Smolensk North, Part II
What, would you say, is the most dangerous game in Litvak's Arcade?
It's a multi-faceted question, if anything, but the general consensus is that it is, in fact, Hero's Duty, the high-octane science fiction rail shooter that pits an elite marine unit (the funny English word for "naval infantry", not the adjective for aquatic life) against the "Cy-bugs", a very dangerous form of semi-intelligent alien life.
I have never visited Hero's Duty, but I'm inclined to believe Novikov, who did so on one occasion. But that's a story for another time.
There is a difference, however, between the most dangerous game, and the most dangerous side. In this regard, it is the Red Air Force of Smolensk Strike that is the most dangerous, in the sense of capable of the most destruction.
Why? Dr. Igor Kurchatov.
To elaborate, we have something Hero's Duty's fighting men (and woman) don't: atomic weapons. In fact, we have many of them, in the form of Kh-15 and Kh-55 atomic missiles. Putting aside the larger Kh-55 briefly, the Kh-15 is a supersonic (as in "five times faster than the speed of sound") cruise missile that carries a 200 kiloton nuclear warhead. A kiloton, in civilian parlance, is a measure of explosive energy equal roughly equal to one thousand English tons of TNT. The White Swan can, and does, carry twelve of these "short-range strategic weapons" at a time.
The point to take from this is that Smolensk North Military Aerodrome, and by extension, Smolensk Strike the arcade game, are nuclear powers.
There are many, many such missiles sitting in the Storehouse, an underground bunker beneath the Aerodrome, and naturally, we get a steady supply of more from the Aircraft Plant to replace the ones we lose, just as we get a replacement Tu-160 bomber to replace the one that is lost. I've calculated, very roughly, that we have more than four times the missiles necessary to wheel at least one on a loading cradle into every single game in Litvak's Arcade, allowing for multiple missiles for the geographically larger games like Rogue Squadron and some of the fantasy games, and destroy everything everywhere. And we also have the technical know-how to set them off; we could even fashion equipment in such a manner than any attempt to disarm or move the weapons triggered their warheads.
That, I suppose, would be considered "Going Turbo."
I did this arithmetic on the back of a napkin in the cafeteria many months before Hero's Duty first appeared and Novikov's investigation, and the thought lingered in my mind every time Mai or anyone else extorted some small favor from me that involved any sort of major equipment, including that particular occasion. No other game in the arcade, not even other aircraft games like Area 88 or Macross Plus, has used splitting the atom as a weapon of war, and here we are in Smolensk Strike, sitting on enough nuclear arms kill everything, everywhere as far as the arcade is concerned.
We never spoke if it again, of course, but I kept it in the back of my mind. It surfaces every time I personally visit the Storehouse or I read the last page of an inventory report. I don't even remember what led me to consider the mathematics behind that, I hate maths.
I was thinking of that while in the back of an Albatros jet trainer with Tails, not far off the ground—no more than five-hundred meters, I judge by eye, ignoring the altimeter in front of me.
"Go ahead and climb. Shallow, no more than ten degrees. You won't need to increase power."
"Yes sir."
"It's a lot different than a biplane, huh kid?"
I see Tails' eyes underneath his too-big helmet in the rearview mirror on the canopy. "Actually, not that much sir. A lot more gauges though."
"I…sort of took for granted you at least read a book on jet propulsion before you got here," I admitted, a little ashamed. I'd let a minor take the joystick of a fully-fueled Albatros—when I put it like that, I sound really stupid.
"Oh, don't worry about that, sir. I did a lot of reading before I even thought of asking Ms. Shiranui."
I cocked my head. "Speaking of which, how is it that you know her? Through Sonic?" Sonic the Hedgehog, of course, I know.
Tails tone changed abruptly. It wasn't hostile, but it certainly wasn't the same bubbly friendliness from before. "How do you, sir?"
Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. "From the Illusion Bar originally. Then they started coming to Smolensk North on occasion. When you've got three-thousand mostly inactive men loafing about and the only women are the handful of medics they're superstitiously fearful of, you'll find they're pretty much amenable to anything."
"Really, so that city is empty?" I noted that Tails old voice returned as he pointed to the south.
"That's Smolensk," I explain, not looking. "And yes, it's empty. Just a perfectly-maintained Eastern European ghost town."
"There's nothing there?"
"I didn't say there was nothing there, kid. There's plenty of stuff there. Movie theaters, a wedding palace, Smolensk State University and Smolensk State Medical Academy. It's a whole city. There are just no people there."
"Why not, sir?" His curiosity was getting the better of him, and I told him so with a very direct look. It's a sore point for me because I have no doubt that, if the 300,000 or so residents of Smolensk, or even a fraction of that, were in this game, things would be very different.
"Increase the throttle power to ninety percent and climb to 2000."
"Yes sir!"
For all the cold shoulder I'm giving him, I can tell that the kid's a skilled pilot. I can also tell that not all of that transfers to flying a jet trainer, but enough does. I directed him due west and kept my eyes peeled.
"Tree cover is starting thin, bring her down to 1200."
"Why sir?"
"You'll see. Keep an eye on the scenery, and another your horizon."
When we were over 400 kilometers through the border of Belarus, he saw it. "Sir, is that…is that another airfield?"
There's a rather crude dirt airstrip visible in the drained swamps of Lake Selyava. It's not long before he pass directly over it, and I gesture at Tails to turn us for another flyover. By the second time, something is definitely up: small human figures emerged from camouflaged tents, and the shape of aircraft underneath tarps can be seen.
"What are they bothering to hide for?" I mused, smirking.
"Sir, that's an airstrip!"
"It should be the Selyava Wildlife Refuge of Soviet Byelorussia. But it's Airstrip One, the base of the loyal opposition. Check it out."
As I explain that, on the ground at Airstrip One, the largest of the tarps is being pulled of, revealing a shiny, white aircraft with forward swept wings, canted stabilizers and two massive jet turbines.
"W-What's that?"
"Don't recognize it?" I asked, grinning at the back of his head.
"I've never seen any aircraft like that before! Where's the canopy?"
"It doesn't have one. That's the unmanned White Air Force air superiority fighter, the Falken."
It wasn't visible from our height, but the abnormally large aircraft—it's wingspan was almost twice as long as the adjacent F-15E that had its cover likewise removed—instead had a honeycomb of twelve small, octagonal camera ports where the canopy would otherwise be. Near those were canard wings, not unlike that on the Flanker.
"I…I don't…"
"It's the player fighter, boy. It's easily the most powerful fighter in the game, not to mention has thrust vectoring, unlike ours. The thing has almost as much thrust output as a Tu-22M, and can almost outrun one of our Foxbats."
"What a monster."
"Yeah, what a monster," I muttered.
"They're…they're not going…"
"No, no. They don't launch until someone drops a quarter in," I explained. "If anything, we probably just reminded them they're on the job. Wakeup time, guys! Wakey-wakey, eggs and beacey!" I shouted in their general direction uselessly.
"Plus, they've got no real air defenses to speak of," I tell Tails as we turn east for home.
Tails has no trouble landing the Albatros, leaving a few skid marks on the runway but otherwise setting it down perfectly, and he begged me for the chance to check out the White Swan. Everyone loves the White Swan, to the uninitiated, it's such a cool aircraft they can hardly believe it exists, much less that actually exists outside the game. I assign another pilot, a captain, to watch him while I undo my uniform tunic and loosen the elastic on my necktie. I'm definitely tired, to my surprise. Time was I could stay up all night, spend a morning perfecting Pugachev's Cobra in the Flanker, then land and enjoy a nutritious breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes smuggled in from the only place in Litvak's Arcade you can find then, South Town. Now I don't smoke anymore, and I rarely take coffee outside of breakfast.
