Dream Drive: Yuri Ch. 01

I got into a bit of a creative slump in December. I felt like nothing I wrote was any good. To get out of the slump, I read my favorite books and tried to imagine additional stories set in their worlds. It came to naught, until I re-read Over_Red's story "Dream Drive", which he published on this very site. I managed to conjure up a character and sent him on an adventure in the world of Dream Drive.

Over_Red gave me permission to write this story and to publish it here, in the Sci-Fi & Fantasy category. Everything I've written below is to be considered fanon and not official Dream Drive canon. I hope you'll enjoy this little piece of fan-fiction. It's far more story than sex, but I've written an outline for part two, which will have threesomes and stuff. However, I'm swamped with time-consuming obligations and I don't know when I'll be able to finish it.

DISCLAIMER: This story contains a non-Occidental protagonist and a lot of violence. If you're not up for either, go read something else.

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Warrant Officer Yuri Yanuk stood in the hallway before the closed doors of the Intelligence Service Cipher School's auditorium. Within, the voices of dozens of flag officers were raised in heated debate. He knew it was a debate about his work, but he didn't know exactly what was being debated. No matter how hard he strained his ears, he couldn't quite make out their words. Not with the droning of hundreds of disbelieving officers coming from the opposite end of the short hall.

Yuri swayed on his feet. He had spent an entire day and night working. His body wasn't tired, but his mind was exhausted. He could hardly string two thoughts together. He needed to sleep. The endless chatter filling his ears seemed to be inviting him to shut it all out. He slowly leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. The raised voices coming from inside the auditorium tried to rouse his attention, but he had none to spare. His head nodded.

"Stand at attention!"

Yuri snapped to attention and turned on his heel to see Lieutenant Colonel Tariq Ali standing before him. He saluted. The Colonel glanced at him in disdain and refused to return the salute. In the four years Yuri had been at the Cipher School, Ali had returned his salute only a few times, leaving him to stand with his hand at his brow until either Ali left his sight, or a superior officer came along.

Yuri couldn't help but grin. Things were going to change for the better around here. Particularly for him.

Ali stared at the auditorium doors, his unibrow drawn down into a scowl. "Half the flag officers of the Caliphate military seriously debating the fears of a whining baby." He shook his head.

"Sir, my cryptanalysis-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel." The brief pause between the two words of Ali's rank was all Yuri could do to fight back against the man's molestation and not get court-martialled for it. Usually, he only used it when Ali abused military statutes to leave him locked into a salute for minutes on end, but he was tired and didn't feel like waiting. The implication of instantaneous demotion by three ranks never failed to anger Ali into raising his voice and drawing the attention of other officers.

Except this time. Ali wasn't even looking at him.

"You're predicting the first naval invasion in more than thirteen years of war, boy."

"The intercepts-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

Ali still refused to rant and rave at Yuri, which confused Yuri until the muted voices reminded him that half the Caliphate's military brass was ten feet away, behind a wooden paneled door. Of course Ali wouldn't do anything rash in this situation.I really need some sleep, Yuri thought.

"You're a bare-faced boy, Yanuk, not a man that should be taken seriously. Why the General ever brought you in, I'll never understand."

Yuri almost rolled his eyes in annoyance. "The messages clearly-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

"And you dreamed up the key to decrypting all that traffic."

"The Dream Drive-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

Ali stood silently staring at the auditorium doors. Yuri kept his salute the whole time. He was starting to wonder if he could now take a swing at the Colonel's head and get away with it.

He decided not to try his luck. He was trained in hand-to-hand combat, but Ali used to be Special Forces and would gladly break him in half. Then Ali'd insist Yuri be brought before a court-martial and dishonorably discharged. The brass might listen to the man and that would leave Yuri's future in jeopardy. And his family was counting on him.

Yuri nodded to himself. He just had to muddle through this latest bout of petty abuse of power and everything would be okay. He wished his mind wasn't lagging so much. His eyes seemed unwilling to remain open any longer.

