Infinity Wars

by Jonathan Strahan

  Kripanand had been working on G3—Generation Three teleport technology—since before he and Kandiah had met, though he had not been able to tell her about it until recently. Even now, he could share only the broad outlines: the tech could deliver ‘a person-sized payload’ without harming either the payload or the target. “Does ‘person-sized payload,’” she had asked him, “include an actual living person?”

  “No comment,” was all he had replied. But the length of the pause before replying, and the smile she could practically hear in his voice, had been all the confirmation she had needed that her guess was correct.

  But the problem of targeting still existed. The major targets were too well hidden, and the minor targets didn’t justify the use of such an expensive and disruptive weapon. Yes, you could now put a soldier, or a spy, anywhere you wanted—but the arrival was still far from subtle, and if you didn’t know exactly where he or she would land, you might blow up both the soldier and the transmitter. Transmitting to a locating beacon avoided that problem, but if you could put a locator on a spot, you could probably place a person there by conventional means.

  So warfare at Kandiah’s level continued pretty much as it had for over a century: boots, bullets, and grenades, with a few technological tweaks. And, just as it had been for centuries before that, the side with the greater numbers had an advantage. Not an insurmountable advantage, to be sure, but an advantage nonetheless.

  Their conversation continued for a while longer, but eventually it ended as it always did, with him telling her “I love you” in Tamil, and her replying “I love you too” in Marathi. It was nearly the only phrase each of them knew in the other’s childhood language.

  Kandiah folded up her phone, kissed it, then turned off her lantern. Tomorrow would be another day.

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned clear, cold, and windy; dust storms seemed likely. After a quick cold breakfast Kandiah blew her nose—disgusted at the mixture of snot and dried blood that came out—and conferred with her squad and her superiors. They soon came to an agreement that a gun emplacement on Chagpori Hill, which defended the main army’s most straightforward path to central Lhasa, was their best target for the day. Strike Team Makdi would coordinate with Strike Team Lomri to take it out.

  The squad’s comms were uncharacteristically quiet as they deflated their tents and began hiking toward the objective. They were all still somber, angry, and thoughtful at the loss of Raj, but now even more determined to complete the liberation of the Tibetan people from their long Chinese domination—not to mention gaining India access to Tibet’s impressive reserves of copper, uranium, lithium, and graphite.

  Soon they came in sight of Chagpori Hill, and rising beyond it Marpori Hill, topped by the impressive Potala Palace. This vast complex of white and red stone, containing over a thousand rooms, rose nearly untouched above the bomb-blasted buildings of central Lhasa. The residence of generations of Dalai Lamas, it was a world heritage site; not even the Americans would deliberately attack such a place. Seeing it shining in the coppery light of the rising sun gave Kandiah hope for the future.

  But then she turned her head to the right, and zoomed in her camera on Chagpori, soon locating the gun emplacement: a house-sized blocky plinth of concrete, with narrow horizontal slits facing the road beneath. “There’s our target,” she said to her squad and Lomri. Without further discussion they fanned out, Makdi to the left and Lomri to the right, as they’d planned that morning. Kandiah’s breath came harder and heavier as she began to climb, and her squad’s breathing hissed in her ears as well, but no one complained. They had a job to do.

  After yesterday’s debacle, Kandiah kept a sharp eye out for Chinese troops who had slipped through the Indian relay net. But they encountered no one as they climbed, and soon her squad was set for their attack. Makdi’s job would be to assault the objective frontally, drawing the emplacement’s defenders out; Lomri would climb past the target and strike from above and behind. “In place,” she sent to Lomri’s Havildar.

  “Roger,” he replied. “Give us five more minutes.” His voice was more peppered than usual with digital artifacts, indicating that few relays were in range. This made Kandiah still more nervous, and she raised a camouflaged periscope camera for a detailed visual scan of the area. Still no sign of any defenders.

  Her helmet beeped. “We’re set,” said Lomri’s Havildar.

  “Acknowledged,” Kandiah replied, then “Makdi.” Another beep as her squad was added to the link. “Strike Team Makdi, Strike Team Lomri, prepare to attack on my mark.” She took a deep breath of the cold, thin air... and coughed, spattering her visor with flecks of blood. “Ommala,” she hacked, then forced another breath. “Three,” she gasped. “Two. One. Mark!”

  Automatic weapons fire burst out from all sides, much of it only chipping the emplacement’s thick concrete. But her squad’s aim was good, and many bullets found their way into the slits. Flashes came from the darkness within, and shouts in alarmed Chinese. Kandiah grinned fiercely and kept firing.

  And then a pair of sally ports burst open at the emplacement’s base, dozens of Chinese troops swarming out with their own rifles blazing. This was the reaction the Indians had anticipated, even desired, but the sheer number of defenders and their heedless aggression was unexpected and alarming. Kandiah hunkered down behind a rock and returned fire, but for every defender she felled it seemed that two more emerged from the armored doors behind them. “Lomri!” she called as she continued firing. “Request immediate assistance!”

  “Sorry, Makdi,” came the reply, even more torn by interference than before. Gunshots were audible as well. “We are pinned down at the moment.”

