by Liu Cixin
JANUARY 11TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL
STAFF HEADQUARTERS
“I know what you want. Don’t waste words, spit it out!” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Caucasus Army.
“I want the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield for the last two days to last another four days.”
“Surely you’re aware that seventy percent of our battlefield jamming teams have been destroyed? I can’t even give you another four hours!”
“In that case, our army won’t be able to arrive in position on time. NATO airstrikes have greatly slowed the rate at which our forces can assemble.”
“In that case, you might as well put a bullet in your head. The enemy is approaching Moscow. They’ve reached the position Guderian held seventy years ago.”
As he exited the war room, the commander of the Caucasus Army said in his heart, Moscow, endure!
JANUARY 12TH, MOSCOW DEFENSIVE LINE
Major General Felitov of the Taman Division was fully aware that his line could endure at most one more assault.
The enemy’s airstrikes and long-range strikes were slowly growing in intensity, while the Russian air cover was diminishing. The division had few tanks and armed helicopters left; this last stand would be borne on blood and flesh and little else.
The major general, dragging a leg broken by shrapnel, came out of the shelter using a rifle as a crutch. He saw that the new trenches were still shallow, unsurprising given that the majority of the soldiers here had been wounded in some way. But to his astonishment, neat breastworks about a half meter tall stood in front of the trenches.
What material could they have used to build a breastwork so quickly? He saw that a few branch-like shapes stuck out from the snow-covered breastwork. He came closer. They were pale, frozen human arms.
Rage boiled through him. He seized a colonel by the collar. “You bastard! Who told you to use the soldiers’ corpses as building materials?”
“I did,” the divisional chief of staff said evenly behind him. “We entered this new zone too quickly last night, and this is a crop field. We truly had nothing else to build with.”
They looked at each other silently. The chief of staff’s face was covered in rivulets of frozen blood, leaked from the bandage on his forehead.
A time passed. The two of them began to walk slowly along the trenches, along the breastworks made from youth, vitality, life. The general’s left hand held the rifle he used as a crutch; his right hand straightened his helmet, then saluted the breastworks. They were inspecting their troops for the last time.
They passed by a private with both legs blown off. The blood from his leg stumps had mixed with the snow and dirt into a reddish black mud, and the mud was now crusted over with ice. He lay with an anti-tank grenade in his arms. Raising his bloodless face, he grinned at the general. “I’m gonna stuff this into an Abrams’s treads.”
The cold winds stirred up gusts of snow mist, howling like an ancient battle paean.
“If I die first, please use me in this wall too. There’s no better place for me to end, truly,” the general said.
“We won’t be too long apart,” said the chief of staff, with his characteristic calm.
JANUARY 12TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL
STAFF HEADQUARTERS
A staff officer came to inform Marshal Levchenko that the general director of the Russian Space Agency wanted to see him—the matter was urgent, involving Misha and the electronic battle.
Marshal Levchenko started at the sound of his son’s name. He’d already heard that Kalina had been killed in action, but aside from that, he couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with the electronic battle a hundred million miles away. He couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with any part of Earth now.
The general director came in with his people behind him. Without preamble, he gave a three-inch laser disc to Marshal Levchenko. “Marshal, this is the reply we received from the Vechnyy Buran an hour ago. He added afterward that this isn’t a private message, and that he hopes you’ll play it in front of all relevant personnel.”
Everyone in the war room heard the voice from a hundred million kilometers distant. “I’ve learned from the war news updates that if the electromagnetic jamming fails to last for another three to four days, we may lose the war. If this is true, Papa, I can give you that time.
“Before, you always thought that the stars I studied had nothing to do with the ways of the world, and I thought so too. But it looks like we were both wrong.
“I remember telling you that, although a star generates enormous power, it’s fundamentally a relatively elegant and simple system. Take our sun, for example. It’s composed of just the two simplest elements: hydrogen and helium; its behavior is the balance of just the two mechanisms of nuclear fission and gravity. As a result, it’s easier to model its activity mathematically than our Earth. Research on the sun has given us an extremely accurate mathematical model by this time, work to which I’ve contributed. Using this model, we can accurately predict the sun’s behavior. This would allow us to take advantage of a tiny disturbance to rapidly disrupt the equilibrium conditions inside the sun. The method is simple: use the Vechnyy Buran to make a precision strike on the surface of the sun.
“Perhaps you think it no more than tossing a pebble into the sea. But that’s not the case, Papa. This is dropping a grain of sand into an eye.
“From the mathematical model, we know that the sun is in an extremely fine-tuned and sensitive state of energy equilibrium. If correctly placed, a small disturbance will create a chain reaction from the surface to a considerable distance down, spreading to disrupt the local equilibrium. There are recorded precedents: the latest incident was in early August of 1972, when a powerful but highly localized eruption created a massive EMP that heavily affected Earth. Compasses in planes and boats jumped wildly, long-distance wireless communications failed, the sky shone with dazzling red lights in high northern latitudes, electric lights flickered in villages as if they were in the center of a thunderstorm. The reactions continued for more than a week. A well-accepted theory nowadays is that a celestial body even smaller than the Vechnyy Buran collided with the surface of the sun at that time.
