– Want some? – he asked, taking out the second. – Vodka in the Motherland is really like water, but to you – according to the circumstances – even water is not superfluous.
– No.
– “No, sir”, Anika-warrior. You had to say “no” at home, to your mother. So if it's “no” then get on with the task. Assigned by the heroically fallen Senior Ensign. Let's see what there is for two hundred million… pennies.
– I need to take something, – said Vadim, pointing to Petrovich's corpse, pretty drenched in blood.
– No question, take it, – Bashkalo pressed the bottom of the half-empty second bottle into the ground and aimed, holding the machine gun with both hands.
The dead, Alex the Aspirant and Petrovich, had been absolutely right. Several flares marked the shape of “eight” of the “gitiks” perfectly, as in the class. Smelly smoke was being blown along the boundaries of “locations of anomalous gravitational intensities of unknown kind”, clearly denoting them.
– Two hundred million pennies… Some crooked junior science employee gets four thousand one hundred and eighty-five rubles per month! – proclaimed Bashkalo suddenly from somewhere from another world. There too, a thought process was ongoing, gaining momentum, being born, coming to conclusions and finding the general meaning of things. But Vadim did not even turn around, mesmerized by the almost living twists of smoke. It was akin (not the same, but akin) to the drawing of tobacco smoke in the sun, peeking through the cracks in the dark shed.
– And he sits in his tents – clicks on the scores, did you understand?! Damned JR! Call me formally by name and patronymic, he says… And what about an academic then – a hundred thousand per month? I beat the shit out of their mother together with your Gorbachev! Who marks the tracks? An academic? Who carries devices and cables? JRs? Who carries jars, funnels, loots inside and out? Gorbachev? Fu-cking no! Me! I went out to the airfield, I went to the “Zhitkur” object, reached up to halfway together with Pasha-Maz! (Here Vadim picked up his ears for a second. “Yes-yes-yes”, said Mumbler, “'Pasha-Maz'. I wrote down.”) And to me, to me! – two hundred rubles with deductions for the work. Where round here should I spend it? Quarantine? Fuck your quarantine.