Vor: The Playback War Read online

  The figure that stood in the doorway was only vaguely human-shaped. Freakishly tall and thin, it had gangly legs and strangely jointed arms that folded back upon themselves twice, causing the arm to bend at a Z-shaped angle. One of its overlong hands gripped a metal staff tipped with a blade that crackled with sparks of electricity. The creature was entirely naked, without any visible genitalia. Its skin was a vivid blue. Its head was smooth and bald, an overlong forehead giving it an egg shape. It stared at Alexi with eyes that were twin pits of shadow. Falling snow settled on its shoulders, melting and running down its bare skin in tiny rivulets. The creature seemed oblivious to the cold.

  Without understanding how, Alexi knew with a cold certainty that this was the alien that the Union soldier had spoken of. The Neo-Soviets were fond of mutants; rad-hounds, “pukker” dogs, and other bioengineered beasts were already in use on the battlefield, and there were rumors that the scientists were also genetically altering humans in an attempt to create a race of superwarriors. Yet Alexi somehow knew that this creature was not something cooked up in a Neo-Soviet military research lab. It was something entirely new—something entirely alien.

  Something entirely terrifying.

  The creature’s free hand—the one that wasn’t holding the staff—snaked forward in a strange, double-jointed motion. At the same moment, the fears in Alexi’s mind avalanched into motion. Whipping his AK-51 around, he pulled viciously on the trigger. The cargo bay filled with a roar as the assault rifle bucked in his hands, spewing out a deadly stream of lead. Alexi screamed over the jackhammer roar of his weapon, giving vent to his terror as he fought to correct his aim against the recoil. . . .

  And suddenly the alien creature wasn’t where it had been.

  Some corner of Alexi’s mind shouted a warning at him. In his peripheral vision he caught a glimpse of the helicraft’s cockpit. Something was obscuring its snow-shrouded windows and instrument panel: a patch of impenetrable blackness, a darkness that Alexi could feel, as well as see. Colder even than the wind that blew in through the rear door, the darkness swelled back into the cargo bay, bulging out toward where Alexi crouched. In that same instant, his mind registered the Union soldier, hurling herself off the bench in a tackle.

  In the split second that it took him to decide between the two targets, his ammunition ran out. The AK-51 fell silent. The Union soldier crashed into him, knocking Alexi back against the side of the cargo bay. The back of his head smacked into the ice-filmed metal, and bright points of light danced in front of his eyes. Suddenly dizzy, unable to hold his weapon, he felt himself borne to the floor and flipped facedown as the enemy soldier pinned him in an arm lock. The textured surface of the cargo bay’s metal floor bit a pattern into his cheek.

  Alexi stared in horror at the blackness that was bulging out of the cockpit. Then the darkness hesitated. After a moment, the black void shrank back into the cockpit, then disappeared with a soft pop, like the sound of a blowtorch being shut off. The alien creature stepped out of the spot where the blackness had been and leaned over Alexi as the Union soldier held him down.

  “You are being foolish,” it said in perfect Russian, using the form of the pronoun usually reserved for children. Its voice was overlaid with a soft hissing that reminded Alexi of the static crackle of the speakers in his missing helmet.

  “We don’t need him,” the Union soldier said. “He can’t be trusted—he was going to shoot me, and he just tried to shoot you.” She tugged on the arm that was bent behind his back, sending a jolt of pain up it. Her knee was on the back of his neck, forcing him to lie still.

  “I do need this one.” The alien turned its head slightly, so that its shadowed eyes stared down at the other human. The creature was so tall that its bald blue head nearly touched the ceiling of the cargo bay. Bone-thin and naked though it was, the creature had an aura of power and authority about it. “Set it free.”

  The pressure on Alexi’s arm slackened, then ceased. The knee disappeared from the back of his neck. The Union soldier stood, then took a step back from him.

  Alexi sat up, shaking his head to clear it. “What—”

  “The impact site is not far,” the alien said. “A walk of less than one-twentieth of your planet’s period of rotation. There is sufficient light now for the journey. We will leave.”

  Alexi’s head was clear now, but he still felt dizzy, as if the deck of the helicraft were shifting beneath him. Except that it wasn’t the helicraft that was unsteady—it was his entire universe that had come unhinged.

