Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  Say again, Corporal. We did not receive your last transmission. Over.

  Alexi picked up his glasses. As he hooked the wire frames over his ears, he saw the bright red spot of the Viper’s laser sight on the floor in front of him. In that moment, a sense of déjà vu washed over Alexi. Was the Leitenant going to kill him—again?

  “Put that weapon away, Leitenant!” the pilot shouted.

  The beam of laser light was trembling as Soldatenkof fought to control his rage. For some inexplicable reason, he hadn’t shot Alexi yet, much as he wanted to.

  Alexi looked up. In the rear of the helicraft, the eyes of every squad member were trained on the drama that was unfolding in the cockpit. Boris had picked up his AK-51 and was glaring; Nevsky, sitting beside him, used the flat of his hand to push it gently to one side.

  “Put the pistol away now, Leitenant,” the pilot shouted at Soldatenkof. “You’re aboard my helicraft, and I’m in command here. There will be no shooting on board. That’s a direct order!”

  The laser light winked out.

  All of this had happened in a matter of heartbeats. During the entire exchange, Alexi was only half-listening. Instead his eye was caught by something in the very back of the helicraft, beyond the benches where the squad sat: a patch of shadow that was darker than it should have been. At first, Alexi thought it was a smudge of oil or dirt on the lens of his glasses, or a discoloration of the helicraft’s rear cargo door. But it wasn’t any of those things. The blackness had a shifting quality about it—a kind of solid formlessness that Alexi’s mind couldn’t quite shape into a proper outline. . . .

  Alexi jerked back in surprise. Was that a blue face looking out from the center of the patch of black?

  In a blink, the face was gone.

  The leitenant hauled Alexi to his feet. The microphone swayed at the end of its cord. Soldatenkof grabbed the mike and spoke into it.

  “Intelligence, please stand by.” His eyes blazed fury at Alexi as he spoke. “A full report is coming momentarily. Over.”

  “Ah . . . Leitenant Soldatenkof,” Alexi began. He glanced back at the patch of blackness that nobody else in the squad seemed to have noticed. “There’s something I think you should know . . .”

  8

  —in hell is Alexi?

  Piotr’s voice, crackling in his headphones. Where . . . ?

  Alexi seemed to be asking himself that question a lot today.

  He jerked back in terror as he saw what was crouched next to him: a tiger as big as a horse. Twin fangs lanced up like sabers from its snarling mouth, and eyes sparkled in the moonlight as it prepared to spring.

  Recoiling in horror, Alexi fired a burst from his AK-51 at it. The bullets punched into the tiger’s hide, tearing away bits of fur. Clods of stuffing rained out the other side of the creature, filling the air with a musty smell.

  Stuffing?

  Alexi held his fire. He reached out and gave the tiger a poke with his finger. Then he looked around.

  He stood in a building filled with broken glass cabinets and stuffed animals. Snakes, bears, birds—and the saber-toothed tiger that he’d just shot. And all of them with glittering glass eyes that stared hungrily at him out of the darkness. He walked slowly from one to the other, looking at the exhibits in the moonlight that filtered through the shattered skylight in the ceiling. A museum, then. That’s where he was. His mind flashed back to the times before the war, when he’d taken classes of schoolchildren to look at similar displays. What was he doing there now, assault rifle in hand, armored vest on his chest, boots crunching the shattered glass underfoot?

  The answer was quick in coming. Alexi thumped a hand against his helmet to clear the static from its speakers.

  Boris’s voice: We’ve got . . . pinned down . . . harbor. Where’s . . . with those grenades?

  Soldatenkof: Get moving, you useless . . . take it out or I’ll . . .

  Piotr: Does anyone else . . . grenades?

  Over the static in his helmet, Alexi heard the stutter of automatic weapons and explosions, coming from the streets outside the museum. He kept walking, looking at the beautifully painted backdrops that showed each animal’s natural habitat. A lot of work had gone into creating the displays, and now they were pockmarked by bullets. What point was there in fighting a war, if your land and culture were being destroyed?

  Nevsky: Where the hell . . . Alexi? I thought . . . bringing up the . . .

