So as to guarantee transport, no country dared to risk any of its sea power, and hence during naval battles, the opposing sides’ ships stayed far away from each other, usually beyond the line of sight. Attacks at that distance required technical sophistication, but giant missile attack systems had a very low hit rate in the children’s hands. Few strikes actually hit the target, and only a few transport ships were sunk during the games.
It was the same below the surface. Piloting structurally complicated submarines through the inky depths, relying only on sonar in a cat-and-mouse game with the enemy, was a game that required rich experience and top skills the children could not possibly have attained in such a short time.
As in air combat, submarine battles didn’t work. Not a single torpedo struck its target during the whole games. Moreover, since Antarctica had no submarine base, and constructing one was far more complicated than setting up a bare-bones port for surface ships, all countries were forced to use logistics bases in Argentina or Oceania. Conventional subs were ill-equipped for lengthy activities in the Southern Ocean, and few countries had nuclear attack subs. In the course of the underwater games, just one conventional sub was sunk, and that owed to its own malfunction.
During the Olympic Games period of the Supernova War, most of the fighting was concentrated on land, which saw quite a number of peculiar forms of combat brand new to the history of warfare.
Most terrifying of all were the infantry games. Although all games of this type used light weapons, they saw casualties in far greater numbers.
The biggest infantry games were firearm duels, and were played in the fortifications and assault categories.
Fortification infantry games involved opposing sides firing at each other from fortifications across a separation, and they could last as long as several days. But as the children discovered, firing from fortified positions meant there was very little exposure, which minimized the lethality of ordinary firearms. They would rain bullets at each other in volleys so dense they would collide in midair, and the spent casings piled up to calf height in the firing positions, but in the final analysis, apart from chipping away the outside layer of the enemy’s fortifications, they achieved very little.
And so they switched to scope-equipped precision sniper rifles, which cut ammo expenditure to a thousandth of what it was and boosted combat successes by a factor of ten. Now the game saw the young gunners spending most of their time lying low observing the opposite position, scanning inch by inch for the slightest discrepancy in the stones and patches of snow, and sending over a bullet at any potential firing gaps.
Ahead of the line was empty ground, with no creature stirring across the broad plain as the children hid in their bunkers. The characteristic snap of a sniper rifle and then the zip of a bullet through the air, pop—zip pop—zip, only intensified the chilly quiet of the battlefield, as if somewhere out under the southern lights a lonely ghost were randomly plucking a zither. The children chose a striking name for this game: “Rifle Fishing.”
The most thrilling and savage of the infantry games were the grenade events, which were also subdivided into fortifications and assault categories. In the former, fortifications were constructed before the game began, with the two sides separated by just twenty meters, the distance a child could throw a grenade. Once the game started, the children popped up from their defense works, made their throws, and then ducked back down again to avoid the incoming ones.
Wooden stick grenades were used most often, since they were relatively powerful and could be thrown relatively far; egg-shaped grenades were far less common. The game required high levels of strength and courage, and a particularly strong nerve.
After the start command, grenades flew like hailstones, and even within the fortifications the rapid pace of the violent explosions could spook your soul out of your body, to say nothing of keeping you from jumping up to counterattack. The integrity of the fortification was the decisive factor. If an enemy grenade managed to pierce or tear away part of the roof, then it was all over. The game had one of the highest casualty rates, and the kids dubbed it “Grenade Volleyball.”
The assault subcategory of grenade games had no fortified positions. Opposing sides faced each other across open ground, when they closed to within throwing distance, commenced throwing. Then they threw themselves to the ground or beat a retreat out of the fragmentation area to protect themselves. This game mostly used egg-shaped grenades, since it was easier to carry more of them. Attacking and evading, the two sides invariably intermingled, and everyone then just chucked their grenades at crowded areas. It was nothing short of a nightmarish scene of madness: dense smoke and fire of explosions on the open ground, crowds of kids running and diving and occasionally pulling a grenade from a bag and tossing it up, smoking grenades tumbling about on the ground…. The children called this game “Grenade Football.”
Artillery games acquired fanciful nicknames as well. The five-kilometer howitzer subcategory, in which parties towed their units into position and finished aiming before receiving the start command, whereupon they commenced firing immediately, was known as “Cannon Boxing.” Artillery games with self-propelled mobile batteries had far more variables and were known as “Cannon Basketball.” Mortars, in which opposing sides were only separated by one or two thousand meters, within line of sight, was a thrilling, physically demanding game the children dubbed “Mortar Soccer.”
Contrary to their enticing names, the games saw some of the most brutal forms of combat in history. During the battles, weapons exchanged fire more directly than they ever had before, and the casualties they caused topped the ranks of their particular category of combat. For example, in the tank battles, even the winning side saw at least half its tanks destroyed. Blood flowed in rivers by the end of every game in the War Olympics. As for the little soldiers, they prepared for eternity with every sortie.
This led to the later identification of the fundamental misperception the people of the Common Era had where children were concerned. The Supernova War taught people that children placed less value on life than adults, and thus had a much stronger tolerance for death. If necessary, they could be meaner, colder, and crueler than adults. Later historians and psychologists agreed that were this cruel, crazy form of war set in the Common Era, the unimaginable psychological pressures produced would have pushed all participants into a collective mental breakdown.
True, no small number of children fled on the brink of battle, but mental breakdowns were rare. Later generations were in awe of the grit they displayed on the battlefield, particularly in the baffling heroics of heroes who emerged during battle. During the grenade games, for example, there were children known as “pitchbacks,” who never used their own grenades but picked up the ones thrown by the enemy and tossed them back. Although few managed to survive the games, it still was an honor to be a pitchback. They were described in a popular fighting song: