Dragovich turned his head away from the screen. There, outside the window, poplars, sticking out in the middle of concrete boxes destroyed either by battles or by desolation, were shedding yellow leaves.
Then the overpass turned right and began to go into another city block. In contrast to what was happening on the screen, the picture was calming.
A pretentious complex of tall buildings by local standards appeared in the window.
- Soviet houses, Stalinist, - Flaxen-Haired commented.
- Stalinist? How old are they? - Dragovich answered with disbelief in his voice.
- No, that's just what they call them, they look like the original Stalinist ones. And probably inside too. They were built during the Soviet years.
- They're probably good.
- Not everything that's Soviet is good, and not everything that's good Soviet is good in itself, - Flaxen-Haired said.
- I don't get it.
- I mean, they liked to show off more than they could afford to, - Flaxen-Haired answered, - in some places they decorated houses like palaces, and in others people lived in barracks, and they still live there.
Dragovich never figured out Flaxen-H's attitude to the Soviet past - sometimes he praised something Soviet in particular, sometimes he denounced everything Soviet in general with the worst words. Dragovich himself had a respectful attitude to the departed superpower, despite the fact that his great-grandfather, being Russian, had just fled the nascent Second Union. So Dragovich was twelve and a half percent Russian, which he bragged about a couple of times. However, no one from the locals took it seriously. Well, he said it and said it.
The tram began to shake noticeably - the rails had obviously not been repaired for a long time. Rare cars and city buses drove along the avenue. There were also the ubiquitous military trucks scurrying back and forth, sometimes with awnings, sometimes with kungs.
Having passed the station with an old black locomotive, the tram turned right. This was a fork. The straight part of the line went up onto an overpass and went on, apparently, towards the right bank.
Flaxen-Haired confirmed Dragovich's guess: another route went along that line, which had somewhere to turn before the closed bridge - towards the industrial zone "Inter-Nitro".
The line chosen by the tram-train went in an easterly direction along a wide straight avenue, which was called Ilyicha Avenue, of course, the name was from Soviet times. There was no overpass here.
After the station, the tram went a couple more stops. Approaching the third, Flaxen-Haired made a sign to Dragovich and moved towards the exit.
Where they got off there was another fork in the tracks, laid at what must have been a busy intersection at one time. The branch, like the line near the station, went north, towards the right bank. Unlike that one, this one was in complete disrepair. Young maples grew in the middle of the tracks, the roadway was dug up with pits that had long since been overgrown with tall grass. Everything pointed to the fact that the tram line, if not the entire street, was the main thoroughfare leading to RBSF, but it turned out that this was not the case at all.
Making his way along the winding path with Dragovich, running through the maple trees that had grown tall here and there, Flaxen-Haired began to tell the story of this street.
The desolation of both the railway line and the entire roadway, according to Flaxen-H, was explained by the fact that in 2114 the former mayor of the city started repairs.
Surprisingly, he could not have chosen a better time than the first, most difficult year of the War. This was the state of this street when the local confrontation took place, in the autumn of 2114.
The columns that broke through to the western part of the city dealt with the equipment working here without much fighting. One could only guess how great the threat to the workers was, but by that time they had, of course, fled.
- And what do the builders have to do with it? - Dragovich asked in bewilderment.
- Who needs them, these builders! It's all about the equipment. Of course, no one would shoot at the workers, but the cars... They belonged to business. By that time, those devils were already on the right bank, or even outside the country - you couldn't get to them, so at least they chopped up their junk.
But wouldn't it have been better to use them, those cars, ourselves? - Dragovich continued to doubt.
- It's clear that it would have been better, but then who could have known in advance when we would win, how we would win, in what order we would liberate the city districts and how quickly, - Flaxen-Haired was quite adept at the conversation, which is why he didn't ask a more straightforward question that sounded like "will we win".
- And in general, - he continued, - don't forget that we are the People's Anarchist Republic, so we can do this.
The name of the republic caused Dragovich slight bewilderment. In general, in his mind, anarchy looked somewhat different from what KANAR was. The Republic was certainly not a model of social structure and order, but there was nothing out of the ordinary here.
In terms of technology and defense systems, there was real development here - not advanced technologies, like on the Big Front, but still there was its own anti-drone defense of high-speed drones and missiles, an air defense network coordinated with the bloc forces and a bunch of similar homemade products.
All this was built by large, clearly organized teams - it could not be otherwise. This was quite strange for anarchy.
On the right side, a view gradually opened up onto some square, cluttered with pavilions and containers. Music boomed loudly from afar. A white signal lamp was blinking on a high pole - this meant that everything was calm, both in terms of the threat from the Asian Bloc and in terms of the threat of provocations from the right bank. In general, such an "anti-alarm".
This only happened here, in Superfederant, in LBSF, although who knows, maybe the right-bankers did the same. The idea was that, having heard some kind of blow, you could look for the closest of the numerous signals and, if it continued to blink white, you could calm down - the machine very rarely makes mistakes.
And sounds were not rare - there were "booms" from supersonic attack aircraft, there were thunderous launches from anti-missile terminals. The latter, in a safe situation for the locals, could fire at some warhead flying half a thousand kilometers to the area of its target, which was already a thousand kilometers away. Or catch something flying from Asia to Western Europe - this also happened.
There was also a variety of non-aggressive activity of their own, LBSF, and exactly the same internal training work of RBSF. All this constantly howled, rumbled and shook the glass. A flashing white lantern in such cases indicated that all this was no more dangerous than thunder on a summer day. In the middle of the square there was a monument to some guy who looked quite a lot like a priest. In the distance, beyond the square, there was an old brick building with a patch in the left corner of the facade. The patch was two stories high and three windows wide, as usual it was made of unevenly painted sheet metal.
- Here it is, the supply center, - Flaxen-Haired waved his hand towards the building.
The monument turned out to be not to a priest, but to some medieval traveler who discovered that there was coal in these parts.