The agent froze over the frozen body lying in a torn plastic bag, paying his last respects to a comrade-in-arms. With a practiced motion, he lit a thermite charge, throwing it onto the corpse of the Red Army soldier, disfigured by death and prolonged transport.
The flame greedily bit into the dead flesh, its hiss accentuating the death rattles of the still-living GOR operative. The Salarian tried to pinch the artery to stop the bleeding, but his weakened hands merely slid powerlessly over the spacesuit, mangled by the punisher's fury. His blood slowly soaked into the sand, becoming black and lifeless.
A secondary detonation sounded. The remnants of fuel in the wreckage of the shot-down vehicle exploded. The shuttle, hit by an RPG, burned, smoking with dirty black smoke. Around the crash site lay other GOR fighters, broken like dolls. In the remains of the cockpit, the pilot, trapped in the mangled cabin, struggled, screaming, drowning out the roar of the flames. His kin did not bother to help him, more concerned with the preservation of the contents of the body bag, which had already cost dozens of lives.
The technologies of the USSR attracted other races. They were willing to do anything to obtain them, let alone disturb the peace of the dead, tearing secrets from the country from their stiffened bodies.
Looking at the chemical flame, the agent placed his hand on his wide-brimmed hat, saluting the fallen Red Army soldier. He would have said the customary words: "Sleep, comrade. May the tall grass be soft for you," but he couldn't, no matter how much he wanted to. He simply had no vocal cords. A terrible wound, leaving a horrible scar on his throat, had made him a silent terror for the enemies of communism and the working people. From now on, until his death, the enemies of the Motherland would only hear a gurgling roar.
The liquidator turned on his heel. The blued cheeks of the pistol, with red stars burning on them, flashed for the last time. Two quiet shots put an end to two more lives.
It should be this way. Every citizen of the Union, if captured, must be returned, and if killed, then revenge must be taken for him. Centuries will pass, but this will remain unchanged. Even if there were no order, he would descend upon the aliens with retribution. For him, it was an unacceptable sacrilege, even towards a dead comrade.
Glancing once more at the photo of his new target, the agent slowly walked towards his ship, hidden in the sands, slapping his flippers. Soon, another world would await him, driven by an order. The avenging sword of the proletariat must strike a new blow...
New York greeted the guests from Citadel Space with evening twilight and the shimmering lights of skyscrapers reaching for the heavens. The city, like a living organism, pulsed with energy, and its rhythm, unfamiliar to the aliens, was felt in every gust of wind, in every reflection of light on the glass facades. The local skyscrapers, seen for the first time by the aliens, were unlike the familiar spires of corporate towers or elite high-rises. Instead of the cold grandeur of capitalist megacities, a different aesthetic reigned here, a combination of functionality and harmony, where concrete and glass intertwined with the greenery of parks and the shimmer of solar panels.
Concrete and glass merged, framed by solar panels, sprawling trees that rustled their leaves in time with numerous wind turbines. It seemed as if the city itself was breathing, and its steel lungs were filled with clean air, purified by thousands of filters and living plants woven into the very structure of the buildings. It gave the impression of sandstone mountains, from the peaks of which waterfalls cascaded, surrounded by many hot air balloons. Fountains and vertical gardens flowed between floors, and aerostats floated in the sky, illuminated by a soft light, like the lights of giant fireflies.
Soviet engineers and designers, along with architects and artists, thanks to the power of science unbound by chains, managed to integrate urban development into nature so skillfully that the seam was invisible. There was no violence against the landscape here – only symbiosis, where technology served life, not suppressed it. The artificial and the natural entered into a voluntary union, intertwining into one, projecting an almost audible, beautiful symphony of harmony, which was only emphasized by the scarlet banners waving in the wind. They fluttered over the squares not as symbols of suppression, but as a reminder – here, man is not an enemy of nature, but a part of it.
Just as the city was beautiful from a bird's-eye view, so it was beautiful from the ground. The streets, wide and spacious, were drowned in greenery, and the sidewalks were paved with tiles that changed color depending on the temperature, creating a living pattern underfoot. The air was clean, and the foliage shone with unfatigued green. No soot, no smog – only the light aroma of blooming gardens and the freshness brought from the ocean. This very purity most amazed the alien guests. They were accustomed to sterile domes, to artificial atmospheres, but here nature and civilization existed in balance, and it seemed almost a miracle.
If Moscow was solid and ancient, filled with merchant solidity, with a measured rhythm, and Berlin was thoroughly provincial and unhurried, evoking a sense of rural peace, then New York was the personification of movement. It did not sleep, it did not freeze – it lived in an endless stream of people, cars, magnetic levitation trains, flying platforms, and pedestrians hurrying somewhere with smiles on their faces. All the cities together created a single ensemble, even though they were located in different corners of the planet, forming a picture of the Union as a whole.
