Interlude I: The Last Will and Testament of Senkouji Hagino

VDNKh Metro Station, Ostankino District
Moscow, Occupied Russia
Second Universal Layer

It had been a cold spring, and today was even colder than usual. Pyotr kept his raggedy jacket wrapped tightly around himself as he made his short walk to the Metro entrance. If he looked behind himself now, he'd see the sweeping spire of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space and, further away, the knobby spike of the Ostankino Tower as dark silhouettes against the afternoon sky. Pyotr didn't look back, though – there was nothing new to see, not for a man who'd been coming here since he was old enough to walk. A gust of wind ruffled his thinning hair, and then he was inside the station.

No one troubled him as he melted into the thin crowd, becoming part of the masses flowing under arched white ceilings and long lines of hanging light fixtures. The workers knew him down here, in one of the deepest terminals in the Moscow underground. They knew that, on a certain hour of every day, Pyotr put away his janitor's coveralls, signed out of the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics and boarded the orange line train running south.

They knew him, but they didn't know him. Pyotr Timofeyevich Kuznetsov – a nice generic name to go with his nice generic face. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither young nor old. Brown hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing scars or other marks. They knew him at VDNKh, but his was a comfortably forgettable persona everywhere else in the city... and that was just how he liked it.

Pyotr's work shift ended a solid hour before the afternoon rush, and his usual car was nearly empty. Only a handful of people had gotten on the southbound train already, at Sviblovo or Botanicheskiy Sad, and only a few more boarded at Alekseyevskaya – a mere echo of the volume this system once accepted. A mother and her two children got on at Rizhskaya, sitting directly across from Pyotr. He knew them and yet didn't know them: the woman was a clerical worker who had lost her husband and remarried after the war. Her elder daughter must have been born right around the time the invasion started. The other looked about ten years old: she strongly resembled her mother, but her eyes and hair were the blue and white of the alien occupiers.

There was a time when that kind of sight would have infuriated Pyotr, but he'd learned to keep it to himself. Ignoring the family, he let his eyes wander over the posters and broadsides spread along the carriage walls. His better-educated friends thought it an amusing irony that the Arume, who smugly looked down on their subjects' cultures, had so eagerly taken to the socialist realism school of art. It wasn't just about the propaganda value – they actually liked that old shit. Pyotr was never a great appreciator of the arts, but the idea made sense to him. It was the Arume, after all, who had done what Gennadiy Yanayev and his cohorts failed to achieve in August '91: turned back the clock and made Moscow look like it was once more the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist fucking Republics.

At Prospekt Mira, a familiar face transferred off of the brown line from Novoslobodskaya: Sidor Baryshev, a balding apparatchik with a significant paunch. "Afternoon, Petya," he grunted, easing into the seat immediately to Pyotr's right. "Rolling home?"

"Yeah."

"How's work?"

"Same as always." Pyotr stretched his arms in front of himself. "No excitement today."

"Mm." Sidor sat in silence while the train stopped at Sukharevskaya. "Ivan's whiskers are getting long," he said as it lurched back into motion.

On that remark, the conversation split into an entangled word-meaning duality. "What's he going to do with them?" asked Pyotr. What's the job?

"Trim 'em back, probably." A courier delivery. "You know he can never make up his mind... Anyway, have you visited Mariya lately?" Can you take it to Krylatskoye?

"Not in a while." I can. "What about her?"

"Here." Sidor delved into one of his coat pockets and took out a pack of cigarettes – Bluebells, one of the high quality, officially sanctioned brands. The Arume frowned on smoking among their own kind, but they understood the value in controlling supply of a high-demand commodity. "A little bonus from work." This is the package. "I'm trying to quit, you know, so I thought she might like them." I can't make the drop myself.

Pyotr accepted the pack. "They don't mind if you give these away?" Are the enemy looking for this?

