Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  She finds the Captain putting on her jacket, straightening her official rank patch on her chest, the eyes of the tiger shining in the dim light. “Captain—”

  “I know.” Giang’s voice is curt.

  Mankind is but one step away from lawlessness. Only the word of Heaven and of the Everlasting Emperor keeps us from becoming monsters to one another.

  Barely contained panic within Ai Thi—Giang’s appeaser, not hers —hers is silent and watchful, but not surprised.

  “We have to hold,” Captain Giang says. “We need to re-establish harmony and order.” She shakes her head. Again that feeling of rising panic within Ai Thi, the edge of something so strong Giang can barely contain it.

  “Captain –”

  Giang is halfway to the door already. “There’s no time, private. Come.”

  Something is wrong. Not the riot, not the crowd, not what seems like a station-wide panic. Captain Giang wouldn’t lose her head over that. And she’s not currently broadcasting emotions at Ai Thi. Whatever causes that panic is so strong that it’s simply spilling outwards, like the hurt of Ai Thi’s appeaser when Hoa wouldn’t touch them.

  And why hasn’t she mentioned reinforcements? “Captain,” Ai Thi says, again. “We’ll hold, but what about Plum Blossom Company?”

  Giang turns then. For a moment, her composure breaks, and the face she shows to Ai Thi is the white, ashen one of a corpse, a bewildered, lost and hungry ghost. “The dissidents have overwhelmed the Palace of Heaven and Earth, private. The Everlasting Emperor is dead.”

  Dead.

  No.

  The roar in Ai Thi’s ears isn’t the sound of the crowd—it’s a long, desperate scream that scrapes her throat raw, and she can’t tell if it’s coming from her or the appeaser.

  “How can he—” she starts, stops, unable to voice the enormity of it. “How—”

  Giang has pulled herself together again. “I don’t know,” she says. “But that’s not what matters. There are no reinforcements coming, private.”

  Outside, on Ai Thi’s implants, the crowd has trampled the two harmonisers guarding the gates. A press of people is battering at the gates, and it’s only a matter of time until the fragile metal gives way.

  Dead.

  The Empire is as long lasting as the stars in the heavens, as the bonds of filial duty between parents and children.

  The Empire...

  They’ll die, holding the barracks. Die trying to impose harmony on a crowd that’s too large and too big for them to control.

  “Captain, we can’t—”

  “I know we can’t hold.” Giang is at the door: she doesn’t turn around anymore. Ai Thi calls up the inside of the gates on her implants, sees another press: Kim Cuc and Tuyet and Vu and half the harmonisers in the barracks in a loose formation that mixes all squads under the orders of Sergeant Bac and Sergeant Hong, sending wave after wave of appeaser thoughts towards the crowd, trying to calm them down. It’s like throwing stones and hoping to stop the ocean.

  Giang says, “We swore an oath to the Emperor, private. Loyalty unto death.”

  Giang’s appeaser: warmth and contentment within Ai Thi, the satisfaction of duty done to the bitter end. It is the duty of all subjects to give their life...

  Within Ai Thi, her appeaser stirs—brings up, not the Everlasting Emperor’s voice, but Hoa’s compassion-filled gaze, Hoa’s voice, a rock against which the other appeaser’s thoughts shatter.

  You shouldn’t be doing this to yourself.

  “It’s not…” Ai Thi says. She’s surprised at how steady her voice sounds.

  “I beg your pardon?” Giang stops then.

  “It’s not our duty,” Ai Thi says. “That’s not how that saying ends, Captain.”

  He never asks for more than what is necessary, and reasonably borne.

  The Everlasting Emperor is dead. There is nothing that says they have to die, too.

  Ai Thi’s appeaser has fallen silent, knowing exactly what she wants. She feels the thoughts from Giang’s appeaser, dancing on the edge of her mind—duty, loyalty, death, a trembling wall she can barely hold at bay for long.

  Giang moves back into her office, comes to stand before her. “This isn’t a discussion, private. It’s an order.”

  Necessary. Reasonably borne. Ai Thi uncoils, then—even as, within her, the appeaser moves—a psychic onslaught centred around a single, pinpoint thought. Giang grunts, goes down on one knee, eyes rolling up in her face, and Ai Thi’s hand strikes her jugular, taking her down.

  Ai Thi stands, breathing hard, over Giang’s unconscious body—for a moment, at a loss at what she’s done, what she should do —but there is only one thing that she can do, after all. The rioters will come for their families next, and neither Second Aunt nor Dieu Kiem have had any training in combat or eluding pursuers. There’s a risk she’ll lead the crowd straight to them, but it’s offset by what she and the appeaser can bring them. She can help. She has to.

  Ai Thi thinks of the other harmonisers, lined against the doors and waiting for them to cave in. She heads towards the squad room. Within her, rising emptiness, a howling need—how will they survive, with the Everlasting Emperor dead—what does wisdom mean, anymore, if its incarnation is no more—nothing, there is nothing left...

  In the squad room, there’s only Lan, bloodied and out of breath, who smiles grimly at her. “It’s a war zone out there. Fortunately they haven’t found the back door yet, but I don’t know how long we can hold.”

  Ai Thi’s voice comes from very far away—a stranger’s, utterly emotionless—because the alternative would be an endless scream. “The Everlasting Emperor is dead. Captain Giang… says to run. To scatter back to our families. There’s no point in holding. We’ve already lost.”

  They’ve lost everything. They—

  For a long, agonisingly long moment, Lan stares at her—as if she knew, as if she could read straight into Ai Thi’s mind. She smiles again, almost with fondness. “Families. Of course.”

  Her hand rests, lightly, on Ai Thi’s shoulder, squeezes once, twice. “I’ll tell them, though not everyone will listen. But you run, lil sis.”

  And then she’s gone, and it’s just Ai Thi, walking through empty corridors towards the back of the barracks, the roar of the crowd receding into meaninglessness.

  It’s not too late. She can go out of the barracks—go back the way Lan came from—go get her aunt and daughter before the rioters find new targets—she can run, as fiercely, as far away as she can—to the heart of the Quynh Federation if need be. They can make a new life, one that’s no longer in service to the Everlasting Emperor.

  They can—

  The Emperor is dead, and nothing will ever be right again – the appeaser reaching, again and again, for words, remembering that they mean nothing now.

  “Ssh,” Ai Thi says, aloud, to the appeaser. “It’ll be all right. It’s nothing we can’t survive.” And, slowly, gently, sings the lullabies she used to sing to Dieu Kiem when she was a child—again and again as they both run from the shadow of the barracks—again and again until the songs fill the hollow, wordless silence within her.

  COMMAND AND CONTROL

  David D. Levine

  BLOOD SPATTERED THE inside of Amirthi Kandiah’s visor. “Balli kar dena!” she swore, her native Tamil returning under stress... and then she coughed again, a wracking spasm that left more red drops obscuring her heads-up display.

  “What’s wrong?” asked her helmet, in its precise neutral Hindi.

  “Just another damn nosebleed.” She raised the visor and cleaned it, eking out the last use from an already-blood-saturated wipe, then sucked down more water from her canteen before lowering it again. They had drugs for altitude sickness, drugs for headaches, drugs for pain and fatigue and nausea, but the air of the Tibetan Plateau— the chill, bone-dry, oxygen-poor air at nearly four thousand meters —led to coughs, cracked lips, and constant nosebleeds, and drugs couldn’t help with those. It was just physics an
d physiology.

  Bad enough that the Chinese were shooting at them. Even the air here in Lhasa was hostile.

  Kandiah checked her heads-up for any nearby movement, following up with a visual scan of the area, before hunkering down again behind the fragment of wall where she’d been waiting for the last twenty minutes. “Dighe.” Her helmet beeped and opened a connection with Lance Naik Dighe. “Waitin’ on ya.”

  “Almost there, Havildar.” Dighe’s Hindi words through the headset came as a labored gasp—not too surprising, as her helmet cam showed she was moving at a near run over bomb-shattered pavement. Even walking was an effort at this altitude, and she was carrying over fifty kilos of gear. “Had to wait for a patrol to pass.”

