The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  Both sides fired flares, and their surroundings lit up in green light. Wang Ran looked through his scope at the yellowish haze ahead of them, the dust cloud kicked up by tank #105 to their forward left. All of a sudden the yellow dust in his field of vision turned red with flickering firelight. The scene cleared up and he saw #108 slow down, trailing smoke and fire, and then it was far behind them. Ahead to the right another tank was on fire, and was also left behind. At no time did he hear the two tanks get hit. Suddenly a column of dust was kicked up straight ahead of them, and they ran directly into it, stones and shell fragments clattering on the tank’s outer armor. The shot, a high-speed fin-stabilized armor-piercing round, had fallen short of the target. Now his tank was at the head of their formation, and Wang Ran heard in his earpiece the voice of the lieutenant colonel in command of their battalion, from her command vehicle: “Targets sighted directly ahead! Fire at will!”

  More bullshit. Just like in the previous engagements, in the crucial moment they never provide you with the information you want. They’re just a distraction. Now the tank slowed down, evidently so he could fire. Wang Ran looked ahead through his viewfinder, and in the light of the flares he saw first the dust clouds blocking out the sky over the horizon, and then, at the base of the cloud, he saw the black dots. He adjusted the focus until the Abrams tanks resolved, and his first impression was that they were nothing like what he had seen in photographs, where they looked as powerfully sturdy as two square iron ingots bolted together. Here, trailing long dust clouds behind them, they looked smaller.

  He caught one in the crosshairs, and then pressed the button to lock it, turning the M1A2 into a magnet to attract the 120 mm smoothbore cannon, so that no matter how the tank pitched or rocked, the barrel would remain stubbornly trained onto its target like a compass needle. He pressed the fire button and saw the spurt of fire from the barrel and the dust kicked up ahead of them by the vented air. Then off in the distance the shell exploded in fire and smoke. It was a clean explosion, no dirt, and Wang Ran knew it was a hit. The tank continued to advance, trailing smoke, but he knew that it wouldn’t make it very far before it stopped.

  He moved the crosshairs to capture another target, but then from outside the tank came a deafening noise. His helmet and earphones had excellent noise-shielding, but he knew it was a loud noise because it rocked his entire body numb. The viewfinder went dark, and his legs suddenly felt burning hot, like the time when he was young and his father carried him into a hot tub. But the heat turned scorching, and he looked down at the inferno he was now standing in: flames were everywhere in the lower part of the cabin.

  The extinguishers went on automatically, filling the cabin with fog and suppressing the fire. Then he realized that a black, branch-like object beneath his feet was twitching. A fire-scorched arm. He grabbed the arm, not knowing whether it belonged to the driver or the loader, but neither would have been so lightweight. He quickly learned the reason: he had pulled up just the upper half of a body, blackened all over, the lower part of the chest still in flames. His hand shook, and the half torso slipped down again. He still couldn’t make out who it was, or why the hand was still moving. He opened the hatch and climbed out as fast as he could. The tank was still moving forward, and he rolled off the back and crashed heavily to the ground, surrounded by clouds of smoke from the tank he had just exited.

  After a breeze cleared the smoke, Wang Ran saw his tank at a standstill ahead of him. The smoke had ebbed, but flames were spurting from the interior. It had been hit by a shaped charge, he now knew, one designed to cut through armor by concentrating explosive energy into a high-temperature jet, turning the tank into a furnace. He moved backward, passing a number of other burning tanks, and his burned trousers dropped in shreds from his legs. He turned around at the sound of a dull thud behind him; his tank had exploded and was now a ball of thick flame and smoke. Now he felt an intense pain in his legs and sat right down on the ground, surrounded by explosions and fires, beneath flickering southern lights dulled by the thick smoke in the night sky. He felt the chill wind, and then the colonel instructor’s words echoed in his mind once again:

  “. . . group engagements are more complicated. Now, our tank group and the enemy’s can be thought of in mathematical terms as two matrices, and the entire course of battle as the multiplication of these matrices . . .”

  Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Even now Wang Ran had no idea how matrices were multiplied. Surveying the battlefield, he carefully counted the number of destroyed tanks on each side. The relative damage rate needed to be calculated.

  *

  Three days later, and still dragging his injured leg, Wang Ran got into a third tank, this time as driver. They reached the match location before it was light. More than a hundred tanks were parked along a long brick wall for the wall-smashing game, waiting for the start command. When the command came, they and their opponents, parked behind a parallel wall ten meters beyond theirs, would push the walls over and attack each other. The event required fast reflexes, and the key to victory lay in the attack formation, not shooting skills since there was basically no need to even aim when it came time to shoot. Their instructors back in the Common Era would never have imagined that their students would be firing upon enemy tanks at a distance of just a few meters, much less that the command to shoot would be issued by a Swiss judge, surveying the battle from a helicopter far overhead.

  For the next several hours, that wall was all of the outside world Wang Ran could see through the tank’s forward window. It flickered between indistinct and crystal clear as southern lights danced overhead. He inspected it in minute detail, down to the last fracture of every brick and the shape of every segment of still-wet cement, enjoying the interplay of light and shadow on the wall from the aurora australis that he couldn’t see. He discovered for the first time that the world had so many things to enjoy, and he made a decision: If he made it out of this game alive, he would enjoy every inch of the world around him as if it were a painting.

  His earpiece broke its five-hour silence with the command to attack. The voice came so suddenly, right in the middle of his careful study of the pattern of cracks in the thirteenth brick in the fourth row up, that he froze for a second. But just one second, and then he slammed the accelerator and sent the giant steel beast leaping forward to smack down the wall alongside the other tanks. As bricks scattered and dirt flew, he realized he was already in the enemy’s armored formation. In the brief, chaotic battle that followed, the constant noise of smoothbore cannon fire and exploding shells, blinding flashes outside, the turret above him spinning rapidly, and the ammo loader grinding away as the smell of propellant filled the cabin, he knew that the gunner had only to fire as quickly as possible in all directions with no need to even aim. The firing frenzy lasted less than ten seconds, until there was a thunderous noise and the world exploded before his eyes.

  When Wang Ran regained consciousness he was lying in the battlefield first-aid station. Standing next to him was a reporter for the army newspaper.

  “How many tanks do we have left in the battalion?” he asked weakly.

  “Not a one,” the reporter said. He should have known. The tanks were close enough to set a world record for armored-vehicle combat. The reporter added, “But I should congratulate you: One to one-point-two! We turned around the relative damage rate for the first time! Your tank destroyed two of theirs, one Leclerc and one Challenger.”

  “Zhang Qiang’s amazing,” Wang Ran said, nodding, despite his splitting headache, in recognition of his tank’s gunner.

  “So are you. Only one was due to shooting. You flipped the other on impact!”

  Wang Ran felt drowsy again owing to lack of blood, and he dropped off with the sounds of frenzied shooting echoing in his ears like a rainstorm beating down endlessly on a metal roof. But all his eyes saw were those abstract patterns on the brick wall.

  *

  The commander of Wang Ran’s armored division stood on a low
hill watching the last of her battalions roll out. When the steel skirmish line reached the enemy’s position and the tanks switched on their smoke generators, all she could see was a band of white smoke. A rapid series of explosions followed, and although from this vantage point she couldn’t see the enemy’s tanks, she could see the explosions of the shells they fired at hers, lighting up the band of smoke with dazzling balls of light. At times a silhouette would momentarily be visible amid the fog and explosions. The thirteen-year-old commander had the sudden sense of familiar recognition: back on the morning of the first Spring Festival she set off firecrackers, she had been so frightened after lighting them she had thrown the entire long strand on the ground, where it cracked and thundered, sending hundreds of tiny flashes into the drifting smoke. . . .

