Western Siberia Post Road. 125 miles east of Perm.
The world had ceased to exist beyond the narrow cone of sickly yellow light thrown by the two acetylene headlamps mounted on the front of the truck. Everything else, the dense forest of Siberian firs flanking the road on both sides, the completely black sky with neither moon nor visible stars, the horizon that should have been somewhere ahead, had been literally swallowed by a solid darkness, and by a cold so deep it turned every breath into microscopic ice needles stabbing the lungs from inside.
Ivan Petrovich Sokolov, forty-two years old, former coachman of the Imperial Household, now a pioneer driver of heavy trucks, gripped his gloved hands with white-knuckled desperation around the varnished wooden steering wheel of the Russo-Balt Heavy Model T. His knuckles were completely white under the wool-lined sheepskin leather gloves. He had been driving for ten straight hours without real rest, and every bone in his body, from the vertebrae of his spine to the small bones in his fingers, vibrated in miserable resonance with the deep, recurring, hypnotic roar of the six-cylinder diesel engine thundering ceaselessly beneath his feet.
"Temperature's dropped again, Ivan." Said Mikhail, "Mishka" Volkov, his twenty-year-old co-driver, vigorously rubbing the inside of the windshield with a rag soaked in pure grain alcohol to keep the steam from their own breathing from freezing into an opaque layer of frost on the glass. "The mercury thermometer hanging from the mirror reads twenty-six below zero Fahrenheit, thirty-two Celsius. And falling."
"As long as the oil keeps flowing through the lines, we keep moving." Ivan growled in a voice roughened by hours of silence, his eyes fixed on the barely visible road ahead. "There is no other option."
There were five trucks in all forming the convoy. Five beasts of olive-green military-painted steel, each loaded to the limit with heavy mining machinery, pneumatic rock drills, steel pulleys, cart rails, and wooden crates containing stabilized nitroglycerin explosives destined for new mineral excavations in the Northern Urals, where promising tungsten deposits had been discovered.
It was madness. Historically, for centuries, in the full grip of the Siberian winter you traveled only by horse-drawn or dog-drawn sleds. General Winter, that invisible enemy who had defeated Napoleon and Charles XII of Sweden, had always dictated that wheels stopped in November and did not turn again until April.
But the Tsarevich, or more likely his completely unhinged engineers in Saint Petersburg who didn't truly understand Siberia, had decided to declare direct war on the calendar itself. They had ordered the convoy to depart in the dead of January. On the coldest night of the year.
The truck lurched violently as it struck a deep ice pothole completely hidden under the uniform layer of compacted snow. The steel leaf-spring suspension, technology borrowed directly from railway locomotives, groaned with a metallic protest but absorbed the impact without breaking.
"This engine's sounding strange, Ivan." Mishka warned with genuine concern, tilting his head to one side to listen more carefully. "You hear it? That knocking that wasn't there before."
Ivan sharpened his hearing, filtering through the engine's omnipresent roar. Between the deep, recurring sound of the six pistons hammering inside their cylinders, there was a new metallic click-click-click, irregular, troubling.
"It's the extreme cold." Ivan diagnosed with the experience of weeks driving these monsters. "The front radiator is too exposed to the wind. At this speed the airflow is cooling the coolant faster than the engine can heat it back up. If the radiator water freezes solid, the expansion of the ice will crack the cast-iron block in the middle of nowhere. And then we'll be two frozen statues before sunrise."
"Do we stop then? Cover the radiator?"
"We cannot shut down the engine under any circumstances." Ivan shook his head emphatically. "If we cut the engine now, the oil in the crankcase will thicken to tar in under ten minutes. It will never start again without external heaters. And we have no heaters out here."
Ivan looked at the coolant temperature gauge mounted on the dashboard. The needle was dropping dangerously toward the red freezing zone. The paradox of the Neva engines in extreme winter was that they generated an absolutely infernal heat inside, the cylinders reached temperatures of nearly two thousand degrees Fahrenheit during combustion, but the Russian winter was capable of stealing that heat faster than combustion could produce it.
"Get the emergency bottle." Ivan ordered without taking his eyes off the dark road.
Mishka reached down and pulled a bottle of cheap vodka, the kind that costs thirty kopeks and burns the throat like acid, from under the passenger seat. It wasn't for drinking. It was specialized emergency equipment for exactly these moments, though no one would have believed that.
"Open the side hood panel. While we're moving. Very carefully."
Mishka, with the desperate agility of youth and the very real fear of freezing to death in the middle of nowhere in Siberia, a hundred and twenty miles from any human settlement, opened the cabin's side window. The arctic wind entered like a fist, instantly stealing all the accumulated warmth. He climbed with careful movements onto the running board of the moving truck. The wind howled like an animal, trying to tear him from the metal. With numb fingers he wrestled open a gap in the side hood panel protecting the engine.
"Now! Do it now!" Ivan shouted over the roar of the wind.
Mishka poured the vodka directly onto the exposed water intake pipes and the metal casing of the external water pump. The alcohol evaporated instantly on contact with the hot metal, creating a cloud of steam that smelled sweet and intoxicating in the surroundings. But the alcohol also dissolved and cleared the ice crusts that had been dangerously beginning to form on the external valves and gasket joints.
The engine coughed once, then twice, as if clearing its throat, recovered its regular rhythm and roared powerfully. The temperature gauge needle climbed one degree. Then two.
"It worked! Dear God, it worked!" Mishka shouted as he climbed back into the cab, shaking so violently his teeth were audibly chattering. "Blessed be Russian vodka! The best medicine in the Empire!"
"It's the best antifreeze the Empire has ever produced." Ivan said, allowing himself for the first time in hours a slight smile beneath his frost-encrusted beard. "The Germans have their expensive chemicals. We have vodka and it works just as well, and the best part is that both the machines and the men can enjoy it."
They kept moving relentlessly. Kilometer after kilometer of completely uninhabited white solitude. No villages. No waypoints. Nothing but snow, black trees, and cold.
Ivan thought as he drove about his former life as an Imperial Household coachman. He had driven carriages for Grand Dukes. He had handled purebred horses that cost more than a house. Horses were warm to the touch. They had souls. They breathed. They watched you with intelligent eyes. You could speak to them and they understood the tone if not the words.
These trucks were completely cold, soulless monsters made of iron and oil. But horses would die in this climate hauling these loads. They would break their legs. They would freeze standing still. The truck, if you treated it with respect and brutality in equal measure, kept moving regardless of what was thrown at it.
Suddenly, without any prior warning, Ivan saw something at the blurry edge of the headlamps' yellow light.
Green points. Small. Bright. Reflecting the light.
Dozens of them.
"Eyes." Mishka murmured in a tone that tried to sound calm but betrayed a primal terror — the terror born into human beings since time immemorial. "Those are wolf eyes."
It wasn't one or two scouts. An entire pack, easily twenty or thirty animals, emerged simultaneously from the dark tree line flanking the road. They were enormous, Siberian gray wolves, some probably weighing over a hundred and thirty pounds, with thick, matted coats, hungry and absolutely desperate after a winter that had been unusually brutal even by Siberian standards. The deer and elk they normally hunted had moved south in search of grazing land.
Under normal circumstances, wolves instinctively feared loud machines, the smell of combustion, the smoke. But extreme hunger overrides every learned fear.
One particularly massive wolf, probably the alpha male of the pack, with scars visible even in the faint light, leapt directly at the moving truck, its jaws open and showing yellowed teeth, and savagely bit the front right tire. The solid rubber, no inflatable tires were available for loads this heavy, held without puncturing, but the violent impact of sixty-odd pounds of muscle and fury sent the entire steering column lurching dangerously.
"They're attacking the wheels directly!" Ivan shouted, fighting the wheel with force to keep the truck on the narrow road. "They think we're large prey! Some kind of mammoth!"
Another wolf jumped nimbly onto the left running board, its black claws scraping and scratching the painted metal of the door with a sharp shriek, its foam-flecked jaws inches from the window glass, the saliva freezing into hanging icicles at centimeters from the pane. Ivan could see the animal's yellow eyes, completely wild, without fear, nothing but desperate hunger.
"The rifle! Get the damn rifle now!" Ivan bellowed.
Mishka turned and pulled with trembling hands the Mosin-Nagant Model 1891 rifle they carried as mandatory emergency equipment behind the seat. He lowered the side window just enough, barely four inches, to get the barrel out without letting in too much of the killing wind.
BANG!
The point-blank shot inside the cab was deafening, leaving both men's ears ringing. The 7.62mm round hit the running-board wolf in the chest, throwing it violently backward where it fell rolling in the snow and lay still, leaving a dark red trail.
The truck behind them, fifty yards back, hit its horn frantically, three short blasts. Emergency code. The wolves were trying to leap up onto the rear cargo platform, where oilcloth tarps covered the valuable machinery. If they tore through the tarps or, worse, bit through the hydraulic cables or brake lines, the entire convoy would stop. And stopping meant death.
