Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  “Juliana?” he asked. “What do you suppose we’ll find when we get . . . ah . . . to where we’re going?”

  “A big hole in the ground,” she answered. “And it’s Captain Ko, Corporal. Not Juliana.”

  “I’m sorry?” Alexi asked. “What did you say about a hole in the ground?”

  “An impact crater,” she said tersely. “That’s what we’ll find.”

  Ah. So they were headed toward the place where the meteorite fell, after all.

  “What does Raheek expect us to do once we get to it?” he said.

  “Figure out a way to disarm it, I suppose.”

  Disarm it? After a moment’s puzzled thought, Alexi hazarded a guess: “The ‘meteorite’ is really an unexploded bomb?”

  “That’s what Raheek says it is.” Her voice sounded deliberately noncommittal. “If the alien is right, we’ll be standing at ground zero when it goes off. Are you ready to die for your planet, Alexi?”

  “To die for my country, you mean,” Alexi corrected her. Funny, that her Russian had slipped up. Other than the one mistake, it was flawless.

  “Neither one of our countries will exist anymore, if Raheek is telling the truth—if the meteorite really is capable of destroying the Earth.”

  Alexi shook his head. What in heaven’s name was she talking about? Their conversation was starting to sound like the plot of one of the century-old children’s science-fiction stories from the library of the school where Alexi used to teach. Alexi mulled over what to say next. But no matter how he worded the question in his mind, asking how, exactly, a meteorite would be capable of blowing up the Earth sounded silly.

  Just as silly as following bare footprints through the snow in a Siberian forest.

  Behind him, he heard the Union officer’s sharp intake of breath. He looked up from the trail they were following—and saw an impossible sight. A short distance ahead, a three-sided pyramid with gray walls rose above the tree line to the height of a skyscraper. Except that it wasn’t behaving as a pyramid should. Instead of resting firmly on its base, it was balancing on its point. Or so Alexi assumed, since the point of the tetrahedron was hidden by the forest.

  He turned to see if Juliana’s mouth was also hanging open, and found her consulting what looked like an oversize wristwatch. A series of maps flashed across it, gradually changing scale to show Asia, the Neo-Soviet Union, Siberia . . . At the same time, green letters followed by numbers flashed on an otherwise blank screen. The alphabet was English, but Alexi had used English-language maps of Europe and the Union enough times in his history classes to know what the letters spelled: LONGITUDE 100 DEGREES EAST , LATITUDE 67 DEGREES NORTH .

  Alexi nodded to himself, envious of the Union’s sophisticated equipment. The “wristwatch” was a Global Positioning System unit. Despite the fact that many of the satellites which supported that system had fallen from the sky or gone missing during the Change, there were obviously enough still left in orbit for the Union soldiers to track their position via GPS.

  Alexi looked back over his shoulder at the tetrahedron. Had it really fallen from the sky? Why hadn’t it burned up or spalled apart on impact? And why in hell was it balancing on one point? Had it driven itself into the dirt?

  A thought occurred to Alexi: The trees should have been lying down. If the tetrahedron really had been the meteorite he’d seen streaking across the Vladivostok sky, it should have flattened the forest for kilometers around. Just as the Tunguska meteorite did, nearly two centuries ago. . . .

  Alexi stared at the coordinates on the GPS. Then he blinked. No. It couldn’t be.

  It was. A flash of one of his history lessons came back to him. The pyramid was poised at the exact spot where a meteorite had fallen to earth in 1908. The meteorite had come streaking down in a giant fireball as bright as the now-vanished sun. It flattened trees in a thirty-kilometer radius and knocked down a trapper who was standing on the porch of his cabin eighty kilometers away.

  When the scientists of the day struggled to the desolate spot in Siberia where the meteorite had struck, they found hundreds of dead reindeer—and a big hole in the ground. The meteorite—estimated to be more than sixty meters across when it first entered Earth’s atmosphere—had spalled into a multitude of small fragments that finally exploded, just before striking the earth. That was why no pieces of it were ever found.

  A second meteorite hitting exactly the same spot on Earth nearly two centuries later was statistically impossible. Boris would have offered odds of a billion to one against its happening—and lost his shirt.

