The yellow-brown, hill-covered, desert landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. Little brown shrubs peeked out of the relatively desolate soil.
Commissar Sasha Gradenski walked ahead of me, a thin smile painted on his pale face.
“Try to keep up, doc!” He urged me onward. “You don’t want to miss seeing this one. It’s going to be huge!”
I sighed and shook my head. The numbers were bad. Really, really bad. The dose rates in Ust-Kamenogorsk were still up to 1.6 millirems per hour, a hundred times what was deemed the “permissible rate”. Our small expedition had travelled across several villages surrounding Semipalatinsk Polygon. The samples I took from the village of Znamenka, now sitting inside my lead-lined case bore disturbing results. Three people in the little village had acute radiation sickness. The radioactive cloud from the last test had travelled over two hundred kilometers across Kazakhstan.
The previous report about the villages were obviously false. The doctor who had written them was either told exactly what to write or was terrified of being shot. It downplayed the danger saying that "the various issues in people’s nervous system and blood could not be considered as the changes which arose due to the impact of ionizing radiation”.
The old report explained that the people of Znamenka were "sickly-looking" due to “poor sanitation, a dreary diet and various diseases such as brucellosis and tuberculosis”.
I knew that this wasn't the case. I had recorded considerable radioactive contamination of soils, vegetable cover, and food. I wasn’t going to lie on my report. I was going to be honest, my future in the party be damned, my life forfeit.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked when we finally stopped our ascent to the top of the hill.
“Hrmmmmm?” Sasha lit a cigarette. “Our goal is to protect the motherland.”
“We’ve computed the yields on Besm-6! Why are we still doing the tests? You saw the villagers. Their hair fell out, Sasha! It’s not tuberculosis! It's radiation! We’re literally killing the Kazakh people in these little hamlets! The milk in their cows is radioactive. The soil is contaminated. Their homes are practically glowing at night!”
“You’re exaggerating things again, doc,” Sasha said. “I didn’t see nothin’ glowing.”
“You know that I’m right, damn it! This is lunacy!” I shouted exasperatedly. “How many is enough? A hundred hydrogen bomb tests? A thousand?”
“We have to make sure the designs work,” the commissar shrugged. “This one is going to be really big… but just you wait… next year. Ohhh, we’ve got something even bigger that'll make the Americans piss their pants.”
“How much bigger?” I wiped sweat from my brow. I felt like throwing up.
“It’ll be the ultimate bomb. The biggest hydrogen bomb anyone’s ever built. Krushev calls it the Tzar Bomba. It will have a yield in excess of 100 Megatons.”
“Kruschev is clearly insane,” I muttered. “This is insane. 100 Megatons yield is 3140 times more powerful than the combined two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki! When are we going to stop?”
"Don't worry! The Tzar Bomba's test won't happen here. It'll be in the Arctic, I hear!"
"So we're just going to irradiate the Arctic, contaminate the tundra for 40 future generations, poison the natives living there?!" I cried exasperatedly.
“You are lucky Nikkita allows for this sort of talk. You know, if this was back in Stalin’s time I’d already…” Sasha squinted at me making a gun-shaped gesture with his fingers.
I sighed again. Commissar Gradenski was my personal guard and also my warden. Wherever I went, so did he. He was the eyes and ears of the state, making sure I didn't do anything stupid. He was the human-shaped shackles in charge of me, directing my path across Kazakhstan. If I stepped out of line, he was technically allowed to shoot me with his Nagant.
“Our enemies won’t stop so neither will we,” Gradenski said. “Someday we’ll turn America into the Stalin’s strait with just one bomb, just you wait. Get it?”
“We’re going to nuke America so hard that it sinks like Atlantis?”
“That’s the plan.” The commissar grinned. “A beautiful, pristine ocean strait between Canada and Mexico.”
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
The commissar looked at his metal watch and then back at the desert. “Show’s about to begin, best hang onto your case.” He put on a pair of black goggles and handed me a pair.
I looked at the silent desert through the dark goggles.
“Five, four, three...” Gradenski counted.
The desert in front of us ignited, a blinding inferno blossoming from within. I sucked in air.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” The commissar asked. “Sorry, my timing was two seconds off, but hey… at least you got to see one live. Aren’t you happy?”
The hair on the back of my neck tingled. A titanic mushroom cloud many kilometers tall rose into the air in the distance. The boom had finally reached us, wind blowing dust across the desert. It was beautiful in a way, beautiful like a supercell storm but far more horrific… a specter of man-made death that would imprint its invisible touch onto the world for a thousand years.
