There was still an opportunity to gawk at the passing neighborhoods.
At some point, a couple of police cars pulled up alongside the train. They were flying Chryslers - most countries had them. In general, flying troughs with a width and length greater than a tank chassis were not often used as police cars, but they were still not rare. Of course, you couldn't find them in Superfederant, but in the rest of Russia, exactly the same ones were flying every now and then. The paint job was different, of course, but otherwise it was the same. These German ones were black and green.
The car itself was quite interesting. Even army flat-bottomed cars were made according to schemes where the propellers were open. There, the propellers were protected by ring channels, but open. If such a flat-bottomed boat were to act as a police car, sooner or later it would have received something like a rope or cable with two weights, for example nuts, on both ends. In addition to this thing, people's ingenuity has invented a bunch of other nasty things, often delivered by drones.
At the front, everything was simpler - if an enemy drone overtook a flat-bottomed boat, it would simply blow itself up, and not get sophisticated with nooses dropped on the propellers. Fortunately, it did not come to warheads on drones in the rear, but the challenge was undoubtedly thrown down.
he designers, in turn, solved the problem by packing the propellers inside the hull, equipping them with an input device - a shield that opened in various configurations: on the march, during safe hovering, in protected mode. All this, of course, reduced the aerodynamic efficiency of the propellers, but the creators were not embarrassed and poured an exorbitant power-to-weight ratio into the trough. People consoled themselves with rumors that these machines exploded very well, but this was just self-consolation of the haters.
Not yet wanting to give in to the heavily armed flat-bottomed vehicles, the engineers supplied these flying policemen, flugpolizei, in the local language, with everything necessary for installing automatic turrets and some other defense systems. These, to their credit for their peacefulness, did not have any machine guns.
Now both troughs were moving with their doors wide open, sticking out over the hoods. They also spread thin folding wings to the sides, reminiscent of scissors - the flat-bottomed vehicles had such.
The head in a black helmet with a face hidden by a mask and black glasses looked calmly forward - the driver's figure was quite visible. At some point, he even turned his head towards the train, but then continued to watch what was directly ahead. After some time, the train nevertheless moved forward - the menacing troughs, for all their brutality, were still not a model of rational aerodynamics, and other trains easily overtook much more elegant helicopters.
In general, the "flying tanks" we saw were quite expressively at odds with the policeman who tried to reason with the soldiers at the airport. For a knowledgeable person, this was not surprising - unlike Russia, in some countries even the patrol police could have a fairly pronounced gradation, including in terms of authority and technical means. Much more intricate than the line of patrol service, special forces, who usually broke down doors, after which they laid everyone face down on the floor, and internal troops. Here, both the policeman at the airport and these equipped flyers were "the street", "the street" without all these forensic experts and who knows who else - they were a separate story.
The train now and then dived into some forest plantations. Then he would emerge and find himself flying along his overpass over neat low-rise blocks, and so on several times. Comparing the pictures flashing past the window, Zavirdyaev caught himself thinking that he was comparing them with the Superfederant, and not with the rest of Russia - the vile region had polluted perception so much that it was time to ask the question, had it not begun to be perceived as the norm? In fact, the Kuznetsk Region, being a fairly populated territory, noticeably contrasted with the "samples" of the rest of Russia with the same level of population - a coal-mining, or rather a former coal-mining region, had been out of order almost since Soviet times. In the years of the late Second Union, this was an ecological disaster zone - at that time, coal was mined at full speed - due to the technological aspects of manufacturing the then transport batteries, there was a great need for graphite. In addition, the Soviet industry never completely abandoned boiler houses and old technologies in metallurgy. A special chic was the fact that private households in the region, even at the end of the last century, were often heated with coal.
Since the early eighties of the last century, the demand curve for coal has been creeping down. This was mainly due to the fact that organic matter had replaced graphite, and carbon of "various allotropes", in particular fiber, could be obtained even from garbage under conditions of access to almost limited energy.
