Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  17

  C old. He was freezing, despite the blankets he’d wrapped around himself. Darkness surrounded him, and the metal wall behind him was slippery with ice. Alexi fumbled for his glasses inside the heavy flak jacket he wore, then put them on, hooking the wires over his ears.

  He was inside the helicraft, which was on the ground, silent. The only light came from the cockpit, which was illuminated by fading emergency lights in the instrument panel.

  Alexi walked to the front of the helicraft and peered out through the cockpit windows, which were starting to dust over with falling snow. Outside, everything was dark. The helicraft was in a clearing in a forest, without a building in sight. Above, the sky was an inky black found only in the wilderness, away from the haze of city lights. The constellations of the Changed sky shone brightly overhead. There were fewer stars than there had been before. And all of the constellations were different.

  Alexi sighed. So many mysteries. So far away . . .

  Something stirred in the cargo bay. Alexi crept cautiously back, and in the fading light saw a figure curled up on the bench opposite the one he’d been sitting on. The Union officer—Alexi recognized her face under the ushanka cap. Her blankets had fallen onto the floor, but she didn’t appear cold, despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing much—just a thin pair of combats over a one-piece bodysuit. Alexi touched a hand to the dull silver fabric. It was warm—as warm as an electric blanket set on LOW . No wonder she wasn’t cold.

  Alexi shivered and breathed a fog of air onto his chapped hands. In her sleep, the woman rolled over on the bench, so that she was facing him.

  No—not in her sleep. Her eyes were open, and one hand held a Pug pistol.

  “What do you want?” she asked in accented Russian.

  Alexi spread his hands to show her that he was unarmed. His AK-51 lay on the floor behind him.

  “You’re so warm,” Alexi said. “And my hands . . . I thought . . .”

  Where had that ludicrous idea come from? As if an enemy soldier would let him place his hands on her back.

  “It’s difficult to sleep when it’s so cold,” he finished lamely.

  Sleep. Was that what he’d been doing during his last blackout?

  “I thought we could talk,” he added.

  The Union officer sat up. “Why?” she asked in a suspicious voice. “I’m not going to give you any information, other than what you’ve already got. My name and rank: Captain Juliana Ko. Nothing more. And if you’re thinking of warming your hands on my therm suit, you can forget it, Leitenant.”

  Leitenant? Alexi frowned, then remembered that he was wearing Soldatenkof’s armored jacket. He must have put it on after climbing aboard the helicraft, sometime during his blackout. He was glad he didn’t remember what Soldatenkof’s body had looked like—probably pretty horrible, like the boiled beef they served in the mess, back at the induction center.

  Funny, that the Union officer should have been fooled by Soldatenkof’s jacket. Alexi thought she’d gotten a good look at him back in Tomsk 13, when they’d collided with each other in the street. She must have failed to notice his corporal’s chevrons, in all of the confusion.

  Alexi toyed with the idea of pretending to be an officer. But the thought left a sour taste in his mouth. Officers were petty-minded psychopaths, human excrement that seemed somehow always to float to the top of the military ranking system. Bad enough that Alexi was wearing Soldatenkof’s jacket. At least the growler’s breath had steamed away the stink of the leitenant’s sweat. Now all the suit smelled of was boiled meat.

  The smell put a smile on Alexi’s lips. At least the Leitenant was dead. That was one bright spot in an otherwise questionable day. Or night, actually.

  “I’m a corporal,” Alexi told her. “Corporal Minsk. But I’m not that formal. The others in my squad just called me Alexi. You can, too, if you like.”

  The Union officer took a moment to digest this new information. “You can call me Captain Ko, Corporal,” she said.

  Alexi settled on the bench beside her. He gestured at the silvery bodysuit she wore. “Nice suit,” he said. He resisted the urge to lean closer to her, to try and soak up some of the warmth it was generating. Despite the fact that she was an officer—something that normally would have caused him to keep a cautious distance—he felt drawn to this woman. It was as if they had been friends in another lifetime. And yet he had only just met her.

  And she was the enemy. Or so he kept having to remind himself.