“These disruptions on the sun’s surface certainly occurred many times, but most would have happened before humanity invented wireless equipment, and therefore went undetected. In addition, since these collisions were placed by random chance, the disturbances in equilibrium wouldn’t have been optimal in strength and area.
“But the Vechnyy Buran’s impact location has been meticulously calculated, and the disturbance it will create will be orders of magnitude larger than the natural examples mentioned. This time, the sun will blast powerful electromagnetic radiation into space in every frequency, from the highest to the lowest. In addition, the powerful X-ray radiation generated by the sun will collide violently with Earth’s ionosphere, blocking off short-wave radio communications, which are reliant on the layer.
“During the disturbance, the majority of wireless communications outside of the millimeter radio range will fail. The effect will weaken somewhat at night, but during the day, it will even exceed your jamming of the previous two days. Based on calculations, the disturbances will last a week.
“Papa, the two of us always did live in worlds far away from each other’s. We could never interact much with each other. But now our worlds have come together. We’re fighting for the same goal, for which I’m proud. Papa, like all your soldiers, I await your order.”
“Everything Dr. Levchenko said is true,” said the general director. “Last year, we sent a probe to enact a small-scale collision with the sun according to calculations based on the mathematical model. The experiment confirmed the model’s predictions of the disturbance. Dr. Levchenko and his research group even hypothesized that this method could be used to alter Earth’s climate in the future.”
Marshal Levchenko walked into a side room and picked up the red telephone
that was a direct line to the president. A little later, he walked back out.
The historical records give different accounts of this moment: some claim that he spoke immediately, while others recount that for a minute he was silent. But they concur on the words he said.
“Tell Misha to carry out his plan.”
JANUARY 12TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,
ABOARD THE VECHNYY BURAN
The Vechnyy Buran fired all ten fission engines, jets of plasma hundreds of kilometers long erupting from every engine nozzle as it made final corrections to trajectory and orientation.
In front of the Vechnyy Buran was an enormous and lovely solar prominence, a current of superheated hydrogen wheeling upward from the sun’s surface. Like long ribbons of gauze drifting high above the fiery sea of the sun, they shifted and changed like a dreamscape. Their ends anchored to the surface of the sun, forming a gigantic gateway.
The Vechnyy Buran passed slow and stately through the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer-tall triumphal arch. More solar prominences appeared in front, one end attached to the sun, but the other extending into the depths of space. The Vechnyy Buran with its blinking blue engine lights threaded through them like a firefly amid burning trees. Then the blue lights slowly dimmed. The engines stopped. The Vechnyy Buran’s trajectory had been meticulously established; the rest depended on the law of gravity.
As the spaceship entered the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, the black backdrop of space above turned a magenta all-pervading in its radiance. Below was a clear view of the sun’s chromosphere, twinkling with countless needle-shaped structures: discovered in the nineteenth century, they were jets of incandescent gas emanating from the surface of the sun. They made the atmosphere of the sun look like a burning grassland, where each stalk of grass was thousands of kilometers tall. Underneath the burning plain was the sun’s photosphere, a sea of endless fire.
From the last images relayed from the Vechnyy Buran, people saw Misha rise to his feet in front of the giant monitoring screen. He pressed a button to retract the protective cover outside the transparent dome, revealing the magnificent sea of fire before him. He wanted to see the world of his childhood dreams with his own eyes. The view was distorting and rippling; that was the half-meter-thick insulation glass melting. Soon the glass barrier fell in a sheet of transparent liquid. Like someone who had never seen the sea facing the ocean wind in rapture, Misha spread his arms to greet the six-thousand-degree hurricane that roared toward him. In the last seconds of video before the camera and transmission equipment melted, one could see Misha’s body catching alight, a slender torch melding into the sun’s sea of fire….
What sight would have followed could only be conjecture. The Vechnyy Buran’s solar panels and protruding structures would have melted first, surface tension making silver beads of fluid of them on the spaceship’s surface. As the Vechnyy Buran traversed the boundary between the corona and chromosphere, its main body would begin to melt, fully liquefying at a depth of two thousand kilometers into the chromosphere. The beads of liquid metal would cohere into a huge silvery droplet, diving unerringly toward the target its now-melted computers had calculated. The effect of the sun’s atmosphere would become apparent: a pale blue flame would emanate from the droplet, trailing hundreds of meters behind it, its color gradating from the pale blue, to yellow, to a gorgeous orange at the tail.
At last, this lovely phoenix would disappear into the endless sea of flames.
JANUARY 13TH, EARTH
Humanity returned to the world as it had been before Marconi.
As night fell, undulating auroras flooded the sky, even into the equatorial zones.