Suddenly, Ali's face was right in front of his. "You know they don't believe you, don't you?"

"I'm not-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

"You just have to ask yourself why that's so, Yanuk." Ali cocked his head. His humungous lip ferret twitched as his mouth pouted. "I mean, it's a preposterous idea, all on its own, but is there something else?" He narrowed his eyes. "Is it because you were a double agent, for a time?"

"My contact with-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

"No, it isn't that, either. We both know what's tripping them up in there. Don't we? It's because you're a Zibar. A descendant of the infidel whores our ancestors snatched off passing ships and enslaved."

"The Zibar have lived-"

"Silence!"

"Yes, Lieutenant...Colonel."

"I'll not be hearing your filthy Zibar propaganda. Not anymore." His lips curled up into a smirk. "No, definitely not. It's time, Yanuk."

Yuri turned his head and looked at the auditorium doors. The voices within were quiet, but only for a few seconds. The debate was still going on.

"A new day is upon us. The beginning of the Caliphate's rise to glory."

Yuri's eyebrow rose at that last phrase. If Ali was thinking that the Caliphate could hold its own against the combined military might of the Greater Atlantic Union, then he had clearly taken leave of his senses. The ant that gets stomped by the boot wins no glory.

Ali turned around and walked away.

Yuri watched him go. As soon as Ali's back was swallowed up by the press of uniforms at the end of the hallway, Yuri lowered his arm. Instead of relieved, he felt annoyed. In the four years of working at the Cipher School, he had come to know that irritating smirk quite well. Ali always wore it when he had a serious ace up his sleeve, like when he caught a mistake of Yuri's that he could lord over him in front of the General.

Yuri used to be a daydreamer, too caught up in surges of ideas to see any one of them through to the end. His mind skipped eagerly from topic to topic and tended to get lost in tangents. Only codes and logical puzzles could engage his intellect for more that a few seconds at a time. He got really good at solving them.

When he had taken his aptitude tests at the start of his secondary education, the Caliphate military expressed an interest in his abilities. As soon as he had finished high school, he had seized his chance to join the Army. He had originally been given special dispensation to skip basic training and had been assigned to the Intelligence Service's Cipher School.

While the School did teach secure communications and intelligence work to military officers, its actual purpose was to decrypt all foreign military transmissions. Ali had been at the School for a decade already and he began to ride Yuri's ass right off the bat, catching every single one of his mistakes and using them against him.

Always with that stinking smirk on his face.

Ali had been the one that had convinced the General to forgo the special dispensation and ship Yuri off to basic training. He had said that Yuri could only benefit from rigorous discipline and a demanding schedule of physical training. The six months Yuri had spent at the mercy of a bunch of Army sergeants had left him with a chiseled physique. That physique was maintained by the habit of strenuous daily exercise that they had drilled into him.

The sergeants also forced him to develop the ability to focus on a single task, like rope climbing, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, except for the fear that his arms would come off at the shoulders if he was forced to do any more push-ups.

Even after Yuri completed basic training and was reinstituted at the Cipher School, the smirk would still make an appearance, from time to time. It forced Yuri to go over his work from other angles, check and double-check his suppositions. It made him develop a habit of seeing if the same data he was basing his premises on could be used to support the exact opposite hypothesis. Much to his surprise, it sometimes could, and he'd have to work harder.

In a way, Yuri was glad for Ali and his smirk. The smirk, as much as he hated it, had a big hand in making him the best cryptanalyst he could possibly be.

A dopey grin spread across Yuri's lips.And I'm certainly the best.

He had spent the past few months working at gaining valuable intelligence data from the children of key officers in the Greater Atlantic Union's military. Ali had wasted no opportunity to deride his work, as it mostly consisted of playing video games with North American teenagers in the Hub, the virtual space of the Dream Drive. Fortunately, the General both understood Yuri's premise and trusted him enough to allow him free reign and it had paid off just last night.