Instead, like the weeny I've become, I find myself sitting in the Aerodrome's reading room, where we rotate the more interesting books from the library at Smolensk State University on a schedule. It's Novikov's idea—our very own fighting scholar thinks it's the only thing keeping our brains from rotting when we're not on duty, though he put it in different words.
The telephone on the wall rings, surprising me. "Air Commander here, go ahead."
The voice is a little distorted, but clear. "Sir, this is Communications. We have a call from the Front Desk, a Mr. Robert Omb."
I snort and chortle. What was originally a discreet security precaution has become a long-running gag, as happens in Smolensk Strike. Real-time intra-game communication—like through telephones carrying audio—doesn't exist, obviously. The most common way to deliver a message is by physical courier. In Smolensk Strike, our discipline, resourcefulness, and abundance of spare time has come up with a moderately better solution: the Signals Troops Company, under the command of Novikov, has a small detail of men posted at the railway tunnel in Smolensk City that lead out of the game. They're glorified telephone operators, with a wired army telephone set that reaches out to a man physically waiting on the other end of the tunnel, who is rotated in and out. That way, someone who wants to communicate with someone in our game doesn't need to enter it—they merely need reach the power junction, get the attention of the soldier waiting at the desk, and speak into a handset. It's not that impressive technologically, but it beats the hell out of anything any other game has, including Hero's Duty with their mastery of anti-gravity.
"Send him through." To this day, Bob always identifies himself as Robert Omb to the Signals troop at the "front desk", a way to distinguish himself from the otherwise physically identity other walking metal bombs.
"Patching you now, sir."
I hold back the laughter until I hold the tone. "Hey, Bobby, how was your date with Juuuuli? Was she hooot?" I coo at him annoyingly, pulling the handset on its cord over to the clipboard that's covered in photographs and sketches of all kinds. With a little searching I find Juli from the Street Fighter series, in her purple-blue outfit and with an expression devoid of any emotion or life.
Metallic laughter from the other end, and then an explanation.
"Cold huh? Well, with all that sweater meat, I guess her personality doesn't really matter, now does it?" I tell him vulgarly, pulling the thumbtack out and looking at the photo. "You need to be careful around those German girls, they're…"
He interrupts me.
"No, nothing here. Gave an eight-year-old fox some flying lessons, but that's about it. Snoozeville as the Yanks say."
More metallic chattering.
"Really. Mario, eh? I didn't know you guys…hung out."
An explanation.
"No, I don't mean hang out hang out, you know what I mean. But sure, I'll meet him. I mean, I don't know what to tell you, it's never occurred to me. The actual Mario might be a working-class Stakhanovite hero of the proletariat, but you know, here, he's a cartoon bricklayer who jumps on tortoise shells."
A correction from Bob-omb.
"I stand corrected," I concede. "I'm just saying, he's no Tifa Lockhart. Hell, he's no Cloud Strife either. But I'll be there."
Some more pleasantries.
"Uh huh, you too, Bob."
I hang up and once again, I'm standing in silence, so I walk back to the armchair I was sitting in, put my reading glasses back on, and grab the hardback I'd been holding earlier. No sooner than I do that, there's a polite knock on the door.
"Come in," I say, feigning an intellectual air, as I have a good idea who it is.
Tails plops in on skinny orange legs and gives a salute that I have to imagine one of the officers taught him, seeing how it's our style, and not a western salute. "Sir, Miles Prower reporting in!"
I give him an unsympathetic eye. "Actually, you only salute if you're wearing a cap, but don't worry about it. Was your experience educational?" I ask, returning to my book.
"Very much so, Comrade Colonel."
I hold back a chuckle. "I'm glad to hear it. Not all the officers and ground crew have accents as weak as mine. Some are less than fluent in English."
I say nothing after that, leaving Tails to waddle around the library softly with those giant feet of his. Eventually, he stops behind my chair.
"Who are you reading?"
