Struggle: Grip of steel - стр. 11
The "Damned" battalion was moving from the "Archa" sector towards Poltava, to then reach Kharkov. There was to be a small base of Detachment-14 there, and Bolotnikov expected to meet some of his own, to at least find out the latest news, and what status he himself was now in: deserter, traitor, or whatever. Frankly speaking, he was not much concerned about what word they could call him, but more about the fate of "Detachment-14" itself, which in his understanding had gone down with Khmelnitsky's overthrow. And now it remained only to find out where this bottom was, and how his former comrades-in-arms would behave on it.
And how Misha and Natasha were doing was also important. Still, there were almost no close friends left. And the fewer of them there were, the more precious became those who still existed. After all, you can't lose friends indefinitely. You can only keep their memory endlessly....
And especially now he was curious to ask if they were having the same dream as he was. After all, no one among the "damned" had ever had such a dream. He had asked several of them, and then somehow he had asked them at the general meeting in the evening. He had nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of being misunderstood or thought he was crazy. He had long ago passed those boundaries, and the only criterion for him was the practicality of something, not how it looked from the outside.
No one laughed or looked askew – it was just that no one had ever dreamed anything like this. He stood at the edge of a grove and saw that in the middle of the grove, where everything was illuminated by light, stood a girl and a boy in smart white clothes. "Only together with Mary can you discover the secret of the Black Stone," he only heard from their side.
Raven
"He has a man in there who will blow himself up along with everyone else if ordered to do so," those words loomed in Raven's mind as he stood in the corridors outside the main hall in the Diza Sector administration building. Of course, Cobra's men had let him and his escort of 120 fighters through, pointed out the right roads, led him past the mine barriers where necessary, and now all he had to do was press the button for the elevator to take him downstairs.
But he remembered those words of Cobra's at the meeting. Where he'd said that the prefect's authority was different from the authority within the Kiwi units. The miners followed the prefect's orders as if the sword of Damocles hung over every one of them and would cut them in half for the slightest offense.