by Cixin Liu
The major returned, cutting short the general’s woolgathering. Baker accepted the dentures on the paper towel, put them in, and after a few seconds, looked at the major in astonishment. “How did you do that?”
“Sir, your dentures were buzzing because of electromagnetic resonance.”
Baker stared at the major in clear disbelief.
“Sir, it’s true! Maybe you’ve been exposed to strong EM waves before, for example near radar equipment, but the frequency of those waves must have been different from your dentures’ resonant frequency. But now, the air is filled with powerful EM waves at all frequencies, which caused this condition. I’ve modified the dentures to make their resonant frequency much higher. They’re still vibrating, but you can’t feel it anymore.”
After the major left, General Baker’s gaze fell onto the clock standing beside the digital battle map. Its base was a sculpture of Hannibal riding an elephant, engraved with the caption EVER VICTORIOUS. The clock had originally inhabited the Blue Room of the White House; when the president saw his gaze straying again and again in its direction, he’d personally picked up the clock from its century-old resting place and gifted it to him.
“God save America, General. You’re God to us now!”
Baker pondered for a long time, then slowly said, “Tell all forces to halt the offensive. Use all our available airpower to find and destroy the source of the Russian jamming.”
JANUARY 8TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL STAFF HEADQUARTERS
“The enemy has disengaged, but you don’t seem happy,” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Western Military District, newly returned from the front line.
“I don’t have reason to be happy. NATO has concentrated all their airpower on destroying our jamming units. It’s really proving an effective countertactic.”
“It’s no more than we expected,” Marshal Levchenko said evenly. “Our strategy would catch the enemy unprepared at first, but they’d come up with a way to counter eventually. Barrage-type jammers emitting strong EM waves at all frequencies wouldn’t be hard to find and destroy. But fortunately, we’ve managed to stall for a considerable length of time. All our hopes now rest on the reinforcement armies’ swift arrival.”
“The situation might be worse than we predicted,” said the district commander. “We might not be able to give the Caucasus Army enough time to move into position before we lose the upper hand in the electronic battle.”
After the district commander had left, Marshal Levchenko turned to the digital map display of the frontline terrain and thought of Kalina, right now under the enemy’s massed fire, and as a result thought again of Misha.
That one day, Misha had returned home with his face bruised blue and purple. Marshal Levchenko had heard the gossip already: his son, the only anti-war factionist at the college, had been beaten up by students.
“I only said that we shouldn’t speak of war lightly,” Misha explained to his father. “Is it really impossible to reach a reasonable peace with the West?”
The marshal replied, his tone harsher than it had ever been toward his son, “You know your position. You can choose to stay silent, but you will not say things like that in the future.”
Misha nodded.
Once they were through the door that night, Levchenko told Misha, “The Russian Communist Party has taken office.”
Misha looked at his father. “Let’s eat,” he said, without inflection.
Later, the West declared the new Russian government unlawful. Tupolev assembled an extreme rightist alliance and instigated civil war. Marshal Levchenko didn’t need to tell any of it to Misha. Every night, father and son silently ate dinner together as usual. Then one day, Misha received his order from the spaceflight base, packed his things, and left. Two days later, he boarded a spaceplane for the Vechnyy Buran, waiting in near-Earth orbit.
All-out war broke out a week later, an invasion by an unprecedentedly powerful enemy, from an unexpected direction, aiming to dismember Russia piece by piece.
JANUARY 9TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT, THE VECHNYY BURAN PASSES MERCURY
Due to the Vechnyy Buran’s high velocity, it couldn’t settle into orbit around Mercury, only sweep past the sunward side. This was the first time humanity observed Mercury’s surface at close range with the naked eye.
Misha saw cliffs two kilometers tall, winding hundreds of kilometers through plains covered with huge craters. He saw the Caloris Basin, too, thirteen hundred kilometers across, termed “Weird Terrain” by planetary geologists. The weird part came from the similar-sized basin exactly opposite it on the other side of Mercury. It was hypothesized that a huge meteor had struck Mercury, and that the powerful shock waves had passed right through the planet, simultaneously creating nearly identical basins in both hemispheres. Misha found new, thrilling things, too. The surface of Mercury was covered in shiny speckles, he saw. When he used the screen to zoom in, the realization took his breath away.
Those were lakes of mercury on Mercury, each with a surface area of thousands of square kilometers.
Misha imagined standing by the lake banks in the long Mercury days, in the 1,800-degree-Celsius heat: what a sight it would be. Even in a tempest, the mercury would lie calm and still. And Mercury didn’t have an atmosphere, or wind. The surface of the lakes would be like mirrored plains, faithfully reflecting the light of the sun and Milky Way.
Once the Vechnyy Buran passed by Mercury, it was to continue approaching the sun until its insulation reached the absolute limit of what the fusion-powered active-cooling system could sustain. The sun’s heat was its best protection; none of NATO’s spacecraft could enter the inferno.
Gazing at the vastness of space, thinking of the war on his mother planet a hundred million kilometers away, Misha once again sighed at the shortsightedness of humanity.
JANUARY 10TH, SMOLENSK FRONT LINE
As she watched the gradual encroachment of the enemy’s skirmish line, Kalina understood why her location alone had survived where the surrounding sources of jamming had been destroyed one by one. The enemy wanted to capture a Flood unit intact.
The helicopter squadron, three Comanches and four Blackhawks, had easily located this control unit. Due to Flood’s massive EM radiation emissions, it could only be remotely operated via fiber-optic cable. The enemy had followed the cable to Kalina’s control station three kilometers from the Flood unit, a lone abandoned storehouse.
