cover art copyright 2025 Acacia Gallagher
[III] Details from Interview 34 in Cell 3C
ICC Detention Center, the Hague
Scheveningen, the Netherlands
HR-Spec-9: Introductions are over, Herr Cruzak. Recorder is started. Tell about your war experiences again now.
Cruzak: Hah. None. You’re new. Is that a Dutch accent? German? Anyway, I guess you’re calling it the Mood War because the news services are doing it. It wasn’t a war. The action lasted for less than a dozen rounds of battle, all in one place. When the skirmishes started, my job title was ‘railway scout.’ Damn sure no one thought the scouts would get into a fight.
HR-Spec-9: Before the recording began, you told me you were not a scout.
Cruzak: When I started at the UN transportation board, I wasn’t. I was a gravel truck repairman. All diesel engines. Later, I fixed electric buses. I got an award for that.
“Anyone can repair train engines,” my boss said after my award. He transferred me to the train detail. “They’re big and simple. Magnetic trains have the same parts as electric buses. It’s like you’ve been working on them all along!”
Last April, the International Transportation Board sent me to Dzhartyrabot. I got a promotion in grade.
HR-Spec-9: (Rustling sounds. The interviewer reports that he took some notes on paper at this time and he found the promotion in grade to be correct.)
Cruzak: “Why are you here?” my new boss said, soon as she met me. She put her hands on her hips. That was because she figured out that I couldn’t speak Tajik about a minute into my on-site meeting. Speaking the local language wasn’t a written requirement. She thought it should have been. She said, “Blin!”
She repeated “blin,” and “davai, davai” a few times. They sounded like nonsense syllables to me. She tried a few other Russian phrases on me. It became obvious that I couldn’t speak that, either.
“Daaavai,” she moaned at me. I liked her attitude. She wanted work done. And I wanted to do some. I would have liked her better if she hadn’t shipped me right back out. She said, “On this site, engine repairman Mister Cruzak, you are surplus.”
She stretched an arm across her desk. In a few seconds, she moved my file into the spreadsheet of her assistant, the branch chief in Shaymak. Now, Shaymak is a decent-sized city at the eastern edge of Tajikistan but it’s a long way from Dzhartyrabot. It dawned on me my shipment of clothes would need forwarded. Plus, to get to my new work site, I’d have to take a bus ride over the mountains. The ride took two days over plateaus, down valleys, and back up mountains again.
This was, in theory, the best way to meet the branch supervisor. In fact, my meetings with him took place over the airwaves. We got in touch as I approached Shaymak. He was a Ukrainian fellow, thin and harried, and he kept moving around. Every time I managed to reach him on my phone, he was somewhere else. Sometimes he lost connection in the middle of my call. He followed his road crews working on the rails of the magnetic suspension trains around Shaymak.
HR-Spec-9: This is an admirable project.
Cruzak: I thought so. The trickiest part of it is that the trains don’t work in the mountains. They convert them to use cogwheels. Only cogwheels can help trains to climb up slopes. No vehicle short of a rail gun could do it with only magnets.
HR-Spec-9: Is this so?
Cruzak: Oh yeah. Even amusement park rides start with gears and cogwheels for the initial climb. I could see right away that it made sense. As I read up on the technologies during my travel, I saw that the way the engines and gears converted from one type of transportation to another was pretty neat. That was just my opinion, though. Everyone else on the job felt we were doing crap work. Cogwheel tracks are the sort of crude but efficient transportation that the ITB builds in backward areas. Just being assigned to the project made the engineers feel bad.
HR-Spec-9: That cannot be correct.
Cruzak: (Laugh.) Sorry if you believed the propaganda. I did too, but it’s bullshit.
HR-Spec-9: Do not tell me I am bullshit. You are in prison. You are bullshit.
Cruzak: Wow, you’re swimming in it. You can’t even smell the shit.
HR-Spec-9: (Silence for 24 seconds. Sounds of shuffling paper.)
Cruzak: Anyway, I remember ... “Let me know when you get in.” That’s what my Shaymak boss said over the phone on my last morning of bus travel. “I’ve had to move since we last talked.”
“Again?” I remember saying. Damn, but he got around. He was exactly the sort of guy who should have missed the fighting by being too busy. Instead, he came to help us and died on the second day. “I’m pretty much at the end of my bus route.”
“Is that as far as you’ve got? Well, it takes you to the ITB helicopter pad outside of Shaymak.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Do you expect to go sailing? It’s a helicopter pad, Cruzak.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
HR-Spec-9: (Quiet laughter.)
