Hold Up The Sky

by Liu Cixin

  Kalina forced back shivers from cold and fear, so that the horizon line steadied in her binoculars. She saw blurry masses of snow spray, edging the horizon with fuzzy trim.

  That was when Kalina heard the rumble of engines behind her. A row of Russian tanks passed her position as they charged the enemy, more T-90 tanks leaving the highway behind them. Kalina heard a different rumble: enemy helicopters were appearing in the sky ahead in neat array, a black lattice in the ghastly white sky of dawn. The exhaust pipes of the tanks around Kalina kicked into action with low splutters, cloaking the battleground in white fog. Through its crevices she could also see Russian helicopters passing low overhead.

  The tanks’ 120 mm guns stormed and thundered, and the white fog became a wildly flashing pink light display. Almost simultaneously, the first enemy shells fell, the pink light replaced by the blue-white lightning of their explosion. Kalina, lying on her stomach at the bottom of the bomb crater, felt the ground reverberate with the intense percussion like a drumhead. Nearby dirt and rock flew into the air and landed all over her back. Amid the explosions, she could dimly hear the whinny of anti-tank missiles. Kalina felt as if her viscera were tearing apart in the cacophony, and all the universe, the pieces falling toward an endless abyss—

  Just as her mind teetered on the breaking point, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only thirty seconds.

  When the smoke cleared, Kalina saw that the snowy ground in front of her was scattered with destroyed Russian tanks, heaps of raging flames crowned with black smoke. She looked farther; even without binoculars, she could see a similar swath of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance, appearing as black smoking specks on the snow. But more enemy tanks were rushing past the wreckage, wreathed in the snow spray churned up by their treads. Now and then the Abramses’ ferocious broad wedge heads emerged from the spray like snapping turtles launching themselves out of the waves, their smooth-bore muzzles flashing sporadically like eyes. Just above, the helicopters were still embroiled in their melee. Kalina saw an Apache explode in midair not far away. A Mi-28 wobbled low overhead, trailing fuel from a leak. It hit the ground a few dozen meters away and exploded into a fireball. Short-range air-to-air missiles slashed countless parallel white lines low in the air—

  Kalina heard a bang behind her. She turned; not far away, a damaged and badly smoking T-90 dropped its rear hatch. No one got out, but she could see a hand hanging down from it. Kalina leapt from the bomb crater and rushed to the back of the tank. She grabbed hold of the hand and pulled. An explosion rumbled inside the tank. A blast of blazing air forced Kalina back several steps. Her hand held something soft and very hot: a piece of skin pulled loose from the tank crew member’s hand, cooked through. Kalina raised her head and saw flames burst from the hatch. Through it, she could see that the tank interior was already an inferno in miniature. Among the flames, dimly red and transparent, she could clearly see the silhouette of the unmoving crewman, rippling as if in water.

  She heard two new shrills. The artillery crew to her front and left fired its last two anti-tank missiles. The wire-guided Sagger missile successfully destroyed an Abrams; the other, radio-guided missile found its signal jammed and veered upward at an angle, missing its target. Meanwhile the six missile crewmen retreated from their bunker, running toward Kalina’s bomb crater as a Comanche helicopter dove for them, its angular chassis resembling the profile of a savage alligator. Machine-gun bullets struck the ground in a long row, their impact abruptly standing snow and dirt up in a fence that just as quickly toppled. The fence crossed through the little squadron, felling four of them. Only a first lieutenant and a private made it over to the crater. There Kalina noticed that the lieutenant was wearing an antishock tank helmet, perhaps taken from a destroyed tank. The two of them held an RPG each.

  The lieutenant jumped into the crater. He took a shot at the nearest enemy tank, hitting the M1A2 head-on, triggering its reactive armor, the sound of the rocket explosion and the armor explosion mingling peculiarly. The tank charged out of the cloud of smoke, scraps of reactive armor dangling from its front like a tattered shirt. The young private was still aiming, his RPG jittering with the tank’s rise and fall, too uncertain to fire. Then the tank was just fifty, forty meters away, heading into a dip in the ground, and the private could only stand on the rim of the crater to aim downward.

