The Work Of War

"The Work of War"

Who: Sokolof, Lesina, Maschenko
When: October 1942
Where: Building 7 - Shipping - Stalingrad

What: Comrade Sergeant, the doctor and Sokolof talk of the factory labors, and their own work in the great war machine.

Building 7 - Shipping

The Grid-----> > > > > THE GREATEST GENERATION < < <


Coordinates : 3 2

Once the main shipping zone for this quarter of the factory complex, large fuel tanks and truck niches flank both sides of the large sliding doors which open onto the western street. German artillery bombardment changed all of this quite some time ago, however. Warped and misshapen by the resulting fire, what remains of this loading zone is blackened and rusting, but still Soviet trucks come and go from here, bringing what supplies are available to the workers.

It is currently dusk.

Sub-Rooms :
1. Scrap Iron Pallet
2. Stationary Lift Machine
3. Long Conveyor Belt
4. Damaged walkway

Contents
Maschenko
Sokolof - 4. Damaged walkway
Lesina

West <W> East <E>
South <S> North <N>

Sokolof is picking his way into the remains of the shipping area. He's been doing odd bits of work here and there around the factory since they were moved here. Maintenance on the electric parts of the machines. Any sort of hauling or carrying he had time for between watches. There are no shipments to unload currently so he just takes a long look around the place. Frown on his face, not that that's not his habitual expression.

Lesina has been lending a helping hand herself, reconstructing the sandbag line at the entrance. She clangs along the walkway redistributing grime between her hands. She stops abruptly and takes a look from the slightly raised position. A hand rests agaisnt a railing, which wobbles.

Maschenko has been all but absent from the clump where their little group tends to sleep, the last two days spent picking among the burnt and broken from the plane crash and fire fiasco. Little sleep and little food, the doctor has an exhaustion about him that's far more than physical as he wanders out to this walkway, having jut seen to a few injured hands and feet on the generator line. Shoulders stiff, trying to avoid jarring burns that are stubbornly refusing to heal, he leans a hip against the railing and lights up a cigarette. Which the cold wind tries instantly to blow out.

"Comrade Sergeant," Sokolof offers to Lesina when he spots her, picking way over to the sandbags. He's careful to walk gingerly in the factory. The metal and machinery wreckage that blankets parts of it is more dangerous to stop wrong on than standard rubble. "This place does amaze me. So much work still goes on alongside so much destruction." The sound of someone else moving makes him turn his head. "Luka."

Lesina lets go fo the railing, steadying herself. The light catches her attention, "Such a luxury. Somewhere to smoke where the snipers wont see you." She absently pats a pocket lips flickerign upwards when they turn out empty. She gives Sokolof a nod, "Comrade." She's still slightly hazy with names, she's been worse since they got back here, still she recognises him. "They seems the same to me." She replies, "Working and fighting. The same dangers, the same end product." She shrugs, standing a little apart from the men.

"Efim." Maschenko finally gets the damn thing lit, after multiple tries and turning around to put his back to the wind — at least, as much of the freezing gusts as he can. Shelling hasn't left much of the framework intact. "Nothing for granted, eh comrades?" Slightly dry, this, and he fishes the rest of his pack out of his pocket. A glance in, jostling around the few sticks of rationed lung chokers left, and holds it out towards both man and woman. "Help yourselves."

Sokolof grins thinly at Lesina. "Sokolof," he supplies the name for her. "Efim Sokolof." A nod to her comparison between the work and the fight. "It is all one fight. This equipment does not get off the line, the soldiers will have nothing to fight with. All part of the great machine, we are." A grateful nod to Maschenko and he, wordlessly, mooches a cigarette.

Lesina is sorely tempted, eyeing the packet for a while. Then a little headshake. "And if we don't kill, our Comrades make nothing." She adds, nodding to Sokolof's name. "I remember now." Deaths travel quickly along the grapevine. Back to the cigarettes, she can't seem to keep her attention off them. "It is funny, you don't realise how much you need them until you have none." She's still not taking one.

Maschenko offers his lit cigarette to Sokolof rather than his handful of matches to get his own going. The pack's still there, occupying nebulous space in the air between all three of them. "Go on, comrade," he tells Lesina in quiet voice. "No man wants to die feeling selfish. It's a favor to me." A faint, thinly given grin. He sits down on the edge of a broken piece of concrete by the railing, standing just aggravating the poorly cared-for burns rashed from ribs to hip. "Been down to the generators much, Efim? I hardly understand things like that, but I don't doubt you do."

Sokolof lights up, smoking in short puffs. He's learning little tricks to make single cigarettes last longer. A curious look to Lesina when she hesitates in taking one, but she does not press the issue. "Were you with another unit before you came to us, Comrade Sergeant?" he asks her. With the casualties, and other sorts of losses, their original collection of conscripts is becoming more patchwork. A nod to Maschenko. "Many of the machines are too damaged to work anymore. It has put extra stress on those that remain. I was an electrician back when life was ordinary. Feels good to do that sort of work again. Almost…normal."

It really doesn't take much encouragement to convinve Lesina she takes a cigarette and produces a solitary match. There's a little dance as she copies Maschenko and turns her back to the wind, a hand cupped over the whole arrangement. Her speach is slightly muffled by the cigarette. "Yes." She replies, after a few moments she feels rather short and adds, "Some of them might even be alive out there somewehre." A smoke filled sigh. "You forget how much you miss them." She might mean the cigarettes, or her comrades. She returns to the conversation proper, "I must admit, the opportunity to do what I did before all this seems sweet."

