by Chris James
Gunnery officer Freddie Buckley, one of the few to survive, conveyed the sense of desperation: ‘Our battlefield-Pulsar unit lasted less than three minutes after we began tracking the first targets. In that time, we managed to bring down four Blackswans. I remember wondering how much good we were actually doing. Even if we stopped these flying bombs getting into the city, they were still crashing and exploding somewhere in the suburbs. Then, their super AI must have decided we were a threat to be eliminated. While we were hitting a Blackswan which was coming right at us, my sergeant noted three more vectoring in on our position. The clever bastards were approaching outside our field of fire, too. I ordered the unit to be evacuated. I made sure all the men got out, and we ran for cover. The unit went up sky high and threw me into a dense hedgerow, taking off my legs in the process. I think that’s why the Spiders left me alone instead of killing me along with the rest of my men.’
Across London, many similar vicious engagements were resolved in a matter of moments after furious exchanges of fire. By midmorning the attack was over, the last Blackswan releasing its deadly cargo over St. Bartholomew’s hospital. As military and civilian emergency services rushed to do their utmost to deal with the chaos, another storm erupted almost at once, in the media. Tara Arnold, a twenty-five-year-old nurse working at the hospital, posed the question that morning: ‘Can anyone tell us why St. Bart’s has been almost flattened, but just a couple of miles away St. Paul’s Cathedral stands undamaged?’
In the days and weeks following the London attack, controversy raged as it became clear the Civil Defence Authority had given precedence to the city’s cultural heritage over locations such as hospitals. London had been insufficiently prepared to meet the attack, and the limited defences programmed to protect historical sites as a priority. In this they did not wholly succeed, as the Tower of London and the newly restored Houses of Parliament were both comprehensively ruined. However, many monuments, including Buckingham Palace, the Royal Albert Hall and much of the area surrounding Hyde Park, escaped unscathed, while in total some 67% of all hospitals in the Greater London area were either partially or totally destroyed.
These figures compare unfavourably with the attacks on other European cities on the same day. All of Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin and Warsaw endured similar onslaughts. For example, in Paris the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Arc-de-Triomphe and Musée d’Orsay were reduced to rubble, but more than 70% of the city’s hospitals were defended successfully. The figures for the other cities are comparable. Thus, amid the drama of the invasion, which the Caliphate renewed in the south, and as the authorities in the democracies struggled to cope with millions of civilian casualties, political mudslinging became the order of business on the British Isles. The Leader of the Opposition, the taciturn David Bentley, could not resist asking the same question as the nurse at St. Bart’s, albeit coached in softer terminology. He called on Napier to explain why so many London hospitals had suffered. Napier had no intention of doing anything of the sort, and ultimate responsibility fell to her Home Secretary, Aiden Hicks. Despite initially defending that London boasted more monuments and sites of historical interest than other European cities, Hicks was obliged to resign the next day. (Within weeks of the war’s end, Hicks published a memoir which remains one of the most damning accounts of Napier’s premiership.)
For the military, however, the imperative remained the Caliphate’s advance, which resumed on all three fronts at 07.00 that morning. In what was taken as a sign of the invader’s resources becoming stretched, Caliphate warriors deployed the Lapwing laser ACA which had worked so effectively in Israel and in subduing the southern parts of Europe. Once again, coherence-length variation played a pivotal role in delaying the Caliphate advance. At around 11.00, units of the French 2nd Armoured Brigade began a phased withdrawal northwards, leapfrogging the British Royal Armoured Corps. Twenty-seven-year-old French Captain Pascal Degarmo later reported to his superiors: ‘Before we withdrew, through the smoke of battle we glimpsed the warriors approaching in their land transports. Many of the men wanted very much to engage them, and I even had to threaten one or two with court martial if they did not withdraw. I had to convince them that we would have to wait for revenge.’