“Do you think that there’s life after death, doc?” Commissar Gradenski suddenly asked.
“Uhrm...” I fumbled the briefcase. “A few people at the Academy think that there are common elements that define near death experience. They call it the wheel of Samsara, a machinery of the universe that recycles souls.”
“Souls?” Sasha scratched his face. “Do you think that a body can live on without a soul? Just keep going, if someone brought a person back from death? An empty shell of a person, just following the predetermined path, unable to escape from the tracks? Living on, but not knowing the difference?”
I looked at the commissar. The idea made me queasy.
“That’s what I like about you, Slava. You struggle. You don’t simply accept what you’re told. It's amusing. You’re like a little fish trying to find the limits of your bowl,” he added.
“Have I reached the limits, yet?” I inquired. “Are you going to kill me if I hand my honest report to the higher-ups?”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“No,” Alexander Gradenski simply smiled at me, his face suddenly growing even paler and longer, unnaturally warping in the hot desert air. “I think that you’re a predator like me. A little, lost predator that just needs to wake up, take charge and deviate from the path. I like what I see in you. I think you've got a great future ahead of you, my beautiful, little shark.”
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I awoke with a choking gasp. The horrid mushroom cloud and the pale-faced man in a red cap with a gold star on it, burned, shimmered, felt unnaturally imprinted into my mind as my dream refused to let go of me. My body was covered in cold sweat, the edges of my fingers cold as if I was touching ice just a second ago. The chilling sensation and the terror faded away. The past was behind me and I was no longer Dr. Kerenski, no longer in charge of anything, no longer bound by USSR. I was in Skyisle and I was twelve and I still had a future, had a family to protect.
Nearly two and a half weeks passed since the moment Kliss put collars on our parents and confined them to the house ward, making me and my sister into the people responsible for bringing our parents food or supplies from town. Thankfully, dad could do his carpentry from home as clients came to his workshop. Mom had a far more sour attitude as she could not go out for work and bugged me and Delta endlessly for things she could not get herself.
The Overseer had almost completely replaced Wiklogg as the mathematics Instructor. Delta and I were at the top of the class, showcasing what good, little, cooperative children we were. I could pretend to unlock the Soul Song anytime I wanted to, but Delta required time to fiddle with [Chrysalis] while she slept, to make the outside of her body seem like her System was unlocked, to slowly raise her fake level up.
Over time I managed to modify Battie’s Ward-Shield to repel 99.44% of Kliss’s [Charisma] making me completely immune to her. I was hoping that my search for another, bigger battery would pay off because I was getting tired of ripping the effects of the Overseer’s insidious, mind-control magic from Delta and other student's souls after each class. Sure, it gave me some experience and was a handy practice to destroy Kliss's hold on the students of Skyisle, but it was starting to get annoying.
The mountain sunrise painted the wall of my room pink. I woke up far too early because of the nightmare.
I rubbed the back of my throbbing neck and realized that [Infoscope 3] just pinged me as it crashed.
Last night, just like I did every night before heading to bed, I set NeuroVista to look for something of value in Skyisle, searching the forest-covered landscape for a usable battery while I slept.
The ping had come from the North-eastern direction. I focused on the memory of the event reviewing it with Neurovista.
[Infoscope 3] had encountered some kind of nothingness about 2 meters underground, having crashed against it just moments ago. It wasn’t the usual kind of nothingness that usually happened when I encountered a no-spy rune. The no-spy rune covered space felt distinctively… familiar to me, was pulsing with raw power that my Infoscope detected seconds before it was destroyed.
I stretched and went to the bathroom.
Delta was already awake, sitting on the edge of the roof and watching the sunrise. She waved at me to come and join her.
I yawned in response, waving back at her through the window. She was a skylark, waking easily with the rays of dawn and I was an owl, staying up late and figuring out how to save Skyisle.
Sliding the round window open I climbed next to her on the roof.
“Good morning, Slava! Someone’s up early,” she commented in Russian. “How’s things?”
The wind coming from the glaciers blew her white hair to the side as she smiled at me.
“I think that I found something of value at the edge of the valley facing the fault,” I said.
“Something like… what?” She asked.
“I don’t know yet. It could be nothing or it could be everything that I was hoping for,” I said. “I’m going to head there and find it. Want to come with me and check it out?”