Cruzak: I was tired of sitting. It was exhausting to think of doing nothing again. After I hung up the phone, I got a little excited for the first time in days. Because, hey, even if it meant more sitting I was going to take my first helicopter ride.
That leg of the trip was disappointing. The flight was five minutes straight up a mountain. The pilot let me inspect the engine afterward. As vehicles go, it wasn’t much, an old turboshaft model that used avgas. The engine block was a weird shape, long and narrow to fit above the cockpit. I hadn’t realized that the gear wheels, turbine shaft, fuel tank, and everything that’s important sits above the passengers. That makes perfect sense, really, to keep it all near the rotors but it seemed dangerously top-heavy. I had to mention it.
The pilot admitted it was a problem.
“When I don’t have a passenger,” he told me, “I like to bring a present for wherever I’m going. Around here, it’s usually a two hundred liter tank of water. I carry it full, so the load won’t shift. It weighs about as much as a person.”
“Water as a gift?”
“On mountain tops? Hell, yeah. The crews are happier to get water than people.”
It sounded like I wouldn’t be well received at the Shaymak work site. That suspicion turned out to be correct. I didn’t find anyone in place to meet me. For a while, I stumbled around the tarmac with a hand shielding my eyes because the sun was so bright. I figured I must be missing a secretary or some co-worker who would come out to give me the tour. After a few minutes, I headed to the nearest shack.
Folks at the ITB base had to know that I was new. They sure hadn’t seen me before. But they weren’t helpful. Every one of them begrudged listening to me as I asked for directions. When I finally did locate my barracks, I discovered that my new toolbox had arrived before me, which was nice, but I also found out my boss had stolen most of the tools out of it.
On the top was a hand-written note.
I needed the drain pan. Then the wrenches and the general diagnostic box. The special screw bits. You know how that is. I took the torx set. Then the vendor diagnostics. You really got issued a very good tool kit. Sorry. Taking most of the rest of your kit, now. Will return it all soon.
The ink of the scribbles alternated between blue and black. It looked like he really had cannibalized my kit section by section starting the day it arrived.
It’s a good thing I couldn’t reach him right away. I started to yell at him by means of a voicemail message but I had half a minute to think, so I deleted it. After a few more tries at being polite but failing, I settled for, “You’ve got my fucking engine tools. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
In the middle of the night, in my bunk, I received a voice notice.
“I am assigning you an exploration suit.” My boss sounded calm and pissed off at the same time. “Don’t fuck it up. I’m serious. The suits are expensive. You see, I have been informed that you must be given full-time work. And I have taken your tools. So you are getting a suit.”
Ten minutes later, he followed up.
“Here are three locker combinations. You may piece together your outfit from what is available. Please, Pahn Cruzak, do not fuck up. You have been temporarily assigned as an engineering scout.”
HR-Spec-9: What is Pahn? Your name is Daniel. Oh wait, I am remembering.
Cruzak: You’re looking it up. I can see you.
HR-Spec-9: It means nothing. It is a Russian or Ukranian honorific. Like calling you ‘herr’ or ‘mister’ Cruzak.
Cruzak: Yeah, thanks. Anyway, he said that normally, this would mean a decrease in pay.
“But the construction chief for the Tajik Project announced that we have only two-thirds of the engineering scouts we require,” was part of the voicemail. “Anyone who gets assigned to scout duty keeps their previous pay and receives a bonus for their first, valid engineering report.”
That sounded pretty good to me. The problem was that I wasn’t qualified for engineering, not even in the bottom ranks. Under the circumstances, I suspected it wouldn’t matter. And I was right. At fifteen minutes past the opening hour for headquarters, my authorization forms came through. They asked me to sign, so I read the forms. It looked like my assignment wasn’t permanent, just two months. I got a bonus for signing, another wad of cash at the end of thirty days, and another wad at sixty days.
HR-Spec-9: This is another bump in pay. Good deal.
Cruzak: Hell yeah. I slapped a suit together out of the crap pieces, which got me a better outfit than most staff did although I wasn’t aware of their equipment problems yet. For a while, I stomped around the locker room, practicing. My elbows kept bumping the walls. Since I was a couple inches taller in the suit, I had to reach down for the door handle. But I got the hang of it.
After I practiced, I commissioned a jeep ride to the engineering scout camp. The jeep had a special back seat where two scouts could sit side by side in their armor. There was only one of me, so I spread out.
“Are you in a hurry, sir?” my Tajik driver asked.
