Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Donaldson shook his head, confused.

“March eighth, 1965, at nine A.M. It was the scene awaiting the first American marine forces landing at China Beach, the start of the Vietnam War.”

Donaldson felt as if he’d been plunged into ice. His momentary calm vanished; his breathing sped and his voice started to shake. “No, Major, don’t do this to us! We’ve hardly killed anyone, they’re the ones who do all the killing,” he said, pointing out the window to the helicopters hovering in midair. “Those pilots there, and the computer missile guidance gentlemen in the mother ships out in space. But they’re all good people too. All their targets are just colored icons on their screen. They press a button or click a mouse, wait a bit, and the icon goes away. They’re all civilized folks. They don’t enjoy hurting people or anything, honest, they’re not evil —are you listening?”

The major nodded, smiling. Who ever said that the god of death would be ugly and terrible?

“I have a girlfriend. She’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. She’s beautiful like you, honest, and she attended the anti-war rally…” I should have listened to her, Donaldson thought. “Are you listening to me? Say something! Please, say something.”

The major gave her foe one last radiant smile. “Captain, I do my duty.”

A unit from the reinforcing Russian 104th Motorized Infantry Division was half a kilometer from the Flood operation station. They first heard a low explosion and saw the little storehouse in the broad, empty fields disappear in a cloud of white mist. Immediately after, a terrible cacophony a hundred times louder shook the ground. An enormous fireball emerged where the storehouse had been, the flames embroiled in black smoke rising high, transforming into a towering mushroom cloud, like a flower of lifeblood blooming in the expanse between heaven and earth.

“I know what you want. Don’t waste words, spit it out!” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Caucasus Army.

“I want the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield for the last two days to last another four days.”

“Surely you’re aware that seventy percent of our battlefield jamming teams have been destroyed? I can’t even give you another four hours!”

“In that case, our army won’t be able to arrive in position on time. NATO airstrikes have greatly slowed the rate at which our forces can assemble.”

“In that case, you might as well put a bullet in your head. The enemy is approaching Moscow. They’ve reached the position Guderian held seventy years ago.”

As he exited the war room, the commander of the Caucasus Army said in his heart, Moscow, endure!

Major General Felitov of the Taman Division was fully aware that his line could endure at most one more assault.

The enemy’s airstrikes and long-range strikes were slowly growing in intensity, while the Russian air cover was diminishing. The division had few tanks and armed helicopters left; this last stand would be borne on blood and flesh and little else.

The major general, dragging a leg broken by shrapnel, came out of the shelter using a rifle as a crutch. He saw that the new trenches were still shallow, unsurprising given that the majority of the soldiers here had been wounded in some way. But to his astonishment, neat breastworks about a half meter tall stood in front of the trenches.

What material could they have used to build a breastwork so quickly? He saw that a few branch-like shapes stuck out from the snow-covered breastwork. He came closer. They were pale, frozen human arms.

Rage boiled through him. He seized a colonel by the collar. “You bastard! Who told you to use the soldiers’ corpses as building materials?”

“I did,” the divisional chief of staff said evenly behind him. “We entered this new zone too quickly last night, and this is a crop field. We truly had nothing else to build with.”

They looked at each other silently. The chief of staff’s face was covered in rivulets of frozen blood, leaked from the bandage on his forehead.

A time passed. The two of them began to walk slowly along the trenches, along the breastworks made from youth, vitality, life. The general’s left hand held the rifle he used as a crutch; his right hand straightened his helmet, then saluted the breastworks. They were inspecting their troops for the last time.

They passed by a private with both legs blown off. The blood from his leg stumps had mixed with the snow and dirt into a reddish black mud, and the mud was now crusted over with ice. He lay with an anti-tank grenade in his arms. Raising his bloodless face, he grinned at the general. “I’m gonna stuff this into an Abrams’s treads.”

The cold winds stirred up gusts of snow mist, howling like an ancient battle paean.

“If I die first, please use me in this wall too. There’s no better place for me to end, truly,” the general said.

“We won’t be too long apart,” said the chief of staff, with his characteristic calm.

A staff officer came to inform Marshal Levchenko that the general director of the Russian Space Agency wanted to see him—the matter was urgent, involving Misha and the electronic battle.

Marshal Levchenko started at the sound of his son’s name. He’d already heard that Kalina had been killed in action, but aside from that, he couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with the electronic battle a hundred million miles away. He couldn’t imagine what Misha had to do with any part of Earth now.

The general director came in with his people behind him. Without preamble, he gave a three-inch laser disc to Marshal Levchenko. “Marshal, this is the reply we received from the Vechnyy Buran an hour ago. He added afterward that this isn’t a private message, and that he hopes you’ll play it in front of all relevant personnel.”

Everyone in the war room heard the voice from a hundred million kilometers distant. “I’ve learned from the war news updates that if the electromagnetic jamming fails to last for another three to four days, we may lose the war. If this is true, Papa, I can give you that time.

“Before, you always thought that the stars I studied had nothing to do with the ways of the world, and I thought so too. But it looks like we were both wrong.

“I remember telling you that, although a star generates enormous power, it’s fundamentally a relatively elegant and simple system. Take our sun, for example. It’s composed of just the two simplest elements: hydrogen and helium; its behavior is the balance of just the two mechanisms of nuclear fission and gravity. As a result, it’s easier to model its activity mathematically than our Earth. Research on the sun has given us an extremely accurate mathematical model by this time, work to which I’ve contributed. Using this model, we can accurately predict the sun’s behavior. This would allow us to take advantage of a tiny disturbance to rapidly disrupt the equilibrium conditions inside the sun. The method is simple: use the Vechnyy Buran to make a precision strike on the surface of the sun.

“Perhaps you think it no more than tossing a pebble into the sea. But that’s not the case, Papa. This is dropping a grain of sand into an eye.

“From the mathematical model, we know that the sun is in an extremely fine-tuned and sensitive state of energy equilibrium. If correctly placed, a small disturbance will create a chain reaction from the surface to a considerable distance down, spreading to disrupt the local equilibrium. There are recorded precedents: the latest incident was in early August of 1972, when a powerful but highly localized eruption created a massive EMP that heavily affected Earth. Compasses in planes and boats jumped wildly, long-distance wireless communications failed, the sky shone with dazzling red lights in high northern latitudes, electric lights flickered in villages as if they were in the center of a thunderstorm. The reactions continued for more than a week. A well-accepted theory nowadays is that a celestial body even smaller than the Vechnyy Buran collided with the surface of the sun at that time.