The Kid from Hell Chapter 6 - The Truth Hurts
The Perfect Trench
Chapter 6 opens with Gack inspecting a mortar position that Dramba just finished digging. Two hours and ten minutes. Perfectly smooth walls, regulation slope, tamped-down floor, beam-covered dugouts. Gack is proud. His Highness’s Engineer’s Academy would approve.
This is Gack’s therapy. Out here on the plains, away from the house and all its impossible technology, he can be a soldier again. Everything makes sense. Dig, measure, inspect, approve. The world has rules that he understands.
And then Kornei shows up.
The War Is Over
Kornei finds the mortar position and is amused. But he didn’t come to inspect fortifications. He came to deliver news.
The war on Giganda is over.
Gack asks who won. Kornei goes quiet. That silence tells you everything. When Gack presses him, Kornei says what he always says: nobody won. Or rather, everybody won. The armies were disbanded. Soldiers cast aside their weapons and went home. There are no more armies, only civilians.
Gack doesn’t buy it. But Kornei keeps going, and it gets worse.
The duke, Gack’s supreme leader, ran away “like the lowest of cowards.” The emperor was executed by firing squad in his own palace. Gack’s entire world order, the thing he was trained to kill and die for, is gone.
“Be Careful I Don’t Become Dangerous Here”
This is where the chapter gets really heavy. Kornei tells Gack the truth with no sugar coating. People like you, he says, have formed armed bands back home. They wanted to put the old regime back on its feet. Nobody else did. They’re being hunted down like dogs, and they’re doomed.
If we send you home now, Kornei says, you’d join one of those bands. And that would be the end of you. And the people you’d manage to kill and torture along the way.
You are dangerous. To yourself and to others.
That hits different because Kornei has been nothing but patient and kind for five weeks. But here he’s not playing the gentle father. He’s being a warrior. And he hits the target dead center.
Gack fires back: “So you’re afraid I’ll be dangerous there? Well, be careful I don’t become dangerous here!”
For one second, Kornei’s eyes go cold. Then he just laughs, slaps his head, and shouts: “Think! Use your brains! Have you really spent five weeks here without learning anything?”
That’s the most frustrating thing about Kornei. You can’t get to him. You throw your worst at him and he just asks you to think harder.
Walking Into Despair
Gack wanders out into the plains. And the Strugatskys give us full access to his grief. He sees the duke’s face, hears his hoarse voice calling “My loyal, unconquerable kids!” He imagines the Forest Guards and the Blue Dragons still fighting, still loyal, bristling with bayonets and flamethrowers. The best fighters in the world.
And where is Gack? Sitting on an alien planet. A lousy puppy, not a Cat. They healed his paw, put a ribbon around his neck, and now he wags his tail and says “Yes, sir.”
He trips, falls face-first into the dry grass, and stays there. Hiding his head in shame. His hands are scraped bloody from punching the ground. Dramba silently follows him and stands so his shadow shields Gack from the sun.
That small detail, the robot moving with the sun to protect him, might be the most tender moment in the whole book so far.
Meeting Dang
Then comes the twist. Gack overhears an unfamiliar voice speaking Alayan. His heart goes wild. He sneaks to the window and sees Kornei talking with a thin, blond kid. About sixteen, huge pale eyes, a severe limp. A southern Alayan named Dang.
Dang is some kind of math genius. He’s discussing a missing Gigandan scientist with Kornei, passionately arguing that the scientist must be found. He even says “It would have been better if you had left me there and rescued him.”
After Kornei leaves, Gack follows Dang out onto the plains. Two Alayans meeting in this alien hell, he thinks. We should talk. He catches up, grabs Dang’s arm, tries to be friendly.
Dang’s response: “Your friend, like hell!”
And suddenly it all clicks. Those messages on the wall. The mathematical formulas. The word “therefore” written in Alayan. It was Dang. The mysterious friend in hell who stopped responding, who went silent for days. It was this crippled math prodigy who apparently hates Gack’s guts.
“Cold-blooded executioner. Killer.”
Violence
Gack beats him. A jab to the stomach, a rabbit punch when he doubles over, a knee to the face. A trained soldier against a crippled teenager. It takes seconds.
He stands over Dang watching him writhe in the grass, choking on blood, and thinks: so here’s your ally. Here’s your friend in hell. His mouth tastes bitter and he feels like crying.
Dang, bleeding, manages one last word: “Trash. A killer. Even here.”
Two locals show up and find the scene. Gack doesn’t explain. He crashes through the bushes, goes to his room, collapses face down, and lies there until dark.
This scene is brutal not because of the violence itself, but because of what it destroys. Gack’s last hope of having an ally, someone from home, someone who understands, is gone. And he destroyed it himself. The one person who could have been a friend sees him as a monster.
The Weapon
But Gack doesn’t collapse permanently. That night, when the house goes quiet and the cicadas are singing, he gets up, takes Dramba to the far corner of the garden, and asks: “Private Dramba. Do you know how to work metal?”
He’s going to build a weapon.
This chapter is a masterclass in showing how trauma works. Gack loses everything, his country, his leader, his war, his potential ally. And his response is not to grieve. It’s to plan the next attack. Because that’s all he knows how to do. The Strugatskys don’t judge him for it. They just show you, with painful clarity, how a child raised for war can’t imagine any other path.
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