Gathering Point C, Road 320-H, Agryz, Tatarstan, Russia

November 14th, 1991, 15h00’

56.5193° N, 52.9405° E

“How many people have you fucked in the ass?”

General Vladimir Sytnyk slammed his fist on the table, breaking the wood in half; woodchips rained down on his and his prisoner’s shoes. The proud general of the Silver Vanguard had been obsessed with justice from the day he learned of the horrible deeds enacted by the Republic of Moskva. Sytnyk had always cherished a determination for a Russia free from manipulation. It was an intention forged from decades of discipline in the army, bolstered by an unmatched physical prowess and an excellent tactical mind.

As such, the general had worked tirelessly, trying to undo the horrendous acts of those disgusting pigs from Moskva, along with every following consequence. From dealing with alcoholism, hooliganism, to the trafficking of cloned specimens, few would expect that behind his cantankerous appearance was such an industrious individual.

Today, he was personally resolving another crime, an outrageous atrocity in his eyes.

Sexual desire.

The room confining Andrei Maksimov was large enough for only one person to stretch out his legs under a table. Sitting in the corner of the room, hands cuffed behind his back and blood on his lips, Maksimov showed no fear, even with the guards—the Special Agents, to be exact—staring at him from the other side of the door. Like Sytnyk, he was an idealist, and dared to live up to his ideal. Unlike Sytnyk, he had sex with men.

“None you’d know of.” Maksimov’s answer was truncated. It was the only answer he’d uttered since entering this room.

Another punch hit Maksimov’s reddened cheek. He knew full well Sytnyk was not a person to back down. The man would find an answer, and he would find the answer he wanted to hear.

“Do you think I’m going to believe your bullshit? You think I’m going to believe you turned sick because of nobody? I thought you had more dignity than this, Lieutenant Colonel!” The wall rumblrd and flecks of paint fell as Sytnyk slammed his fist against it. The copper tang of blood merged with chalky, limestone dust in Maksimov’s nose. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re but a mere prisoner, Andrei. You aren’t a Lieutenant Colonel. You are a NOBODY, copulating with NOBODY, am I right?”

“I’m not guilty of anything.” Maksimov coughed as he gasped for air.

Sytnyk couldn’t fathom why anyone would waste time on an act contributing nothing to themselves and risk isolation from the rest of society. His stomach turned and churned at the mere thought of sticking his cock up another man’s ass.

“You were supposed to be an upstanding member of the army. But you can still go back. You’re Russian, goddamnit, not some wimpy Finn.” Sytnyk grabbed his prisoner by the collar, “I know you’re sick, and even the toughest men give in to sickness sometimes. Just tell me who those filthy beasts are, and I will keep your shameful acts a secret.”

Maksimov had served under his superior long enough to understand Sytnyk was a man of his word. He was being given a choice, a luxury granted for his twenty years of loyal service. He just needed to betray his lovers, admit what he did was reprehensible, and he could carry on his life, free of scornful glances from colleagues. He just needed to accept copulating was a sin.

“If I tell you, what will happen to the people I denounce?” Maksimov asked.

Sytnyk roared at him, “You think you are in a position to care about others? You know full well what will happen to them, the same thing that should have happened to you long ago! I will send you lot to Solnechnyy Svet, so we can turn you into normal people again! What part of this can’t you grasp?”

If Maksimov had lived anywhere else, he would have immediately received the punishment of copulators: the death penalty, or if not, the ridicule of everyone around him until the day he died. Copulators were faulty prints—asexual soldiers were not supposed to feel lust, and were genetically programmed to not feel lust.

Faulty prints were to be terminated.

Maksimov’s crimes would be etched on his tombstone so others could spit on it, piss on it—if he had a tombstone. Luckily for Maksimov, he served Silver Vanguard. The leader of Silver Vanguard, Timur Karenin, deemed the death penalty too harsh; thus, Solnechnyy Svet—a facility solely for the purpose of curing sexual diseases—was established. If Maksimov lied about his desire for other men, he might be lucky enough to get a doctor to sign a Certificate of Authenticity, and he would be released before being subjected to beatings or torture.

