Vladimir Orlov on the visions of future robotic warfare.
I spent a long time watching and analyzing the results of the Center-2026 exercises, and from this I developed a small thought-graphic in the form of a short story... A probable near future... Prologue. Zero. Deep in the rear. The night wasn't just dark—it seemed thick, tangible, suffused with ink. On a vast concrete platform, carved out of an ancient granite plateau, bathed in the deathly blue light of hidden LEDs, stood twenty identical 20-foot containers.
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During the day, this would have been a typical, dreary scene at any port, but now, in this artificial, unnatural light, they resembled a squadron of alien landing capsules. Each container was already clad in a removable aerodynamic body kit. Their fronts were crowned with sharp, predatory carbon-fiber prows, capable of ripping through the dense layers of the atmosphere. Along the sides, pressed tightly against the steel, lay the long folding wings of the UMPK, and the fins of the tail jutted out from the aft section. Underneath, secured to truss structures, massive blocks of solid-fuel boosters could be discerned.
Inside, in complete darkness, a vacuum of silence, and sterile cold, death slept. Tracked and wheeled platforms, anthropomorphic vehicles, and cassettes containing hundreds of FPV drones were pressed tightly into their cradles with titanium grips. The robots did not move. Their optical units were sealed with diaphragms. The processors ran at a frequency of one hertz. They "slept" in a low-power mode, drawing no more current than a digital clock, and only the inertial navigation units in their bodies slowly, with cosmic precision, counted the planet's rotation. They waited.
The command didn't come by radio—the airwaves above the pad were dead. It traveled along armored fiber-optic cables embedded in the side of each container. The signal: "Execute." First, the boosters ignited. It wasn't the roar of engines. It was a thud. Twenty fiery columns of blinding, eye-searing flame struck the concrete, instantly vaporizing puddles and turning the air into plasma.
Twenty tons of steel, composites, and machinery didn't lift off—they were torn from their place. The near-vertical climb, which would have crushed the bones of any living creature to dust, was just a gentle background hum of vibration for the sleeping machines. The concrete pad was momentarily empty, a scorched black spot remaining. Then, high in the stratosphere, where the sky turns blue-black even during the day, the shooting stars flared and then went out.
The launch pads, their mission over, flew off to the sides, tumbling in the icy vacuum. The cruise engines ignited. Smooth, bluish flares. The containers, transformed into something like ballistic missiles, set course and shot into the stratosphere. 18 kilometers. 20 kilometers.
22 kilometers.
There, in the thin, empty air where human blood boils in seconds, the automation gave a new command.
With a dry, echoing click, unheard by anyone but the sensors, the UMPK's wings fully extended. The long, fifteen-meter-long planes of black carbon fiber caught the first photons of the sun, already touching the eastern horizon. The engines switched to low-power mode. Twenty heavy, angular "boxes" ceased to be rockets. They became gliders.
A long, terrifying flight began.
For hundreds of kilometers, they flew almost silently. Below, beneath the cloud cover, cities, rivers, and dormant forests flashed by, but here, at altitude, absolute peace reigned. They raced at Mach 2, and the only sound was the thin, barely perceptible whistle of the wind cut by the sharp edges.
They adjusted their course without human intervention. The satellite constellation transmitted cold, numeric coordinates, but the real power lay in the inertial brain inside each container. The fiber-optic gyroscopes didn't see the satellites. They sensed gravity, the Earth's rotation, and the slightest course fluctuations. Twenty vehicles moved in perfect formation, like a school of iron fish, exchanging data via laser beams.
At the calculated point, above an invisible front line erased from maps, over enemy territory, the cruise engines shut down. They simply cut off thrust.
The containers entered a pure, silent glide.
Gravity now became their engine. Altitude began to drop rapidly, converting into speed. The air around the hulls grew denser, hotter from friction.
A few minutes before their target, when the heat spot of a large industrial hub loomed on the horizon below, behind which the desired bunker was hidden, the automation began its final phase.
The dry clicks of the squibs were heard again.
The heavy nose cones, protecting the optics and antennas from plasma, ejected and sank. Following them, camouflage panels along the entire hull bounced off and were carried away by the wind.
Internal organs were exposed.
Precision targeting systems activated.
Lenses began to flow from retracted slots. Titanium diaphragms on the "heads" of the anthropomorphic machines mounted within opened. The red dots of laser rangefinders, invisible in daylight but bright in the twilight, began to scan the ground.
