The marsh was a cold, grey hell. For four hours, they had pushed through it, following the trail Zoya Koval had found. The partisan moved like a wraith, a slim silhouette against the skeletal trees, her feet finding solid ground where there was only sucking mud. Sineus followed, his greatcoat heavy with freezing rain, the water seeping into his boots. Behind him, Kulagin moved with the steady, uncomplaining rhythm of a man who had walked through worse. Morozov, the political officer, struggled. His clean uniform was stained with filth, his face a mask of exhaustion and disgust. He was a creature of offices and meeting rooms, and the raw, physical truth of the world was an insult to him.
Sineus’s goal was simple. Find Sokolov. The man was a loose thread in the fabric of the state, and his job was to pull that thread tight. The thought was automatic. It was the logic of his profession. But the image of the silent safe house, of the shimmering wound in the air, kept returning. It was a piece of data that did not fit the equation. A stain, as Kulagin had called it.
The rain turned to sleet, sharp and stinging. Zoya stopped. She did not turn. She simply raised a hand, palm flat. The signal was clear. Contact. Sineus moved up beside her, his pistol already in his hand. Through the mist and the falling ice, he saw him. Fifty meters ahead. A figure stumbling through the waist-deep, black water of a bog. Dr. Viktor Sokolov.
The scientist was at the end of his strength. Each step was a monumental effort. He was not running. He was just moving, propelled by a will that had long since burned through his body’s fuel. Sineus gave a series of sharp, practiced hand signals. Kulagin moved to the right, a flanking maneuver to cut off any possible retreat. Zoya faded into the reeds on the left. Morozov stayed back, his hand near his own pistol, ready to observe and report.
Sineus advanced. He moved directly toward his target, the cold water rising up his legs, a brutal, numbing shock. He did not feel it. He was a commander closing on an objective. The world narrowed to that single point. The splashing of his own movement. The rasp of his breath. The dark shape of the man ahead.
He was ten meters away when Sokolov finally stopped. The scientist turned slowly, his face gaunt and pale, his eyes hollowed out by exhaustion and something else. Not fear. Resignation. He stood in the icy water, his shoulders slumped. He had nowhere left to run.
— It’s over, Doctor, — Sineus said. His voice was flat, carrying easily over the water. The pistol in his hand was steady.
Sokolov gave a weak, rattling cough. A thin smile touched his lips. It was a terrible sight.
— No, Commander. It’s just beginning.
— On your feet. You are coming with me.
Sokolov made no move to obey. He simply watched Sineus, his gaze unnervingly calm.
— I will. But first, you will see why I ran. You will see the proof.
— I have seen all the proof I need, — Sineus said, his mind flashing to the three dead men in the apartment. — Three dead agents.
— They were not agents. They were jailers, — Sokolov replied, his voice gaining a sliver of strength. — And they were not the first. They will not be the last, unless you see. Unless you understand.
Morozov called out from the bank.
— Commander, do not listen to his lies! He is a traitor! Secure him now!
Sineus ignored him. The man in the water was not behaving like a cornered traitor. He was behaving like a man with one final move to make. A man who had planned for this exact moment. The doubt, the small fracture in his certainty that had begun in the safe house, widened. He had to know. The price was a few minutes of his time, weighed against a lifetime of serving a lie. He paid it.
— Show me.
Sokolov nodded. He reached slowly into his coat, his movements careful, deliberate. He pulled out a leather satchel. From it, he produced two items. The first was a bundle of thin, rectangular sheets of quartz, each one etched with impossibly fine, shimmering lines. The Sokolov Cipher. The second was a small brass cylinder with a crystal lens at one end. A projection device.
— You are a man of duty, Commander Sineus, — Sokolov said, his voice low and intense. — A man of a noble house, serving a state that despises nobility. You believe in the hard right. I know your file. Volkov chose you for your integrity. He is counting on it to make you blind.
Sokolov twisted the base of the brass cylinder. The lens at the end began to glow with a soft, pale blue light. He aimed it at the sheets of quartz. An image flickered into existence in the air above the black water. It was ghostly, made of shimmering lines of light, but it was perfectly clear. It was a schematic. A monstrous engine, vast and complex, with a central core that pulsed with a sickly energy.
— This is the Oscillator, — Sokolov said. His voice was a dead monotone. — The Red Directorate’s final solution.
The image shifted. It became a map of the front. A city Sineus recognized. A red circle was drawn around it. Then the circle filled in, becoming a solid disc of blackness. The city was gone.
— It doesn’t conquer territory, Commander. It erases it. It projects a wave of pure oblivion. It cuts the memory of a place, of its people, of its history, from the fabric of the world. A clean slate. Volkov’s words.
Sineus stared, his knuckles white on the grip of his pistol. This was not war. This was something else. Something profane.
The image changed again. A graph. A single line that started low and then curved upward, steeper and steeper, until it was almost vertical. An exponential curve.
— But the memories don't disappear, — Sokolov whispered, his voice cracking. — The pieces you cut away… they rot. They pool together. They become a cancer in the script of the world. A void that eats reality. We called it the Whispering Plague.
The final image appeared. It was a transcript of a conversation. Sineus recognized the formatting of a Directorate intelligence file. He saw General Volkov’s name. He read the words, projected in cold, blue light. …collateral damage is high, but the strategic benefit of total historical denial is absolute. The growth of the Plague is an acceptable cost.
Acceptable cost.
The words echoed in the frozen marsh. The projection died. The blue light faded. There was only the grey sky, the black water, and the quiet hiss of the sleet. Everything Sineus had believed in, every order he had followed, every man he had lost, it all rearranged itself into a new and monstrous shape. His loyalty was not to a state. It was to an engine of annihilation. His service was not a sacrifice for the future. It was fuel for the end of the world.
He was not a soldier. He was a functionary in a suicide pact.
The weight of his uniform, of the medals on his chest, became unbearable. They were not symbols of honor. They were marks of shame. He had not been enduring the past. He had been helping to erase it, and in doing so, erasing the future. The shift inside him was a physical thing, a tectonic plate grinding into a new position. Ignorance was a luxury he no longer had.
He looked down at the water. His own face stared back at him, broken by the ripples of the freezing rain. It was a fractured reflection. But this time, it was not the face of a stranger beside his own. It was just him. The commander who had followed orders. The man who now knew the truth. Two halves of a broken whole, staring at each other across an impassable divide. The image was clearer than any mirror. It was honest.
He had his proof. He had his choice.
The rain slowed to a whisper. The grey light of dawn began to filter through the skeletal trees.