“You bet your ass I do,” she nodded.
“How’s things on your end?” I asked her.
“Progressing,” she nodded. “I think I... almost got her. I’ve been slowly moving up the hive, infecting littleeeeest mites for years.”
“Oh?”
“Soon, I shall be a Queen Bee! Mwa ha ha ha ha,” Delta declared theatrically. “And then all shall bow before my striped might and despair.”
“Sounds good,” I nodded.
From what my twin sister told me, she was using her Astral spores as an [Astral Fungus] to try and infect the bugs in our garden. Her progress was slow since it was very hard to infect the soul of a living creature, but she persistently kept at it for over 10 years, aiming to dominate an entire colony or two to her will.
“How are things on the front of acquiring blueprints for a skyship?” Delta asked.
“Not great,” I sighed. “The skyships that land at the church to deliver the mail are covered in anti-spy wards. I still have no idea how they work.”
“Boo,” Delta declared
I shrugged watching as the sky lit up pink and orange.
“I’m worried about the reach of the Empire,” she said after a minute of silence. “How does the Empire view Ishikaria and Skyisle?”
“The Gregarius Empire views the nation of Ishikaria and Skyisle as a resource of future manpower,” I replied. “From the books my Infoscopes scanned in the church, Ishikaria is described as a Semi-Autonomous territory within the greater Imperium. Generation by generation, people like Kliss have been stealing the best and brightest away from Skyisle.”
“Vows,” Delta mulled. “So everyone in the Empire is like Kliss? That’s not good.”
“Gregarius is an Empire built on Vows,” I nodded. “It’s how the Empire keeps its citizens in check. I honestly feel like I’ve gone from one Soviet state to another... except instead of commissars it's Vows that watch over people here." I sighed.
“So... how many walk under the Vow to Equality?” Delta asked.
“Millions,” I answered. “The Empire has magitek tools and immense, complex machines made by high-artificers. Flying warships, living armor, tanks. Its legions are packed with specialist mages. The levels aren’t exactly mentioned, but they can do a lot if the books are to be believed. Overseer Kliss is just a little fly compared to the people standing above her and the people above her superiors are even stronger.”
“Damn it,” Delta growled. "And here I was hoping to make Kliss disappear."
“The odds are stacked sky-high against us from the start,” I exhaled.
It was just me and my soul-sister against the entire Gregarius Imperium. A deadly tsunami of professionals, artifacts and wealth could turn our way at any moment. The might of the Imperium could crush us whenever it wanted, to pulverize all of Skyisle. We were just a tiny mote in the eye of god.
I knew that we couldn't just vanish Kliss because behind her stood a thousand-some-year-old system, a bureaucracy, the purpose of which was to weed out aberrations like me, to exterminate souls that came up and claimed the place of another. I was concerned that it was only a matter of time until we were discovered, worried that my parents or my sister would end up dead because of me.
“Don't be glum," Delta said, having evaluated my expression. "Kliss doesn’t know that we’re Astral Phantoms. We just need to keep at it. Keep making Infoscopes and I’ll keep dominating mites. I believe in us!”
“Thanks,” I nodded.
We went downstairs and had a quick breakfast. I got a large backpack from dad’s workshop and stuffed it full of old tools, plus a large shovel, a bedroll and tent that he had from his days as an adventurer. Delta got herself a smaller backpack which she packed with wrapped sandwiches.
Two hex-lanterns that we cut off from the attic beams of our parents' house were now hanging off our belts. We were as ready as we were going to get.
We traversed north, quickly leaving the safe path. Thankfully, mom stopped putting tracking spells on us since the whole revelation of the prophecy. Plus, she could not chase after us, now that she was confined by Kliss to the Ward of our house.
The pine forest was gloomy and deep and I used my trio of Infoscopes to avoid Blood Elks, Hogbeasts, Vinewraps and other dangerous things, leading us forward.
In about thirty six minutes of walking, climbing over ravines and fallen trees we had reached our destination.
Green, wet, moss covered rocks lay strewn about.
Directly in front of us in a clearing next to a small lake stood an ancient… tower. It looked like a derelict, neglected, overgrown light-house. Purple flowers and shrubs hung from the huge rocks composing its base. A warped, steampunk-looking, bent metal structure was at the top.
“Wow,” Delta caught up to me, trudging through the ferns. “Hang on… I remember this place, I think.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “I remember this place too. It’s…”