Still, in the opinion of the Quarian, they were conspicuously prim, bordering on megalomania, even though they could afford it. But here, in this city, even monumentality did not oppress. It inspired. Any of their claims would sound like a libel, if not chauvinism, from representatives of another culture. It was not for them, who knew about their society's latent diseases firsthand, to complain or criticize. And there was no reason to.
The USSR was simply different, unfamiliar, and because of this, in the air, besides the fruity aroma, there was a sense of a catch, mixed with doubt about the possibility of such a thing in principle. Even visual evidence to the contrary did not help them get rid of the feeling of a musty fairy tale from ancient times, lodged somewhere deep in their souls. Perhaps it was indeed a fairy tale, but it lived, breathed, and shone before them in all its impossible reality.
Therefore, after admiring the city panorama from the top of the hotel, the guests went to sleep. Another journey awaited them in the morning…
"Here we are again…" I muttered quietly to myself, feeling absolutely nothing.
Sentient beings bustled around, following a guide, but for me, they didn't exist. Their hustle and bustle only intensified the memories of the last minutes of the Old World's existence. Looking at these walls, where all traces of the assault and the desperate, hopeless resistance had been carefully preserved, I felt only a phantom fatigue.
Then. Almost exhausted to the limit, after countless combat sorties, the storming of the Pentagon represented only a swift rest for us. It and its defenders were the last barrier separating us from our beds.
Now this place evoked almost nothing, only the breath of fallen comrades, who never woke up after death, was felt behind me.
See, comrade, that slave pillar,
That blocked the light with its presence,
We were chained to it long ago,
We have no freedom in chains.
We pull the yoke, sparing no strength,
Heeding the old lie,
As if the stronger and taller the pillar,
The sweeter the slave life…
The song, flowing from the speakers, too vividly illustrated the impression of those days – its rhythm was brisk, almost deliberately cheerful, as if trying to plug the emptiness behind the facade. But it was not these images that flashed before my eyes, and not these lines that sounded in my ears.
I saw something else. Dim streets where neon signs flickered at half-strength, as if saving their last energy. People in identical coats, hurrying under a low, smog-filled sky. A world where the polymer, which had changed not only science but also ourselves, had never been created. It would have been a gray world – not in an aesthetic sense, but in its very essence. A world without that strange, almost alchemical transformation that gave us new colors, new sounds, new ways of existence.
The "Future Radio" technology was a curse, not a gift. It didn't just catch signals from the airwaves – it fished out fragments of realities that could have been. Sometimes, from quantum probability, one could catch not just background noise – sometimes the truth was there.
Five minutes of video. A fragment of a TV show, accidentally recorded during an эфирная помеха (broadcast interference). They thought it was a glitch, a decoding artifact. But we knew.
We saw how it could have been different, to the quiet whisper of a song performed by the same voice that was now singing for tourists here:
Heard a legend,
As if once
This land was inhabited by giants.
As if they lived
A strange fate:
They were ready for work and for battle…
They knew they were right,
Their sickle and hammer,
They knew that the world was only temporarily divided,
That pain and sorrow are not eternal...
But they became petty. Alas, they became petty.
Alas, they became petty, petty.
Their descendants
Hide timidly
In the musty silence of office boxes.
They think standardly,
They don't dream of the distance,
They lifelessly reconcile credit with debit.
They dream small,
They think rarely...
Is there anything left of their ancestors in them?
All this was accompanied by a gray, dreary video sequence. A world that had not become unified. A world where collecting money was a desirable process.
A reality where the plastic world had won. Not metaphorically. Literally. Houses made of cheap composite, furniture – light, hollow, falling apart after five years. Clothes that don't warm, but only imitate style. Food that doesn't satisfy, but simply fills the stomach. And faces… faces just as smooth, unreal, polished to an unnatural shine.
This was the best inoculation against doubt. Yes, we wrote a fairy tale with blood, but all these sacrifices, in my opinion, were worth it. We broke, burned, wiped from the face of the earth those who clung to the old order. We remelted reality like metal in a crucible, and it came out different.
Let's stand, comrade, shoulder to shoulder,
Forgetting the old discord.
And the rotten pillar will shake
Of the dark ages' shame.
And the vicious circle will break:
A scarlet dawn will rise.
The vaults of palaces will become common,
And the trace of prisons will disappear…
The end of the song brought me back to reality. There, in line, stand my children, who never knew that world. Next to them is my wife, who is telling her alien friends about how she and I stormed the last stronghold of the former world.
