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.”
“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.
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.
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.