Distant Worlds Volume 2 Read online

  Katerina nodded. Even that modest effort elicited a pained groan.

  Dmitri glanced back at the door. Inga wasn’t there. He leaned closer to his daughter.

  “What about the dreams?” he asked. “Did they come back too?”

  The girl bit her lower lip and nodded.

  A dull, buzzing tone sounded from the apartment’s main hall.

  Someone at the door.

  Dmitri wondered if Inga was expecting company. He patted Katerina’s hand and stood to leave. “I’ll be right back.”

  Katerina grasped her father’s wrist. “Papa, don’t…”

  A tingling sensation shot up his arm, like he’d plunged it into a bucket of ice water.

  The door tone buzzed again.

  “I’ll get it,” Inga said.

  Images flashed through Dmitri’s mind: citizen managers in riot gear, the caseless round of a submachine gun clicking into the chamber, a woman with eyes like cold iron.

  He heard the door open.

  Then Inga screamed.

  Dmitri wrenched his arm free from Katerina’s grasp and rushed out to the hallway where a squad of four citizen managers armed with submachine guns poured in the front door to the living room. The first one to enter caught Inga by the arm and wrestled her to the ground.

  “Remain calm, Citizen!” The CMO agent clamped handcuffs around her wrists. “This is a routine sweep.”

  Two of the citizen managers spotted Dmitri in the hallway and raised their weapons.

  “Hands where we can see them, Citizen! Now!”

  Dmitri did as they commanded. They closed in on him quickly. One manager kept a gun trained on him while the other forced him against the wall. After binding his hands, they dragged him into the living room and deposited him next to his wife. She looked at him expectantly, but he could do little more than shake his head in response.

  The penalties for interfering with representatives from the Citizen Management Office could be quite severe. Although Dmitri’s status as a citizen afforded him certain legal rights, refusing to cooperate with a CM sweep was not among them.

  The fourth manager inspected each of the hallway’s rooms while the others went about securing Dmitri and Inga. He stopped when he peered into Katerina’s room and trained his submachine gun on the girl’s bed.

  “Here, Commander! She’s in here!”

  A blonde woman wearing a long, black coat glided in the front door. Her face had a certain ageless quality, she could have been anywhere between twenty and fifty. She glanced at Dmitri and Inga as she moved across the living room, her black boots clanking against the ceramic floor. Something about her eyes, cold and gray as weathered iron, made Dmitri shudder.

  The woman’s coat bore no patches or insignia, but even a fool could tell what she was by her demeanor: an Otdel Neobyasnimii Yavlenii agent, responsible for investigating “unexplained phenomena” throughout the ACC.

  She strode down the hallway and entered Katerina’s room. Nearly a minute went by before she emerged.

  “Sedate her and bring her downstairs,” she said to the nearest manager, her voice flat and emotionless.

  Dmitri’s mind raced, trying to muster some legal argument that might prevent them from hauling his daughter out the front door. If the ONY was interested in her, chances were good that she might not return.

  “Wait!” he said. “You can’t just take her like that! She’s a citizen! What crime has she committed?”

  The woman stalked into the living room and glared at him. “Your daughter is no longer a citizen. As of this moment, she is the property of the Allied Corporate Council.”

  “What?” Inga said, her voice wavering. “You don’t have the right to—”

  “I have all the right in the world, Citizen,” the woman said, raising her voice only slightly. “Your daughter poses a potential danger to herself and those around her. Count yourselves fortunate that I’m choosing to overlook your failure to report her recent health irregularities. Your negligence could well have endangered everyone in this building. In light of Citizen Dmitri’s outstanding history of service, however, I’ve recommended only routine surveillance until such time that loyalty can be affirmed.”

  Two of the citizen managers carried an unconscious Katerina out of her room, her arms and legs bound tightly. She looked so frail in their rough grip, so vulnerable, like she might snap in two at any moment.

  Inga burst into tears when she saw her.