  Or would he? Alexi toyed with an equally impossible thought. What if there had been just one meteorite? If it had somehow existed in two places in time at once? Perhaps it had thrown the explosive energy of its landing back in time. That could explain why the tetrahedron was intact. . . .

  Once again, a feeling of déjà vu settled over Alexi. He’d had these same thoughts earlier—had drawn the same conclusion once before . . .

  Alexi shook his head to clear it. He couldn’t believe the crazy paths his mind was wandering along. It was his own place in time he should be worried about—not the meteorite’s. The blackouts were really starting to get to him. He had no idea where he’d wake up next, what impossible thing would confront him when he did . . .

  Gunfire erupted from somewhere up ahead. Close: no more than a few meters away.

  Alexi whipped the AK-51 off his shoulder. The Union officer pulled a pistol from the pocket of her combats. They pointed their weapons in the direction from which the gunfire had come—and at the same time kept a wary eye on each other. They were still enemies, after all. . . .

  Out of the corner of his eye, Alexi saw a patch of inky darkness appear behind him. Raheek stepped out of it. After all of the crazy events of the day, Alexi never even thought to ask himself how that was possible. Magic, he told himself. The world had gone crazy, and magic had become possible.

  The alien was still naked, despite the cold. But not shivering. A crease of bright purple marked its hip. Light glowed under the alien’s overlong fingers as it held them to the wound in its side. Even as Alexi watched, the wound knitted together. Bright flecks of red danced in the alien’s midnight blue eyes.

  “There is an automated weapon, twenty-eight paces ahead,” it told them. “A weapon of Earth, a short distance from the crystal. Go no farther, or you will cause it to fire.”

  Crystal? That was the first time he’d heard anyone use that word to describe the meteorite. But it fit: that perfect tetrahedral shape, those smooth glossy sides . . .

  Alexi slung his assault rifle back over his shoulder. No soldiers to fight, then. No one but a crazy man would be soldiering here, in the freezing cold of a Siberian taiga. Of all the useless places in the world that weren’t worth defending, this one topped the list.

  Unless, of course, the crystal was valuable. Alexi looked over Raheek’s bald blue head. The balancing tetrahedron didn’t look like a diamond or any other precious stone—it had almost a metallic sheen. But it might be worth a few rubles, just the same.

  No, wait. It would be worth something because it was a bomb—one capable of destroying the Earth, if the Union officer was to be believed.

  “Can we circle around the weapon?” she asked Raheek.

  The alien waved its fingers—a gesture Alexi assumed to be equivalent to a head shake.

  “Nyet,” it said. “A ring of these weapons completely surrounds the crystal. They are buried in the ground. They were not here last night.”

  “They’re dug in?” the Union officer asked. She looked thoughtful. “Does the weapon have jets around its circumference, and a rotating top that telescopes up and down with a gun barrel protruding from it?”

  The alien touched a forefinger to its chin. “Da.”

  “It’s a combat drone then. One of ours.” She glanced thoughtfully up at the sky, her head cocked as if she were listening. “If our side has ringed the landing site with drones, our airborne troo
ps can’t be far behind.”

  Alexi looked up at the tetrahedron. “Landing site?” he asked. “Do you really think that thing is a spacecraft?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “It could be a bomb, like Raheek says, or a spaceship, or . . . anything. But whatever it is, it’s going to be in Union hands, soon enough.”

  She looked meaningfully at the alien, who stood silently watching the two humans. “Raheek, as a Union officer, I can personally guarantee your safety—there’s no need for you to fear our soldiers. You’ll be treated by the Union with the same respect as an ambassador.”

  Then she turned to Alexi—and he saw that the Pug pistol was in her hand, its barrel leveled at his chest. “But you, Corporal Minsk, are a prisoner. Drop your weapon. Now!”

  Alexi suddenly wished he hadn’t been so quick to assume they were out of danger, just because they had not yet entered the range of the automated combat drone. The Union officer was still very much his enemy. Slowly, he raised his hands and let the strap of his AK-51 slide from his shoulder. The weapon fell into the snow.

