The tell-tale on his wrist has started to blink urgently red: return to secure area immediately. A warning that does him no good at all.
A block of ice forms in his lungs. It is suddenly impossible for him to breathe. He doesn’t dare go back, it would lead the Bears right into his post.
There is no way he can warn his unit, but if he doesn’t return they will know, and take measures. Either way, it is too late for him.
The smell of blood has vanished, but the acid smell of spent powder etches his nostrils, fills the entire world. Slowly, slowly, he turns and starts to walk, then run. Crosswise and downhill; in a whole loop away from his bunker, away from safety, away from hope.
6.
In the ruins of Worcester, the triumphant Russian troops are coming up Belmont Street from Boston. The resistance waits for them. Rorvik’s unit has managed to find a gas station that was shelled to rubble early in the war, its buried storage tanks are almost untouched. They have filled a dumpster with gasoline, poured in five dozen bags of nitrate liberated from an old greenhouse supply, and then melted in styrofoam to make it gel. At the bottom of the dumpster is a pound of black powder, with a detonator made from a lightbulb filament.
The dumpster is hidden inside the bricked-up front of an abandoned apartment block, just another forgotten piece of debris in a city full of rubble.
Russian air cover is too complete and the computer triangulation and jamming too swift for Rorvik’s unit to trust a radio link, even with encrypted relays. They lost two men learning that lesson. Rorvik was odd man out on the coin toss. He has found a concealed niche, across the street from the bomb, and waits, nervous, sweat dripping down his back. Through a tiny hole drilled in the wall, he watches the enemy as it walks, crawls, rolls up the street on jointed steel legs and armor-plated wheels.
Wondering if he will be able to get away, after.
Now.
The explosion is huge, an orgasm in orange and black and glorious rolling thunder. The blast picks up one of the ceramic-armored high-mobility one-man tanks and flips it against the wall. It struggles to right itself, but the move is pointless. As planned, the blast has undermined the stone facade of the building, and a slow-motion avalanche of Fitchburg granite rumbles down over the column. Five tanks and about a dozen mechanicals are swept up in the river of boiling stone, then tossed aside and buried by rubble.
The Russian commander is sharp, and in control. Before the dust has started to settle, Rorvik hears the amplified voice booming out in clipped Russian. “They left a man behind to detonate it! Find him! Squadron A, left side of the street! B, right!”
He should have scrambled the instant he pressed the button, not stayed to see what he accomplished. He could hide forever from ordinary eyes, but to infrared sensors the plume of his breath must glow like a beacon. He has only moments. He dashes through the streets, and can hear the clatter of armored soldiers entering the street behind him.
He dodges down an alley, hoping to stay out of sight of the sky for a few more moments, and only after he enters it sees that the shelling has completely blocked it with rubble. It is too late to run back the way he came; troops are too close behind him. He spots a window into the basement of a dime store, and miraculously the iron grille over the window has been shaken loose, but the glass is still intact. He smashes the glass with a piece of asphalt and drops into the darkness.
He lands awkwardly, bruising his leg. In a few minutes his eyes adjust to the dimness. The basement is empty save for rubbish; the cement floor damp and glistening. Across from the window a stairway once rose to the main level. It is now just a pile of splintered wood. The door hangs above empty space, and through bullet holes he can see sky.
This, then, will be his last stand. There is nowhere left to run.
Turning, he sees the shadow of an articulated leg fall across the empty window. He limps away from the window, crouches against the wall and pulls out his automatic. The remote stops, hesitates by the window while the operator queries for directions, and then a lens pokes in through the window.
It swivels left, the wrong way. Rorvik aims, but holds his fire, waiting for a better shot. The body of the remote starts to press in through the window at the same time the camera pans right, and an instant before it fixes on him, Rorvik fires.