“I want to get to the scout power station and activate my bonus pay.”
He got a laugh out of that. But he couldn’t speak much English and I didn’t know phrases of other languages to try, so I read my suit manuals for most of the ride. After about forty minutes, I discovered I had translator modes in the suit. I didn’t try them, though. It seemed too awkward after all the silence.
HR-Spec-9: You were not wearing all the same pieces when you returned to ITB.
Cruzak: Right, right. On the third day of the fighting ...
HR-Spec-9: No, no. The previous interviewer said you always get out of order. Please tell in order. I should not have spoken.
Cruzak: Start on the first day?
HR-Spec-9: We are to go back to the day before, please. When you were scouting ahead of the railway construction.
Cruzak: There was no real scouting, you know. Certified engineers did that. Folks at my level took their already completed diagrams, headed up the hills, and warned the construction crews if the terrain had changed. We lugged equipment around for them, built the construction crew rest stops, stuff like that. We installed charging stations for folks like us who had powered suits. We did all this with just two hours of training.
HR-Spec-9: A self-defense course?
Cruzak: That would be crazy. They assigned a standard service course on engineering ethics. The material didn’t cover conflicts. I spent most of the time listening to lectures about how I shouldn’t lie to engineers. Then there was a quiz where every question was basically like ‘should you lie?’ and the correct answer was no.
HR-Spec-9: You mentioned this part before recording this morning. Personally, it is hard for me to understand that this is an issue.
Cruzak: There’s a morale problem among the scouts. If you do the job for long, it’s sort of brainless, and there’s a chance you’ll stop doing it right. You won’t keep careful records. That means you’ll make things up on your reports.
HR-Spec-9: Aha. (Sound of a pen on paper.) Did you have this habit?
Cruzak: No, I wasn’t in the position long enough to get that way. Actually, in my couple of weeks around Shaymak, I loved it. I thought this stuff was great. The best part was the other scouts. The ones I worked with were nice. They were happy to see me. Wojchek was super considerate. Szymon, too. We used to get together before the shifts and ... and ...
HR-Spec-9: Stop that.
Cruzak: (Choking noises, then sniffling.)
HR-Spec-9: Stop. Nenavizhu tebya. Ich hasse dich. (Sounds of a chair pushed back. The interviewer apparently rises and calls loudly.) Gewebe, bitte. Gewebe! Tissues! Can I get some tissues here? Yes, you. I forgot to bring the box of tissues.
(Silence and soft noises for 14 seconds. A door opens and closes. Silence for 57 seconds.)
HR-Spec-9: Normal scouting. How did it proceed, Repairman Cruzak?
Cruzak: The armor is so smart. Smarter than humans are, really.
HR-Spec-9: What has this to do with scouting?
Cruzak: (Blows nose.) They don’t need humans in the suits. The armor takes about half of the readings. They could just build in more surveying instruments and mineral analysis. They wouldn’t need people. But people are cheaper, I guess. That’s probably the reason we had jobs.We were easier to maintain than smart armor, even in our second-hand scout-level stuff.
HR-Spec-9: Do not keep calling it armor. That does not help your case. You were issued a survival suit. These suits save men who get lost in the mountains.
Cruzak: We called it armor. Everyone did. Why would it matter if ITB, the transportation board, called it a survival suit? It was a collection of armor. Half of the pieces had weapons built in, for fuck’s sake.
HR-Spec-9: (Groans.)
Cruzak: The normal scouting job was nice. The other scouts taught me how to think like a bridge engineer, a railroad designer, a survivalist, and just about every other viewpoint I needed. I learned how to find water and store it in a reservoir in my suit so I wouldn’t have to drink my recycled pee. Gillian, one of the Americans, showed me flowers I could eat. Petrov, a Russian fellow, showed me how to make my suit recycle a type of shrub into edible paste that the suit stored in packets. He wanted to charge me for the lesson but then he decided that we’d barter.
HR-Spec-9: You were popular.
Cruzak: Not especially. The scouts were nice, that’s all. When they found out I was an engine repairman, they started bringing me pieces of our suits to fix. They were patient with me. For the first week, I had no luck. I just collected a bag of stuff I had to lug around. I learned, though. Like I said, the scouts were tolerant. The suits helped me. They’re smart. They can tell you what needs to be repaired if you understand their language.
HR-Spec-9: They can self-diagnose, correct? Just not self-repair.
Cruzak: The pieces have their own sensors, yeah. The sensors are usually the parts dying, though. The self-diagnosis part is wrong. If you learn to listen and if you have a few basic instruments, you can figure out what the sensors should be saying.