“I’m not guilty of anything! There’s nothing wrong with me, Vlad!” screamed Maksimov, tendons creeping up all over his neck. He had now regained his strength, an inextinguishable flame of resistance and rebellion. “And you know it! I’ve served you for twelve fucking years! We killed the Republic’s General Radomir Granklin together! I can do my job just fine, and my personal preference has done nothing to interfere with it—”

Maksimov couldn’t finish his sentence; another punch landed on his face. A cracking sound resounded—the prisoner’s nose broke. “Sick people never realize they’re sick,” grunted Sytnyk. “Listen closely while I’m still keeping your damn brain intact. We’ve been keeping tabs on you. We know where you’re hiding those shitty letters you’ve been passing to your lovers in the dark, like thieves. If I find out who they are myself, I’m going to chop those sickly bastards into pieces!”

He knew about the letters. Even though they wrote the letters in cryptic language, Maksimov understood a man like Sytnyk wouldn’t have trouble deciphering them. The prisoner knew he could hide no longer.

“Then were Anosov and Shigin sick as well?” Maksimov spat blood. His nostrils were clogged, forcing him to speak through a thick wad of blood in his throat. He’d insisted on keeping their names a secret to save them from embarrassment, so they would be remembered as war legends. They had been heroes their whole life, and they would live on as heroes. But it was pointless. Heroes, scumbags, bastards. The title mattered not, for Shigin and Anosov were dead.

Sytnyk smirked at the thought that his fists had finally punched the truth out of Maksimov, but that wasn't the case. Maksimov had simply decided that kissing a man was nothing to be ashamed of.

The general propped himself up in front of his prisoner. He tried to suppress the flames of anger in his heart, to speak with steely calm, an extraordinary effort from a hot-tempered person. “Did you perform such acts with Anosov and Shigin?”

“Yes. So what?” Maksimov’s face perked, a challenging gesture. “Anosov died because he jumped to block a bullet for me. Shigin held an entire section on his own, lured them into an empty house, and then detonated the bomb inside. During their funeral, you called them war heroes. You called me a war hero. Do those words mean nothing to you now, because their tongues were intertwined with mine? Are you going to refer to them as filthy rats? Are you going to dig up their graves and publicly shame them both, so people can laugh at your face for employing us, for your inability to tell normal people and copulators apart?”

If the confession had come from anybody else, the general would have arrested the person for defamation. Because it come from the famously upright Andrei Maksimov, Sytnyk had to choose to believe. But it still didn’t mean there was any chance to convince the general his views were wrong.

“Just how many times have you used that dick of yours, that you’ve become this foolish?” Sytnyk said. “Their heroics have nothing to do with this! You don’t know it yet, but you will! Sexual attraction is a dysfunctional form of idolatry. It creeps into every corner of your soul, then unassumingly eats away your perception, your ability to tell right from wrong, just from unjust. You will soon become obsessed, debilitated, useless. If those two didn’t die, they would have become . . . become like you! Don’t even give me the ‘I was born this way’ crap! We’ve funded research to debunk your bullshit. You have a mental disease, Andrei. It’s messed with your manly hormones! Denying your sickness is digging your own grave.”

Maksimov didn’t answer. He had long concurred that nothing would sway the general’s deep-rooted belief.

Sytnyk stood up, stepped away from Maksimov, and placed his hand on his chin, pondering the possibilities. Silver Vanguard’s army was getting weaker day by day. Their smaller unit was surrounded by the Republic of Moskva, cut off from all means of communication, destined to be eradicated before they could call for help. Talented people, like meat, were hard to find. And Maksimov was one of the best officers Sytnyk had access to. Losing him would be the biggest blow to their ambition since the battle of Volgograd.

“Andrei Maksimov,” pronounced Sytnyk, “Do you accept you are sick?”

