Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
It is difficult to underestimate the memo’s impact. Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury described reading it as: ‘… experiencing an earthquake which smashes everything down, but then you see what, actually, you knew had to be the truth anyway. One thing which really worried me was evidence of an ACA we hadn’t seen yet, three times the size of the Blackswan. At once, I contacted my counterparts in other armies to give this thing a designation and notify all troops of its existence.’ English Prime Minister Napier’s aide wrote in his diary: ‘Everyone who could, read it. And then they read it again. The boss didn’t like it at all, but she accepted it without trying to question its veracity. I swear half her hair went gray from one day to the next.’
Although shocking, this would be only the first of a series of communications from the
Institut Neuropsi
as its computers continued analysing the twenty-four years’ worth of Oveisi’s memories, identifying glimpses of relevant data and snippets of conversations which could aid the war effort. In time, these would be supplemented and cross-referenced with the extracted memories of more wounded Caliphate warriors. By the time the
Institut Neuropsi
was overrun at the beginning of July, its key hardware, which could not be replicated, had been transported to the University of Rochester in New York. All further injured Caliphate warriors who survived action with their heads and torsos intact would be taken there also. This policy continued until the end of the war.
On the battlefields of Europe, meanwhile, the invader continued to push NATO forces relentlessly to reverse. ‘Success’ for the democracies became a measure of the degree to which their militaries could slow the Caliphate’s advance. In the second week of June, the invader averaged thirty kilometres a day on all three fronts; by the third week, this rate slowed to fewer than fifteen kilometres a day, due mainly to increased production and deployment of the Footie anti-personnel smart-mine. The hundreds of thousands of these devices left behind by NATO forces obliged advance Caliphate units to send Blackswans ahead at greatly reduced speeds to neutralise the mines.
The vast social upheaval continued as millions fled headlong in front of the advancing Caliphate. Disturbances grew among the general population when public transport was requisitioned for military use. In France, Germany, Slovakia and Poland, clashes broke out between members of the public and military police. Although not significant, on two occasions monorail links were sabotaged, causing delays to vital reinforcements to the front line. Central governments endeavoured to ensure local and district authorities were equipped with sufficient water replicators as the height of summer approached, and for the most part were successful. On 28 June, the midday temperature in Paris reached forty-six degrees Celsius. Many Europeans had become accustomed to this effect of global climate change in the preceding decades; however, they had done so in peacetime, with air-conditioning in their vehicles, homes and offices. Now governments in these countries found themselves obliged to limit power usage. Many air-conditioning systems were deactivated on official instruction either by the manufacturer or the installer, whichever managed a given system. In addition, those refugees forced to walk tens of kilometres a day would in any case not benefit from such luxury.
Young Turkish engineering student Berat Kartal, last seen hiding in a barn outside Sarajevo, had by this time made his way to Munich. The entry in his journal for 28 June states: ‘I took one look at the monorail station and continued walking. I feel like I have been walking forever. The pale-skinned people suffer with what to them is extreme heat, although it is not unusual to me. They crowd around the water replicators clutching plastic bottles and beg. The overweight ones are the most unsettling, for their clothes are covered in dark sweat stains and they huff and puff, unable to catch their breaths. I imagine the Caliphate warriors feel very much at home in this climate… It is unbelievable how the Caliphate has not yet destroyed the civilian communications networks. Today, I passed a group of middle-aged people using functioning devices to talk to and reassure their loved ones. Feeling lonely because I abandoned my own devices when the Caliphate’s microwave burst destroyed them, for a moment I felt like telling these strangers to enjoy this bonus while they could, but that would have been unreasonable of me. I suppose suffering is relative, and I am sure it will soon get worse here. Tonight my bed is a clump of dried German grass, still warm from the heat of the day, and my supper is a sip of water and some dry biscuits. At least having daylight until ten in the evening allows me to write this journal.’
Kartal’s observation was prescient: two days later, in the evening of Friday 30 June, the Caliphate would launch its most devastating ACA raid to date which, while causing extensive civilian casualties, would also present new challenges to NATO’s military campaign to delay the advance. It began with a sequence of powerful microwave bursts which burned out nearly all civilian communications devices. Although the German firm Siemens had already designed and begun production of a universal data-pod workaround, distribution had been limited by existing social dislocation (this workaround contained organic elements which rendered remote replication impossible). Military hardware was in any case insulated to protect against such threats, and remained unaffected.
