Vor: The Playback War Read online

  Alexi ducked and shielded his eyes. A second later there was a muffled whumff, and a lurid orange glow came from around the corner. Alexi heard a frantic whirring as the disabled legs of the suit fought to lift it upright, then silence. So much for that Union soldier—and for that piece of cover. The crater in the road would be poisonously radioactive for the next few hours, until the glowing cloud of highly unstable isotopes that filled it reached the end of their incredibly short half-lives. In the meantime, it was a good thing there wasn’t a wind blowing. Alexi’s respirator wasn’t working, and he didn’t relish the thought of breathing in highly radioactive dust. Especially when he was the only member of the squad who didn’t receive an issue of antiradiation pills.

  As the gloom of dusk deepened, the glow in the crater seemed to get brighter. Static crackled in Alexi’s helmet speaker: the leitenant’s angry voice.

  Private Maltovich! Bring . . . sprayer . . . or I’ll . . .

  A moment later, Vanya lurched out of the doorway of a ruined building across the street and began moving in Alexi’s direction. His narrow face with its high, balding forehead was a sickly shade of green, and there were dark circles under his eyes. One hand holding his helmet respirator over his mouth, he staggered under the weight of the twin tanks of the chem-sprayer on his back. His tall black gumboots flapped against his skinny calves as he ran.

  Alexi heard the roar of a machine gun and saw bullets chipping the concrete at Vanya’s feet. The Chem Grunt tripped and fell—and that saved him. For the moment, at least, a pile of rubble stopped the bullets. But whoever had fired those bullets was on the move; the cover wouldn’t last long. Somewhere down the street to Alexi’s right, another Union soldier in an assault suit was advancing.

  Christ. Just Alexi’s luck that his squad should wind up in an area of the city that had not one but two of the monstrosities. The assault suits were thinly spread across the city—the enemy was trying to take Vladivostok with just a handful of them. But despite their small numbers, they were easily a match for the two battalions of Rad Troopers the Neo-Sovs had poured into the battle so far.

  Alexi gripped his AK-51, trying to psyche himself into leaning around the corner and firing back at the heavy-assault suit. There was always a chance that a bullet would strike a vulnerable spot on the steel suit—although if there were any weak points, Intelligence hadn’t gotten around to letting the average grunt know about them. But despite the fact that he’d made up his mind to just get it over with and die today, Alexi couldn’t bring himself to do anything so foolhardy. It was as if his body were refusing to obey orders out of an involuntary sense of self-preservation.

  Above and to Alexi’s right, Boris leaned out of a hole in the building he’d gone into and sprayed the street with rifle bullets. As the machine gun from the advancing Union assault suit swung up, seeking this new target, Vanya rose from cover and struggled the last few meters across the street.

  “Hey, Vanya!” Boris shouted down from above. “Give them a squirt for me!”

  Vanya sagged against the wall next to Alexi. He looked bad. The front of his fatigues were stained with wet splotches—the remains of the freeze-dried eggs that had been their only meal all day. Even though he’d been starving, Alexi hadn’t been able to chew the rubbery, gray mottled mass that smelled more like the plastic in which it had been vacuum-sealed than it did like food. No wonder Vanya had gotten sick.

  Vanya, a musician in the Moscow Folk Orchestra before the war, had long, delicate fingers that had once danced across the mandolin. Now they were spotted with overlapping scars from chemical burns. He struggled to unlimber the hoses of the chem-sprayer, then turned a valve at the base of each of the corroded nozzles that were paired at the end of the hoses.

  “Let’s give him a Russian serenade, Alexi,” he said with a pale grin. “You on assault rifle and me providing accompaniment on chem-sprayer.”

  Alexi couldn’t help but grin back. “Da. Count me in.”

  Vanya picked up on Alexi’s unintended pun. “In four-four time then,” he said. “And one, and two, and three, and . . .”

  Alexi poked the barrel of his assault rifle around the corner and opened fire. At the same time Vanya stepped out into the street, aimed, and pulled the dual triggers. Toxic chemicals spewed out of the hoses, the streams mingling in midair with a sizzling hiss. The first few splatters of the black, tarry substance hit the side of the building that Boris had sheltered in. Flaking paint sizzled and began to slide down the wall. Then Vanya got the pressurized, bucking hoses under control and sent a stream of the foul-smelling chemical spewing up the street. It arced high into the air, landing with a gentle splatter. The streams fell just short of the heavy-assault suit, which was painted bright green, with what looked like a yellow thunderhead on its chest and an inscription.

