by Chris James
“Understood, Sir,” she replied without enthusiasm.
“Good. Pakla out.”
Three seconds later, the super AI announced an incoming secure communication and Kate smiled in relief. General Pakla’s voice again filled the mobile command vehicle, quieter and with a caring lover’s softness. He said: “Events are too chaotic to talk now, but you did the right thing, which is why I did not countermand your order.”
“Will that not cause you problems later?”
“In a few days, missing-presumed-dead troops will be the least of our problems. This is not merely another exercise.”
“I know.”
“Get out of there as soon as you can, please. We will be together again in a few days, I promise.”
The connection ended and Kate murmured: “Bolek, delete all records of that conversation and retreat. Notify local commanders that the line should fall back.”
The Polish Army’s super AI acknowledged: “Confirmed. General Pakla’s post has ordered the front to retreat now.”
“Windows please, Bolek, the usual configuration,” Kate said and then sighed. The data on screens around the sides of the mobile command vehicle vanished to reveal clear windows offering views of southern-European pine forest and winter-bare birches. Kate lolled her head back in the main command chair. Through the window in the roof above her, she saw the sky shining a bright, cold blue with the promise of spring.
“Please secure yourself, Major, as we are approaching uneven terrain,” the super AI suggested.
Kate immediately reached for the chair’s thick black straps and buckled herself in, recalling that for Bolek, ‘uneven terrain’ covered everything from slight inclines to sudden near-vertical drops that could test the strongest of stomachs. The vehicle rocked and bounced between trees while its sole occupant kept looking at the sky above her. “What is the situation in Plovdiv?” Kat asked.
“Substantial numbers of refugees are fleeing the city and there are reports of localised civil disturbances.”
“Most of those people are going to die, are they not?”
The super AI’s tone did not change: “Total projected casualties vary too broadly to have any meaningful value at this stage.”
“Oh,” Kate said with irony, “even the super AI doesn’t know how bad it is going to be.”
“The situation is too fluid at this stage. Variables include how many and in what formations the enemy deployments att—”
“And in what we can do to counteract them?”
“Nothing, to any significant degree.”
“What? What on earth are you talking about?”
The super AI replied: “Continually updated forecasts suggest that if the New Persian Caliphate continues to attack NATO with the current level of firepower, their invasion will be complete and Europe overrun in—”
Kate’s brow furrowed at the super-AI stopping in mid-sentence. The mobile command vehicle jolted and slewed before righting itself on flatter terrain, and when Kate had managed to steady herself in her seat, she barked: “Go on, in how long? When?”
“Access to that information has been restricted.”
Kate knew better than to argue. She asked: “How long until we reach the air transport facility? And do not say ‘approximately’ if you intend to give me a precise figure.”
“Five minutes and… thirty-seven seconds.”
“That’s better.” With her index finger, she traced a line above the lip of her cleft palate again as she attempted once more to grasp the magnitude of what was happening around her, minute by minute, hour by hour. A part of her mind observed in detached fascination as the very essence of history itself seemed to be shifting and sliding like some vast rocky mountain that had begun to collapse because one tiny grain of sand too many had slid from underneath it.
She considered where it might all end more than how it had started. The whole world had treated the Caliphate with suspicion for as long as she could remember. But ever since her childhood, the received wisdom insisted that the Caliphate was simply too backward and too consumed with its own internal strife to pose any threat to the rest of the world. Her teachers at school, the media in her home country of Poland, and everyone else it seemed to her, considered the sealed-off Caliphate the least of the world’s problems. Worsening climate change occupied most of the global armed forces, who could support a country’s regular emergency services in evacuation and rescue duties. In the last few years, China growled more like a lion than a dragon once it had become by far the largest economy on Earth, and Russia engaged in its usual subterfuge without understanding that Europe had for decades known the measure of its ham-fisted duplicity. At the same time, knowledgeable Americans lamented the erosion of their once-insurmountable empire with a regret singularly lacking in the British a century earlier.
However, quite suddenly and from out of nowhere, that backward Arab conglomerate which was thought to be fighting medieval levels of poverty and corruption, into which anyone could enter but from which no one could leave, exploded onto the international stage, destroying the accepted world order in mere days.
Kate tilted her head forward to see pines and birches flash past outside as the mobile command vehicle sped along a well-established but dusty forest track. She turned to the remaining screens to follow the battle and sighed when she saw the increasing list of casualties. Hungarian, Czech and Polish troop transports had fled to the ground if they’d lasted long enough. Many had been destroyed. The displays looked like some appalling video game, but the graphics represented actual deaths and injuries to real people. Her spirit sank.
In a few days, she would be with the General, the only man who understood her, the only man who’d looked at her as a woman and not as some kind of strange freak for not having her cleft palate corrected. She exhaled and told herself that yes, the General, her General, would know what would happen next.