  His RPG and the Abrams’s 120 mm gun sounded simultaneously.

  The tank gunner had fired a nonexplosive depleted-uranium armor-piercing round in his desperation. With an initial velocity of eight hundred meters per second, it turned the soldier’s upper body into a spray of gore upon impact. Kalina felt scraps of blood and meat strike her steel helmet, pitter-pattering. She opened her eyes. Just in front of her, at the edge of the crater, the private’s legs were two black tree stumps, soundlessly rolling their way to the bottom of the crater next to her feet. The shattered remains of the rest of his body had spattered a radial pattern of red speckles in the snow.

  The rocket had struck the Abrams, the focused jet of the explosion cutting through its armor. Thick smoke billowed from the chassis. But the steel monster was still charging toward them, trailing smoke. It was within twenty meters of them before an explosion from within stopped it in its tracks, hurling the top of its turret sky-high.

  The NATO tank line went past them immediately after, the ground trembling under the heavy impact of treads, but these tanks took no interest in their bomb crater. Once the first wave of tanks was past, the lieutenant grabbed Kalina’s hand and leapt from the crater, pulling her after him to the side of an already bullet-scarred jeep. Two hundred meters away, the second wave of armored assault was bearing down on them.

  “Lie down and play dead!” the lieutenant said. So Kalina lay by the jeep’s wheel and closed her eyes. “It looks more realistic with your eyes open!” the lieutenant added, and smeared a handful of somebody’s blood on her face. He lay down, too, forming a right angle with Kalina, his head pressing against hers. His helmet had rolled to one side, and his coarse hair pricked at Kalina’s temple. She opened her eyes wide, looking at the sky almost swallowed by smoke.

  Two or three minutes later, a half-track Bradley infantry fighting vehicle stopped ten or so meters from them. A few American soldiers in blue-and-white snowy terrain camouflage jumped from the convoy. The bulk of them leveled their guns and advanced in a skirmish line. Only one walked toward the jeep. Kalina saw two snow-speckled paratrooper boots step next to her face; she could clearly make out the insignia of the Eighty-second Airborne Division on the handle of the knife sheathed in his boot. The American crouched down to look at her. Their gazes met, and Kalina tried as hard as she could to make hers blank and lifeless across from that pair of startled blue eyes.

  “Oh, god!” Kalina heard him exclaim. She didn’t know if it was for the beauty of this woman with a major’s star on her shoulder, or for the terrible sight of her bloody, dirty face; maybe it was both. He reached a hand to unfasten her collar. Goose bumps rose all over Kalina, and she nudged her hand a few centimeters closer to the pistol in her belt, but the American only tugged the dog tag from her neck.

  They had to wait longer than expected. Enemy tanks and armored convoys thundered endlessly past them. Kalina could feel her body freezing almost solid on the snowy ground. It made her think of a couplet from an old army song, of all things. She’d read the words in an old book on Matrosov: “A soldier lies on the snowy ground / like they lie on white swan down.” The day she received her Ph.D., she’d written the lines in her diary. That had been a snowy night, too. She’d stood in front of the window on the top floor of Moscow State University’s Main Building; that night, the snow really did look like swan down, and through the haze of snow flickered the lights from the thousands of homes of the capital. She’d joined the army the next day.

  A jeep stopped not far from them, three NATO officers smoking and conversing inside. But the area around Kalina and the lieutenant was clearing. The two finally rose. The
y jumped in their own jeep, the lieutenant turned the ignition, and they hurtled along the route planned out earlier. Submachine guns sounded behind them; bullets flew overhead, one shattering a rearview mirror. The jeep whipped into a turn, entering a burning residential area. The enemy hadn’t pursued.

  “Major, you have a doctorate, right?” the lieutenant said as he drove.

  “Where do you know me from?”

  “I’ve seen you with Marshal Levchenko’s son.”

  After a silence, the lieutenant said, “Right now, his son is farther from the war than anyone else in the world.”

  “What are you implying? You know that—”

  “Nothing, I was just saying,” the lieutenant said neutrally. Neither of them had their mind on the conversation. They were still lingering on that last thread of hope.