The ships of the USSR are plowing the expanses of the galaxy, and hunger can only be read about in historical chronicles. Not a utopia, but a reality that stood for all this blood. Much more will be shed so that the light of this fairy tale does not fade. Nothing comes from nothing.
Once we dreamed of the stars, bound by the gravity of outdated orders. Now our beacons burn in the black abyss, and children laugh, knowing perfectly well how many lives their carefree laughter was paid for, because to forget such a thing is a crime.
"Dad, why are you frozen?" my daughter called out to me.
"I'm coming! I was just thinking a little…" I replied, feeling a smile appear on my face.
The peaceful sky above the heads of future generations was worth all these sacrifices…
Once Antarctica was an icy desert, but the whim of the mind and it surrendered to the power of manual labor. Where there were ice floes, grass grew today, and megafauna of the past roamed among the relict trees. Icy expanses gave way to emerald valleys, where among relict ferns, towering like ancient towers, giants of the past roamed. Diplodocus, slowly chewing juicy leaves, left deep tracks in the soft soil, and mammoths, covered in thick fur, trumpeted in the morning mist, like living horns, awakening the world.
The entire continent became a giant nature reserve, where science and dreams merged into one. The air here was crystal clear, filled with the aroma of pine needles and freshly cut grass. In the distance, beyond the hills covered with tree ferns, lakes sparkled, in which creatures considered extinct millions of years ago splashed.
The only large city on the continent – Zvezda (Star) – breathed this. Its streets, paved with stone, resembled pages of ancient fairy tales: here stood carved terems, as if descended from the pages of Russian folk tales, there – Japanese pagodas, shrouded in the haze of blooming sakura. In the parks roamed living characters from myths, from Scandinavian trolls to Slavic leshy, created with the utmost precision. Actors and robots created real magic.
Here, there was also room for corners from relatively modern literature. One could walk through the Shire or visit the house of the girl who survived, and then eat pastries, because it was time for tea. For those who wished, one could don a power armor and rush into battle for the matriarch Dora or indulge in meditation in an attempt to feel the intangible energy.
The city was not just a museum. It lived, developed, absorbed new stories. Scientists, artists, and storytellers worked side by side, preserving the folklore of the peoples of the Earth, so that no legend would be lost. Even alien guests could not hide their admiration for this titanic work.
While Ferrion, like any Turian, only looked with approval at all this and with what scrupulousness they tried to restore the way of life of ancient peoples down to the smallest detail, Lyra, as a Quarian, found a different meaning in this. Until her people became nomads, they did not treat history the way the Union did. What can be said, there were very few historical buildings on Rannoch. Old buildings were demolished without hesitation to make way for skyscrapers.
How much stranger it was that relics of the old world were preserved here on the Fleet. Once again, she realized how much her people had lost during their exile.
The Turian, on the other hand, simply enjoyed a piece of reality, ennobled, like the spirit world, thinking that it would be good to have such a town on Palaven as well. It should have a positive effect on the younger generation.
Having become ten years younger, he simultaneously gained wisdom, as if he had become older. Being in the USSR had changed him, and he saw nothing wrong with that. He looked at many things from a different angle and would be able to better benefit the Hierarchy, is that bad?
The Nechaevs simply enjoyed the trip, returning to childhood. Even adults sometimes need to visit Baba Yaga and listen to the stories of the Wise Cat…
When the ship rose into the sky again, leaving behind the green expanses of Antarctica, the travelers were silent, each immersed in their own thoughts. Ahead of them lay Atlantis – a man-made continent rising in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The enormous tower of the orbital elevator, like the mythical World Tree, pierced the heavens. The bridge connecting Atlantis to the mainland seemed like a thread connecting the past and the future. The city itself, descending in tiers into the depths of the ocean, became home not only to land dwellers but also to intelligent marine creatures who created their quarters here among coral reefs and underwater gardens.
Its lights shone from under the ocean surface, shimmering like precious stones, beckoning into the depths. Many small submarines and robots scurried in the water, resembling mythical sea animals…
Changing from a light aircraft to an orbital elevator gondola, they soared into the sky-high heights. There, beyond the clouds, shone the Moon, bathed in the light of atmospheric shields, embraced by a steel belt. It was time for the wanderers to return to the stars, for the world is much larger than the cradle of one race. The galaxy awaited, and its inhabitants were preparing along with it, for the communists had already made it tremble once with the tread of their heel. Would they show their military prowess again, striking so hard that everyone would be swept away, or would they create worlds… Only time would tell, recording what happened in the pages of history.
Now the Solar System was preparing to reveal its secrets to its guests. They had only to accept the truth that wandered with them somewhere nearby.