Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  What was this thing?

  In the middle of the hail of bullets, the creature looked up. Its heavy brow was crinkled, as if it was frowning at Alexi for interrupting its meal. The assault rifle was taking its toll; bullets had torn deep creases into the creature’s metallic hide and thick liquid was oozing from them. The creature rocked back on its haunches and threw up a heavily muscled arm as if to fend off a blow. Then it began to hack, like a cat coughing up a hairball.

  Alexi’s magazine ran out of bullets. Wrenching it out of the assault rifle, still backing away from the blood-fouled creature, Alexi tore open his greatcoat and yanked another magazine from the pocket of his fatigues. The creature continued to make strangled, coughing noises as it sat on Piotr’s chest, the steely claws on its feet embedded in his flesh like knives in soft cheese. Was it going to roar again?

  The answer came just as Alexi snapped the magazine into his AK-51. Opening its mouth impossibly wide, the creature coughed up a stinking wad of phlegm twice the size of a fist. It splatted onto Alexi’s chest, just on the spot where he’d wrenched open his greatcoat a second before. Instantly, he felt a burning sensation, as if his chest were on fire. An acrid smell rose from the shirt of his combat fatigues as the fabric melted against his skin. The acidic stench brought back a flash of memory—of the arts and crafts classes in the high school where he’d taught. Then he realized what that smell reminded him of: hydrofluoric acid, used for etching glass.

  Screaming, he threw his assault rifle down. By the time he’d wrenched off his greatcoat, the acid had eaten deep into his chest. His skin was a bubbling, steaming mass of red blood and gooey phlegm. The pain was overwhelming. He couldn’t breathe. Something inside his chest cavity collapsed as air rushed from it—a lung?

  As the first trembles of shock overtook him, Alexi sagged to his knees. He’d been killed by . . . spit? He’d had a feeling that he might die today, but he never expected it to be like this.

  A stray thought entered his mind: If he’d died when he was supposed to, back in Vladivostok, it would have been much cleaner and quicker. . . .

  Alexi fought to lift his head as he held himself up, hands splayed on the cold concrete floor. The light from his helmet illuminated the creature from below, throwing its jutting brows, heavy shoulders, and apelike arms into shadowed relief. Still eyeing him, the creature growled—a rumble that was a cross between a cat’s purr and the rattle of two metal gears clashing together.

  Alexi fell face forward onto the bubbling cavity that had once been his chest. The creature gave a small belch, glanced down at Piotr with satisfaction, and went back to its grisly meal.

  As Alexi’s consciousness slipped from his shock-numbed body, his mind groped for a word to describe the horrific creature. At last he found one: growler.

  Where had he heard . . . ?

  10

  B oris laughed out loud.

  “Growlers?” he asked in a mocking tone, leaving a lazy trail of blue smoke in the air as he gestured with a hand that held a foul-smelling cigarette. “Is that the best name Command could come up with? It sounds like something out of a children’s cartoon! Ten rubles says the officer who thought that one up was the same fellow who came up with the name ‘glowworm’ as a code for rad grenades.”

  Alexi’s head jerked back as laughter rippled across the rest of the squad. He stiffened in his chair. Had he nodded off? He clutched at his chest, wondering why it didn’t hurt any more. He was amazed to find that the shirt of his combat fatigues was intact. His chest was whole, the flesh solid under his probing fingers. He was breathing. . . .

  He sucked air into his lungs in a ragged gasp. Beside him, Boris turned and gave him a strange look. “Is my cigarette bothering you, Alexi?”

  The smoke was pungent. To make their tobacco last, the soldiers cut it with something that, when it burned, smelled like vegetables left too long in a pot on the stove. Alexi waved the smoke away from his face, and Boris shifted the cigarette to his far hand.

  It must have been the smoke, irritating his lungs as he slept.

  It must have been a dream . . .

  But now the dream was gone, all memory of it vanished.

  Alexi glanced around. He was sitting on a folding metal chair behind the other squad members, in a room with walls painted a dull military green. The other five members of the squad were all here, watching as the leitenant slapped a pointer across the flat of his hand in annoyance. His Viper pistol lay on the table beside him, next to a worn leather briefcase. Even though the squad members were unarmed, Soldatenkof wasn’t taking any chances.

