Chapter 12.5.

 The building turned out to be even more interesting - climbing up the wide stone porch, Flaxen-Haired said that once, to be more precise, before the fourteenth year, it was a mining academy, which had been a university even earlier.

 Entering the doors, both Dragovich and Flaxen-Haired found themselves in a fairly spacious hall, filled with bustling people. The people were very different - militiamen in uniform and plainly dressed civilians flashed by. There were some punks in jackets, as well as some street riff-raff like idle youth. A table was set up against the wall, on which an elderly woman with a face tanned black had laid out pies and other similar grub.

 On the left side there was another hall, fenced off by a figured wooden lattice at the top and a wicker fence at the bottom. Music was blaring. Apparently, there was a tavern there. If all this were happening at home, Dragovich would have decided that the soldiers were partying there.

There were plenty of people returning from the front here, but, unlike in Europe, the cheeky front-line soldiers did not have much room to roam here - if in Europe they were, by and large, the only force that solved all their problems head-on, then here there were plenty of their own military - militias. One way or another, the front-line soldiers, thirsty for a wild rest, had long been forced out of the city to country establishments that adapted to their needs. - Before, a couple of years ago it was a cultural place, a municipal canteen, cheap, and now God knows what has happened - Flaxen-Haired waved his hand towards the fence.

 - And what happened to the university? - asked Dragovich, when they were both climbing the wide stairs.

 - It went down the drain, - answered Flaxen-Haired, - More precisely, it went down. And it served them right. Otherwise, they started a… A nest of vipers here. Some, however, managed to leave for the right bank.

 - You mean the professors?

 - Yes, those same ones. Some were openly for the right bank, some supported the capital's coup. Only a few were for us, probably, and maybe no one at all.

 - Now, it turns out that you don't teach mining engineers?

 - They taught not only them here, but everyone in a row - chemists and machine builders. Now it turned out that things were going well anyway - Inter-Nitro would find chemists for itself, we ourselves, as you can see, know how to create defense, and who else is there... Builders... What do you need to teach them... a year and a half in a sharaga and that's it. And the mining business died, I hope for good. They just poisoned everyone around, and themselves like poison - drug addicts and drunks... Such a disdainful attitude towards the working people plunged Dragovich into bewilderment. What was surprising was that such speeches came from Flaxen-H - a man, as far as Dragovich had managed to get to know him, a hard worker, able to handle a tool in his hands, simple and alien to the arrogance inherent in the inhabitants of megalopolises from the awareness of belonging to a highly cultured society. In general, by psychotype, he belonged more to the workers than to the white collars. Maybe even to the villager. On the floor where the stairs led and where the warehouse was located, disappointment awaited - the duty officer was not there. Instead, another militiaman, only half dressed in uniform, was guarding the entrance to the part of the corridor blocked by bars. We had to wait for the duty officer.

 He appeared twenty minutes later and announced that the clothing warehouse would open in an hour and a half, not earlier, because the person responsible for the warehouse was not there yet. Both men were definitely not completely sober, but it did not play a special role.

 We had to think about what to do in those hour and a half.

 - Let's go for a walk around the market, - suggested Flaxen-Haired.

 - Is there much interesting there? - Dragovich doubted, but there was nothing to do anyway.

 The market stalls, as it turned out, were located not only on the square with the monument, but also in the courtyard, bordered on all sides by definitely non-residential buildings. All of them, according to Flaxen-H, once belonged to this technical school or university.

 The air was filled with the smell of braziers, and also some household chemicals like washing powders. Somewhere a diesel generator was rattling. People's voices merged into one continuous hum - a common thing for such places.

 The first rows that caught the eye were located under flimsy awnings and were hung with all sorts of rags from women's robes to work overalls and winter jackets. A little to the side were those same household chemicals that began to smell almost as soon as they entered the building - there were boxes of powders, some plastic canisters without labels, toilet cleaning kits and much more.

 In the middle of the square there was a narrow square tower with a pair of wheels on top - this is what mine lifts looked like.

 Flaxen-Haired moved deeper into the rows. Dragovich followed him. Further on there were phones and tablets, garage tools, woodworking tools, and more clothes. Then a counter, even several, with various electronics like radios, surveillance cameras and dosimeters. And then there were rows of animals - rabbits, geese, chickens.

 Dragovich looked at the tower rising in the middle with some interest once again - that's the direction they were moving.

 - What's this? - Dragovich finally pointed at the tower.

 - They had some kind of tunnel here - a shaft goes down, a tunnel at the very bottom, and in the basement of the building there's an exit back up.

 - Holy shit, - Dragovich was surprised by the thoroughness of the approach, - Were they training to work in mines or something?

 - Something like that - surveyors measured their crap underground. Then, after the city was liberated, there were stupid rumors that there was a network of tunnels here, and from this network there was an exit to the city's utilities. And in Soviet times, by order of the KGB, communications were equipped as lines with passage tunnels, so that a saboteur could get through the entire city from here. It is not entirely clear, however, why this was built and why it was necessary to get through, and why the KGB needed a saboteur in its own city, but rumors and logic have always been at odds.

 - Why from here? This is a noticeable place. If so, then through the basement of any of the houses...

 - This is a separate joke, - Flaxen-Haired pointed to the building towering in the opposite part of the block, - the enemy once fortified here.

 The building was covered with protective fabric along its entire height, although some scraps were sticking out from above, which definitely indicated that something was wrong with the house.

 There was also something wrong with the neighboring building, in the upper corner of which, as if with a knife, a piece two stories high and fifteen meters wide was cut out of a cake. The cutout was covered with a patch roof from above. All the windows below and to the left of the cutout were sealed with metal sheets.

 - Did an aerial bomb hit there? - said Dragovich, nodding towards the damaged couple of houses.

 - Take it harder! - answered Flaxen-Haired cheerfully, - our guys loaded it with "Izverg".

 Dragovich knew very well what the "Izverg" was - a self-propelled 230-mm howitzer 5S75, also known as RU/VPK 5S75 in the new language. The weapon was legendary, brutal in the Soviet style. With some modifications, it was still produced to this day, and was regularly noted in reports from the front.

 KANAR had five howitzers at its disposal and now, as of autumn 2119, they were dispersed at a distance of about fifty kilometers from the city, forming a kind of strategic echelon in case of a sudden invasion from the right bank.

 Holy shit, - Dragovich was amazed, - did they really hit the city directly? - he had heard in detail about the battles in the eastern part before, but he knew nothing about this single strike by a terrible howitzer.