"We cannot brake under any circumstances!" Ivan shouted, his voice cracking with adrenaline. "If we slow down even for a second they'll surround us completely! They outnumber us! More speed!"
Ivan floored the accelerator pedal until his foot could push no further. The Neva engine responded immediately with a bellow that was almost like the snort of a massive animal, spitting a dense column of black smoke and unburned carbon particles from the vertical exhaust stack rising above the hood.
The smoke, hot, laden with carbon monoxide and soot, struck directly into the portion of the pack pursuing the truck from behind. The wolves, confounded by the chemical cloud they couldn't understand, stunned by the sound of the accelerating engine vibrating the very ground beneath them, began to waver. Some coughed, shaking their heads.
"Shoot the leaders! The biggest ones!" Ivan ordered, keeping the wheel steady. "Kill the alpha and the rest will run!"
Mishka fired the rifle three more times in rapid succession, the weapon's recoil slamming painfully into his shoulder each time.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Two large shadows fell heavily into the snow, staining it dark red. The rest of the pack, seeing that this strange "prey" didn't bleed like a normal animal but instead spat black smoke and fire, and ran faster than the swiftest elk they had ever hunted, collectively decided that easier game existed somewhere in the forest.
The green reflected-eye points began to retreat, disappearing into the black trees.
Ivan kept his foot firmly pressed to the accelerator for ten full minutes more, until the last green points had completely vanished from the side mirrors.
Slowly, carefully, he brought the speed back down to the twenty-five miles per hour, about forty kilometers, that was the sustainable cruising pace.
Silence returned to the cab, or the closest thing to silence possible with a diesel engine roaring, broken only by the sound of the motor and the ragged, almost gasping breathing of two men processing the adrenaline.
"Still think horses were better than these machines?" Mishka asked after several minutes, his voice still unsteady, as he reloaded the Mosin-Nagant with shaking hands, feeding five fresh cartridges into the internal magazine.
Ivan stroked the varnished wooden steering wheel with something resembling affection. He could feel the engine's heat rising through the metal cab floor, warming his frozen feet. It was a warmth that smelled of burned oil and incomplete combustion.
"Horses would have panicked completely at the first wolf." Ivan admitted, his voice softer now. "Total breakdown. We'd have overturned the cart. The load would have spilled. And the wolves would have devoured us before dawn while we lay injured in the snow."
He patted the instrument panel with something like fondness.
"This thing... this thing is a brainless, soulless iron brick. But it is an extremely hard and unstoppable iron brick."
He looked at the odometer mounted on the dashboard, barely visible in the faint panel light. They had covered nearly two hundred miles, three hundred kilometers, in a single night. A distance that would have been literally impossible with horses, sleds, or any traditional method.
"We're redrawing the map of Russia, kid." Ivan said with something close to wonder in his voice. "If we can cross Siberia with these monsters in the dead of winter... then Russia has suddenly gotten smaller. Distances that used to take months now take days. Or maybe it's us, the Russians, who've gotten bigger. More capable than anything we'll see ahead of us."
At dawn, when the pale winter sun finally began to light the infinite steppe with its gray and feeble glow, the convoy of five trucks came roaring into the mining advance post, a miserable collection of wooden barracks and a watchtower at the foothills of the Northern Urals.
The armed security guards who came out to investigate the noise looked at them with expressions of absolute disbelief, as if staring at ghosts or demons. Nobody, absolutely nobody, had expected to receive supplies until April at the earliest. The post had been prepared to remain isolated for three more months.
Ivan finally cut the engine after twelve continuous hours of operation. The sudden silence was deafening. His ears rang. He climbed down from the truck on legs as stiff as wood, every joint protesting the movement, and patted the still-warm hood of the Russo-Balt with genuine affection.
"Well done," he murmured quietly, as if the truck could hear him and appreciate it. "Very well done."
One of the guards approached, still in shock.
"How... how did you get through the route in January? It's impossible. The road doesn't even exist under all that snow."
Ivan smiled, showing yellowed teeth.
"It's not impossible anymore, friend. Welcome to the twentieth century. Welcome to the new Russia."
He looked back toward the road they had come by, barely visible now as a pair of tire tracks across the infinite white snow.
Russia had a new circulatory system pulsing beneath its skin, its vast, endless skin. And it had just proved it could pump supplies and life even when the very heart of the Siberian winter threw everything it had against it.
General Winter had just lost his first great battle.
And it was only the beginning.
[Nemryz: If you've enjoyed this story and want to read ahead, I have more chapters available on my patreon.com/Nemryz. Your support helps me continue writing this novel and AU. Thank you for reading! ]