Vor: The Playback War

by Lisa Smedman

  Then he realized he was making an assumption: that the aliens were his enemies. What if they were potential allies instead? Maybe this was a different alien race than the one that had wiped out the Neo-Soviet deep-exploration ship NP-30. Perhaps if they were approached correctly, in a spirit of friendship, they could teach humanity all of the secrets of this strange new universe the Earth had been sucked into. The more Alexi thought about it, the more certain he became.

  He suddenly hoped he’d merely knocked out the alien, not killed it. Entire wars had been started over such incidents. He slung his AK-51 over his shoulder, making a decision. He would not tell Intelligence about the spaceship. He’d go back into the museum, find the injured alien, and try to convince it that he really didn’t mean it any harm.

  He turned and headed back for the hole in the roof just as a blue-and-white arm snaked up through the opening. Something metallic whistled through the night air, something that looked like a whirling metallic boomerang. It cut through Alexi’s armored vest as if it were no more than a layer of cotton gauze, slicing a deep crease through the flesh underneath. The pain hit an instant later. Alexi looked down at the blood that sheeted out of his chest, at the exposed ribs that glistened wetly in the moonlight. Then the air left his lungs in a sudden rush. Shock numbed the pain.

  He crumpled to his knees, looking up at the alien that stood over him, its strangely jointed arms folded across its skinny chest. The moon haloed its egg-shaped head, illuminating its long strands of unkempt hair and throwing its face into shadow.

  “This . . . wasn’t . . .” Alexi could only mouth the words; no sound escaped his lips. “We could . . . friends . . .”

  As Alexi lay dying, a strange thought entered his head. The bald one. That was the alien he could trust. The others . . .

  But the bald one had killed him, too. Would kill him, too. Would be killed by him, too. Unless . . .

  21

  W hen the door opened at the rear of the cargo bay, every nerve in Alexi’s body screamed at him to fling off the blankets that covered him, grab his AK-51, and shoot. But it wasn’t the slavering growler with enormous tusks so vividly pictured in Alexi’s mind’s eye that peered into the cargo bay of the helicraft.

  It was Raheek.

  A second vision flashed through Alexi’s mind: of the blue-skinned alien holding the blade of its staff to Alexi’s throat, preparing to slit it ear to ear. But even as Alexi threw up a hand to ward off the blow, that image faded like the first. It had never happened. Would never happen.

  Alexi blinked the sleep from his eyes as the alien climbed into the helicraft. Two things immediately registered on his sleep-fogged mind: he was naked, aside from a pair of military-issue boxer shorts and wool socks—and the gold cross he always wore about his neck. Juliana lay under the blankets beside him, her bare feet resting against his leg. The light touch sent a shiver of warmth through his body.

  Her therm suit lay in a crumpled silver heap on the floor. Alexi reached out and touched it with a finger. It was as cold as the metal it lay on. He remembered using the magnet in the first-aid kit to scramble its programming—a stupid trick that he regretted now, since it left her without any other way to stay warm. But after that, everything was a blank.

  Looking down at Juliana’s face, he felt a rush of emotion for her. In his mind she was no longer an officer, nor even just a fellow soldier. She was a woman. And a beautiful one. They’d shared something in the last few hours, but whether they’d been physically intimate, Alexi couldn’t say.

  Juliana’s eyes opened. She sat up, and Alexi saw she was wearing the combats that she’d been wearing over her therm suit earlier. Perhaps nothing had happened. . . .

  The way she blushed and glanced away from him suggested that something had.

  Alexi cursed whatever was causing his blackouts. If his memory loss really was triggered by trauma, as Nevsky had suggested, this was one trauma he wanted to remember.

  The blue-skinned alien used the end of its staff to tug the blankets away. “We are close to the impact site,” it said. “A walk of less than one-twentieth of your planet’s period of rotation. We will leave now that there is sufficient light and warmth for you.”

  Funny, Alexi could have sworn he’d already heard the alien say those words, once before. But this time the phrasing was just slightly different.