  “I’m here,” Alexi said into the microphone in his helmet. Something bumped against his thighs as he walked. He glanced down at his belt and saw a web bag filled with fragmentation grenades. Where had they come from?

  “Uh . . . Are we still in Vladivostok?” he asked.

  Soldatenkof: Get your pathetic . . . into position immediately, Minsk! And quit joking around. There’s a heavy-assault suit . . . the docks . . . where the S-56 is beached.

  Boris: Twenty rubles says Alexi doesn’t . . .

  Ah. The S-56, one of the famous “red banner” submarines. A relic of the Great Patriotic War—the second of the World Wars. It had been hauled onto shore like a beached whale—back when there was still an ocean lapping at the docks of Vladivostok—and turned into a museum ship. So they were still in the city.

  Alexi looked at his watch. It was 10:44 P . M . Where had the last hour gone? The last thing he remembered was taking out the heavy-assault suit with a rad grenade. How did he get here?

  He turned a corner, looking for a way outside. This room was filled with a display of artworks from the Futurists, members of a movement that had flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of the paintings were torn or burnt, but the few that remained showed utterly abstract geometrical shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. The art wasn’t to Alexi’s taste—yet one of the pieces caught his eye: a painting that was dominated by a large black triangle, poised on one of its points.

  Alexi stopped to read the inscription beneath it. The painting was by Kazimir Malevich, an artist who claimed that Futurism had freed art from having to depict the material world. He claimed his paintings were doorways to a “higher reality.”

  Alexi shook his head. Ridiculous. And yet the painting fascinated him. The triangle in it beckoned silently, as if luring the viewer into an unknown, sharp-edged future. The thought sent a chill up Alexi’s spine.

  Tearing his eyes away, Alexi walked into another wing of the museum. Here a more practical display caught his eye: a relic of a war fought over 150 years ago. Amid a display of artifacts from the Great Patriotic War was a motorcycle and sidecar that had been lovingly restored. A mannequin dressed in a uniform from the previous century slouched in the sidecar, just behind the machine gun that was mounted there. Alexi toyed with the idea of adding his own AK-51 to the display. He might as well; it was as much of an antique.

  Then he saw the dead soldier. She lay on the other side of the motorcycle. Her sand-on-green fatigues and the red star on her helmet identified her as Neo-Soviet. The orange radiation sign tattooed on her exposed chest told Alexi she was from the Battalion of Death. Although her chest and guts had been torn open by what looked like a sword slash, her face was untouched. It was a shame that someone so pretty had to die. . . .

  Alexi pushed the thought aside. She was a soldier, nothing more. A member of the rad squad. In a few months—a year or two, at most—she would have been dead from radiation poisoning, anyway.

  Piotr’s voice screamed over the speaker in Alexi’s ear. . . . told you I saw . . . in the hole on the left . . . naked soldier with blue skin? I’ve never seen anything like . . .

  Blue skin? That reminded Alexi of something. His mind reached for the thought, but he could no more grasp it than he could a cloud of smoke. There was a face attached to the thought: a bald head, deep-set eyes . . . But like a face from a dream, only its outline remained, without any features colored in. Except the color blue.

  Which reminded Alexi of something from his history classes.

  “Som
eone’s running around in woad?” he asked, chuckling. “So we’re fighting ancient Celts, are we?”

  Corporal Minsk! Soldatenkof screamed. I ordered you to bring back grenades, you dolt. What’s keeping . . . court-martial for you, you spineless . . .

  Which was the leitenant’s way of saying that he’d shoot Alexi if he didn’t get himself back to the squad’s position. Fast.

  Alexi’s boot thumped against something that gave off a hollow metal thud: a petrol can. He kicked it again, and it sloshed. Its metal side was marked with a red star—the dead soldier must have been carrying it. Had she honestly been thinking that the ancient motorcycle would still run?

  Alexi peered into the sidecar. It was filled with loot—but not the sort an ordinary soldier would steal. It wasn’t antique jewelry, or gilded religious icons, or any of the other valuables the museum had to offer.

  It was filled with books.

  Alexi smiled. It would take him months to read through all of those.

  What the hell. Maybe he didn’t want to die today, after all.

