by Liu Cixin
The Comanche charged toward its open target and launched all sixty-two 27.5-inch Hornet missiles. Walker watched rapt as his swarm of fire-stingered little bees buzzed happily toward their target, swamping the enemy in a sea of fire. But when he turned to fly over the results of the encounter, he realized that something was wrong. The soldiers on the ground hadn’t tried to conceal themselves. Instead, they stood in the snow, pointing at him. They seemed to be cussing him out.
Walker flew closer and clearly saw the destroyed armored car’s insignia for himself: three concentric circles, blue at the center, white in the middle, red on the outside. Walker felt as if he’d dropped into hell. He started cussing, too.
“You son of a bitch, are you blind?!”
But he still had the wisdom to fly away in case the enraged French returned fire. “You son of a bitch, you’re probably thinking of how to pin the blame on me in military court right this moment. I’m telling you here, you won’t get away with this. You were the one in charge of identifying targets, are you clear?”
“Maybe … maybe we’ll still have the chance to make up for our mistake,” Haney said timidly. “I found another unit, right across—”
“Fuck you!” Walker said.
“They’re definitely the enemy’s this time! They’re exchanging fire with the French!”
Walker perked up at that. He steered toward the new target and saw that the enemy force was primarily infantry without much armored-vehicle strength. This did support Haney’s assessment. Walker launched his last four Hellfire missiles, then set his double-barreled Gatling gun to 1,500 rpm and started shooting. He felt the comfortable vibration of the machine gun through the chassis, watching as it scattered snow and powder like ground white pepper over the enemy skirmish line on the ground. But the intuition of a veteran armed helicopter pilot warned him of danger. He turned, only to see a soldier standing on a jeep fire a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to his left. Walker frantically shot off magnesium heat pellets as lures and swung backward for evasive maneuvers, but too late. The missile, trailing cobwebs of white smoke, had punched into the Comanche right under the nose.
When Walker woke from his brief explosion-induced concussion, he found that the helicopter had crashed in the snow. Walker scrambled desperately from the smoke-filled interior, bracing himself against a tree that had been severed neatly at waist height by the propeller. When he looked back, he could see the remains of Captain Haney in the front seat, blasted into a pulp by the explosion. When he looked forward, he saw a band of soldiers running toward him with submachine guns raised, their Slavic features clear.
Shaking, Walker dug out his handgun and set it on the snow in front of him. He dug out his Russian phrase book and began to clumsily read out his surrender.
“Y-ya postavil svoye oruzhiye. Ya voyennoplennym. V Zhenevskoy konventsii—”
Walker took a gun butt to the back of his head, then a boot to his belly. But as he collapsed into the snow, he was laughing. They might beat him half to death, but only half. He’d seen the eagle insignia of the Polish army on the soldiers’ collars.
JANUARY 7TH, MINSK,
NATO COMBAT OPERATIONS CENTER
“Get that goddamn doctor over here!” General Tony Baker roared.
The gangly military doctor ran over.
“What the hell went wrong?” Baker demanded. “You’ve messed with my dentures twice and they’re still buzzing!”
“I’ve never seen anything like it, General. Maybe it’s your nervous system. How about I give you a shot of local anesthetic?”
“Give me the dentures, sir,” said a major on the staff, walking over. “I know how to fix them.” Baker took out his dentures and set them on the major’s proffered paper towel.
According to the media, the general lost his two front teeth when his tank was hit during the Gulf War. Only Baker himself knew that this wasn’t true. That time he’d broken his lower jaw; he’d lost the teeth earlier.
It had been at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, during the Mount Pinatubo eruption, when the world around seemed to be volcanic ash and nothing else. The sky was ash, the ground was ash, the air was ash, too. Even the C-130 Hercules that he and the last of the base personnel were about to board was coated with a thick layer of white. The dim red of magma glimmered intermittently in the gray distance.