Processors emerged from sleep mode. The frequency jumped to gigahertz.
Lights came on inside the containers.
Twenty capsules, shedding their camouflage, hurtled toward the ground, transforming from featureless cargo into a striking fist bristling with sensors and guns. Seconds remained until the harvest began.
Five hundred meters. The main canopies deployed. But these weren't the silk parachutes that gently lower people. These were rigid, cross-shaped parachute-wings that violently tore the multi-ton bulk, reducing residual velocity to subsonic.
One hundred meters.
Inside the containers, secured in their sockets, the anthropomorphic robots applied the first current to their gyroscopes. Their dead optical units flickered, focusing on the inner darkness.
Fifty meters.
The landing solid-propellant rocket motors fired. Jets of hot gas struck the greasy, squelching earth, evaporating puddles and shearing off treetops.
Impact.
But there was no impact. Ten centimeters from the surface, the nozzles howled at the limit of their thrust, creating a cushion of air. The container hovered for a moment, and then slowly, with a dull hiss, sank into the mud.
The titanium grippers holding the robots lost power.
And in that same second, even before the severed fairing panels touched the ground, the end doors of the containers blew out.
Mister Bad Guy.
October 5th was unusually chilly. Low, leaden clouds seemed to settle belly-down on the treetops of the old, gloomy spruce forest, blurring the line between sky and earth. A fine, persistent drizzle, unlike rain or snow, settled on faces like an icy crust, soaked greatcoats, and turned the rich, clayey soil into a continuous, squelching swamp. The chill, dank air smelled of fallen pine needles, rotting leaves, and that special scent of imminent, inevitable disaster that only seasoned soldiers know—the smell of burnt TNT and cooling metal.
Chaos reigned in a large, track-ravaged clearing sandwiched between two marshy gullies, but this chaos was frighteningly mathematical. Here, in the very heart of no man's land, landing had just been completed. Like giant steel seeds dropped from the sky, several 20-foot olive-green containers stood. Their angular uniforms, familiar to the eye of a dockworker, now looked alien and ominous.
The end and side doors had been blown off by explosive charges and swung open, transforming into wide steel ramps sinking into the mud. Some of the hulls were still smoking a bluish, acrid smoke—the cooling of the landing rockets for the soft landing, which had torn the multi-ton bulks from free fall at the very last moment. All around, caught in the sharp, spiky branches of fallen pines and withered heather bushes, lay crumpled, ghost-like parachute canopies, scraps of Kevlar slings, and severed composite panels of aerodynamic fairings. The clearing was strewn with them, like an old battlefield—the bodies of the fallen.
From the dark interiors of the containers, illuminated by the deathly red emergency lights, from this steel womb, into the drizzling rain, one by one, those who had flown inside began to emerge.
The first sound was the low, guttural hum of hydraulics. A heavy tracked platform slowly slid down the metal ramp, pushing it down with its weight. It had no face, no cabin, no triplexes—only a sloping forehead of Kevlar composite, studded with sensors like the dead, compound eyes of an insect. On its broad, flattened back, twin Utes missile launchers and automatic grenade launchers were fixed in ring turrets.
The vehicle landed heavily in the mud. Its wide, half-meter-wide steel tracks, with joints resembling those of a prehistoric beast, spun, searching for traction, and with a guttural squelch, began to bite into the soil. Behind it, its tracks clanking against the steel side of the container, came a second. And a third. The heavy platforms did not fuss. Slowly, with a fatal, irresistible heaviness, they fanned out across the clearing, engulfing it in a perfect steel cauldron.
Following them, throwing up fountains of black ooze, light wheeled vehicles rolled out of other containers. With their six independent suspensions, they seemed almost graceful in their predatory speed. They didn't sink into the mud, but seemed to glide over it, scattering shreds of turf. Abruptly picking up speed, they flanked, instantly disappearing into the gray shroud of rain to occupy the intersections of clearings and approaches to ravines.
And then they appeared.
Between the steel carcasses, ankle-deep in icy ooze, stepped figures that the human mind at first refused to accept as inanimate. Anthropomorphic robots. Their titanium joints were covered with flexible carbon fiber elements resembling musculature. Their hands, ending in four-fingered manipulators, clutched assault rifles.