  The ONY woman went on talking, but Dmitri couldn’t hear her. Instead, another voice rang inside his skull, bashing against the back of his eyes like a hammer striking an anvil.

  Help, Papa!

  Rage and desperation wracked his limbs, forcing him onto his feet.

  “No! Put her down, damn you!”

  He took one step forward before the ONY agent calmly pressed her hand against his chest. A jolt of electricity surged through his body, causing his muscles to seize up and his jaw to slam shut so hard that he cracked a tooth. He withstood the searing pain for only a split second before he lost consciousness.

  Somewhere in the blackness, Katerina’s voice called out to him.

  Podolsk, Russia: December 13, 2416

  The shelter’s roof caved in during the night, crushing six people and badly wounding eleven others. What little heat the overworked generators produced escaped out the ruined ceiling, plunging the temperature inside well below freezing. By the time morning finally arrived, seven more people had died of exposure.

  Dmitri was no structural engineer, but even he could see that the shelter would be a death trap until the roof was repaired. Several families left after sunrise, gambling that they could find space in another makeshift shelter before nightfall. Those who remained were already clearing away the wreckage and doing their best to patch together a temporary roof. Search parties assembled to go scavenging the surrounding neighborhood for materials while the children pulled rivets and screws from mangled steel beams. All the while, snow drifted down into the shelter and accumulated on every surface, promising to soak everything the next time they fired up the generators.

  Inga was still asleep when Dmitri returned to their tiny space, wedged between a cement support column and another family’s pile of weathered blankets. Their neighbors had gone to lend a hand with the repair efforts, leaving no one else within earshot.

  Dmitri nudged his wife with his tattered boot. “Get up.”

  She rolled over, groping for the bottle she’d carried to bed last night. Dmitri reached over her and snatched the bottle up before she could find it.

  Not that it mattered much. There was nothing left in it.

  He tossed the bottle aside.

  “Get up,” he said, pulling her off the ground.

  She swatted at him and muttered something unintelligible, but Dmitri eventually got her to sit up. A whitish film covered her eyes, and her breath smelled like spoiled milk.

  “Pull yourself together,” he said. “I need you to lend a hand here getting the roof fixed.”

  “Roof?”

  “Yes, the roof. Part of it caved in last night, remember? If one of us doesn’t pitch in with the repairs, they’re liable to throw us out of here.” Dmitri hoisted Inga to her feet.

  She wavered, but managed to keep her balance. “You’re not staying?”

  Dmitri shook his head. “It’s Monday, remember? They’ll be looking for new workers down at the transit station.” He leaned close, whispering into her ear. “If everyone here is working on the roof, I’ll have a better chance of getting chosen. A good week’s pay might be enough to get us out of this shithole.”

  Inga nodded, but her expression didn’t change. “Right. Whatever.”

  “Inga, listen to me.” He turned her head, forcing her to meet his gaze. “We can do this. We can do it together.”

  She sighed. “Right.”

  The look on her face made him sick to his stomach.

  Hundreds of men and women gathered at the Podolsk tra
nsit station every day in the hopes of finding paying work. A fleet of armored buses showed up at 0630 hours, followed half an hour later by hovercars carrying labor subcontractors. Aspiring laborers queued up to be assessed, and the lucky ones got to board the buses and be whisked off to sign a twenty-four hour contract to work in the city’s factories. The paltry salary terms were non-negotiable, especially since anyone who balked at them had a hundred people in line behind him willing to accept any pay rate, no matter how small, if it meant getting a contract. After their contracts expired, the weary workers would be loaded back into the armored buses and paid as they staggered off back at the transit station.

  If they were lucky, they might get home before getting mugged.

  No one knew exactly what they would be asked to do until they signed their contracts, but the pace and conditions of the work were uniformly grueling. Workers who fell behind their benchmarks or made too many mistakes had their pay docked, sometimes to the point where they left owing the factory money. Anyone who failed to finish a shift due to injury or sheer fatigue could be arrested for breach of contract.