  “I don’t understand.” He fought to banish the tremble from his voice. “Who . . . where are . . .”

  The alien’s arm zigzagged out with impossible speed, like a striking snake. Alexi gasped as bone-thin fingers wrapped around his chin and cheeks, forcing his head back. He eyed the alien’s staff, with its razor-sharp blade. Sparks danced across the metal.

  The alien’s shadowy, blue-black eyes stared into Alexi’s. “Something is wrong with his mind,” it said. “He is no use to me in this condition.”

  Alexi heard a sharp whir. The alien’s staff spun in a blur, coming to rest with its point just under Alexi’s right ear. The blade crackled with menace. Alexi’s nostrils filled with an ozone smell. He struggled to back away from the weapon, but the alien’s fingers had a death grip on his face.

  Alexi’s mind finally caved in as he realized what was going on. He was going to die—the alien was going to cut his throat.

  A spark tickled Alexi’s ear.

  Either that, or electrocute him.

  The staff suddenly blazed with the brilliance of a lighted sparkler, the sparks crackling against Alexi’s temple and ear. Just as the alien began to draw the blade across his throat, Alexi’s consciousness slipped away.

  7

  T he roar of the helicraft’s engines and the stink of diesel fumes rushed at Alexi in a wave. He blinked. Where . . . ?

  He sat on one of the benches in the helicraft’s cargo bay, jammed in between Boris on his right and Nevsky on his left. Across from him on the opposite bench were the other members of his squad. Irina was busy running a cleaning tool through the barrel of her AK-51 and Vanya was applying antiseptic cream from the helicraft’s first-aid kit to chemical burns on his hands. His sprayer was tucked under the bench below him, its chemical-crusted nozzles emitting an acrid stench. Piotr leaned back against the wall, eyes closed. The cargo bay was lit with only running lights to save the soldiers’ night vision; dim red bulbs on the floor illuminated the soldiers from below with a macabre glow, throwing their faces into shadow.

  A thought entered Alexi’s mind as he glanced at the bear of a man beside him: Boris should be dead. He glanced around. So should Vanya. And so should . . .

  For a moment, his imagination and paranoia ran hand in hand. The others in the squad were dead. He was dead. The helicraft was carrying them up to heaven. . . .

  No. That was a crazy thought. He’d saved them all from death by taking out the heavy-assault suit. Only one of them was even wounded: Irina. A bandage around her left calf was dark with dried blood.

  Alexi looked around, focusing on the normal—the everyday. Up in the cockpit, the pilot and copilot were strapped into their seats, staring out the windows as they flew the helicraft. Leitenant Soldatenkof stood between them, shouting into the microphone of the helicraft’s radio. His back was to the cargo bay, and yet still the members of the squad kept glancing at their officer, in the same way that soldiers glance at an unexploded round, wondering when it is going to go off.

  Alexi peered out the tiny window in the wall behind him and saw the city of Vladivostok sliding past below as the helicraft flew away from it. Explosions blossomed with bright flares of light in the streets of the former port, and its ruined buildings reached up with skeletal fingers to the sky. On the horizon, the Maw was just setting in the west, a swirling blood-specked implosion that dwarfed any destruction that mere humans could wreak. Alexi pressed the button on his watch.

>   The time was 2:16 A . M . Where had the last four and a half hours gone?

  Boris glanced out the window, grinned, then shouted at Alexi over the roar of the engine and the chuff of the helicraft’s rotors. “I’m glad we’re out of there, even if you did cost me two hundred rubles, Alexi. I hear the Union heavy-assault suits have already slaughtered the equivalent of an entire battalion. Our troops are catching hell. Thanks for getting us out of it, tovarish.”

  The other soldiers were listening. They stared at Alexi with something he’d never seen in their eyes before: admiration. There was also an undercurrent of something else—embarrassment.

  “Uh . . . You’re welcome.”

  Irina nudged a tarp-covered object on the floor with the toe of her boot. “That was nice shooting, Alexi,” she shouted. “Lucky for us you’re half-blind.”