  Of the entire battlefront, this might be the only breach.

  JANUARY 5TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,

  ABOARD THE VECHNYY BURAN

  Misha was experiencing the solitude of a lone inhabitant in an empty city.

  The Vechnyy Buran really was the size of a small city. The modular space station had a volume equivalent to two supercarriers and could sustain five thousand residents in space at a time. When the complex was under centripetal force simulating gravity, it even contained a pool and a small flowing river. Compared to other space work environments of the day, it smacked of unparalleled extravagance. But in reality, the Vechnyy Buran was the product of the thrifty reasoning the Russian space program had demonstrated since Mir. The thinking behind its design went that, although combining all the functionality needed to explore the entire solar system into one structure might require a huge initial investment, it would prove absolutely economical in the long run. Western media jokingly called Vechnyy Buran the Swiss Army knife of space: It could serve as a space station orbiting at any height from Earth; it could relocate easily to moon orbit, or make exploratory flights to the other planets. Vechnyy Buran had already flown to Venus and Mars and probed the asteroid belt. With its huge capacity, it was like shipping an entire research center into space. In the field of space research, it had an advantage over the legion but dainty Western spaceships.

  The war had broken out just as Vechnyy Buran was preparing for the three-year expedition to Jupiter. At that time, its over one hundred crew members, most of them air force officers, had left for Earth, leaving only Misha. The Vechnyy Buran had revealed a flaw: Militarily, it presented too big a target while possessing no defensive abilities. Failing to foresee the progressive militarization of space had been a mistake on the part of the designer.

  Vechnyy Buran could only take avoidance measures. It couldn’t depart for farther space, with numerous unmanned NATO satellites patrolling Jupiter’s orbital path. They were small, but whether armed or unarmed, any one could pose a deadly threat to the Vechnyy Buran.

  The only option was to draw near the sun. The automatic active-cooling heat-shielding system that was the pride of the Vechnyy Buran allowed it to go closer to the sun than any other man-made object yet. Now the Vechnyy Buran had reached Mercury’s orbital path, five million kilometers from the sun and one hundred million kilometers from Earth.

  Most of the Vechnyy Buran’s hold had been closed off, but the area left to Misha was still astonishingly enormous. Through the broad, clear dome ceiling, the sun looked three times larger than it looked on Earth. He could clearly see the sunspots and the singularly beautiful solar prominences emerging from the purple corona; sometimes, he could even see the granules formed by convection in the surface. The serenity here was an illusion. Outside, the sun pitched a raging storm of particles and electromagnetic radiation, and the Vechnyy Buran was just a tiny seed in a turbulent ocean.

  A gossamer-thin thread of EM waves connected Misha to the Earth, and brought the troubles of that distant world to him as well. He had just been informed that the command center near Moscow had been destroyed by a cruise missile, and that the Vechnyy Buran’s control had passed to the secondary command center at Samara. He received the latest news of the war from Earth at five-hour intervals; at those times, each time, he would think of his father.

  JANUARY 5TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL

  STAFF HEADQUARTERS

  Marshal Mikhail Semyonovich Levchenko felt as if he were face-to-face with a wall, though in reality, a holographic map of the Moscow theater of war lay in front of him. Conversely, when he turned toward the big paper map hanging on the wall, he could see breadth and depth, a sense of space.

  No matter what, he preferred traditional maps. He didn’t know how many times he’d sought a location on the very bottom of the map, forcing him and his strategists to get on hands and knees; the thought now made him smile a little. He also remembered spending the eve of military exercises in his battlefield tent, piecing together the newly received battle maps with clear tape. He always made a mess of it, but his son had done the taping neater than he ever did, that first time he came along to watch the exercises….

  Finding that his musings had returned to the subject of his son, the marshal vigilantly cut off his train of thought.

  He and the commander of the Western Military District were the only people in the war room, the latter chain-smoking cigarettes as they watched the shifting clouds of smoke above the holographic map, their gaze as intent as if it were the grim battlefield itself.

  The district commander said: “NATO has seventy-five divisions along the Smolensk front now. The battlefront is a hundred kilometers long. They’ve breached the line at multiple points.”