  “Baagad bullya!” she swore. Another beep drew her attention to the map, where a swarm of fuzzy circles was climbing the hill below her position. Her squad was minutes away from being surrounded. “Makdi! Retreat to the west!” The terrain in that direction was rough, a mixed blessing; there were few defenders there, but Makdi would also find it slow going.

  Moving in a crouch, still firing, Kandiah scrambled to her left, shifting from rock to bush to bullet-riddled Buddha statue as the Chinese troops pressed in from above and drew closer below. Her breath grew ragged and painful from the cold thin air, and she tasted blood. Comms fell nearly silent except for the sound of automatic weapons; all her people were focused on survival.

  Then the path to the west ended suddenly, as Kandiah found herself and her squad wedged at the top of a rocky three-meter cliff. “Makdi!” she called. “Dig in and return fire!”

  For a seemingly endless half-hour they hammered the Chinese with everything they had—automatic weapons, antipersonnel bombs, mini-grenades, even sidearms. Makdi’s elevated position and the rocky ground gave them an advantage, and the carnage was appalling; the foliage beneath their cliff was soon shredded and red with blood. But the Chinese troops kept coming.

  “I’m getting low on ammo, Havildar,” said Vallabanath, and Sori and Kaur echoed this.

  “Acknowledged,” Kandiah replied. There was nothing else to say. She kept firing, trying to make every shot count.

  “I’m out!” said Sori. His helmet cam changed to a view of a rough rock wall as he ducked down behind it. Then he drew his combat knife. Even in the tiny display Kandiah could see the blade tremble.

  Kandiah gritted her teeth and threw her last mini-grenade, watching it arc over palm trees toward a dense group of Chinese.

  But the explosion came sooner than expected and was far bigger than any mini-grenade—it was the huge red bloom of an antipersonnel bomb, even though Kandiah was sure her squad had none remaining. Screams in Chinese and the sound of charred fragments peppering the foliage followed. “Sorry for the delay, Makdi,” came the voice of Lomri’s Havildar. Then a second AP bomb detonated to the left of the first, and a third to the right, opening a huge hole in the Chinese forces.

  “Makdi!” Kandiah called. “Through that hole, double time!”

  They rushed through
the hole and down the hill in a mad half-run, half-tumble. Chinese bullets pinged off Kandiah’s helmet and armor, but more AP bombs from Lomri put a stop to that.

  As they descended the hill toward Indian-controlled territory the circles on the map grew fewer and sharper, and it became easier to avoid them. Soon Kandiah called her squad to a ragged halt under the canopy of a car charging station that was still mostly whole. They were safe, at least for the moment.

  Gasping, hands on knees, Kandiah looked around at her people.

  There were only five of them, plus herself.

  Sori hadn’t made it.

  Damn it.

  The survivors looked like hell, their armor scarred and pockmarked and their faces wrecked with exhaustion. Her own face in Vallabanath’s camera was frightening—its whole lower half smeared with blood from her nose. She pushed back her visor and cleaned her face with her hands, as best she could, then wiped her hands on her thighs. But all that did was make everything filthier.

  She wiped and wiped, but the blood on her hands wouldn’t come clean.

  Blood on her hands.

  How many Chinese had she killed today? Dozens? Hundreds? They had just kept coming!

  There had been no choice. She would have died otherwise. But she couldn’t help but think of Sori, and Raj, and the holes their losses had torn in her heart. Every one of those Chinese had been someone’s squad mate, someone’s son or daughter. The pain this war was causing to both sides was... incalculable.

  They were not her enemies. Their government was.

  And their government, which had thrown them by the double handful into the meat grinder of Makdi and Lomri’s weaponry, was their enemy too.

  “Havildar?” It was Kaur. Her helmet was off and her filthy face showed concern. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m... I’m fine.” She wiped her nose with a hand and sniffed back blood and snot and... yes, dammit, tears. “I’m fine.”

  She was not fine. This was not how she was supposed to be feeling—it was contrary to all her training. She was traumatized— shell-shocked and exhausted and demoralized. She needed immediate counseling.

  She was also, still, responsible for her squad.

  “Anyone need medical attention?” she said, raising her head and firming her spine.

  “I think I do...”

  Everyone’s heads turned to the new voice.

  Sori.

  He had just arrived under the canopy. Staggering, helmetless, clutching his dangling right arm with a blood-soaked left hand—it looked like a bullet had found the weak spot in his armor’s right elbow—but still alive.

  His knife, Kandiah noted as the squad rushed to prop him up, was missing. But he’d made it out.

  She wouldn’t let this happen again.

  Chatterjee gave Sori a quick medical once-over, shook her head, and gave him a shot for the pain. “Havildar!” Sori said with urgency even as his eyes began to flutter closed, “I got something for you.” He gestured left-handed to the pouch at his waist, from which Kandiah drew a battered, bloodstained rectangle.

  It was a Chinese military tablet, with a green light blinking in the corner.

  “Great work, soldier.” She gripped his shoulder, hard enough for him to feel through the armor, and he smiled and went under.

  THEY RIGGED UP a travois to get Sori back to camp. There they cleaned up, licked their wounds, and debriefed. Kandiah wanted to understand the engagement from all her people’s perspective before reporting to her superiors. Everything had gone according to plan... except that the Chinese had been far more numerous, and far more determined, than their intel had led them to expect.

  After Chatterjee, the last to report, left Kandiah’s tent—Sori was stable, but would need evac ASAP—Kandiah pulled out the Chinese tablet and looked it over.

  She had considerable latitude in dealing with captured electronics. Standard operating procedure was to send it up the line, where people with specialized resources and training would extract as much information as possible. But if the situation was urgent, she was permitted to investigate on her own initiative—keeping in mind that such investigation could destroy intelligence that might be ferreted out by a more skilled operator at headquarters.

  But she wanted to know what secrets the device held now.

  Her finger hesitated over the power button.

  And then the tablet trilled and the screen lit up, taking the decision from her.

  The face on the screen was familiar—astonishingly so.

  It was General Fu Jiaoyang.

  No question it was her, with the scar and the gold headset and the famous piercing eyes that, even on a crappy little scarred screen, seemed to penetrate Kandiah’s visor, bore right through her skull, and keep going out the back of her helmet.

  General Fu was the Chinese Army’s Rommel, or Patton—a larger-than-life force of nature who combined strategic brilliance, ruthless efficiency, charismatic personality, and gigantic ego. She had taken most of the credit for China’s successful campaign in Laos... deservedly so, in the opinion of Kandiah’s instructors. But she was also known as a hot-tempered martinet who micromanaged her subordinates—symbolized by the ever-present command headset which was her personal trademark and which, according to rumor, she’d had permanently grafted into her left ear. Her management style served her well within the Chinese tradition of central control and respect for authority, but was viewed by the Indian military as a potential weakness.

  And now here she was, live and direct, glaring at Kandiah when she’d probably expected some low-level field commander. Hazily visible in the background was something complex, red and gold and green. It didn’t look military.

  General Fu was not stupid. Her eyes narrowed, the screen blanked, and immediately the tablet in Kandiah’s hand grew too hot to touch. “Magi!” she cursed, and flung the thing out her tent flap. A moment later came a sizzling bang. “Anyone hurt?” she called.

  “No, sir,” came the reply. “What was that?”

  “Actionable intel, I hope.” She massaged her stinging fingers and refocused her attention on her visor. “Did you record that?”

  “Yes,” said her helmet. Video of the brief encounter appeared in a window.

  “Analysis.”

  The general’s face was outlined. “General Fu Jiaoyang of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, Kandiah didn’t bother saying. “What’s that in the background?”

  The tablet’s screen froze, then zoomed out to fill the window. The general’s face vanished, replaced by an extrapolation of what had been behind her... fuzzy at first, then quickly resolving into focus. The object that had caught Kandiah’s attention was a dragon—an ornate gold dragon with a green head and a huge red horn on its nose, coiled around a pillar. Definitely not military.

  “Where is that?”

  “Just a moment.”

  Kandiah’s fingers drummed on her knee. “Come on, come on, come on,” she muttered under her breath.

  Suddenly another window opened—the same dragon pillar, and another matching one, and between them three elaborately-ornamented Buddhist figures. It looked like an image from a tourism website. “Lokeshvara sandalwood statues,” the helmet said, “at Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet.”

  Kandiah’s heart thudded beneath her armor. General Fu was here, on the ground in Lhasa, no doubt micromanaging the Chinese defenses with her usual ruthless brilliance. This was new, and explained their unexpected recent changes in tactics. And, defying numerous treaties, she’d set up her headquarters in a world heritage site.

  Prying her out of there would be hard. But now Kandiah knew where she was.

  “Gotcha, motherfucker,” she said in English. It was a quote from an action movie.

  “WE WILL NOT attack the Palace,” said Lieutenant Singh, Kandiah’s commander. “And you are expressly prohibited from doing so yourself.”

  “But it’s General Fu! You know how she w
orks! She will already have eliminated a whole layer of command structure in favor of directly commanding the field officers. Take her out, and the whole defense will collapse!”

  “And if we destroy one of the most holy sites of Tibetan Buddhism in the process, the whole rationale of our liberation offensive will collapse!”

  “You don’t have to destroy it! You can drop a pellet on her!”

  “Absolutely not! For one thing, even a one-milligram teleport strike would certainly damage irreplaceable religious artifacts, and might destabilize the entire structure. For another thing, we would have to locate her precisely within the complex.”

  “But we know from the imagery exactly where she is!”

  “Where she was. That was hours ago, and don’t think she doesn’t realize how much can be extrapolated from a single image. She might not even be in the Palace any more.” They glared at each other across the noisy video link, both breathing hard. “I appreciate your initiative, Havildar Kandiah,” he said at last, “but you have sustained casualties, you are low on morale and materiel, and your own judgment may be impaired. I am afraid I must ask you to stand down.” His expression softened, becoming avuncular. “Look, you need to evacuate Naik Sori anyway. Take the whole squad back to Xigaze for some R&R. You’ve earned it.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. To come so close to complete victory and let it be... just snatched away? “Is that an order, sir?”