  Pinned to the wall beside the leitenant was an enlarged color photograph of an apelike creature with more teeth than face and metallic-looking horns growing out of its back. It lay on its side inside what looked like a glass-fronted coffin; the picture had been taken through the glass from above the lid, then rotated so the creature was in a vertical position. The silhouette of a human figure beside it showed the thing to be twice the height of a human. Stamped across the top of the photograph, in red, were the words TOP SECRET .

  Alexi stared at the creature—a thing from his worst nightmare. His stomach clenched as if he’d eaten something bad.

  Boris was whispering something—a joke that had the other squad members chuckling—but Alexi’s mind was elsewhere. He tried to remember his dream. He and Piotr had been in a dark, close space, somewhere underground . . .

  Soldatenkof’s pointer cracked across the tabletop. “Pay attention, you dolts,” he snapped. “What I tell you could save your worthless lives.”

  The laughter died away.

  Irina, sitting just in front of Boris, turned and hissed angrily at him. “I want to hear what the leitenant has to say, even if you don’t. He’s talking about an incredible moment in Neo-Soviet history. Just imagine it: an alien race. And our nation was the first one to make contact.”

  Piotr—who for some reason Alexi was startled to see alive and well—leaned over to elbow Irina. “We were the first ones to take them captive, you mean,” he whispered at her. “And just look where it got us. But that’s what comes of poaching—eh, Irina?”

  As the leitenant droned on at the front of the room, Alexi swiveled in his seat to look behind him. Through a grubby window high in the wall he could see snow falling. It was light outside. The combats he was wearing were worn, but clean. He could smell the detergent that had been used to launder them—and the lingering scent of vodka on one shoulder. The squad had been away from the fighting for some time, then.

  The last thing he remembered was staring out through the window of the helicraft cockpit at the Maw as it sank below the horizon in a darkened sky. . . .

  He must have been exhausted, after the battle at Vladivostok. By the time the helicraft whisked them away, they’d been in the thick of battle for three solid days, playing a game of cat and mouse with the heavy-assault suits—with the rad squads faring about as well as a mouse in a cat’s jaws. It was no wonder the past few hours were a blank. Alexi remembered the times in basic training—when he’d literally slept on his feet—when he’d dozed off even as he was marching.

  The thought cheered him up. He wasn’t going crazy, after all. But he wished he’d been paying attention during the leitenant’s briefing. There was something about the creature in that photograph, something that was causing Alexi to experience a feeling like heartburn, deep in his chest. . . .

  “The growler in this illustration is much larger than the creatures you’re likely to encounter,” the leitenant continued. “The growler that was spotted in yesterday’s flyover is considerably smaller, about the size of a large dog. Intelligence believes it came from one of four cryotanks that were assumed destroyed after a Union smart bomb leveled the building they had been housed in. But obviously at least one of the cryotanks must have come through the bombing intact, if a growler was spotted on the surface. Intelligence has concluded that the lower levels of the building survived the bombing.”

&nbs
p; Soldatenkof gave his squad a brief, falsely reassuring smile. “None of the cryotanks in that building was large; all held growler pups. Even if all four have survived and have escaped the cryotanks, they’ll be sluggish and disoriented after being on ice for so long. According to Intelligence reports, they’re small and won’t pose much of a threat.”

  Boris leaned over to whisper in Alexi’s ear. “And we all know how accurate Intelligence reports are, don’t we?” he muttered. “Fifty rubles says they turn out to be as big as a house.”

  Alexi didn’t want to take that bet. Given the unreliability of what they’d been told about Vladivostok—that the Union troops attacking it were inexperienced and only lightly armored, certainly without heavy-assault suits—Boris was probably right.

  Alexi leaned closer. “Uh, Boris.”

  The bear of a man looked at him eagerly. “Yes, Alexi? I didn’t think you had fifty rubles.” He held out a meaty palm in anticipation.

  Alexi ignored it. “I ah . . . fell asleep earlier. What’s the leitenant talking about?”