  She said nothing, merely stared at him in the semidarkness. But at least the Pug pistol was in her lap, now. She still held it—but it wasn’t pointed at Alexi’s chest.

  An uncomfortable minute or two of silence passed.

  “You don’t like officers much, do you, Corporal?” she asked at last.

  Alexi shook his head. “Not much. They’re as bad as the Gosavtoinspektsia. And they shoot for the head, not the windshield.”

  “The what?”

  Alexi chuckled. Despite her officer’s aloofness, he’d managed to snag her attention. “The Gosavtoinspektsia—the traffic police. They make their living by pulling over motorists for made-up traffic violations. If you don’t pay the fine, they shoot out your windshield. Or your tires.”

  She gave a skeptical snort. Obviously she’d never driven in Moscow.

  “If you want to ask me questions, go ahead,” Alexi told her. “I don’t have any secrets. I’ll tell you all about the rad squad. My comrades are dead now, anyhow. Words won’t hurt them.”

  “What’s ‘rad’?” the Union officer asked. “The designator for your unit?”

  “Rad is short for radiation,” he answered. Then he explained how conscription worked, and how the bulk of the Neo-Sov army would collapse without its monthly issue of radiation pills.

  “That’s obscene.” Her voice had an edge to it, as if she didn’t believe what she was hearing. “No wonder your army’s morale is so bad. You Sovs are hardly worth killing. Your soldiers are dead men and women already. They’ve got nothing to fight for.”

  “Except their next rad pill,” Alexi said. “And another month of life.”

  They sat for a moment more before she spoke: “I volunteered.”

  “Da,” Alexi said. “So did I.”

  “To get the pills?” she asked.

  “Nyet. I wanted to go into space. But they assigned me to the rad squad. I didn’t realize that extreme astigmatism fell into the same medical classification as radiation poisoning.”

  “Astigmatism? But that’s easily fixed by laser surgery. They’ve known how to correct it for more than a century.”

  “That’s true,” Alexi said. “But just try to find a clinic that has the equipment—and that doesn’t have a kilometer-long waiting list, with boyars at the front of the queue. I might as well waste my time waiting in a bread or milk lineup.”

  “Declaring war on the Union was a stupid thing to do,” the Union soldier said sternly. “Just look at where it’s left your country. Irradiated, unable to feed itself, and without the resources to do simple eye surgery. What the hell were you thinking, starting a war with us?”

  Alexi bristled. “It wasn’t me who started the war,” he said. “I was still teaching high school—not even a soldier yet—when the nuclear bombs were launched at your country. I didn’t—”

  Her angry voice cut him off. “You didn’t push the button that launched the nukes, so you’re not responsible, right, Sov?” she gritted back. “It was your country that launched the first strike, and the target this time around just happened to be my country, instead of China. But I took the attack personally. And let me tell you why.”

  The Union officer’s eyes glinted in the faint light that was coming from the cockpit. “I was night skiing on Mount Baker, taking a break after defending my thesis, when the war began,” she said. Alexi thought he heard a catch in her voice. Her next words confirmed it.

  “My lover was in Seattle. I had a perfect view of the bo
mb flash. I’d already seen the Maw appear in the sky a few minutes earlier. I thought it was a nearby star gone supernova and that its heat had caused the city to combust spontaneously. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t burning up, too.

  “Everything was chaos, after that. It was three days before I learned that Seattle had been the target of a nuclear attack by the Neo-Soviet Union. Three days of wishing that I was dead, too. I decided to kill myself—and found some pills in an abandoned pharmacy. I counted them out on the counter, and broke open a vending machine for a can of soda. But then I looked at the pills, lined up in neat little rows, and I changed my mind.”

  Alexi couldn’t help but ask the obvious question. “Why?”

  “I decided that if I was going to die, I might as well do it in service to my country. And take out a few Sovs, first. My only regret was that my assault suit didn’t let me do it up close and personal.”

  The Union officer’s cold eyes challenged him across the cargo hold. The Pug was pointed at him again. At first, Alexi wasn’t sure what to say. He couldn’t tell her about Tatyana—the ache was still too fresh. His sister’s memory was still an empty hole in his heart.

