by Chris James
III. THE ASSAULTS BEGIN
Saturday 11 February 2062 was Eid-al-Fitr in the Muslim calendar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast. US satellites began tracking the first waves of ACAs at 06.21, as soon as they left the cloak of Caliphate jamming and emerged over the waves of the Aegean Sea, heading northwest towards Greece. Seventeen minutes later, several more waves emerged from the North African coast, Italy their target. One issue which vexed the defenders was how best to deploy their limited resources. The Greek army possessed a mere five battlefield-support laser units: large, multi-terrain tracked vehicles designed primarily to defend ground won in combat against counterattack. The previous day, following fraught negotiations between NATO members, the Greeks had been reinforced with one Polish and three German vehicles. All were deployed to defend Athens, with little time to spare. In addition, Greek formations were supported with over a hundred RIM 214 Standard surface-to-air missile batteries. The thousands of flesh-and-blood soldiers surrounding the Greek capital additionally boasted a number of formidable small arms, including the shoulder-launched Stiletto Z50 smart missile. In their eagerness to throw everything into the defence of their capital, the Greeks also deployed three tank divisions. The hills around Athens bristled with autonomous super-AI Leopard tanks, believed to be equal to the task of defending the capital.
Captain Raptis, commanding a regiment attached to IV Army Corps, wrote of the morning’s events to his parents in Lamia: ‘The dawn was coming on, high cloud flecked with beautiful reds and oranges, and I shivered from the chill in the air. There was a small sense of relief among the company when forward observation reported that we had Blackswans incoming, rather than the laser-equipped Lapwings they’d used on Israel. I went back into the command post - we were twenty kilometres from the city centre - and watched the screens as they told us of the Caliphate’s approach. I know you don’t rate him, father, but General Kokinos conducted things as well as any general could, in truth. Since we knew that no Caliphate warriors had advanced out of Istanbul, we expected this to be more of an extensive terror raid, but what a primary target they chose - the Acropolis!’
The first three waves of Caliphate ACAs were defeated by NATO PeaceMakers in fiery aerial clashes whose debris obliged civilians to take cover. Subsequent waves attacked the defenders, as military doctrine insisted. The first ground casualty was one of the German battlefield-support lasers, situated close to Athens’s most recognisable landmark. Once destroyed, the next wave of Blackswans released an estimated two hundred Spiders, which reduced the Acropolis to rubble from 07.59 to 08.03. High-altitude SkyWatcher ACAs above the country noted further waves of Caliphate Blackswans breaking off from the main attack, and heading north towards Delphi.
This baptism of fire for the Greeks yielded valuable experience for the defenders. Captain Raptis again: ‘… despite the urgency, during the battle Corporal Metaxas reported the best way his men had found of knocking out a Blackswan: it needed at least three shots from a tank, and two Stiletto Z50 missiles. After that, its shielding was down and even small-arms fire would make it explode and crash. I was sorry when Metaxas was killed a little later - he was a good man.’
In this first land battle between Caliphate and NATO forces, the former’s numerical superiority again cost the defenders dearly. By 11.00, all of the NATO battlefield-support lasers were smoking wrecks, and two of the three tank divisions had suffered 90% casualties. Already the defenders were obliged to lose flesh-and-blood soldiers, while the Caliphate merely committed hardware to the battle. Although the numbers were not high by the standards of the previous century’s wars, the beginning of the conflict would cost NATO many well-trained personnel for whom the military was a way of life, to be replaced with lesser-trained and sometimes foolhardy raw recruits later in the war.
It is difficult to underestimate the effect of the battle on ordinary Athenians. Yannis Megalos, a retired shop-owner who had lived through most of his country’s problems that century, spoke for many when he said: ‘They had no right to send their evil machines here and destroy these monuments. My heart bled when the Acropolis fell. It had stood over the land for thousands of years, how could anyone believe they had the right to bring it down?’ In the northern district of Galatsi, mother-of-three Narkissa Simonides described the worries of many civilian parents: ‘We lived in a third-floor apartment, and I had to force the boys to hide under the kitchen table. The crashing and bangs and screams scared me but seemed to excite them. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and all the windows in the apartment shattered. I found out later that three Spiders had destroyed the Red Cross Hospital.’
