Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064

by Chris James

  The supporting units which arrived on the first day included mobile trauma centres to process local survivors. They did not want for patients. Twenty-three-year-old Melvina Allen was a newly qualified psychotropic analyst who described her first day to the post-war English Parliamentary Select Committee hearings: ‘We landed in the afternoon. The soldiers had organised the survivors in an enclosure and medics had given them basic medical attention. We took them into isolation rooms one by one. I wasn’t prepared that first day. It was very difficult to get through to them. All were young women who’d been repeatedly raped - something they’d endured just to get enough food to live. I set out our range of psychotropic drugs which could erase their memories, which might help them start again, but it didn’t help. One young woman, heavily pregnant, cried and said to me: “How can you make me forget this? Is it supposed to give me hope? Because it doesn’t, it only reminds me and I don’t want to be reminded. Do you have some clever drug to treat that?” I couldn’t do much [breaks down]… she and I cried together for a while, but the pregnancy was far too advanced for termination. I learned a lot very quickly.’

  The morning of 2 August dawned with little change in the hot weather. By 11.00 the two spearheads of Attack Group South joined up forty kilometres southeast of Rouen. Lead elements continued the drive west towards Paris, to solve the mystery of why contact with the city’s resistance had been so abruptly lost almost a year previously. This created long, exposed flanks which NATO ACAs monitored closely, until the afternoon when a further three battalions of US Marines arrived to begin the advance south. Given that the terrain was far less built-up than in the north, NATO forces spread quickly throughout the day. Major Peter Basel, observing progress from his command post, said: ‘As data feeds came in from the forward units, I was reminded of a literary metaphor I’d read years before: “Spreading like ink flung across blotting paper.” That’s exactly how our forces were retaking France; slowly but inexorably, village by village, town by town. My adjutant kept trying not to notice the habit I had of clicking my fingers, so I kept my worries to myself but couldn’t stop thinking that it was all too easy.’

  Major Basel’s fears would be realised soon enough. Meanwhile, in Belgium the spearheads of Attack Group East continued taking ground to encircle the Delta Works. Lead units of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry reached the outskirts of Antwerp in the mid-afternoon. Here they noticed a new development. Private Sam Davis explained, ‘Most of the buildings were blasted or otherwise damaged, but when we had to clear one that was fairly intact, we soon learnt to expect the worst. In one, there must have been at least ten females, from young girls to women at least thirty, all with freshly cut throats. These poor bitches had almost made it through the war, but when the warriors were forced to retreat, they decided to kill their captives first.’

  Although not exclusive to either front, more of these atrocities took place in the eastern theatre than in the southern. G. K. Morrow in The Great European Disaster catalogues in detail the discoveries of some fifteen thousand young women whose deaths were recorded as having taken place in the forty-eight hours before their discovery. In addition to these events, in the rear areas military and civilian investigators began unearthing evidence of mass graves which Caliphate forces had seldom troubled themselves to disguise. The first and probably most notorious was at a school on the outskirts of Ghent. A journalist for The Times media outlet described the scene to his readers: ‘The building itself is such a blackened, roofless shell as can be expected in any warzone. But on closer inspection, it harbours a shocking discovery. Within the walls are the remains of hundreds or possibly thousands of people. The rain has whitened bones which were fused together somehow. I ask a sergeant close by what has caused this. He shrugs his shoulders and replies “Lasers”. One cannot begin to imagine the fear and terror which made up these people’s last moments on Earth.’

  The following weeks and months would bring many such disturbing revelations. The reaction in the global media in the first few days of August brought some pressure on the Caliphate. Chinese outlets were careful to condemn the discoveries without blaming the Third Caliph by, for example, suggesting these were the actions of ill-disciplined warriors. But in general, Europe’s plight found little sympathy. Typical of many disinterested nations’ approaches was that taken by the Defence Minister of Rwanda. In his country’s most popular media outlet, he wrote: ‘How strange it is that the European finds it distasteful to be obliged to die in humiliating circumstances, while the rest of the world looks on in indifference. Although we might feel sympathy for Europe’s suffering, it is curious that those people seem to have trouble grasping the fact that the rest of the world does not really care. This is hardly a surprise, when historically those same countries now in pain often turned their eyes from the suffering endured by others.’

