He punched keys on his suit and a map popped onto my faceplate, showing the section of the line, one where Popov still hadn’t arrived in force.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell the boys we’re doing fine; for now our guys are giving air cover to keep the skies clear, and that’s something. Ask if they need anything. Give them a hand job if they want one.”
The general walked me to the ramp and my night vision clicked in, the stars twinkling in greenish yellow.
“Come back and tell me what you learn,” he said, and headed back into the ground.
I crept over the rubble. Our engineers would have an underground defense network established eventually, and we prayed that it would be soon, but this time it was almost guaranteed that Pops would also hit us topside. Remnants of an Army battalion had emplaced all their sentry bots around the perimeter and had some artillery, but it wasn’t nearly the amount we’d need, not even close to what would make topside attacks too risky for the Russians. Overhead, drones whined and fought each other. But the real battle hadn’t started yet—this was the quiet before the attack—and I felt my nerves begin to slip again, so I had to play games of counting blocks of rubble as I traversed the city streets, and of watching the map display to make sure I headed in the right direction, reminding myself that thinking was just as real an enemy as the Russians.
In the darkness, a square shape emerged from the rubble, a building. It had sustained some damage but was largely intact, a huge thing that had once been Almaty’s biggest hotel, the Premier, and it stopped me in my tracks so that I stood, dumfounded, just staring. How had we gotten this far? Almaty had once been a city like any other, with people who had dreams of doing something other than being invaded and killed, and I doubted that many of them even knew the current market price for rhenium or selenium or lanthanum; they probably didn’t even know what the metals were used for. But we did. The Russians did. At the moment word got out that Kaz had something everyone wanted, someone at the Pentagon dusted
off the abacus and did the math, a simple equation that estimated cost of deployment, engagement, and retreat, to be balanced against the estimated reserves of rhenium and someone’s wild-ass guess at how much we could get out—a kind of lottery that the locals hadn’t even known they’d played until they were notified of winning the grand prize: us. I recalled the discussions when I first arrived in Bandar, when reporters in the bar would still haggle over the amounts we’d be able to pull out before the Russians countered, and how I’d engaged in them too, because it had all been so important back then. Now? Now it was like seeing a trillion one-dollar bills in person versus hearing it described; if you saw the cost of getting our share, it was indescribable, and you’d realize that there had been no words for all this until now. The cost was a hotel in the middle of an empty rubble field, surrounded by the dead. Useless. I pushed past and did my best to shake the feeling that the Premier watched me as I left, staring at my back with a look of
you-did-this-to-me-and-I’ll-never-forget-it.
Its empty windows made strange noises in the breeze, and if Ox or Bridgette lived there now, I wasn’t ready to see them.
When I reached the inner perimeter, I dropped into a trench manned by three Army guys, and one of them nearly shot me.
“Jesus.” He lowered his Maxwell and turned to face north. “Jesus Christ.”
I asked, “How are you guys doing?”
“What do you mean how are we doing? Who the fuck are you?”
The other two didn’t even look at me, hadn’t thought I was worth shooting, much less speaking with.
“Command sent me to check on things, to let you know that we still have air cover. Where’s your CO?”
“Yeah, right.
CO.
I’m the CO. My name’s Private Jerk-off. I don’t know, smart guy.
You
tell me where he is, because I haven’t seen an officer since they put us here.”
“What did they tell you to do?”
The question made all of them laugh, and the one who had almost fired at me leaned his Maxwell against the trench and slid into a crouch. He popped his helmet.
“They told us to watch north, toward the outer perimeter, and if we see any of our guys booking this way, to give them cover, because it means Pops is coming.” He lit a cigarette and then looked at me, his night vision goggles glinting. “Hey, you got any drugs?”
“No. I’m heading to check the outer perimeter, but I’ll be coming back this way, so if you see someone headed toward you, don’t shoot.”
And I booked it. Pops waited, gathering strength so he could roll in and roll over, and when he did arrive, I didn’t want to be trapped in a trench with those guys. They were lepers. My stomach turned at the realization that all those green and blue dots, which were supposed to represent able-bodied soldiers on the map, hadn’t really meant anything. These
were
soldiers in a way. But none of them were in one piece.
Sentry bots hissed, popping out to scan as I approached the outer markers, and then returned to their holes, allowing me to pass and slide into a second set of trenches. This one was filled with men, shoulder to shoulder, who faced north and ignored my joining them. I tapped one on the shoulder and waited for him to turn.
“Command sent me to check on the lines, to let you
know that we still have air cover and the engineers are working out a tunnel network. You guys see anything?”
“Yeah.” He faced north again. “I see it all now, like in daytime. Jesus is on a white horse at the head of Popov’s army, and he’s pissed. He’ll be coming soon. Jesus wants revenge.”
This time
I
was the one who slid to the trench floor, trying to figure out how I’d do it, how I’d make it across the entire sector, because that close to the front, you knew like these guys did, sensed it: the Russians had finished prepping and were just waiting for the right time to come in. It was obvious.
I picked myself up and wormed through the trench, heading east, unable to shake the feeling that sooner or later I’d get high again.
