Quaranteam: Ruins United Ch. 05

Ruins United is a part of the Quaranteam universe created by CorruptingPower, written with his expressed permission. If you have not read the original or spinoffs by BreakTheBar, AgathonWrites, BronanTheLibrarian, OtterlyMindblowing, SilverRyden, RonanJWilkerson, BirchesLoveBooks, The_Licentious_Laureate or DisquietCertitude I would highly recommend you do that, not just to better understand the developments but also because those are really good and lots of fun.

I also want to express my gratitude to the QT writing group and especially The_Licentious_Laureate for their immeasurable help with proofreading and editing.

xoxo,
Cy~

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CHAPTER CONTENT WARNING: sexual abuse mentions, death.

Nov 27th, 2020.

"I'm sorry, have we met?"

Surprise, thought process, furrowed brows - Dan used everything to show he was trying to remember the man approaching him. Better come off as dumb than a threat.

"Oh, sorry, my bad. I'm Makarenko, Anatoly Ilich. I'm in charge of internal communications here."

"Nice to meet you, Anatoly Ilich," Dan relaxed his forehead, raised his brows and smiled. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Um... this is a delicate matter, selfish too, as one might think. You are the new broom here, from what I've heard, so my question is how soon will my department undergo changes and restructuring?"

He spoke with a perfect accent and mannerisms of a lifetime local. A little too perfect, Colonel.

"Oh, well... you see, it's the first day and everything is a bit hectic," Dan's outside smiled apologetically. "But I'm sure you have nothing to worry about. Internal communications is what keeps this place running, right? Don't you worry none, I have no plans to disband your department."

"Is that so?" 'Makarenko' nodded thoughtfully. "Thank you, Danila Kirillovich, I won't keep you anymore. Have a nice day."

"You too!" Dan responded cheerfully, spun on his heels and headed into the lobby.

Makarenko, my ass. He fed cash into the vending machine, pushed some buttons and stood there, waiting for his drink and at the same time carefully observing the lobby reflected in the shiny surface of the coffee apparatus. How many rats are there in the City Hall now? But the bigger question is what's his game? Fuck. I'm flying blind here.

Holding a paper cup with extremely hot, too sweet and shitty tasting coffee, he carefully climbed the stairs again to the second floor. Members of the team scurried around the hallway, barging into departments' doors without knocking. Lit a fire under their asses, it seems. Good. Makes them productive. He stopped by the window and put his cup onto the wide windowsill, then pulled out his phone, looked at it and stashed it back. These news are better delivered in person.

"Dan," Duchess approached him, seemingly out of nowhere. "I don't mind you doing things differently, but I'd like your actions not to diminish my agency."

He took a sip of the coffee, looking at her without a word. It was as bad as he expected, so he put the cup back onto the windowsill to never touch it again.

"Let's go have a smoke, my dear Freundin," he simply said.

Her eyes briefly went wide - she recognized the code. Since none of them ever smoked, between the two of them this phrase meant 'let's go have a talk in private' without alerting anyone who might be listening. The code was born during the first of the election campaigns they've worked on. They were right to be a bit paranoid - the election HQ was bugged top to bottom, as they found out later.

One of the windowless storage rooms on the second floor was converted into a smoking room with a powerful ventilation system. Dan flicked the switch, and the fans' roar quickly drowned out all the other sounds in the room. He stepped closer to her.

"Do you know Makarenko?" He asked in a voice barely heard over the noise of the ventilation.

"The internal comms guy?" She raised her eyebrows. "Yeah, why?"

"Think, Olya. Who else do you know from internal comms? What are their functions?" He paused. "Does their department even exist?"

She took a step back from him, fear clear on her face.

"The First Department*," she mouthed.

[*During Soviet times, The First Department was a KGB branch installed in nearly every organization, designed to control and watch over any and all activities]

He stepped closer to her again and leaned to her ear.

"He goes by Colonel Grishin, a war crimes aficionado. You see him on the floor, watch closely whom he speaks to - those might be his rats. Exclude them from meetings and cut their access to vital info."

"What are we going to do, Dan?" She whispered.

"I don't know yet. Even if we officially fire him, there's no telling how many more feds are working here for him or Moscow. The place used to crawl with loyalists after all. And when I say you can't trust somebody - you absolutely can't trust them."

