“It’s no more than we expected,” Marshal Levchenko said evenly. “Our strategy would catch the enemy unprepared at first, but they’d come up with a way to counter eventually. Barrage-type jammers emitting strong EM waves at all frequencies wouldn’t be hard to find and destroy. But fortunately, we’ve managed to stall for a considerable length of time. All our hopes now rest on the reinforcement armies’ swift arrival.”

“The situation might be worse than we predicted,” said the district commander. “We might not be able to give the Caucasus Army enough time to move into position before we lose the upper hand in the electronic battle.”

After the district commander had left, Marshal Levchenko turned to the digital map display of the frontline terrain and thought of Kalina, right now under the enemy’s massed fire, and as a result thought again of Misha.

That one day, Misha had returned home with his face bruised blue and purple. Marshal Levchenko had heard the gossip already: his son, the only anti-war factionist at the college, had been beaten up by students.

“I only said that we shouldn’t speak of war lightly,” Misha explained to his father. “Is it really impossible to reach a reasonable peace with the West?”

The marshal replied, his tone harsher than it had ever been toward his son, “You know your position. You can choose to stay silent, but you will not say things like that in the future.”

Misha nodded.

Once they were through the door that night, Levchenko told Misha, “The Russian Communist Party has taken office.”

Misha looked at his father. “Let’s eat,” he said, without inflection.

Later, the West declared the new Russian government unlawful. Tupolev assembled an extreme rightist alliance and instigated civil war. Marshal Levchenko didn’t need to tell any of it to Misha. Every night, father and son silently ate dinner together as usual. Then one day, Misha received his order from the spaceflight base, packed his things, and left. Two days later, he boarded a spaceplane for the Vechnyy Buran, waiting in near-Earth orbit.

All-out war broke out a week later, an invasion by an unprecedentedly powerful enemy, from an unexpected direction, aiming to dismember Russia piece by piece.

JANUARY 9TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,
THE VECHNYY BURAN PASSES MERCURY

Due to the Vechnyy Buran’s high velocity, it couldn’t settle into orbit around Mercury, only sweep past the sunward side. This was the first time humanity observed Mercury’s surface at close range with the naked eye.

Misha saw cliffs two kilometers tall, winding hundreds of kilometers through plains covered with huge craters. He saw the Caloris Basin, too, thirteen hundred kilometers across, termed “Weird Terrain” by planetary geologists. The weird part came from the similar-sized basin exactly opposite it on the other side of Mercury. It was hypothesized that a huge meteor had struck Mercury, and that the powerful shock waves had passed right through the planet, simultaneously creating nearly identical basins in both hemispheres. Misha found new, thrilling things, too. The surface of Mercury was covered in shiny speckles, he saw. When he used the screen to zoom in, the realization took his breath away.