  V. COUNTERATTACK

  On 3 August, Caliphate forces made their first material counterattack, employing a development which NATO’s super AIs had given a small probability of materialising. At 07.28, the SkyMasters high above the battlefield noted the launches and approach of thousands of Caliphate ACAs converging on the spearhead fifty kilometres from Paris. However, at the same time another wave of Blackswans left Spain, sped out over the Atlantic Ocean, and then turned onto a northwest heading. The SkyMasters correctly assumed this wave intended to assault NATO rear areas, and sent instructions to scramble reserve Scythe squadrons in southern England. Caliphate forces intended that this pincer movement would split the defences; however, in the event less than 15% of Scythes assigned to protect the forward units had to be sent back to defend the support units.

  A fierce aerial engagement took place above the battlefield to the west of the French capital. Captain Sabine Oberst, on that morning a twenty-five-year-old infantrywoman, spoke over thirty years later about what happened: ‘We felt confident, but not overly so. Things had gone very well up to then. We were in our transports heading up a hill in front of a town called Conches-on-Ouche. I was at the displays in the rear of the vehicle, on-point monitoring the tanks up ahead. The battles in the sky had been going for about a quarter of an hour. Perhaps I should have got us to cover, I do not know. The tanks began tracking Blackswans coming in to attack them. The Blackswans released their Spiders, so the tanks fired their Falaretes. That should have been the end of that, but the Falaretes did not destroy the Spiders. I remember thinking there must be some kind of mistake, but it was not a mistake. The tanks resorted to their field guns, but I knew at once there were not enough time [sic] for them to breach the Spiders’ shielding. The tanks began going offline and the last thing I remember is shivering in realisation or fear or whatever it was. But that is how quick events happened: just seconds from the tanks going offline to our transport being hit. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a casualty clearing station behind the lines with a GenoFluid pack wrapped around the stump of my missing arm. According to my CO, the only reason I made it out was because the monitoring screens were at the rear of the vehicle. No one else in it survived.’

  Two hundred kilometres north at Ostend, a similar drama unfolded. With the port now fully repaired, merchant vessels operated to a precise schedule to bring in manufactured equipment, fresh food and other supplies. Private Simon Parker of the 12th Guards wrote at the time of the same sense of initial disbelief as Captain Wood. He was on sentry duty when: ‘… my Squitch told me to take cover from the Blackswans before they released their Spiders. I thought that was bullshit, frankly speaking. We’d deployed something like two-k Falarete batteries around the port, so even if any of them got past the Scythes - which I couldn’t see happening - they wouldn’t last long. I still can’t believe the Falaretes didn’t work. They hit the Spiders but nothing happened. Then a Spider came right down near me. That was a thing to see - I thought that was my lot. But the claws came out of the bloody thing and it clattered along the wharf. Then it disappeared over the edge and below the waterline before explodin
g. After the explosion, I came to pretty quickly, I think. Smoke and dust were everywhere. My Squitch told me my leg was broken. I told it to shut up.’

  Such is the nature of any war that if one component of a carefully constructed set of military means fails, the results are often punishing. NATO intelligence quickly established that the Caliphate had developed and deployed a modulator as part of the Spider’s shielding. In effect, when the Falarete embraced the smart-bomb with its net, it was prevented from matching the frequency of the shielding by rapid, miniscule adjustments which the Spider made to the latter. However, in what would become one of the most widely appreciated achievements in the war, scientists at Aldermaston analysed how the modulation to the frequency of a Spider’s shielding worked. Within less than an hour, they had developed a countermeasure which utilised redundancy in the Falarete’s guidance system. This patch would allow the net to match the Spider’s shielding modulation because, although the adjustments were random, they were limited to a narrow frequency range. The practical upshot was that each net would require up to half a second longer in a confrontation to match frequencies and destroy the Spider. The patch was transmitted to all deployed Falaretes within fifteen minutes. Thus, a mere two hours after the attack during which the Caliphate had introduced a potentially war-changing tactical improvement, NATO had countered it successfully, for the cost of fewer than five thousand casualties.