"Do you at least have a plan?"

"I do, but it's better if you don't know what it is," he lied.

They returned to the conference room - Duchess glum, Dan deep in thought. I need Lara on this, fulltime. Most of the team was already at the table, ready for him to kickstart the second part of the show. Eldar and Masha, huh? Good for them if it works out. He resumed his post at the head of the table, while Duchess sat on a chair in a row along the wall.

"Okay, what do we have?" He asked, eyeing the team.

"If I may, Dan?" Eugene, a nerdy guy in thick glasses raised his hand and stood up. "I've been talking to social services, and they report retirees and low income families didn't get their pensions and welfare subsidies this month yet, and they're struggling to make ends meet, since grocery chains started hiking up prices."

"Good, what's your solution?" Dan nodded encouragingly.

"Um... I thought, maybe we could organize a farmers' fair or several of them across the city? Contact the farmers from stanitsas* around, tell them we're reopening the fair locations."

[*Stanitsa - Cossack village]

"It's a bad idea, but it's a good bad idea," Dan emphasized. "Fairs will become super-spreaders instantly. But cutting the middleman? That will lower the prices significantly. What can we do to achieve this?"

"My grandma keeps chickens," someone said. "And complaining she can't store that many eggs. And her neighbors in the stanitsa too."

"We could do direct buying and distribution," another voice. "Just go door to door, buy whatever they are willing to sell, then sell directly to those in need with the help of social workers."

"Who's going to pay for this operation?" Dan smiled slyly. "I mean, the gas prices alone..."

"I doubt stanitsa households will sell at exorbitant prices," Eldar leaned forward, putting elbows on the table. "So whatever we charge the buyer in the end will still be significantly lower than them buying in the grocery store. Add a small margin to the buying price, with enough trade volume it will cover our expenses. We're not looking to make a profit here."

"This kinda goes behind the back of the farmers' businesses, are we okay with that?" Someone asked.

"We're talking about socially vulnerable people now. Farmers can sell directly to the bigger shops in the city and resource centers who supply them, that market is targeting stable income families," Dan turned to Eugene. "Zhenya, contact social services, make it happen."

"This still leaves the question of pensions, welfare and other kinds of social payments," Eldar looked at him. "What are we doing about that? Moscow is stalling transfers."

Dan paused for a long moment, considering the options.

"Contact the bank, tell them to freeze tax payments to Moscow. Everything stays here, we're using that money to cover socials."

"Local FNS* management won't like that," Eldar shook his head.

[*Federalnaya Nalogovaya Sluzhba - Federal Tax Service]

"Their salaries come from the same budget - city and region, not the federal one," Dan put his hands on the table, hovering. "We're on the same side, remind them of that."

He briefly glanced at Duchess, who gave him an almost imperceptible smile and a nod.

The rest of the planning session went relatively okay. As it turned out, everybody knew what the biggest problems of the city were, and everybody wanted to pitch their solution. Even Artemi voiced his not-quite-awful suggestions several times. Dan tried to keep everything brief, but the meeting dragged nearly to lunchtime.

"Okay, boys, girls and enbys," he exhaled, propping himself on his arms on the table. "Good job today, but we really need to stop now, wrap our heads around whatever we have discussed and assigned to us as our areas of responsibilities, and also get a good lunch, 'cause you don't wanna tackle any of this on an empty stomach. Except for Kira," he nodded to a tiny Jewish girl with curly black hair. Kira was in charge of overseeing the city's healthcare - a rather grizzly endeavor given the circumstances. His comments had drawn some sad chuckles, then Duchess took his place at the head of the table.

"Proud of you all, team," she announced. "None of you ran out screaming, and it's not easy to work with this here thug," she nodded at Dan.

"I'm getting soft," he grinned.

"Seriously doubt that," she scoffed at him, then turned to the team again. "Okay. Bad news today - I've contacted the Ministry of Healthcare, and requested a vaccine shipment to be sent immediately, no matter how small. What I've been told is, I quote, DuoHalo vaccine doesn't exist, it's common knowledge. So that's that, we're on our own, I guess. If anyone has bright ideas, they should come forward with them as soon as possible."