  The blue-skinned alien began to lay its blade-tipped staff down in the snow, meekly following Alexi’s lead. But as soon as the Union officer glanced back at Alexi, it whipped the weapon up in a flashing arc. The blade smashed into the Pug, slicing the barrel in two and tearing the weapon from her hand.

  The Union officer stared at him in shock. She backed up a step and raised open hands to plead with the alien. All the while she kept one eye on Alexi, who lifted his AK-51 out of the snow. “There’s no need for hostilities,” she told Raheek. “Our side isn’t at war with your people. We can—”

  “Be silent,” Raheek said. “I have no time for the squabbles of your race. We must get to the crystal. Now. You will lead us past the weapon.”

  Her eyes widened. “I can’t,” she said. “The drone won’t recognize me as a friendly. It’s no more discriminating than a land mine—it’s programmed to shoot at anything that moves. If I had my assault suit, I could walk right through that defensive ring. But without it . . .”

  “Where is your assault suit?” Alexi asked. But he already knew the answer: according to a now-distant memory, the suit was irradiated and lying in a street in Vladivostok.

  With Juliana’s body beside it.

  16

  “—sounds like trauma-triggered repression to me,” said Nevsky.

  Alexi stared at the soldier who sat next to him. He and Nevsky were naked, sitting on cedar benches in a small, steam-filled room. Alexi clutched at the bench with both hands, his heart pounding. For a second or two he had a wild hallucination: The steam—it was coming out of the mouth of a gigantic black monster, scalding the flesh from his bones . . .

  He gulped in hot air, his knuckles whitening. But even as he sought to bring the monster into focus in his mind, the image of it drifted away into the swirling clouds of steam that filled the room.

  Nevsky shook Alexi’s shoulder with a sweaty hand. “Tovarish! Are you all right? You’re very pale, and your pupils are dilated. Do you need to leave the parilka?”

  Alexi blinked away the last wisps of the ghost that had occupied his mind a second before. “I . . .” He looked around. They were sitting in a parilka, a bathhouse sauna. Hot rocks crackled on an electric heater, and a ladle and a bucket of water mixed with sweet-smelling eucalyptus oil hung nearby. Sweat poured down Alexi’s body and his skin tingled and was red in patches. The gold cross that had been his mother’s—and his grandmother’s, and his great-grandmother’s—lay against his bare chest, the hot metal searing it. He leaned forward so it swung away from his skin and looked down at the floor. Strewn across it were the birch branches that bathers used to switch themselves with, to get their blood flowing. The wire frames of his glasses were equally hot, but he bore it without complaint. The thought of being half-blind inside a swirling mass of steam was just too unnerving. . . .

  He and Nevsky were alone in the sauna. He had no idea how he’d gotten there. The last thing he remembered, he’d been sitting beside Nevsky on the bench in the back of the helicraft. . . .

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  Nevsky’s next question caught him by surprise. “No you’re not. You’ve had another blackout, haven’t you?”

  Alexi glanced sideways at Nevsky. The former nurse looked more like a patient now, with his eyebrows gone and only clumps of hair remaining. His skin was blotchy—but not just from the vennki they’d switched themselves with. A radiation blister had erupted on one shoulder, and his hands were shaking.

  “Did I tell you about the blackouts?” Alexi asked.

  Nevsky nodded. “We were just talking about it. You asked what could be causing them, and I said they might be occurring because your mind is repressing a traumatic incident. Something that is impossible for your conscious mind to cope with.”

  “Ah.” Somehow, Alexi didn’t think that was the answer. He remembered with vivid clarity every detail of the battle in Vladivostok, with all of its gruesome horror. If there was anything he’d like his conscious mind to suppress, it would be the image of the irradiated Union soldier who had crawled out of her heavy-assault suit and died before Alexi’s eyes. The look on her blistered face as she realized that she was dying haunted him still.

  But why? Alexi should have found Boris’s rocket-seared corpse much more disturbing. . . .

  Except that Boris wasn’t dead.