Young Turkish refugee Berat Kartal, last seen escaping the Caliphate on a ferry, was among the thousands attempting to flee northwards. Later he recorded in his journal: ‘The Greeks look to be putting up a fair fight, but just like us, they are plagued by too many of these awful machines. I have to stay clear of the main roads, for their machines make sure of hitting major junctions and other infrastructure. A few hours ago I had my head lowered, jogging down a side street, when I came upon a group of people who were staring through a gap in the buildings and howling. I looked out across the city and saw the Acropolis dissolving in a massive cloud of dust. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I wept along with the Greeks around me, not only for the loss of their culture, but also because I knew the same thing must be happening to the heritage in my own country. Nothing would ever be the same again.’
With Athens’s infrastructure, transport links and cultural heritage destroyed, the Caliphate broke off the attack and withdrew its remaining ACAs shortly after midday, leaving behind over three hundred downed machines for NATO military scientists to analyse, in order to identify how they might develop a better defence against them. In the north, the ancient ruins at Delphi were levelled, as were sites at Knossos and Olympia.
Eight hundred kilometres to the northwest, the authorities in Rome were involved in a dispute with the Vatican. At a meeting early in the day, General Romano of the Italian Army bemoaned to his subordinates: ‘The Pontiff is absolutely wrong to refuse to allow us to move our defences closer to him - does he not understand that St. Peter’s Square must surely be ruined?’ The Pope rejected the insistence absolutely, and suffered the consequences. However, a cardinal writing in private said: ‘The Catholic Church is much more than a collection of beautiful buildings, and everyone to whom I spoke agreed with the position His Holiness took. We believe that Rome’s limited defences would be more justly employed defending hospitals and schools rather than the Vatican. We would place our faith, as always, in God.’
With the attack on Athens already underway, the first waves of Caliphate ACAs, which had launched from the Caliphate’s westernmost major port of Tunis, approached their target over an unusually calm sea. Writing only two years after the war in the inappropriately titled The Final Fall of Rome, Italian historian Antonio Moretti said, with a trace of dramatisation: ‘The eight ships of the Italian Navy bravely set out to sea, knowing that only the cold, rocky seabed awaited them. But they destroyed many of these merciless machines before they were finally overcome, which lessened the number destined for Rome. Other NATO forces assisted, but were it not for the heroic courage of our seamen, Rome would have suffered even more than she did.’ Moretti is being disingenuous here: the Italian Navy was able to destroy more than two hundred Blackswans by varying the coherence length of the shots from its Pulsar lasers, an advantage hard won by the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean five days earlier.
Nevertheless, many hundreds of Caliphate ACAs arrived in Rome and proceeded throughout Saturday to wreak a similar level of chaos on the city as they had in Athens. NATO losses also mirrored those in the Greek capital. At dawn on Sunday, Moretti investigated the scene and wrote: ‘I climbed and tripped and staggered over the still-smoking rubble of St. Peter’s Square, my heart heavy in despair. I stopped when I recognised a partial image on a chunk of masonry. I bent over awkwardly and saw it came from the c
eiling of the Sistine Chapel, a detail of Adam’s finger pointing out. Next to it lay a child’s plastic doll, charred and with its blond hair melted into a runny mess. Seeing the two objects together like that, I could hold back the tears no longer. I howled at the injustice of it all. I wailed like the old women who cried for their dead sons and husbands, like the little children who cried for their dead parents. I am not ashamed to admit I felt a wrenching in my very soul, that we should be the ones chosen by God to endure His ultimate displeasure.’
