Grisha fed the fire, deep in thought. The subarctic night settled. The temperature dropped, and the
The northern lights were not unknown in Akku. But the phenomena in southeast skies, when the clouds cleared, were usually subdued compared to this, even at their best. Above him they bent and circled in scrolls that had to be a thousand kilometers high. Bands of light winked on, broadening from a pinpoint to a swath of unimaginable width in the space of three breaths. Great sections of sky would suddenly present a mist of pink, green, or even yellow.
He wondered about Nik. What ate at the man so voraciously? What aspect of their current life could cripple him like that?
“You must be livin’ a different life than me,” Grisha mumbled through the flames at the sleeping form. “I really don’t think it’s so bad.”
They’re all going to die, you know.
That tone wasn’t what Nik called rhetorical. He said it like he knew it for fact. Grisha frowned, tried to remember how the other guards had treated Nik.
They had left him alone. But to be fair, he was always reading and writing in little notebooks; maybe the other soldiers just thought Nik pretentious and avoided him, most of them couldn’t read anyway. Grisha scratched his head and yawned.
He pushed himself up with a grunt and walked to the edge of the camp before urinating. The temperature had dropped for sure; his urine froze with a crackle in the air before hitting the snow with soft thuds. After piling more wood on the fire, leaving some for the morning, he crawled into his bag and closed the heavy zipper.
Moments later someone shook his shoulder, hard. He pried open one eye and peered at Nik’s face.
“Let me sleep, okay?”
“It’s time to get up. You’ve been asleep for hours.” Nik stood and laid wood on the coals of the fire. Coals.
Grisha didn’t feel like he’d slept at all, but he pulled himself out of the warm bag anyway. His full bladder added proof he had slept. As he relieved himself he noticed the overnight temperature had risen slightly.
“Nik?” he said, walking back to the fire, suddenly chilled.
“Yeah?” He was packing his bag.
“Why didn’t the other guards talk to you?”
Nik froze for a long moment; then continued stowing his gear.
“Because I could read. Because I had gone to school for more than three or two years. Because my English is as good as my Russian even if I didn’t come from southeast.”
“That’s what I thought,” Grisha said with finality. “But I wanted to hear you say it.”
“Why? Do you think me incapable of lying?”
“I think I could tell if you were lying, and I don’t think you are.”
Nik shook his head. “Are the Kolosh a perceptive people?”
“Sure, most peoples are or they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to become a race. My mother’s people can tell by a person’s name who they are related to, where they fit in the house where they live, and even where they fit into the village.”
“My God, that’s even more stratified than Russian life!” Nik said.
“It’s more complete, I think. It’s also a clan culture, not something that would work in St. Petersburg and maybe not even St. Nicholas.”
“Does anybody ever pretend to be something they are not in your mother’s culture?”
“Why would they bother, to make a joke? Everyone would know they weren’t telling the truth.”
“But you’re part Russian, too, Grisha. Did your father know where he fit in Russian society?”
“Yeah. At the bottom,” Grisha said, his voice revealing the bleakness he suddenly felt. “I started from the bottom and worked my way to major’s flashes in the Troika Guard. Then I was sacrificed for political reasons and had to start over, got back to where I owned a boat and was master of my life.”
“What happened?” Nik asked, his face rapt.
“I’m not sure, and I’ve thought about it a lot. I took a charter job where the customer wasn’t what he said he was, went places we weren’t supposed to go, and did things we weren’t supposed to do.”
“Sounds like smuggling to me.”
“No, at first I thought that’s what was going on, too. But, we picked up a woman who knew the man and on the way back they talked about the other North American countries. You know, the U.S.A, the Confederacy, all them.”
Nik nodded.
“Then Karpov, the guy, got drunk and tried to snag the woman, got real direct about it. So there was a fight and we killed him.”
“We?”
“Da. While he was choking me, she hit him in the back of the head with a halibut club, the spiked kind.”
“So why did you end up in Tetlin Redoubt? Did they only hang her for murder?”
“She told them I did it. They were going to hang me, but then they changed their minds and sentenced me to thirty years hard labor instead.”
“You wouldn’t have lasted another thirty days,” Nik said with professional disdain.
“I thought I was going to die that day. If the Dena had waited another minute before attacking, I’d be dead. Life is strange.”
“It’s getting light. We need to go.”
“Nik, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you’ve turned into a moody bear.”
“I don’t think you’d understand.”
Grisha swallowed the anger that immediately flared through him. It left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Why not, because I don’t have enough education?”
“You wouldn’t like me anymore, take my word for it.” Nik strapped on his skis and pushed off down the trail, heading for the cut that dropped into the next valley.
“Nik!” Grisha yelled. “I want a real answer, a real reason!”
The Russian stopped and looked back.
“I’m a traitor. I’m a traitor and I can’t stand to live with myself.”
Then he skied away and Grisha scrambled to follow.
20
Bear wasn’t sure about this helicopter stuff. He didn’t understand what held the damned things up. But it sure covered the distance as they raced along twenty meters above the treetops in excess of sixty exhilarating kilometers an hour.
They had flown from Tetlin Redoubt to St. Anthony Redoubt the day before and spent the night there. They left early this morning, long before the winter sun rose, so they would be in the target area during the brief subarctic day.
He noticed the captain watching him with her superior little smile that said he was only shit and she knew it. He wished he could catch her without her bodyguard corporal and his machine pistol. Today the dog of a soldier even carried a Kalashnikov.
Between the three of them they could stand off a dozen Indians. He thought them heavily armed for this mission. The captain remained adamant about only the three of them going into Indian country alone.
With Wolverine White dead, there wasn’t anybody he trusted to fight at his back anyway. Now he faced the world alone.
“Ten minutes to landing zone, Captain,” the pilot said in his jovial voice. He would stay with the aircraft and keep the engine warm. If the other three weren’t back in exactly twenty-four hours, he would return to base
