“Major, you have a doctorate, right?” the lieutenant said as he drove.
“Where do you know me from?”
“I’ve seen you with Marshal Levchenko’s son.”
After a silence, the lieutenant said, “Right now, his son is farther from the war than anyone else in the world.”
“What are you implying? You know that—”
“Nothing, I was just saying,” the lieutenant said neutrally. Neither of them had their mind on the conversation. They were still lingering on that last thread of hope.
Of the entire battlefront, this might be the only breach.
Misha was experiencing the solitude of a lone inhabitant in an empty city.
The Vechnyy Buran really was the size of a small city. The modular space station had a volume equivalent to two supercarriers and could sustain five thousand residents in space at a time. When the complex was under centripetal force simulating gravity, it even contained a pool and a small flowing river. Compared to other space work environments of the day, it smacked of unparalleled extravagance. But in reality, the Vechnyy Buran was the product of the thrifty reasoning the Russian space program had demonstrated since Mir. The thinking behind its design went that, although combining all the functionality needed to explore the entire solar system into one structure might require a huge initial investment, it would prove absolutely economical in the long run. Western media jokingly called Vechnyy Buran the Swiss Army knife of space: It could serve as a space station orbiting at any height from Earth; it could relocate easily to moon orbit, or make exploratory flights to the other planets. Vechnyy Buran had already flown to Venus and Mars and probed the asteroid belt. With its huge capacity, it was like shipping an entire research center into space. In the field of space research, it had an advantage over the legion but dainty Western spaceships.
The war had broken out just as Vechnyy Buran was preparing for the three-year expedition to Jupiter. At that time, its over one hundred crew members, most of them air force officers, had left for Earth, leaving only Misha. The Vechnyy Buran had revealed a flaw: Militarily, it presented too big a target while possessing no defensive abilities. Failing to foresee the progressive militarization of space had been a mistake on the part of the designer.
Vechnyy Buran could only take avoidance measures. It couldn’t depart for farther space, with numerous unmanned NATO satellites patrolling Jupiter’s orbital path. They were small, but whether armed or unarmed, any one could pose a deadly threat to the Vechnyy Buran.
The only option was to draw near the sun. The automatic active-cooling heat-shielding system that was the pride of the Vechnyy Buran allowed it to go closer to the sun than any other man-made object yet. Now the Vechnyy Buran had reached Mercury’s orbital path, five million kilometers from the sun and one hundred million kilometers from Earth.
Most of the Vechnyy Buran’s hold had been closed off, but the area left to Misha was still astonishingly enormous. Through the broad, clear dome ceiling, the sun looked three times larger than it looked on Earth. He could clearly see the sunspots and the singularly beautiful solar prominences emerging from the purple corona; sometimes, he could even see the granules formed by convection in the surface. The serenity here was an illusion. Outside, the sun pitched a raging storm of particles and electromagnetic radiation, and the Vechnyy Buran was just a tiny seed in a turbulent ocean.
A gossamer-thin thread of EM waves connected Misha to the Earth, and brought the troubles of that distant world to him as well. He had just been informed that the command center near Moscow had been destroyed by a cruise missile, and that the Vechnyy Buran’s control had passed to the secondary command center at Samara. He received the latest news of the war from Earth at five-hour intervals; at those times, each time, he would think of his father.
Marshal Mikhail Semyonovich Levchenko felt as if he were face-to-face with a wall, though in reality, a holographic map of the Moscow theater of war lay in front of him. Conversely, when he turned toward the big paper map hanging on the wall, he could see breadth and depth, a sense of space.
No matter what, he preferred traditional maps. He didn’t know how many times he’d sought a location on the very bottom of the map, forcing him and his strategists to get on hands and knees; the thought now made him smile a little. He also remembered spending the eve of military exercises in his battlefield tent, piecing together the newly received battle maps with clear tape. He always made a mess of it, but his son had done the taping neater than he ever did, that first time he came along to watch the exercises….
Finding that his musings had returned to the subject of his son, the marshal vigilantly cut off his train of thought.
He and the commander of the Western Military District were the only people in the war room, the latter chain-smoking cigarettes as they watched the shifting clouds of smoke above the holographic map, their gaze as intent as if it were the grim battlefield itself.
The district commander said: “NATO has seventy-five divisions along the Smolensk front now. The battlefront is a hundred kilometers long. They’ve breached the line at multiple points.”
“And the eastern front?” Marshal Levchenko asked.
“Most of our Eleventh Army defected to the Rightists too, as you know. The Rightist army is now twenty-four divisions strong, but their assaults on Yaroslavl remain exploratory in nature.”
The earth shook with the faint vibrations of some ground explosion. The lights hanging from the ceiling cast swaying shadows around the war room.
“There’s talk now of retreating to Moscow and using the barricades and fortifications for a street-to-street battle, like seventy-odd years ago.”
“That’s absurd! If we withdraw from the western front, NATO can swing north around us to join forces with the Rightists at Tver. Moscow would fall into panic without them lifting a finger. We have three options in our playbook right now: counterattack, counterattack, and counterattack.”
The district commander sighed, looking wordlessly at the map.
Marshal Levchenko continued, “I know the western front isn’t strong enough. I plan to relocate an army from the eastern front to strengthen it.”
“What? But it’s already going to be a challenge to defend Yaroslavl.”
Marshal Levchenko chuckled. “Nowadays, the problem with many commanders is their tendency to only consider a problem from the military angle. They can’t see beyond the grim tactical situation. Looking at the current situation, do you think the Rightists lack the strength to take Yaroslavl?”
“I don’t think so. The Fourteenth Army is an elite force with a high concentration of armored vehicles and low-altitude attack power. For them to advance less than fifteen kilometers a day while not having suffered serious setbacks seems like taking things slow on purpose.”
“That’s right, they’re watching and waiting. They’re watching the western front! And if we can take back the initiative in the western front, they’ll keep on watching and waiting. They might even independently negotiate a cease-fire.”