While Moretti and many like him suffered from the loss of loved ones, more and more data became available to the NATO militaries. Sunday 10 February saw frenetic exchanges of new information between commanders and subordinates, super AI and government officials, and arms manufacturers and frontline soldiers. The super AIs in each country reformulated forecasts of where the Caliphate would strike next, and its likely invasion strategies. The first of many US merchant shipments, escorted by the US Navy, left Philadelphia and set out across the Atlantic. All of the threatened countries made every effort to increase arms’ production. The German Air Force took the drastic step of reactivating four squadrons of its mothballed F-38s, the last manned combat aircraft which had been withdrawn from service in 2054. In the event they would not be committed to battle: the remaining pilots of the day only flew museum aircraft at air displays, and in any case the speed, precision and aerial dexterity of super-AI-controlled ACAs had long-since superseded any human being’s ability to defeat them. Nevertheless, this demonstrates that the NATO militaries, fully alive to the extent of the threat now facing them, left no option unexplored.
Despite the success of the Caliphate’s attacks on the Saturday, there now followed a pause in its activity. At the time there was much speculation for this. Some media outlets suggested the Caliphate had all-but-exhausted its resources while others claimed that there had been a coup d’état against the Third Caliph in response to the destruction. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In the first case, its actions suggested it had many more arms available for deployment; and in the second, commentators appeared to forget that Caliphate citizens had no free access to impartial information. The most likely explanation is that the Caliphate had achieved absolute supremacy over the battlefield. Europe could not as yet answer its tremendous firepower, thus the Caliphate was able to proceed with its invasion at its leisure. Few doubted an invasion would come, and when it did, a week later on Sunday 18 February, its scope matched what the super AIs had predicted.
Throughout the war, at no time did the Caliphate deploy a navy. Having subdued the Mediterranean, it needed only to provide a protective screen of ACAs for the transport ships which took its warriors and their support units to invasion points in Spain, Italy and Greece. In addition, more warriors would cross the Bosporus and enter Bulgaria. But before the invasion began in earnest, the peoples of the democracies would be subject to more ACA attacks, to remind them at whose mercy their countries now lay.
IV. THE DEMOCRACIES FRAGMENT
Due to the subsequent invasion, accurate casualty figures for the Saturday attacks are not available. The generally accepted numbers of fifty thousand dead in Greece and twice that number injured, and slightly fewer in Italy, cannot convey the sense of terror which now took hold among some sections of the populace. It is important to bear in mind that this was the bloodiest destruction Europe had endured in well over a century. Its decades of peace and security relative to many other parts of the world had engendered a tendency to provoke extreme reactions to minor misfortune. While an aviation disaster or terrorist outrage was a tragedy for those involved, the casualties merely numbered in the tens, or perhaps a hundred or more. But such events nevertheless produced a vast and disproportionate outpouring of grief among the general population.
Now, these societies faced a humanitarian catastrophe the like of which had long-since slipped out of living memory. In both Greece and Italy, despite military support, local emergency services were inundated with more injured than they could adequately care for. Francesco Costa, an off-duty surgeon who hurried back to his hospital in Rome on the day of the attack, recalled later: ‘I’d never seen so many awful injuries, and I’d spent six months in Chile during the Super-AI War there. We had of course replicated as many extra GenoFluid packs as we could, but most of these were still programmed for general practice - regenerating worn joints in the elderly, repairing damaged organs in the obese. There were minutes of delay when the super AI reprogrammed the nano-bots to deal with blunt-force trauma, to match the blast and falling masonry injuries we had. In addition, no hospital in Rome that day had a tenth of the beds it needed to allow the GenoFluid packs to work properly. I spent the whole of Saturday night treating victims on the floor of the reception area. I had to get soldiers to bring in broken pieces of wood from the debris outside to support the packs as they tried to save the victims. Many packs split, and the patient was lost.’
