Chapter 25

There is a famous line from a certain video game franchise.

“War ... War never changes.”

This, of course, is bullshit.

War changes all the time. In fact, war changes so frequently that it can, and often does, change several times over the course of just a single war. For all we know, it has changed again in the time it takes to finish this sentence. It is unrecognizable compared to what it was only a relatively short time ago.

Modern warfare is nothing like what you see in the movies ... or at least not in the movies that have been made yet. For the generations of people who grew up under the threat of the cold war, or their children who just heard and learned about it, it is hard to imagine a conflict that doesn’t rely entirely on the military strategy known as “combined arms warfare.”

Combined arms, for those of you not familiar with the minutiae of military tactics, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is warfare, as it was fought in most wars from World War II onwards. It is the combined use of infantry, artillery, armored vehicles, tanks, aircraft, and - where possible- naval assets in a single operation. It was the infantry working to support huge tank formations on massive maneuvers, all of it under the cover of air support. Or it was tanks and artillery providing cover for an infantry advance on a target while aircraft attacked positions to the enemy’s rear. It was massive amphibious landings like D-Day. It was using all of the armed forces available as a single military encounter, and it is what whole continents worth of military planners worked on for decades. The West’s entire defensive strategy for Europe during the cold war was completely and solely based on the idea that they would be defending against waves of armored tank columns supported by hordes of infantry, massed artillery, and swarms of air superiority and ground attack aircraft. I’m sure the Russians had something similar with their own strategies.

Modern warfare has outgrown that.

It has outgrown it to the point that its implementation would be disastrous.

The war in Ukraine was proving that on an almost daily basis. Russia had invaded the sovereign nation with the mistaken belief that nothing had changed. They rolled on Kyiv, thinking that elite armored brigades would smash through the hastily mounted defenses while paratroopers and special forces dropped behind the lines to secure the airfields needed to land the rest of the army.

They got waffle stomped by weekend warriors, the Ukrainian equivalent of the National Guard.

But why?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. The technology of war has surpassed those tactics. Fifty years ago, the only way to combat an attack from the air was the mass deployment of anti-air batteries. Even when those flak cannons were upgraded to anti-air missile systems, they were still immobile, needed to be dragged around by a truck, and required half a dozen men to operate. Now, that can all be performed by a single man with a shoulder-mounted launcher. That launcher can be mass-produced and transported to the front in the trunk of a car ... or just carried, and it takes about a day to train a soldier to use it effectively.

The same applies to shoulder-mounted anti-tank weaponry. A strong argument could be made that infantry-carried anti-tank weaponry has been around since the Second World War, but due to the way those weapons worked - hitting a tank directly on the front, back, or sides - tank designers were able to counter these with more efficient armor designs. Their success rate came down largely to luck. Modern Anti-tank missiles, however, are designed to be launched high, then come down at the tank from above. Not only are they infinitely more accurate and powerful, with vastly greater ranges, but they are hitting the tank where the armor is weakest. The fields of destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles were more than enough proof of how effective that particular form of weaponry had become.

Artillery, for almost the entirety of its existence, needed to be positioned and used on mass to be anything close to effective on a large scale. Modern weapon platforms had an accuracy margin of error of half a meter ... Fifty centimeters ... at the most extreme edge of their range. They didn’t need to target a neighborhood to take out an enemy hiding in its buildings anymore; they could choose which window of a single building to send the rounds through.

Hell, even the classic aerial dogfights made famous in movies like Top Gun were a thing of the past. Modern stealth systems, over-the-horizon radars, and missiles that had a range of more than a few hundred miles meant that aircraft were engaging each other without their pilots ever even seeing each other. Survival against one of these missiles had become less about the skill of the pilot and more about the countermeasure systems and the stealth profile of the plane on the receiving end.

