders.
"And we weren’t ready to nuke ourselves just yet. But the tripods? Fuck ’em." He spits on the floor.
"They were fast. Their cannons fired what—two, three rounds a minute? Accurate too, despite having to stop and aim. They’d tear through everything. Agile bastards, too—I swear I saw some lower themselves after firing, hiding behind trees and buildings while their cannons recharged. You’d see one hit a position, and five minutes later, it’d be five kilometers away, flanking the reinforcements. Fuck ’em."
He pauses, shaking his head. "That’s why I laid down in the cold and rain on that rooftop, just waiting for one of those pieces of shit to poke its nose out. I wasn’t the gunner, but I wished I was—just to see one go up in flames and know I did that."
"Any luck?" I ask.
"Got three." He nods, satisfied. "We did our job, held the line—until, naturally, we ran out of ammunition. Tell me, young man, traveling the world to interview old vets like me—aren’t you tired of hearing us say we ran out of ammunition?" He grins.
"Yeah, it’s a recurring theme," I reply in my best Russian.
"Hah, so it was for us." He exhales, eyes distant. "We were waiting for spare missiles from our makeshift depot when one of them reared its ugly head from behind the trees. Just for a few seconds, enough to get a shot off. If I hadn’t been on the other side of the rooftop, making my way to the stairs to carry up a missile, I’d have been vaporized like my mates. Turned to ash. Shared human remains."
He pauses, lighting another cigarette with steady hands.
"The guy behind the Kornet panicked as he saw that thing was about to fire, threw himself off the roof. Landed three floors down. I’ll let you draw that picture in your mind."
I swallow. "What happened next?"
"Got the fuck out of there." He shrugs. "Pulled back, tightened the cordon around the airport. Gave up the tarmacs, just held the administrative buildings and hangars. Fought like rabid dogs for three days. Lost half our men—you know that part already. They air-dropped us ammo, crates. By the time our friends broke through, we were down to our last five buildings.
"But we were expecting BTRs or BMPs." He leans forward, flicking ash onto the floor. "We saw American Bradleys."
I raise an eyebrow. "Were you surprised?"
He smirks, passing me a cigarette. This time, I take it.
"No. What surprised us was that the president got shot by one of his own bodyguards over this. Rather than admit we were all in this together—let the Westerners and the Chinese into Russia—he had to be put in an early grave. The geopolitics of it all? Lost on me. I was too busy sprinting toward a Bradley, some black kid offering me water. I hadn’t had a drink in 24 hours—I didn’t care if the guy handing it to me was from Baltimore or Moscow."
He exhales smoke, chuckling bitterly. "We fought our way back north, all the way to St. Petersburg. Stalin would’ve had a second aneurysm if he knew American tanks were fortifying there one day."