Elena, the Filipina office worker he had been sleeping with, tracked him down after all this. The base was gone, she said, and she’d lost her job. Her house was buried under ash. How were she and the child in her belly supposed to live? She pulled at his hand and begged him to take her to America. He told her it was impossible. So she took off a high-heeled shoe and whacked him in the face, knocking out two of his teeth.
Where are you now, my child? Baker wondered, gazing at the gray ocean. Are you living out your days with your mother in the slums of Manila? In a way, your father is fighting for your sake. Once the democratic government takes over in Russia after the war, NATO’s vanguard will be at China’s borders, and Subic Bay and Clark will once again become America’s Pacific naval and air bases, even more prosperous than they were last century. You’ll find work there! But most importantly, under NATO’s pressure, those Chinese just might give you folks what you’ve wanted for so long: those beautiful islands in the South China Sea. I’ve seen them from the air: snow-white coral surrounding the brown sand, like eyes in the blue sea. Child, those are your father’s eyes….
The major returned, cutting short the general’s woolgathering. Baker accepted the dentures on the paper towel, put them in, and after a few seconds, looked at the major in astonishment. “How did you do that?”
“Sir, your dentures were buzzing because of electromagnetic resonance.”
Baker stared at the major in clear disbelief.
“Sir, it’s true! Maybe you’ve been exposed to strong EM waves before, for example near radar equipment, but the frequency of those waves must have been different from your dentures’ resonant frequency. But now, the air is filled with powerful EM waves at all frequencies, which caused this condition. I’ve modified the dentures to make their resonant frequency much higher. They’re still vibrating, but you can’t feel it anymore.”
After the major left, General Baker’s gaze fell onto the clock standing beside the digital battle map. Its base was a sculpture of Hannibal riding an elephant, engraved with the caption EVER VICTORIOUS. The clock had originally inhabited the Blue Room of the White House; when the president saw his gaze straying again and again in its direction, he’d personally picked up the clock from its century-old resting place and gifted it to him.
“God save America, General. You’re God to us now!”
Baker pondered for a long time, then slowly said, “Tell all forces to halt the offensive. Use all our available airpower to find and destroy the source of the Russian jamming.”
JANUARY 8TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL
STAFF HEADQUARTERS
“The enemy has disengaged, but you don’t seem happy,” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Western Military District, newly returned from the front line.
“I don’t have reason to be happy. NATO has concentrated all their airpower on destroying our jamming units. It’s really proving an effective countertactic.”
“It’s no more than we expected,” Marshal Levchenko said evenly. “Our strategy would catch the enemy unprepared at first, but they’d come up with a way to counter eventually. Barrage-type jammers emitting strong EM waves at all frequencies wouldn’t be hard to find and destroy. But fortunately, we’ve managed to stall for a considerable length of time. All our hopes now rest on the reinforcement armies’ swift arrival.”
“The situation might be worse than we predicted,” said the district commander. “We might not be able to give the Caucasus Army enough time to move into position before we lose the upper hand in the electronic battle.”
After the district commander had left, Marshal Levchenko turned to the digital
map display of the frontline terrain and thought of Kalina, right now under the enemy’s massed fire, and as a result thought again of Misha.
That one day, Misha had returned home with his face bruised blue and purple. Marshal Levchenko had heard the gossip already: his son, the only anti-war factionist at the college, had been beaten up by students.
“I only said that we shouldn’t speak of war lightly,” Misha explained to his father. “Is it really impossible to reach a reasonable peace with the West?”
The marshal replied, his tone harsher than it had ever been toward his son, “You know your position. You can choose to stay silent, but you will not say things like that in the future.”
Misha nodded.
Once they were through the door that night, Levchenko told Misha, “The Russian Communist Party has taken office.”
Misha looked at his father. “Let’s eat,” he said, without inflection.
Later, the West declared the new Russian government unlawful. Tupolev assembled an extreme rightist alliance and instigated civil war. Marshal Levchenko didn’t need to tell any of it to Misha. Every night, father and son silently ate dinner together as usual. Then one day, Misha received his order from the spaceflight base, packed his things, and left. Two days later, he boarded a spaceplane for the Vechnyy Buran, waiting in near-Earth orbit.
