Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

14

  . . . is approaching your . . .

  Irina panted out the words. She was breathing quickly, as if running. Cursing his helmet for the millionth time that day, cursing Soldatenkof sitting warm and cozy in the helicraft with his bottle of vodka, cursing the whole bloody war, Alexi glanced nervously around him for the growler they’d been sent to Tomsk 13 to kill.

  There! A low, dark shape sprinting toward him down the gap between two of the bombed buildings. Alexi snapped the metal butt of the AK-51 to his shoulder, sighted down the barrel and . . .

  Something—some sixth sense—made him lower the weapon at the last moment. It was almost as if he knew what he would see next. Not a growler, but a dog: a wolfhound, a purebred like the animals Alexi’s grandfather had kept. The dog was scrawny, with matted fur. A ghost of its former, beautiful self. Running in terror from Irina, who had just tried to shoot it.

  Alexi plunged a hand into the pocket of his greatcoat. He pulled out the tube of puréed sausage he’d been unable to eat earlier. Pursing snow-chapped lips, he whistled. The dog skidded to a stop, froze, and looked at Alexi with hungry eyes. Then its long nose twitched.

  Alexi’s feeling of déjà vu was still strong. He could feel it pressing down on him from above. He needed to get away from it. To hide.

  “Come!” he shouted to the dog. “Treat!”

  Alexi ran for the shelter of one of the bombed-out buildings, scrambling in through a hole where an entire window frame had been blown out. The wolfhound, following the scent of the sausage, leapt gracefully in through the hole behind him.

  Squatting in the shadow of the building, Alexi stroked the dog’s head, squeezing sausage out of the tube for it. The animal lapped it up, its tongue making loud smacking noises. Alexi prayed that it wouldn’t bark.

  Why the sudden urge to stay quiet?

  Alexi looked around the interior of the building he’d climbed into. It was filled with dark shadows, its floor dusted with snow that had drifted in through the gaping holes in its thick cement walls. Was that a bare footprint in the snow, or just Alexi’s imagination turning one of the dog’s footprints into something larger? Was that a growler crouching in the corner?

  One of the shadows shifted.

  Alexi dropped the sausage tube and lifted his AK-51. Nothing. Just a shadow. It had only been a trick of his imagination. If there had been a growler there, crouching in the darkness, it would have torn out his throat by now.

  Or his chest . . .

  For a second, Alexi couldn’t breathe. He fought to suck in air, as if battling a collapsed lung. Then his breathing returned to normal. Gasping in a shuddering lungful of air, he shook his head. A panic attack? Now—after so long in battle? It didn’t make any sense.

  Something had triggered it—some soldier’s sixth sense. Some threat. But the threat wasn’t within the building. It was outside . . .

  Irina’s voice crackled over his helmet speaker: . . . are you, Alexi? I can’t . . .

  Alexi peeked out through the hole where the window had been. Irina stood just outside where he was hiding, her weapon at the ready. Her dark eyes swept the area between the buildings. Her lips were moving. Her voice was a broken whisper in Alexi’s helmet speaker.

  . . . you, Alexi?

  The tension was unbearable. Something was about to happen. Alexi just didn’t know what. Snow drifted down outside, settling on Irina’s shoulders and helmet, flattening like tiny parachutes hitting the ground . . .

  “Irina!” Alexi shouted. “Above you!”

  The microphone in his helmet must have been working. Irina’s head snapped back. Her mouth dropped open, even as she fought to bring up her weapon. The assault rifle in her hands spat fire, and empty cartridges fountained out the side in a tinkling counterpart to its roar. In that same instant, the chutter of a machine gun came from above. Bullets churned the snow at her feet to slush.

  Then the slush became red. Irina was hit. Blood leaked out the bottom of her greatcoat as she slowly twisted to the ground. A bullet struck the visor of her helmet, puncturing a hole in it with a loud crack.

  Alexi ducked. The wolfhound beside him lowered its belly to the ground and growled.