Chapter 5
06.31 Sunday 19 February 2062
GENERAL SIR TERRY TIDBURY fought an onslaught of inward alarm as he stood in front of the screens in the new War Rooms in Whitehall and observed the unfolding disaster. With his extensive military experience, he knew how to retain a calm exterior, but the effect of his entire career having passed in peacetime—only to face this most brutal war at the end—hit to the centre of his being. Now, in real time, NATO forces were enduring losses never before seen in the organisation’s one hundred-and-thirteen year history.
Each second brought new reports, new indications, new super-AI assessments of how long his forces, and by extension Europe, could expect to survive, as well as new reports of casualties, updated estimates of the numbers of the Caliphate’s victims, and the projected spread of the invading warriors.
In a thumbnail in the top left-hand corner of the main screen, the African-American face of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Joseph E. Jones, peered in fascinated concentration, which, Terry assumed, matched a similar look on his own face.
From one of the monitoring stations, a young man announced: “Organised resistance in Spain has collapsed. Remaining NATO forces now outnumbered over two hundred to one.”
Terry turned to the central holographic display console, which displayed a digital representation of the battle taking place over Grenada in Spain. Blotches of light representing his troops and his arms winked out of existence. The image shrank to bring the whole of southern Spain into view. Illuminated markers with time stamps showed how the Caliphate’s ACAs had made landfall on a one-hundred-kilometre front from Cartagena to Alicante. Once over Spanish territory, this spearhead had split north and south, and Grenada was the southernmost Caliphate landing point. Terry shook his head at the question-mark icons that denoted suspected landing points for Caliphate invasion forces.
“Any new data on the invading forces?” he asked the room.
“No, Sir,” came the immediate response.
Terry turned back to the screens around the perimeter of the room, and kept his br
eathing even. In the zone designated ‘Central’, the city of Rome was suffering another intense assault, but the country around it had been caught in a pincer as enemy forces destroyed all in their path on two fronts, fifty kilometres apart. The local people had barely begun to recover from the punishment attack a week earlier, and now they were obliged to suffer even greater destruction.
Athens endured a similar misfortune: mere days after vast swaths of the ancient city had been levelled—including the Acropolis—Caliphate ACAs now swarmed over the remnants, pulverising what little resistance Greek and allied forces could offer, and then embarking on the systemic annihilation of the remaining civilian population. Further east, reports detailed Caliphate forces pouring into Europe through Istanbul and surging up through Bulgaria, wreaking a similar havoc.
From the screen, Jones growled: “Secure channel. General?”
Terry glanced at his adjutant, Simms, and said: “I’ll be in my office.” The General left the station and entered his private office next to the main entrance to the War Rooms. He closed the door and called: “Squonk? Link to SACEUR, evaluate potential for compromise.”
Terry paced around the small, windowless room as the British Army’s super AI answered: “Less than three-thousandths of one percent.”
“Proceed.”
Jones’s face resolved on the largest wall in the room in two dimensions, Terry eschewing the holographic option which he could have over his desk. “What’s the matter, General?” Terry asked, struggling to keep the frustration from his voice.
“How would you assess morale over there, General?”
The American’s question nonplussed the Englishman for a moment, but he answered: “Holding up. Obviously the situation on the continent is looking less than ideal—”
“You realise we’re gonna be fortunate if we last more than a few weeks?”
“The rearmament progra—”
“Eighty sites scattered over northern Europe? The enemy will pulverise them before a single PeaceMaker rolls off the line.”
“Perhaps not if we can delay his advance with reinforcements from your forces?”
Jones’s eyes narrowed: “Unlikely, because we have to do the job with the resources we currently have avail—” He broke off and peered at something Terry couldn’t see. Abruptly, he ordered: “Pass it around,” and turned his gaze back to Terry. “Looks like we finally got some intel.”
Terry instructed: “On the desk, Squonk,” and spun round from the wall to see a holographic image resolve of some kind of aircraft. The image flickered and flashed with indistinctness, and Terry realised he watched a running loop of a few seconds’ movement that repeated. The aircraft had a thick, tubular fuselage with a flattened underside. The wings seemed stunted, although Terry was no expert on aeronautics. The aircraft had no visible means of propulsion.
From behind him, SACEUR’s voice growled: “Ample Annie is getting it all figured out.”
Terry muttered: “Just how big is that thing?”
Squonk’s asexual voice announced: “Received data confirms a wingspan of two hundred metres with a total lift capacity of—”
“Christ,” Terry said. “How many troops can it carry?”
Squonk replied: “Initial estimates range from one to two thousand, depending on the extent of support equipment.”
“How on earth is it powered?”
“Insufficient data, however a preliminary analysis points to an above-average probability of increased development of the units that power the enemy’s ACA flee—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Terry broke in, his distrust of super AI flaring again. “The units which power ACAs absolutely cannot be made large enough to lift such vast craft. That kind of tech must be years if not decades away…” His words trailed off and he spun back to face General Jones on the wall-screen.
The American let out a sigh and said: “I’m no engineer either, General, but if the enemy’s tech really is so far ahead of ours, then our chances of holding their attack up, never mind reversing it, are shrinking real quick.”
