Atonement

[Vogel]

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"If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal."

Konstantin had been running from the moment they turned their backs on him.

Somewhere in the back of his rather dazed mind, he understood what a comical image it presented. A scraggly man running around wearing a Captain's rank insignia being chased by a trio of incompetents inside what had to be one of the most secure places in all of Sirius. Comical.

Not necessarily comical for him, but comical for onlookers, certainly.

They'd be locking down this entire deck in short order; exits to other decks would be sealed, doors would no longer respond to the neural chip embedded in his skull, Marines would show up, the works. But in terms of priority, the little gang he'd just passed was at the top of the list. He'd run past them in order to find a more advantageous position.

The synthetic rubber on his boots squealed as he skidded to a stop in front of a small room adjacent to one of the seemingly endless hallways on this deck.

This looked about right. Grates in the floor, with easy access to a maintenance vent, a single security camera in the ceiling, reinforced but not impossible to thwart, and best of all, one way in and one way out.

A grin tried to play about his face, but something suppressed it. The irony that they had trained a monster was in some ways amusing. But monsters didn't smile.

---

The security officer worked furiously at his console, calling up information, sending information, receiving information, quicker than anything he'd had to do in recent memory. Deck lock down, categories Three, Two, and One, a call for reinforcements, preferably a Marine platoon, and most importantly discerning the identity of the rogue onboard.

Beletsky had an overlay of the entire deck projected up across the wall before him. Lit triangles surrounded by circles inscribed with text represented the locations of every tracking target the computer could detect. With every Coalition citizen bugged using their neural uplinks, it wasn't difficult to use them for constant surveillance, and made situations like this much easier.

At least it should have made it easier. He still had no positive ID on the rogue, and had to sift through hundreds of contacts in attempt to find the one looking the most suspicious...

There. One was moving quickly, sprinting even, and only a hundred meters behind were the trio of guards dispatched at the first alarm. Beletsky selected the marker and was provided all the information he'd ever need.

"<Service History: Case Sensitive>"

The Sub-lieutenant gulped despite himself. It didn't take the brightest denizen of that fine political machine to figure out what something like "Case Sensitive" entailed.

But now wasn't the time.

He pulled up a local security camera and watched the disheveled man, now identified as a Private Konstantin Grigoriyich Petrovin, stop short of the next hallway and look into an open room next to him before rushing inside.

Beletsky grinned maliciously as he pulled up the appropriate camera inside and zoomed in on his target.

"Rushing into a dead end?" he said aloud to nobody in particular, alone in the security room, "Be my guest. You could have just taken a bullet, or you could have kept running until you hit a force field, but now you want to be captured and..."

Petrovin had slipped underneath the view of the camera.

Annoyed, Beletsky toggled the zoom function and reeled it back, trying to get a fix once more. The screen had barely shown the edge of a peaked cap before it went black.

"<Security Report, System Failure, camera sixty, Maintenance Section Iota.>"

"Well!" Beletsky spat, hitting buttons more furiously than ever, "You can gouge out the eye, but we still have your brain, eh?"

He called up the security team on an intra-station frequency.

"He's in a power hub, two corridors down, on your left."

"Understood," came the fuzzy reply.

"Oh," Beletsky continued, with a hint of mocking amusement, "He's locked inside, now, so take him as you will."

Just another day at the office. Maybe now he could get back to that lovely centerfold on the datapad...

---

"Move in."

The door's security system had identified the response of a friendly neural chip and slid open.

Revealing nothing.

The trio of guards walked in, sidearms already pointed and at the ready. They fanned out across the tiny room, as if they were scanning a much larger area.

The leader stopped in the center and looked up at the camera in the ceiling. A few feet down, along the wall, an access panel had been ripped from its mounting and the wires beneath had been torn to pieces.

"Are you certain he's here?" he spoke into a small microphone on his uniform collar.

"You mean you... Positive, he's... right on top of you!"

The three instinctively braced themselves and pointed their weapons at the ceiling.

The door to the hallway slid shut.

Silence.

"Control, we don't-"

A metal grate flew up from the floor, hinges screeching, and smashed one of the guards in the face. He stumbled backwards and hit the nearby wall, gun slipping from his fingers.

The leader's eyes snapped down to the grate, and saw a face that would haunt him for the rest of his decidedly short life. Before his arms could move in tandem, the crack of a gun drowned out the eruption of shouting, and a bullet found its way into the man's throat.

Like a specter, Petrovin suddenly bolted from the vent and wheeled around to fire at the third guard. His shot missed by inches, and instead send a chunk of lead ricocheting about the room. Pinging metal mixed with gurgling sounds as the third man tried to take aim, but found one of his legs cut out from under him as the bullet dug into the back of his calf.

Without skipping a beat, Petrovin lunged forward and jammed a palm into the man's neck, continuing until he hit the wall. His sounds of screaming were instantly muffled as his airway caved in.

While the two men slowly suffocated to death on opposite sides of the room, the third had regained his bearing and found himself staring at the back of his assailant. This one was fast, too fast to afford bending over to pick up the gun he'd just dropped. With caution thrown soundly to the wind, the guard cast himself over the grate and reached for the rogue's neck with both hands.

He was waiting.

The moment Petrovin had felt the clammy hands brush against the hairs on his neck, his muscles seemed to move automatically. His left elbow smashed backwards into the guard's ribcage, alone not enough to down the man, but enough to distract him for the barest moment, and cause him to lose his balance. As the guard's head came forward, Konstanin's other hand let the revolver fall and reached over to grip the neck. Using the jaw as a point of pressure, and his arm as a lift, he twisted his body in order to get the best leverage and hefted the man up and over his shoulder.

The guard smacked into the deck plating head-first, crumpling into a heap on the floor.

Trying to regain his breath, Konstanin bent down and picked up his revolver, pocketing it once again.

Yes, alive. This made him feel alive. A rush he could only receive while spilling blood, blood of those he deemed traitors, fools, cowards.

But not this man. Even as the other two twitched their way into the next life, the third was still alive, but very much dazed.

Good.

Petrovin reached inside his coat and pulled out a standard-issue vibroblade from a sheath on his belt. Flicking the activation switch, he put the humming knife to the back of his head and took a breath.

The authorities had always said that puncturing the scalp would lead to rapid blood loss, so repair of a neural chip was best left to appropriate personnel. He'd been in the Commissariat long enough to know that that was simple fear mongering. Either that, or desperation won out over reason.

He jammed it underneath the skin and grit his teeth together as the tip slid behind something solid. Suppressing a cry, Petrovin bent the knife, ripping a rectangular chunk from his head. Wires on it tugged on something deeper in his head; whatever damage that had done to his brain was beyond him, and by now it didn't seem to matter.

While the external portion of the chip handled mundane functions and was more exposed for ease of access, the wiring and probe that actually went through the skull and into the brain were essentially permanent, and obviously more difficult to tamper with.

That was why the standard "bomb" was in the probe. He'd been very familiar with it from his Commissar days, that handy little device that essentially overcharged the brain with electricity. If he recalled correctly, its victims screamed for quite some time before they were officially expired...

No sense worrying about it now. Luckily, that required a higher level of authority to activate.

He gave himself about five hours. Six at most.

Konstanin Petrovin looked down at the dazed guard and found himself smiling crookedly.

"So, you want to serve the Revolution, Tovarisch...?"

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