  Outside the helicraft, a light snow was falling. The wind shifted, carrying a few flakes inside the cargo bay’s open door. Shivering, Alexi pulled on his trousers and Soldatenkof’s flak jacket. Juliana already had the ushanka pulled down over her ears, and held the blankets around her as she stood. Her teeth chattered as she looked around the cargo bay.

  “I’m freezing.” She looked ruefully at the crumpled therm suit, then at the alien, who was tapping its staff, clearly impatient for them to set off. “You might not need clothes to protect you from the cold, but we do,” she told Raheek.

  As Alexi laced up his boots, Juliana began rummaging through the cargo bay’s storage lockers. Only as she started to turn the handle of one in the back did Alexi remember the gruesome cargo he’d hidden inside it.

  “Wait!” he shouted.

  Juliana looked back over her shoulder at him, one hand on the latch that would open the locker. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you worried there’s another growler on board?”

  “What do you mean?” Alexi asked.

  She pointed at the locker next to it. For the first time, Alexi noticed the hole that was melted in the bottom of its door and the bullet marks that pocked the floor in front of the locker. He had no idea what she was talking about—something that had happened during one of his blackouts, perhaps? He remembered shooting at the arm of the growler that had been clinging to the bottom of the helicraft earlier, when it reached in through the hatch on the floor. But that hole in the locker looked like an incendiary round had hit it.

  “Don’t worry,” Juliana said. “The growler is dead, thanks to your quick thinking, and the helicraft is clear.”

  Before Alexi could stop her, she opened the door of the locker in which Alexi had hidden Soldatenkof, and the Leitenant’s corpse fell out. Cold and stiff, it hit the deck of the cargo bay with a loud crash. A puffy finger broke off and skittered across the floor.

  Juliana stared at the corpse without flinching. She’d obviously seen as much combat as Alexi had, to be unfazed by its sudden appearance.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “A coward,” Alexi answered. “And my commanding officer. He was hiding in the helicraft while the squad was fighting growlers in Tomsk 13. But the growlers got him, anyway.”

  Juliana looked pointedly at the jacket Alexi was wearing. “And if he was in the locker all this time, how did you come to be wearing his jacket, Corporal?”

  The edge was back in her voice. Alexi suddenly remembered that she, too, was an officer. And that she came from an army that treated its officers with respect. He wondered if looting an officer’s corpse was cause for court-martial in the Union forces—or if the Union executed a squad when its officer died. Somehow, he suspected the answer was no.

  Alexi deflected her question. “Soldatenkof’s greatcoat is in the next storage locker,” he said. “It should be small enough to fit you. And there are some spare combat boots.”

  “We must leave now,” the alien reminded them. “Gather those supplies you need.”

  The voice was quiet, but it crackled in Alexi’s mind like a command. He grabbed a backpack and began stuffing it with whatever might be useful: the few bandages from the first-aid kit, extra ammunition for his AK-51, the blankets, some tubes of the vile-tasting sausage paste, two frag grenades, the helicraft’s emergency flares . . .

  He couldn’t shake the feeling there was something else they should be taking with them—something too important to be left behind. But he couldn’t see anything else that he should add to their meager supplies. Eventually, he picked up Soldatenkof’s empty vodka bottle, figuring it woul
d come in handy if they needed a container in which to melt snow.

  Beside him, Juliana pulled on Soldatenkof’s greatcoat and laced up the boots. Then she bent over the leitenant’s corpse and started to unfasten the holster that held his pistol.

  “Don’t,” Alexi said. “Leave it.” The Viper was a weapon of discipline, as loathsome as a slave master’s whip.

  Juliana ignored him. She slid the pistol from the holster and pulled its magazine free. Then she tossed the weapon into a corner, where it landed with a clatter. “It only has one bullet left in the magazine,” she said.

  Alexi’s eyes widened in surprise. If the leitenant’s ammunition had been that low, Soldatenkof would have been faced with the dangerous prospect of enforcing discipline entirely by bluff. Alexi glared at the frozen corpse. No wonder he’d stayed inside the helicraft. If the squad had known he’d only had one bullet left . . .

