Read Online We Install by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online

way! This way!” a big fellow with a metal gorget shouted. Sack was among those whom he directed “this way”: aboard the Yevgeny Vuchetich . The men packed the boat’s four decks so tight no one had room to sit down. Combat engineers had mounted a 20-millimeter antiaircraft gun at the bow and another on the third deck at the stern, but the lance-corporal doubted their crews had room to serve them.
    The old boat’s overloaded diesel roared flatulently to life. Slowly, so slowly, it pulled away from the riverbank. The Sovietskaya Rossiya was a couple of hundred meters ahead. It had drawn close to the colonnaded mass of the river station when a bomb or a big rocket struck it amidships.
    The excursion vessel seemed to bulge outward, then broke apart and sank like a stone. Hundreds of soldiers must have gone down with it. More hundreds thrashed in the chilly water. Many of them quickly sank, weighted down by their gear.
    The Yevgeny Vuchetich slowed to throw lines to survivors and pull aboard those they could. Sack stared in horror as men drowned within easy reach of a line because they were too stunned to reach out and grab it. The boat did not save as many as it might have under other, more peaceful, circumstances, both because it was already overloaded itself and because stopping would have left it even more vulnerable to an attack like the one that had sunk its sister.
    At the Pochtovaya Ploshchad river station, more military police lined the docks. Like their fellows on the east bank, they screamed, “This way! This way! This way!” As he followed their pointing arms into the station, Sack wondered if they knew how to say anything else.
    Milling men in grimy uniforms filled the main hall. Still more men in dog collars profanely urged them on their way. One of the herd, Sack shambled sheeplike past wall panels depicting big blond men in chain mail (Varangians, he supposed), men with guns under red and gold hammer-and-sickle banners entering Kiev in triumph, and factories pouring smoke into the sky under the same Soviet emblem. The lance-corporal deliberately looked away from those. He had seen all the red flags he ever cared to look at.
    The German military police did know how to say more than “This way!”—the ones at the rear of the station were shouting, “To the subway station! To the subway station!” That was an order Sack obeyed gladly; the farther underground he went, the safer he felt from Red air attacks.
    More crowds of wet, stinking, dazed soldiers jammed the platform. When he’d been here last, the station had been immaculate. It was a long way from immaculate now. The trains did not run on time, either. Advancing as much from the pressure of the men behind him as by his own will, Sack moved toward the track.
    After a longish while, he boarded a train. It rumbled through the darkness of the tunnel, then came to a jerky stop at Kreshchatik Station, only two stops south of Pochtovaya Ploshchad. The few Ukrainian flags that draped the inside of the station were faded and stained; he’d have guessed they were the identical banners he’d seen when he came through Kiev heading east to the front. Now he was back, and the front with him.
    When he walked outside into the rain, he met only silence. He looked around in confusion, then turned to the soldier nearest him and said, “Where the devil are the boys in the dog-collars? I figured they’d be screaming at us here, same as everywhere else.”
    â€œDo you miss them so badly, then?” the other fellow asked, tugging at the straps of his pack. He and Sack laughed. They both knew the answer to that.
    The lance-corporal started to say something more, but a public address system beat him to the punch and outshouted him to boot: “German soldiers detraining at Kreshchatik Station, report to Dynamo Stadium in Central Recreation Park. The stadium is north of the station. Signboards will direct you.