His shot is aimed at one of the vulnerable hydraulic lines, and the spray of hot fluid tells him he damaged it. Before he can shoot again, two more shatter the door above. He hears the shot an instant after he feels it hit him in the chest. The second shot, an instant later, he never hears: the one that blows apart his skull.
7.
Then he awoke. The memory of being drafted was fresh in his mind, as it always was when he awoke from a long sleep. All that had been long ago. He’d been captured; the US had fallen. He was, like many others, in a reeducation camp. Since he’d been drafted, not volunteered, the camp bureaucracy had considered him a victim of the imperialist aggressors, rather than a war criminal. That fact had earned him a chance at reeducation, instead of the bullet in the back of the head that had awaited most of his fellow soldiers.
As he stood in the line for the “voluntary” evening reeducation lecture, a man behind him put a hand on his shoulder and whispered.
“Resistance meeting tonight. Strike a blow for freedom!”
How crazy were they? Didn’t they know that the Bears had stoolies and paid informants everywhere? Hey, he could even earn brownie points—maybe even a chance to see Angela and Lissy—by passing along what he’d heard.
The lecture was about economics and simulation war. Very little of the war, he discovered, had actually been fought; most of it had been simulation. Both sides’ tactical computers could model the outcome of every battle, and the side that would have lost would always withdraw without actually fighting.
In theory.
“What the capitalist computers failed to take into account,” said the lecturer, a tall Hispanic man with a Stalin moustache and a habit of nervously looking over his shoulder, “was that the loyal soldiers of the Hegemony have the force of history with them. Citizens of a democracy are by nature unable to act in harmony. Knowing that history is invincible, the soldiers of the Hegemony are unswerving. Purity of ideology gives them strength. How could the computers of an obsolete political system calculate this? Only with the data from actual battles, showing the staggering battlefield superiority of Hegemony troops. Victory of the Hegemony was inevitable. Even now, with algorithms bolstered with actual battle data, the computers of the aggressor capitalist governments have correctly calculated their inevitable defeat. The capitalist government has surrendered unconditionally to the provisional government, and asked all its soldiers to lay down arms. Resistance of any sort is treason, and will be dealt with as such.”
Rorvik listened to it sleeping with his eyes open, automatically noting phrases to parrot back in the group reeducation sessions the next morning. Attending the lecture would earn him points, maybe a second piece of toast at breakfast the next time supplies came to the camp.
Later, after the official lecture, the lecturer—who had been a high-school history teacher before the war—casually gathered interested parties for the second talk, this one quite unofficial. The Americans had a clandestine school system of their own in the camps, and whenever the Russkies’ lecturers gave any information from the disputed territories or talked on how the resistance was going, they tried to sort out the kernel of truth from the shell of propaganda. The resistance was still alive, they said, and the Russians were having a tough time trying to govern the territory they had captured. If they could hold out, frustrate their captors at every turn, soon the alleycats would . . .
“Resistance” was a forbidden word, and anyone caught using it could be shot without hesitation. The slang for the day was to call the remnants of the armed forces who had escaped capture “alleycats.”
But nothing changed, and if there really were alleycats, he’d heard plenty of talk but
seen no real signs of them in the camp. Until now.
As the man spoke, barely loud enough to hear, Rorvik’s attention drifted. The talk was about the necessity for computer models to be grounded in data, something Rorvik had no need to be taught again. His mind was running on another track. He couldn’t actually remember being captured, and suddenly that had struck him as odd. Surely that was an important moment in his life; he ought to have vivid memories, or at least some recollection of how it had happened. He must have blacked out, that was it. The time he had been wounded, bleeding to death in the rubble . . . but no, he hadn’t been captured then, he remembered it vividly, remembered the artillery, remembered dying.
No, that was impossible, he had survived, joined the resistance, set off the bomb and been chased into . . . no, that couldn’t be. He had died then, too. There was something wrong with his memory. Had he hallucinated it? But it had been real, he was sure of it, as real as the barbed wire and concrete surrounding him.