The American Abrahams N4-1A autonomous main battle tanks performed markedly better than the Challengers, as Sergeant Blake Skinner of the Windsor Household Cavalry ruefully acknowledged after the attack: ‘We left a little nest of eight Abrahams in the backstreets of Tarbes and followed the action as we pulled out. These things were much better in defence than we’d expected. Each of them took cover in houses and shops, mainly by smashing through the walls, and led the Lapwings a right little dance. It took four shells to burn through a Lapwing’s shielding, then the fifth shell would kill it. The Abrahams played off each other in pairs, drawing a Lapwing off. The Caliphate’s lasers thrashed about, making roofs and walls explode, but the Americans’ tanks worked so smoothly together. This wasn’t how it was with our Challengers. Those dumb beasts just sat in their positions, firing off shells. One or two made an effort to take defensive action, but most of them brewed up where they sat. I don’t think they destroyed a single Lapwing between them.’
No matter how well ordered, this was still a retreat: NATO lost territory; Caliphate forces gained it. The line around Milan fell back throughout the day similarly as in France. The German 21st Armoured Brigade also found the Abrahams to be a superior weapon, accentuated by the fact that the withdrawal took place in the densest conurbation of all three fronts. Lance Corporal Peter Baumann, a twenty-three-year-old medic with Tank Battalion 203, wrote to his family while on leave: ‘It was really the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen. We saw people peek through shattered windows as we withdrew along the streets. The majority of the civilian population had fled weeks earlier, of course, and with the information campaign there was no excuse for anyone to be there who wanted to leave. But faces - ghosts? - poked out now and again. I often wonder how many will survive.’
II. THE EASTERN FRONT
In Hungary, NATO forces found themselves obliged to fall back more swiftly, as had been anticipated at SHAPE, because they faced two Caliphate armies rather than one. But here occurred the first flesh-and-blood battle between the defenders and Caliphate warriors. Natalia Ornass, a young Polish private from the 1st Armoured Brigade, recounted her adventure in previously unpublished memoirs: ‘The colonel visited us two days before the attack. He gave us a rousing speech, including that us Poles would, like in Vienna four hundred years ago, face the largest and most powerful of the enemy’s formations. Once again, Europe needed Poland to save it. He urged us to show the world what we could do. He recalled the Warsaw Uprising, the Battle of Britain, and the Miracle on the Vistula. These were the steps in which we would shortly follow. We loved his speech, it is true, and I’m damn sure it made a difference when the attack came.’
Ornass’s commander, Colonel Pakla, was a thickset, bullet-headed thirty-eight year old who could trace his family’s military history back to the Battle of Britain. He would transpire to be one of the ablest commanders of the war, amply demonstrating the Polish military tradition of dogged resistance combined with a flair for seeing opportunities in the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, he was one of those commanders of which every army in each war needs at least one, as his troops would follow him wherever he led. Private Ornass continues: ‘We had to give ground almost at once. There were hundreds if not thousands of the Caliphate’s ACAs zipping all over the sky. One of the engineers had mapped a few abandoned railway tunnels around ten kilometres behind our lines. As we left the area, a message came from HQ - the Colonel - which said that if there was any opportunity to take a Caliphate warrior alive, this would be looked on very highly. Me and my unit had to argue with the others, but eventually we convinced them we should do it.’
Private Ornass and her unit, led by their commanding officer, took refuge in a disused tunnel ten kilometres long which ran
in line with the Caliphate’s advance. They planned to wait in hiding, capture a warrior alive, then evacuate through the tunnel whose exit would still be behind their own lines. In a move of remarkable prescience, the CO advised his troops to deactivate as much of their electronic support systems as possible because, he guessed correctly, the ACAs used these signals to detect the NATO soldiers. Private Ornass describes what happened next: ‘All of us were nervous about switching our Squitches off, but we followed orders. The Caliphate ACAs knocked out the two tanks we’d left close to the tunnel entrance. All of us waited about a hundred metres inside with our Stiletto Z50 shoulder-launched missiles poised - deactivated. If an ACA came inside to have a look, we didn’t expect to last very long. The time passed, all of us held our breaths. The hissing from the ACAs faded and died away. No one made a sound. Then we heard shouting. Slowly we put our Stilettos on the ground and collected our Pickups. We heard a scream and some shots. The CO told us to stay silent.’