  VI. OPERATION THUNDERCLAP

  Despite the dexterity shown by their forces, the NATO warlords harboured growing doubts about Repulse. In In the Eye of the Storm, Sir Terry Tidbury described a meeting with the chief of the US Air Force and Chief Air Marshall Erskine in Whitehall on 4 August: ‘After softening them up with a little praise for the way their people had dealt so professionally with the shielding problem, I told Don and Jim that intel suggested Repulse had enjoyed a great deal of good fortune so far. We discussed the broader picture for a while and Jim lamented how difficult it was to penetrate Caliphate territory, as though we weren’t dealing with humans at all. We agreed a war between the Caliphate and India would benefit Repulse but was also unlikely. I suggested that the only reason the operation had gone this well so far was because many Caliphate ACAs had been transferred to the border with India. If things should calm down there, we might find our forces coming under greater pressure.’

  In this Sir Terry is only partly correct. After the war, aggregated data indicated that Tehran moved over a million warriors from Europe to prepare for a possible invasion of India, replacing them mostly with inexperienced men, but few ACAs. As would become plain, the manufacturing facility at Tazirbu had increased its production of Blackswans and Lapwings to meet the new threat to the Caliphate. During the warlords’ meeting on 4 August, Sir Terry recorded: ‘The Air Chief Marshall said that for Repulse to succeed, we needed to hit the Third Caliph on his own ground, but that after what happened to Israel, he was hanged if he knew how to do that. I think he wanted me to ask him for ideas as to how the air forces might make it happen, but instead I told them that the issue was already in hand. Both men raised their eyebrows in curiosity, but that was as much as I felt comfortable divulging.’

  In the early hours of 4 August, HMS Warspite arrived off the North African coast to deliver Hastings, his team and their equipment. Writing in Sightseeing in Tazirbu, team member Captain Rory Dixon described their disembarkation: ‘I fancied the submariners regarded us as doomed creatures, aware as they were of the antiquity of most of our equipment. The ship surfaced and I and the team were out in less than seven minutes, beating the times we had set during training. The sky was already paling with the onset of dawn, the air warm but the swell slight. The inflatables carried us the two kilometres to the shore, where it took nearly half an hour to locate and bring in the large equipment which Warspite had launched through her tubes.’

  This was the last time the team would be able to use any kind of modern technology. They assembled their motorbikes and loaded weapons and supplies on them. Again Dixon references the sense of wonder they felt: ‘On one hand, it felt good to be using more traditional methods to wage war; but on the other, each of us carried thirty litres of fresh water, which obviously weighed thirty kilos - how on earth did any army fight campaigns without the benefit of water replicators?’ They left the area quickly and proceeded south towards Tazirbu. Dixon spends several pages describing the six-hundred-kilometre journey, made only with compass and paper maps. He explains that the only warning they would have of an approaching enemy would be a visual indication, which would not be much help if they were discovered by a Caliphate ACA capable of Mach 8.

  Their journey began well enough: the paper maps guided them over mostly flat, stony terrain and avoided sand. However, on the second day when they were only twenty-five kilometres from the Tazirbu, one of the motorbikes broke down, apparently with ‘some problem or other in its stone-age internal combustion engine.’ Precious time was lost burying the vehicle, and the affected team member had to ride pillion with Dixon. At length they approached the city. Dixon wrote: ‘It was remarkable to think that fifty years ago, this was an oasis in the middle of a war-torn country with a mere six thousand residents. We now approached a vast metropolis by riding parallel with an eight-lane highway with vehicles clearly controlled by super AI or its equivalent. It occurred to me just what transformations could be effected with water and construction replicators. We paused at the outer edge of the city, and the General said, with the faintest trace of irony: “I’m pleased to see we didn’t bring too many sonic mines with us, after all.” The General remained confident regarding the threat of detection: the Caliphate would not expect a NATO operation this far inside its territory, and certainly not without modern technology, so the only security we should expect to encounter is that to guard against the local population. The General gave us a dismissive smile and said: “In any case, if we should be discovered, it will all be over quite soon I should think.” The rest of us restarted our motorbikes and followed him towards the city.’

  VII. PARIS LIBERATED

  As Hastings and his team advanced on their target, outside Paris NATO troops were about to make one of the most disturbing discoveries of the war. In the lead was a Mobility Troop from 22 SAS A Squadron. During the English Parliamentary Select Committee hearings after the war, one of the first troops to enter the city said: ‘It was when we got to Sector 192 in the northeast of the city that I began to feel something was very off. We’d had no enemy presence for over ten klicks, and on the way in there’d been no signs of him, either; no dumps, no abandoned stores, or anything else you might associate with an occupying force in retreat. It might sound like a cliché, but Paris was a ghost city. We had the Scythes overhead, giving us the all-clear, and above them the SkyMasters made sure the Scythes knew what was going on. In our ears the Squitches were silent as well; nothing to report.’

  Known during the hearings as ‘Soldier L’ because he was still serving in the SAS, this trooper and his men pushed further into the city, their equipment relaying scenes of destruction back to headquarters. In the early afternoon, the company reached the coordinates which the Paris resistance had given to NATO the previous year. It had been almost a year to the day since contact with the defenders had been lost. The would-be rescuers found themselves obliged to manually remove masonry and other debris. Soldier L said: ‘The resistance only gave us one reference point for the sake of security, so we had to dig through a fair bit of rubble. Inside this typical tenement building, we first turned left, then right, and went to an iron door which opened to reveal a dark staircase.’

  The troop’s CO selected four of them to investigate and ordered the others to defend the entrance. They descended the darkened stairs to find: ‘… a series of three doors, which we broke through quite easily. After the third one we came across two guards lying dead on the concrete. Their uniforms had the tricolour insignia, so we knew we were in the right place. But they must have been dead for a year: the skin was tigh
t and pale, and the eyes had shrunken to little black pebbles deep inside the sockets. We checked for any obvious signs of injury, but couldn’t find a thing which might have told us how they died. Their weapons were loaded but unused, and on a table we saw the rotted remains of some food.’

  The men of 22 SAS advanced further into the network of tunnels so recently excavated to withstand ‘a siege of several years’, and were greeted by progressively more horrific scenes. Soldier L told the Select Committee hearing: ‘We called a medic down to take samples. From what we saw, it was obvious they’d all died at about the same time - there were a few pairs of bodies in embraces, for example - and it had happened so quickly they didn’t have time to make a distress call. We knew whatever killed them wasn’t there now because our Squitches would’ve alerted us, so at that time the smart money was on a nerve agent which had probably long-since dissipated.’

  Soldier L’s deduction proved to be accurate. Analyses of the first samples taken and then cadavers recovered later that day revealed that all of the victims had succumbed to asphyxiation caused by uncontrolled muscle contraction. At the same Select Committee hearing, a scientist from Aldermaston explained: ‘The enemy had merely taken old knowledge and updated it. Forensic investigation gave us the evidence that Spiders were used to deliver the nerve agent in aerosol form. We can’t be sure exactly how many, but a number of them penetrated through damaged buildings, venting ducts and such like, and in a coordinated attack released their cargoes, which in this case were not explosives but this highly lethal nerve agent. The resistance had little time to let the outside world know. The Spiders likely trotted around the complex releasing an invisible, odourless aerosol which paralysed the victim within three seconds, by causing involuntary contractions of all of the body’s muscle tissue. This included the diaphragm. The victim, unable to move, would most like have gone into shock before suffocating.’