  But the battle didn’t even last as long as the firecrackers had, and in fact to the commander it seemed even longer than it actually was. Afterward she learned that the shooting had only lasted for twelve seconds. In twelve short seconds, enough to take six breaths, the commander’s one remaining division was annihilated. The Type 99s sat in flames before her; under the thinning smoke it was almost as if they were torches obscured beneath a gauze curtain.

  “What’s the damage rate?” the commander asked a staff officer beside her, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice. She stood on the crossroads between heaven and hell, a ghost asking God which road to take. The staffer took off his wireless earpiece and uttered the fiery, icy figure they had obtained at the price of a hundred-odd children’s lives.

  “One-point-three to one, sir.”

  “Tolerable. Not over the limit,” the commander said, and let out a long breath. She knew that in the invisible distance, enemy tanks equivalent to ten-thirteenths the number of her own were also aflame. The game was still in progress, but she had completed her mission, and kept their relative damage rate below the limit.

  *

  Second Lieutenant Wei Ming, one of Huahua’s classmates, took part in the heavy-weapons subcategory of the tank vs. infantry games with his armored platoon. Unlike the light-arms subcategory, which restricted soldiers to antitank grenades, soldiers in this game were able to use antitank guns and guided missiles against their opponents. By no means did this given them an easier time of it, because while the other game pitted a platoon against a single tank, they were facing three main battle tanks or five light tanks simultaneously.

  Today was a group match, and Wei Ming and his young comrades had spent the night poring over the battle plans. The previous day they had watched their company’s Second Platoon use the country’s most advanced antitank missile, the HJ-12, which their adult instructors had raved over, in particular the three types of guidance it utilized, including its cutting-edge visual pattern matching. In the game itself, all three of the missiles Second Platoon had fired were jammed and went wide of their targets, and only five soldiers survived. The rest were taken down by the guns and cannons of three Leclercs. The M1A2 tanks that Wei Ming’s platoon now faced had an even more powerful jamming system, so they had decided to use the more outdated, wire-guided HJ-73 missiles. They had less range, but were resistant to jamming, and the warheads had been improved to increase the armor-penetration capability from 300 mm to 800 mm.

  Now their preparations were complete. Three antitank missiles were set up in a line in their small base, no grander-looking than three white-painted wooden pegs. The Indian judge at their side motioned to indicate that the game had begun, and then scurried off to hide behind a line of sandbags and train her binoculars on them. The tank vs. infantry game was not easy on judges; it had already killed two and wounded five.

  Wei Ming was operating one of the three missiles. During training in the adults’ time, he had posted the highest total performance in this discipline, owing to his love of playing with a video camera back home. Missile operation consisted of keeping the target captured in the crosshairs from start to finish to guide the missile in its flight.

  Dust appeared on the horizon, and through binoculars Wei Ming saw a large group of tanks. With an entire infantry regiment taking part in today’s game, all but three of the M1A2s were attacking other targets. Wei Ming quickly picked out the three that were on their preset path, tiny shapes that didn’t seem at all ferocious from far away.

  Letting go of the binoculars, he dropped down to the missile to track one of the tanks in the viewfinder, keeping the crosshairs steady on the black spot that showed indistinctly through the dust. When he was certain it was within his three-thousand-meter firing range, he pressed the button to fire, and the missile next to him took off with a whoosh, trailing the wire behind it. He heard two more whooshes as the other two missiles took off. Now fire flashed from the front of the three M1A2s, like they were opening their eyes, and two or three seconds later the shells landed to the right and back of them, and then a few earsplitting explosions and a storm of dirt and stones rained down on them. More shells followed, and Wei Ming involuntarily shielded his head with his arms amid the explosions. He recovered quickly, but when he turned to the viewfinder all he could see was the horizon, rocking unsteadily. By the time he found the target again and locked it in the crosshairs, he saw a column of dust rising up to the tank’s right side, and he knew that his missile had gone wide. Looking up from the eyepiece, he saw two other dust columns behind the tanks. All three missiles had missed. The tanks charged toward them, clearly recognizing that without any missiles the base was no longer a threat. It had become a light-weapons game, but the platoon was facing not one but three tanks.

