Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  Alexi breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the rad squads would finally be getting some heavy-duty reinforcements. Assuming, that was, that the heavy-assault suit was assembled before the battalion was wiped out to the last grunt. And assuming, of course, that the damned thing actually worked.

  One of the soldiers who was unpacking the crates looked up—and with a startled glance stepped forward to close the door Alexi was looking through. In that same instant, someone jostled Alexi from behind—a soldier carrying a machine gun. And he didn’t look happy.

  “Where are you supposed to be, soldier?” he asked curtly. If looks could kill, Alexi would have been dead already.

  “I . . . I’m looking for the supply depot,” Alexi stuttered. “My commanding officer sent me to fetch more grenades.”

  “Right.” The soldier jerked his head, indicating a hallway to Alexi’s left. “This way.”

  Alexi was briskly marched to what he’d been looking for all along: a supply sergeant. He was a squint-eyed fellow with a receding hairline. He sat behind a desk covered with neat piles of paper, staring at Alexi like a penny-pinching grocer watching a suspected shoplifter from behind his counter. Behind him, two Uzi-toting privates stood guard over the boxes of ammunition, neatly folded uniforms, and packages of freeze-dried foodstuffs that filled the room.

  Alexi gave the fellow a wary salute. Noncommissioned officers could be even bigger bastards than officers—just give them a little power and watch it go to their heads.

  “Corporal Alexi Minsk of the Sixty-sixth Rad Squad, Sergeant,” he said. “Leitenant Soldatenkof sent me to collect some grenades.”

  The supply sergeant stared at Alexi for a long moment. “Radiation or fragmentation?” he asked.

  Alexi hesitated. Soldatenkof hadn’t specified which type. If Alexi brought back rad grenades, the leitenant might suspect him of plotting to use one against him and take the preemptive measure of correcting Alexi’s misguided initiative with a bullet to the brain.

  “Frag grenades,” Alexi guessed.

  “How many?”

  Alexi shrugged. How many did the leitenant want? How many could one man carry?

  “Fifteen?”

  “They come in units of one dozen.”

  Alexi sighed in exasperation. “A dozen, then.”

  In one of the dressing-station rooms that Alexi had passed on his way in, a wounded soldier started screaming. Over and over, the woman begged someone not to amputate her foot. Outside, the sound of explosions drew nearer. The chandelier tinkled, and plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling.

  The two privates guarding the stores glanced at each other uneasily, worried perhaps that a Union assault suit was coming their way. But the supply sergeant ignored the screams and explosions, intent upon the papers he shuffled on his desk. He thrust one of them at Alexi without looking up.

  “Fill out this requisition,” he said.

  Alexi looked at the paper and frowned in disbelief at the multitude of lines to be filled out, boxes to tick, and sections to be initialed or signed. Surely the supply sergeant didn’t really want him to fill out his full name, rank, unit, type of materiél wanted, date, time . . .

  He glanced at one of the guards, who gave a slight nod. The other guard rolled his eyes behind the sergeant’s back, mocking him.

  “Pazhalsta,” Alexi said, pointing at a green metal box that was clearly labeled as containing frag grenades. “My leitenant will be angry if I don’t get back quickly. Can’t I just take that one?”

  “Nyet.”

  The supply sergeant held up a pen and waggled it at Alexi, quite content to wait until he took it. He watched every scratch of the pen as Alexi filled out the form, making him rewrite the request in proper military order: grenade, fragmentation, one dozen.

  The sergeant stamped the form, placed it neatly on a pile, then waited until plaster dust from the recent explosion had stopped falling and blew the dust away. Then he rose to his feet and crossed to the boxes of grenades. Slowly and carefully, he removed a dozen grenades and lined them up in a neat row on the floor, their heads all pointing in the same direction. He closed the hasp on the empty case and set it to one side.

  “There you go,” he told Alexi. “One dozen grenades.”

  “Why didn’t you just give them to me in the case?” Alexi asked incredulously. He winced at the screams of the woman whose foot was being cut off, just down the hall. “Are you saving the case for something? As a coffin for the amputated foot, perhaps?”

  “You didn’t say you needed a grenade case,” the sergeant said through annoyance-pursed lips. “That will require a second requisition form.”

  “Never mind,” Alexi growled. He reached into the pocket of his combats and pulled out a web bag. “I’ll use this to carry them.”

  Silently cursing each and every one of the petty bureaucrats in the Neo-Soviet army to a slow, lingering death by infected paper cut, Alexi filled the web bag and hooked it to his belt. Then he left with his dozen grenades bouncing against his thigh.

  As he left the hotel, he mentally labeled each of the grenades. Number one would blow the supply sergeant and his idiotic paperwork into a bloody mangle. Number two was for the recruiter who had promised Alexi a place in the military’s space corps, if only he would volunteer. Grenades three, four, and five were for the admin clerks who had refused to reassign him away from the rad squad. And maybe if he set off numbers six through twelve all together, the percussive force would be enough to knock Soldatenkof unconscious inside his protective armored suit, ridding the squad of him once and for all, cracking the armor off him like a shell from a well-boiled crab.

  It was just a fantasy, of course. Alexi didn’t really want to condemn the rest of the squad members to court-martial and firing squad. But the thought reminded him of something, making him slow his stride along the street. Steam . . . armor . . . But then the tickle of memory was gone.

  He paused to catch his breath and watch the show as explosions blossomed with red fire on the hillside. He was glad to be momentarily out of the thick of it, to be a spectator to the battle, if only for a little while. In the center of Vladivostok flashes of explosions lit up the night, and the chatter of machine-gun fire was a constant background noise. Helicraft rose into the air and settled again like fat black flies on a corpse, moving squads of rad soldiers from one part of the ruined city to another. The Neo-Soviets were trying to outmaneuver the handful of Union heavy-assault suits, but were failing miserably. The assault suits were tearing them to shreds. But here on ulitsa Svetlanskaya, a few streets up from what used to be the waterfront, all was quiet. Even the static in Alexi’s helmet speaker had dulled to a faint hiss.

  Why the Union forces had suddenly chosen to attack Vladivostok three days ago was anyone’s guess. The city, once a bustling port that was home to seven hundred thousand people, had shrunk to a fraction of its former population in the past few years. When the Earth was drawn into the Maelstrom, the coastlines had altered overnight. The Change brought the sudden departure of Vladivostok’s shoreline, sending the city into a downward economic spiral from which it never recovered. The last of the city’s civilian population had left three days ago, when the fighting began. There was nothing of economic or military value left in the city, as far as Alexi could see.

  According to the briefing Soldatenkof had given the rad squad before they were shipped out to Vladivostok, Command had no idea why the Union had chosen to send heavy-assault suits against the city—Vladivostok’s feeble reserve militia was hardly worth such a show of force. Perhaps the Union’s intelligence service had been led to believe that the city held something of strategic value. Or perhaps there was no strategic reason. Maybe the Union had just wanted a place to test out its assault suits, and had thrown a dart at a map to choose the location. That made as much sense as many other military decisions made down through history.

  And those who ignored history were doomed to repeat it.

  As were those who i
gnored the future. . . .

  Alexi shook the strange thought out of his head. He found himself staring at the main entrance of a sprawling, multiwinged building whose sign proclaimed it to be the Arsenev Regional Museum. The heavy front doors had been blown off their hinges, and a mangled turnstile lay beside them. The darkness inside seemed somehow to beckon to Alexi. He hesitated, feeling the bag of grenades swaying from his belt. Soldatenkof’s voice was just barely audible over his helmet speaker; the squad must have changed position. And Alexi didn’t really want to find them, anyway. He’d much rather take a tour of a museum. Especially when there was free admission.

  Alexi entered the museum and wound his way through its corridors. He glanced briefly into the wing that held taxidermy, but decided that looking at the moldy corpses of animals would be too depressing. He also bypassed the display of military memorabilia. The last thing he wanted to look at just then were relics of previous wars, each equally as idiotic as the war he was currently fighting. Instead he climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  Much of the ceiling had collapsed. Moonlight poured in through jagged holes that were probably the result of a mortar attack. But the displays along the walls were still protected by overhangs of ceiling. One, a display of eggshell-thin Japanese ceramics, had miraculously survived intact.

  Alexi brushed grime away from the glass front of a display case to get a better look at the elegant vases inside it. He leaned closer, eyes drinking in the creamy yellow porcelain with its vivid red dragons.

  A face stared back at him in the glass.

  Alexi jerked back in surprise at the reflection. The face was androgynous—long and oval, with strangely shaped eyes and a shock of unruly white hair. The person was not wearing a helmet or uniform—no military insignia to mark it as friend or foe. Just a strange white pattern on the cheeks, like a photographic negative of Maori tattoos.

  Holding his AK-51 in the ready position, Alexi looked warily around. Nothing. He was alone in the room. Then a drop of something splattered down onto his helmet. In that instant, he realized that the display case had been reflecting the ceiling above him. He looked up . . .

  The person who had been crouching on the roof of the museum leapt down through a hole in the ceiling. Alexi had only a momentary glimpse of strangely articulated limbs covered in intricate blue-and-white patterns as he brought his assault rifle to bear. The patterns started to shift . . .

  Suddenly, up became down. Overwhelmed by vertigo, Alexi fell sideways onto the floor. He landed hard, his finger reflexively tightening on the trigger of his AK-51. Bullets roared from the barrel, smashing the display case.

  Splinters of glass and broken ceramics tinkled down onto Alexi’s chest/back/side/chest. His body thrashed about while his mind fought to figure out which way was up. Something in his peripheral vision—the figure that had jumped through the hole in the ceiling—fled from the room. It ran with a peculiar loping gait, staggering as if it were wounded.

  As suddenly as it had come on, the dizzy feeling stopped. Alexi sat up, his heart racing.

  What in Christ had that thing been? Only one thing was certain: Although it had a face, two legs and two arms, it wasn’t a normal human. Was it a new product of the Neo-Sov mutant program—a skinnier version of the Cyclops perhaps? Or something the Union had cooked up? And why hadn’t it attacked Alexi?

  Alexi got to his feet again, but one of his boots slipped on something on the floor. Looking down, he saw a purplish liquid—less viscous than blood, but somehow suggestive of blood in the way it was spattered. The mutant that had jumped down from the roof had been bleeding, and had left a trail of bloody footprints behind.

  Alexi followed it.

  The trail led to an intact wing that held a display of rocks and minerals. Its centerpiece was a fist-sized moonrock, brought back to Earth by the Neo-Soviet cosmonauts who had surveyed the sites for the first moonbases. After a quick look around the room told him it was empty, Alexi crossed to the moonrock display. Glancing back over his shoulder—and laughing at himself for doing so, when the museum was long since abandoned—he brought the barrel of his assault rifle down on the display case. Then he brushed aside the broken glass and lifted the moonrock out.

  The rock was a grayish black, and heavily pitted. Alexi stared at it, marveling at the irony. Here he stood, holding in his hand a little chunk of the heavens. He’d enlisted in the army with a dream of entering space, with hopes as big as the Maw. And now the dream had shrunk to the size of the rock he held in his hand, and the hopes were as shattered as the display case that lay in shards at his feet.

  Alexi turned and hurled the rock down the corridor.

  His impulsive anger saved him. This time, he hadn’t seen the mutant as it crept up on him. But he heard the crack of the rock colliding with its skull and the heavy crash of its body falling to the floor.

  AK-51 trembling in his hands, Alexi crept toward the spot on the floor where blood was starting to puddle. He could see the outline of the purplish fluid around the prone figure clearly, but the body itself was no more than a dim blur as the white tattoos shifted.

  On a whim, Alexi lifted his glasses—but the figure remained as blurry as before. No—the blur wasn’t a smudge on his lenses. Had the military researchers developed some sort of cloaking device that conveyed partial invisibility?

