Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

Her unborn child grew day by day, as did her body weight, not solely because of her pregnancy, but because, like everyone older than thirteen, the symptoms of the supernova sickness were becoming increasingly obvious. She had a perpetual low-grade fever, her temples throbbed, her body was soft as mud from head to toe, and it was getting harder to move. Even though her fetus was developing well as a healthy little being unaffected by supernova sickness, she still wondered whether her own worsening condition would allow her to carry him to term.

Before being admitted to the hospital, she visited her students Jin Yunhui and Zhao Yuzhong as she’d promised.

Jin Yunhui was now training to be a fighter pilot at an air base a hundred kilometers outside of the city. At the start of the runway, she found him among a group of flight-suited children next to a few air force officers, enveloped in an atmosphere of nervous fear. They were looking at the sky ahead of them, and with enormous effort she was able to make out a silvery dot in that direction. Yunhui told her it was a fighter jet that had stalled at five thousand meters. The J-8 interceptor in a tailspin plummeted like a stone. They watched it pass two thousand meters, the optimum altitude for a parachute, but the expected chute didn’t appear. Was it an ejector failure? Or did the pilot miss the button? Or was he still trying to rescue the plane? These questions would never be answered. The officers set down their binoculars and watched with naked eyes the falling plane glittering in the midday sun before it vanished behind a distant ridge. Then they saw the rising fireball wreathed in smoke over the hillside, and heard the heavy sound of an explosion.

The senior colonel commander stood off to one side looking mutely at the distant column of smoke, still as a stone carving, as if the air had frozen around him. Yunhui whispered to Zheng Chen that the jet’s pilot had been his thirteen-year-old son.

After a long while, the political commissar broke the silence. Striving to keep his tears from flowing, he said, “I’ve said it before. Children can’t pilot high-performance fighters! They don’t measure up in any area: reaction time, bodily strength, or psychology. And letting them solo after just twenty hours in the air, and putting them in J-8s after thirty more? You’re just toying with their lives!”

“We’d be toying with them if we didn’t have them fly,” the commander said as he rejoined the group. His voice remained heavy. “As you all know, the kids over there have put two thousand hours in F-15s and Mirages. If we keep tiptoeing around, my son’s not the only one who’s going to die.”

“8311 on deck!” called another colonel. This was Jin Yunhui’s father, and he was calling his son’s number.

Yunhui picked up his helmet and flight bag. The pressurized suits had been hurriedly prepared for the children and fit them well, but the helmets were for adults and looked oversized. The handgun at his waist seemed too big and heavy, too. When he passed his father, the colonel saluted him.

“Weather conditions are poor today, so keep an eye out for crosscurrents. If you stall, first thing to do is to keep calm, and then determine the direction of your spin. Then extricate yourself using the steps we’ve been over again and again. Remember: above all else, keep calm!”

Yunhui nodded. Zheng Chen saw his father’s grip relax, but he still held on, as if something about his son held him there. Yunhui gently shrugged his shoulders to ease off his father’s hand, and then ran off to the J-10 multirole fighter. He didn’t look back at his father before climbing into the cockpit, but flashed Zheng Chen a smile.

She stayed at the base for more than an hour, watching the tiny silver dot leave a snow-white trail across the blue sky, and listening to the dull thunder of the engines, until Yunhui’s fighter had safely returned to earth. She was hardly able to believe that it was one of her students flying through the air.

She visited Zhao Yuzhong last, out in a field on the plains of Hebei. The winter wheat was planted, and the two of them sat in the warmth of the sun on warm, soft ground, like a mother’s embrace. Then the sunlight was blocked, and they looked up into the face of the old farmer, Yuzhong’s grandfather.

“Kid, the land’s generous. You put in the effort, and it’ll repay you. The land’s the most honest thing I’ve met in all my years, and it’s been worth every effort I’ve put into it.”

Looking out over the sown field, Zheng Chen let out a sigh. She knew that her own life was nearing completion and she could depart without worries. She wanted to enjoy her final moments, but threads of attachment kept her tied up. At first, she thought the attachment was to the child inside her, but she soon realized that the threads led three hundred miles away to Beijing, where in the beating heart of the country, eight children were enrolled in the toughest course in human history, studying things they could not possibly hope to learn.

“This is the territory you’ll be defending,” the chief of the general staff department said to Lü Gang, pointing to a map of the country. The map filled an entire wall of the room. It was the largest map Lü Gang had ever seen.

“And this is the world we’re in.” The chief pointed to a similarly sized world map.

“Sir, let me have a gun!”

The chief shook his head. “Kid, the day you have to fire on the enemy yourself is the day the country is lost. Let’s get to class.” As he spoke, he turned toward the map and passed a hand upward from Beijing. “In a moment we’re going to fly this distance. When you look at the map, picture the vast terrain in your mind, and imagine its every detail. This is a military commander’s basic skill. You’re a senior commander directing the entire army, so when you look at this map, you need to have an overall feel for the country’s entire territory.”

The chief led Lü Gang out of the hall and, along with two other colonel staff officers, boarded a military helicopter standing in the yard. Engine whining, the helicopter took off and in a flash they were soaring over the city.

Pointing at the cluster of buildings below them, the chief said, “The country’s got thirty-odd big cities like this. In a total war, they may become focal battlefields or launching points for campaigns.”

“General, are we going to learn how to defend large cities?” Lü Gang asked.

Again, the chief shook his head. “Specific urban defense plans are for the army and front commanders. What you need to do is decide whether to defend or abandon a city.”

“Can the capital be abandoned?”

The chief nodded. “For the sake of ultimate victory in the war, even the capital can be abandoned. The decision must be made according to the situation. Of course, there are many factors that have to be considered where the capital is concerned. But you can be certain of one thing: That is an extremely difficult decision to make. The easiest thing in war is desperate, death-defying use of effective force. However, the superior commander does not use death-defying measures, but arranges for the enemy to do so. Remember, child: War requires victory, not heroes.”

Soon the helicopter was outside of the city and over rolling hills.

The chief said, “If war breaks out in the children’s world, it’s unlikely to be a high-tech war as we currently understand it. The shape of war may be more like the Second World War. But that is just a guess. Your minds are very different from adults’. Children’s war may take a form completely unlike anything we’re capable of imagining. But adults’ war is all that we can teach you right now.”