Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Baker had expected that the defensive line would be poorly arranged. Under the electromagnetic conditions on the battlefield, it had been effectively impossible to quickly and accurately determine the direction the main enemy assault would take. As to how the defense would proceed, he didn’t know. With the C3I system completely down, quickly adjusting the defensive dispositions would be enormously difficult.

“Calibrate to three thousand meters, fire!”

“General, you were looking for me?” The French commander Lieutenant General Rousselle came over. Beside him were only a French lieutenant colonel and a helicopter pilot. He wasn’t wearing camouflage, and the medals on his chest and general’s stars on his shoulders shone brightly polished, making the steel helmet he wore and the rifle he held seem incongruous.

“I hear that the French Foreign Legion is withdrawing from the fortifications on our left wing.”

“Yes, General.”

“General Rousselle, seven hundred thousand NATO troops are in the process of retreat behind us. Their successful breakthrough of the enemy encirclement depends on our steadfast defense!”

“Depends on your steadfast defense.”

“Care to explain that comment?”

“You have plenty to explain yourself! You hid the real battle situation from us. You knew from the beginning that the Rightist allies would independently negotiate a cease-fire in the east!”

“As the commander in chief of the NATO forces, I had the right to do so. General, I think you’re also clear on the duty placed on you and your troops to follow the orders given.”

A silence.

“Calibrate to twenty-five hundred meters, fire!”

“I only obey the orders of the president of the French Republic.”

“I do not believe you could have received orders to that effect right now.”

“I received them months ago, at the National Day reception at Élysée Palace. The president personally informed me of how the French army should conduct itself under the present conditions.”

Baker finally lost his temper. “You bastards haven’t changed a bit since de Gaulle’s time!”2

“Don’t make it sound so unpleasant. If you won’t leave, I will stay here without my retinue as well. We will fight and die honorably together on the snowy plain. Napoleon lost here too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Rousselle said, gesturing with his French-made FAMAS rifle.

A silence.

“Calibrate to two thousand meters, fire!”

Baker turned slowly to face the frontline commanders in front of him. “Relay these words to the American soldiers defending these lines: We didn’t start out as an army dependent on computers to fight our battles. We come from an army of farming men. Decades ago, on Okinawa, we fought the Japanese foxhole by foxhole through the jungle. At Khe Sanh, we deflected the North Vietnamese soldiers’ grenades with shovels. Even longer ago, on that cold winter night, our great Washington himself led his barefoot soldiers across the icy Delaware to make history—”

“Calibrate to fifteen hundred meters, fire!”

“I order you, destroy all documents and excess supplies—”

“Calibrate to twelve hundred meters, fire!”

General Baker put on his helmet, strapped on his Kevlar vest, and clipped his 9 mm pistol to his left side. The grenade launchers went silent; the gunners were shoving the grenades into the barrels. Next sounded a mess of explosions.

“Troops,” Baker said, looking at the Russian tanks spread in front of them like the veil of death. “Bayonets up!”

The sun faded in and out of the thick smoke of the battlefield, throwing shifting light and shadow onto the snowy plain as the battle raged.

1 A simplified explanation of the electronic battle vocabulary:

Frequency hopping: The transmitter switches carrier frequencies according to a pattern possessed by the receiver.

Direct-sequence spread spectrum: The signal is distributed across a wide range of frequencies to make eavesdropping and jamming difficult.

Adaptive nulling system: An antenna array that nulls out signals coming from the direction of enemy jamming, allowing it to communicate with ally antennae in other directions.

Burst transmission: Transmitting data at a high rate over a short period of time using a wider-than-average frequency range.

Frequency agility: The signal is capable of rapidly and continuously changing frequency to avoid jamming.

2 In 1966, General de Gaulle withdrew all French armed forces from the NATO integrated military command, a serious blow to NATO’s Cold War efforts at the time.

FIRST HALF

The Low-Temperature Artist

It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist here. The idea was absurd, but once the oceans had dried, this was how Yan Dong always thought of it. No matter how many years passed by, the scene when the low-temperature artist arrived remained clear in her mind.

At the time, Yan Dong was standing in front of her own ice sculpture, which she’d just completed. Exquisitely carved ice sculptures surrounded her. In the distance, lofty ice structures towered over a snowfield. These sparkling and translucent skyscrapers and castles were steeped in the winter sun. They were short-lived works of art. Soon, this glittering world would become a pool of clear water in the spring breeze. People were sad to see them melt but the process embodied many of life’s ineffable mysteries. This, perhaps, was the real reason why Yan Dong clung dearly to the ice and snow arts.

Yan Dong tore her gaze away from her own work, determined not to look at it again before the judges named the winners. She sighed, then glanced at the sky. It was at this moment that she saw the low-temperature artist for the first time.

Initially, she thought it was a plane dragging a white vapor trail behind it, but the flying object was much faster than a plane. It swept a great arc through the air. The vapor trail, like a giant piece of chalk, drew a hook in the blue sky. The flying object suddenly stopped high in the air right above Yan Dong. The vapor trail gradually disappeared from its tail to its head, as though the flying object were inhaling it back in.

Yan Dong studied the bit of the vapor trail that was the last to disappear. It was flickering oddly, and she decided it had to be from something reflecting the sunlight. She then saw what that it was—a small, ash-gray spheroid. Then quickly realized that the spheroid wasn’t small—it looked small in the distance, but was now expanding rapidly. The spheroid was falling right toward her, it seemed, and from an incredibly high altitude. When the people around her realized, they fled in all directions. Yan Dong also ducked her head and ran, darting in and around the ice sculptures.

An enormous shadow hung over the area, and for a moment, Yan Dong’s blood seemed to freeze. The expected impact never came, though. The artists and judges and festival spectators stopped running. They gazed upward, dumbstruck. She looked up, too. The massive gray spheroid floated a hundred meters over their heads. It wasn’t wholly spheroid, as if the vapor expelled during its high-speed flight had warped its shape. The half in the direction of its flight was smooth, glossy, and round. The other half sprouted a large sheaf of hair, making it look like a comet whose tail had been trimmed. It was massive, well over one hundred meters in diameter, a mountain suspended in midair. Its presence felt oppressive to everyone beneath it.

After the spheroid halted, the air that had driven it charged the ground, sending up a rapidly expanding ring of dirt and snow. It’s said that when people touched something they didn’t expect to be as cold as an ice cube, it’d feel so hot that they’d shout as their hand recoiled. In the instant that the mass of air fell on her, that’s how Yan Dong felt. Even someone from the bitterly cold Northeast would have felt the same way. Fortunately, the air diffused quickly, or else everyone on the ground would have frozen stiff. Even so, practically everyone with exposed skin suffered some frostbite.