The field outside Brest-Litovsk was burning.
Black smoke coiled into the grey sky like snakes. The wrecks of twenty Panzer IVs lay scattered in the snow, their turrets blown clean off.
Hans, the German commander, crawled through the frozen mud. His leg was dragging, a bloody mess of shredded uniform and bone.
"Medic!" he screamed. But his voice was swallowed by the roar of the fire.
He looked back at the field.
It was quiet again. The snow was pristine, except for the craters.
Then he saw it.
Ten meters away, a small mound of snow shifted. A metallic hiss cut the air.
A cylinder rose from the ground. It was the size of a fire hydrant, topped with a glass dome.
Inside the dome, something pink pulsed.
Hans froze. He knew what it was. The rumors. The biological mines.
The cylinder rotated. The glass eye fixed on him.
It didn't fire. It just watched.
"Don't move," Hans whispered to himself. "It tracks heat. It tracks movement."
He lay perfectly still. The cold seeped into his bones, numbing the pain in his leg.
The cylinder hovered, suspended by silent gas jets. It drifted closer. Like a curious dog sniffing a wounded bird.
Hans stared into the glass. He saw the neural tissue floating in the gel. He saw the wires.
And for a second, he thought he felt a wave of... pity?
No. Hunger.
The cylinder chirped. A mechanical sound.
Then it lunged.
It didn't shoot a projectile. It was the projectile.
It slammed into Hans' chest. The shaped charge detonated.
There was no pain. Just a flash of white light.
And then, silence returned to the field. The Swarm went back to sleep, waiting for the next heartbeat.
The Kremlin. The War Room.
The footage from the border played on the main screen. It was grainy, captured by a high-altitude observation balloon.
The Generals watched in stunned silence.
"Efficiency: 98%," Menzhinsky read from the report. "Twenty tanks entered the kill zone. None left."
"It's a massacre," Timoshenko whispered. "They didn't even see where the shots came from."
Jake sat at the head of the table. He wasn't watching the screen. He was watching the Generals.
He saw fear. Not of the Germans. Of him.
"This changes warfare," Jake said. His voice was calm, detached. "No more trenches. No more infantry charges. We control the ground by making the ground alive."
"But the cost," Zhukov said. "Comrade Stalin, the production of these... units. It requires..."
"It requires raw material," Jake finished. "Yes."
He stood up. He walked to the map.
"Hitler has halted his advance. He is terrified. That buys us time."
He pointed to the East. To the factories in the Urals.
"Scale it up," Jake ordered. "I want a belt of these mines from the Baltic to the Black Sea. An Iron Curtain that bites."
"We don't have enough volunteers," Menzhinsky said softly.
"We have plenty," Jake said. "The Gulags hold two million people. Most are useless mouths. Make them useful."
The room went cold.
"You want to liquidate the camps?"
"I want to recycle them," Jake corrected. "If a man cannot work, he can still serve. His brain is a national asset."
He turned to look at them.
"Do you want the Germans in Moscow? Do you want your children speaking German?"
Silence.
"Then give me the harvest," Jake said.
Berlin. The Reich Chancellery.
Adolf Hitler threw the report across the room. Papers fluttered like dying birds.
"Monsters!" Hitler screamed. "They are fighting with abominations!"
Himmler stood by the door, pale as a sheet.
"The soldiers are refusing to advance, my Führer. They say the ground is haunted. They say the snow watches them."
"Shoot the cowards!" Hitler roared.
"We did," Himmler said. "But the fear is spreading. It is not just fear of death. It is fear of... being eaten."
Hitler paced. He was shaking.
"Stalin has broken the rules of war. He has unleashed a plague."
He stopped at the window.
"If he uses biological weapons... then we are free to use everything."
He turned to Goering.
"The gas stockpiles. Sarin. Tabun. Load them into the bombers."
"My Führer," Goering hesitated. "If we use gas, they will use it back. And they have rockets that can reach Berlin."
"They are already using worse than gas!" Hitler shouted. "They are using souls! I want that field sterilized! Burn it! Poison it! Turn it into a desert!"
He slammed his fist on the table.
"And send a message to the Americans. Tell Hoover... tell him we are willing to talk."
The room gasped.
"Talk, my Führer?"
"An alliance," Hitler hissed. "Against the Red Devil. We may be enemies, but we are both human. Stalin... Stalin is no longer human."
Washington D.C. The Oval Office.
Hoover held the encrypted message from Berlin.
Proposed Ceasefire. Joint Operation against Soviet Biological Threat.
He laughed. A dry, humorless bark.
"He's scared," Hoover said. "The Corporal is wetting his pants."
"Do we accept?" the Secretary of State asked.
"Hell no," Hoover said. "We don't ally with Nazis. The public would lynch me."
He dropped the message into the ashtray and lit it.
