Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

COUNTRY B: How about another head-on charge?

COUNTRY A: Good. How many are you mobilizing?

COUNTRY B: Oh, 150.

COUNTRY A: That’s too many. Some of our tanks are in a tank vs. infantry game tomorrow. Let’s say 120.

COUNTRY B: Fine. How does Arena 4 sound?

COUNTRY A: Arena 4? Not the greatest. It’s hosted five head-on charges and three ultra-close wall-toppling games, so there are wrecked tanks all over the place.

COUNTRY B: Wrecks can act as cover for both sides. It’ll add variables to the game and make it more fun to play.

COUNTRY A: That’s true. Arena 4 it is. But the rules need to change a bit.

COUNTRY B: The jury can handle that. Set the time?

COUNTRY A: Let’s start at 10 A.M. tomorrow. That way we’ll both have enough time to assemble.

COUNTRY B: Great. See you tomorrow.

COUNTRY A: See you tomorrow!

Careful thought reveals that this form of warfare is not entirely inexplicable. Rules and agreements suggest the establishment of a system, and a system gains inertia once established; a violation by one side implies the system’s collapse, with unforeseeable consequences. The key point is that this warfare system could only have been established in a children’s world where game thinking was determinative, and could never be reproduced in an adult world.

If anyone from the Common Era had witnessed the game war, what they would have found most surprising would not have been the sports-like form, since such wars could be found, if not quite so glaringly, back in the old days of cold-weapons warfare; no, they would doubtlessly have been shocked, mystified even, by the nature of the roles played by the participating countries. Enemies were established according to the order of play. People later referred to the “athlete role” of the belligerents who competed in battles set up in a manner never before seen in human history.

One other key characteristic of the game war was the specialization of the fighting. Every battle was a single contest of weapons. Integration of forces and cooperative operations were basically nonexistent.

Not long after the Olympics started, the land-based Supernova War transformed into a huge tank battle. Tanks were the children’s favorite weapons; nothing better embodied their fantasies about fighting. During the adults’ era, a remote-controlled tank was guaranteed to be a welcome gift. Once war broke out, their fascination transferred to real tanks and they sent them out onto the battlefield with abandon. All together, the countries brought nearly ten thousand tanks to Antarctica to engage in unbridled tank combat on an immense scale, with hundreds to upward of a thousand tanks pitted against each other in each fight.

On the open plain of Antarctica, these groups of iron monsters raced, fired, and burned. Everywhere you looked were fragments of destroyed tanks, some of them on fire for two or three days and, when the wind let up, releasing long, thin columns of weird black smoke from clusters of wrecks all over the plain. From a distance the land looked like it had a wild head of hair.

Compared with the grandeur and brutality of the tank battles, air combat was a much chillier pursuit. Dogfights ought to have been the most competitive fights of all, but the child pilots had trained for less than a year and had put in less than a hundred hours in high-speed fighters, meaning they had mastered only normal takeoff, landing, and level flight, at best.

The superior skill set and physical fitness required for air combat was simply unattainable for the vast majority of them. Hence, combat between opposing fighter formations could barely even get started; far more planes were lost owing to accidents than were shot down by the enemy. During dogfights, most of a pilot’s concentration was devoted to not crashing, with little energy left for attacking. Moreover, the acceleration produced by a modern fighter in air combat could be over six gees, to as much as nine when evading a radar lock or a tracking missile, more than the children’s fragile cerebral blood vessels could take. There were, of course, a few prodigies, like the American flying ace Carlos (the F-15 pilot who twice evaded missile tracking), but they were in the minority, and avoidable if not provoked.

It was even chillier on the water. Due to the Antarctic’s particular geographic location, ocean supply lines were the lifeline for the armies of every country. A cut supply line was the worst of all possible disasters, and would be like abandoning the children on another Earth.

So as to guarantee transport, no country dared to risk any of its sea power, and hence during naval battles, the opposing sides’ ships stayed far away from each other, usually beyond the line of sight. Attacks at that distance required technical sophistication, but giant missile attack systems had a very low hit rate in the children’s hands. Few strikes actually hit the target, and only a few transport ships were sunk during the games.

It was the same below the surface. Piloting structurally complicated submarines through the inky depths, relying only on sonar in a cat-and-mouse game with the enemy, was a game that required rich experience and top skills the children could not possibly have attained in such a short time.

As in air combat, submarine battles didn’t work. Not a single torpedo struck its target during the whole games. Moreover, since Antarctica had no submarine base, and constructing one was far more complicated than setting up a bare-bones port for surface ships, all countries were forced to use logistics bases in Argentina or Oceania. Conventional subs were ill-equipped for lengthy activities in the Southern Ocean, and few countries had nuclear attack subs. In the course of the underwater games, just one conventional sub was sunk, and that owed to its own malfunction.

During the Olympic Games period of the Supernova War, most of the fighting was concentrated on land, which saw quite a number of peculiar forms of combat brand new to the history of warfare.

Most terrifying of all were the infantry games. Although all games of this type used light weapons, they saw casualties in far greater numbers.

The biggest infantry games were firearm duels, and were played in the fortifications and assault categories.

Fortification infantry games involved opposing sides firing at each other from fortifications across a separation, and they could last as long as several days. But as the children discovered, firing from fortified positions meant there was very little exposure, which minimized the lethality of ordinary firearms. They would rain bullets at each other in volleys so dense they would collide in midair, and the spent casings piled up to calf height in the firing positions, but in the final analysis, apart from chipping away the outside layer of the enemy’s fortifications, they achieved very little.

And so they switched to scope-equipped precision sniper rifles, which cut ammo expenditure to a thousandth of what it was and boosted combat successes by a factor of ten. Now the game saw the young gunners spending most of their time lying low observing the opposite position, scanning inch by inch for the slightest discrepancy in the stones and patches of snow, and sending over a bullet at any potential firing gaps.

Ahead of the line was empty ground, with no creature stirring across the broad plain as the children hid in their bunkers. The characteristic snap of a sniper rifle and then the zip of a bullet through the air, pop—zip pop—zip, only intensified the chilly quiet of the battlefield, as if somewhere out under the southern lights a lonely ghost were randomly plucking a zither. The children chose a striking name for this game: “Rifle Fishing.”