  Scooping up the can, he unscrewed the cap and poured the gurgling contents into the motorcycle’s gas tank. The sharp smell of petrol filled the air. Slinging his assault rifle over his shoulder, he tossed the bag of grenades in on top of the books that already covered the mannequin’s lap. He almost hauled the mannequin out, but on a whim decided to leave it in place. He might as well have some company on this ride. He sat on the motorcycle’s creaking leather seat and tried the kick start.

  The engine coughed.

  He tried again.

  The engine sputtered once. A fart of exhaust and dust wafted up from its tailpipe.

  He jumped on the kick start again. And again. And again.

  The engine roared to life.

  Amazing!

  Grinning fiercely, Alexi snapped a salute at the dead woman on the floor—a fellow comrade who must have shared his love of literature. Then he opened up the throttle and shifted. The motorcycle lurched forward, steering sloppily on underinflated tires. Hoping the brittle rubber wouldn’t break, he steered the bike around the broken glass on the floor, and out through the shattered front doors of the museum.

  The motorcycle’s headlamp was no longer working, but the moon and the Maw provided enough light for Alexi to find his way. He rode the bike down ulitsa Svetlanskaya, a street that was relatively free of rubble. He roared past the huge monument in the Square of the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East and steered for the waterfront.

  “Alexi here,” he shouted over the sputtering roar of the bike, hoping the microphone in his helmet was working. “Hang on! I’m coming. And I’m bringing you a treat.”

  Wind whistling in through the open faceplate of his helmet—the visor was still stuck in the up position—Alexi turned right onto ulitsa 1 Maya. Something red flickered in his peripheral vision as he started the turn, and a bullet spanged off the sidecar. Then a burst of bullets stitched across the mannequin’s chest, spraying chips of plastic everywhere.

  He revved the bike and finished taking the corner with the wheel of the sidecar in the air. The mannequin bounced out onto the road as the sidecar thumped back down onto the pavement.

  “Thanks for taking a bullet for me, tovarish,” Alexi shouted back at it.

  The beached sub was just down the hill. Artillery fire from the recent fighting had torn gaping holes in the sub’s sides at several points; every now and then gunfire would erupt from one of them. Then the rad squad, who were hunkered down behind debris on the beach, would pop up to return fire with a hail of bullets that bounced off the rusting metal walls of the sub. Without grenades, the squad wasn’t going to be able to oust the enemy from the improvised bunker.

  Alexi roared past ruined buildings—the abandoned headquarters of the previous Soviet state’s Pacific Fleet. They’d been turned into a civilian office complex after the Change altered the eastern shoreline, leaving Vladivostok a landlocked city; scattered files drifted across the darkened streets. Alexi waited for his own side to start shooting again, then gunned the bike and roared to the spot where Leitenant Soldatenkof, Boris, and Irina had taken shelter behind a block of concrete that used to be part of the docks.

  “Hey!” Alexi shouted. “I brought the grenades.”

  He killed the engine and leapt off the bike. Tossing the bag of grenades out onto the ground, he picked up a book—a copy of War and Peace—and held it above his head.

  “And books!”

  A rifle cracked. A bullet struck the book, knocking it from Alexi’s hand. Gulping, he ducked down below the concrete. When he picked up the book, there was a ragged round hole where the word peace had been.

  “About time you got here,” Boris muttered. “I was offering ten-to-one odds that you’d finally deserted.”

  Leitenant Soldatenkof slapped the book out of Alexi’s hands and picked up the bag of grenades. Then his face purpled.

  “Minsk, you idiot,” he shouted. “What good are these? I told you to bring back rad grenades! You’re not only a sluggard—you’re stupid! And for that, you get the honor of making the attack on the sub. With frag grenades.”

  Alexi glanced at the beached submarine. Stutters of red flared from a hole in its side. The enemy inside it had to be an assault-suited Union soldier, but for some reason he had gone to ground, taking cover inside the sub. Maybe the assault suit was disabled and the Union soldier had shed it—which would mean that a frag grenade would work, after all . . .

  Bullets spanged off the concrete near Alexi’s head. He suddenly wished he had deserted, after all. There was cover here and there on the beach—mangled chunks of machinery, bits of broken concrete—but the spaces between them were long indeed. And Alexi had never been much of a sprinter.