HR-Spec-9: Where were you on the day before?
Cruzak: Oh yeah. (Rustling noises.) We had moved our camp to the east of Shaymak. Some of the older scouts told us about a Buddhist temple and how the railroad went right through it. This was the first time I saw the place. Sure enough, the building sat right on the top of the mountain. Damn weird spot for it. The path of the railroad led right through the gates. We stood there looking at it for most of the day.
HR-Spec-9: Didn’t you work?
Cruzak: We cleared bushes and put up a shelter for the construction crew behind us. We installed a charging station for our suits, too. Most of us got a proximity charge. But no matter where you stood on the slopes, you couldn’t help seeing the temple. Thing is, it wasn’t in the engineering plans. The blueprints showed a place marked ‘ruins.’ Instead of a pile of rubble at that spot, there was a real temple. No one had torn it down or anything. It had walls.
HR-Spec-9: Could you see the monks?
Cruzak: We were too far away. But we could tell they were there. Even from a kilometer downslope, you could see the walls had fresh paint. Once, I thought I noticed a change in the dome, a shadow like someone had climbed up on it. (Ten seconds of silence.) Clouds of dust billowed from the temple down the south slopes for about half an hour that day.
HR-Spec-9: You have been asked to write about your experience. Have you composed your report?
Cruzak: I’m trying.
HR-Spec-9: You must do this, even if you dictate it to a machine. These interviews are not a substitute. You are an employee of the UN International Transportation Board, like me. This is an ITB investigation. Your report is a requirement.
Cruzak: I know, I know.
HR-Spec-9: (Sighs heavily close the microphone. One second of static.) So, it is the day before events. What you do that day, it is only the surveying work?
Cruzak: No. At lunch, our scouting chief pulled up in a truck. He made me and Ahmed help him unload a bunch of crates from the cargo bed. The first one said SMART .22. The next was SMART .44. There were a few more of SMART .44, some SMART .33, and then SMART RIF, SMART RIF, SMART RIF.
HR-Spec-9: Rifles. Weapons.
Cruzak: Yeah. Kaspar, the scouting crew chief, started handing them out.
HR-Spec-9: Did anyone refuse?
Cruzak: One of the Poles, Wojchek. And Gillian Baker.
HR-Spec-9: The American woman refused?
Cruzak: Not just her. I think everyone was getting ready to tell Kaspar to fuck off. He could see it coming. He held up a hand and announced that the rifles were mandatory. He said he wouldn’t make us arm them. We were only going to intimidate the Buddhists in the temple to make sure they didn’t interfere with our work.
HR-Spec-9: Who authorized him?
Cruzak: Maybe no one. It could have been just Kaspar’s decision. I don’t know. He didn’t have rights to dock our pay or anything but he’d thought ahead, like he usually did.
HR-Spec-9: He still does.
Cruzak: Aha, so the army hasn’t had him shot or anything. (Sounds of a chair moving.) Good. Last time I saw him, he wasn’t wounded. Anyway, he’d given everyone bonuses in the past week. Although he couldn’t touch our regular pay, those bonuses were at his discretion until the end of the pay period. When Gillian didn’t accept her rifle, he revoked her bonus and made everyone watch. Wojchek grabbed his weapon then. Everyone else did, too, although it took a couple minutes of arguing until we were done. Hell, I picked up my weapon before he could threaten me. No one wanted to part with a ten percent bonus over wearing a rifle.
HR-Spec-9: The American died, yes? Did she take a weapon?
Cruzak: Yeah, but no. Kaspar kept negotiating with her. He convinced her to carry a backpack of ammo in return for half of her bonus restored.
HR-Spec-9: This is what time?
Cruzak: I’m sure you’ve got it from the readouts in the armor. The guns and the suits started communicating as soon as everything powered up. The smart components adjusted to each other. Most of us had ammo in our suits but we hadn’t known about it until the suits loaded the ammo into our rifles.
HR-Spec-9: That is unfortunate. Do you remember the time?
Cruzak: After lunch, so ... maybe 11:20 in the morning.
HR-Spec-9: That is not before lunch?
Cruzak: Nope, after.
HR-Spec-9: You were in an Islamic area. The hills, the valleys, the steppes, all of it. All the villagers were Muslim. Did it not seem unusual to encounter a Buddhist stupa?
Cruzak: Not to me. In retrospect, that was ignorant. Any group who would re-occupy a Tibetan temple outside of Tibet had to be fanatical. It sure worried Kaspar.