That sent a round of pretty angry sounding murmurs through the team. The common knowledge was that huge amounts of Sputnik Q were being distributed in Moscow through official channels as well as black market and drug networks.

"We have some small scale pharmaceutical production facilities around," Kira offered. "We could probably replicate the thing and start producing ourselves. We'll only need a handful of doses to start the process, the only question is how to source them."

Smart girl.

"Who would run the lab?" Duchess looked at the girl questioningly. "None of us in this room has any idea about the biology or chemistry of the process."

"Ask Smith," Kira responded with a shrug. "He's smiling like a proud daddy at a school recital."

Duchess turned to him, brows raised.

"Dan? Do you want to tell the class the fuck you're smiling about?"

"You know I know everybody," his smile turned smug. "Get me a lab, I'll get you people to run it."

The meeting finally concluded, people breaking into small groups discussing the work ahead and planning a lunch together. Dan noticed how Artemi intercepted Masha and dragged her aside before Eldar got to ask her, so he intervened.

"Masha, don't leave just yet, please, I have a special assignment for you."

The tall girl stalked across the conference room to him and sat down on the chair beside, and Dan was pleased to see the mazhor leave the room all by himself.

"How can I help?" She cocked her head and smiled.

"You're our liaison with the Justice Department, right? I need you to run a thing with one of the good judges."

"Give me the name," she unlocked her phone, preparing to type.

"Larisa Ptitsyna, house arrest. She tells me the case was fabricated, and I want to see if it can be thrown out."

Masha typed, then paused and raised her eyes to him.

"Wait, Lara? The tiny programmer girl?" She lowered her voice and smirked. "The one with the ass?"

"Yeah, that's the one," he rolled his eyes. "What's it with you all so hung up on that? She has a lot of other amazing qualities."

"Oh, I don't doubt that," she put her phone away and stood up. "I'll expedite this request today. You'll probably want her to boost your digital department, given the sorry state it's in."

"You know about that?" He stood up, following her.

"Yeah, I tried to get access to some of the databases. You're down to just two guys there, and they barely manage to keep the place running," she flung her bag over her shoulder and turned to the door. "See you, Dan, really nice working with you again!"

Dan turned to Eldar and inconspicuously nodded in her direction. Come on, dude. As the short guy darted to catch up with the tall girl, Dan swiped his jacket off the chair and turned to Duchess having a discussion with Kira and Eugene.

"You good, people? I'm going to check on my digital domain. Hit my Telegram or Discord if you want to discuss anything, I'm not planning to stick around the office much longer today."

He gave Duchess a knowing nod which she returned, and headed out, nearly colliding with Artemiy standing outside the door, having a hushed conversation with Daria. Dan frowned.

"The fuck you doing here, Red? You can't talk to anyone on my team. Artemi, don't trust that bitch."

"Yeah, fuck you too, Koval," the woman scoffed and stalked away.

"I mean it," he turned to the Muscovite. "Don't talk to her, only info she gets from us will be spoonfed to her by Knyazeva."

Without waiting for an answer, he turned into the side hallway.

The Department of Digital Development, called 3D among the local techfolk because of its fancy modern English branding, designed specifically to attract potential foreign sponsors and investors, was located in a new building, semi-attached to the City Hall. Concrete carcass encased in three stories of tinted blue glass and metal had its own entrance from the city square, but it was closed for visitors, so Dan had to enter the building through the second-floor gallery, connecting the two buildings over the pedestrian zone.

He crossed the overpass and swiped his second keycard on the magnetic lock, waited for the lock to click, then pushed the door and entered the cool second-floor lobby. The building was eerily quiet, offices that used to host over a hundred people were standing empty with their doors open. Dan frowned. Security violation.

"Anybody home?" He called.

"Down here," a voice answered from downstairs.

He found them in a small corner office on the first floor - an overweight glassed man probably in his thirties, with a beard he was struggling to keep inside his mask, dressed in a thick-knit sweater, and a small feminine-looking young guy with a heap of unkempt blonde hair. Both were looking exhausted and bored at the same time, and jumped when Dan appeared in the doorway, giving them an appraising look. Both ends of the IT spectrum. Bet the twink has programming socks on under those jeans.

"Privet," he said. "Understaffed, are we?"

"I know you!" The bearded guy exclaimed. "Danila, right? I'm Roman. You are our new boss? Thank God for someone who knows how to run this place!"

"I practically feel the all encompassing love for Voznesensky suffusing this place," Dan chuckled. "How are you two holding up?"

The blonde hid his eyes. The beardy tiredly dropped back into his chair.

"It's bad," he croaked. "We're not programmers, you have to understand. I'm a pretty basic sysadmin, I never ran an operation this complex. I've been taking systems offline, because they keep bugging out and we have no one to fix them. Nik... Nikita here," he stuttered for a moment, nodding to the blonde. "S- He's only doing cable and networking and can't help me."

"Okay," Dan took a chair. "I need details. How many services are offline right now?"

"Uh... As of this morning - all of them, I think? The data center is still running, input APIs and client-facing forms are still up, so there are terabytes of accumulated data. But without anything working to process it, we'll be running out of disk space in a month."

"Blyat, this is bad," he leaned back in the chair. "There might be a real treasure trove of data in there that will be useful to us to understand the situation better and actually start fixing the city. What's in there anyway?"

"Everything, man. Public transportation, whatever's left of it anyways - active routes, passenger load, revenue. Traffic watch, although that's the least problematic thing right now. Powergrid data. Economic activity, mostly retail. All the education has stopped, so we can just ignore it for now, but other social facilities, mostly healthcare, still report their workloads in detail," Roman shook his head. "All that and more has to be put through a processor that somebody still has to write, for the data to be turned into a comprehensible form. I mean, human readable. You can read the source data, but..."

He shrugged, sighed and shook his head again.

"Some of them still use SOAP XML, can you believe that?"

"W-what?" Now it was the time for Dan to shake his head. "In 2020? Fuck, that shit is ancient... What are your estimates, how many people do we need?"

The beardy and the blonde exchanged glances.

"I'd say... thirty backend and systems programmers is a bare minimum to fix and run everything," the beardy scratched his head, then took off his glasses and began to clean them, blinking at Dan. "Fifty, for them to not be running around like wedding horses* all day."

[*Russian idiom, basically goes "flowers on the head and sweating your ass off"]

Fifty good programmers. Let's hope this city still has enough of them.

"Okay," Dan slapped his knees and stood up. "New task for both of you - pull the resumes of all people who applied here in the last five years, see if they're alive, explain what mess we are in, ask them to reapply. Prioritize people whom Rodion rejected personally."

Both guys grinned and turned to their stations.

"Yes, boss!" The beardy was already typing furiously.

"Okay, I'll look around, but won't stay for long," Dan walked to his desk and scratched his phone number and Telegram handle on a piece of paper. "Ping me if something important comes up."

He turned to walk out, but a sudden thought hit him, and he turned to the guys again.

"One more thing. In addition to the people who will be running the systems and the services, we'll need web and mobile apps developers, especially with experience in banking."

"Will do, boss!" The blonde chimed for the first time. His voice carried a definite feminine lilt.

Dan climbed the stairs to the third floor, most of its space divided between two fancy conference rooms, staff break room slash kitchen, and the director's office, into which he headed. Swiping the card on the maglock, he pushed the door, looked inside and chuckled to himself.

I wouldn't expect anything less.

In the spacious corner office, two walls of which were glass from the floor to the ceiling, nothing hinted at the actual trade of the previous occupant, save for maybe a workstation, hidden in the desk pocket below the table. The place looked like an office of a late Soviet bureaucrat, complete with a fucker-in-chief icon on the wall and a Russian tricolor on a flagpole in the corner, massive oak desk you can't comfortably cross your legs under the way you like, and equally massive leather chair, one that is very soft and looks comfortable but actually completely unsuitable for someone who actually works in IT, well, you know the kind. Surprised there are no Faberge replicas or Romanovs' family portrait anywhere.

Briefly looking over the desk, filing cabinets and bookcases - yes, icons, how could I forget about icons, Rodion was famously religious and never missed a chance to remind everyone of that - he approached the window and observed the square again. Two guys in striped tracksuits on electric scooters crossed the square at a decent speed and disappeared behind a corner. Bulls' crew keeping watch. That gave him an idea.