The Kid from Hell Chapter 7 - Breaking Free
This is it. Chapter 7 is where everything breaks and everything begins. If you’ve been following Gack’s story, you know this has been building. The kid from another planet, the child soldier who worshipped his duke and his generals, finally gets hit with the full truth. And what he does with it is the entire point of this novella.
The Reports
At breakfast, Kornei won’t even look at Gack. Complete silence. Cold shoulder. Gack sits there feeling like dirt, goes upstairs, puts on his uniform, but it doesn’t help. He picks up His Highness’s portrait and it slips out of his hands and rolls under the cot. He doesn’t bother picking it up. That detail right there tells you everything.
Then Kornei storms in, shoves a stack of papers in Gack’s face, and walks out without a word. Gack kicks the papers across the room. But eventually he picks one up. Then another. Then he gathers them all, puts them in order, and reads.
They’re intelligence reports. Kornei’s agents had infiltrated Giganda at every level. Porters, barbers, generals. Even the Marshal of the Court was one of Kornei’s men. And the reports cover everyone Gack ever respected. The duke. The One-Eyed Fox. Field Marshal Bragg. All of them. How they conducted politics, how they spent their leisure time.
Every once in a while, Gack stops reading and bites his nails to calm down.
The Collapse
When he finishes, Gack makes a neat pile of the papers, evens the edges, weighs them in his hand, and lets them fall to the floor. And then he says something that hits like a hammer: “The only thing left for me to do was to put a bullet through my head.”
They broke his backbone. That’s what. His whole world turned upside down. How to go on living, he didn’t know. Why to go on living, he didn’t know. He thinks about jumping headfirst out of the second-floor window, arms at his sides.
But Dramba barges in asking for the next diagram. Distracts him. And slowly, over the next hour, something shifts. Gack describes it as a painful abscess that had been swelling in his soul, and just now burst. A strange feeling of relief. Like a debt had been repaid, though he didn’t know what debt, or to whom.
And then the only thought left: go home. Home. That’s where all his remaining debts are.
The Gun
This is the part where Gack stops being a victim and starts being Gack again. Remember Dramba building things in the workshop? He was building a gun. On Gack’s instructions. Homemade, from scratch, metal filings and hot oil. Two days later, it’s done. Gack carries it to the pond in a bag, assembles it, says a short prayer, and tests it.
It works. Not perfect, he admits, but better than the rebel popguns back home made from leftover pipe. He hides it in his steel chest. Everything is ready.
The Woman
That evening, a woman appears in Gack’s doorway. He’s sitting on his cot, one boot off, one boot on, and he looks up and just freezes. She is, in his words, terrifyingly beautiful. He’s never seen anyone like her back home and probably never will.
She says she’s looking for Kornei. Gack can’t speak. Not a word. He just stares. She looks around the room, studies him carefully, and leaves. The room seems to grow dark after she’s gone.
Gack spends half the night pacing. He knows she lied, she wasn’t looking for Kornei in his room. She came to see him. But more than that, he realizes he just saw a tiny fragment of the real world these people live in. And he understands why Kornei never let him out. In that world, he would have killed himself, because seeing such beauty every minute and knowing you will never be part of it, that you will be “ugly, nasty, and corrupt” to the end of your days, is unbearable.
At dawn he hides in the bushes to see her again. She walks past with Kornei, heading toward the null booth. And this time, nothing. A beautiful woman, sure, but the magic is gone. Like her living soul has been extracted.
Then she stops and says: “You know, he has the eyes of a killer.”
Kornei answers quietly: “He is a killer. A professional.”
Gack crawls back to his room and looks in the mirror. His eyes look normal to him. But he doesn’t argue. Professional killer. Nothing to be ashamed of. He learned what he was taught.
The Fake Blue Dragon
Then comes the expert test. Kornei wakes Gack up, tells him to put on his full uniform, and brings him downstairs. In the study, sitting in an armchair in full battle dress, is a Blue Dragon officer. Senior master cuirassier. Scorched jacket, blue cord, shaved head with burn marks, eyes like view slits.
Gack’s body reacts before his brain does. Palms slam against his thighs, heels click. “At ease, cadet,” the Dragon says.
They go through a military Q&A. The Dragon asks about His Highness, about marshals, about camp life. And Gack starts noticing things. The guy keeps demanding his full rank, which no real front-line officer would do. He doesn’t know how to smoke a cigar properly. His questions are slightly off.
Gack loses his temper. Drops the military posture, puts his hands behind his back, stares right into those fake view slits. The Dragon charges at him across the room, but Kornei jumps in and stops it.
And then Gack delivers his verdict. If you want people to believe you’re a front-line officer, don’t make them call you “senior master cuirassier” every sentence. That’s not a big mistake, but nobody will respect you. They’ll say you’re a rat from the rear wearing a front-line uniform.
He walks out feeling proud. For about five minutes. Then he realizes what just happened. They’re sending a spy to Giganda, and he just helped them polish the disguise. Like the lowest traitor.
But Kornei comes to him later and explains. They’re trying to save a great scientist hiding on Giganda, near Lake Zagutta. Armored troops are dug in there, only their own pass through. So the spy needs to be perfect. Gack just saved two lives, one Gigandan and one Earthling.
The Ambush at Dawn
Gack asks one casual question: when does the spy leave? Five in the morning. From the glade. And that’s all he needs.
He doesn’t sleep. At three he gets up. At four he’s sitting in the garden with his homemade gun. At five, the Phantom arrives, its huge warm sides quivering like a living thing. The hatch opens.
Gack steps out of the bushes and aims.
“Don’t make a move.”
They freeze. Kornei and the fake Blue Dragon, ten meters away, staring at a kid with a homemade gun and nothing left to lose.
“I want to go home, Kornei. And you will send me home right now. Without any discussions or delays.”
Their faces show nothing except attention. Gack knows Kornei is still Kornei, and the Blue Dragon is still dangerous. But he’s ready.
“Either we set off together, or no one will set off. I kill you both and then myself.”
Silence. Then the Blue Dragon turns to Kornei: “That kid… he’s really gotten out of hand. Maybe I should take him along? I do need an orderly.”
“He’s not right for an orderly,” Kornei says. And on his face appears the same expression of anguish from the hospital, back at the very beginning.
Gack wavers. “I’ve got to go home!” he says, and it sounds like he’s asking forgiveness.
But Kornei has already recovered. “Cat,” he says. “What a tomcat. The terror of the mice.”
And that’s where we leave Chapter 7. Gack with a gun, Kornei with a sad smile, and a Phantom with its hatch open. The kid who was broken, rebuilt himself. Not into what Kornei wanted. Not into what Giganda made him. Into something new. Something that won’t take no for an answer.
Previous: Chapter 6 - The Truth Hurts
Next: Chapter 8 - Coming Home