Feb 28, 2057, 0835 Hours (UTC +8)

Ladakh, India

Ladakh & Jammu and Kashmir Border

Missing one of their members, Chen Jiahao’s TOCU squadron was cycled out of offensive line duty into the more boring task of mobile missile defense. This meant long hours punctuated by the occasional spike of adrenaline when the sensor picked up something that could be a ballistic missile. Most of the time it wasn’t. But India sometimes launched dud missiles just to test Chinese defenses and catch the pilots sleeping.

Countries were increasingly switching to using their nuclear weapons as defensive mines rather than strategic bombs. Nuclear mines had repelled the initial Chinese advance in the previous year and taken roughly a million lives on both sides in the process, including three squadrons of TOCU pilots. The Intelligence Bureau suggested the Indians were out of nuclear weapons converted into mines, and that the remainder of their stockpile was still in missile and bomb form. Jiahao did not want to be the one to find out whether that was true or not.

“It’s still in Cairo…” he heard Sister Yang say in his head.

“The Rock Devil? How would you know? Did you bring your phone?” asked Chen Xinyue through the same network.

“Hehe… I might have,” Sister Yang replied.

“You know our superiors can track that.”

“There’s nothing that can’t be tracked, but I know someone in the signal interception office who white-listed my device. You know, I could make it so you all could bring your phones too.”

“No thanks,” Jiahao replied. Somehow the lack of diligence felt even worse coming from Sister Yang. “And please do not tell Little Hu that’s possible or he will be playing gacha games while we’re in combat.”

This made the other two pilots laugh, but anything slightly amusing would at this point. Even with the low doses of amphetamine added to the pilot’s cocktail, time still dragged during the 12-hour cycles. The other pilots, usually chatterboxes around each other, kept silent. No new information entered their ecosystem rendering the exchange of it pointless. Unless, that was, new information flowed in from Sister Yang’s phone.

“You know, a week ago you all thought I was being crazy,” she said, breaking the silence.

“I believed you,” said Xinyue.

“I believed you too! Don’t pin this on me when it was Little Hu!” said Jiahao.

“Oh no, it was both of you, I didn’t forget. Maybe he was worse, but you and him both laughed at me,” replied Sister Yang.

“I don’t recall.”

There was no denying this rock devil was real now though. It was hard to hide a mobile boulder that defied artillery, tanks, cruise missiles, and even two TOCUs. Jiahao wondered what Egypt would do about it. The Americans surely would not help. They only cared about money, and there was no profit to be made in endangering their TOCUs and pilots. Same with Israel. Pan-Arabia might help if the devil came close to the Sinai, but otherwise they would watch from a distance.

Chen Jiahao was reminded of his international relations courses at the National University of Defense Technology, how he had learned the Centralized Democratic model for how countries behaved like billiard balls. No matter how they were ruled, countries still acted in a rational, self-maximizing way within an international system and with a hard outer-shell of us vs. them. The Liberal Democracies at the start of the century falsely believed in countries coming together through institutions. The collapse of international trade and the deaths of three billion people proved them wrong. Not that the Lib-Dems ever put this theory into practice. As soon as there was a reliable defense against nuclear first strikes, humans were back at each other’s throats.

The idea that the international community would come to Egypt’s aid was laughable, and yet already Jiahao could imagine soft-hearted Westerners posting on social media about supporting Egypt or perhaps donating money to a charity for the refugees (though not helping to resettle them). Unfortunately, Egypt, like the rest of the world, could only rely on her own strength. Through law, a civilization like China could stand as a unified whole, but above China and America and Egypt and whatever other countries there may be, there was no law. There was only power.

“Why?” a voice asked.

“Why what?” asked Jiahao.

“Huh? Who are you talking to?” asked Xinyue.

“Didn’t one of you say ‘why?’”

“No. We’ve been radio silent for the past hour,” Sister Yang said.

Had it really been an hour since Sister Yang mentioned the rock devil? To Jiahao it felt like a few minutes. This wasn’t uncommon while under the Pilot’s Cocktail, but time dilation was never a comfortable experience. And then there was the voice, which belonged neither to his fellow pilots nor to Commander Li.

“I’m feeling very strange today,” Jiahao said.

“I think we all are, staring at all this blue and brown and white,” Sister Yang replied from twenty kilometers away in the West.

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She was the furthest link of the great steel shield China projected into India. To the East, another thirty of China’s 100 TOCUs stood sentry at any given time, prepared to shoot down plane and missile. After them began the fixed fortifications in Tibet and Yunnan provinces. It filled him with pride to think about and yet,

“Why?”

This time Jiahao was sure the question hadn’t come from anywhere else, but it also didn’t feel like it was coming from him. Yet the neuronal system that linked him to his TOCU and his TOCU to the others and Commander Li was a closed circuit with the exception of Sister Yang’s phone. So where did this voice come from? Why was it asking why?

“What do they put in the pilot’s cocktail?”

It took Jiahao a moment to register that this had been his voice, and that it was broadcast to the other pilots.

“What do you mean? It’s low-power amphetamine, beta blockers, and synthetic oxytocin, isn’t it? This is covered in training, Chen Jiahao,” Sister Yang said.

Of course he knew that. Every pilot knew that. But without the ability to know for sure, there was nothing stopping the Unified Chinese Army from adding other things to the cocktail. This particular thought had the flavor of familiarity. Jiahao had thought about it before. When? Probably numerous times. And the answer too was familiar:

“If they do add more, so what? You have to go on the same.”

