Those were lakes of mercury on Mercury, each with a surface area of thousands of square kilometers.

Misha imagined standing by the lake banks in the long Mercury days, in the 1,800-degree-Celsius heat: what a sight it would be. Even in a tempest, the mercury would lie calm and still. And Mercury didn’t have an atmosphere, or wind. The surface of the lakes would be like mirrored plains, faithfully reflecting the light of the sun and Milky Way.

Once the Vechnyy Buran passed by Mercury, it was to continue approaching the sun until its insulation reached the absolute limit of what the fusion-powered active-cooling system could sustain. The sun’s heat was its best protection; none of NATO’s spacecraft could enter the inferno.

Gazing at the vastness of space, thinking of the war on his mother planet a hundred million kilometers away, Misha once again sighed at the shortsightedness of humanity.

JANUARY 10TH, SMOLENSK FRONT LINE

As she watched the gradual encroachment of the enemy’s skirmish line, Kalina understood why her location alone had survived where the surrounding sources of jamming had been destroyed one by one. The enemy wanted to capture a Flood unit intact.

The helicopter squadron, three Comanches and four Blackhawks, had easily located this control unit. Due to Flood’s massive EM radiation emissions, it could only be remotely operated via fiber-optic cable. The enemy had followed the cable to Kalina’s control station three kilometers from the Flood unit, a lone abandoned storehouse.

The four Blackhawks, carrying more than forty enemy infantry, had landed less than two hundred meters from the storehouse. At the time they arrived, there had still been a captain and a staff sergeant in the station with Kalina. Hearing the sound of an engine, the sergeant had gone to open the door; a sniper aboard the helicopter immediately shot off the top of his skull. Enemy fire was careful and restrained after that, fearful of damaging the precious equipment inside the storehouse, allowing Kalina and the captain to hold their ground for a while.

Now, to Kalina’s left, the captain’s submachine gun that had sounded her only comfort went silent. She saw the captain’s unmoving body behind the tree stump he’d used for cover, a circle of bright red blood blooming in the snow around him.