  With a trembling hand, Alexi reached for the tin mug of tea that sat beside a thermos on the bench. He sipped from it, trying to steady his crazy thoughts. The taste gave him something concrete to focus on: bitter black tea, sweet sugar, and a dollop of blackberry jam lying in a sticky lump at the bottom of the mug.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “In Novosibirsk,” Nevsky said. “On our second day of leave after the fighting in Vladivostok.” His eyes searched Alexi’s. “You do remember Vladivostok, don’t you, Alexi?”

  Alexi nodded. “I remember it. And shooting the alien. And flying out by helicraft. But that’s where it stops. The next thing I knew, I was . . . here. In a bathhouse in Novosibirsk, thousands of kilometers to the east. A city I haven’t been to since I was a child.”

  “Fascinating,” Nevsky said. “You remember the city—where it is, when you last visited—and yet have forgotten how you got here.”

  Then he grinned. “Well, the vodka would account for your losing your memory of last night, but the alcohol would have been out of your system by this morning. You’ve been perfectly lucid all day.”

  Oh yes. Now that Nevsky mentioned it, Alexi could call up hazy memories of yesterday’s drunken binge. Of the theater, and the church—and the guardian-angel hallucination that too much vodka had induced.

  “Not even a hangover,” Nevsky continued. He touched a hand to his temple and winced. “Not like the rest of us. But then—you aren’t . . .” He glanced away before continuing. “Your immune system isn’t compromised.”

  “Da, I know,” Alexi muttered. “I’m not sick like the rest of you.” Then he laughed. “Too bad being ill doesn’t make us unfit for duty, da?”

  He kept the rest of his thought to himself: that the blackouts would be just one more excuse for the bureaucrats in Moscow to refuse to transfer him away from the rad squad.

  “Is there anything I can do to stop the blackouts?” Alexi asked. “Any medication I can take?”

  Nevsky shook his head. “Not that I can get my hands on.”

  Alexi sighed and wiped away a rivulet of sweat that was trickling down his temple. No hope then. He’d have to tough this one out.

  They sat in silence, brooding and listening to the crackle of the hot rocks. Then Nevsky got up and used the ladle to toss water on them. Steam billowed into the air, and the temperature instantly increased. Hot though he was, Alexi luxuriated in the feeling of being clean—a rare luxury, for a soldier. The grime that had accumulated over the days of fighting in Vladivostok had wormed its way into his pores. It
felt good to sweat it away.

  “Do you remember anything of what we were talking about earlier?” Nevsky asked as he settled back on the bench. “We were having some fun, ranking the other members of the squad in the order of who we’d take a bullet for—who we’d actually throw ourselves on an unexploded grenade to save. Do you remember who was at the bottom of the list?”

  “Soldatenkof?” Alexi asked tentatively.

  Nevsky guffawed and clapped Alexi on the back. “He didn’t even make the list!” He chuckled a moment more before continuing. “At least, not unless you were counting saving his life to avoid a court-martial, and thus saving the lives of all of the squad. No, last on the list was Irina—at least, that was my vote. But you had some reservations. You thought she was pretty enough to be second-to-last on the list.”

  “I did?” Alexi asked incredulously. “She’s not that pretty—she’s just the only woman in any of the squads who still has a full head of hair. Nyet—I must have been thinking of someone else.”

  Someone who wasn’t pretty anymore, now that her face was blistered.

  Alexi pushed that thought from his mind. The truth was, he didn’t care enough for any of the members of the squad to take a bullet for them. Even if all of them were about to be torn to pieces with a frag grenade, he wouldn’t throw himself on it for them. Nyet. The only one Alexi was interested in keeping alive was himself.

  Now it was his turn to chuckle. Just a couple of days ago, Alexi had resigned himself to dying. Not in some heroic gesture like Nevsky was suggesting, but simply in the quickest and most painless way possible, for the peace and quiet it would bring.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, feeling the sweat slide down his body. He was glad that he hadn’t carried through on his decision. Or rather, it was a good thing dumb luck had saved his hide, to be more accurate. Sitting here in the hot, humid womb of the parilka was as good as dying and going to heaven, any day.

  He let the hiss of the steam lull him to sleep. . . .