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But luckily, there was something at Savyolovskaya that would save them, the station and perhaps the entire Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya branch. They were nearly at the station, soaked in sweat, shouting at the Savyolovskaya guards about their narrow escape from death. Meanwhile, the guards at the post were quickly pulling the cover off of some kind of impressive-looking piece of kit.
It was a flame-thrower, assembled by the local craftsmen from spare parts – homemade, but incredibly powerful. When the first ranks of rats became visible, gathering force, and you could hear the rustling and the scratching of a thousand rats’ paws from the darkness, the guards fired up the flame-thrower. And they didn’t turn it off until the fuel was spent. A howling orange flame filled the tu
The rats retreated. Their blind will had been broken by one of the last inventions of human military genius. Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.
The rats flowed backwards and returned to their enormous kingdom, whose true dimensions were known to no one. All of these labyrinths, lying at incredible depth, were so mysterious and, it seemed, completely useless for the functioning of the metro. It was hard to believe, despite the assurances of various persons of authority on the matter, that all of this was built by ordinary metro-builders.
One such person of authority had once worked as a conductor’s assistant on an electric train in the old days. There were hardly any of his kind left and they were greatly valued, because at first they had proven to be the only ones who could find their way around. And they didn’t give in to fear the moment they found themselves outside the comfortable and safe capsules of the train, in the dark tu
Of course he did. For all those who survived, the employees of the metro were like local guides to scientific expeditions in the jungles. They were religiously believed, they were depended upon completely, and the survival of everyone else depended on their knowledge and skill. Many of them became the heads of stations when the united system of government disintegrated, and the metro was transformed from a complex object of civil defence, a huge fallout shelter, into a multitude of stations unco
They were driven forward, in their endless and desperate onslaught, by an instinct for self-preservation, and by that eternal revolutionary principle: conquer and divide. The defenders of successful stations, organized into battle-ready divisions by former military professionals, stood up to the assaults of vandals, to the very last drop of their blood. They went on to launch counter-attacks and won back every metre of the inter-station tu
Survive. Survive at any cost.
Artyom accepted a white, enamelled cup, in which some of their homemade station tea was splashing around. Of course, it wasn’t really tea at all, but an infusion of dried mushrooms and other additives. Real tea was a rarity. They rationed it and drank it only at major holidays, and it fetched a price dozens of times higher than the price of the mushroom infusion. Nevertheless, they liked their own station brew and were even proud enough of it to call it ‘tea.’ It’s true that strangers would spit it out at first, since they weren’t used to its taste; but soon they got used to it. And the fame of their tea spread beyond the bounds of their station – even the traders came to get it, one by one, risking life and limb, and soon after their tea made it down the whole metro line – even the Hanseatic League had started to become interested in it and great caravans of the magical infusion rolled towards VDNKh. Cash started to flow. And wherever there was money, there were weapons, there was firewood and there were vitamins. And there was life. Ever since they started making the very same tea at VDNKh, the station had begun to grow strong; people from the nearby stations moved to the station and stretches of track were laid to the station; prosperity had come. They were also very proud of their pigs at VDNKh, and legend had it that it was precisely from this station that the pigs had entered the metro: back at the very begi