Diktat: Fractured Reflection

– 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.

The First Lie

The first shot was not a Soviet weapon. It was the hard, flat crack of a German rifle. The sound cut through the hiss of the freezing rain. A gout of black water and mud erupted less than a meter from Sokolov’s leg. The scientist flinched, a puppet whose strings had been jerked. He was the target.

Sineus did not think. He acted. His objective, burned into his mind by a decade of command, was to secure the asset. But the images Sokolov had shown him – the Oscillator, the city erased from a map, the graph of the Whispering Plague climbing toward infinity – had overwritten that objective. The asset was not Sokolov. The asset was the truth the man carried.

He lunged, grabbing the thin fabric of Sokolov’s coat. He hauled the scientist down into the freezing water, the shock of the cold a distant, unimportant fact.

– Fall back! – Sineus roared, his voice raw. – To the trees! Now!

The world dissolved into noise and motion. Muzzle flashes winked from the skeletal trees fifty meters to the west. Bullets slapped into the water around them, each impact a sharp, angry splash. The Ahnenerbe. They had been waiting. They had let him do the work of finding Sokolov, and now they were here to collect the prize.

Zoya Koval was already firing. She had dropped to one knee on the bank, her rifle a part of her. There was no wasted motion. The weapon cracked once. A figure in the distant trees jerked and fell. She worked the bolt. The rifle cracked again. A second man vanished from sight. Three shots in as many seconds. Three hits. She was not a soldier. She was a predator.

To his right, Kulagin opened up with his submachine gun. The weapon’s chatter was a brutal, hammering sound. He was not aiming for kills. He was aiming for suppression, stitching a line of fire across the enemy’s position, forcing them to keep their heads down. Bark flew from the white trunks of the birch trees.

– Go! – Kulagin yelled, his voice a gravelly bark over the gunfire. – I’ll cover!

Sineus hauled Sokolov through the sucking mud and black water, toward the relative safety of the bank. The scientist was a dead weight, his body wracked with shivers, his strength gone. He was an academic, a man of paper and theories, and the physical reality of combat was crushing him. Sineus was a creature of this element. The cold, the fear, the smell of cordite on the air – it was his natural habitat.

They reached the bank. Morozov was huddled behind a thick tree, his face white, his pistol held in a trembling hand. He was useless. A spectator at his own potential death. Sineus shoved Sokolov down behind the same tree and turned, adding his own pistol fire to Kulagin’s. The small-caliber rounds were insignificant at this range, but they added to the noise. They added to the pressure.

The enemy fire slackened for a moment, pinned by Kulagin’s relentless barrage.

– Now, Sergeant Major! – Sineus shouted.

Kulagin broke from his position and sprinted toward them, his boots churning mud. He dove behind the line of trees as a fresh volley of rifle fire tore through the space he had just occupied. They were all together. Four soldiers and a scientist. Trapped.

The firefight settled into a grim rhythm. The crack of the Ahnenerbe rifles. The answering chatter of Kulagin’s gun. The methodical, deadly punctuation of Zoya’s single shots. They were outnumbered. Their position was temporary. They had maybe five minutes before they were flanked and destroyed.

Sineus pulled the radio from his belt. The Bakelite handset was cold and slick with rain. This was the moment. The point of no return. He could report the ambush. He could call for reinforcements. He could follow procedure and die a loyal officer, his mission a failure, the truth lost forever in this frozen swamp. Or he could choose the other path. The hard right.

He keyed the microphone. The speaker hissed with static. The signal was weak.

– Vostok-One, this is Falcon. Come in, Vostok.

The static answered him. He tried again.

– Vostok-One, this is Falcon. Report follows.

A voice, thin and distorted, crackled back.

– Falcon, send traffic.

Sineus took a breath. The air burned in his lungs. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat. He looked at Sokolov, shivering and pale. He looked at the quartz plates in the man’s satchel. He saw the image of the city erased from the map. He saw the words: *acceptable cost*.

He made the choice. The price was his name, his honor, his entire life up to this point. He paid it.

– We made contact with the target, – Sineus said, his voice a low, steady monotone. He kept it flat. Devoid of emotion. The way a commander files a report. – Engaged by unknown enemy force. Sokolov is dead. I repeat, Sokolov is K.I.A. Body lost in the marsh during the firefight. The cipher is lost. We are breaking contact and returning to base. Over.

Silence. Only the hiss of the radio. For a long, terrible moment, he thought they had not believed him. That they would order him to hold his position. That they would send a team to verify.

Then the voice came back, just as clipped and impersonal as before.

– Acknowledged, Falcon. Proceed. Vostok-One, out.