  Angry screaming staticked in Alexi’s helmet speaker. Vanya released the trigger of the sprayer and the stream of chemicals sagged back until only a dribble fell from the twin nozzles. He lurched back to where Alexi stood, making it behind the corner of the building just as a fresh burst of machine-gun bullets raked the street.

  Vanya glanced back over his shoulder, and Alexi turned to see what he was staring at. Leitenant Soldatenkof—well in the rear of the squad, as usual—had the barrel of his Viper pistol pointed at the pair of them. Alexi could hear only fragments of his screamed insults over the radio in his helmet. And those words that did come through the speaker were almost incoherent. But the tone of the leitenant’s voice told him everything he needed to know.

  You incompetent . . . worthless piece of . . . make an example of . . .

  A thin line of neon red—the laser-light sighting system of the weapon—stretched from the sight on the barrel of the Viper to a spot on the wall next to Alexi and Vanya. The leitenant’s angry eyes glared at them from behind his pistol. Only twenty-two years old, the leitenant was a product of one of the Neo-Soviet’s elite Suvorov military training academies. But the soldiers in the two squads under his command used to joke that Soldatenkof was instead the product of one of Russia’s foremost madhouses. Prone to violent rages and commanding out of the barrel of a gun, Soldatenkof was a short man who stood only as high as most of his soldiers’ shoulders. He had deep-set eyes and a protruding forehead with a blue vein that throbbed when he was angry. Day and night, he wore a helmet and a full suit of field armor, emblazoned with the red hammer and sickle of the reforged Soviet state. A solid yellow stripe on each shoulder marked him as a leitenant—or as a coward, if you listened to the jokers in the squad.

  The leitenant’s armor was one of the things that prevented his squad from killing him. The other preventative measure was the army’s standing order that any squad that lost its officer in questionable circumstances would be summarily executed. It didn’t seem to matter that it was nearly impossible to prove that enemy fire had taken out an officer. Once an officer died or disappeared, the squad was under a death sentence. The standing order was designed to encourage soldiers to sacrifice themselves so that their officers might live. In fact, the only thing the policy encouraged was desertion.

  Daring another brief look around the corner, Alexi saw the bright green assault suit advancing. The hulking metal monstrosity lurched down the street, feet crumbling concrete to dust and power-assisted joints whirring. The thing was twice the height of a man, bristling with weapons and wrapped in layers of reinforced steel. One arm was mounted with a heavy machine gun, and a rocket launcher was nested on the other shoulder. Somewhere inside all that mechanized steel and bristling weaponry was a Union soldier, but the mirrored surface of the faceplate had turned Alexi’s enemy into a faceless, terrifying metal monster. The single gold stripe on the shoulder of the armored suit was the only clue as to the identity of the soldier inside it. Whoever he or she was, the soldier’s rank was leitenant. Alexi wondered if the Union officer was as big a bastard as Soldatenkof was.

  As the noise of the suit’s approach grew louder, the nozzles in Vanya
’s hands began to shake, spattering dribbles of chemical goo onto his feet. The rubber in his asbestos-impregnated boots began to smolder. He turned as if to run, and Alexi jumped back out of the way. Resigned to death though he was, Alexi didn’t relish the thought of having his flesh melted by chemicals.

  The movement saved him. Alexi couldn’t hear the bark of the leitenant’s handgun—it was lost in the roar of Boris’s AK-51 and the zinging twangs of bullets bouncing off the assault-suited Union soldier. But it had to have been Leitenant Soldatenkof who fired. The red light of the Viper’s sighting laser had slid across Vanya’s turning shoulder a fraction of a second before a bullet struck the chem tank, dinging a dent into it. Vanya’s eyes widened in fear as one of the tank’s seams sprang a leak. Frantically, he began loosening the straps that held the tanks to his back.

  Soldatenkof’s second shot was even less accurate. It tore through the twinned hoses of the chem-sprayer, severing them both. Without the pressure of the nozzles to hold them back, chemicals surged up and out of the tank, mixing in a bubbling black foam as they emerged from the frayed hose ends.