One of the other men in the camp, Povelli, brushed past him on the way to the latrine. Rorvik looked up, and Povelli, without looking at him, bent over, untied his shoe, and then carefully retied it. “Wait a few minutes, then get up and make like you gotta go to the crapper,” Povelli said softly. Rorvik glanced around. No one was paying attention to them. “Past the crapper, you know the tool shed? Ten minutes. Whistle once when you approach.”
Rorvik nodded slightly, as if agreeing with something the professor said, and Povelli finished tying his shoe and got up.
The lecture was breaking up anyway; it was dangerous to gather in groups of more than two or three for very long. Rorvik stretched and looked around. Nobody was paying particular attention to him. He strolled toward the latrine.
Before he got halfway to the meeting, just outside the prefab, Khokhlov stopped him. They had two reeducation counselors to assist them in learning correct political thought. Khokhlov was the nicer of the two, and spoke British-accented English with a bare trace of guttural Slavic vowels.
He offered Rorvik a cigarette. The Russians all smoked heavily. Rorvik accepted it, but only puffed on it enough to show that he appreciated the courtesy.
“You have come very far in your thinking, Mr. Rorvik,” Khokhlov said. “I believe you are one of my best students.”
Rorvik nodded and gave him a wide smile. “Thank you. I have been doing my best.”
“Are you dissatisfied at all?” Khokhlov waved his hand. “Of course, I know that food here is not as plentiful as it could be. I assure you that we all are under the same conditions, even guards.”
Rorvik wondered what Khokhlov could be after. Did he know about the meeting? “No, no—everything is fine,” he said. He knew quite as well as Khokhlov that complaining was a sure sign of regressive thinking. “Really.”
“Perhaps we could chat a bit?” said Khokhlov. He took Rorvik by the arm. “I have been very disturbed by something I heard, my friend. One of the people I have been chatting with—you won’t object if I don’t mention his name?—said that he believed you were sympathetic to the resistance. I, of course, told him this could not be correct, but he quite insisted on the point.”
“No, no,” Rorvik said hastily. “Absolutely not. I steer clear of them, let me assure you.”
Khokhlov looked interested. “Really? Then you know who they are?”
He wanted to kick himself for speaking without thinking, but tried to keep his expression innocent and candid. “Well, no—that is, not really. I’ve heard rumors, of course—”
“I am quite interested in rumors.”
“It wouldn’t be fair—”
Khokhlov cut him off. “I am judge of fairness in this camp, Mr. Rorvik. Please, we are not barbarians here. Let me give you my assurance that I am here to help people adjust to scientific society, not to punish them for retrograde-thinking. If you are hearing rumors, I should be aware of them. If people are spreading tales—gossips, this is correct word?—spreading the gossips without foundation, I should know this, in order to better guide people to correct-thinking. Please, do not hesitate to speak completely candidly with me.”
Rorvik smiled ingratiatingly, trying to assume the puppy-dog expression of a convert to correct-thinking. “I don’t know any specific names.”
“I am afraid that you are not being completely open with me, Mr. Rorvik,” Khokhlov said, his face expressing deep sorrow mixed with sternness, the expression of a teacher with a willfully disobedient pupil. “Perhaps I have been overly hasty in evaluating your progress toward objective political thought. You are aware, I am sure, that this camp is quite the luxury dacha. You are guests here, not prisoners. In other places food is not quite so plentiful, and discipline is a bit more . . . severe. Please, I beg of you, tell me some names.” He smiled. “I do believe that we could . . . work together.”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
Khokhlov frowned. “I am not stupid, Mr. Rorvik. Let me point something out to you. I know that there are resistance sympathizers in this camp, and I know something is going on. I can feel it in the air, and I also have my . . . sources. I suspect that you know what is going on. Now, consider. We have been talking for quite the while. Ten minutes? Don’t think we haven’t been noticed. Now, what are these resistance sympathizers to think, as they watch us talk? Even if you assure them you told me nothing, how can they trust you? Talk to me, and I will see to your safety—I have my means in this camp, I assure you—or else . . .” He shook his head. “It is not me you should be afraid of. You are tagged for being a pigeon whether you talk or not.”