At length, some Caliphate warriors looked over the burning Abrahams and advanced into the tunnel’s mouth. The CO held his men back until he judged the warriors to be sufficiently inside, then, according to Private Ornass: ‘The Caliphate men - obviously they were all men, coming from that backwards society - slotted on their infrareds just as we lit them up. We targeted their limbs and blew their arms and legs off. Staś and Marta rushed forward to secure the entrance while me and the CO checked the wounded. I shot one in the head because he was jigging all over the place losing a lot of blood and would soon expire, but we had one of the kurwas who had passed out. We checked his vitals and the CO jabbed him full of stabilising drugs. I called up the transport.’
A utility vehicle reversed from its position and the captured warrior was loaded into it, but the engagement was not over yet. Private Ornass continues: ‘More warriors were converging on our position. We certainly didn’t want a drawn out fire fight. The CO ordered Staś and Marta to get back to the vehicle. They threw a couple of grenades and came running down the tunnel; the driver crept back in reverse to shorten the distance. But when they were only a few metres away, they both got shot. I swear the bullets went right through them and pinged on the back of the vehicle. They both fell down dead at the same time, and at once the driver put it in forward and accelerated as quickly as possible. “Right, forget them,” the CO shouted at me, “Get the Stilettos powered up.” I wasn’t sure why we should, but the reason became clear soon enough. The driver shouted “Incoming!” and I thought he meant one of their ACAs. Luckily for us, it was only one of their smart missiles. Me and the CO smashed the windows out of the back doors and brought it down with our Stilettos with about ten metres to spare. I felt some shrapnel go deep into my eyes and thought I was blinded. The CO threw a handful of Footie anti-personnel mines out of the back and we sped off. A few minutes later we got out; an hour later I’d had surgery and a GenoFluid pack strapped to my head got my sight back.’
As mentioned above, many NATO Special Forces units were intentionally left behind enemy lines, although very few lived to tell the tale. Private Ornass’s story is almost unique in that, at this early stage in the war, NATO suddenly had a live, captured warrior who would reveal the enemy’s secrets. Now time became essential. Before Private Ornass had her sight restored, an unmanned air ambulance whisked the severely injured warrior north-westwards to Paris, to the Institut Neuropsi for Neuroscience in Saclay. Here the warrior’s memories of his entire life would be removed from his brain and analysed.
It needs to be borne in mind that cerebral scanning and extraction technology was in its infancy in the early 2060s. At that time, the level of neural-pathway degradation invariably left the subject brain dead. Thus, experiments were restricted to newly deceased volunteers. This itself caused notable controversy as the Institut Neuropsi gained its subjects by offering cash incentives to those who travelled to end-of-life clinics in Europe. Nevertheless, these scanning experiments were performed on deceased individuals who had given their consent. This technology’s leading proponents extolled its virtues of keeping a digital record of a subject’s entire life, although the full range of its applications and usefulness would not materialise for another five years. At this time, however, NATO’s political leaders faced a moral dilemma: to allow the Institut Neuropsi to scan the injured warrior’s brain would be a death sentence, but the data from such a scan would provide invaluable intelligence which the democracies sorely lacked.
Most military observers saw few qualms in making the most of this fortunate tactical advantage. Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘He was a military casualty in our possession, that’s why he was delivered to the Institut Neuropsi in the first place. At that point, our lack of intelligence would certainly cost us the war. People were starting to realise that Europe, as a political and social entity, would be finished in a matter of weeks. But the reaction from the politicians defied belief, in many ways.’