All-out war broke out a week later, an invasion by an unprecedentedly powerful enemy, from an unexpected direction, aiming to dismember Russia piece by piece.
JANUARY 9TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,
THE VECHNYY BURAN PASSES MERCURY
Due to the Vechnyy Buran’s high velocity, it couldn’t settle into orbit around Mercury, only sweep past the sunward side. This was the first time humanity observed Mercury’s surface at close range with the naked eye.
Misha saw cliffs two kilometers tall, winding hundreds of kilometers through plains covered with huge craters. He saw the Caloris Basin, too, thirteen hundred kilometers across, termed “Weird Terrain” by planetary geologists. The weird part came from the similar-sized basin exactly opposite it on the other side of Mercury. It was hypothesized that a huge meteor had struck Mercury, and that the powerful shock waves had passed right through the planet, simultaneously creating nearly identical basins in both hemispheres. Misha found new, thrilling things, too. The surface of Mercury was covered in shiny speckles, he saw. When he used the screen to zoom in, the realization took his breath away.
Those were lakes of mercury on Mercury, each with a surface area of thousands of square kilometers.
Misha imagined standing by the lake banks in the long Mercury days, in the 1,800-degree-Celsius heat: what a sight it would be. Even in a tempest, the mercury would lie calm and still. And Mercury didn’t have an atmosphere, or wind. The surface of the lakes would be like mirrored plains, faithfully reflecting the light of the sun and Milky Way.
Once the Vechnyy Buran passed by Mercury, it was to continue approaching the sun until its insulation reached the absolute limit of what the fusion-powered active-cooling system could sustain. The sun’s heat was its best protection; none of NATO’s spacecraft could enter the inferno.
Gazing at the vastness of space, thinking of the war on his mother planet a hundred million kilometers away, Misha once again sighed at the shortsightedness of humanity.
JANUARY 10TH, SMOLENSK FRONT LINE
As she watched the gradual encroachment of the enemy’s skirmish line, Kalina understood why her location alone had survived where the surrounding sources of jamming had been destroyed one by one. The enemy wanted to capture a Flood unit intact.
The helicopter squadron, three Comanches and four Blackhawks, had easily located this control unit. Due to Flood’s massive EM radiation emissions, it could only be remotely operated via fiber-optic cable. The enemy had followed the cable to Kalina’s control station three kilometers from the Flood unit, a lone abandoned storehouse.
The four Blackhawks, carrying more than forty enemy infantry, had landed less than two hundred meters from the storehouse. At the time they arrived, there had still been a captain and a staff sergeant in the station with Kalina. Hearing the sound of an engine, the sergeant had gone to open the door; a sniper aboard the helicopter immediately shot off the top of his skull. Enemy fire was careful and restrained after that, fearful of damaging the precious equipment inside the storehouse, allowing Kalina and the captain to hold their ground for a while.
Now, to Kalina’s left, the captain’s submachine gun that had sounded her only comfort went silent. She saw the captain’s unmoving body behind the tree stump he’d used for cover, a circle of bright red blood blooming in the snow around him.
Kalina was in front of the storehouse, behind the crude cover of a few piled sandbags. Eight submachine-gun cartridge clips lay at her feet, and the hot gun barrel hissed in the snow atop the sandbags. Every time Kalina opened fire, the enemy opposite her would crouch down, the bullets splattering snow in front of them, while the enemy on the other side of the semicircular encirclement would spring up and push a little closer. Now Kalina only had three cartridge clips left. She began to fire single shots, but this tactic only announced to the enemy that she was running out of ammunition. They began to push forward more boldly. The next time Kalina reloaded, she heard a sharp squeaking sound from the thick snow on top of the sandbags. Something flew out and struck her on the right, hard. There wasn’t any pain, just a rapidly spreading numbness, and the heat of blood running down her right flank. She endured, firing the remnants of this clip wildly. When she reached for the last clip on the sandbags, a bullet cut through her forearm. The clip fell to the ground. Her forearm, connected by a last strip of skin, dangled in the air. Kalina got up and went for the storehouse door, a thin trail of blood following her steps. When she pulled open the door, another bullet pierced her left shoulder.