Sidor waved his hand. "It's fine." They don't know about it. "Just make sure Mariya's boy doesn't steal them." It's for Herr G. "And don't you let them get squashed, either." It's a priority job.

Pyotr pocketed the cigarettes. "When have I ever squashed them?" Not a problem. "I'll tell her you miss her cooking." Anything else?

"Please do." That's it.

Sidor got off at Oktyabrskaya and the family of three debarked at Leninskiy Prospekt, leaving Pyotr alone with his thoughts for the last leg of his ride. A delivery direct to Herr G, is it?

The actual package was an Arume flash memory card, hidden in the bottom of the cigarette pack. He'd delivered many others like it, but it was a task of rare importance indeed which required him to go all the way out to Krylatskoye. Pyotr was still mulling over this when the train slowed and tiled walls of blue-striped white appeared outside the windows: Akademicheskaya, his stop. Leaving the train, he emerged onto Ho Chi Minh Square and crossed it, heading southwards along Profsoyuznaya Street.

Pyotr lived, together with a few hundred other Muscovites, in the lower floors of a building on the east side of the street which had once housed shoe and textile expositions. The makeshift accommodations were adequate for a single man with no dependents, and the neighbors had worries enough of their own such that they added none to his... Worries like keeping out the cold, feeding the kids, and fending off the skinhead gang from the travel agency over on Babushkin Street. The punks had a cozy quid pro quo arrangement with the Arume: their depredations kept the proles downtrodden and disorganized, and in return the authorities only laxly enforced their anti-vagrancy ordinances.

There were no skinheads on the street today, though – nor any gopniks, whom Pyotr detested equally. Unfortunately, this was most likely due to the two Arume public order officers who were slowly coming up the street towards him, unmistakable in their white tights and boots and blue-trimmed pullover tops which reached down to mid-thigh. Here to remind us just who is in charge, the man thought sourly. These were the aliens one really had to watch out for, with their roving eyes hidden behind tinted wraparound visors and their hands never far from their guns. Pyotr had been walking by when a couple of them shot a stray dog, one chilly morning a few months back: you didn't need a vivid imagination to work out what that firepower would do to a human body.

He walked with his eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of him, looking neither left nor right. Better not draw their attention, especially if they were feeling aggravated or – even worse – bored. Out here, in a borderline slum far from the brothels and other amenities of the occupation's stronghold in northern Moscow, the Arume were often cranky. Being stopped would mean trouble even if Pyotr hadn't been carrying any incriminating articles, because Pyotr had been in the camps and anyone who had been in the camps was automatically suspect.

The string of undecipherable glyphs burned onto the skin of his bicep still hadn't faded, eight years after they let him out. The stigma of being a POW hadn't faded, either. Pyotr couldn't remember how long it was since he'd last gone out in short sleeves... And it was their fault, it was all their fault. Them with their living bombs and their brainwave weapons and their huge spaceships. His hands curled into fists inside the pockets of his jacket as he passed the public order pair.

"...Stop!"

Godfuckingdammit.

Pyotr stopped and looked back over his shoulder. It was him they were talking to, all right, and one already had a hand on her sidearm. "Where are you going, citizen?"

Her command of Russian was pretty good, 'pretty good' meaning that Pyotr could understand more than every other word of it. "I'm going home," he answered, waving towards the next building on the left.

"Home?" The other one had already circled around to his front, trapping him between the two. "So well dressed, and yet you live in that hovel?"

Pyotr wanted to say something clever, but checked himself. Don't get angry. Things go wrong when you get angry. "Is there a problem?"

"We will see," the first Arume replied coolly.

Pyotr now saw that each of them carried a knife with a single-edged straight blade about twelve centimeters long, in addition to the standard pistol. Everybody knew the stories about what they did with those knives. "I've lived here for six years," he sighed. "It's all on the record... Look, you can check my ID – "

"Not here," the first one interrupted with a thin smirk. "No need to... make a disturbance." She motioned towards the far side of the street, twin pigtails bobbing. "We'll do it over there."