This reaction centred on a reluctance to condemn an injured enemy to death without due process. In one of the few instances of complete agreement among Europe’s political leaders, all of English Prime Minister Napier, the French President and the German Chancellor expressed reservations at their military’s insistence that the warrior had to be scanned, irrespective of it leading to his demise. Napier’s aide Crispin Webb confided to his diary: ‘With one eye perhaps on the history books, the boss frets how it will look if we give up the moral high-ground and become no better than the Caliphate. I think she’s missing the point: the media are almost totally on the military’s side, which is not surprising when you think how many people have died so far.’
Nevertheless, many notable commentators tried to insist that wounded enemy combatants should not be subject to summary execution. Since the war, a number of historians have suggested that the decision to scan the injured warrior’s brain was entirely the military’s, to absolve the politicians of responsibility. However, English government security files recently released undermine this claim. These contain the minutes of a secret virtual conference between political and military leaders during which the generals, including Sir Terry, placed substantial pressure on the French President in particular to allow the scan to go ahead. They prove the leaders of the democracies were aware of the warrior’s certain death as well as the potential for NATO to learn a great deal of the enemy’s strengths and strategy. The conference concluded with the politicians giving their reluctant consent.
This decision would change the course of the war. However, once again it is important not to allow the benefit of hindsight to colour one’s perception of events. The situation was analogous to the RAF’s commencement of area bombing of German cities in 1942, or the use of mustard gas in the First World War: unsettled by the potential to lose history’s sympathy, the politicians nevertheless understood the immediate urgency of doing something morally dubious to stave off imminent defeat. In this they undoubtedly made the correct choice. The scientists at the Institut Neuropsi were instructed to proceed. The warrior’s brain was scanned, and the memories of his entire life extracted. These data, some twenty-four years of real-time images as well as numerous indicators of neural-chemical responses, were then uploaded to the facility’s super AI. The warrior’s basic details soon became available, but as one senior researcher was obliged to explain to the less-than-impressed Polish General Pakla, the super AI had to analyse over twenty-four years’ worth of memories. It would take time to identify key sequences of use to NATO intelligence, for example if or when the warrior had seen or been briefed on sensitive information. The Institut Neuropsi would require at least two weeks.
III. THE IRRESISTIBLE ADVANCE
Meanwhile, the Caliphate’s advance proceeded at a slow but irresistible pace. On all three fronts NATO forces continued to pull back throughout the first fortnight of June, to avoid the constant threat of encirclement. On the 8th, the director of CERN agreed to begin the facility’s evacuation, having had four months to shut down its experiments. Tens
of thousands more refugees fled northwards through France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, placing more strain on battered infrastructure.
In the west, Caliphate forces entered Toulouse on the 6th and Narbonne on the 7th. NATO’s Army Group Centre found itself obliged to yield the remaining part of Italy on the 9th, and the same day Caliphate forward units overran Milan and Turin. More Caliphate thrusts used the Lapwing laser ACAs which destroyed everything in their paths. In France, the Committee for National Defence embarked on an overambitious and ill-considered plan to create a physical barrier a hundred kilometres south of Paris. This consisted of using large, autonomous mining replicators to excavate channels under stretches of forest which would, it was hoped, collapse under the warriors and delay the advance. It is a measure of the desperation prevalent at the time that such schemes were not only given more than a moment’s consideration, but actually implemented.
At sea, Atlantic Convoy SE-07 suffered heavy casualties on the 10th. More than ten thousand tonnes of military aid, including two hundred battlefield Pulsar units, went to the bottom and the US Navy lost four cruisers. This stark reminder of Caliphate lethality offered an indication of greater danger to NATO. The Blackswans attacked the convoy nearly two thousand, five hundred kilometres from the Portuguese coast, far beyond the distance these ACAs had hitherto been believed to be able to operate. In addition, the attack began as a reporter on board the merchant ship Endless Horizon was live-broadcasting. Despite being ordered below decks when the ship detected the Caliphate’s approach, the reporter merely climbed down to a lower passageway on the portside of the vast merchantman. Thus, millions of Americans witnessed the attack and watched as the hapless journalist described the Spiders disappearing beneath the waves moments before the ship on which he stood keeled over and sank, portside foremost.