  “And the eastern front?” Marshal Levchenko asked.

  “Most of our Eleventh Army defected to the Rightists too, as you know. The Rightist army is now twenty-four divisions strong, but their assaults on Yaroslavl remain exploratory in nature.”

  The earth shook with the faint vibrations of some ground explosion. The lights hanging from the ceiling cast swaying shadows around the war room.

  “There’s talk now of retreating to Moscow and using the barricades and fortifications for a street-to-street battle, like seventy-odd years ago.”

  “That’s absurd! If we withdraw from the western front, NATO can swing north around us to join forces with the Rightists at Tver. Moscow would fall into panic without them lifting a finger. We have three options in our playbook right now: counterattack, counterattack, and counterattack.”

  The district commander sighed, looking wordlessly at the map.

  Marshal Levchenko continued, “I know the western front isn’t strong enough. I plan to relocate an army from the eastern front to strengthen it.”

  “What? But it’s already going to be a challenge to defend Yaroslavl.”

  Marshal Levchenko chuckled. “Nowadays, the problem with many commanders is their tendency to only consider a problem from the military angle. They can’t see beyond the grim tactical situation. Looking at the current situation, do you think the Rightists lack the strength to take Yaroslavl?”

  “I don’t think so. The Fourteenth Army is an elite force with a high concentration of armored vehicles and low-altitude attack power. For them to advance less than fifteen kilometers a day while not having suffered serious setbacks seems like taking things slow on purpose.”

  “That’s right, they’re watching and waiting. They’re watching the western front! And if we can take back the initiative in the western front, they’ll keep on watching and waiting. They might even independently negotiate a cease-fire.”

  The district commander held his newest cigarette in his hand, but had forgotten all thoughts of lighting it.

  “The defection of the armies on the eastern front really was a knife in our back, but some commanders have turned this into an excuse in their minds to steer us toward passive operational policies. That has to change! Of course, it must be said that our current strength in the Moscow region isn’t enough for a total turnaround. Our hope lies in the relief forces from the Caucasus and Ural districts.”

  “The c
loser Caucasus forces will need at least a week to assemble and advance into place. If we account for possession of the airspace, it might take even longer.”

  JANUARY 5TH, MOSCOW

  It was past three in the afternoon when Kalina and the first lieutenant entered the city in their jeep. The air raid alarm had just sounded, and the streets were empty.

  “I miss my T-90 already, Major,” sighed the lieutenant. “I finished armored-vehicle training right around the time I broke up with my girlfriend, but the moment I arrived at my unit and saw that tank, my heart soared right back up again. I put my hand on its armor, and it was smooth and warm, like touching a lover’s hand. Ha, what was that relationship worth! Now I’d found a real love! But it took a Mistral missile this morning.” He sighed again. “It might still be burning.”

  At that time they heard dense explosions from the northwest, a savage area bombing rare in modern aerial warfare.

  The lieutenant was still wallowing in the morning’s engagement. “Less than thirty seconds, and the whole tank company was gone.”

  “The enemy losses were heavy, too,” Kalina said. “I observed the aftermath. There were about the same number of destroyed vehicles on each side.”

  “The ratio of destroyed tanks was about 1 to 1.2, I think. The helicopters were worse off, but it wouldn’t have gone over 1 to 1.4.”

  “In that case, the battlefield initiative should have stayed on our side. We have a sizable advantage in numbers. How did the battle end up like this?”

  The lieutenant turned to eye Kalina. “You’re one of the electronic-warfare people. Don’t you get it? All your toys—the fifth-generation C3I, the 3-D battle displays, the dynamic situation simulators, the attack-plan optimizer, whatever—looked great in the mock battles. But on the real battlefield, all the screen in front of me ever showed was ‘COMMUNICATION ERROR’ and ‘COULD NOT LOG IN.’ Take this morning, for example. I didn’t have a clue what was happening in the front and flanks. I only got one order: ‘Engage the enemy.’ Ah, if we’d only had half our force again in reinforcements, the enemy wouldn’t have broken through our position. It was probably the same way all down the line.”