Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“What we’re dealing with amounts to a grain of sand in the cosmos. It ought to be easy,” the UK prime minister said, looking up at the stars.

The other leaders voiced their assent.

“So then, do we all agree to extend the present session of the UN?” the secretary general asked hopefully.

“This will of course require contacting our respective governments, but I believe that won’t be a problem,” the US president said with a smile.

“Then, my friends, today is a day to remember,” the secretary general said, unable to hide his delight. “So let’s join once more in song.”

“Ode to Joy” started up again.

Speeding away from the sun at the speed of light, the mirror knew it would never return. In more than a billion years as a musician it had never held a repeat performance, just as a human shepherd will never toss the same stone twice. As it flew, it listened to the echoes of “Ode to Joy,” and a barely perceptible ripple appeared on its smooth mirror surface.

“Oh, that’s a good song.”

1 The French musician’s 1992 performance in China was the first by a major foreign pianist, and he has remained the most recognized classical musician in the decades since.

2 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is known as the Fate Symphony in Chinese.

3 “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller.

Dedicated with deep respect to the people of Russia, whose literature has influenced me all my life.

On the subject of selecting a method of electromagnetic jamming for the battlefield, this manual recommends the use of selective frequency-targeted jamming rather than engaging in barrage jamming over a wide range of simultaneous frequencies, as the latter will interfere with friendly electromagnetic communication and electronic support as well.

The fallen city had already disappeared from view. The front line had retreated forty kilometers in the span of a single night.

Under the light of the early-morning sky, the snowy plain appeared a cold, dim blue. In the distance, black columns of smoke rose from destroyed targets. There was almost no wind; the smoke ascended straight and high, like thin strands of black gauze tying heaven to earth. As Kalina’s gaze followed the smoke upward, she started: the brightening sky was clogged with a vast, dense bramble of white, as if a demented giant had covered the sky in agitated scrawls. They were the tangled fighter plane contrails left by the Russian and NATO air forces in their fierce night battle for control over the airspace.

The aerial and long-range precision strikes had continued throughout the night, too. To a casual observer, the bombardment wouldn’t have seemed particularly concentrated. The explosions sounded seconds, even minutes apart. But Kalina knew that nearly every explosion had signified some important target hit, sparking punctuation marks in the black pages of the previous night. By dawn, Kalina wasn’t sure how much strength was left in the defensive lines, or even whether the defensive lines had survived at all. It seemed as if she were the last one standing against the onslaught.

Major Kalina’s electronic-resistance platoon had been hit by six laser-guided missiles around midnight. She’d survived by pure luck. The BMP-2 armored tank carrying the radio-jamming equipment was still burning; the other electronic-warfare vehicles in the battery were now piles of blackened metal scattered around her. Residual heat was dissipating from the bomb crater Kalina was in, leaving her feeling the cold. She pushed herself to a sitting position with her hands. Her right hand touched something sticky and clammy. Covered in black ash, it looked like a lump of mud. She suddenly realized it was a piece of flesh. She didn’t know what body part it came from, much less whose. A first lieutenant, two second lieutenants, and eight privates had died in last night’s attack. Kalina vomited, though nothing came out but stomach acid. She shoved her hands in the snow, trying to wipe away the blood, but the smears of blackish red quickly congealed in the cold, as stark as before.

The suffocating stillness of the last half hour signified that a new round of ground assault was about to begin. Kalina turned up the volume dial on the walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder, but heard only static. Suddenly, a few blurry sentences emerged through the receiver, like birds flitting through thick fog.

“…Observation Station Six reporting! Position 1437 at twelve o’clock sees thirty-seven M1A2s averaging sixty meters apart, forty-one Bradley IFVs five hundred meters behind the M1A2s’ vanguard; twenty-four M1A2s and eight Leclercs currently flanking Position 1633, already past the border of 1437. Positions 1437, 1633, and 1752, prepare to engage the enemy!”

Kalina forced back shivers from cold and fear, so that the horizon line steadied in her binoculars. She saw blurry masses of snow spray, edging the horizon with fuzzy trim.

That was when Kalina heard the rumble of engines behind her. A row of Russian tanks passed her position as they charged the enemy, more T-90 tanks leaving the highway behind them. Kalina heard a different rumble: enemy helicopters were appearing in the sky ahead in neat array, a black lattice in the ghastly white sky of dawn. The exhaust pipes of the tanks around Kalina kicked into action with low splutters, cloaking the battleground in white fog. Through its crevices she could also see Russian helicopters passing low overhead.

The tanks’ 120 mm guns stormed and thundered, and the white fog became a wildly flashing pink light display. Almost simultaneously, the first enemy shells fell, the pink light replaced by the blue-white lightning of their explosion. Kalina, lying on her stomach at the bottom of the bomb crater, felt the ground reverberate with the intense percussion like a drumhead. Nearby dirt and rock flew into the air and landed all over her back. Amid the explosions, she could dimly hear the whinny of anti-tank missiles. Kalina felt as if her viscera were tearing apart in the cacophony, and all the universe, the pieces falling toward an endless abyss—

Just as her mind teetered on the breaking point, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only thirty seconds.

When the smoke cleared, Kalina saw that the snowy ground in front of her was scattered with destroyed Russian tanks, heaps of raging flames crowned with black smoke. She looked farther; even without binoculars, she could see a similar swath of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance, appearing as black smoking specks on the snow. But more enemy tanks were rushing past the wreckage, wreathed in the snow spray churned up by their treads. Now and then the Abramses’ ferocious broad wedge heads emerged from the spray like snapping turtles launching themselves out of the waves, their smooth-bore muzzles flashing sporadically like eyes. Just above, the helicopters were still embroiled in their melee. Kalina saw an Apache explode in midair not far away. A Mi-28 wobbled low overhead, trailing fuel from a leak. It hit the ground a few dozen meters away and exploded into a fireball. Short-range air-to-air missiles slashed countless parallel white lines low in the air—

Kalina heard a bang behind her. She turned; not far away, a damaged and badly smoking T-90 dropped its rear hatch. No one got out, but she could see a hand hanging down from it. Kalina leapt from the bomb crater and rushed to the back of the tank. She grabbed hold of the hand and pulled. An explosion rumbled inside the tank. A blast of blazing air forced Kalina back several steps. Her hand held something soft and very hot: a piece of skin pulled loose from the tank crew member’s hand, cooked through. Kalina raised her head and saw flames burst from the hatch. Through it, she could see that the tank interior was already an inferno in miniature. Among the flames, dimly red and transparent, she could clearly see the silhouette of the unmoving crewman, rippling as if in water.