  Alexi prodded the still form with the barrel of his AK-51. The blur looked human enough, although it was incredibly tall and skinny. The fellow seemed to be out cold, but Alexi wondered if he should shoot, just to be sure. His finger almost tightened on the trigger, but then something made it relax. A face floated into his mind: a face much like the one he’d seen reflected in the glass, except without the tattoos and white hair. A friendly face, one he could visualize encouraging him to . . .

  The thought was gone. Alexi groped for the meaning behind it, but came up empty.

  He backed slowly away from the blur that lay on the floor. As he reached the section where the ceiling had fallen in, near the Japanese ceramic display, the hiss in his helmet speaker became clearer. Piotr’s voice staticked in and out.

  . . . see that, Boris? It . . . blue . . .

  Alexi’s head came up like that of a dog on the scent. What was Piotr talking about? Some sixth sense told Alexi that it was important he find out more. He thudded a hand against his helmet, but the static didn’t clear. Maybe if he climbed onto the roof, the reception would improve.

  Scrabbling up the pile of rubble that led to the hole in the ceiling, Alexi climbed out into the crisp night air. The rooftop was a maze of vents, chimneys, and low dividing walls. And something else—something that looked like a gigantic metal spider covered in multicolored blobs of melted plastic.

  The body of the thing was a donut-shaped tube as wide as an oil pipeline, standing on five mechanical legs that folded in on themselves like accordions. Two of the legs appeared to be broken; the machine was leaning to one side, exposing the bottom of the donut, which was studded with what looked like mortar tubes of varying lengths. Circles of blistered metal ringed the end of each of these tubes, and the donut itself was covered in sticky-looking blobs.

  Alexi walked around the machine slowly, wondering what it was. It looked almost like the diagrams he’d seen of the Union’s combat drones, but bigger again by a factor of ten and without the turret-mounted weaponry. Or course, if it had been a drone, Alexi would have been dead the second he climbed through the hole in the roof. Fully automated, bristling with infrared, vibration, and low-light sensors, the Union drones would open fire on anything bigger than a cat that passed through their multiple fields of fire.

  The roof tiles that the machine sat on had blistered and burned away, and the cement under them was cracked in a radial pattern, as if a fist had slammed down into it. The tubes on the bottom of the donut were obviously jets—and ones that hadn’t worked very well, judging by the damage the thing’s legs had sustained upon landing. Probably one of ours then, Alexi mused. The Ne
o-Soviets weren’t noted for their quality control, even when it came to cutting-edge military technology.

  He flicked on the light in his helmet for a better look at the thing. He didn’t see any military markings on its surface—no lettering in either the English or Cyrillic alphabets. Between the blobs of melted plastic, which turned out to shade from red to orange to yellow, were smoother sections, some of which were engraved with an intricate pattern. The design reminded Alexi of the pattern he’d seen on the cheeks of the mutant that had jumped down into the museum.

  There had to be a connection. Alexi could feel it in his gut.

  Then it came together in his head. That wasn’t a mutant he’d knocked out with an incredibly lucky toss of a chunk of moonrock. It was an alien. And this strange-looking vehicle was the craft it had come to Earth in. So that was why the enemy was so interested in taking Vladivostok. One of the Union’s moonbases or patrol ships must have picked up the spacecraft as it approached the Earth, and noted its landing place. Or rather, noted its approximate landing place, since the Union soldiers in their heavy-assault suits didn’t seem to have found the spaceship yet.

  Alexi trembled like a man who had suddenly discovered he was holding a billion-ruble lottery ticket. If he reported the spaceship to Intelligence, he might at long last be reassigned to the military’s space arm as a reward for finding the first scout ship of what might be an invading alien force. . . .

  Nyet. It wouldn’t happen. He’d get a pat on the head and be sent back to the line. He was only a corporal, after all—a corporal they’d deemed useful only as missile fodder, because of his poor eyesight.

  Did Alexi really care that aliens had landed on Earth and might even now be setting out to conquer the planet? He sighed. Not really. Aliens couldn’t possibly mess up the Earth any more than the humans already had. Especially this corner of the planet. Let them have the abandoned coastline of Vladivostok and the polluted wastes of Siberia. Let them have the whole of the Neo-Soviet state, for that matter. Nothing in Alexi’s world would change.