“It’s not safe to go out right now,” she says. Tonya, she’s not at all like him, even as she comes from the same stock as him. She fights not on behalf of her children, but on behalf of the children she’d never had. Little does he know she’s about to disappear, to blend in with the teeming masses, to make herself one with the rebels of the Popular Front in anticipation of the final offensive. She may not survive; in fact, it’s almost assured she’ll die in the very streets where once she’d lived. But hers will, in time, be an honourable death, noble, in service of the working man’s cause. She’ll live long enough, though, to make herself useful to the working man in standing against the criminals in power, in seizing her home and forcing the criminals to try and take it back.
Though neither Tonya nor Roger have told anyone, it’s obvious to the other residents they’ve fallen in love, not from anything either has said or done but from the way they seem to avoid one another in the day and only take into each other’s rooms at night. But Valeri looks on her with a muted envy, half-wishing his love Sydney could be there with them to make their stand, whether they live or die unimportant to him in this frame of mind so long as they’re together. But he shakes the thought. “It’s imperative we all do what we can,” he says, “for our children, and our children’s children.” She says, “I would trade my life for my children’s, if I had any children to trade my life for.” Valeri nods and says, “I know what you mean.” He looks on as she gathers her things and makes to leave, then steps in front of her. Though this is that time, that short, brutish time between war’s declaration and the first battles, the city and the country beyond is already burning, from the corner of his eye Valeri spotting through the window behind Tonya a column of smoke rising from the city’s streets, casting a shadow that strikes the two of them at just the right moment to send a shiver running the length of his spine. In the morning, she goes with Valeri to the union hall and in so going she encounters her own future. There won’t be any one sight, any one word spoken or clenched fist thrust into the air that should move her to commit herself wholeheartedly and enthusiastically to the Popular Front’s struggle; there’s no way to explain what happens, if anything happens at all. This is what she was meant to do, the path she was meant to walk in service of the higher purpose assigned to her by the flow of history.
It’s all happened so fast. It’s been building for hundreds of years. If you were to tell the working man that these are the times foreseen by learned men, men more learned than him for every one of those hundreds of years, he’d scoff and push you away. As men squabble over which personality ought to take the chair of some committee in parliament, forces gather. Carefully, the rebel chooses his target, and when the timing is right he strikes. In the time before the rebel’s next strike, though, the working man has found himself caught up in the turmoil, his life spiralling out of control until he soon finds himself struggling to maintain anything like a normal, day-to-day routine. Aboard the cruiser Borealis, the Captain announces they’ve made into port at Copenhagen to take on supplies and join a multinational task force. Their sister-ship, the Australis, has already arrived some days earlier. Then he dashes hopes by declaring there’s to be no shore leave. Already Dmitri has become something of a leader among the men. Perhaps it’s inevitable there should be a leader who arises from the men, out of the little conversations that forge a consensus the men self-selecting for their own. Still, the men are allowed time on deck, during one such break Dmitri looking out across the port at a Spanish-flagged frigate, the frigate’s crew on deck looking right back. There’s a silent moment exchanged between the men of the two nations, cut off by the sudden exploding of a bomb in the streets. It’s distant enough not to be seen, but close enough to be felt like the quivering of a slight earthquake, to be heard almost like the backfiring of a lorry’s engine. Then, the intermittent rattling of gunfire, only for a moment before cutting out. If Dmitri should close his eyes and listen, he would think the Borealis still at home on the Thames.
As the fires rage and as the world he knows crumbles into dust, the working man might be forgiven for seeking at least some small measure of solace in the memories of his own making. In the union halls he meets with his brothers and sisters, but now the mood has become grim. Their numbers have thinned, some jailed, some killed, but most scattered into the wind in cobbling together at least some meagre sustenance for their families. The rebel has not yet begun to provide for him; as if to punctuate this fact, a string of explosions rip through the city, scattering debris like wooden splinters and broken bodies like broken dreams. In the union halls, the working man gathers the last of his strength, takes the stage, and puts in his best face for his brothers and sisters as he makes the case for the next wave of strikes. At the union hall where Valeri takes Tonya, they encounter not one but three angry men standing up high on the stage. “…Are you ready?” one speaker asks the crowd, receiving in response cheers and roars. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen Captain Abramovich orders the crew of the Borealis below decks, curtailing even the minimal privilege of fresh air for the men. There’s some resistance, but it’s limited mostly to the muttering of expletives when the officers’ backs are turned. Dmitri, though, remains standing on deck for a moment, gripping the rails, thinking to stand firmly in place and force the officers to drag him away. But it’s a fleeting thought, a futile notion, in the end the better part of him turning in with the rest, in the bunks that night those mutterings becoming open dissent. “I hate that Captain,” says one crewman. “We’ve lost men in these drills and still he orders more,” says another. “If we’re ordered into action, what will we do?” asks a third. “We’ll fight,” Dmitri says, to himself as much as his bunkmates, “it’s what we do.” The others nod their grim assent.
The speaker at the union hall goes on to say, “They have spent our wages on weaponry and technology to defeat armies on the battlefield, at sea, in the skies, but none of these expensive weapons can possibly defeat the rising of the working man against them!” Another round of cheers and roars. Soon Valeri is shouting, Tonya shouting too, the whole lot of them drowning their own doubts in a sea of voices all crying out for vengeance as one. Tonya seems excited in her own right, and for a time Valeri is convinced she’s come around to his way of thinking, if only he could know better. In agreeing they’ll fight, the crew of the cruiser Borealis silently acknowledge the truth of the matter, that it’s not important whether the coming battle against some foreign enemy is won or lost, whether the men aboard the Borealis live or die in the waters of the Baltic Sea. (They still haven’t been told where they’re headed, but from their course so far it’s abundantly clear to all.) Clinging to the futility of a life marked by impoverishment, indignity, and despair is the folly of the delusional. Still, as Dmitri listens through the night to the rattling of gunfire and the intermittent thud of explosions on the streets of this foreign city, he is committed to the working class struggle in ways even he can’t understand, his spirit given to the way forward offered by the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front, even if his mind is not yet made on the exact way forward. Still there’s talk of mutiny; it’ll come to that, sooner than they think.