The Shield of the City
Timonovo RKO Headquarters,
Greater Moscow Area
15 March, 1999
The chain of apparation had been sickening. They had gone straight to MinKol headquarters together, Councillor Gusarov and herself. For the first time, Larissa would be fighting alongside of the feared enforcers of MinKol…
For the first time, you’ll be fighting, period.
The stakes were so high that anyone except a monster would fight, though. And so they apparated again, with Larissa first hastily casting a charm on herself to help from vomiting. A wrenching chain apparation, and then they were in front of Timonovo RKO headquarters, having found themselves blocked from entering directly by some kind of magical shield thrown up at the facility.
“Well, that wasn’t good, Sir.”
“Fuck, no,” Gusarov muttered. “They’re here in strength. Quickly!” He dashed for the entrance, personnel, where the guards levelled rifles with particularly blank expressions. Larissa, who had studied the dark arts, felt she knew those expressions. A simple Stupefy would not work.
So Larissa spun out of line, and hit them with an upward-cast body binding spell and then a downward cast in short succession, disabling both men.
Councillor Gusarov shot a glance back at her. “Larissa Sergeivna!?”
“Imperio,” she explained, describing their condition. The Imperious Curse. Her boots skittering on gravel, she caught up with the mad rush. Her commander’s wand overcame the armoured defences of the command post, and their boots pounded across the floors. Down, down into the heart of the bunker. Each of the doors they blasted off, though, made her feel just a bit more uncomfortable. “The bunker will be useless, if anything gets through!”
“I know, but we won’t let anything through, will we?”
It was a challenge. And a reassurance. There was only one response for that. “Urrah!”
They ran into the first group of enemies. These men had not faced MinKol’s Oprichniki before, with nothing to hold them back. Larissa saw two of the team work spells that let them pass through the heavy concrete walls to flank the position of these wizards, who had seized the command post of their capital. She quickly cast a sharp “Protego!” to deflect their defensive attacks and keep them engaged with the enemy in front of them.
When the traitors were distracted by the surprise flank attack, Larissa and Gusarov shifted to the attack. Cutting spells forced the enemy on the defensive. Then a man in uniform appeared behind them, and she watched one of the enemy wizards collapse in a well of blood as the boom of a gun ripped through the corridor.
Her cutting spell and Gusarov’s intersected on the other, and sectioned him as neatly as a butchered hog. Two more had their bodies outright vanish in flashes of light, as the Oprichniki turned their power on them. God knew what they had done.
Gusarov looked up to the man. There was a hesitation, an uncertainty on his face, wondering about the MinKol wizards and witches in front of him—Larissa could see it: Are they friend or foe? It was nothing more complicated, but still, that was a very dangerous question.
“Comrade,” Councillor Gusarov spoke, with a disarming familiarity and informality. “We’ve got to get the defensive batteries operational again. Moscow is under nuclear attack.” Whomever it was had avoided being controlled by the enemy. He had fought back when the opportunity presented itself. That was all one could ask, and more, when muggles faced wizards sent to kill.
Larissa could only imagine it, in that single fraught moment, what someone would have to decide—but the answer was obvious. If they were enemies, he was no worse off than he had been thirty seconds before. If they were comrades, loyal soldiers of Russia in their own way, then the information they had was accurate, and the situation was desperate.
The soldier spun on heel. “This way, quickly!” He led them at dead run down the last corridor, the last set of stairs into the main vault. With a forward guard of wizards, those in the command centre had not thought to secure the door—the infantile mistake of overconfident, arrogant men who never thought muggles could threaten them, who didn’t care to learn something as simple as the interlocking latch on a nuclear vault.
They paid for it.
The battle of spells was short, sharp, savage. In the magical duel the art of combat was to begin the next spell even as you completed the last. The carry-through of the motion to cast magic must become the motion to cast magic. Life is like a wheel. And her spells were much the same, muscles snapping through motions of her whole body—initiated by her hips, shoulders shifting, arm moving with momentum.
It was over so fast that she was almost embarrassed. Larissa barely got to the seventh spell, before having to quickly end the motion of her wand, seeing that there was one of the Oprichniki in front of her, not an enemy. She coughed, only then realising her body was aching, her breath straining against her chest. Actually, she had been in one of the most physically exhausting five minutes in her life, and she hadn’t even realised it at the time it had happened.
Blood mingled with bodies and a wafted scent of charred flesh in front of her.
Those robed and cowled figures, their allies but still scary for what they were were, their enforcers, who had kept the name of Ivan Grozny’s secret police establishment long after it had been disestablished, walked the ranks of the confused, insensate, or Imperioused soldiers, releasing them from the bonds of their curses.
The alarms which had just been the background noise of the cacophony of battle to Larissa, took on an ominous and horrifying note to those men as they regained their wits. They began to implement the necessary commands, even with shouts of horror, to activate the computers. It seemed like it would be much too late, but it was do or die, and that was the kind of moment where brave men found their courage, and even weak men put in the last bit of effort to make themselves count.
And women. Larissa smiled, and stepped to Councillor Gusarov’s side. “Have we done it?”
“We’ve at least given the city a fighting chance. We’ll die on our feet.” He pitched his voice to carry. “Come on. We’ll provide Timonovo all the cover we can. Let’s go!”
“Now remember,” Gusarov instructed as they made a short disapparation to the surface, and Larissa’s stomach wrenched once more, but she held herself together, a neophyte to combat no longer. “We will need to protect ourselves from our own defensive missile detonations just as much as the enemy bombs.”
They turned their wands skyward, and found themselves shielding against both ‘leakers’ and the sudden brilliant flash of the nuclear-tipped defensive missiles, whose shining light promised life to the City of Moscow.
It took three hours for the attacks to end. Body trembling from head to toe, it was then, and only then, that Larissa sank down and wept. She wasn’t the only one.
It was only the first day of the war, but in nuclear combat, surviving the first day mattered for a great deal. They had done exactly what they needed to do—give their country a fighting chance in the struggle to come.