  “Leitenant, I . . .” He looked at the newest addition to the squad, who squatted beside Boris. “Irina’s better at throwing—”

  “Irina’s wounded.”

  Alexi took a second look at Irina and saw that Soldatenkof was not lying. A bandage around her left calf was just starting to soak through with blood. Knowing Irina, she’d probably insisted upon staying with the squad, despite the wound. She was tougher than any of the others in the squad.

  “But—” The rest of the protest died on Alexi’s lips as the red laser sight of the Viper settled on his chest. At point-blank range, his armored vest wouldn’t stop the slug.

  The leitenant’s voice was harsh and unyielding: “You make the attack. Now move!”

  Alexi wet his lips and clutched the bag of grenades. He glanced at Boris, but the big man only shrugged. Alexi heard Boris say, “five hundred rubles” over his helmet speakers and knew his chances weren’t good. Then Boris glanced in his direction. “Ready?” he asked.

  Alexi nodded.

  “Go!” Boris shouted. He and Irina leaned out from cover to rake the sub with rifle fire. Heart pounding, Alexi sprinted from behind the block of concrete and ran for a rusted-out forklift that was tipped over on its side. Vanya was hunkered down behind it. Bullets chewed up the ground at Alexi’s feet as he ran, and something thudded—hard—into the bag of grenades he carried against his chest. He prayed they wouldn’t explode. He leaped behind the forklift next to Vanya, who was bent down over his chem-sprayer, jamming a splinter of metal into the nozzle.

  “What’s wrong with the sprayer?” Alexi panted.

  “The nozzles are plugged,” Vanya answered. Then he grinned at Alexi. “It’s just like cleaning a trumpet. Except the spittle is toxic.”

  “Will it be cleared anytime soon?” Alexi asked. If the chem-sprayer were working, Vanya could fill the submarine with toxic chemicals at a distance. Alexi wouldn’t have to . . .

  Vanya shook his head. “No, Alexi,” he said. “You’ll have to play this one solo.”

  Alexi’s helmet crackled to life with Soldatenkof’s exasperated yelling. Get moving, Minsk! We . . . time to . . . assault suit moving toward . . .

  Boris cut him off. Six hundred rubl
es says . . .

  Alexi took a deep breath. The next piece of cover—a jumble of broken concrete that a dead Neo-Soviet soldier was draped over—was within throwing distance of the largest of the holes in the sub’s hull. But the run to it would leave Alexi completely exposed. He made sure his AK-51 was slung out of the way on his back, then patted the web bag of grenades. They’d already stopped one bullet for him.

  Then he ran.

  This time, he could hear the bullets hissing past his ears, cutting the air around him. Sweat running down his sides, he pounded across the open ground. Only a meter or two to go . . .

  His foot caught on something: a loop of cable buried in the broken concrete. Alexi crashed to the ground, knocking the wind out of himself. The bag flew from his hands, scattering the grenades. Panting, dazed, Alexi lay there for a moment. Then a bullet chipped a piece of concrete directly in front of his face. Acting purely on instinct, he pulled himself into a crouch and dived for the pile of rubble, landing on it in a painful belly flop next to the dead soldier. Without the grenades, which now lay in perfect view of the hole in the sub.

  Alexi could hear the enemy moving inside the submarine. The soldier was firing his weapon nonstop, crashing about in there.

  He looked back over his shoulder. He couldn’t see any of the other members of his squad; they were all hidden behind cover, waiting until the grenades were thrown. Any moment now, the leitenant would see the spilled grenades, and would realize that Alexi had failed. And then Alexi’s back would make a perfect target for the leitenant to vent his rage upon. . . .

  Now Alexi could hear screaming inside the sub. Had the enemy been wounded?

  He gasped as a soldier ran past his position. A Union soldier, in the tight-fitting silvery bodysuit they wore inside their heavy-assault suits. Running away from the sub. Then something very odd happened. A ball of light—almost like ball lightning, except that it had swirling shapes inside it that were suggestive of howling, screaming faces—streaked across the open ground. It slammed into the Union soldier’s back. The stricken soldier threw back his head and began to scream.