  Silence. Then a soft thud and a whispery rustling. Summoning up his courage, sweaty hands gripping his assault rifle, Alexi dared a look through the hole in the wall. A Union soldier lay on the ground, his parachute still settling to the ground. A light machine gun lay smoking beside him, melting the snow. He was dressed in a dull silver bodysuit that had been riddled by bullets. Blood leaked from the holes, sliding off the water-resistant suit and dripping into the snow. As Alexi watched, the parachute settled over the body, gentle as a shroud.

  From several directions at once, Alexi could hear gunfights erupting. There must have been more than one parachutist. But what was a squad of Union paratroopers doing there?

  No time to wonder. Leitenant Soldatenkof was screaming. The radio transmission was broken with static, as usual, but Alexi could make out something about the helicraft. He could hear its engines revving and its rotors speeding up.

  “Come on, dog,” he shouted to the wolfhound. Then he scrambled out of his hiding place.

  They ran between the buildings, man and hound racing each other toward the sound of the helicraft. The dog seemed to have adopted Alexi; it heeled beside him beautifully. Either that, or it was too exhausted and weak to run any faster.

  Gunfire raged up ahead. And one by one, the familiar voices coming over the speaker in Alexi’s helmet were falling silent. But Alexi was nearly at the helicraft, now. Just one more corner to round . . .

  Suddenly all Alexi could hear was Soldatenkof’s voice: Get this helicraft into the air before—

  A sound overwhelmed all of the other noises. A strange roaring noise that sounded to Alexi like metal being torn apart.

  The wolfhound suddenly was no longer running beside him. Alexi’s mind only had a second to register the fact that it had skidded to a stop and was growling with hackles raised as he rounded the corner.

  Alexi should have been looking ahead. Glancing back to figure out where the dog had gone had been a big mistake. He slammed headlong into the back of a figure in a silver bodysuit who was firing a machine gun in the direction of the helicraft. Tangled together with the Union soldier, Alexi fell to the ground.

  He had only a moment’s glance at the face of his enemy, but that one brief look sent a chill down his spine. How could it be? He recognized that face. Her features were burned into his memory: wide Korean face, snub nose . . .

  But without the radiation blisters.

  “Impossible,” Alexi croaked. “I killed you in Vladivostok.”

  He scrambled away from her as if he were a crab and she a pot of boiling water. Amazingly, the woman did not shoot him. Then Alexi saw why: her weapon—a Pitbull assault rifle, by the look of it—had jammed. She was squeezing the trigger, but the rifle wasn’t firing.

  Yet.

  Then Alexi saw what she’d been shooting at. Noticing the horrified expression on his face, she glanced over her shoulder.

  The helicraft rotors whirred at top speed; the machine was seconds away from taking off. The pilot had turned around in his seat and seemed to be shouting at someone. Machinery whined, and Alexi could hear a wet crunching noise. In the rear of the helicraft, Leitenant Soldatenkof struggled to loosen the body of a Union soldier that was stuck in the cargo bay’s wide door, preventing it from closing. Soldatenkof kicked ineffectually at the corpse, a look of frustration on his face. From the unsteady way he stood, Alexi assumed the officer was drunk. Too drunk to notice that the body wasn’t the only thing keeping the cargo bay from closing.

  As Alexi saw what the real problem was, the blood froze in his veins. Standing at the rear of the helicraft was a growler, its head nearly level with the rotor blades that flattened white hair against its muscled hide. One clawed hand had a death grip on the door, holding it open.

  Alexi laughed—the cackle of a man driven to
the brink of madness. “You’ve won your bet, Boris,” he croaked. “It is as big as a house.” Then he pulled the trigger of his AK-51.

  The creature ignored the bullets that chewed their way into the helicraft beside it as Alexi fought to correct his aim. The thing was immense—three times the size of a gorilla, with tusks nearly a meter long that curved up over its shoulders. A single horn protruded from its jutting brow. The white hair on its body ringed its wrists and ankles, and hung in a tangled mat at its crotch. Muscles bulged as it strained against the motors that were trying to force the cargo-bay door shut. Slowly, the door was levered open.

  In the same instant that Soldatenkof saw what he was up against, a second growler, equally as large as the first, bounded out from behind a building. This one had skin that was cracked and weathered, like the smoky glaze of flame-fired pottery. As it panted in the cold air, white fog whistled through its mouth like steam erupting from a broken pipeline. Alexi directed his fire at it, but the bullets literally bounced off its glossy black hide.

