no charge, of course.”
The general struck her to the ground. “You and your ‘girls’ have ten minutes to vacate this building, or I’ll nail shut the doors and burn this degenerate place to the ground with you in it. How many soldiers do you have here?”
The madam got to her feet and with a mingled look of resentment and grudging admiration-that of one professional for another-said, “Unless you placed guards at the side and back doors before you came in, none. The little girl at the top of the stairs-I doubt you even noticed her-was a lookout. All your geese have flown.”
“Thirty years in the military,” the general remarked to no one in particular, “and this civilian thinks I don’t know how to secure a whorehouse.” Then, to the madam: “Well? Assemble your harlots.”
The brothel keeper rang a bell and called up the stairs, “Quickly, quickly, girls! Everyone! Or you’re out of a job! Bring your outdoors clothing-you can dress in the parlor.” Already there were women in loose robes peering over the balustrade at the top of the stairs. These swirled about to go back to their rooms, while others, dresses draped over their arms, scampered past them. They were all smiling and serene with the indwelling presence of the Divinity.
Save for one woman who had not bothered to fetch respectable clothing, but stood proudly naked, revealing to all her zebra-striped skin. Apparently her mother had foreseen where she would wind up and paid for the genework that would enhance her status there. This woman’s eyes were dark and smoldering; clearly the God she worshipped was crueler and more pragmatic than that of her compeers.
“Ludmila! Where are your clothes?” the madam cried.
“Rubles were flowing like wine.” Ludmila’s voice was low and husky. “They emptied their wallets for me. All I had to do was ask.” Casually, she slapped a hand around the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and ripped it free. Splinters went flying. Lifting the post over her head like a club, she said, “Who was it who dared drive the marks away?”
“It was me.” The general calmly raised her pistol and shot the woman in the head.
The whores shrieked.
Standing over Ludmila’s corpse, General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka addressed the shocked room. “This is serious business. Whether they know it or not, everyone in Moscow is now under military rule. That means that whoever disobeys an order from a uniformed officer can be summarily executed. Is that clear?”
There were nods and mumbles.
“Good. Now you and you”-she jabbed her finger at two whores at random-“take this body and put it in a room that can be locked. Then secure it and bring me the key.”
Baron Lukoil-Gazprom chose that moment to enter the parlor. He glanced at the dead body, but made no comment on it. “We’ve got thirty-nine enlisted men. Plus one we nabbed on his way in. He’s drunk, of course, but a little action will sober him up fast enough.”
“It’s a start. Form them up into four squads. We can use them to raid the other whorehouses.”
Zoesophia cleared her throat. “Provided the baron agrees, of course.”
“Protocol be damned! It’s the only sensible thing to do, and the faster it’s done the better.”
The smallest of smiles blossomed on the baron’s face. It was clear that he found the notion of the two women coming close to blows amusing. But, “Good advice is good advice,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
“It wasn’t-” the general began, exasperated.
A messenger entered the room. He stopped in astonishment at the sight of the half-dressed trollops, pulled himself together, and saluted. “Ma’am. Sir. You ordered the Arsenal to send a wagonload of klashnys, along with bayonets and ammunition? It’s just arrived out front.”
“That’s just wonderful. We’ve got guns when we need soldiers.”
Yet another messenger ran into the room and saluted. “Ma’am. There’s a force of hundreds of civilians coming up Bolshaya Yakimanka. They have banners and they’re singing.”
The general spat on the floor.
“If I may make a suggestion…” Zoesophia murmured, flicking a glance at the prostitutes and hoping the baron would catch her meaning before the general could.
However, it was General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka who caught her thought on the fly and, turning to the brothel keeper, asked, “Are all your harlots as strong as the one who attacked me?”
“For tonight, I am afraid so,” the madam said apologetically. “It is this new drug, you see. It-”
“Never mind that! Your girls are under my command now. If I cannot have my soldiers, I’ll have the next best thing.”
“How many of them are there?” The baron’s mouth moved as he counted silently. “Plus the two who are disposing of the corpse. I’ll have bayonets fixed on enough klashnys for the lot of them. No ammunition, however, I should think.”
“No, of course not,” the general snapped.
Zoesophia looked thoughtfully after the baron as he went out into the street. He had not noticed that General Zvyozdny-Gorodoka had established her ascendancy over him. Which made him the only person in the room who hadn’t.
Once he was free of the drug-saturated confines of the City Below, the cold night air cleared Darger’s head wonderfully. But clarity of thought did not make him any the happier. Quite the opposite, in fact, for the seriousness of the rebuilt-cyberwolf ’s threat came home to him with full and terrifying force.
Quickly, he ran a mental thumb down the particulars of his situation. A creature that was the stuff of nightmares, yet undeniably real for all that, had promised him torture and slow death sometime in the very near future. Meanwhile, he was helplessly strapped down on an apparatus from which he, not being an escape artist, could not hope to free himself. Further, a genetic chimera engineered for strength and (to judge by appearances) controlled savagery was his own personal prison guard. Those were the negatives. Against all of which, he had no weapons, allies, or special abilities other than his own native wit.
Luckily, that would suffice.
Step one would be to get some sense of Sergeant Wojtek’s character.
“Sergeant, I fear that my wallet, being overstuffed with banknotes, is digging into my hip. I wonder if you could possibly-”
Sergeant Wojtek looked down at Darger with enormous scorn. “You don’t know much about the Royal Guard if you think that one of us can be so easily bribed as that.”
“Well, indeed, I am a foreigner and thus woefully ignorant of many important matters. Still, my situation is horribly uncomfortable. Couldn’t you let me up? I can give you my word as a gentleman that I will not attempt to escape.”
“So you can. But does that mean you’ll keep it? No, I think that, if you don’t mind, I’ll simply obey the orders I was given.”
“Your logic is impeccable,” Darger said. “And yet, this position remains most damnably painful.”
With a sigh, Sergeant Wojtek upended the gurney, folded its legs shut, and then leaned it against a nearby wall so that Darger was upright. “There. Is that better?”
Surprisingly, it was. In addition to doing much to restore his circulation, simply being upright again, after so long a time on his back, filled Darger with hope. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He mentally counted to twenty and then said, “Do you play chess?”
Sergeant Wojtek stared at him. “What kind of a question is that? I’m a Russian.”
“Then I’ll start. Pawn to d4.”
After a moment’s astonished silence, Sergeant Wojtek relaxed slightly and said, “Knight to f6.”
Which was, if not a beginning, at least an opening.
By the time the game was played through, Darger and the sergeant were, if not chums, at least on an amicable footing. “Well played, Sergeant Wojtek,” Darger said.
“You’d have had me, if it hadn’t been for that one bungled move in the endgame.”
“My attention wandered.” This was only a half-untruth, for though Darger had planned to lose from the outset, there had also been a distracting incident. “That man in the odd gray costume who walked by us. He looked