Smoke puffs from the end of Maschenko's cigarette once it's back in his mouth, pack and matches returned to his inner pocket. "Take a man out of normalcy and still he functions," he says under his breath to Sokolof. "Just like those machines in a way. Many become too damaged, and the rest pick up the slack. We go on." He exhales a short plume of smoke that's instantly whipped away by the wind, blue eyes flickering to Lesina as he scratches the shell of his ear. "What was that, Comrade Sergeant?"

"Go on for as long as they can," Sokolof says under his breath, between puffs of smoke. "You can only put so much stress on a machine before it stops working altogether." Ever the cloud of pessimism, he is. He also looks up at Lesina with some curiosity. Not repeating Maschenko's question, though he waits for her answer.

Lesina grins, "I washed Comrade, at the hospital, it was good enough work." There's a shrug. "I see a differance though. Macines, they work best under normal conditions. But men, when they are threatened that is when they are at their best." She smirks, "It is as if we were made to defend the Motherland."

"Ah, but the Fascist machine is working too, my friend." Maschenko jabs towards one of the gaping holes in the walls with his pinky. "Which means it too must break down eventually." He sticks the cigarette back in his mouth, the white bobbing gently as he speaks. "And the Comrade Sergeant is right. There is something about a defense of home." Smoke gently curls from his nose and he raises an eyebrow at Lesina, curiously. "At the hospital? I /thought/ I had seen your face somewhere…outside those apartments, I mean. Did you work with, uh…" He closes his eyes, rubbing fingertips between his lined brows. "…oh, what was her name. She limped."

"Their machine is thousands of miles away in Fascist Germany, at least," Sokolof says. Spitting on the floor after he says those words. "Mother Russia is a long land, and she is not welcoming of travelers." A nod about defending one's home. He seems almost surprised he shares the feeling, but apparently he does.

Lesina nods, "And our machine goes east forever." She assures. She cocks her head, "I spent more hours of those days down witht the vats, now one of us limped, couldn't say which." She shrugs. The home comment gets Maschenko an apraising look from her as well, "And when their's breaks down, they will have a long way to run."

So Maschenko's home didn't do so well on the defense. Technicality. From his tone one would never know home isn't 'here', besides what the singsong accent gives away. He gives Lesina an idle nod on her talk of that hospital, long razed. "I may not have done so well as you on my technicals in school, Efim," he says, with a twitch of his lips. "But if one interrupts a circuit, the light goes off, ni?" Another nod towards the outdoors. "They've stretched far. Far, far. Thin. Sooner or later…" He makes a slow vertical motion with the blade of his hand, and a click with his teeth.

Sokolof regards Maschenko for a moment. Some sympathy in his gaze. But he says nothing, clearing his throat and taking a few more of those short, conservative puffs. A chuckle at the moment. "Da, you've the right of it there, at least, Comrade Doctor," he replies dryly, as to interrupting circuits. "And the longer you stretch a line, the less power you can get from it."

Lesina listens in to this talk of circuits. It seems to make sense. "Well, all that may be true, but it still must be done." She reminds them. "We can talk of it all we like." She's been watching the same patch of factory for a while now, so she turns to them, "Then again, it would not do to have either of you breaking from something so simple as overuse."

"Really?" Shit Maschenko Never Knew, part one thousand and ten. He shoots Sokolof a crooked grin, weakened by tiredness and pain but still quite there, a shadow of how he used to smile so much. "Well. Aren't they just fucked." There's tobacco on his lip and he uses the patriotic statement to turn and conveniently spit. Then sniffling and straightening his head, he looks back at Lesina. "You either, you know."

"I extend the metaphor too far, perhaps," Sokolof says with another of those thin smirks. "But there is something to be said for it. So we can hope." A nod to Lesina. "We trust in our good Comrade Sergeants to see we are not used too hard."

Lesina grins, "Aren't they." She lets out a snort at Maschenko's comment, the last centmetre of cigarette falls. As she follows its decent she replies, "Sergeants are replacable. Doctors and technicians, now you are valuable." To Sokolof's statment, "Then your trust is misplaced, it is my job to get what is needed out of you." She smiles, but is probably being truthful.

"It's all that Pushkin," Maschenko tells Sokolof, as to the metaphor abuse. A vague smirk, and he knocks the side of his thumb against his cigarette. Ash tumbles into the concrete by his boot, promptly whisked off in an eddy of cold air and over the ripped shreds of a once-bright red poster lying on the walkway ground. "But I think it is right in its way, my friend. The way of men reflects the ways of nature, no? Nature is all we are in the end, after all." He chuckles under his breath at Lesina's answer to the electrician. "I hesitate to say we're any more valuable, Comrade Sergeant. Soldiers need guidance; one can't fight a war disorganized, now can we."

"As the Petrel flies, so do we," Sokolof waxes poetic for a second. It's almost a moment of humor from him. Not particularly /jovial/ humor. The man can never quite emerge from his cloud of dour. A nod and shrug to Lesina. "We shall do our best to give you what is needed without too much pain for ourselves, then."

Lesina isn't inclined to argue, she's vaguely puzzled all this literary talk. The thought that effort and rest could be mutually exclusive suddenly occurs to her. A frown, "We do what we can, I suppose." It's rather lame, "Though it is hard to get work out of a corpse." She spits, "On that note, I will be needed somewhere. Take care Comrades." She begins to move off, watching the floor carefully. It's probably just a headache born of so many high minded concepts but she seems a little more grim now.

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