  Alexi yelped and danced back from the rapidly growing puddle of toxic goo on the ground. At the same moment something bright flashed just above him: a rocket. His ears registered the explosion and then began to ring. Concrete rained down on him, knocking him to the ground.

  Above Alexi, a second rocket slammed into the ruined building and exploded with a whoosh that sent flame and dust through the hole that Boris had fired from. Alexi looked up and saw smoke and dust curling through the opening. There was no way Boris could have survived that blast.

  Dazed, on hands and knees, he glanced up at the sky and saw the moon rising above the jagged skyline of Vladivostok. Since the Change, it was the only part of the heavens that had remained the same. The constellations had all been rearranged, the other planets in the solar system had been left behind, and the sun had disappeared from sight. In its place was the angry red eye of the Maw.

  The scientists were still at a loss to explain exactly where the Maw had come from or why the Change had occurred. But thanks to the space-exploration teams, they were starting to get some answers. They knew that the Maw was the heart of a galaxy-sized space anomaly they had named the Maelstrom. It dominated this anomaly like the eye of a hurricane. Except that while the eye of a hurricane is an empty void, the center of the Maelstrom was a superdense implosion of matter and energy, capable of consuming entire worlds.

  The moon—the only familiar object left in the sky after the other planets had disappeared—was a stepping-stone into space, a point of departure for exploring the mysteries of the reconstituted heavens. Alexi looked enviously at the twinkles of light that marked the moon bases. But for the clerical foul-up that assigned him to the rad squad, even though he wasn’t radiation-poisoned, he would have been there now.

  Then he sighed. With his luck, even if he had made it into space, he’d probably have been posted to the part of the moon where the fighting was going on. Funny, to think that World War III was raging just as fiercely across its cratered face.

  A streak of light flashed between the moon and the Maw, and continued down through the night sky, toward the western horizon. A falling star?

  No use wishing upon it. Alexi was stuck here on Earth.

  As the ringing in his ears subsided, Alexi realized that someone was screaming beside him: Vanya. Clawing his way out of the rubble, Alexi pawed at the broken concrete to expose Vanya’s face. He immediately regretted his action. The gurgling screams stopped as Vanya’s head imploded with a sucking noise. The chemicals had corroded his skull until it was no stronger than wet tissue. Now the puddle of brains and flesh that remained were bubbling. The smell that rose from the mess was a violent combination of seared flesh and sharp chemical.

  Leitenant Soldatenkof was still screaming. Glitches of it came through Alexi’s staticky headphones.

  Pick up . . . sprayer and . . . that armor suit to . . .

  Alexi suddenly realized that the leitenant wanted him to continue the attack—using a piece of equipment that Soldatenkof’s own foolish action had destroyed, costing Vanya his life. It was the final straw.

  “You pompous idiot,” Alexi spat back. He had no idea whether the microphone in his helmet was working. He hoped it was. He’d already made up his mind to die today, so he might as well tell the leitenant exactly what he thought of him. He gestured at the ruined chem-sprayer and Vanya’s bubbling corpse. “If you hadn’t shot at Vanya, it wouldn’t have—”

  This time, the leitenant’s aim was better. Alexi blinked as a line of red light caught his eye, and then a bullet from the Viper smacked into his forehead. He sagged to his knees as blood trickled down his . . .

  cheek, onto his . . .

  chest, onto the . . .

  ground . . .

  which rushed up together with the blackness to claim him.

  3

  A lexi skidded to a halt as he reached the bottom of the pile of rubble. Despite the fact that he was sweating from his scramble over the debris that choked the streets of Vladivostok, a chill ran down his spine under his armored vest. No. This way was no good. Staying there would be too dangerous. He wasn’t sure why, but . . .

  He peeked around the corner of the building and saw a downed heavy-assault suit, lying in a crater in the road. The machine gun mounted on it swung this way and that, seeking a target. Alexi ducked back.

  He glanced to his left, and saw Leitenant Soldatenkof glaring from behind cover at someone across the street. Somehow the sight of the pistol in the leitenant’s hand was even more unnerving than the bullets that chewed their way down the rubble-strewn street, coming from the direction of the heavy-assault suit. Alexi had done nothing wrong—he was always careful never to raise the leitenant’s wrath—but somehow he knew that if he stayed here, Soldatenkof would shoot him. He could even picture where the bullet would hit: right between the eyes.

  He shuddered.