  He decided instead to tell his own story of where he had been when the war began. Everybody in the world could remember exactly where they were when the Change happened. Alexi had told his story so many times he could recite it in his sleep.

  “I was in Omsk when the Change came,” he said at last. “It was early in the morning, and I was taking a class on a field trip to the World War II memorial in the park,” he said. “A bit ironic, since World War III was about to start. One of the students noticed that the sun had disappeared. I told her not to be ridiculous—that it was just hidden behind the clouds. The Maw had not yet risen that day, so the sky didn’t look any different—yet.

  “When we got back to the school, the principal made a broadcast. That was when we heard that our nation was at war.”

  “And then?” she prompted.

  Alexi sighed. “And then I went back to my lesson,” he said. “Remember that we’d just been through a war with China—war was something my students had grown up with. It wasn’t until the Maw rose that afternoon that I realized that something even more momentous had occurred. That was when the chaos started to happen. People screaming in the streets, looting, the priests all preaching that this was the Apocalypse—it was a full week before order was restored and the schools were opened again.”

  A few seconds of silence. “The war meant nothing to you, then.” Her voice was bitter. “It left you untouched.”

  Alexi could have contradicted her. But for some reason, he remained silent. Despite his sister’s death, he had no reason, really, to fight. Or to die. No thirst for vengeance burned inside him as it did for her. He knew that dying wouldn’t bring anybody back.

  “I didn’t lose a lover to the war, it’s true,” he told her. “But I did lose something I treasured. A year after the war began, they shut down all of the senior schools. Several of my former students were fourteen years old—just old enough to go into the army. I was offered a job at a primary school, but there didn’t seem to be any point. What good is it to teach children, to watch their eager minds blossom with ideas, when you know a bullet is going to smash all of that knowledge away as soon as they reach their teens? And so I drifted for a year. And then finally signed up myself.”

  After a moment’s silence, the Union officer spoke in a quiet voice. “Our schools are still open,” she said. “But the draft begins at sixteen.”

  Alexi smiled. She was starting to open up to him, to speak to him as one ordinary person did to another, rather than as an officer to an enemy corporal. He suspected that she had something in common with him—unlike the members of his squad: a love of learning that had been cut short by the war. Had they both been wearing the same uniform, they might have been friends.

  Or even lovers . . . Which reminded him of something. Some common ground.

  “You said you’d just defended a thesis on the day the Change occurred,” he said. “You were a university student, then?”

  “Computer science,” she said. “In Seattle.”

  “With your lover. A fellow student?”

  “Nyet. A professor.”

  “I see. A teacher, like me.”

  She spun on the bench to face him. The pistol trembled in her hand. She was a hair’s breadth away from pulling the trigger. Alexi wondered what he’d said to provoke such a reaction.

  “Nothing like you,” she spat. “He was a patriot who believed in his country. If he’d lived . . .”

  If the fellow had lived, Alexi thought, he’d have met his end some other way. That was the long and short of it. In the five years since the Change and the beginning of the war, all kinds of new ways to die had been invented. Only the lucky survived.

  But she had one thing right: Alexi was no patriot. He loved his country—the land, its people, their history—but hated its government. And no wonder—his breeding had run true. When Alexi had traced his family tree, he’d found dissidents and deserters on every branch. They’d served in Russia’s many wars, over the centuries, but only after being conscripted. Alexi had been the first, ever, to volunteer for military service.

  “I’m sorry about your boyfriend’s death,” Alexi said. But it was a lie. He didn’t feel sorrow about anything. Three months of brutal basic training at the induction center and nearly three years in combat had blunted all emotion. It was difficult to feel anything, any more.

  He didn’t even care that the tentative truce they’d begun to build had so suddenly shattered.

  He crossed to the other side of the cargo bay, folded down the ice-cold bench, and sat on it. His teeth immediately began chattering. “Go ahead and sleep,” he told her. “I’ll just sit here until . . .”

  He paused. What were they waiting for? Alexi wasn’t sure.