  The other squad members broke into relieved laughter. Their faces were strained with the weariness that comes after a battle. But it wasn’t just that. The thing on the floor was what was making them uncomfortable. Several were deliberately not looking at it.

  Alexi felt like a man who had just walked in on comrades sharing a private joke. Not the butt of it—just unable to understand the punch line.

  He stared at the floor. Lying among the clutter of equipment, covered by a stained tarp, was a shape that looked like a body. Was it the Union officer Alexi had killed? No—it was too tall, too thin. The person under the tarp would have stood nearly two and a half meters tall.

  Alexi felt a chill of fear. He wasn’t frightened of the body—not in the same way that the other soldiers were. Instead he was frightened that he would see a familiar face under that tarp. The thought was irrational; Alexi had already glanced around the cargo bay and seen that all of the members of his squad were alive. And even if one of them was missing—if it was a squad member lying under that tarp—Alexi didn’t really care. He’d never gotten close to anyone in the squad. There was no point. If a bullet didn’t get them, radiation poisoning would. In a very real sense, he was living among dead men and women.

  The tension was getting to him. Who was it, under the tarp?

  The helicraft tilted then, as the pilot sent it into a turn. A hand slid out from under the tarp. Cold and stiff, it had turned a deep shade of blue, like the lips of someone having a heart attack. Except that this blue was deeper, richer—a natural skin tone.

  Raheek!

  The word exploded in Alexi’s mind like a grenade, filling him with anxiety. Before he realized consciously what he was doing, he bent and flipped back the tarp.

  In the instant when he saw the body, two emotions washed over him: shock at seeing such an alien creature—and relief. This was someone else.

  It wasn’t . . .

  The name that had been in his mind a second ago was gone.

  The body was tall, and lean—as thin as a starving man but with an overlaying of stringy, tough-looking muscle. The forehead was twice the height of a human’s and the arms were strangely jointed, with two elbows instead of one. A loincloth of what looked like fur covered the groin, and the flat chest of the creature was studded with four nipples—and numerous bullet holes. The alien’s hair was pure white, except where purplish blood had clotted in it. As the helicraft turned the other way and the angle of the floor tilted, the head flopped to one side, revealing a gaping bullet wound in the back of the skull.

  The entire body of the creature was covered with intricate white lines that reminded Alexi of the henna patterns that the women of India decorated themselves with. Wondering whether they were tattoos or part of the alien’s natural skin coloration, he touched the body, running a finger along one of the lines. The skin was cold and waxy. . . .

  “What are you doing?” Nevsky smacked his hand away. “Don’t touch it!”

  Irina leapt from her seat to flip the tarp back over the creature’s face. The former ranger wasn’t scared of much—but she was frightened of this alien.

  “Are you mad, Alexi?” she shouted, her eyes wide. “What were you thinking? We have to keep it covered. We don’t know if its tattoos are still active.”

  Alexi was at a loss to explain his actions. For that matter, he was at a loss to explain how he had come to be on a troop-transport helicraft, instead of fighting house to house through the streets of Vladivostok. Was he going mad? He glanced nervously at Vanya’s chem-sprayer. He had an uneasy feeling that he’d been exposed to its chemicals. Had they caused temporary amnesia?

  “I never thought we’d see one face-to-face,” Nevsky said. His wide, moon-shaped face held a mixture of wonder and fear. He scratched at his head, and a patch of dark hair came away. His scalp was mottled with small blisters—like many of the others in the rad squad, Nevsky’s body wasn’t responding well to the antiradiation pills. Nevsky tossed the chunk of hair under the seat, not looking at it. As the squad’s unofficial medic and purveyor of black-market medicines, Nevsky knew better than any of them what hair loss meant. He’d been a nurse before the war, and had watched hundreds of patients die of radiation poisoning.

  Alexi nodded at the tarp that covered the body on the floor. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Remember the attack on the deep-space exploration ship, Novyy Proezd 30?” Nevsky gave a hard look at the corpse on the floor. “This blue bastard is one of the aliens that did it. It took an entire company of spaceborne spetsnaz to clear just six of these creatures from the NP-30.”