Even more prolific, however, was the fact that almost every Ukrainian civilian was in possession of a device that could take professional-grade photographs of Russian units and positions, complete with the exact global positioning coordinates of where it was taken. Basically, turning them into fully equipped OSI agents. Those pictures could be sent to Ukrainian command, and they could call in an airstrike to destroy that unit a few minutes after it had smiled for the camera. Mobile phones had changed war entirely. Individual calls could be tracked and traced, meaning that any soldier stupid enough to make one was basically telling the Ukrainians exactly where he was. On New Year’s Eve, one Russian officer called home to wish his family a happy new year. Unfortunately for him and the five hundred or so other soldiers in the makeshift and hitherto secret base that he was calling from, the enemy was listening in. His call was cut short when a Ukrainian airstrike flattened the barracks and killed almost everyone inside.

The Russian army had been so shocked and overwhelmed by the utter ineffectiveness of their initial assault and so incapable of comprehending the realities of modern war they had regressed back to the use of trenches and dugouts. Because the simple truth of their new existence was that it was now too dangerous for them to be out in the open. Every soldier, every unit, everything wanting to survive was forced to dig in or find heavy cover. A tank was no longer a weapon of support for infantry; It was a priority target for weapons more than capable of blowing it the fuck up. Men moving through open terrain were just begging for the attention of the Ukrainian artillery gods, and even the lowest of simple soldiers could see that massed frontal assaults were tantamount to suicide, even if their officers had not the first idea of what other tactics to employ.

If they advanced, they were slaughtered. They couldn’t really retreat either, not just because Daddy Putin threatened them with execution if they did, but because the Ukrainians had artillery shells and drone weapons that could be fired over the Russian lines, blow up in mid-air, and scatter a few dozen landmines each onto the ground behind them like a particularly lethal form of confetti. Even if they were to risk execution by retreating, the Russian soldiers had to literally cross a brand new minefield in order to get to safety.

So they dug trenches, in much the same way their great-grandfathers did, and just sat there waiting for the inevitable counterattack to come.

Until, of course, a hand-launched and remotely operated drone flew overhead and dropped a grenade on them.

In less than a year, Russia had lost more men than the Americans did over the entire course of the Vietnam War. The writing was already on the wall, and it had been written in the needlessly expended blood of tens of thousands of young men on both sides.

On the other hand, the “War never changes” sentiment could be referring to the motivations and power struggles of war never changing. But my plight was proving that revenge was as much of a reason to lay waste to an enemy as the thirst for greater political power. There were, however, plenty of constants that really did never change...

War is not pretty.

War is not glamorous.

But war had changed, even if only one side knew it.

And glory could never be won with the blood of a whole generation.

It must be one of the more blatant examples of irony that I, of all people, would choose to make that statement given how casually I had been dishing out violence and ending lives of late.

And now, sitting in the back of a Russian transport truck, having used my powers on the other occupants of the vehicle to make them completely ignore us as we moved toward our destination, I found myself asking one very simple yet profound question.

What the fuck had I become?

The frigid, frozen winter landscape of eastern Ukraine rolled steadily passed the flap that covered the back of the truck as I peered out of the crack down the middle. I was able to use my powers to keep myself comfortably warm, but Bob and the remaining members of our escorts - not to mention the Russian soldiers we were traveling with - were huddled together with their hands under their armpits and struggling to fight off the cold.

It had all been remarkably easy.

We had stuck around the area of the Inquisitor’s office after Henry and Jerry had been airlifted out. With the massive expenditure of my power and our firm belief that it would be tracked, we had decided to lay a little ambush of our own for whoever came to investigate.

It was a great plan, in theory.

Or at least it would have been if anybody actually turned up to investigate. But no one did. After twelve hours, we had given up and moved on. We had headed east, towards the Russian rear, easily convinced the men at the first checkpoint that we were friendly - largely thanks to another use of my powers - hopped on the first truck we came to, and suddenly the occupants were convinced that we were not only friendly, but that they had urgent business in Alchevs’k.