Harrowing scenes of wounded civilians flooded the media. More than a few victims suffered the added discomfort of knowing their demise was being transmitted live around the world. Although these attacks caused a strengthening of resolve in political and military circles, the objective of creating terror among many civilians was comfortably achieved. Karen Hines, a middle-aged career woman in the City of London, wrote to a friend: ‘Just what the hell is going on? People at work are saying the Caliph could hit London at any time. Our offices are on the fortieth floor of the Shard. I can’t concentrate, Annie. I spend all my time staring out of the windows looking for… I don’t know - what? What would these things look like? Would we even be able to see them approaching? Yesterday the girl from billing tried to give me a bollocking for not releasing my client-billable time, and I said to her, “This is bullshit. People are dying all over the place - who gives a shit if the client gets the bill? This time next month we could be foraging for berries in the forest - if we’re still alive”.’
Similarly, in sombre mood Simon Waters, a thirty-year-old nano-bot developer at a tech company in Maidstone, Kent, told his parents: ‘If things get as bad as the media says, I expect us here in the Southeast to get the worst of it. I’ve been looking closely at the pattern of attack the Caliphate used in Greece and Italy. These bastards are clever, although they should be, since I don’t doubt they’re using their own version of super AI. God, their computers have got everything from Sun Tzu to Hitler’s tactical balls-ups, so I’m not surprised it’s going so well for them. But for us? I think we’ve been well caught out. Anyway, if the worst should happen in the next few days, I’ll do my best to look after myself. I spoke to some of my mates at work, and they said a number of shelters are being prepared around the town, and I took the time to find out where they are. We all hope it won’t come to that.’ Waters was unfortunate: during subsequent attacks on the British Isles, he would be one of the fatalities.
In addition to the surge in refugees who began pouring northwards, the attacks also led to much civil unrest. All major European cities saw widespread protests demanding peace at any price: ‘Better Muslim than murdered’ became a popular slogan at the time. Many conspiracies abounded behind the real reason for the sudden violence from the previously peaceful Caliphate, none of which stand up under scrutiny. However, this did not stop those individuals with limited ability from expressing their feelings and demands, which was a hallmark in the democracies of that period. Fringe political parties enjoyed a boost in popularity, while mainstream leaders had suspicion and criticism heaped on them. While civil-defence measures were implemented with the greatest efficiency, many ordinary citizens openly expressed their fears.
Most of Europe’s media outlets assisted their governments by recalling the heroism of the Second World War. Several prominent elderly members of these societies were interviewed recalling dim and distant childhoods in the 1990s, listening to the tales of courage from people who had fought in the 1940s. It is doubtful such strategies had a significant impact, but thos
e in power felt obliged and even entitled to use propaganda in their efforts to combat sociological breakdown.
A secret memo from the English Home Office recently made public indicates the extent of the problems facing Napier and her cabinet: ‘Police forces in many constabularies have reported a five-fold increase in public disorder crimes, mostly involving property and personal offences in which drunkenness plays a role. A number of hospitals in London and the Home Counties are reporting an alarming rise in suicide cases… [there] seems to be a failure in the anticipated strengthening of resolve among the general population. Therefore, HMG should urgently consider further emergency measures to curb the availability of alcohol and other recreational stimulants.’
The English and other governments of the British Isles were not alone. The leaders of Spain, France and Germany faced similar dilemmas. In one notorious case, the charismatic mayor of Lyons declared the city to be a ‘peace zone’ which would not allow the passage of troops or weaponry to show the invader that its people were peaceful. In a number of municipalities and districts, low-level political figures attempted to find a way that they might avoid the Caliphate’s attentions and protect their populations. In the second week of February, the whole concept of nation statehood came under material pressure: thousands sought to distance themselves from their nationality and promote a global hegemony - ‘there is only one race: the human race’ - in the vain hope that if and when Caliphate warriors arrived, they might be spared.
Although history tends to view the pre-invasion period as one of Europe preparing to meet the enemy, it is relevant to note that the continent’s populations were by no means unanimous in their response. This discomforting upheaval in the more northern countries would continue until the refugees and then the violence overtook them.