The red light on the handset winked out. The connection was severed. He had done it. He had committed treason with a few calm words. He was no longer Commander Sineus of the Red Army. He was a liar. A rogue.

Morozov stared at him, his mouth hanging open. The political officer looked as if Sineus had just shot him. In a way, he had. He had shot the man’s entire world, his system of belief, his faith in the unbending structure of the state.

– Commander… – Morozov whispered, his voice shaking. – That was a false report. You have a duty… a sworn oath…

– I have a new duty now, – Sineus said. His voice was cold. He looked at Morozov, and the political officer flinched, taking a step back.

He turned to Kulagin. The Sergeant Major was watching him, his expression unreadable. He had heard the lie. He had seen Sokolov, alive and breathing, not three meters away. Kulagin’s gaze flickered from Sineus to the scientist, then back to Sineus. He held his commander’s eyes for a long second. Then, he gave a single, sharp nod. He did not need to know the details. He trusted the man, not the uniform. His loyalty was here, in this patch of frozen mud.

Sokolov looked at Sineus, and for the first time, there was something other than fear or resignation in his eyes. It was a look of profound, weary understanding. He knew what Sineus had just sacrificed. He knew the weight of that lie.

The gunfire from the trees had stopped. The Ahnenerbe were regrouping. Or perhaps they were fading back into the mist, their objective denied them. For now.

Sineus knelt by a pool of black, still water. He splashed the icy liquid on his face, washing away the sweat and the tension. He saw his own reflection. It was the face of a stranger. Gaunt, hard, tired. But it was a single face. The two halves he had seen before – the loyal commander and the man who knew the truth – were gone. They had merged into this new, grim visage. A fractured reflection made whole. It was the face of a traitor. It was his own.

He stood up. The cold clarity that followed the decision was absolute. The path behind him was gone, erased by his own words. There was only the path forward.

– We move east, – he said. It was an order. The first order of his new command.

Kulagin checked the action on his weapon. Zoya slid a fresh clip into her rifle. Sokolov, shivering, pushed himself to his feet. Morozov simply stared, a man whose map of the world had just been burned.

They left the bodies for the crows and walked east.

The Prisoner

The truck smelled of wet earth and diesel. Sineus drove. His hands were steady on the wheel, his knuckles white. The road was a pair of muddy ruts cutting through an endless, flat expanse of frozen farmland. Behind them, 150 kilometers of mud and forest separated them from the marsh. From the firefight. From the lie he had sent over the radio. It was not enough distance. It would never be enough.

His goal was simple. Keep moving east. Survival was the mission now. Everything else was secondary. He glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle was low. Another problem for later. There was always another problem.

In the passenger seat, Sergeant Major Boris Kulagin was awake. He had been awake for two days. His submachine gun rested across his lap, its metal dark and oiled. He watched the horizon, his eyes missing nothing. Kulagin was a soldier. The world could end, and Kulagin would still be cleaning his weapon, watching his sector of fire.

The truck hit a pothole. The frame shuddered. In the back, a metal tin rattled. Zoya Koval did not look up. She sat cross-legged on a pile of damp sacks, drawing a whetstone along the edge of a long, thin knife. The sound was a quiet, rhythmic scrape. *Shhhk. Shhhk.* A predator’s lullaby. She had not spoken a word since they had stolen the truck from a deserted collective farm. She simply killed, and moved, and waited for the next chance to kill.

Beside her, Pavel Morozov stared at the canvas flap of the truck. His face was slack, his eyes empty. The political officer was a broken thing. His faith, the rigid iron spine of his entire existence, had been shattered by Sineus’s treason. He was a ghost in a Red Army uniform.

And then there was Sokolov. The scientist sat opposite Morozov, huddled in a threadbare coat. The man who had torn Sineus’s world apart with a few projected images and a single, damning phrase. *Acceptable cost.* Sokolov met Sineus’s eyes in the rearview mirror. There was no gratitude in his gaze. Only a cold, intellectual curiosity.

– You are a man of contradictions, Commander, – Sokolov said. His voice was thin, but it cut through the rumble of the engine.

Sineus’s jaw tightened. He kept his eyes on the road.

– Silence.

– You commit treason to save my life, to protect the truth I carry, – Sokolov continued, ignoring the order. – Yet you still wear the uniform of the men who would see the world burn. You still think like a commander. Who are you lying to? Them, or yourself?

– I said, silence, – Sineus repeated. The words were flat. Hard. An order.

Kulagin shifted in his seat. He did not look at Sineus. He did not look at Sokolov. He just watched the road ahead. Zoya’s knife stopped its rhythmic scraping. The sudden quiet from the back of the truck was louder than the engine.

Sokolov leaned forward.

– Your loyalty was a cage, Commander. You have opened the door. But you are still standing inside, afraid to step out. You think this is about survival. About escaping. You are still thinking on the scale of a soldier.

Sineus gripped the wheel. The man’s words were scalpels, cutting away the scar tissue of his old life. He was right. That was the worst part. He was right.

– What do you want, Doctor? – Sineus asked, his voice low.

– I want you to understand the weapon you are, – Sokolov said. – Volkov did. He chose you because you are a sensitive. He was going to use you, burn you out, and discard the husk. Your headaches, your… instincts. That is the world screaming at you. It is the Plague. You feel its pressure. You can see the echoes it leaves behind.

The memory of the shimmering shell over the rail junction. The phantom tanks in the sky. The fractured face in the shard of glass. It was not shell-shock. It was a sense. A terrible, unwanted sense. The strain of it was a constant pressure behind his eyes.

– You can learn to control it, – Sokolov pressed. – To shield yourself. To see clearly. Without the goggles and blades the Directorate and the Ahnenerbe rely on. You are the next step in this war. The only thing that can truly fight them.

Sineus said nothing. He drove. The truck rumbled on, a tiny, isolated world of five broken people. Kulagin took a piece of hard, black bread from his pocket. He broke it in two. He offered half to Zoya. She looked at the bread, then at him. She took it without a word and began to eat, her knife resting on her knee.

The truck’s engine sputtered. It coughed once, twice, then died. The sudden silence was absolute. Vast and heavy. They coasted to a stop in the middle of nowhere. A flat, white plain under a sky the color of lead.

Kulagin was the first to speak.

– Fuel’s gone, Commander.

Sineus looked at the gauge. The needle was on empty. He had known this was coming. He had just chosen not to face it. He got out of the truck. The cold hit him like a fist. The air smelled of snow and damp earth. There was nothing in any direction. Just the flat, empty horizon. They were stranded. 150 kilometers was not enough.

– We walk, – he said. It was the only option.

– Walk where? – Morozov asked. His first words in hours. His voice was a dry rasp. – There is nothing.

– We walk east, – Sineus said.

Sokolov had gotten out of the truck. He was looking not at the horizon, but at a map he had taken from his satchel. It was not a military map. It was covered in strange lines and symbols, charts of things that did not appear on any official survey.

– Walking is suicide, – the scientist said. – We will freeze before we cover 20 kilometers.

– Do you have a better idea, Doctor? – Sineus asked. The question was a challenge.

Sokolov did not look up from his map. He traced a line with his finger.

– The main rail line is seven kilometers north of here. According to this, a military transit train – an armored supply run – is scheduled to pass in three hours. It will be moving fast. But it will be heated. And it will be going east.

Sineus looked at him. He was being asked to trust the strange map of a traitor over his own military instincts. To bet their lives on it. It was a test. A shift in power. He had given the order to walk. Sokolov was offering a different path. A harder one. A riskier one. But a better one.

He looked at Kulagin. The Sergeant Major’s face was grim. He shrugged. A soldier’s gesture. It meant: *Your call, Commander.*

Sineus made the choice. He was no longer just a commander. He was the leader of this broken little unit. And the scientist was no longer just his prisoner. He was his navigator. The choice cost him a piece of his authority, a piece of the certainty that had defined his entire life. He paid it.

– North, then, – Sineus said. His voice was quiet. – We move.

As he turned, he caught his reflection in the truck’s filthy side mirror. It was a dark, distorted shape. For a second, a trick of the light and the grime, he saw Sokolov’s gaunt face shimmering beside his own. A fractured reflection, two men becoming one purpose. He blinked, and it was gone. There was only his own tired face, and the long walk ahead.

The snow began to fall again, thick and wet. The world dissolved into a swirl of white.

Armored Train

The train was a promise made of steel and steam. Its whistle cut through the falling snow, a long, mournful cry in the vast, white dark. Sineus and his four broken pieces of a unit were huddled in the ditch beside the tracks, the cold a physical weight. They had walked for three hours, a forced march through the blizzard, guided by the mad geometry of Sokolov’s map. The scientist had been right.

The locomotive thundered past, a black monster breathing fire and smoke. Its pistons drove with relentless power. Behind it, the dark shapes of the carriages slid by.

– Now, – Sineus said.

They moved. There was no other choice. Kulagin went first, a solid shadow moving with the economy of a lifelong soldier. He swung himself up the iron ladder of a freight car, his submachine gun held tight against his chest. He reached the top, scanned the length of the train, and gave a sharp, downward gesture. Clear.

Sineus pushed Sokolov toward the next car. The scientist stumbled, his movements clumsy. Sineus grabbed the back of his coat and shoved him toward the ladder.