  Alexi scrambled back the way he had come, then changed direction and clambered over a burbling sewer pipe and down into a basement. It was all that was left of a three-story building that had been reduced to a skeleton of twisted metal girders. Overhead, chunks of window glass dangled from what remained of aluminum window frames, tinkling against each other each time an explosion rattled the ground. A twisted metal fire escape leaned at a crazy angle against an outside wall. A piece of something—a human leg—lay on one of the girders, as if placed there by an unseen hand. The thigh was a mess of chewed flesh, ripped open by the explosion that had tossed the limb there. But the boot was spit-polished, a glossy black that belonged on the parade square.

  Alexi shook his head in wonder at the oddities of battle. He felt dizzy, disoriented. And it wasn’t just the foul-smelling fumes that wafted up from the puddles of raw sewage that his boots were splashing through. He had a premonition that something or someone was coming his way . . .

  Static crackled in his helmet speaker. The leitenant was yelling at someone again. During a lull in the officer’s insults and threats, Alexi heard Boris bet that he could shatter the assault suit’s faceplate with a tightly grouped burst—that he would be the one to kill the soldier inside it. The leitenant yelled at him to keep the communications frequency clear, then ignored his own advice and added a full minute’s worth of insults.

  Alexi suddenly stiffened as a figure appeared up above in his peripheral vision, ducking between the girders. Heart pounding, he pointed his assault rifle up at it, pulling the trigger even as he turned. The spray of bullets chewed a diagonal line up the basement’s concrete wall. Just as it reached the top, the soldier there slipped on a loose piece of rubble, falling to one knee. The bullets passed harmlessly overhead.

  Alexi gasped, and checked his fire. He’d nearly shot Irina, the squad’s newest member.

  “Prastitye pazhalsta,” Alexi called out, hoping the apology was enough. “I . . . didn’t realize who it was.”

  Iri
na turned, and Alexi saw that she carried a stick with a bulbous orange head in her hand. A second rad grenade hung from the webbing at her belt. A third . . .

  Alexi paled. The third grenade teetered on the lip of the basement wall. Then it fell down into the basement, landing with a splash on the sewage-covered floor. Alexi backed away from it in horror, expecting at any moment to see the walls lit up with the bright orange glow of more than two thousand rads. He had a vivid picture of himself reduced to a mere shadow on the wall by the flash of the explosion. . . .

  “Don’t worry,” Irina called down. “It wasn’t primed.” She made no move to recover the sewage-covered grenade. Instead she grinned and hefted the rad grenade she still held. “Which way is the machine gun? I’m going to take Boris up on his bet.”

  Alexi jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the way he’d come.

  “Spahseebe,” Irina cheerfully replied, and ran off in that direction.

  Alexi shook his head. Irina had been assigned to the rad squad to replace Tamara. That had been just ten days ago, shortly before the squad was ordered to Vladivostok. Not only was Irina visibly healthier than all of the others in the squad, she was an annoyingly patriotic presence in a six-person squad filled with sarcastic cynics and brooding fatalists. She was proud to be a member of the Battalion of Death, even more so after Alexi told her the history of the unit’s nickname.

  Back in the first of the three World Wars, early in the twentieth century, the original Battalion of Death had been made up entirely of women—an unusual thing, for that period of history. They had sworn to fight unto death, as an example to the “cowardly” men who were deserting in droves after the Russian Revolution. Irina saw it as her patriotic duty to set a similar example. She actually followed Leitenant Soldatenkof’s orders without need of the goad of a laser sight. As a reward, she got to carry the deadly rad grenades.

  Until recently, Irina had been a ranger in the Lapland Nature Reserve, up near the Finnish border. It had been her job to protect what was left of its wildlife from poachers. Whenever she got the chance, she’d preach to whoever would listen about the need to do whatever it took to protect this last scrap of wilderness. And the facts backed her up. The Neo-Soviet Union was a nation that had been poisoned by toxic waste and radiation from a chain of nuclear-power-plant accidents that stretched all the way back to the infamous Chernobyl disaster, back in the twentieth century. As early as the 1990s, scientists had calculated that fifteen percent of the country was “ecologically unsafe.” Today, just over a century later, that figure stood at seventy-five percent. Why they bothered fighting to keep it was beyond Alexi. If the Union wanted his country, they could have it, in his opinion.