Using cutting edge technology, Yuri had won some online gaming competitions and enough prestige to get the right people to want to hang out with him in virtual space. The reclusive son of a GAU Navy officer had joined him in a private chat room and gushed over his performance in a prestigious gaming tournament.

Yuri had carefully guided the conversation from the war games he had just played to the actual war and then shared with the boy his desire to join the real thing. The boy jumped on the bandwagon and the topic of conversation became his father, an operations officer aboard a GAU aircraft carrier.

Yuri had stroked the boy's ego and plied him with ideas of being useful to the GAU's cause and living up to his father's legacy. When the boy's élan faded, Yuri struck hard. He had already known the boy's father had trouble connecting with him. He guessed that their only common ground was the father's cryptography work.

Yuri painted a picture for the boy. A way to use his computer skills in the military. To be a communications officer for the GAU and ensure their messages never got read by the enemy. The boy laughed before launching into a lengthy lecture on everything he had ever heard his father say about his duties.

Late last evening, Yuri Yanuk had been told the principles which governed the way the GAU Navy chaffed its transmissions while at sea. He had also been told the actual communications protocols and callsigns for a carrier's air group. He had quickly ushered the boy out of the chatroom and logged off to get to work. He had put all the School's supercomputers to the task and begun winnowing the chaff from the recent GAU transmissions the Intelligence Service had picked up. Using the callsigns as cribs and knowing where in the messages they should be, he was able to guess the encryption methods the GAU was using.

Just like that, the number of possible permutations the supercomputers had to run through to decrypt the messages went from infinite to a mere few dozen quadrillion.

Yuri had worked hard through the night, making educated guesses and cutting off futile avenues of calculations, until he had managed to extract a plaintext translation from a transmission. He wanted to jump for joy, but the thought of Ali's smirk had kept him focused. He still hadn't known if he had been right. He had triple-checked his assumptions and let the supercomputers work at the progression of encryption for another hour. He got his confirmation when more messages were decrypted. The code was cracked. He had cracked it.

As the supercomputers solved more and more permutations, the process of decryption gained speed at an almost exponential rate. Pretty soon, he had enough decrypted material to be able to predict the correct encryption method, based on nothing more than the exact time the message had been sent. No cribs were required any longer. All the GAU Navy's secrets were laid bare before his eyes.

By the time dawn came along, the supercomputers were decrypting the messages all but instantaneously as they were being fed into them. When the rest of the staff started coming in, they were stunned by his accomplishment. General Houdani, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Service Cipher School, laughed at seeing the plaintexts and hugged Yuri, calling him "the brightest boy under the heavens".

Everyone, even Ali, got to work at Yuri's direction and they resolved the backlog of stored GAU intercepts before lunch.

Some of them wished they hadn't. The rest barely contained their panic.

Put together, the recent transmissions plainly told of a huge invasion fleet anchored off Sardinia as it was being loaded with men, munitions and machines it would use to invade the Caliphate. It was going to happen any day now.

Despite the grim news, Yuri couldn't help but feel proud. This was the greatest code-breaking accomplishment of the entire war. If either the GAU, or the Bloc, had ever managed to break the other's codes like this, they had kept it to themselves.

He knew he wasn't going to get a medal anytime soon. As soon as the General had realized what was being said in the messages, he had put the Cipher School on a strict lockdown, disabling all telecommunications. He had summoned couriers and dispatched them to deliver handwritten notes from him to all the senior military officials in the capital. Now that the Caliphate knew the GAU's plans, they needed to keep the GAU from knowing that they knew, at least until they decided that they wanted the GAU to know that they knew.

A steady stream of senior officers started pouring into the School shortly thereafter. The NCOs and civilian secretaries scrambled to accommodate them all and find each one a seat and table where they could read a secure copy of the decrypted transmissions. Their disbelieving murmurs made a continuous droning sound which threatened to lull Yuri into sleep, once again.

The memory of Ali's smirk roused him back into action. He had to figure out the reason behind it. He knew that his analysis was immaculate, the sheer volume of decrypted messages was testament enough to the quality of his work.

