The working man is lost, still yet committed as he is to the cause of taking on the way of things. But we must never allow ourselves to be seduced by the notion that the way of things was peaceful before all this started; this is the insidious temptation offered by they who would dream themselves our masters. Even back in those times when there were no gun battles breaking out in the streets, no hit and run attacks by the rebel’s gunmen, no storm trooper’s massacres of the young and the innocent. For, you see, our way of life is one of force, with the wealthy man and his servants in the apparatus of the state relying always on the threat of force to have their way. And so, too, will the working man of the future rely on this threat to have at his way, to safeguard the future he will have built for himself and to lay down the path through to a stage of historical development even more advanced than what he will have built for himself. And Dmitri’s intuition should soon prove right. But in the meanwhile, at home events soon come to a head. Captain Abramovich has gotten wind, somehow, someway, of the planned mutiny, and he’s acted to head it off. “All you better think twice about it,” says the Captain, “if you all don’t muster for duty in the morning then I’ll put you all in the stockade. And you’ll be hanged after you’re court-martialed.” But threats have long since lost their power. “There’s not enough room in the stockade for all of us,” Dmitri says at the next meeting of co-conspirators, “and unless we want to wind up dying for the sake of some rich man’s wealth, I prefer the hangman’s noose to the enemy’s guns.” All are in agreement. The mutiny will go ahead as planned, but with one key difference.
Amid the carnage, news breaks of the current government’s troubles, of backroom dealing and of petty squabbling the likes of which the working man has become used to by now. But after another defeat on the battlefield and another round of attacks by the rebel’s gunmen, the remaining recruitment centres grow desolate, the invalids and the retired soldiers manning them spending their days alternating between fearing for their lives and fighting off sheer boredom. It’s a far cry from where we’ve been, where we’ve come from, the scene around the city and across the country the way of things, the glass and steel towers that once so threatened the essence of the working man’s way of life. It’s under these circumstances that the announcement comes of compulsory service, with the first of the young men to be inducted within days. In the morning, the time comes for the crew to muster outside the barracks at the base. But Dmitri and the others are already on board the Borealis. “No more the enemy can kill us,” he says, “than can we be provoked into killing them.” News comes of the next battle, in which the Australis has been lost. She took a missile right to the forward magazine, not far from the very spot on the Borealis where Dmitri serves. In this same battle, one of the Royal Navy’s mightiest class of ships, a massive aircraft carrier with unreliable, near-useless stealth fighters sinks, too, a single enemy missile striking at exactly the right spot. When he reads the report on his screen, that same shiver runs the length of his spine, the knowledge he’d have died had the Borealis received that hit instead in his mind confirming every instinct he has to rebellion.
Events have come to a head. Whatever the wealthy man and his apparatchiks in government might’ve expected, this announcement produces only a renewed burst of rage on the streets. The working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner defy the state of emergency and fill the streets once again, at the centre of their mass the Victory Monument jutting into the sky like a pillar of salt cast from a mould of steel. As punishment for their failure to turn for muster, Dmitri and the others have been confined to quarters, the stockade on base already filled beyond capacity. In the afterwards, the rebellious fervour among the crew of the Borealis has nearly reached its inevitable climax. Still Dmitri thinks of his friends on the Australis, sunk by a Russian hunter-killer submarine. There are no survivors. Lying in his cot, he says to himself, “they die for no purpose but a sacrifice to the criminals in parliament.” While confined to quarters, Dmitri and the others can hear the cries of the people in the streets through the distance like the surging of a mighty river through the rapid’s jagged rocks. To Dmitri, this is the call of the wild. And he bitterly resents being locked in his quarters while so many are fighting and dying not only on the faraway battlefields in a foreign land but on the streets of this very city.
In the night, parliament falls, the coalition government cobbled together from a dozen different parties giving way to a new coalition government cobbled together from a different assortment of parties. At times like these, no one really knows who’s in power. But news of this sudden and new formation of government does not resonate far, the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner still in the streets. There’s violence; of course there’s violence. The troopers attack with their batons, their water cannon, and their pepper spray, while the crowds respond with hurled bricks and raised fists. Gunfire cracks through the air. Bodies fall. Blood stains pavement. This is an orgy of violence without end, which must never end, a grand act of theatre under which all must carry out their prescribed roles to their logical and inevitable ends, no matter the futility. It becomes as one could’ve predicted, a storm of chaos unravelling by the day, as each new sequence of events brings with it a new burden placed on the way of things, soon the day coming when there’ll be one burden too many and it’ll all come crashing down. In the street, in the halls in his little apartment block, Valeri meets Tonya, asking her, “are you leaving?” She replies, “never.”
“Good.” He’s about to go on, when she pre-empts him by saying, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he replies, “with people like you on our side, how can we fail?” She smiles.
“Have you spoken to your friend?” Valeri asks. “I have,” Tonya replies, “and we’ll get what we need.” A few days later, Tonya knocks on his door and presents him with a package, inside a semi-automatic rifle and a few hundred rounds of ammunition. “Just one?” Valeri asks. “It’s all I could get,” Tonya replies. And Valeri believes her. He takes the rifle in his hands, holds it as one would and looks down the sights, envisioning his soon-to-be target. With the couple of revolvers and the old, bolt-action rifle they’ve been able to scrounge from among the remaining residents, this is the arsenal they’ll have to defend themselves from the coming attack. They’ll be hopelessly outgunned, but Valeri knows in his heart it’s not the firepower they can muster but the mere act of raising arms in defense of the right to live in their own homes that matters. Although the rebel has been carrying out his attacks for months, theirs will be, with others, the first rising of the ordinary worker. It’s a tantalizing thought, one which makes Valeri’s mouth water even as it makes his stomach turn. In the night, there’s regular blackouts, the power switched off, they say, to make the city less vulnerable to enemy air raids and to enemy ships and submarines that might be lurking just offshore.