  “Ready antitank grenades!” Wei Ming shouted, taking out one of his own and crouching in the shell scrape as the tanks grew ever closer. With magnetic material in its head, the grenade was heavy in his hand.

  “Sir . . . ​how does it work? I never learned!” a kid next to him said anxiously. Indeed they had never learned how; the adults who had trained them had never imagined their charges would be going up against the world’s most ferocious main battle tanks armed only with hand grenades.

  As the three iron beasts closed in, Wei Ming could feel their vibrations in the ground beneath his feet. He ducked as machine-gun rounds zipped overhead, and had to estimate the tanks’ distance. When he sensed they were charging into the base, he stood up and hurled his grenade at the middle tank, and at the same moment saw a flash from the muzzle of the turret machine gun pointed straight at him, and a bullet whisked just past his ear. The grenade traced an arc through the air and stuck to the side of the M1A2’s sloped turret a little to the front of the smokescreen outlet, scaring the American kid manning the gun back inside.

  Other kids in the platoon came up and hurled their grenades, some of which stuck to tanks, others landing on the ground. The kid next to Wei Ming collapsed to the ground outside the trench with a gaping bullet wound to the back, dropping a grenade that tumbled to a spot two or three meters away. It lay there unexploded; perhaps the kid had forgotten to pull the firing pin. The other grenades exploded, but the three tanks charged onward through the flames and smoke over the trenches, completely unscathed. Wei Ming leapt backward out of his trench and tumbled out of the path of the oncoming tank treads, but many of the other kids were crushed. Then, with a tremendous crash, one tank tipped over into a trench and came to a stop, after hitting and dragging under its tracks a kid right in the middle of throwing a grenade, which exploded, severing the track and dislodging a wheel into the air.

  The far-off judge put up a green signal, declaring the game finished. The turret of the crippled Abrams opened with a clang and a helmeted American kid emerged, but at the sight of Wei Ming’s machine gun trained on him, he ducked mostly back inside, leaving just half a head poking out as he called through his translation unit, “Follow the rules, Chinese kids! Keep to the rules! The game is over. Stop fighting!” Once Wei Ming lowered his weapon, he came out, with three other kids on his heels, and climbed off the tank, hands on the guns at their waists as they looked warily around at the s
urviving Chinese kids on the ground. Then they headed off toward the US base. The last kid, who had a huge translation unit strung round her neck, stopped, turned back toward Wei Ming, saluted, and said what her translator then translated as, “I’m Lieutenant Morgan. You all played well, Lieutenant.”

  Wei Ming returned a salute but said nothing. All of a sudden he noticed movement at Morgan’s chest, and a cat poked its head out of the kid’s armored division jacket and meowed. Morgan took the cat out of her jacket and showed it to Wei Ming. “This is Watermelon, our crew mascot.” To Wei Ming, the cat’s ringed markings did make it resemble a watermelon. With another salute, Lieutenant Morgan turned and walked off.

  Wei Ming stood still for a while watching the Antarctic horizon shimmer under the spectrum of the southern lights. It was a long time before he walked slowly over to the edge of the trench and his two crushed comrades, and then sat on the soggy ground and burst into tears.

  *

  The fighting taking place on the Antarctic continent was an unprecedented form of battle, and one unlikely to be repeated: a game war. In this war, enemies fought using the format of an athletic competition. High command on both sides set the time and location of the battle, determined the strength of each side, and chose or drafted rules of battle that they all would abide by. Then they fought according to the arrangements, while an impartial jury observed the fighting and decided the ultimate victor. All participating countries had equal status, there were no alliances, and they took turns fighting. Below is a transcript of a conversation between two countries’ high command arranging a competition: