Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

No one answered. The cloying darkness left the officers feeling as if they were at the bottom of a dark sea. It even felt hard to breathe.

“General Andreyev, tell it to us.”

“Like it felt on the battlefield these few days,” the commander of the Fifth Army said, eliciting a wave of quiet laughter from the darkness.

“Everyone else empathizes with him, I think,” said the marshal. “Of course you do! Think of it—nothing but static in your headsets, solid white on your screens, not a clue as to your orders or the battlefield around you. That same feeling! The darkness presses down until you can’t breathe!

“But not everyone feels like that. How are you, Major Bondarenko?” asked Marshal Levchenko.

Major Bondarenko’s voice came from one corner of the room. “It’s not so bad for me. Everything was a blur around me anyway back when the lights were on.”

“Maybe you even feel an advantage?” asked Marshal Levchenko.

“Yes, sir. You may have heard the story of the New York blackout, where blind people led everyone out of the skyscrapers.”

“But General Andreyev’s sentiments are understandable. He’s eagle-eyed, a legendary marksman—when he drinks, he uses his revolver to take the caps off his bottles at ten-odd meters. Wouldn’t it be interesting to picture him having a gun duel with Major Bondarenko at this moment?”

The darkened war room once again sank into silence as the officers considered this.

The lights turned on. Everyone narrowed their eyes, less because of the discomfort of the sudden brightness, and more for the shock of what the marshal had just implied.

Marshal Levchenko stood up. “I think I’ve explained our army’s new electronic-warfare strategy: large-scale, full-spectrum barrage jamming. With regard to EM communications, we’re going to let both sides enjoy a blacked-out battlefield!”

“This will cause our own battlefield command system to completely break down!” someone said fearfully.

“NATO’s will too! If we’re going to be blind, let’s both be blind. If we’re going to be deaf, let’s both be deaf. We can then reach equal footing with the enemy’s electronic-warfare capabilities. This is the central tenet of our new strategy.”

“But what are we supposed to do now, send messengers on motorcycles to transmit orders?”

“If the roads are bad, they’ll have to ride horses,” Marshal Levchenko said. “Our rough prediction shows that this kind of full-spectrum barrage jamming will cover at least seventy percent of NATO’s battlefield communication network, meaning that their C3I system will suffer a complete breakdown. Simultaneously, we’ll be leaving fifty to sixty percent of the enemy’s long-range weapons useless. The best example is with the Tomahawk satellite-guided missile. Missile guidance has changed a lot since last century. Before, it primarily navigated using onboard TERCOM with a small-scale radar altimeter, but now these methods are only used in end-stage guidance, while most of the launch process relies on a GPS system. General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas Corporation thought this change was a big step forward, but the Americans trust their EM wave guidance from space too well. Once we disrupt the GPS transmission, the Tomahawk will be blind. The dependency on GPS exists in most of NATO’s long-range weapons. Under the battlefield conditions we’ve planned, we’ll force the enemy into a traditional battle, allowing us to fully utilize our strengths.”

“I’m still unsure about this,” the commander of the Twelfth Army sent from the eastern front said anxiously. “Under these battlefield communication conditions, I’m not even sure my division can smoothly reach the western front from the east.”

“Of course it will!” said Marshal Levchenko. “The distance was nothing even for Kutuzov, in Napoleon’s time. I don’t believe the Russian army needs wireless to do it today! The Americans should be the ones spoiled rotten by modern equipment, not us. I know that an EM blackout over all the battlefield will put fear in your hearts. But you have to remember, the enemy will feel ten times your fear!”

Watching Kalina disappear among the other camo-clad officers as they exited the war room, Marshal Levchenko felt apprehension rise in his heart. She was returning to the front, and her unit was stationed right in the middle of the enemy’s most concentrated firepower. Yesterday, during his five minutes of communication with his son a hundred million miles away, the marshal had told him that Kalina was perfectly well. But she nearly hadn’t come back from this morning’s battle.

Misha and Kalina had met at one of the military exercises. The marshal had been eating dinner with his son one night, silently as usual, Misha’s late mother looking on from her picture frame. Suddenly, Misha had said, “Papa, I recall that tomorrow is your fifty-first birthday. I should give you a gift. I thought of it when I saw the telescope; that was a wonderful present.”

“How about you give me a few days of your time?”

Son quietly raised his head to look at father.

“You have your own work, and I’m happy for you. But surely it’s not unreasonable for a father to want his son to understand his life’s work! How about you come with me to observe the military exercises?”

Misha smiled and nodded. He smiled very rarely.

It had been the largest Russian war game of the century. Misha showed little interest in the torrent of steel-armored vehicles rumbling past them on the highway that night before it started; the moment he was off the helicopter, he ducked into the tent to assemble the newly arrived battle maps with clear tape in his father’s stead. The next day, Misha didn’t show the slightest interest through all the exercises. Marshal Levchenko had expected that. But one incident gave him all the reassurance he could ever want.

The exercise scheduled for the morning was a tank division assaulting high ground; Misha sat with some local officials on the north side of the observation station. The station was safely out of range, but in order to satisfy the curiosity of the local officials, it had been placed much closer to the action than before.

Tu-22 bombers soared in formation above, heavy aerial bombs fell like rain, and the hilltop exploded into an erupting volcano. Only then did the officials understand the difference between movies and a real battlefield. As the ground quaked and the hill shook, they pressed themselves flat against the table and covered their heads with their arms, some even crawling under the table with shrieks. But the marshal saw that Misha alone sat with his back straight, the same cool expression on his face, calmly watching the terrible volcano as the light of the explosions flashed across his sunglasses. Warmth flooded into Levchenko’s heart then. In the end, son, you have a soldier’s blood in your veins!

That night, father and son walked along the practice field. In the distance, the headlamps of armored vehicles densely sprinkled the valleys and plains with stars. The faint smell of gunpowder smoke still lingered in the air.

“How much did it cost?” Misha asked.

“The direct cost was about three hundred million rubles.”

Misha sighed. “Our task group wanted a third-generation evolving star model to work with. We couldn’t get a grant of three hundred fifty thousand for expenses.”

Marshal Levchenko at last said what he’d long wanted to tell his son. “Our two worlds are too far apart. Your stars are all four light-years away at the least, yes? They don’t have any bearing on the armies and wars on Earth. I can’t claim to know much about what you do, though I’m very proud of you all the same. But as an army man, I just want my son to appreciate my own profession. What father wouldn’t feel the greatest happiness telling his son about his campaigns? But you’ve never cared for my work, when really, it’s the foundation and safeguard for your own. Without an army strong enough and big enough to keep the country safe, fundamental science research like yours would be impossible.”