"Andrey Sinyavsky," I told him. Tails looked at me with clearly no idea who I was talking about. "A famous dissident writer. Of course, no one in a game can really appreciates what he was a dissident about, but he does have a way with words."
"I see."
"In my culture…well, the culture that I'm programmed from, anyway…our dissident writers have been our greatest national heroes for centuries, in part because they were dissidents. They say what needs to be said, apparently." I close the book. "Feel free to laugh, everyone does. Maybe we should place consistency over intellect and just treat them like the dissidents that they are."
To my surprise, Tails gave me a genuinely perceptive look—a real feat given his distinctly non-perceptive looking face. "I think that's very important, sir."
I feel a rare smile cracking over my face. "Here." I give him my copy of the book I'm reading, Fantastic Stories. "This one is actually in English. Considering he was rehabilitated in 1991, you'd think we'd have more contraband English copies of his work, but we don't."
Tails takes the book, either with genuine interest or at least being very good at faking it. Knowledge, really, is the single greatest commodity in inter-game commerce. It is spread not by paperbacks like that, but between characters, intangibly and unrestrained, like air filling a vacuum.
"We are programmed knowing certain things and, to be clear, can live forever only knowing those things. But unlike the real world, there are no constraints on the pursuit of knowledge, no church or government who declares what you should know and what you shouldn't. Our God isn't just a watchmaker, he's an absentee hobbyist. The exchange of ideas is the single greatest power we have over our own destinies."
I hear what I'm saying and feel a little embarrassed. "So, you're gonna' put in a good word with Mai for me, right?"
"Sure, sir. Uh…are you…?"
"Oh, myself and Mai? No, no. Not even close. But the beautiful tend to associate with their own kind, and she has a lot of pull among the ladies," I tell him unapologetically, glad to change the subject. "In multiple games."
"I heard she's won the Miss Arcade contest once, sir."
"At least once." The Miss Arcade Contest is, as the name would suggest, an annual inter-game beauty pageant, judged by a committee that I have sat on in the past by virtue of being the presiding character from my own game. I am actually a very poor judge, ignoring most of the criteria and voting however the heck I want to, but even without me, the young women from the numerous, cheesecake-heavy fighting games tend to clean up: particularly The King of Fighters (unsurprisingly), SoulCalibur (obviously), Dead or Alive (duh), and Virtua Fighter—I suspect Tekken would do better if it wasn't for the fact that, first, Namco already has a cheesecake-heavy 3D fighting game in the running, and second, all of its heroines didn't look like they covered in Saran wrap and experiencing some intestinal distress. There are exceptions: Lara Croft won at least once in the past, as has Princess Peach. My cynicism aside, talent does factor into the judging process. At the risk of sounding insulting, that's how Cammy White won, I think.
"This is a very impressive library, sir," Tails tells me.
"You should see the one at the University, this is just a fraction of the books from there. Though I have no idea if you've got universities back there in…Sonic…Land. I confess, I don't properly know where you're actually from, besides the game series."
Tails is about to answer when the chime on the large clock on the wall with a red star in the middle of its face. The day's begun, Litvak's Arcade is officially opened. More grateful than usual for the inescapable march of time, I stick my hand out to Tails.
"I believe that's our cue," I tell him with all due military rigidity.
"Yes sir," he says, taking it. "Thank you very much for your time, sir."
"Perhaps we'll meet again," I offer him. Tails looks very happy at the thought.
A UAZ military jeep shuffles him into Smolensk City, where he'll take the commuter train out of our game and sign out with the Signals troop manning the Front Desk. In the meantime, I find my way back to the Ready Room, where the other officers have already congregated. At the front of the room, a radio set broadcasts a familiar, vaguely patriotic musical beat that blends into a rock song. Years ago, Novikov's Signals Troops Company tapped into the White Army frequencies, and have been able to adjust for changes and scrambling since then. The very first time, it gave us unparalleled insight into the enemy strategy. The second time, we realized their strategy almost never changed because this is an arcade game, and we mostly used it to eavesdrop.