"But we use it," Hoover said. "We leak it. We let the world know that Stalin is so terrifying that even Hitler wants help."
He looked at General Groves.
"The EMP?"
"Ready," Groves said. "But we need a delivery system that can penetrate the Soviet air defense."
"We have the B-29s," Hoover said.
"They are too slow. The Swarm will intercept them."
Hoover tapped his desk.
"Then we don't fly over," Hoover said. "We fly under."
"Under?"
"Cruise missiles," Hoover said. "Low altitude. Following the terrain. Under the radar."
"We don't have that technology, sir."
"Von Braun does," Hoover smiled. "He drew it on a napkin yesterday. The V-1. A flying bomb. Cheap. Fast. And dumb."
"Dumb?"
"No brains," Hoover said. "Clockwork guidance. Immune to their bio-scanners because it has no heartbeat. It's just a machine."
He stood up.
"Build a thousand of them. Load them with the microwave generators. We are going to cook Stalin's zombie army from the inside out."
The Secret City. The Processing Center.
The conveyor belt moved slowly.
On it lay the "volunteers." They were sedated, strapped to metal trays. Their heads were shaved.
Turing stood on the gantry, conducting an invisible orchestra.
"Faster!" Turing shouted. "The queue is backing up!"
A technician ran up to him.
"Sir, we have a problem with Batch 47."
"What problem?"
"They are... resisting."
"They are sedated!"
"Not the bodies," the technician said. "The minds. The integration is failing. The neural tissue is rejecting the interface. It's... screaming."
Turing frowned.
He walked down to the monitoring station. He looked at the oscilloscope.
The wave pattern wasn't the smooth sine wave of a guidance loop. It was jagged. Chaotic.
It looked like pain.
"Play the audio," Turing ordered.
The technician flipped a switch.
A sound filled the room. It wasn't a voice. It was a digital screech, a feedback loop of pure terror converted into data.
NO-NO-NO-NO-NO...
Turing covered his ears.
"Cut it!"
The sound died.
"They know," Turing whispered. "Even under sedation, the subconscious knows it's being harvested."
"What do we do? Scrap the batch?"
"No," Turing said. He looked at the rows of sleeping men.
"We lobotomize them," Turing said coldly. "Cut the frontal lobe. Remove the fear center. Leave only the motor cortex and the visual processing."
"But sir... that makes them vegetables. They won't have initiative."
"We don't need initiative," Turing said. "We need obedience. We need machines."
He grabbed a scalpel from a tray.
"I'll show you."
He walked toward the first man on the belt.
The man's eyes fluttered open. He was groggy, drugged.
"Please," the man mumbled. "I didn't do it."
"Shh," Turing whispered. "It's just a haircut."
He raised the scalpel.
He wasn't a mathematician anymore. He was a butcher of souls.
The Kremlin. Jake's Bedroom.
Jake woke up screaming.
He sat up, drenched in sweat. He checked the corners of the room. Shadows. Just shadows.
He had dreamed of the field. The mines. But in the dream, they didn't look like cylinders. They looked like Nadya.
Hundreds of Nadyas, buried in the snow, waiting to explode.
He got out of bed. He poured a vodka. His hands were shaking so bad the glass clinked against his teeth.
He walked to the window.
The city was dark. The blackout was in effect.
But in the distance, he saw searchlights. Sweeping the sky.
The Dome of Eyes was active.
He felt safe. He felt powerful.
And he felt absolutely, crushingely alone.
"Yuri," he whispered.
He needed to see his son. To remind himself why he was doing this.
He walked down the hall to the nursery. The guards saluted.
He opened the door quietly.
Yuri was asleep. But he was thrashing. Whimpering.
"No... no rocket... no..."
Jake froze.
Yuri was having a nightmare too.
Jake knelt by the bed. He touched the boy's forehead. It was hot. Fever.
"Yuri?"
The boy opened his eyes. They were glassy.
"Papa?"
"I'm here."
"The rocket," Yuri whispered. "It has eyes. It looked at me."
Jake felt his heart stop.
"It's just a dream, son."
"No," Yuri said. He grabbed Jake's hand. His grip was weak. "I heard it. In the wall. It's scratching."
Jake looked at the wall.
He heard it too.
Scratch. Scratch.
A rat? A pipe?
Or something else?
He stood up. He pulled his revolver.
"Stay here," Jake ordered.
He walked to the wall. He put his ear against the plaster.
Scratch. Scratch.
It was coming from the ventilation shaft.
Jake ripped the grate off the wall. He shined his flashlight into the darkness.
Nothing. Just dust.
But on the metal floor of the duct, he saw something.
A mark. Written in soot.
A single word.
ALIVE.
Jake dropped the flashlight.
Nadya.
She wasn't dead. She hadn't frozen.
She was in the walls.
And she was haunting him.