Yuri resolved to re-examine the man's words, looking for a clue as to what the ace up his sleeve was.What was it that he said? A bare-faced boy? He knew that wasn't it. In Arab culture, smarts were only possessed by those who also possessed moustaches, the thicker a man's facial hair, the wiser he was. Yuri couldn't grow a moustache, as everyone could plainly see.

No, it was something else...The first naval invasion in thirteen years.

As ridiculous as that sounded, it was true. World War Three had been raging for fourteen years and it had been more than thirteen years since either side had tried a true naval invasion. He thought back to how the war had even started and the naval invasions he had learned about, both in school and in basic training.

He snorted softly. The things that were written in his high school history book were quite different from the things the drill sergeants had told him. The history books always painted war in terms of just causes and grand strategies. The sergeants told the stories in different terms; logistics and supply lines. The history books spoke of morale and convictions winning battles. The sergeants spoke of how ammo trumped courage every time and how air superiority was never optional.

After watching the war unfold for years, Yuri had to concede that the sergeants were right and the history books and academia were largely wrong. The people who burned for a just cause always lost to the people who shelled them from beyond the horizon with pinpoint precision by using a tiny robot disguised as a bee for a forward artillery observer. Yuri could predict how every military campaign would end, even before it began, based on nothing more than a good look at the supply lines it relied on. Even the most advanced technology was rendered useless if it ran out of critical supplies.

He focused his tired mind anew and thought back to fourteen years ago, when the war had started. He had been just a boy kicking a ball. If someone had tried to explain the war to him back then, they would have told him about the American city of Phoenix being nuked by terrorists. Now, he knew it was the result of economic collapse in both the global powerhouses and their antiquated leaderships' fear-driven efforts to force their markets to recovery.

The Greater Atlantic Union on one side, and the Sino-Russian Bloc on the other, decided to fight a small skirmish by proxy over natural resources in eastern Africa. Things slowly escalated from there into World War Three. While the GAU and the Bloc only added about a dozen nations to their official ranks during the war, the entire world was brought into the conflict. Whether they had to bow to economic pressures, or a direct threat of invasion, every nation had to declare for one side, or the other.

The few countries that managed to remain officially neutral only did so with tacit permission from both the warring sides. They were used as third party go-betweens that allowed the rich and powerful to circumvent the strict embargo laws and do business with their enemy counterparts.

As the crisis spread from Africa to the Middle East, the GAU intervened into the Israel-Iran conflict and wound up occupying most of Iran. High on the success, they got the bright idea of invading Russia via the Caucasus countries. The plan would bypass the bulk of Russia's armed forces.

When the war began, the GAU and Bloc massed their forces at their shared borders. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction had kept their armies idling in place, even while their comrades in arms had been slaughtering each other in faraway deserts.

Since armies hate sitting idle, they busied themselves with making defensive preparations. This suited the politicians well. Despite threatening to do it, neither side actually wanted to be the one to let loose with the nukes and spark the end of the world. Both sides had been increasing their nuclear arsenals to ludicrous proportions. All thoughts of a crippling first strike were rendered futile. The sheer number of nukes either side had, as well as the various methods they developed for deploying them, meant that any nuclear strike was going to result in the certain destruction of the Earth.

Despite this sobering fact, the world leaders still pressed on with their war, using propaganda to foment pro-war sentiments amongst their citizens. More accurately, they used propaganda to turn their citizens against anyone who dared question, in any way, what the government was doing. Such critical thinkers were painted as traitors and backstabbers. If they got lynched by the angry relatives of dead soldiers, law enforcement routinely looked away and buried the evidence afterwards.

In such an atmosphere, the governments couldn't afford to appear weak while facing the enemy, so they got on board with the fortification program. The GAU-Bloc borders in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe were quickly stitched up tight with multiple layers of defenses.

An Exclusion Zone was established. It ran for thousands of miles, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and was tens of miles wide. It was riddled with land mines and automated turrets and tank obstacles. Every square inch of it was pre-sighted by the countless artillery pieces that were installed there.