  “And now they’ve made it as far as Earth,” Boris rumbled from Alexi’s other side. “I’m doubly glad we’re out of Vladivostok now. God only knows what those creatures were doing there. Fifty rubles says Command didn’t even know the aliens were on Earth.”

  “Now that’s a sucker’s bet,” Nevsky shouted back across Alexi. “Most of the time Command doesn’t know where its own soldiers are, let alone soldiers from another planet.”

  The burst of laughter that filled the helicraft suddenly cut short. Everyone in the squad stiffened as Leitenant Soldatenkof stomped back into the cargo bay. Vanya tried to hide the tube of antiseptic cream up his sleeve, but it fell onto the floor near Soldatenkof’s boot. The officer wasn’t interested in black-market contraband, however. Instead he stopped where Alexi sat, then leaned over him to brace one hand on the wall. Even though they were airborne and out of combat, the officer still wore his armored jacket and pants. Alexi winced at the smell of sweat that leaked out of the open front of the flak jacket.

  “Minsk!” Soldatenkof bellowed.

  Alexi, who had been pointedly avoiding the leitenant’s eye by studying the crusted sewage on his boots, was forced to look up when he heard his surname.

  “Sir?”

  “Forward, soldier. Into the cockpit. On the double!”

  Alexi slid a glance at Boris. The larger man shrugged slightly.

  Soldatenkof cuffed Alexi. “Let’s go, slug! Intelligence wants to talk to you. MOVE!”

  Alexi stood as quickly as he could. When the leitenant got that tone in his voice, somebody usually died. It was a wonder the officer hadn’t drawn his Viper already. Alexi jogged forward, lurching as the floor of the helicraft tilted this way and that. Praying that he hadn’t done something to irritate the leitenant during the four and a half hours that were missing from his memory, Alexi searched for reasons why Intelligence would want to speak to him.

  Soldatenkof shoved Alexi into the cockpit with a hand at his back, then picked up the radio microphone and shouted into it. A voice crackled back from the radio in the helicraft’s instrument panel as the leitenant pushed the microphone into Alexi’s hand.

  Corporal Minsk, the leitenant tells me that you were the one who took down the alien. We need a full report. Leave nothing out. Tell us exactly how you were able to overcome it. Over.

  Alexi stared at the microphone, dumbfounded. How was he to make a report on something he didn’t remember? He wet suddenly dry lips, trying to think what to say.

  The leitenant jabbed Alexi’s arm with a forefinger.
“Idiot. They’re waiting for you to speak. Push the button on the side of the microphone, you moron.”

  Alexi bit back his retort. He was tired of the leitenant treating him like a slow-witted child. Alexi knew a thing or two about how to get children to listen to you—and neither insulting nor belittling them was the way to do it.

  He pressed the button. He’d thought of a way to stall for time. “Hello, Intelligence. Corporal Minsk here. Should we be discussing this over an open radio?”

  The transmission is encrypted, Corporal. Make your report.

  “Tell them how you were able to kill the creature,” the leitenant hissed angrily in Alexi’s ear.

  Alexi pressed the button and spoke into the mike. “Uh—” He thought about the alien on the floor, and the gaping wound in the back of its skull. “I shot it?” he guessed.

  Pain flared in the back of his own head as the leitenant smacked him with an open palm.

  “Details!” he shouted at Alexi. “They want a detailed report!”

  The microphone was slippery in Alexi’s sweaty hands. “Uh, Leitenant,” he said hesitantly, finger hovering over the mike button. “Just how did I kill it?”

  Soldatenkof grabbed Alexi by his armored vest and shook him. The vein in his forehead was throbbing. Spit sprayed into Alexi’s face as he shouted.

  “Tell them”—shake—“why”—shake—“you weren’t”—shake—“affected!” Soldatenkof screamed.

  The microphone flew from Alexi’s hand as the Leitenant’s final push slammed him into the pilot’s seat. His glasses fell onto the floor and slid as the helicraft lurched to one side. Cursing, the pilot shoved Alexi off his seat, and shouted something back at Soldatenkof. Alexi dropped to his hands and knees as the helicraft came level again, and lunged after his glasses as they slid back across the tilting floor. The radio crackled behind him.