The air on Palace Square was thick enough to chew. It smelled of horse manure, damp autumn rot, and the metallic tang of pure, undiluted fear.
On one side, a sea of red armbands. Thousands of Red Guards, a raw, angry mob that Jake had forged into a semblance of an army.
On the other, a perfect, disciplined line of steel and tradition. The Orenburg Cossacks, sitting motionless on their horses, their faces stoic, their lances held high. They were the past, made flesh and bone, and they had come to murder the future.
It was a standoff on the edge of a bloody abyss.
Then, the leaflets began to fall.
Trotsky's printers had worked all night. The small, cheap pages, the weapon Jake had designed, fluttered down over the square. Red Guards passed them to the front, and brave, unarmed workers walked into the no-man's-land, offering them up to the silent horsemen.
Jake watched from a forward command post, a hastily fortified apartment window overlooking the square. He saw the Cossacks take the papers. He saw their stoic faces shift, their brows furrowing in confusion. He saw them talking to each other, their voices a low, angry rumble.
COSSACK BROTHERS! THE BANKERS WHO PAY YOU SELL YOUR LAND TO FOREIGNERS! WE HAVE THE PROOF!
His psychological bomb was working. He wasn't fighting their bodies. He was attacking their souls. He was making them doubt.
A Cossack officer, a grizzled old veteran with a magnificent mustache and cold, dead eyes, screamed an order. "Forward! Charge! For the Motherland!"
He spurred his horse forward.
But his men hesitated.
Then, one young Cossack, his face torn with conflict, deliberately spurred his horse forward, not towards the Red Guards, but to the side. With a cry of frustration, he threw his heavy rifle to the cobblestones. It clattered, a sound as loud as a cannon shot in the tense silence.
Another followed his lead. And another.
The perfect, disciplined line broke. The old officer screamed curses at them, but it was useless. The Cossacks were turning their horses, not in a charge, but in a retreat. They were refusing to fight. They were abandoning the Winter Palace to its fate.
A roar of pure, disbelieving joy went up from the Red Guards. It was a bloodless, stunning, impossible victory.
"Forward!" Stepan bellowed, his voice hoarse with triumph. "The Palace is ours!"
The Red Guards surged forward, a human wave of red armbands, cheering and shouting, believing the fight was over.
It wasn't.
As they approached the massive, ornate gates of the palace, a new line of soldiers appeared. They moved with a desperate, disciplined haste, forming a barricade of furniture and sandbags.
They were not men.
They were women.
The infamous Women's Battalion of Death, the last fanatically loyal unit in all of Russia, emerged from the palace, their bayonets fixed and gleaming in the grey light. They were young, their faces pale and streaked with grime, but they were resolute.
The Red Guard's triumphant charge faltered, then stopped. A shocked, confused silence fell over the square.
These were factory workers, peasants, and sailors. They were prepared to kill soldiers, to kill Cossacks, to kill the devil himself. But they were not prepared for this. To charge into the rifles of women, some of whom were no older than their own daughters.
Stepan, the giant of Kronstadt, the man who had begged to burn the city, looked back at Jake's command post, his face a mask of profound conflict. He keyed his field telephone. "Koba… what are the orders?"
The entire revolution, the fate of a nation, had just ground to a halt in front of this last, unexpected wall of human conscience.
The other field telephone in Jake's command post rang. The direct line.
It was Lenin. His voice was cold, sharp, and utterly devoid of emotion. "What is the delay, Comrade Koba? The palace must be taken. Now."
"There's a complication," Jake said, his own voice sounding distant. "The last defenders… it's the Women's Battalion."
There was a moment of silence on the line. Not for consideration. For analysis.
"Are they armed?" Lenin asked.
"Yes. With rifles, machine guns."
"Are they defending the counter-revolution?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then they are the enemy," Lenin's voice cut through him like a surgeon's scalpel. "The revolution does not differentiate between the gender of its enemies, only their actions. Remove them."
The line went dead.
Jake raised his binoculars. He focused on the barricade. He saw the faces of the women. One of them, a girl who couldn't be more than seventeen, her hair tied back in a messy braid, met his gaze through the lenses. Her eyes were wide with terror, but she held her rifle with a white-knuckled conviction he almost admired. A ghost of his own forgotten conscience.
His 21st-century soul screamed at him. This is a war crime. This is a massacre. These are children.
But he also saw the heavy Maxim machine guns they were setting up, their water-cooled barrels pointing directly at his men. He saw the future—a bloody, protracted civil war, famines, purges, millions dead—if this revolution failed here, tonight, because he hesitated.
He closed his eyes for a single, agonizing second. He saw the world he came from, then the world he was in. He made his choice.
When he opened his eyes, they were as cold and dead as the winter sky.
He picked up the field telephone connected to Stepan. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the cold air burning his lungs.
"Stepan," he said, his voice a flat, mechanical thing he didn't recognize as his own. "Use the Demon's Fire."
He saw the barricades through his binoculars. "On the barricades at the flanks. Not on the women themselves. Break their position. Break their will."
Stepan was silent for a long moment. Then, his voice came back, low and rough. "And if their will doesn't break, Koba?"
Jake looked at the young woman's defiant face one last time. He saw the end of his own humanity.
"Then you will advance," he said, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. "You have your orders."