Nevertheless, dirty mines continued their work even then - now coal was a purely chemical raw material, which gave, in addition to graphite, which had not yet completely depreciated, a wide variety of organic matter.
The end of the Second Union found the future Superfederant in the state of a gloomy low-tech industrial region, containing not only coal mining enterprises, but also old, non-"arc" metallurgy and chemical industry, the central object of which was what now belonged to the associated-national company Inter-nitro. If it is completely correct, then GBA InterNitro RU. The post-Soviet privatization process bypassed the region to a certain extent. While the de-Sovietization of the economy transferred valuable enterprises to new owners, and ultimately to the same constellations, mainly GBA, the Super-Federant, which of course was not a Super-Federant at that time, found itself in some sense outside the flow of this truly historical process. The reason for this was that neither GBA nor AEX were in any hurry to get "it" for themselves.
All this was despite the fact that there were much more depressing post-Soviet enterprises in their appearance and technology - but they simply sank into oblivion, leaving their mark only in someone's pockets.
The industry of the Super-Federant hung in this gradation somewhere in the middle - exactly as much as it towered above the obvious junk, it fell short of something decent. At the same time, one must assume that the management of the already globalized industry did not see the possibility of simply taking and putting an end to the sloppy legacy - after all, there was a need for coal as a chemical raw material, and clouds began to gather on the global political horizon of that time. At that time, they were still clouds.
As a result, the industry, which had its modest place in the chains of military production, was preserved, but given over to the mercy of the national economic elements, which, in contrast to the methodical constellations and their equally methodical nature of the spread of influence, was something, it would be correct to say, archaic. A whole galaxy of local kings and magnates of various scales and styles appeared.
Differing from the rest of the country in economy, the future Super-Federate began to isolate itself in terms of population. To put it simply, to slide into depression. There was nothing extraordinary in this - there were several such regions in Russia itself, and even more in Europe. Once, a century and a half ago, Detroit, who would have thought or remembered, experienced not just something similar, but something more depressing.
One way or another, all the post-Soviet decades the Kuznetsk Region was an unattractive, depressed region. In this state, it entered, along with everyone else, first into the Pre-War, then into the Great War, and then into the fourteenth and fifteenth years.
All this historical background made the appearance of the Super-Federate what it was - noticeably inferior even to neighboring regions. And now, instead of comparing cozy German neighborhoods with Russian ones that were not much different, Zavirdyaev's memory every now and then erupted into consciousness pictures of the unsightly life of either the right or left bank, which he, Zavirdyaev, now dejectedly compared with what he saw outside the window. At some point, a tall grey concrete fence ran parallel to the tracks, clearly built during the War. And so it turned out - the tracks soared up the hill and opened up a panoramic view of a fortified facility - a far more advanced version of the irrational pile that housed the CSCE group and other interventionists, as they were called in the Super Federation. Unlike the unfinished Kuznetsk Power Station, this facility had apparently been operating long before the War, long before it became fortified. Many critical industries around the world were now encased in concrete armor - this was in case of a Doomsday Provision or something like that.
It was clear to anyone, and it was never officially hidden, that concrete walls and other accessories like control towers and checkpoints were in no way designed to withstand any impacts from the enemy, that is, "@enemy". In some theory, in science fiction, assuming a complete military defeat and Asian hordes on "ancestral territories", these fortresses could have worked as ancient military fortifications, but these were pure fantasies, appropriate for cheap films, and not now, but sometime after the War. In fact, fortification belts were supposed to protect critical enterprises from the impact of spontaneous armed uprisings of citizens, which could well take place in the event of the development of certain crisis scenarios. National governments have long ceased to suffer from excessive modesty and delicacy and have articulated every now and then that they fully admit the likelihood of such destructive outbursts from their citizens. They were not at all embarrassed by such frankness in response - during the years of the War, everyone had long since abandoned all these habits of bowing and scraping before each other and said everything to each other's faces. Regardless of one's attitude to the current situation, it was hard not to agree that this was a manifestation of a democratic mentality that rejected any attempts to embellish reality and the relationship between the state and society.