The sky over Moscow was a beautiful, burning lie.
Project Aurora was fully operational. High-altitude mirrors and drone swarms painted the clouds with light. A holographic hammer and sickle, five miles wide, rotated slowly in the stratosphere. It bathed the ruined city in a warm, golden glow.
It looked like victory. It looked like paradise.
Down on the ground, in the shadow of the Kremlin, the mud was frozen hard as iron.
Jake Vance stood on the balcony of the Grand Palace. He pulled his fur coat tighter. The air smelled of ozone and unwashed bodies.
He looked up at the hologram. It was mesmerizing.
"It works," Taranov said, standing behind him. "Crime is down. Suicides are down. People stop in the streets just to watch it spin."
"They're watching a cartoon," Jake said. "While their stomachs eat themselves."
"It's better than staring at the rubble, Boss."
A siren wailed in the distance. Not an air raid siren. It was the low, grinding klaxon of the Factory District.
Jake turned away from the beautiful sky.
"The Paste Plant," Jake said. "Again."
Factory District 4. The Mess Hall.
The smell hit Jake before he even entered the doors. It smelled like wet cardboard and copper.
Inside, two thousand workers sat at metal benches. The silence was heavy. Usually, the only sound was the rhythmic slurping of the Grey Paste from tin bowls.
Today, there was screaming.
A man in a torn jumpsuit was standing on a table. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated so much his irises were gone. He was clawing at his own throat.
"Get it out!" the man shrieked. "It's moving! The meat is moving!"
He vomited. A thick, grey sludge splattered onto the metal table.
"Restrain him!" a guard shouted.
Two NKVD officers rushed forward. They didn't use batons. They looked tired, malnourished too. They grabbed the man's arms.
The worker possessed the hysterical strength of the dying. He threw the first guard into the crowd.
"Don't eat it!" the worker screamed, pointing at the bowls. "It's not food! It's worms! I can feel them in my veins!"
Jake pushed through the crowd. The workers parted for him, heads bowed. They didn't look like people anymore. They looked like ghosts haunting their own clothes.
The screaming man saw Jake. He stopped struggling.
"Comrade Stalin," the man whispered. Blood trickled from his nose. "I can see the colors. Why are there so many colors?"
The man convulsed. His spine arched backward with a sickening crack. Then he collapsed.
Dead.
The mess hall was silent again.
Jake looked at the bowl of grey sludge on the table. It quivered slightly from the vibrations of the factory floor.
"Clear the room," Jake ordered. His voice was cold. "And get Lysenko. Now."
The Laboratory. Three hours later.
Dr. Lysenko was sweating. He wiped his forehead with a stained handkerchief.
Under the microscope, the sample of Batch 44 Grey Paste looked inert. Just synthetic protein and starch.
"It's the German blight," Lysenko said, his voice trembling. "It hasn't just killed the wheat, Comrade General Secretary. It has mutated."
"Explain," Jake said. He was leaning against a steel table, arms crossed.
"We grow the fungal protein in underground vats," Lysenko said. "To shield it from the surface radiation. But the blight spores... they are microscopic. They got into the ventilation."
"Is it poison?"
"It's a neurotoxin," Lysenko said. "In small doses, it causes mild euphoria. That's why morale was stable last month. But as it builds up in the fatty tissue..."
He pointed to the dead worker's autopsy photos. The brain tissue was swollen.
"Hallucinations," Lysenko listed. "Paranoia. Complete synaptic misfire. And finally, fatal seizure."
Jake looked at the production charts on the wall.
"How much of the supply is contaminated?"
Lysenko didn't answer. He just looked at his shoes.
"Trofim," Jake warned.
"All of it," Lysenko whispered. "Every vat in the Moscow sector. If they keep eating, they go mad. If they stop..."
"They starve," Jake finished.
The door to the lab slid open.
Yuri walked in. He was wearing a small grey suit that mirrored Jake's tunic. He held a tablet device—a clunky, repurposed German counting machine.
"The calculation is simple," Yuri said.
He didn't greet his father. He didn't look at the dead body on the slab.
"What calculation?" Jake asked.
"We have twenty million people in the central zone," Yuri said. His voice was flat, like a radio announcer reading the weather. "We have zero safe food reserves. The blight creates a toxicity timeline of fourteen days."
Yuri tapped the screen.
"Option A: We cease distribution. Mass starvation begins in 72 hours. Riots. Collapse of state authority."
"And Option B?" Jake asked, dreading the answer.
"We alter the biological processor," Yuri said. "We stop using the fungal vats."
"And use what?"
Yuri looked up. His eyes were blue ice.