  “Roger,” Kandiah replied. The English word roger was a sign of modernity and respect across ranks. Even though Dighe was only a Lance Naik, the lowest rank in the squad, and Kandiah was her Havildar, or sergeant, Kandiah tried to consider herself first-among-equals.

  The local map in her heads-up showed the six other members of Strike Team Makdi already in position. They were moving to surround a Chinese unit camped out in what had once been a tourist mall—dozens of stalls where impoverished Tibetans had sold ‘authentic handicrafts’ under a Chinese-built roof with harsh old-fashioned LED lighting—but was now a fortified base ringed with sandbags and snap wire. Symbolic of the whole thing, really.

  As she waited, Kandiah peered in all directions. Electronic intelligence was imperative on the modern battlefield, but there was nothing like using your own senses. Nothing moved except a scrap of plastic sheeting, whipped by the wind at the broken edge of the wall behind which she crouched. The wind was running fast and cold today, raising a rushing whistle at the edges of her visor; it carried smells of rust and explosives and shattered concrete. From above, on all sides, came the ever-present mosquito whine of drones, beyond that the cough and rattle of tracked vehicles, and far above that the deep authoritative rumble of Indian air support. But the battle right now was on the ground, nasty and personal and house-to-splintered-house.

  Sometimes she fantasized about calling in a teleport strike—dropping a pellet on the base would eliminate it without requiring her or anyone in her squad to risk their lives. But no one, not even Kandiah herself, believed that a single small target like this was worth the billion rupees a teleport strike cost, never mind the political repercussions. So this sort of task fell to ground troops, as it had for centuries.

  Her helmet beeped and highlighted Dighe on the map, the little glowing triangle right where it was supposed to be. “Set to pounce,” Dighe said.

  “Acknowledged.” Kandiah cycled through her squad’s helmet cams and scanned the local and regional intel reports. All was as expected, at least to the degree possible in the middle of a war zone. “Strike Team Makdi, move out.”

  She didn’t have to give any more instruction than that. Her people were good; they knew their parts, and furthermore they could be trusted to make the right decisions when the situation changed, as it inevitably did. That was the whole point of their extensive training, and, again, symbolic of the whole thing... the Chinese troops against whom they were moving, in contrast, had been given only enough training to be effectively micromanaged by their commanders. Which was why the Indians had made it as far as the Tibetan capital, despite being outnumbered and at the end of a hideously long supply chain.

  But the Chinese were dug in, had a big advantage in troop strength, and were more than prepared to keep throwing people at the Indians. The war could still go either way.

  First contact came at the left flank, with Naik Vallabanath surprising a pair of Chinese troops in a sandbagged gun emplacement. Vallabanath succeeded in sneaking around to their less-protected left side before opening fire, bringing one down and sending the other scuttling for cover. Naik Rajadhyaksha, seeing the opening, charged in past the now-silent gun and looped right, taking down another gun crew from behind with a neatly tossed mini-grenade. That created a big hole in the Chinese perimeter, and the other members of the team quickly moved to exploit it. Kandiah, laying down suppressive fire on the right flank, offered a few words of advice, but mostly left her squad to their own devices. They were in a better position to direct themselves than she was, just as she was better placed to command her strike team than the generals behind the lines. It was a kind of fractal, and it worked.

  The map in Kandiah’s visor showed Indian triangles penetrating the perimeter of Chinese circles—those circles more fuzzy or less, indicating the degree of uncertainty in their position—and spreading out within that perimeter to approach the base. Everything was going according to plan, mostly, and with any luck Rajadhyaksha or maybe Sori would soon be close enough to the base to fling a satchel charge and take the whole thing down. For her part, Kandiah kept the Chinese off balance, dashing back and forth outside their right perimeter, harassing them with rifle bullets and flash-bangs while the real attack was proceeding on the left. That was just how it had worked out; if the Chinese positions had been slightly different Kandiah might have wound up taking point herself. She was actually a little disappointed that she had not; she would have liked to be in on the kill.

  And then a big, thick arc of sharp-edged circles suddenly sprang into existence on the map. “Ommala!” she swore.

  The Chinese troops were thick in the space between Rajadhyaksha and the former mini-mall. Electronic intelligence hadn’t spotted them—the Chinese must have really upped their game in sweeping for relays—so they didn’t appear on the map until they came in view of Rajadhyaksha’s cameras. Even as Kandiah watched the number of circles grew. “Raj! Fall back!” she called—unnecessarily, as he was already doing so—even as she charged toward his position, firing smoke grenades in an attempt to cover his retreat.

  But there were too many Chinese. The arc quickly closed on him— the lightly armored, rested Chinese troops advancing faster on their own home ground than Raj could retreat—and a moment later Raj’s camera view went black. “Saale bhadwe!” she cursed, then “Strike Team Makdi, fall back!”

  It was a difficult retreat. Sori, who had been nearly as close to the base as Raj, had to drop his satchel charge—it detonated ineffectively on the ground a hundred meters from anything, spattering the Chinese with small rocks but otherwise doing no damage. But it served as a distraction, and Sori managed to get away. Chatterjee and Kaur were nearly surrounded by swarming Chinese, but were fortunate enough to be within visual range of each other; they coordinated their fire and together they managed to shoot their way out. Even Kandiah herself, far from the action, was surprised by an automated sentry gun she had thought disabled, suffering a painful strike on her shoulder armor before she slapped it down for good. “Rendezvous at checkpoint twenty-six,” she told her squad once they’d all cleared the perimeter, and they fanned out, each retreating on a separate, circuitous path through scouted and prepared ground.

  More than a few pursuing Chinese stepped on Indian mines before they gave up the chase. But there were many, many more behind them, and this was just one base.

  “WE LOST RAJ,” she told Kripanand that night, her low-energy transmission hopping across thousands of relays to disguise its source. Each relay, the size of a sequin, lasted only a few days; drones were constantly scattering more of them across the battlefield. They were supposed to be biodegradable. “There are just too fucking many Chinese.” She spoke in English; Kripanand’s Tamil was nonexistent, and Hindi was only his third best language.

  Kripanand Gurudata sighed. The sound was nearly indistinguishable from the digital noise introduced by the relays and by the satellite link between Tibet and India, but during the four years of their extended and mostly long-distance relationship she’d grown attuned to the little noises he made. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, and they both knew it was inadequate, and they both knew there was nothing more to say. “We are doing all we can here. Not that I can tell you about it.”

  “I know.” Krip
anand was in military R&D, working at a secret facility buried somewhere in the Himalayas.

  “I can tell you that we had a public demo of the G3 today. Went off without a hitch.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Not that it’ll do us much good here.”

  The United States had revealed the existence of weaponized teleportation technology over twenty years earlier, delivering a fifteen-gram osmium pellet to the headquarters of the Islamic Caliphate. On arrival the pellet had intersected with about one milligram of air molecules, transforming their mass instantly into energy: an explosion equivalent in power to twenty tons of TNT. This was far less than an atomic bomb—the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki had been twenty thousand tons—but still an impressive bang, especially given that it could be delivered at the speed of light to any point on Earth that could be located with sufficient precision. For a while this technology had returned the US to superpower status.

  But that requirement of locating the target proved the weapon’s Achilles heel. After first the Pentagon and then the Kremlin were reduced to smoking holes in the ground—once teleportation had been demonstrated, it had not proved difficult for other nations to work out the theory and practice—all major powers began using secrecy, mobility, decoys, camouflage, and other countermeasures to make their key command and control centers impossible to pin down. Cities, of course, could not be hidden, but that applied to all combatants equally, so any such strike would certainly be met with a comparable response. This led to decades of cold war, with international conflict reduced to espionage and border skirmishes under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

  During this time a second-generation teleport technology had been developed, this one capable of swapping an object for an equivalent volume of air at the target location. This eliminated the explosive effect, but the tech still required the power of a city-sized nuclear plant to teleport an object less than ten centimeters on a side, and the payload arrived with a bang that was hard to disguise. It turned out that noisily delivering a small munition or spy device to a particular location, even without warning, was not as much of a game changer as everyone had expected; between drones, artillery, bombers, and ICBMs, that capability pretty much already existed. Apart from a few notable successes and a few even-more-notable failures—errors in targeting tended to spectacularly destroy the transmitting facility —the cold war had continued unabated.