Facing television screens filled with white noise, most people could only guess and imagine at the situation in that vast land where war raged.
JANUARY 13TH, MOSCOW FRONT LINE
General Baker pushed aside the division commander of the Eighty-second Airborne and the assorted NATO frontline commanders attempting to drag him onto a helicopter. He raised his binoculars to continue surveilling the horizon, where the Russian front was rumbling in advance.
“Calibrate to four thousand meters! Load number-nine ammunition, delayed fuse, fire!”
From the sounds of artillery behind him, Baker could tell that no more than thirty of their 105 mm grenade launchers, last of the defensive heavy artillery, could still fire.
An hour ago, the German tank battalion that had been the last remaining armored-vehicle force in the position had launched an admirably courageous counterattack. They’d achieved outstanding results: eight kilometers away, they’d destroyed half again their number of Russian tanks. But under the crushing disadvantage in numbers, they had disappeared under the Russian army’s roaring torrent of steel like dew under the noon sun.
“Calibrate to thirty-five hundred meters, fire!”
The explosive missiles hissed as they flew, and flung up a barrier of earth and fire in front of the Russian tank lines. But they were like a landslide before a flood, the earth a short-lived impediment against the implacable waters.
Once the earth blasted up by the explosions fell back to the ground, the Russian armored cars reappeared in view through the dense smoke. Baker saw that they were arranged as densely as if they were receiving inspection. Attacking in this formation would have been suicide a few days ago, but now, with almost all of NATO’s aerial and long-distance firepower jammed, it was a perfectly feasible way to concentrate armored-vehicle strength as much as possible, ensuring a break in the enemy line.
Baker had expected that the defensive line would be poorly arranged. Under the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield, it had been effectively impossible to quickly and accurately determine the direction the main enemy assault would take. As to how the defense would proceed, he didn’t know. With the C3I system completely down, quickly adjusting the defensive dispositions would be enormously difficult.
“Calibrate to three thousand meters, fire!”
“General, you were looking for me?” The French commander Lieutenant General Rousselle came over. Beside him were only a French lieutenant colonel and a helicopter pilot. He wasn’t wearing camouflage, and the medals on his chest and general’s stars on his shoulders shone brightly polished, making the steel helmet he wore and the rifle he held seem incongruous.
“I hear that the French Foreign Legion is withdrawing from the fortifications on our left wing.”
“Yes, General.”
“General Rousselle, seven hundred thousand NATO troops are in the process of retreat behind us. Their successful breakthrough of the enemy encirclement depends on our steadfast defense!”
“Depends on your steadfast defense.”
“Care to explain that comment?”
“You have plenty to explain yourself! You hid the real battle situation from us. You knew from the beginning that the Rightist allies would independently negotiate a cease-fire in the east!”
“As the commander in chief of the NATO forces, I had the right to do so. General, I think you’re also clear on the duty placed on you and your troops to follow the orders given.”
A silence.
“Calibrate to twenty-five hundred meters, fire!”
“I only obey the orders of the president of the French Republic.”
“I do not believe you could have received orders to that effect right now.”
“I received them months ago, at the National Day reception at Élysée Palace. The president personally informed me of how the French army should conduct itself under the present conditions.”
Baker finally lost his temper. “You bastards haven’t changed a bit since de Gaulle’s time!”2
“Don’t make it sound so unpleasant. If you won’t leave, I will stay here without my retinue as well. We will fight and die honorably together on the snowy plain. Napoleon lost here too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rousselle said, gesturing with his French-made FAMAS rifle.
A silence.
Baker turned slowly to face the frontline commanders in front of him. “Relay these words to the American soldiers defending these lines: We didn’t start out as an army dependent on computers to fight our battles. We come from an army of farming men. Decades ago, on Okinawa, we fought the Japanese foxhole by foxhole through the jungle. At Khe Sanh, we deflected the North Vietnamese soldiers’ grenades with shovels. Even longer ago, on that cold winter night, our great Washington himself led his barefoot soldiers across the icy Delaware to make history—”
“Calibrate to fifteen hundred meters, fire!”
“I order you, destroy all documents and excess supplies—”
“Calibrate to twelve hundred meters, fire!”
General Baker put on his helmet, strapped on his Kevlar vest, and clipped his 9 mm pistol to his left side. The grenade launchers went silent; the gunners were shoving the grenades into the barrels. Next sounded a mess of explosions.
“Troops,” Baker said, looking at the Russian tanks spread in front of them like the veil of death. “Bayonets up!”
The sun faded in and out of the thick smoke of the battlefield, throwing shifting light and shadow onto the snowy plain as the battle raged.
1 A simplified explanation of the electronic battle vocabulary:
Frequency hopping: The transmitter switches carrier frequencies according to a pattern possessed by the receiver.
Direct-sequence spread spectrum: The signal is distributed across a wide range of frequencies to make eavesdropping and jamming difficult.