T
he Russians
didn’t
attack. It was lucky for us, because the respite gave engineers the time they needed to dig their underground fortifications, ringing Almaty’s subterranean territories with tunnels and bunkers so that the men topside could take cover in rock. By the time the tunnels were complete, massive piles of soil and mud dotted the city’s rubble fields, monuments to the amount of material removed. There already were tunnels in place from the first defense of Almaty, which saved the sappers time and effort, so on the third day I found myself back where it had all started, underground, albeit under different circumstances this time and without any friends. Some men stayed topside. Most rotated down to be replaced at eight-hour intervals, but the tank and APC crews didn’t get that luxury and had glared at us when we’d first descended to leave them behind in the dirt, exposed. I didn’t blame them for hating us; they had been assigned to die first, to take out as much Russian armor as they could before plasma fried them in ceramic coffins, and
that
was if they were lucky. If they weren’t, and we lost our air cover
before Pops attacked, the auto-drones would come before our tanks had a chance to get off a single shot.
I had been assigned to General Urqhart’s staff, in the new command post three kilometers underground, and it was empty—it was all empty. Not the tunnel—
that
was packed with people. Thoughts were empty, like something seen out of the corner of my eye but never caught; they came and went, and although a part of my mind heeded them, processed whatever they were, the thoughts left as soon as they arrived, because by then I was outside myself looking down, there but
not
there at the same time. And mail came, just before Pops jammed all outside coms. Letters from home, from a time I barely remembered, arrived in a bolus of emails that automatically uploaded to my suit as soon as I came within range of the main server, but it’s not like it was a good thing. Family hadn’t mattered before the war—drugs had; writing had—and now family was unwanted because of the reminder they carried that outside Kaz was a different world, one that nobody could process and that seemed illusory because it was so ancient. The world at peace was a black-and-white 2-D film, an old documentary. So correspondence threatened to incite madness, because letters grabbed us by the short hairs and shoved our faces into the reality that while we died, the rest of the world went on. You wanted to know about the National Mall in springtime, but you
didn’t
want to know, because that memory was a threat, a corruption. Still, you read them and did your best to pretend that it wasn’t you who your mother wrote to complain about D.C. traffic and the fact that your dad was still disappointed you hadn’t gone to Georgetown Law. And the neighbor’s son had finished
medical school and was now practicing in McLean, happy, a success. Sure, you read them. There was nothing else to do except read them, one at a time, and then delete the things from your suit computer at the same time you wished for a mental delete.
Before I had finished my second email, the general nudged me with a boot. “I need a favor.”
“Sure,” I said, closing my display with relief.
“We’re going to try something, an attack from the northern sector to probe Popov’s lines. Get out there and report back what you see.”
“Won’t you get news over local coms?”
“The jamming might screw it up, and I want a pair of eyes that I trust. Get it on.”
And I got it on. The path northward snaked through the underground positions, and through men who tried to sleep or forget. Now that we had submerged again, they had taken off their helmets and pushed vision hoods back, exposing the bushy beards of the old or the barely-there ones of the kids, and all of them looked wide-eyed and vacant. Panic was contagious. We’d all caught it. Dirt had become our makeup and all of them had slathered it on so that the faces looked gray with dark patches that would never wash off in just one shower. It
had
to smell. I recalled my first exposure to the front, the smells that had once made me dream of some journalistic blow-job fest, but now there was nothing, because once you were immersed in all of it, the odor became an extension of Kaz itself, something that
couldn’t
be sensed. It was like trying to feel my own liver. If it had smelled good, that would have been different; I would have noticed it in less than a second. There was nothing left to do but button up,
and a blinking light on my helmet display led me to a bank of elevators, where I stepped in, grabbing hold of the cage as it rattled upward.
Fall temperatures made my gauge drop as soon as I climbed into the morning darkness, and I hurried through the trench toward a forward observation post. Two men waited there. They stared into the distance and I looked in the same direction, vaguely making out a row of shapes in long narrow green boxes with eight wheels on each side and two turrets on top. They looked like armored cars, but a kind I had never seen before, with an impossibly thin profile.
Once I reached the post, one of the men crouched and began working at a computer, its red light barely visible.
“You come from General Urqhart?” the other one asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then we can get going.” He gestured to the other one, and the vehicles roared to life, beginning their movement north toward the Russian positions.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Bots. Engineers had a thousand in storage; we thought we’d give them a try. They’re armed with Maxwell auto-cannons and grenade launchers.”
And for the first time in a long while, I felt good. We were doing something other than wait. It didn’t matter that there were only a thousand bots against God knew how many Pops, because maybe some would get close enough to take them out, disrupt Russian operations, or at least let them know that we could sting.
“Fully automated,” the crouching one said, and he slapped the computer shut.
I watched. Before the things disappeared from view,
they increased speed, bouncing over the rubble and jogging side to side, some moving out ahead while others lingered in the rear at a slower speed so the group spaced out before I lost sight.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait. Don’t worry, those things are smart, like drones. Some might make it through.”
We didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes later the fields in front of us lit up with tracer fire, and then plasma rounds fell, bursting amid the robots to send them flying before they disintegrated into clouds of wheels and pieces. It ended less than a minute later. As the robots fell, one of the men counted down out loud, the numbers steadily decreasing to zero.
“And that,” the other one said, “is why we don’t bother with ground bots anymore. Useless.”
Just as quickly as my mood had brightened, it went dark. I don’t recall my trip back to the tunnels. The Russians lobbed a few plasma shells in our direction, but they only guessed at our positions, and the rounds never came close, so I didn’t bother to crouch while making my way through the trench. When I returned to the command post, General Urqhart waved me away, having already heard the news, and I slumped back to the floor, opening my email again even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. The only other option was to sleep, but nobody wanted to sleep at that moment, and I knew that aboveground, the sun had begun to rise.