  A glowing circle of green appeared on the Union officer’s wrist as she consulted an oversize wristwatch. The glow briefly illuminated her face, revealing the tear that was trickling down one cheek.

  “The alien has only been gone an hour and a half,” she said. Her tone had changed: She was speaking to him as an officer once more.

  “There are still more than five hours until dawn,” she added. “We’ll wait until then. If Raheek isn’t back by first light, we’ll try to find it on our own.”

  Raheek. The name conjured up the image of a blue-skinned alien with a bald head. The alien had left the helicraft to find . . .

  To search for . . .

  The Union officer lay down on her bench, setting the pistol down beside her. She patted it with one hand.

  “I’m a light sleeper,” she warned Alexi. “So don’t try anything.”

  Frustrated, Alexi chafed his hands together and blew on them in the darkness. His last clear memory of the alien was of its hand, gesturing from within a cloud of utter darkness as it told them to use the helicraft to flee Tomsk 13. He didn’t remember the flight here—or anything that had happened since then. That was all part of the blank that stretched between now and then. But something told him that Raheek would be back soon. And when the alien returned . . .

  The minutes ticked by. Alexi didn’t even bother trying to sleep; he was too cold. He found that he was rubbing his throat with one ice-cold hand. He shivered, and unfastened the armored jacket just enough to slip the hand under his armpit instead. On the opposite bench, the Union officer lay curled in a nice warm ball, snug inside her therm suit with the blankets untouched on the floor. He listened enviously as her breathing deepened into sleep. Typical bloody officer. Nice and cozy, while he sat here shivering in the dark.

  Christ, but it was cold. He scooped her blankets off the floor and hugged them around him. The Union officer hadn’t stirred. He stared at her through his fogging breath, wondering if it would be possible to overpower her and steal the therm suit. But even though she was sleeping, one hand still lightly gripped the pistol that
lay on the bench next to her. And the therm suit was too small and slender to fit Alexi, anyway.

  He glared at it, envious of the enemy’s advanced technology. The silvery material was as thin as a layer of cloth; the wires that kept a warming current circulating through it must have been hair-thin, and the computer chips that regulated its temperature as flexible as tinfoil. He wondered idly if the electromagnetic pulse of a detonating rad grenade would be enough to disrupt the suit’s circuitry.

  The thought gave him an idea. Rising from his seat, he shuffled over to the emergency kit that held the squad’s meager first-aid supplies. The metal box didn’t contain much—just a few rolled bandages, some tape, and a plastic bottle with dried-up iodine crusting the bottom of it. But it wasn’t the supplies that Alexi wanted. It was the canister itself.

  Wrapping cold-numbed fingers around the metal box, he eased it away from the wall. Then he tiptoed silently to where the Union officer slept. Holding the magnetized side of the box toward her, a centimeter or two above her therm suit, he ran the box up and down her body. Then he tiptoed back to his side of the cargo bay, stuck the first-aid kit back on the wall, and sat down to wait.

  It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes, the Union officer shivered. Then she reached down to find her blankets—the ones Alexi had taken. She sat up, tugged off the suit’s gloves, and began patting the suit with her hands. She swore softly in English.

  Alexi raised his eyebrows. “Is something wrong?” he asked innocently. He held out one of the blankets. “Do you need this?”

  She stared at him, a thoughtful look on her face. She was just about to answer when a faint noise came from the rear of the helicraft. They both looked in that direction. To Alexi’s ears, it had sounded like a scraping noise, as if someone were trying to brush away the snow that had fallen on the cargo-bay door. The door opened a crack.

  The Union officer raised her Pug pistol. “Raheek?” she called softly. When there was no answer, she pointed the pistol at the slowly opening door.

  “No, don’t!” Alexi cautioned. For some unknown reason, it was suddenly very clear to him that they must not make any threatening moves when the alien was around—and that shooting at it would be a fatal mistake. Especially when the alien was capable of magically teleporting itself before the bullets could hit. The metal pole that it carried as a weapon might look archaic, but its blade was wickedly sharp. . . .