That left me with another few hours alone with my thoughts.

And that question.

War changes people. It’s a cliche, but like all cliches, the truth of the statement has been proven so many times that simply repeating the words has all but lost meaning. But that doesn’t make them any less true. War really does change the people who are forced to endure it.

Another cliche was the one that said: “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I was in the rare position of having both experienced war and possessed enough power to be corrupted beyond recognition. The more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if I had succumbed to the wisdom of those cliches. The simple fact of the matter was that I had clearly changed beyond anything I would have been able to recognize a year ago.

But that is precisely where the problems started because power doesn’t only corrupt. Power reveals. Philosophers and barstool wisemen have said for centuries that there is an inherent darkness in each of us, one that is held in check by most people’s simple lack of ability to do anything about it. As soon as people get power, those limitations are removed, and the darkness starts to take over. Is that what happened to me? Had my abilities just unlocked and set free the baser instincts of my character? Was I this person all along and just didn’t know it?

I should make it clear, at this juncture, that I felt no remorse whatsoever for the things I had done. I wasn’t haunted by the faces of the men I had burned out of existence, nor by the screams of the men I had mercilessly slaughtered at the party or at Mary’s house. Far from being ashamed or sickened by my treatment of Toussant, I was actually quite proud that I had managed to pull it off. There were moments, however brief, where I relished in the act of decimating my enemy. Their suffering exhilarated me like the release of some pent-up pressure. I gleefully and callously reveled in their pain. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I enjoyed slaughtering them, but I certainly didn’t hate it.

No, there was not even the slightest shred of sympathy for my enemies. There was no empathy, there was no compassion, and there was no regret. But I was acutely aware that there probably should be. That this was not a normal way for a person to think about death and that the old me, the me who I was before I came into my powers, would have been horrified by what I had become.

And yet, in the long moments between the violence, the times when I was left alone with my thoughts when the fear of attack was temporarily put aside, I felt nothing.

I didn’t feel numb; numbness is a feeling unto itself. I literally felt nothing.

And the more that realization rolled around my head, the more it concerned me.

Because I really should have been feeling something. I don’t mean about Faye and Becky, the anger over their deaths had lessened with the recent intervention of Faye in particular, not to mention the fact that the man who had killed Becky was now a literal shell of his former self, dead in all but name. Lessened as it may have been, I still felt that, so why not anything else? There really was nothing, even down to concern over the recently injured Henry. It just wasn’t there. It was like my mind had decided that those were wasted and useless emotions and had just shut them off.

I couldn’t pretend to be an expert, but I was fairly sure that wasn’t normal.

“Darlin’,” the soft, lyrical voice of my fiery-haired beauty echoed from within the confines of my city. I could almost see her comforting smile in my mind’s eyes and feel her fingers curl around mine, and with a soft tug and a “Come on,” I was pulled backward into the mindscape.

It felt like falling into a warm, embracing ocean. That drop backward, like being pulled into a dream. It had been months since I had fallen asleep naturally; I had consciously used the bed in my bunker to initiate sleep since the first days of my awakening. More confusing was the fact that Faye was able to pull me into the mindscape, as opposed to me going there willingly to meet her. It wasn’t that I was unwilling right now; it was just one of those awkward realizations that perhaps she had more power within my mind than I had given her credit for.

Despite this newfound realization, I was happy to see her. Her warm, loving, tender smile was almost maternal in her concern for the thoughts that she had been forced to listen to. We were standing on the top of my city walls, and the breathtaking vista of my metropolis was spread out before us. Her hand was still gently coiled around mine.

Compared to the bitter cold and bracing winds of the Ukrainian winter, my city’s pleasant, temperate, and sunny atmosphere was almost like paradise. It was odd; my body was still obviously in the sub-zero temperatures of the back of the Russian truck, but my mind was here, and that coldness was nowhere to be found. I suppose it was a very literal translation of “mind over matter.”