Getting Real

Sergeant Chang’s superiors had told him the advance under the dome would be a piece of cake. Any sergeant worth his boots knows his superiors are commonly full of crap. Not this time, though.

Here and there, American soldiers in San Pedro fired at the Chinese patrol. So did more than a few American civilians. His superiors had warned that America let civilians freely own guns. Chang Guoliang hadn’t wanted to believe it—it struck him as insane—but it seemed to be true.

But he didn’t have to worry about ordinary firearms. Reactive metareality armor swatted bullets away before they got within thirty centimeters of his hide. It was the same technology that generated avatars—Chang knew that much. How it worked ... he neither knew nor cared. Till the government conscripted him, he’d worked on his parents’ farm in Qinhai Province: almost the exact middle of nowhere. He thought he might make the army a career. He lived a lot better now than he had before the draft got him.

A tongue of fire licked out from a house and engulfed a Chinese soldier. The fancy armor was no damn good against flamethrowers. The poor bastard went up like a moth in a torch. How he screamed!—but, mercifully, not for long.

The Chinese soldiers blasted the house with grenades and energy beams. A defiant minichain burst and another snarl from the flamethrower answered them. This one didn’t fry anybody. It just let them know the enemy was still in business.

“If that’s how they want it...” Chang’s platoon commander said. The young lieutenant sent the address higher up the chain of command.

He didn’t have to wait long. Lightning cracked down from the lid the Chinese had slapped over most of Los Angeles. Chang Guoliang had to look away from that white-violet brilliance. When he looked back, not much was left of the house.

“That’ll fix ‘em!” Satisfaction filled Lieutenant Liu’s voice.

Chang nodded. He thought so, too. He was amazed when a couple of U.S. soldiers staggered from the wreckage. The Chinese let one of them surrender. The other was dumb enough to keep wearing the flamethrower’s fuel and propellant tanks on his back. Hands up or not, he didn’t come very far before he got shot down like a mad dog.

Lieutenant Liu said not a word about that, even if it went against regulations. They would have done the same thing to a fellow carrying nerve-gas grenades. If you fought with the wrong kind of weapons, you took your chances. That rule was older than regulations—old as war, probably.

The Chinese patrol, one of many, pressed ahead under the dome, deeper into Los Angeles. No, the round-eyes didn’t have anything that could stop them, or even slow them down very much.

* * * *

After the Pyrex lid went over most of Los Angeles, Lieutenant Razmara’s phone started working again. He could call anywhere he wanted to—as long as he didn’t want to call anybody stuck under the lid. Since he didn’t want to call anybody who wasn’t, what good did a working phone do him? Well, he could find out what time it was again. Oh, boy!

Sergeant Kyriades’ worries were more urgent than his own. “Can’t get through, God damn it to hell,” Kyriades snarled, and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Sorry, Stas,” Razmara said. He wished he cared about somebody enough to go half nuts when he couldn’t talk to her. Once upon a time, he had. Once upon a time, Ande (short for Andromeda—her dad was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer) had cared for him that way, too. Then ... she hadn’t. Which ended up expensive and heartbreaking and a bunch of other things he didn’t want to think about right now.

He and Kyriades and a bunch of other people who’d got out of L.A. sat under the trees in a Pasadena park. It wasn’t an official refugee camp yet, but by all the signs it would be pretty damn quick. A guy was walking around eyeing the setup and talking into his laptop. If he wasn’t some kind of official, Shapur Razmara had never set eyes on one.

Or maybe he was a spy for China. But why would the Chinese need one, here or anywhere around L.A.? They were kicking the snot out of the USA, same as they had the last time the two countries tangled.

A squadron of fighter jets had fired missiles at the lid. Some bounced off and smashed. Some blew up when they hit. None wrecked it. It wasn’t really made of Pyrex after all. Too bad.

Then a plane had flown straight into the lid. Razmara hoped like hell it was a drone, but he didn’t think so. It looked like the rest of the fighters. And it made one amazing fireball when it hit. That was all it did, though. Only this and nothing more? Where did that come from? An old poem he’d heard somewhere. He could have Googled it and found out what, but he didn’t care enough.

Tanks rumbled past the park, heading south toward the lid. So their electrical systems worked here, too, did they? Razmara wished them luck, there inside his head. And he figured they’d need it. What were they going to do that a fighter plane couldn’t?