  Juliana held up her Pug pistol, then shoved it into the pocket of her greatcoat. “I’ve still got my own weapon,” she reminded him.

  Alexi frowned. Why had she told him that? Was she letting him know that she, too, had the officer’s favorite disciplinary tool? Or perhaps she wanted to remind him that she was still quite capable of taking him prisoner.

  Just as she had when they had first sighted . . .

  The thought vanished.

  The alien didn’t wait for Juliana to finish her preparations. Instead it descended from the rear hatch and disappeared into the forest that surrounded the helicraft. The creature hadn’t said a word; it seemed to expect the humans to follow. Alexi and Juliana had to scramble to catch up to it. They plowed through the snow, following its footprints.

  Within minutes, Alexi was sweating under the armored jacket he wore. The alien walked quickly, on long spindly legs, the butt of its staff thumping neat holes in the snow. Its pace had the humans nearly jogging to keep up.

  Alexi walked between the alien and Juliana; he noticed that she had deliberately taken the rear. Whether that was because she felt herself more competent to deal with any attack from that direction or whether she didn’t want Alexi at her back, he couldn’t say.

  He waded through the snow after the alien, trying to stretch his pace so he could use the same footprints in the snow. They wound their way through the forest, following the path Raheek had made earlier, and crossed a frozen stream. The snow was trampled, as if Raheek had tested the ice carefully before crossing. Good thing, too—just upriver, a hole had formed in the ice. Alexi guessed that spring was early in coming to Siberia if the thaw was beginning already.

  As they walked along through the forest, he looked at the alien’s narrow blue back. The creature stood head and shoulders taller than Alexi. It strode through the taiga without looking back, confident the two humans were following it. The alien was warm-blooded, that much was implied by the sweet-smelling puffs of air that came from its mouth as it walked. But it was oblivious to the cold. The snow that fell around its bald head and shoulders seemed to melt a centimeter above its skin and slide away without ever touching its body. Alexi wondered if it had some sort of protective force field shielding it or whether the effect was magical.

  At first, it had seemed natural to be marching away from the helicraft, out into the snowy Siberian wilderness. In the hurry to get dressed and pack his gear, Alexi hadn’t stopped to ask any questions. But now they tumbled through his mind. He knew that the alien was headed to the meteor impact site—it had insisted that Juliana fly the helicraft northeast after taking off from Tomsk 13. She was obviously useful in getting the alien to where it wanted to be. But what was Alexi’s role in all of this?

  The alien must have explained what was going on during one of Alexi’s blackouts. That was how Juliana had known what its name was. Alexi hoped Raheek wouldn’t become angry if asked to repeat itself. The blue-skinned creature had an aura of power about it, a fluid grace and confidence that suggested it could cut either of the humans down with its blade-tipped staff without effort or even conscious thought. And then there was the ball of howling energy it had conjured up out of thin air. Looking into its swirling depths had been even more terrifying than looking down the barrel of Soldatenkof’s Viper pistol.

  They trudged along for several long minutes before Alexi worked up enough courage to break the silence. He wasn’t sure how to address the alien, so he fell into a familiar pattern.

  “Sir?” he said.

  Silence. Alexi tried again—maybe he’d gotten the gender wrong. “Ma’am?”

  The alien didn’t turn around.

  “Raheek?”

  This time, the alien acknowledged him. “Your question?” it asked over its shoulder.

  Alexi was going to ask what the meteorite was. But then the answer bubbled up out of his subconscious. Without ever having been told, he suddenly knew the thing was a weapon. He had a brief flash of a pyramid-shaped object . . .

  The words seemed to come by themselves, as if someone other than Alexi were speaking them: “The crystal—how does it work?”

  The alien spun around so quickly that Alexi nearly crashed into it. Raheek’s blue-black eyes bored into Alexi’s.

  “How do you know the meteorite’s structure?” Raheek asked, its voice a white-noise hiss.

  Behind Alexi, Juliana had paused and was listening intently.