What did it matter if there was more in the pilot’s cocktail? If he threw a tantrum and protested he would be labeled a troublemaker and make problems for his family. Already his fame was causing them misfortune in the form of paparazzi and protestors, how much worse if it was infamy? Suppose he were exiled and his life reduced to doing degrading tours of campuses in the liberal democratic world, barking about the evils of “authoritarianism” like a trained seal.

He shuddered at that. Dying in combat was a better fate.

Jiahao might be curious, but for the sake of his family, and especially his little brother who had gotten a high enough score on the gaokao to enroll at Tsinghua university, he ought to leave that thought alone. If Jiahao messed everything up by inquiring about things he shouldn’t, it would be his brother’s thousands of hours of studying and his parents’ tens of thousands of hours of providing for their sons that Jiahao would be throwing away.

“Movement. One degree above horizon. 167 degrees south-southeast. Two degrees now…” Xinyue said.

A shot of adrenaline jerked Jiahao’s thinking onto new rails.

“See a firefly. She’s a missile,” Sister Yang said.

“Opening comms with sister squadrons,” Jiahao said.

The neural link in his skull brought up a communications interface with a list of comms links sub-divided by unit division in a zoomable forking path like a family tree. Commander Li, UCU Huiban, and UCU Qinqiu were all green while UCU Huineng was grayed out. He brought up a search for the 33rd TOCU Squadron, the eastern neighbors of his far westerly 21st. He flicked all four of their green lights on and confirmed the request override command.

“This is the UCU Laozi of the 21st. We’ve got a firefly on the horizon moving up and north. Apparent position three degrees over horizon, 168 south-southeast. Over,” Chen Jiahao said at the same time as he was priming his TOCU’s C-RAM system.

“Roger, UCU Laozi. This is the UCU Dunyi. We see it. Apparent position three degrees over horizon, 256 west-southwest. Parallax suggests origin near Srinagar. Looks short range. Will relay to the 27th. Looks like it’s heading your way though. Probably a dud,” replied his comrade in the 33rd squadron.

Probably a dud. That was 90% of what the Indians fired while probing at their missile defenses, but the probing was accompanied by the occasional live missile to keep them honest. Some strange intuition told Chen Jiahao this one was real.

“Looks like it’s headed our way. How much are we committing?” Chen Xinyue asked.

“One C-RAM missile from each of us should be fine,” Sister Yang said. “It’s just the one missile.”

“I think we should deploy a quadrant net,” Jiahao said.

This was a fancy way of saying ‘fire everything.’ All three of them waited a moment to hear if one of the initial two votes would change to consensus with Jiahao. Neither did. All the while the firefly rose in the dawn sky.

“It looks like we’re firing just the one,” Sister Yang said.

If it was a MIRV as he suspected, there was a good chance it would release its payload of warheads before their own missiles could incapacitate it. The result, if it reached the Chinese front line, would be catastrophic. Conversely, if it was a dud and they fired a quadrant net, the Indians now knew their defense was depleted. But no, this one was for real. He was sure.

“I’m going to fire a quadrant net,” he said.

“What!? We voted. The majority agreed to one missile. You can’t overrule that!” said Sister Yang.

In both the military and civilian government, this was the one principle that had to be obeyed: Two Thoughts One Action. Dissent was tolerated, even encouraged, when it brought about new discussion and evaluation during a debate. However, when it came time to make a decision, everyone had to commit to the course decided by the majority. Even if an individual felt it was wrong, it was better for everyone to act in concert than to have one person do one thing and one another and have nothing get done.

Ignoring that principle was grounds for a court martial and imprisonment. But that’s what Chen Jiahao did.

Recognized his intent to fire a quadrant net, the TOCU projected a golden path down the side of the mountain towards an optimal intercept point. While he pounded over a forest, the supercomputer below his feet hummed with quadrillions of calculations per second as it debated with its own instruments and with the instruments of other TOCU units in Ladakh where this missile would be within the next several minutes. Reaching the golden point like an objective in a video game, his own TOCU stood still, stabilizers engaging to minimize the variables the on-board computer had to account for in missile interception.

Chen Jiahao’s head filled with questions from Sister Yang and Chen Xinyue and Commander Li demanding to know why he had disobeyed a democratic order. There was a jolt in his back as the C-RAM missile bay opened like a carton of sharp eggs and primed the 30 missiles to obliterate a section of sky at the cost of around five million Yuan per missile. A timer started in the top left of his vision, counting down until the optimal launch interval.

“I’m sorry, Wen,” he said, speaking his younger brother’s name aloud in the cockpit. If Jiahao was wrong, his brother Wen was about to be related to an insubordinate traitor.

With a hissing roar that melted the snow beneath the UCU Laozi, interception rockets spiraled into the sky then curved southward toward the incoming missile. Both sets of missiles became little daytime stars, twinkling in the sky. Suddenly he felt ridiculous. What if he was wrong? What if he had thrown away his family’s livelihoods over a hunch?

A minute later, a fireworks display of equidistant explosions packed into a cube exploded over the Ladakh mountain range followed by eight more crackling booms which took half a minute to reach his ears.

He’d been right. They were conventional warheads, not nuclear, but the Indian missile was armed. And now it was dead.