  The growlers worked together like a team of soldiers, as though silently communicating with one another. As the white-tusked growler forced the door to the ground, the one with the weathered skin took a deep breath. Its chest expanded to impossible proportions, like the swelling chest of a pigeon about to call. Except that the results were anything but a pleasant coo. With a hissing roar that made a fragment of broken window glass next to Alexi rattle in its frame, the growler let loose. A searing mass of scalding steam shot out of its mouth, filling the interior of the helicraft.

  Alexi could feel the wet heat from where he stood. Inside the cargo bay, Leitenant Soldatenkof gave a strangled scream. The pilot of the helicraft lasted slightly longer; he managed to get the cockpit door open and tumble to the ground as the steam seared his lungs.

  Alexi’s AK-51 fell silent. Smoke curled from its barrel. He didn’t know whether it was out of bullets or had jammed, like the Union soldier’s weapon—but he didn’t want to take the time to find out.

  Realizing the leitenant was dead, Alexi shivered. A dead officer meant a dead squad. But he had more immediate things to worry about. The growlers were both looking in his direction.

  Alexi exchanged a startled glance with the Union soldier. A possibility entered his mind. Perhaps he was dead, like her. A ghost.

  But then why did his stomach feel so loose? Ghosts didn’t need to relieve themselves. And why did he see his own terror mirrored back at him in the Union soldier’s eyes, if she was a ghost, too?

  In the same instant, they both turned and ran. Behind them, the growlers let the hatch on the rear of the cargo bay spring shut against the corpse, and bounded after the humans.

  Alexi and the Union soldier had been enemies. Now that neither had a functional weapon to fight the growlers with, they were rivals in a footrace. Whoever lost would be eaten.

  Or scalded . . .

  Or . . .

  Cold stabbed into Alexi’s lungs as he ran. He no longer cared about the deadly gamma radiation the air held. The Union soldier was gaining on him.

  Alexi reached out, grabbing for her as she passed him. His fingers locked on her arm. He pulled, felt her stagger . . .

  And then they were both down on the ground in a tangle, throwing punches and kicks at one another. Fighting to get away from his adversary, Alexi looked up—into the gaping, steam-filled mouth of the glossy black growler. The creature was at least three meters away, but it loomed as large as a monument, as unnerving as a statue of Stalin. Behind it, the white-tusked growler stood back to watch the fun. The hot steam gusting from the first growler’s mouth suddenly sucked back into its lungs as it drew in a breath that inflated its chest like a balloon. . . .

  Alexi closed his eyes. He knew he was dead.

  Funny—he thought the growler that killed him would be smaller. . . .

  The Union soldier screamed. In the same moment, Alexi felt an unmistakable presence in the air just ahead of him. Not a growler, not a human, something . . . other.

  He opened his eyes.

  A wall of shifting energy had sprung up in the air between the two human soldiers and the growlers. Within it swirled shifting, ghostly forms that looked vaguely human, but with starvation-thin bodies and strangely double-jointed arms like the alien that Alexi had shot. They wove back and forth, mouths open in a silent scream, forming a barrier between the humans and the growlers.

  Alexi scrambled backward on hands and knees, and saw that the Union soldier was doing the same thing. He found the apparitions even more terrifying, somehow, than the growlers. So, apparently, did she.

  On the other side of the ghostly wall, the growlers bristled like dogs with their hackles raised. The one with the curved white tusks took a step backward, then broke and ran. The other one glanced over its shoulder, then fled after the first.

  The unnerving, ghostly barrier winked out of existence. In its place, a patch of blackness formed. A skinny blue hand with pencil-thin fingers poked out of the darkness, pointing toward the helicraft.

  “Quickly,” it said in Russian. “Get in your craft. The growlers are everywhere—an entire adult pack has returned for the young. We must leave.”

  The darkness shrank down to a point and disappeared. A second later, a blue-skinned hand was beckoning from inside the helicraft.