  “We’re being sent to kill those creatures,” the big man rumbled. He nodded in the direction of the photograph at the front of the room, then took a deep drag on his cigarette and expelled a foul-smelling blue cloud of smoke. Nicotine had stained his fingers a deep yellow. His lungs were probably equally filthy, but to a man slowly dying of radiation poisoning, the threat of cancer was a small one. The fingernails were missing from Boris’s hands—a reminder of the poisons that were all that was keeping him alive: the chemicals in the military-issue, antiradiation pills.

  “What are growlers?” Alexi asked. “Something our scientists cooked up?”

  Boris gave Alexi a strange look. “You really were asleep, weren’t you?” he whispered back. “Funny, you looked as though you were listening.”

  “I’m tired,” Alexi said. “Vladivostok left me weary to the bone.”

  Boris’s frown deepened. “Even after two days of leave?”

  Alexi recoiled. Two days? He’d lost two entire days? Even worse, they were two days of leave. What had he done—drunk so much vodka he’d blacked out?

  At the front of the room, the leitenant was busy relating what little the military seemed to know about the so-called growlers. It basically boiled down to what any fool could guess from the photograph—that their claws and teeth were lethal weapons, as long and sharp as bayonets.

  Whispering quickly, Boris recapped what the leitenant had said earlier. “The growlers are aliens. A space-recon team found them inside an artificial asteroid, apparently in hibernation, just after the Change. First contact with an alien race. Very exciting—and very hush-hush. The Novyy Proezd 30 was sent to fetch them. They put the comatose growlers in cryotanks that duplicated the cold and airless conditions inside the asteroid, and brought them back to Earth for the scientists at Tomsk to play with. On the way back to Earth, the NP-30 was attacked by another alien race: those blue-skinned bastards like the one you shot.”

  Alexi blinked in confusion. “But what—”

  Boris winked. “Two thousand rubles says the blue boys didn’t much like the growlers. Or that they wanted them for themselves.”

  At the front of the room the leitenant was droning instructions, listing off the equipment the squad would be carrying. They would be issued winter greatcoats, extra grenades, an experimental new chemical for Vanya’s sprayer . . .

  “How many were brought back to Earth?” Alexi asked.

  “The leitenant says there were only a dozen of them—including the four pups that were put on ice in the research lab, one of which was spotted in yesterday’s flyover,” Boris whispered back. He took one last drag on his cigarette, then lifted his foot and ground the stub out on the sole of his boot. “But you know how that goes—I wouldn’t even offer odds on there really being twice or even ten times as many. Nobody would take the bet.”

  Alexi eyed the photo at the front of the room nervously. The leitenant had taken a map out of the briefcase that lay on the table beside him, and was posting it on the wall. The map was titled TOMSK 13. It showed a series of identical buildings, one of them circled in red.

  Alexi knew nothing about Tomsk 13, aside from the fact that it was a military research facility. Top secret, secure, guarded by an elite Ministry of the Interior unit.

  Tomsk itself—the city of half a million souls that lay a few kilometers to the south—had been suffering the ill effects of the military research facilities for more than a century. Back in 1993, an explosion in the nuclear-weapons plant Tomsk 7 had thrown radioactivity over a 120-kilometer-square area. The next year a tuberculosis epidemic—possibly cooked up in a government weapons lab—swept the area. Now it seemed that dangerous aliens had been added to the mix.

  Reaching into the briefcase a second time, Soldatenkof pulled out a black-and-white photo that showed Tomsk 13 from the air. All of the buildings in the facility had been reduced to rubble. Three of them—including the red-circled one—had vanished entirely; large craters on the aerial photograph marked the spots where they had once stood.

  Boris was counting under his breath. “Ha!” he exclaimed.

  A little too loudly.

  A thin spot of red light appeared on Boris’s wide chest. For a moment, Alexi was reminded of the laser pointers he’d used when teaching his history classes. Then metal scuffed on the floor as the squad members sitting in front of Boris hurriedly pushed their chairs away, out of the line of fire.

  “Do you have a comment, Private?” the leitenant asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Boris smiled like a student who had thought of something his teacher had overlooked.