Maksimov turned away. His silence was a definite answer.

“A man who leads himself to self-destruction has no place in my army.” Sytnyk gestured for the guards to take him away, “Get out of here. I’ll give you a pair of snow boots and food for three days. You deserve nothing else. Don’t ever come back.”

If sacrificing his best officer meant righteousness would be preserved, then so be it.

The soldiers strutted in and carried the once well-respected Maksimov by the armpits. They nudged him on his back with their rifles, and when he refused to walk at the guard’s pace, they whipped him on the butt until he picked up his pace.

“Heard you like it up the ass. Then you must be enjoying this.” One of the guards gave him a sly insult as he whipped Maksimov. The prisoner didn’t reply.

Sytnyk had to take a stroll before he walked back to his office. The incident had taken him an entire day to handle, as he needed to handle this matter upon himself to protect Andrei Maksimov’s dignity. A man should rather die as a hero than live as a disgrace. If Maksimov was subjected to public prosecution, the image of a war hero would crumble within seconds. People would start questioning if the senior officers were truly capable and why such people were recruited into the ranks. Public prosecution of a senior officer would only raise further dilemmas.

Usually, there would be a sub-committee in charge of torturing prisoners for testimony. They almost never failed. The suspect either confessed to their crimes or died during torture and had their testimony faked. Since Sytnyk came to power, the faking of testimony became rarer and more discreet, because the man valued honesty. But, as the proverb said, the person standing on the top of the mountain would see nothing down at the foot. Although Sytnyk’s army fought for ‘righteousness,’ it didn’t mean everyone would be morally upright.

It would upset the hopeless idealists to learn that the Silver Vanguards were the least conservative army in all of Russia.

When Sytnyk returned, he found his third-in-command— Brigadier General Igor Goncharov—holding a stack of documents in front of his chest, waiting for him near the door.

“General Vladimir, sir! I’ve been looking for you for hours.” His face was pale; snow still lingered on his eyebrows. Sytnyk questioned for a second if Goncharov could be a copulator, but dismissed the idea at once. His team could not be that incompetent.

“What is it?” Sytnyk raised his eyebrow, “Surely you can handle some documents on your own, can’t you?”

“I found something in one of these scouting reports, and you absolutely have to take a look at this.” Goncharov hastily turned through the pages. “One of our scouts detected abnormal activities near Izhevsk around a month ago. The signals he received were too peculiar to be generated by a human.”

“A month ago?” Sytnyk raised his voice. “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

“Because we needed to reaffirm that this was not a detection error. And it wasn’t. Rest assured, sir, our machines maintain their one-hundred-percent accuracy. The power patterns weren’t of the newer models, which means they should have came from a prototype. And there had only ever been eight of those, all of whom were high-level officers in the Republic of Moskva. It made little sense for a prototype to show up in Izhevsk.”

Sytnyk swallowed his saliva upon hearing the word prototype. They were the most supercharged, overpowered, and inhuman bunch he had ever fought against—the greatest threat to achieving peace across Russia.

“Give me that.” The general jerked the report from Goncharov and had a close look at it. He couldn’t understand the graphs very well, but didn’t need to understand them to know the indicators were markedly similar to a prototype he killed with his own hands. Radomir Granklin. He then turned to Goncharov, “Do we have any idea who this person might be?”

“Izhevsk was enclosed for the past five months, so there was very little in the way of people going in and out of there. We only harbored seven refugees from there, but none of them seemed to be different. However . . .” Goncharov scratched his chin. “There was a squad of people who were sent there, and one of them shared the name of our common enemy. The timeline of these patterns matched the timeline of their arrival.”

“What’s his name?”

Goncharov disclosed with caution, “Alexei Vronsky.”

Sytnyk recognized that name. He had faced Vronsky a few times. A tough opponent, and an obnoxious asshole.

“Impossible!” the general exclaimed. “Alexei Vronsky is dead.”