Terry tapped the desk with a finger and said: “We need answers. We need to develop countermeasures,” but even as he spoke the words, he understood the flaw in his reasoning.
General Jones said: “We ain’t gonna have the time, General. Seems to me we’ve been outmanoeuvred by a goddamn dictatorship.”
“There has to be an alternative,” Terry said with scant notion what that option might be.
“Militarily there’s only one, and you know what that is, General.”
Terry folded his arms and stared back at the American. He said: “Now hang on a minute. Surrender? Already? The invasion has only just begun—”
“And it’s a whole new ball game. We’re completely outmatched and outgunned, and our damn computers are gonna reach the same conclusion real soon. And when they do, our political masters might decide it’s the only way to go.”
Terry shook his head and insisted: “That’s never going to happen, Sir. The enemy’s behaviour to date totally precludes that course of action.”
“So what do you suggest, General?”
“We have to give our people some kind of hope, however vanishing.”
“Hope in a hopeless situation?”
Terry nodded, understanding that the only option available to NATO was a fight to the bitter end, which might arrive much sooner than even the most pessimistic forecasts suggested.
Chapter 6
06.57 Sunday 19 February
CRISPIN WEBB, Principal Private Secretary to English Prime Minister Dahra Napier, stared at the back of his boss’s head and wondered what must be going on in there. He himself had run out of superlatives in the last week: the most unimaginable, the worst, the most nightmarish. The sense of inescapable finality caused the mood in Ten Downing Street to fluctuate wildly from the height of stoic resilience to the depths of resigned pessimism. On this night, which had seen the promised invasion begin, he had not slept, mainly thanks to a not-entirely-legal supply of reengineered GenoFluid bots suspended in a pill. His boss had retired but returned less than two hours later to monitor the data coming from the War Rooms a couple of streets away.
Now, she stared through the windows into the dark night outside. He followed her gaze and considered that at nearly seven in the morning, the blackness remained impenetrable. She spoke, her voice hoarse from exhaustion: “We have to wrest back some modicum of control.”
Crispin had to smother a guffaw. There could be little doubt who had control. He said: “The only thing we can do is try to exert more diplomatic pressure, boss.”
She didn’t reply, but her shoulders rose and fell as her breathing deepened. He considered again if he were about to have to deliver the same speech he’d given her more than once over the last few days.
She turned around and hissed: “The rest of the world must come to our aid. Pressure must be brought to bear on that damnable Caliph.”
“We’re doing all we can in that direc—”
“Well, it’s hardly enough, is it?”
Crispin took a deep breath. He said: “Diplomacy takes second place behind trade, boss. Old allies further afield of course condemn the Caliphate’s aggression, but as long as China refuses to rein the Caliph in, none of them is going to risk upsetting their most important trading partner. Too much of their economies depend on having Beijing on-side.”
“But this is Europe, the cultural centre of the world. The rest of the world cannot simply sit back and watch us be put to the sword.”
“Yes, I think they can. And I also think the Chinese might have something to say about where the cultural centre of the world is.” Crispin hesitated when he saw how his words affected Napier, and a distant memory surfaced, a piece of advice from his predecessor given to him a few days before Crispin had followed Napier into Ten Downing Street eight years earlier. The chief aide to the outgoing PM had told him always to remember that English politicians carried substantial baggage
with them: the Empire, the Victorians, and an inability to accept that the old power had been lost forever. It didn’t matter how clear-sighted they might be before their election, once they set foot inside the Palace of Westminster and were immersed in the iconology of Great Britain’s past glories, all but the most pragmatic succumbed. And the effect became even more pronounced when they discovered the further trappings of power: stately homes like Chequers, Chevening and Dorneywood. He warned Crispin that centuries of martial success and international deference clouded their acceptance of England’s vastly weakened place in the world. Like a Greek who complained bitterly that more people should remember his country invented democracy, or a Roman who daydreamed of her ancestors’ overwhelming dominance, so too the English could not quite untether themselves from the knowledge that fewer than two centuries before, theirs had been the most advanced and powerful country on Earth.
Crispin repeated what he felt sure he’d already told the Prime Minister more than once over the last week: “Boss, it’s been a while since we could make foreigners do what we wanted them to do—”
“Don’t patronise me. I know that,” she shot back. “Come along, I want to go to the War Rooms and see for myself just how bad things are.” She strode to the door and exited. Crispin hurried after her and followed her down the stairs from the third-floor apartment. With every tread and riser, they passed portraits of previous incumbents, descending as though through a time machine, going into the past, each preceding prime minister having wielded more power and authority than his or her predecessor. Napier continued: “The fact that England is not the world power it used to be is not lost on me, I can assure you. But what the Persian Caliphate is doing today cannot go unchallenged. Yes, I am perfectly aware—as you’ve mentioned more than once lately—about how little weight England carries in global affairs, but that is not the point.”
They hurried past Churchill, MacDonald and Asquith, each of whom stared out unmoved by their descendants’ approaching destruction. Crispin held his council, wondering whether Napier had accepted the objective truth of their situation.