"We use the organic mass that is no longer efficient," Yuri said. "The dead worker. The prisoners in the Gulags who cannot work. The protein conversion ratio is 4:1."
Lysenko gasped. "Cannibalism?"
"Recycling," Yuri corrected. "It removes the toxicity variable. It solves the hunger variable. It is the only logical path to maintain the State."
Jake stared at his son.
He saw the ghost of Alan Turing behind the boy's eyes. Cold. Mathematical. Inhuman.
Jake walked over to Yuri. He knelt down so they were eye to eye.
"We are not eating people, Yuri."
"Then we die," Yuri said. "That is the alternative."
"No," Jake said. He stood up. "There is a third variable."
He walked to the map on the wall. He ripped the "Project Aurora" schematic down, revealing the Atlantic naval charts beneath.
"We don't grow the food," Jake said. "And we don't eat each other."
He stabbed a finger onto the middle of the ocean.
"We steal it."
The War Room.
Menzhinsky looked skeptical. Taranov looked ready to punch something.
"The Americans call it the 'Noah Convoy'," Jake explained.
He pointed to a cluster of markers moving north from Boston.
"Hoover isn't stupid. He knows the blight is airborne. He's moving his clean genetic stock—cattle, seed grain, non-infected soil—to a bunkers in Greenland. He's building an Ark."
"It will be heavily guarded," Menzhinsky said. "Destroyers. Cruisers. We have no surface navy. The German navy is scuttled."
"We don't need a navy," Jake said. "We have the K-1."
"The drilling sub?" Taranov asked. "It's an oil thief, Boss. It's not a warship. It has no torpedoes."
"It has a grappling arm," Jake said. "And it has cargo space. Bladders meant for oil."
Jake turned to Taranov.
"Get me Captain Ramius on the hydro-phone."
"He's deep, Boss. Under the ice."
"Wake him up."
North Atlantic. Depth: 600 meters.
The K-1 was a monster.
It wasn't sleek like American subs. It was a brutalist brick of titanium and stolen German steel. It hummed with the dangerous power of a dirty nuclear reactor.
Inside the conn, Captain Ramius chewed on a piece of dried fish. It was the last real food on board.
"Signal from Moscow," the comms officer said. "Priority Alpha."
Ramius took the handset.
"This is Ramius."
Jake's voice came through, tinny and distorted by the distance.
"Captain. Stop drilling."
"We are only half full, Comrade General Secretary."
"Dump the oil," Jake ordered. "I need the tanks empty."
Ramius raised an eyebrow. "Empty? Why?"
"You are going hunting, Captain. But not for ships."
On the other end of the line, Jake paused.
"How much do you miss the taste of beef, Captain?"
Ramius felt his mouth water. He hadn't seen a cow in four years.
"I dream about it, sir."
"Good," Jake said. "There is an American freighter, the USS Liberty, in Sector 4. It is carrying two thousand head of blight-free cattle and fifty tons of winter wheat."
Ramius looked at his sonar screen. The convoy was pinging loud and clear. Surrounded by destroyers.
"It is a suicide run," Ramius said. "We cannot fight a destroyer."
"You don't fight them," Jake said. "You go under them. You breach the hull of the freighter from below. You take everything that isn't bolted down. And you bring it home."
Ramius looked at his crew. They were gaunt. Their eyes were hollow. They were tired of the grey paste too.
He looked at the depth gauge.
"Dump the oil," Ramius ordered.
"Captain?" the engineer asked. "That's millions of rubles."
"We can't eat oil," Ramius said. He grabbed the periscope handles.
"Helm, set course one-eight-zero. Silent running."
The Kremlin. Balcony.
Yuri stood beside Jake again.
The boy was watching the holographic sky. The giant red star was rotating.
"The probability of success is 14%," Yuri said.
"That's higher than zero," Jake said.
"If they fail," Yuri said, "we will have to use my plan. The recycling."
Jake looked at his hands. They were shaking. Not from cold. From withdrawal. He needed a cigarette. He needed Nadya.
"They won't fail," Jake said.
"Why?"
"Because they are hungry," Jake said. "And hunger makes men do impossible things."
Yuri tilted his head. He was processing the data.
"Hunger is a variable," Yuri admitted. "I will add it to the algorithm."
"You do that," Jake said.
He looked out at the city.
Somewhere down there, in the dark apartments, millions of people were scraping the bottom of their bowls, waiting for the poison to kick in.
Jake looked up at the fake, glowing sky.
"Shine brighter," he whispered to the machine. "Keep them looking up until I can fill their bellies."
He turned back to the War Room.
The heist was on.