*
Captain Rhett Donaldson’s SEAL team approached the storehouse cautiously. Donaldson and two marines stepped over the Russian sergeant’s body, kicked open the door, and rushed in. They found a single young officer inside.
She was sitting beside their target, Flood’s remote control equipment. One broken forearm hung uselessly from the control desk, the other hand was clenched in her hair. Her blood dripped down steadily, forming little puddles at her feet. She smiled at the American intruders and the row of gun barrels pointing at her, a greeting of sorts.
Donaldson exhaled, but wouldn’t get the chance to inhale: he saw her turn her good hand from her hair to a dark green ovoid object resting on the remote control equipment. She picked it up, dangling it in midair. Donaldson instantly recognized it as a gas bomb, sized small for use on armed helicopters. It was triggered by a laser proximity signal and would explode twice at half a meter aboveground, first to disperse a gaseous explosive, second to trigger the vapor. He couldn’t escape its range now if he were an arrow in flight.
He extended a placating hand. “Calm down, Major, calm down. Let’s not get too hasty here.” He gestured around him, and the marines lowered their guns. “Listen, things aren’t as serious as you might think. You’ll get the finest medical care. You’ll be sent to the best hospitals in Germany and return in the first POW exchange.”
The major smiled at him again, which encouraged him somewhat. “You don’t have to do something so barbaric. This is a civilized war, you know. It would go like clockwork, I could tell already when we crossed the Russian border twenty days ago. Most of your firepower had been destroyed by then. That remaining little scatter of gunfire was just the perfect confetti to greet this glorious expedition. Everything will go like clockwork, you see? There’s no need—”
“I know of an even more beautiful beginning,” the major said in unaccented English. Her soft voice could have come from heaven, could have made flames extinguish and iron yield. “On a lovely beach, with palm trees, and welcome banners hanging overhead. There were beautiful girls with long, waist-length hair and silk trousers that rustled as they moved among the yo
ung soldiers and adorned them with red-and-pink leis, smiling shyly at the gawking boys…. Do you know of this landing?”
Donaldson shook his head, confused.
“March eighth, 1965, at nine A.M. It was the scene awaiting the first American marine forces landing at China Beach, the start of the Vietnam War.”
Donaldson felt as if he’d been plunged into ice. His momentary calm vanished; his breathing sped and his voice started to shake. “No, Major, don’t do this to us! We’ve hardly killed anyone, they’re the ones who do all the killing,” he said, pointing out the window to the helicopters hovering in midair. “Those pilots there, and the computer missile guidance gentlemen in the mother ships out in space. But they’re all good people too. All their targets are just colored icons on their screen. They press a button or click a mouse, wait a bit, and the icon goes away. They’re all civilized folks. They don’t enjoy hurting people or anything, honest, they’re not evil—are you listening?”
The major nodded, smiling. Who ever said that the god of death would be ugly and terrible?
“I have a girlfriend. She’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. She’s beautiful like you, honest, and she attended the anti-war rally …” I should have listened to her, Donaldson thought. “Are you listening to me? Say something! Please, say something.”
The major gave her foe one last radiant smile. “Captain, I do my duty.”
A unit from the reinforcing Russian 104th Motorized Infantry Division was half a kilometer from the Flood operation station. They first heard a low explosion and saw the little storehouse in the broad, empty fields disappear in a cloud of white mist. Immediately after, a terrible cacophony a hundred times louder shook the ground. An enormous fireball emerged where the storehouse had been, the flames embroiled in black smoke rising high, transforming into a towering mushroom cloud, like a flower of lifeblood blooming in the expanse between heaven and earth.