So that was it. They didn't actually suspect him of anything, but had merely seized upon him as an easy target for their amusement. He knew perfectly well how this game worked: you could play along with it and hope you still had your balls when it was over, or you could refuse and be dragged off to Lubyanka Square for 'subversion' – and then they would slice you up at their leisure.

The only way to win was to not play, and Pyotr had a winning hand for that. "Sure," he sighed, feigning ignorance of the aliens' intentions. "Whatever you want."

The Arume maintained their formation – one in front, one in back – as they led him across the road, over the central divider with its sickly trees, and then across the southbound lane. A bomber had crash-landed on the west side of the street during the invasion, wrecking the small buildings and razing the trees there. The stripped remains of its wings and fuselage were piled up at the corner where Profsoyuznaya intersected with Kedrov Street, and the great furrow of destruction it plowed had become a sort of neighborhood junkyard, a dumping ground for broken glass, splintered plywood and other refuse pulled from the surrounding buildings.

Pyotr could glimpse the Tupolev's silvery rudder, scarred yet still standing proud, as he walked between the garbage piles. The red star on it was weathered, but not worn away – a fitting reminder of his once-proud country's condition. Then it fell behind him, and he passed into the long shadow cast by the former offices of the Union for Chemical Safety. "Stop," the Arume in front commanded. "This will do."

Sure, Pyotr thought darkly. "I have my identification right here," he said, trying to look cooperative as he unzipped his jacket partway.

The alien pretty obviously didn't give a damn about his identification, but she kept up her own pretense of proper procedure. "Show it."

"Yes, yes." Pyotr reached inside, not for his wallet but for the hard lump tucked under his armpit. In a quick motion, he slid his fingers around the backstrap, pressed the pad of his thumb against the trigger and raised his left arm away from his side.

Pakka!

He didn't wait to see if the shot hit its mark, but attacked immediately. His free hand shot out and wrapped around the Arume's soft throat, choking off her cry of alarm as he lifted her off the ground. Pyotr lunged forwards, carrying her high, and with a furious effort slammed her down onto a length of rusted wrought-iron fence which jutted not quite vertically from the junk heap at her back. The alien's body jerked as the pointed tip of one of the uprights punched through the base of her skull, then went limp.

Pyotr spun away, leaving her dangling there, and went for the other one. His bullet had struck close to the navel and penetrated at a sharp angle, lodging itself somewhere in the back of her pelvis: if he'd used a Tokarev, it would have drilled her a new asshole in the bargain. She was trying to crawl towards her pistol, which she'd dropped upon being shot. Her visor had also fallen off, revealing wide, frightened eyes.

He would have loved to drag her away, to cut her with her own blade and make her experience what she would have gleefully done to him for the sake of a few minutes' entertainment, but there wasn't time enough for revenge. Pyotr picked her up, ignoring the flailing hands which clawed at his sleeve, and spiked her brain on the fence beside the first Arume. Time to clean up and clear out: he checked his back, making sure he was really alone. One gunshot, muffled by the jacket, could be easily missed among the other noises of the city, but he couldn't take that for granted – and in any case, the public order office would soon notice that two of its members had gone offline. He didn't have much time left to finish his delivery.

First things first, he told himself, and pulled out his lifesaver: a former police piece, rescued from Germany as the old government fell, with edges worn white from years in a duty holster. Just now it had jammed itself trying to eject a fired casing inside his jacket, but Pyotr couldn't fault it for something it was never meant to do in the first place. He nimbly cleared the malfunction, pocketed the dented brass cylinder and put the SIG-Sauer back in its hideaway. Then he set off, circling around to the north rather than simply retracting his steps. He needed to grab a few things from his lodging before he left, because chances were that he wouldn't be coming back after this.

Time to take the plunge and join D6 full-time.

He stopped at his so-called apartment only for a few minutes – just long enough to change out of the scorched and perforated jacket, pack up a few essential things and burn some papers which weren't really incriminating but weren't worth taking a risk on. The few cohabitants who saw him, if questioned, could only say that they last saw Pyotr Kuznetsov leaving the building in his winter coat, carrying a black nylon laptop bag. Since he often went out after coming home from work, they might not take note of his departure at all.

This was going to be a bitter night, so the heavier coat shouldn't draw suspicion by itself. The bag contained more or less everything of any value which Pyotr still owned: a handful of personal effects, including a blunt razor, a gap-toothed comb and a couple of worthless medals, along with his two and a half least threadbare sets of clothes. The bag also concealed the Heckler & Koch P8 he'd been keeping in a hole in the wall in case of night raids, loaded with armor-piercing rounds which were too hot for the P6 and cost him more than both the pistols together. He would have preferred something with even more punch for this kind of run, like an SR-3 or 9A-91, but a mere courier couldn't get such fancy toys.

It seemed that the alarm had not yet been sounded, and he was for the moment safe. Pyotr went back to Akademicheskaya, taking the northbound train this time. To get to Krylatskoye, on the west side of the city, he first needed to ride the orange line back to Oktyabyskaya and transfer to the brown line. At Kiyevskaya, he would jump over to the blue line for the last leg of the trip. He expected the hardest part to come at Kiyevskaya, where the security presence was heavier. Those guards were more concerned with the adjacent railway terminal, on the lookout for would-be terrorists coming in from other occupied territories, but they'd just as soon go after him if an alert were issued.

As the train rattled and banged towards Shabolovskaya, Pyotr's mind turned to Mariya and the wisdom of his cover story being a true story. She was a first cousin on his mother's side, a little younger than himself, and a single parent with a son just entering his teens. They lived in the ex-Microsoft Russia offices, a little ways northeast of Krylatskoye Station, but both spent their days nearer the center of Moscow. The boy attended school with diligence, and it was his mother's hope that he would grow up to be an integral part of whatever society ultimately rose from the ruins.

Mariya herself was employed at an Arume street a few minutes' walk from the Kremlin, shedding clothes and grinding against a steel pole under a spotlight in a dark room. When the bids went high enough, she withdrew to a secluded backroom and gave private performances. She was pretty, skilled with her tongue and well educated, traits which meant she had it good for a sex worker. She attracted the ideal clientele – Arume who were respectful and left generous tips, some of them so enamored that they would pay to have her to themselves for an entire afternoon.

He put this train of thought on hold while he switched trains of the Metro. Still no overt signs of alarm in the overseers' machinery: his luck was holding fast.

In Pyotr's admittedly vulgar estimation, Mariya rubbed cunts with more intelligentsiya in a week than he passed on his daily commute in a year. He resented that she'd embraced the new order, but he'd given up arguing about it a long time ago. At least she was using the money to secure young Lyova's future, which was worthy enough a cause for her cousin. Too bad this afternoon's clusterfuck meant he wouldn't be seeing her for a long while: she wasn't involved with D6 and hopefully still had no idea that Pyotr was. The best way to keep her safe from reprisals was to keep her in the dark, he'd convinced himself.

He had plenty of time to second-guess that choice on the way to Kiyevskaya.

They'd found the bodies, but weren't sure who was to blame – that was Pyotr's assessment after watching the security personnel when he got off the brown line. The assholes had good reason to be jumpy: among the myriad collaborators who enabled the Arume regime, the Metro guards were one of the most visible castes. Right now every man in that uniform would be thinking the same thing: Am I next?

It was a sore temptation. If Pyotr pulled out the P8 in here, most of them would die before they could unbutton their holsters... But that would put scores of civilian bystanders at risk, not to mention Kiyevskaya's ornate and irreplaceable decorations. Besides, D6 was a professional outfit and wanton acts of terror only hurt its cause. These small fish would get what they deserved when the real terror started, he reassured himself as he ascended on the escalator, just like the rest.

The thought was fresh in his mind as he came to the next hurdle, a checkpoint between the brown line and blue line areas. There were always at least two guards posted in these places, one of them always within reach of the alarm button. It was one of the few modifications installed by the invaders, together with a series of barred gates that would slam into place and isolate each part of Kiyevskaya from its neighbors once the alarm was tripped. It was all very precise and effective, but the weakest link in its chain was still the human one.

Pyotr quickly sized them up, evaluating their standing within the byzantine hierarchy. Most of these guys didn't wear name tags or badges of formal rank, but there were other ways to tell – whether or not they were getting extra food, whether or not they had smokes, things like that. Pyotr particularly paid attention to the grade of heat they were packing, a good indicator of how far the Arume trusted them. The bottom-tier Metro guards were issued a big stick and an 1895-pattern Nagant: seven warning shots and one aimed throw, in the pithy words of an expatriate Bundeswehr veteran. Loyalty was rewarded by gradual upgrades of firepower, first to newer .380 or 9x18 revolvers with moon clips, and then on to compact automatics.

The one guarding the panic button had a Makarov on his hip. He'd served for a while but without distinction, Pyotr guessed. The other one, slouching on the bench set against the opposite wall, was a different story: he had done something meritorious enough to earn himself a beat-to-hell assault rifle, a Kalashnikov too worn out to be issued by the occupiers' puppet army or the Moscow OMON – or to be stolen by D6. The imperfection of his masters' trust in him was reinforced by the allocation of only a single magazine. It probably wasn't even completely loaded – one third full, one half at most.

Mak on the left, Kalash on the right, and Pyotr had to walk through the middle. He started forwards, keeping his eyes on the floor... and then Kalash wiggled the polished toe of his boot.

Bzzzzzzzzt!

The gate just beyond the two guards dropped into place with a jarring clang, but the general alarm remained silent. Kalash stood up, lazily hip-aiming the AK-74 in Pyotr's direction with a loose, sloppy stance. Typical for the grade of shit permitted by the new regime, the traveler thought with disgust. Now that he saw the man's face more clearly, he realized he'd overestimated Kalash's age: this one must have been in elementary school when Pyotr was in uniform, and was definitely too young to remember much of the Yeltsin years. Either he'd been promoted for something truly exceptional, or else he'd gotten a head start on collaborating. Maybe he had informed on his peers, or even his parents? Others had been caught – and shot – by D6 for doing exactly that.

"What's that lump in your pocket, citizen?"

The collaborators played the same game as their Arume counterparts... Or rather, they put the same spin on the game their predecessors were playing back in the '90s: identify an easy mark, think up an excuse to make a stop and shake him down for a bribe, or bust him for disobedience if he wouldn't cooperate. The aliens did nothing to prevent it, for the same reason that they didn't act to curtail the skinheads or the abuses of power by their own kind.

"A pack of cigarettes," Pyotr replied, slowly pulling out the Bluebells. "See?"

The way Kalash's eyes fixed on them immediately told him that wasn't such a smart move. He shouldn't have assumed the man would only be interested in his money. "Expensive goods, citizen. What are you doing with them?"

"Present for my cousin." Other commuters were starting to pile up behind him, watching warily from a distance. "She'll kick my ass if I show up empty-handed again."

"Where is this cousin, citizen?"

"She works on Nikolskaya Street. Try calling – "

"A likely story." Kalash wanted those smokes, wasn't going along with anything that involved calling in the Arume, and was plainly aggravated at being outmaneuvered. "Your papers, citizen!"

"Papers, sure." Pyotr reached into his coat, meeting the guard's piggy eyes dead on. "I've got – "

Kaboom!

The floor shook under his feet. The lights flickered, dimmed for a second, then returned to full brilliance. Somewhere behind him, a woman screamed.

"What the fuck..?" Kalash hustled over to the kiosk occupied by Mak. "Where was that?"

Mak waved him off with his free hand, pressing one half of a broken set of headphones to his ear with the other. The color was steadily draining out of his face. "Oh no..."

"Attention, citizens, attention... There has been an incident in Kiyevskiy Terminal... All citizens are advised to evacuate the terminal and underlying Metro stations using the nearest exit... Report any persons behaving suspiciously to the nearest public safety officer... Remember, citizens: security comes through unity..."

Mak thumbed an unseen button, raising the barrier as the public address broadcast repeated. "This way, citizens!" he called over the murmurs of growing panic behind Pyotr. "Please keep calm and do not rush!"

The crowd surged forwards, carrying Pyotr with it into the next hall where another current of humanity was already streaming towards the same exit from a different part of the complex. As he followed their lead to the stairs, a figure in a long black coat stumbled into his path, hands fumbling with something in front of herself.

"Allahu ak – "

Pakka!

She pitched forwards, landing facedown on the lowest steps. The surrounding civilians pressed themselves against the walls or sank to the floor, crying out in alarm as Pyotr advanced, aimed at the back of her head and pulled the trigger until the slide locked back. No such thing as a one-shot stop when dealing with suicide bombers. He could hear Kalash yelling at him in the background, ordering him to drop the gun and all the other procedural bullshit, but he had no more time to humor that clown.

The dead girl was a 'martyr widow' who couldn't have been more than sixteen. She was probably quite a looker too, before Pyotr pumped seven FMJs into her skull. He gingerly pried the electrical switch from her hand and turned the corpse over, leaving dark blood smears all over the steps. From the front, she looked about six months pregnant – pregnant, he knew even before he tore away her clothes, with a softball sized lump of Semtex studded with rusty nails. The payload was a simple one, a single-circuit design with no redundancies. He took a few moments to check it for booby traps and, finding none, ripped the soldered leads off the battery pack, then placed the little plastic box on his other side. Leaving nothing to chance, he yanked the cylindrical detonators out of the orange mass of plastic explosive and tossed those as well.

"The bomb is disarmed. Keep moving, citizens!"

The authority in his voice and the seeming expertise with which he disassembled the IED convinced them to obey. Good thing, too – he'd just about used up all his leeway, as well as half of his affordable ammo.

"Hey!" Kalash yelled as the interloper scampered up the stairs. "Where the fuck are you going?"

Pyotr rolled his eyes and slammed the other full magazine into the SIG. I'm going to call a fucking taxi.

"You did a good job."

"Could have been better."

"Of course." Dmitriy Blinov took a drag on one of the Bluebells. "But you know, Fifteen, it's not every day that one of our men has to deal with two gop-stops and a Chechen attack in one afternoon."

D6 didn't use code names, the way they did in the movies. Its members were identified by GRAU indices, cryptic alphanumeric strings taken from the Soviet master catalog of military equipment. Pyotr was 8K15. Blinov, his handler for most of his time in D6, was 9P117.

"I'd like to think my adventure in Kiyevskaya counted for something." Pyotr hunched forwards on his cushioned crate and picked up the P6's barrel off the drywall top of the improvised table. "'But I know the Arume will think differently.'"

"Indeed." Blinov ground out the stub of the cigarette in an ashtray made from an ammo can lid. "You're sure this is what you want, Fifteen?"

"They'll know it was me." Taking a wire brush in his other hand, Pyotr commenced scrubbing. "All they have to do is compare the bullets. Either I get out of Moscow, or I stay underground."

"And you'd rather stay underground," Blinov concluded. "You know there's a quarantine period, right?"

"I know." Pyotr looked up at the roof of the tunnel high over his head. "There's just one thing – "

"It's Mariya, right? We'll keep an eye out for reprisals."

"I'd appreciate that... I mean, I know she's popular with the aliens – "

A door in the tunnel wall, originally built for maintenance access, opened with a bang. Out of it came Herr G, D6 member 11F638. Nobody knew his real name, just that he was another German who'd come to Russia after the defeat, a pro computer hacker who trimmed his hair with electric clippers and decorated his workspace, here in the never-finished extension north of Krylatskoye, with pornographic posters stolen by infiltrators raiding the Arume streets. He was a regular customer for Pyotr's deliveries, and the way his eyes glinted behind his cracked glasses told the Russian today's job was really something special.

"You need to see this," he announced in his characteristic accent. "You both."

Pyotr and Blinov exchanged a look: Herr G didn't invite just anybody into his domain. "Sure," said Blinov, brushing ashes off his pants as he stood up.

The nerve center was a room lined with shelves stacked floor to ceiling with computers, fans and rainbow bundles of cables. Monitors placed here and there displayed the output of programs written to solve problems far beyond Pyotr's level of comprehension, great secrets flashing by as the aging CRTs flickered in the dark. In the middle of the room was Herr G's test box, a grimy UltraSPARC II which was kept physically isolated from all networks. He used it to check incoming media for unwanted surprises – keyloggers, BIOS burners, any other fun things the collaborators' tech division might think up.

"Here it is," said Herr G, humming the Intel Inside jingle as he rolled his balding office chair off to the side and plunked himself down in it. One keystroke, and the open window expanded. Another keystroke and the video file started to play: the test box's screen was filled with an image of an Arume in a naval uniform with cape and cap, long black hair falling over her shoulders. As she looked into the camera and began to speak, giving what was obviously a carefully prepared performance, subtitles in Russian appeared at the bottom.

Pyotr witnessed the playback with growing bewilderment. "So..."

Blinov nodded. "Yes."

"Uh..."

"Quite."

Pyotr pinched the bridge of his nose. "...What the fuck did I just watch?"

"It was sent to us by another resistance group," Herr G volunteered, already rolling away to check on a wheezing Power Macintosh. "That's all there was."

"And what are we supposed... wait." The courier's brow furrowed. Herr G was an important asset to D6 for many reasons, but one feat in particular had made him a legend in the underground. "They want us to broadcast it? From Ostankino?"

"On all channels," the German confirmed, evidently pleased at his intuition. "The date and time will come later."

"Can you do that?"

Herr G grinned. The Mac made a soft daaaaa noise.

"Huh..." Pyotr didn't understand most of what the Arume in the video had been talking about, 'Ekaril' or whatever she called herself, but it wasn't aimed at the people of Moscow. In fact, those words of condemnation seemed to be aimed at her own race, something he'd never seen before. The aliens she singled out, that 'Shivariel' and the others – were they officials in the occupation? Architects of the invasion? Whoever they were, the intent was definitely to shake up their cozy little world. That suited Pyotr just fine, so long as it contributed to D6's ultimate goal.

In pre-invasion lore, 'D6' was the alleged KGB code for a second, highly secret subway system built to evacuate the Soviet government from Moscow in the event of the Cold War going hot. When the truth came to light, as the dust settled after the exploding girls ceased to descend, it turned out to be rather less exciting than some had imagined. The legend lived on, however, and gave its name to an underground army. The new D6 was born in the labor camps which the Arume had opened in an attempt to keep captured soldiers from vanishing into the civilian populace and organizing an insurgency.

They direly underestimated their prisoners' patience. Now thousands of men and women labored under the very noses of the occupiers, stockpiling arms, gathering intelligence and preparing for the day when they would come back into the light and take back the city... The day when the aliens would hang from every branch of every tree in Izmaylovskiy Park and Red Square would be painted white with their blood. It was going to be fucking epic and Pyotr was determined to be there when it happened.

The thought almost made him grin. Shaking off the premature euphoria, he looked to see whether the others had noticed. Herr G was busy rummaging through a box of CD-Rs, looking for something that wasn't a pirated Copland beta or a copy of Windows NT. Blinov was starting pensively at the image frozen on the screen, the program still showing the last frame of the video... Not the image itself, Pyotr realized after a moment, but the ghostly subtitle of Ekaril's final words.

I will return.