LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Copy that!”

      “Chezhin and Nagulin, eat quickly, and we have to keep moving.”

      I checked around just in case, but found no immediate danger. We were in a relatively secluded spot that the German convoys crawling along the roads didn't care about yet.

      “Fall in line,” the Sergeant commanded quietly as we finished our can of stew and ate the rest of the bread, “Listen to the battle order! Given the unfavorable change in the situation and the death of First Lieutenant Fyodorov, our main task is to get to our troops as soon as possible. As a senior officer, I take command of the squad. My deputy is Red Army man Nagulin. We will break through to the east by the shortest route. We move stealthily, do not engage in combat with the superior forces of the enemy. Whoever opens fire without orders – I will shoot him personally. Any questions?”

      “Comrade Sergeant, where are we on ammunition?” I immediately asked, “My ammunition is all used up.”

      “Weapons and ammo for inspection!” The Sergeant nodded, and was the first to take the magazines out of the ammo pouches.

      We had three rifles and forty rounds of ammunition for the five of us. It wasn't just a paucity, it was nothing at all. Pluzhnikov gloomily examined this wealth and gave out a somewhat unexpected solution for everyone:

      “Chezhin, Nagulin and I take the rifles. Chezhin and I get ten rounds each, Nagulin gets 20. Sintsov goes to the head patrol. The rest of the group sticks together. Chezhin, you watch the rear. Nagulin, you're the sniper anyway. You don't go forward, you choose your own position and cover the squad's actions.”

      “Copy that!”

      “Any questions?” The Sergeant looked at us again. “Well, if there are no questions, let's move out.”

      After all, it was the East. The Sergeant's logic was quite understandable, and I did not argue. First of all, everything was so mixed up right now that I couldn't tell which way was safer to go, and secondly, I still couldn't clearly explain to Pluzhnikov the reason why we shouldn't go east.

      I wasn't going to reveal my capabilities to anyone. Too many forces here would want to put them under their control, and it was not in my plans to become a puppet in the hands of the powerful. So I had to relate any of my words and actions to the possibility of rationally explaining them within the framework of existing realities, as well as the level of knowledge and skills that an ordinary Red Army man, albeit a hereditary hunter and taiga resident, might possess.

      We cautiously made our way through the woods, looking around carefully, and I also strenuously pretended that I was expecting some kind of nastiness from every bush, although I knew perfectly well that the nearest Germans were now four kilometers away and were on foot on the road to Talnoye. It was the rear units and infantry hurrying after the mechanized formations that had surged forward and had almost closed the ring around the Soviet armies trapped in a pocket.

      My thoughts were far from optimistic. Perhaps I initially chose the wrong strategy and underestimated all the dangers that awaited me at the front. Or maybe I overestimated the advantages that high-tech equipment and satellites in orbit gave me. It seemed to me now that it was a simple and uncomplicated matter to part with my life in the situation I found myself in, but that surviving and achieving my goals, on the contrary, seemed a rather non-trivial task.

      What prevented me, for example, from appearing before the local authorities in a flying suit, with a plasma gun on my belt and a bunch of all kinds of wonderful gadgets that would make everyone here fall into a reverent stupor? Nothing prevented me, well, almost. Would you like, Comrade Stalin, to win the war with few casualties? Go for it! With my group of satellites, your generals will always be ten steps ahead of the enemy in matters of reconnaissance in any depth, all the way to Berlin and the Normandy coast. Do you want minerals from deposits you don't know about and have never heard of? No problem! Here they are, one can see everything from the satellites. Do you want new technology? I can also give them to you, but your scientists will have to work hard with them, as our levels of development are too different. But it is still possible to make a breakthrough on this issue. That sounds great, but… What's next?

      And then they'll put you, Lieutenant Irs, in a golden cage with a diamond toilet bowl and a bunch of the best girls you choose, and you'll be forging the country's shield, but, most importantly, not so much a shield as a sword. And around this cage Comrade Beria's best men with the most advanced weaponry in the world, which you yourself would place in their hands, will stand in three rows, and they will have strict orders to eliminate the "alien" object at the slightest threat of it falling into enemy hands. And, of course, to immediately destroy the said object in any of his actions which may directly or indirectly endanger the life and health of the leaders of the Soviet state, as well as its Leninist-Stalinist foundations. Is this the life you dreamed of, Lieutenant?

      No, thank you. It is better this way – through the woods, with a primitive rifle in hand, under the threat of being shot or hit by a shell fragment at any moment, but without a gun to your head and the affectionate voice of the Commissar of Internal Affairs over your ear. Because to give what I have to the authorities of any state in this world is only to ruin everything. For the world and for myself.

      Of course, this world lived somehow without me, and I think it would have lived for some time, but it is not the first and not the only one. There are many primitive human civilizations scattered throughout the galaxy, and there are even more dead planets where humans once lived. Barely five percent of such worlds survive to the level of development of our Sixth Republic, or rather, only the Sixth Republic itself has survived. Most human civilizations burn up in the apocalypse of nuclear war, perishing completely or rolling back to the level of the Middle Ages, aggravated by irreversibly destroyed ecology and hereditary diseases.

      Of the few civilizations that have managed to stay on the edge and cross the chasm, most are dying as a result of man-made, ecological, or social disasters, or often all three at the same time. They are slowly killing the nature of their planet, with their own hands they are turning their own children into appendages of electronic devices, for which virtual spaces become closer and clearer than real people, they legalize drugs and all kinds of perversions, they reform the educational system so that to disaccustom people to think for themselves. More and more decisions are given over to artificial intelligence, which seems to be controlled and understood by its creators, but only up to a certain point. It seems to them that all this is done for people, for their own good, to improve the manageability of society, but at some point a critical mass of hidden contradictions, negative changes in ecology, small but critical errors in the management systems of giant production complexes is accumulated… And an explosion occurs.

      And then each civilization has its own unique path to the abyss. Letra showed me footage taken on one of these worlds by scout drones and scientific satellites. In general, this information was considered secret, but not so much that my girlfriend strongly feared the consequences of its disclosure. And then I was scared. Maybe for the first time in my life I experienced such a feeling of fear.

      That world died from weapons that got out of control, and those weapons combined the latest developments in psychotropic poisonous substances, advanced nanotechnology and combat viruses. The strain that broke free was not killing living things – it was changing them. The virus itself was only a transport – a capsule for delivering psychotropic poison molecules and nanomachines, compactly packed inside the protein and lipid shells of the viral particle, into the affected organism. The psychotropic drug, entering the bloodstream, subjugated the human mind to the sole purpose of transforming all the people around him into the same ideal and perfect creatures as himself. The nanomachines that infiltrated the body made the infected person strong, insensitive to pain, hardy, and even highly intelligent, in his own way. But all this was short-lived. Such violence to the organism burned it out in a few months, but as long as the host was alive, it acted cunningly and sophisticatedly, trying to infect as many people as possible. The tricky thing about this weapon was that the infected person, after just half an hour of malaise, would feel rejuvenated and full of energy, and this would become visible not only to him, but also to those around him. All diseases, including chronic ones, receded, people felt better, their

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