  Alexi stared at the helicraft, dumbfounded. Had the blue-skinned creature really teleported before Alexi’s astonished eyes? He glanced at the Union soldier to see if she was going to follow the creature—wondering if she even understood Russian. It seemed that she did. She sprinted for the helicraft and heaved herself in through the open cockpit door.

  It also seemed that she knew how to fly a helicraft. The engines revved at a higher pitch. The helicraft lifted, settled, began to lift again . . .

  A roaring noise filled the street behind Alexi. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the white-tusked growler was circling around the building in an attempt to attack from the rear. After several heart-stopping seconds, Alexi finally got his feet to move. Sprinting for the helicraft, he hauled himself up onto the rear of it just as it left the ground. He wormed his way in through the half-open cargo-bay door, and sprawled on the floor inside. Through the opening, he saw the ground fall away below them as the helicraft rose.

  The white-tusked growler leapt in fury, trying to reach the helicraft as it soared away. The helicraft gave a lurch as the Union officer sent it skidding sideways to avoid the growler’s grasping hands, and Alexi was tumbled in a heap against one wall of the cargo bay. Soldatenkof’s scalded body flopped over on top of him.

  A stray thought entered Alexi’s mind: It was a good thing that it was just a body landing on him, and not a heavy canister.

  Filled with . . .

  The thought was gone.

  15

  F orest. Knee-deep snow. Footprints: a trail in the snow ahead. Flakes drifting down from an overcast sky. AK-51 slung over his shoulder. Stomach cramping with hunger.

  Alexi sighed. He’d been walking for an hour, endlessly putting one foot in front of the other . . .

  He jerked to a halt. Oh Christ. It had happened again. Another blackout. He had absolutely no idea where he was—or what time it was. He glanced at his watch. One question answered. It was seven in the morning. But of what day? There was no way to know.

  Someone nudged him from behind. Alexi turned and saw the Union soldier who had piloted the helicraft away from Tomsk 13. She wore Neo-Sov combats over her silvery gray bodysuit and a Russian ushanka cap. Alexi said the first thing that came into his mind. It wasn’t logical—but then, neither was anything else.

  “You’re not shivering? Why not?”

  “You stopped to ask me that?” the woman said in irritation. “Are you stupid—or just deaf? I already told you; it’s a therm suit.”

  “But why the combats?” Alexi asked. “And the ushanka?”

  “Protective camouflage. I am behind enemy lines.” Her voice grew more brusqu
e. “And I’m behind you—with a Pug pistol in my pocket. And that’s where I’m staying. Don’t get any ideas about asking me to take the lead. Now move out, Corporal.”

  Alexi cocked his head. “You’re an officer, aren’t you?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. Alexi could see her weighing the merits of giving information to the enemy. “What makes you say that?”

  He shrugged. “Just a guess.” He wondered whether she’d shoot him if he refused to go on. He decided not to find out.

  He turned around and continued trudging in the direction he’d been going before. He stared at the trail in the snow, trying to make sense of it. The person who had made it must have had tremendously long legs, judging by the spacing of the steps. He had gone this way once, then returned, then gone back again. And he’d had bare feet . . .

  A piece of the jigsaw snapped into place in Alexi’s mind: bare feet equals Raheek.

  And Raheek had killed Alexi in the helicraft . . .

  The Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in Alexi’s throat as he swallowed. No—Raheek hadn’t stayed with them in the helicraft. The alien had gone on alone, last night. It had wanted to locate the place where the meteorite fell. . . .

  But why? The answer was missing from Alexi’s mind, like a piece gone from the puzzle. A piece right at the center of it, without which the greater picture could not be resolved.

  Alexi wondered if he had just imagined the detail about Raheek looking for the meteorite, after seeing a falling star during the fighting in Vladivostok. Things had been crazy then; perhaps Alexi’s mind had fixated upon that anomaly and woven it into a false memory. . . .

  There was one way to find out. The Union officer behind Alexi would know where they were headed and what was going on. But how to ask her, without causing her to suspect that he was up to something? The armored jacket Alexi had taken from Soldatenkof would protect his back from a bullet, but his legs were unprotected, and his head was an even more inviting target.

  Alexi sought for a place to start and found a name. Although he couldn’t remember having asked the woman’s name, it was lodged there. Just as Raheek’s was.