"I miss anything?" I asked a nearby pilot, who saluted dutifully and shook his head.
"Just the quarter drop." In the first level, by design, we are much delayed in our warning, to give the player an easier time of bombing a nearby atomic power stations. I never cared for that, and it is thankfully solved by our skilled communications officers.
The player character briefing is starting to begin—a typical, movie-esque montage of grainy Cold War photography set to rock music, followed by deep-voiced, manly narration.
"Frank Zappa and the mothers were at the best place around.
But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground.
Smoke on the water…
Fire in the Sky.
Smoke on the water…"
And then the guitar rift, which one of the pilots present laughingly imitated, getting a few chuckles. Deep Purple, am I right?
I'm listening to the music too, since I've heard the briefing a hundred thousand times before, if not more. Still, I hear some of the deep narration come through. It's the usual patriotic but rather nonspecific spiel about the Cold War turning hot, about the showdown for the fate of democracy—how we're not the democratic ones, but they are seems ridiculous frankly, since we actually vote for things like the weekend lunch menu and they haven't voted for bupkis—and how the liberation of Europe from red tyranny is just the start. Who wrote this crap, Clint Eastwood?
"…opening a corridor reaching across the planes of Germany, through Poland, into the heart of the Soviet Union. Operation 'Infinite Freedom' is nothing less than to finally neutralize the military threat posed by the Eastern Bloc."
"Hey, who else is the Eastern Bloc besides us?" a pilot asks.
Another pilot ponders the question, before looking at the large map hanging on the Ready Room wall. "Mongolia, I think."
"Cool. I'm going to call Genghis Khan next time."
"You represent the most elite aces from the best air combat units in the Free World. From our advance staging point outside the Russian city of Minsk, we now have the ability to strike directly at strategic enemy assets and troop positions…" the manly narrator explained.
"Belarusian city of Minsk, you putzes," I mutter. "You aren't even in Russia."
"Smoke on the water…
Fire in the sky.
Smoke on the water…"
Author's Notes:
Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov served as director of his country's atom bomb project, ending the American monopoly on the bomb. The Kh-15 and Kh-55 air-launched missiles are both developed by the Raduga ("Rainbow") Design Bureau, a Russian Aerospace Company. The McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle is an American aircraft now built by Boeing Defense, Space & Security. "Pugachev's Cobra" is a highly demanding aerial maneuver wherein an aircraft "flying at a moderate speed suddenly raises the nose momentarily to the vertical position and slightly beyond, before dropping it back to normal flight" all the while maintaining its airspeed, famously demonstrated by Cosmonaut and Sukhoi test pilot Igor Petrovich Volk in the new Su-27 aircraft.
Smolensk State University and Smolensk State Medical Academy are both institutions of higher learning in the city of, wait for it, Smolensk, Russia. The Selyava Wildlife Refuge is a biological preserve in eastern Belarus. "Smoke on the Water" is a song from the British rock band Deep Purple from their album, Machine Head.
Hero's Duty, of course, is from Disney's Wreck-It Ralph. Area 88, based on the anime film of the same name, is a 1989 arcade game manufactured by Capcom. The Falken is best known as the ADF-01 FALKEN from Bandai Namco's Ace Combat series, though those aircraft are manned and smaller. The SoulCalibur Series is published by Bandai Namco, along with the Tekken series. Virtua Fighter is published by the Sega Corporation and the Dead or Alive series is published by Tecmo Koei Games. Lara Croft is the protagonist of the famed Tomb Raider franchise, developed by Core Design and Crystal Dynamics, and published by Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd., while Mario and Princess Peach are both characters from the Mario franchise, published by Nintendo Co., Ltd. Cammy White is a character from Super Street Fighter II, developed and published in 1993 by Capcom Co., Ltd. Finally, Tifa Lockart and Cloud Strife are both characters from Final Fantasy VII, also owned by Square Enix.