  “There are ten buildings on that map,” he said. “If each one held four cryotanks, that’s forty growlers. I’d like to know why Intelligence is so certain we won’t encounter another thirty-six of them.”

  The purple vein throbbed in the leitenant’s temple. Alexi held his breath, waiting for the finger on the Viper’s trigger to tighten.

  “They’re gone,” the leitenant spat.

  Boris took a deep breath as he looked at the laser that was lined up on his chest.

  “How do we know that?” he asked. “Sir.”

  A sadistic look crept into Soldatenkof’s eyes. The laser sight winked off, and Soldatenkof holstered his weapon. He was enjoying himself now; there would be no “disciplinary killings” today.

  “We know there are no other growlers left in Tomsk 13,” he said, “because those that did escape from their cryotanks after the Union bombed the site chewed their way through the entire company of MVD troops that guarded the facility.”

  Boris’s eyes widened. Off to Alexi’s right, someone gave a low whistle. The Ministry of the Interior troops were elite soldiers with modern weapons—the best the Neo-Soviets had to offer.

  “Three months have passed since the Union’s surprise bombing raid on Tomsk 13,” Soldatenkof continued. “Not a single growler has been seen in the area since then. But Intelligence has received scattered reports of them from across Siberia—as far away as Alaska. They’re spreading out across the north. They aren’t coming back.”

  Soldatenkof picked up his pointer and tapped the red-circled building on the map. “Command has ordered us to go in and deal with the last of the growlers to awaken—the pup that’s roaming around Tomsk 13.”

  Alexi couldn’t help himself. Burning with curiosity, he broke the soldier’s number one survival rule of not drawing an officer’s attention to oneself.

  “Why us?” he asked.

  Beside him, Boris rumbled: “Good question, Alexi. Funny, isn’t it, that we’ve suddenly got top secret clearance.”

  “Why you?” Soldatenkof echoed.

  Alexi didn’t think it was possible, but the leitenant’s expression became even more sadistic. “Because after the MVD failed to contain the growlers, Command ordered Tomsk 13 neutroned. Unfortunately, the blast didn’t take out the growlers that were down in the lowest levels of the
complex; the concrete must have shielded them. The blast released fast-decay isotopes; there’s only residual radiation left. Not enough to bother soldiers who are already on antirad pills—”

  “And already sick as dogs,” Boris muttered.

  “—but enough to incapacitate our regular troops,” Soldatenkof concluded. “Command doesn’t want to waste them on a mop-up mission.”

  “So it’s in with the missile fodder,” Boris grumbled. “Us.”

  “But I’m not . . .” Alexi paused when he saw every soldier in the rad squad looking at him. Their faces held a mixture of envy and pity. They all knew he didn’t belong with them—that he wouldn’t even be here if a clerical error hadn’t lumped bad eyesight in the same category as radiation poisoning.

  “Don’t worry, Minsk,” the leitenant said with a smile. “You’ll be issued antiradiation pills. Just like the rest of the squad.”

  11

  A lexi stared at the stripes that ran the length of the concrete corridor. Just ahead of where the light from his helmet illuminated the floor, part of the ceiling had collapsed. Sparks crackled from the frayed ends of wire that hung down from a broken light panel. Just beyond the collapse, something hissed faintly. The sound reminded Alexi of a serpent about to strike.

  He knew what he’d see next: Piotr, standing beside him, wide-eyed and frightened, holding a frag grenade in one hand and an Uzi in the other. And he could predict, almost word for word, what Piotr was about to say.

  “Let it be, Alexi,” the former actor said. He smiled and gave a falsely hearty wink. “We found nothing. The cryotank was crushed under that collapse, da? Our recon is done. Let’s get out of here.”

  Piotr glanced down the corridor that led away to the left. He gestured with his Uzi at a yellow line on the floor. “I think the yellow is a faster way back to the surface.”

  A wave of déjà vu gripped Alexi. He was frozen in his tracks, unable to move. Whatever was beyond the collapsed ceiling, they couldn’t turn their backs on it. The yellow line somehow seemed prophetic. It was the coward’s way out. And cowards died.