Khokhlov was right, he realized. Even though he hadn’t joined the resistance, he knew too much. Had there been any way he could have avoided talking to Khokhlov? No; the reeducation counselors were all-powerful within the boundary of the camps. Even the guards feared them, and a prisoner who deliberately refused to talk when asked politely could expect to be denounced, or even shot. But it was the wrong night to be talking to him. He wouldn’t survive the night without Khokhlov’s protection.
His muscles were knotted up, and he had to force himself to breathe normally. He knew the feeling intimately; it was the feeling of having hostile, invisible eyes watching from the sky, the feeling of being a target for inevitable death.
But just what, really, did he have to live for? If he talked, other people would die. It wasn’t fair—he’d never even joined the camp resistance!—but he understood war very well by now. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
The muscles in his neck didn’t loosen, but he realized that he could breathe again.
“I am, too, Mr. Rorvik.” Khokhlov waited for one more moment, then shook his head and strode briskly away, as if he wanted to have nothing more to do with Rorvik, abandoning him to his fate. “I am, too.”
Rorvik knew that his one chance was to find Povelli—or somebody, anybody with a line to the resistance—and try to explain. There was a bare possibility that they might take a chance on him, if he went to them immediately, showing he had nothing to hide.
He didn’t move.
There was something wrong. He desperately needed to find somewhere to think. There was nowhere; standing here by the barbed wire was as good as anywhere.
He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. Where the hell was he?
In a camp.
Was he?
The memory of the draft was still fresh in his mind. His biceps still ached from the pushups that Driscott had made him do, back when he was still a FNG, what, two years ago?
That was impossible.
He had died. Unambiguously, totally. Shot in the chest, shot in the head, blown to pieces by artillery.
That was impossible, too.
Simulations. That was the key. He remembered that from his civilian days, as the superpowers of Europe and Japan and America jockeyed and maneuvered for position, watching their simulations of what would happen in every possible attack scenario, each waiting until they found one where they’d have
the advantage. Much of battle was mathematical, a matter of strategy and tactics, faceless forces fighting other faceless forces.
But in some situations, the people mattered. They would need to know how real troops react in battle before they could believe the computer models. God, Driscott had told him that, right out; Driscott had told him everything, and he had been too dumb to understand.
He opened his eyes, and tried to disbelieve what he saw. There was no camp; no war. When he’d been drafted, there had been no war. How long ago was that? A few days? A month? It was ridiculous to think that the Russians would invade the United States; what would they get out of it? The whole war made no sense, not unless it was a scenario, an elaborate set-up to probe how soldiers would act in wartime.
He even knew the technology; it wasn’t that much more sophisticated than what he had used to run his drones, except that the resolution would be higher. Was higher.
It looked real. There would be micro-lasers somewhere, mastering the image directly onto his retina. If the resolution was high enough, there would be no possible way to tell the difference between real and simulated. He would be drugged, strapped into a contour-couch somewhere, maybe in Washington? Paralytic drugs certainly, to keep his motions from causing problems, while SQUID pickups read the nerve impulses to his muscles. Maybe hypnotics to make him suggestible, make it easier for him to mistake the simulation for reality.
He pinched himself, then punched his arm as hard as he could. It hurt, but that proved nothing. That could be simulated.
There must be other real people in the simulation, too. Who? Westermaker? Driscott? Who was real, and who simulated? Westermaker, he thought. She had to be real. Somewhere she was still alive. Someday she would go back to her husband, back to her kids. In a few days she would be wondering if he had been real or a simulation. And an incident that had been innocent and decent would turn into a pornographic sideshow for some Washington desk-jockeys.
Future War Page 21