The four Blackhawks, carrying more than forty enemy infantry, had landed less than two hundred meters from the storehouse. At the time they arrived, there had still been a captain and a staff sergeant in the station with Kalina. Hearing the sound of an engine, the sergeant had gone to open the door; a sniper aboard the helicopter immediately shot off the top of his skull. Enemy fire was careful and restrained after that, fearful of damaging the precious equipment inside the storehouse, allowing Kalina and the captain to hold their ground for a while.
Now, to Kalina’s left, the captain’s submachine gun that had sounded her only comfort went silent. She saw the captain’s unmoving body behind the tree stump he’d used for cover, a circle of bright red blood blooming in the snow around him.
Kalina was in front of the storehouse, behind the crude cover of a few piled sandbags. Eight submachine-gun cartridge clips lay at her feet, and the hot gun barrel hissed in the snow atop the sandbags. Every time Kalina opened fire, the enemy opposite her would crouch down, the bullets splattering snow in front of them, while the enemy on the other side of the semicircular encirclement would spring up and push a little closer. Now Kalina only had three cartridge clips left. She began to fire single shots, but this tactic only announced to the enemy that she was running out of ammunition. They began to push forward more boldly. The next time Kalina reloaded, she heard a sharp squeaking sound from the thick snow on top of the sandbags. Something flew out and struck her on the right, hard. There wasn’t any pain, just a rapidly spreading numbness, and the heat of blood running down her right flank. She
endured, firing the remnants of this clip wildly. When she reached for the last clip on the sandbags, a bullet cut through her forearm. The clip fell to the ground. Her forearm, connected by a last strip of skin, dangled in the air. Kalina got up and went for the storehouse door, a thin trail of blood following her steps. When she pulled open the door, another bullet pierced her left shoulder.
* * *
Captain Rhett Donaldson’s SEAL team approached the storehouse cautiously. Donaldson and two marines stepped over the Russian sergeant’s body, kicked open the door, and rushed in. They found a single young officer inside.
She was sitting beside their target, Flood’s remote control equipment. One broken forearm hung uselessly from the control desk, the other hand was clenched in her hair. Her blood dripped down steadily, forming little puddles at her feet. She smiled at the American intruders and the row of gun barrels pointing at her, a greeting of sorts.
Donaldson exhaled, but wouldn’t get the chance to inhale: he saw her turn her good hand from her hair to a dark green ovoid object resting on the remote control equipment. She picked it up, dangling it in midair. Donaldson instantly recognized it as a gas bomb, sized small for use on armed helicopters. It was triggered by a laser proximity signal and would explode twice at half a meter aboveground, first to disperse a gaseous explosive, second to trigger the vapor. He couldn’t escape its range now if he were an arrow in flight.
He extended a placating hand. “Calm down, Major, calm down. Let’s not get too hasty here.” He gestured around him, and the marines lowered their guns. “Listen, things aren’t as serious as you might think. You’ll get the finest medical care. You’ll be sent to the best hospitals in Germany and return in the first POW exchange.”
The major smiled at him again, which encouraged him somewhat. “You don’t have to do something so barbaric. This is a civilized war, you know. It would go like clockwork, I could tell already when we crossed the Russian border twenty days ago. Most of your firepower had been destroyed by then. That remaining little scatter of gunfire was just the perfect confetti to greet this glorious expedition. Everything will go like clockwork, you see? There’s no need—”
“I know of an even more beautiful beginning,” the major said in unaccented English. Her soft voice could have come from heaven, could have made flames extinguish and iron yield. “On a lovely beach, with palm trees, and welcome banners hanging overhead. There were beautiful girls with long, waist-length hair and silk trousers that rustled as they moved among the young soldiers and adorned them with red-and-pink leis, smiling shyly at the gawking boys.… Do you know of this landing?”
Donaldson shook his head, confused.
“March eighth, 1965, at nine A.M. It was the scene awaiting the first American marine forces landing at China Beach, the start of the Vietnam War.”
Donaldson felt as if he’d been plunged into ice. His momentary calm vanished; his breathing sped and his voice started to shake. “No, Major, don’t do this to us! We’ve hardly killed anyone, they’re the ones who do all the killing,” he said, pointing out the window to the helicopters hovering in midair. “Those pilots there, and the computer missile guidance gentlemen in the mother ships out in space. But they’re all good people too. All their targets are just colored icons on their screen. They press a button or click a mouse, wait a bit, and the icon goes away. They’re all civilized folks. They don’t enjoy hurting people or anything, honest, they’re not evil—are you listening?”
The major nodded, smiling. Who ever said that the god of death would be ugly and terrible?
“I have a girlfriend. She’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. She’s beautiful like you, honest, and she attended the anti-war rally…” I should have listened to her, Donaldson thought. “Are you listening to me? Say something! Please, say something.”
The major gave her foe one last radiant smile. “Captain, I do my duty.”
A unit from the reinforcing Russian 104th Motorized Infantry Division was half a kilometer from the Flood operation station. They first heard a low explosion and saw the little storehouse in the broad, empty fields disappear in a cloud of white mist. Immediately after, a terrible cacophony a hundred times louder shook the ground. An enormous fireball emerged where the storehouse had been, the flames embroiled in black smoke rising high, transforming into a towering mushroom cloud, like a flower of lifeblood blooming in the expanse between heaven and earth.
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 k
illed 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.
