The only option was to draw near the sun. The automatic active-cooling heat-shielding system that was the pride of the Vechnyy Buran allowed it to go closer to the sun than any other man-made object yet. Now the Vechnyy Buran had reached Mercury’s orbital path, five million kilometers from the sun and one hundred million kilometers from Earth.

Most of the Vechnyy Buran’s hold had been closed off, but the area left to Misha was still astonishingly enormous. Through the broad, clear dome ceiling, the sun looked three times larger than it looked on Earth. He could clearly see the sunspots and the singularly beautiful solar prominences emerging from the purple corona; sometimes, he could even see the granules formed by convection in the surface. The serenity here was an illusion. Outside, the sun pitched a raging storm of particles and electromagnetic radiation, and the Vechnyy Buran was just a tiny seed in a turbulent ocean.

A gossamer-thin thread of EM waves connected Misha to the Earth, and brought the troubles of that distant world to him as well. He had just been informed that the command center near Moscow had been destroyed by a cruise missile, and that the Vechnyy Buran’s control had passed to the secondary command center at Samara. He received the latest news of the war from Earth at five-hour intervals; at those times, each time, he would think of his father.

JANUARY 5TH, RUSSIAN ARMY GENERAL
STAFF HEADQUARTERS

Marshal Mikhail Semyonovich Levchenko felt as if he were face-to-face with a wall, though in reality, a holographic map of the Moscow theater of war lay in front of him. Conversely, when he turned toward the big paper map hanging on the wall, he could see breadth and depth, a sense of space.

No matter what, he preferred traditional maps. He didn’t know how many times he’d sought a location on the very bottom of the map, forcing him and his strategists to get on hands and knees; the thought now made him smile a little. He also remembered spending the eve of military exercises in his battlefield tent, piecing together the newly received battle maps with clear tape. He always made a mess of it, but his son had done the taping neater than he ever did, that first time he came along to watch the exercises….

Finding that his musings had returned to the subject of his son, the marshal vigilantly cut off his train of thought.

He and the commander of the Western Military District were the only people in the war room, the latter chain-smoking cigarettes as they watched the shifting clouds of smoke above the holographic map, their gaze as intent as if it were the grim battlefield itself.

The district commander said: “NATO has seventy-five divisions along the Smolensk front now. The battlefront is a hundred kilometers long. They’ve breached the line at multiple points.”

“And the eastern front?” Marshal Levchenko asked.