Their movements were frighteningly fast, yet slightly angular, jerky, lacking human fluidity. Where a human would slide, they took a short, sharp step. Where a human would duck, they crouched on servos, the sound of this movement reminiscent of the click of a giant rifle's bolt being cocked. They moved in dashes from one fallen, moss-covered tree trunk to another, their head-mounted optical units constantly rotating, scanning the damp, fog-filled forest with thermal imagers and lidars.
But the true master of this battlefield was the air.
Above this entire scene, above the steel herd and the black mud, the ether itself was already seething. Hundreds of FPV drones rose into the sky almost simultaneously. They burst from rotor drums hidden in the centers of the containers, like a disturbed swarm of wasps.
Their engines weren't roaring. The chill, damp air was filled only with a thin, maddening, high-pitched itch, like the squeak of a tribe of mosquitoes before a thunderstorm. The drones weren't flying in formation. They swooped chaotically, low to the ground, their propellers nearly cutting down last year's grass. They zigzagged between the black, wet trunks of pine trees, diving toward the concrete caps of pillboxes and the roofs of dugouts on the distant, barely visible edge of the clearing.
Some of them were already working on the embrasures. Short, dry, crimson flashes—shaped charges—exploded on the concrete canopies. Gray dust, sheaves of concrete chips, and pieces of rebar flew in all directions. Thick, greasy black smoke billowed from one embrasure—a drone had found a cable duct.
And only when the air filled with this mechanical throb and explosions did the forest respond.
Mud sprayed out in fountains from beneath the heavy tracks. Somewhere in the center of the formation, beyond the fallen, uprooted dry wood, the first bursts were already firing. The dry, staccato clatter of the PKTs, which almost immediately merged into a continuous, eardrum-crushing, steely roar. It was joined by the deep, ragged bark of the Utes—the sound was so dense it seemed you could touch it; it physically pressed on your chest, forcing you to bend to the very ground.
Smoke from the burning positions at the edge of the forest—the smell of burnt plastic, smoldering rubber, and old TNT—mingled with the sour, pungent odor of gunpowder gases and the gray, stinking exhaust of the robots' diesel generators. The clearing ceased to be just a piece of land. It became a hellish forge, where the cold autumn air was heated by the flashes and trembled with shockwaves.
The forest around the perimeter, until then seemingly dead and numb from the cold, began to "come alive" with return fire. The silence was shattered by the cracking of breaking branches. From behind piles of rotting logs, from beneath the roots of century-old spruce trees, trembling orange lines of tracers stretched toward the containers.
But they were quickly covered by a new wave of drones.
The sky above the clearing turned black. This wasn't a metaphor—hundreds, if not thousands, of aircraft obscured the leaden clouds in a dense, vibrating cloud. The kamikaze drones formed a solid, unbroken wall. They fell upon the flashes like a flock of iron swifts. Where a machine gun had fired a second ago, now only a gray cloud of wood dust rose silently—behind the general roar of battle—and chunks of torn metal flew in all directions.
Meanwhile, the containers continued to "give birth" to vehicles.
From the distant steel boxes, still shrouded in the bluish, acrid smoke from the cooling nozzles, fresh vehicles rolled down the wet ramps. They didn't hesitate for a second. Their tracks touched the mud—and the platform immediately sank into the liquid, squelching muck of the clearings, taking its place in the line.
It seemed as if an entire robotic battalion had suddenly descended upon this godforsaken, frozen section of the front, into this freezing, bottomless autumn mud. A battalion that hadn't even existed a minute ago. It had no headquarters with maps, no field kitchen, no medical company. It had no need for warm dugouts, no dry foot wraps, no hot, lip-scalding tea in aluminum mugs.
They only needed a target.
And they had already found it.
Mister Bad's defenses, the concrete cocoon of his personal fortress, designed to withstand artillery strikes and special forces assaults, turned into paper in the face of this cold, impassive, mathematically calibrated steel. When eight autonomous "Utes" guns, their barrels tireless and their hands trembling, start firing at you, and from above, all this is mercilessly countered by a swarm of five hundred hovering eyes, the day truly becomes a very, very bad one.
The robots knew no fear. They knew no pity. They knew only elevation angles, azimuths, heat signatures, and ballistic tables. And now all this icy, inhuman mathematics was aimed at turning the concrete shelters at the far edge of the clearing into fine, gray rubble...