  Mondays, however, were particularly hectic. That was when subcontractors from Moscow came to the transit station hunting for workers. They offered seven-day contracts for menial labor in and around Moscow, usually on construction or renovation projects. While the work sometimes proved just as dangerous as a job in Podolsk and sometimes paid even less, the promise of a solid week’s pay was enough to drive desperate laborers to desperate action.

  If the subcontractors didn’t bring armed security forces with them, the crowd would surely consume itself in a bloody riot. An undercurrent of violence festered throughout the transit station, like a coiled spring ready to erupt with a dreadful, kinetic force. Fights broke out in the lines with alarming regularity, and every few days, a man might slit another’s throat to move up in the queue.

  Dmitri often thought about the classroom lectures he used to give about how worker demands and regulations crippled the economies of old. He wondered how many of his students accepted that narrative.

  Did he believe it himself at the time?

  He couldn’t remember anymore. Living the last year as a non-citizen left little him time to ponder the true course and nature of the ACC’s history.

  Of course, he had other, better reasons for not thinking about the past.

  “Next!”

  Dmitri stepped up to the folding table where a Moscow subcontractor waited with a NetMini in hand. Two security guards armed in heavy riot gear and submachine guns flanked the makeshift workstation. A small camera device on the table whirred into motion to focus on Dmitri’s face as he approached. The facial recognition scan would connect his face to his PID in the network database, which would deliver every scrap of information about his identity and personal history to the subcontractor’s NetMini.

  The Moscow man didn’t look up from the holoscreen projection.

  “Dmitri Saranov. You were a citizen until last year. Failed to cooperate with a routine Citizen Management investigation. That right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No formal charges or fines. Just a revocation of citizenship status. Sounds to me you got off light.”

  Dmitri said nothing. The camera’s scanners were monitoring his metabolic rate and a multitude of involuntary facial reactions. He didn’t want to give it anything more to work with.

  “It says here you’re fluent in German. Is that still true?”

  “Yes, sir.” He considered answering in German, but decided it best not to try the man’s patience.

  The subcontractor nodded and tapped something on the holoscreen. He didn’t need to ask anything else; the camera’s biometric scanner would tell him whether or not Dmitri had any health problems and update his PID file accordingly.

  “It’s your lucky day. We have a German firm building a new shopping center near the outer roadway ring. They need workers who can interpret for the ones who don’t speak German. Your non-negotiable contract will run for a span of seven days, subject to renewal at the firm’s discretion. Do you accept these terms?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Moscow man waved another security guard over to the table. “Escort this one to bus seven. Next!”

  Dmitri could hardly believe his good fortune. He’d never been selected for a long-term contract. The few times he hadn’t been dismissed out of hand, his status as a former citizen eliminated him from consideration.

  Trust was a hard thing to come by these days.

  The security guard led Dmitri through the electrified fence separating the armored busses from the crowd of aspiring laborers. They walked past the busses bound for the Podolsk factories and toward the newer, less weathered vehicles at the far end of the station. When they reached the bus labeled “Moscow 7”, the guard handed Dmitri off to another armed guard.

  “Got another one for you,” he said.

  After a quick nod, the bus guard gestured to the door. “Get in. Seat 13B.”

  Dmitri dutifully climbed into the bus. Half the seats were already full, with the other workers packed into the rear section. He made his way down the aisle to find his seat. Each row had space for six workers, three on either side of the aisle.

  Seat 13A would have been considered a window seat if the bus actually had windows. A young woman, probably no older than thirty, sat there drumming her fingers on her lap. She looked up at him as he slid into the seat beside her. The expression wasn’t a friendly one, but Dmitri felt an intense urge to speak all the same.

  “Morning,” he said, blurting the greeting out before he could stop himself. “Looks like we both got a lucky break today.”

  She grunted. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

  “There’s a lot of people out there that would kill us for these seats. You ever stop to think about that?”