  “I . . . ah . . .” Alexi swallowed. His hands sketched a triangle in the air. His forehead felt pinched, as if he were concentrating hard. Yet his thoughts were swirling, unfocused. The trees around him were a blur, as if his glasses had iced over. Yet Raheek’s face remained in sharp focus.

  “Well, by its pyramid shape, I guess,” Alexi continued. “The tetrahedron is one of the basic crystalline structures that . . .”

  He blinked, and the forest around him came back into focus again. His mind cleared. He felt like a teacher who had suddenly lost his lecture notes and wasn’t sure what came next. The tidal wave of insight that had been about to flood his mind with information had ebbed away.

  “Uh . . . What was I just saying?”

  Raheek’s lips opened and closed rapidly, making faint smacking noises. Alexi somehow knew that this was the alien equivalent of a smile.

  Juliana looked back and forth between Alexi and the alien. Then her gaze settled on Raheek.

  “You said the meteorite was a bomb,” she told it. “One that had hit its target—Earth—and was about to go off. You promised to show it to us. But now it sounds as though Alexi has already seen it. Or that he knows what it will look like. Which makes me wonder if he was really guessing when he told you where it was.”

  It took Alexi a moment to figure out what she was suggesting. “If it’s a bomb, it’s not one of ours, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Alexi is correct,” Raheek said. “It is not one of your planet’s weapons. It was built by the Shard.”

  “The what?” Alexi and Juliana both asked the question at the same time.

  “The Shard: an elder species, with technology even more advanced than our own,” Raheek answered. “They are a silicon-based life-form, with a hatred of all other creatures. Their weapons, their tools—even their own bodies—have crystalline forms. They regard carbon-based life-forms just as we would view a virus—as something to be eliminated. They wish to wipe the universe clean of us—both your species and mine.”

  “So it really is a bomb?” Juliana asked. “I thought it was a . . .” After a moment’s thought, she asked another question. “Why did it target us?”

  “The beacon,” Raheek said. “Your species has the unfortunate habit of finding crystals beautiful and placing value on them. A group of your space travelers brought back to your moon a crystal that was actually a Shard transmitter. It served as a homing beacon for the bomb.”

  “Is this bomb really capable of destroying our planet?” Juliana asked.

  The alien gave the hand flick that Alexi now recognized as an affirmative. “When th
e bomb activates, it will tear apart the very fabric of local space-time. Space will lose its coherency as one of its four dimensions—time—becomes chaotic. The atoms that make up this planet—and everything on it—will become unstable and break apart into their smallest atomic components. Where your world once existed, there will be nothing more than an infinite distortion of space-time, one in which matter occupies every possible moment in time that ever was, is, or will be.”

  Juliana gave Raheek a skeptical look. “How can a crystal do that?”

  The alien gestured at the GPS on Juliana’s wrist. “It is like the silicon-based circuits you use in your machinery,” Raheek said. “Only on a much larger and more complex scale.”

  “It’s a gigantic computer chip?” Alexi asked.

  “Similar,” Raheek answered. “But not exactly the same.”

  “Is there a way to scramble its code?” Juliana asked. “Depending upon how it’s stored, data is susceptible to being erased. If the software that runs the thing is recorded using a magnetic format, the bomb could be disrupted with an electromagnetic pulse.”

  Alexi glanced guiltily at her. He wondered if she’d guessed how her therm suit had been disabled.

  “I know of no way to affect the crystal,” Raheek said. “Its programming, as you call it, is an integral part of its crystalline structure and cannot be tampered with by physical means. We Zykhee assume that all such attempts by other races failed, given that there now are a number of severe time-space distortions in our universe where planets once orbited.”

  Other races? Alexi stared in wonder at Raheek. In the past few days, Alexi had come to accept the harsh reality of the growlers and the enigma of the blue-skinned Zykhee, who seemed to be both friend and enemy in one. Before the Change, scientists had searched in vain for a single iota of evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. Now, it seemed, the Earth was occupying a universe that was filled with alien species.

  “There must be a way to disarm the bomb,” Juliana insisted.