  The woman glared at him. Dirt had worked its way into the lines on her face, and the dark circles around her eyes made it clear that she hadn’t slept very well for some time. Dmitri stole a glance at her hands, calloused and scarred. A few of her knuckles looked misshapen, a good indication that she’d broken several fingers in several places during her young life.

  “You’re a tumbledown, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Dmitri stiffened.

  He didn’t feel like talking anymore.

  “Yeah,” he said. “How’d you—”

  “How’d I know?” She scoffed. “You couldn’t hide it if you tried. Decent skin, happy to take whatever handouts you get from on high, the way you walk like your feet don’t step in the same shit as ours; anybody with a shred of sense could sniff you out.”

  Dmitri leaned back in his seat and chewed at his lower lip. Deep down, he knew she was right. It had been hard for he and Inga to get a space in that crumbling shelter. No one trusted anybody in Podolsk, but tumbledown citizens were especially suspect. Everyone assumed they were just waiting for a chance to fuck their neighbors over in some scheme to reclaim their citizenship status.

  “I’m sorry for bothering you,” Dmitri said. “Didn’t mean anything by it. I just talk when I’m nervous sometimes.”

  Another laborer, a big man with a broad chest and a slightly hunched back, plopped into seat 13C. He didn’t so much as look at anyone else before lowering his head and closing his eyes.

  Dmitri looked down and fidgeted with his hands while more workers filed onto the bus.

  “How long?”

  He glanced over at the woman in 13A. She didn’t look any friendlier, but at least she wasn’t scowling.

  “About a year,” he said. “I think. It was around this time of winter, at least. I remember nearly freezing to death the first week. My wife came down with something. Must have lasted a month. She never quite shook the cough.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “Plan?”

  “You tumbledown types always have a plan. Some way to get back in good with those high-class corporate cunts in
the big city, back to your soft beds and your fancy meals.”

  Dmitri shook his head. “Not me. The way I got sent down, there’s no going back.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That so, eh? Must have been pretty bad.”

  “Well, it doesn’t take much when you step over the wrong line.”

  “What happened?”

  Dmitri took a deep breath. It had been a long time since he dared to tell anyone about that day.

  “My daughter was sick. Headaches, nausea, that sort of thing. We didn’t think much of it until the day the ONY came for her. I… interfered.”

  The mention of the feared secret agency caused her to draw back a bit.

  He continued. “When I finally came to, I’d already been scheduled for deportation from the city.”

  “And your daughter?”

  He shook his head. “No idea. We never saw her again.”

  The woman stared at him, her expression finally softening into something that almost appeared friendly. “I’m… sorry. Nobody deserves to lose someone they love like that.”

  Dmitri met her gaze for a long while. He had an impression that she spoke from experience.

  She held out her hand. “My name’s Ninel.”

  “Dmitri.” He shook her hand.

  They went on talking while the bus filled up, Ninel telling him about her previous work experience and Dmitri explaining the dire state of his current shelter. When the last laborer sat down, a guard boarded the bus and called for silence. The bus pulled out of the transit station and rolled northward, climbing the on-ramp bound for Moscow. Without any windows to peer through, Dmitri couldn’t watch the industrial ruins of Podolsk give way to the sprawling citizen apartments of the Moscow suburbs. The districts along the outer roadway rings were modest, even pitiful, compared to the glimmering environs of the innermost rings where the ACC’s leading executives and board members resided, but compared to the dismal conditions of Podolsk, they were practically luxurious.

  About an hour later, the bus came to a stop and the guard ordered them to disembark. Dmitri followed the hulking brute in 13C down the aisle, Ninel walking close behind him. They emerged from the bus to set foot in a world wholly unlike the one they’d left. Moscow’s brilliant skyscrapers were visible on the northern horizon, their peaks towering far above even the apartment high rises of the city suburbs. To the east, about a hundred yards from the parking area, the shopping center’s plastisteel framework rose from the frozen ground like the unearthed skeleton of some antediluvian beast. Hundreds of workers swarmed around, over, and through it while heavy equipment steered newly arrived, prefabricated pieces into position.