All of the capitals and other major cities in northern Europe were subject to attack by twice the number of Caliphate ACAs which had been deployed four weeks earlier. In a sector of West Berlin, first responder Uwe Eichel expressed the feelings of many when he wrote afterwards: ‘Of course we knew it would happen again; in the days beforehand, my colleagues and I kept asking each other: “What’s taking them so long?” The city had managed to repair a lot of the previous damage, but that night they hit Berlin with so many of them. We were stationed near the zoo. In the grounds were twenty-five battlefield Pulsar lasers, so within an hour the whole place was just one massive bonfire. They hit the Olympic stadium. They hit the monuments, the power relays. Then they hit road junctions and residential tenements. What we hated the most was their accuracy: these were not dumb bombs falling from the sky, these were intelligent devices which knew precisely the weakest point of whatever structure they landed on. You could see them on the monitors, clattering through a building until they arrived at exactly the right spot. A puff of smoke, and the whole building came down. It was all so incredibly unfair.’
The NATO governments’ super-AIs offered constantly updated probabilities of an extensive Caliphate ACA attack. For the duration of the summer, most of these risks varied between 60-80% over any twenty-four-hour period. However, the urgency of the refugee crisis left little room for prudence. Christian Kalbfleisch was a fifty-three-year-old former accountant newly reemployed as a disaster coordination manager in southern Brussels. After a fraught night which saw extensive damage and numerous casualties in his area, he wrote to a friend: ‘What can we do? We have millions of people on the move, are we supposed to tell them to hide in ditches by the side of the road? We’ve been expecting this attack for weeks, but like people who live on an earthquake fault, you can only care about the risk so much, and for so long. Many of my friends seemed to have renewed faith in the military that they would stop such an attack happening again. I know I did.’
The greatest loss of life occurred in the English Channel, as the Blackswans fell on hundreds of boats of all sizes ferrying refugees from the mainland to the British Isles. In his history
The Great European Disaster
, G. K. Morrow describes the extent of this part of the 30 June attacks in great detail. As he states: ‘… four hundred and two years of Royal Navy history came to a close at a little after three o’clock on the morning of 1 July.
HMS Ark Royal
, deployed with the last four frigates, put up a valiant fight for nearly forty minutes, and doubtless allowed many transport ships to reach safety. But when they were finally overwhelmed and sunk, with them the hopes of thousands for any escape from the Caliphate also disappeared.’ G. K. Morrow is being slightly theatrical here, as the Royal Navy still had four submarines and its detachments of Royal Marines, but after the war the destruction of its last surface ships would be deemed to constitute the end of the Royal Navy as a separate branch of the British Armed Forces.
One of the most moving accounts of the night came from Juan Pardo, a sixteen-year-old Spaniard who had fled his own country with his family. They had made their way up through France and secured passage to the British Isles on account of Pardo’s disabled younger sister. After the war, Pardo told the Parliamentary Select Committee hearing: ‘Our boat made it into Dover harbour, but was stacked alongside dozens of others, all waiting to get people off. The whole place was full of boats. My dad carried my sister and we crowded up with everyone else onto the upper-deck. When we looked back towards France, the whole horizon was just one continuous line of yellow fire, which became red higher up. In the sky streaks of white and yellow light raced back and forth. Suddenly one came down and hit a small ship outside the harbour, which exploded. My dad told me to get to land; that they would follow with my sister. I argued that I could carry her instead, but he insisted, and said we would meet on the land where it was safer. I jumped from our ship to the next. There were thousands of people everywhere. I fought against them, forced myself through them. As I did so, I slowly came to understand my father’s look and my mother’s tears when we parted. I reached the third or fourth boat - I can’t remember exactly because of the pushing and shouting and screams. Some men got a gangplank from the harbour wall onto the ship I had just reached. But too many people were panicking and fighting to get off. Everyone seemed to get more frightened when there was another explosion. I jumped into the water and got onto those big concrete shapes at the base of the wall - that is how I got these scars on my face and hands, see? I climbed up and got onto the harbour wall. Here there were fewer people and I could run quickly towards the land. After some time, when I reached an area with lots of metal containers, I looked back. Just then, lots of the boats in the harbour exploded at the same time, and I knew at once my family were dead.’
The Select Committee hearing at which Pardo gave his testimony sat to determine whether any person in charge at the Port of Dover that night should face criminal negligence charges. It is a measure of the atmosphere in Britain in the years immediately following the conflict that such attempts to apportion blame on individuals were made; individuals who had little or no actual control. A number of other witnesses testified that people were left on the ships unnecessarily and there were delays in positioning extra gangplanks. In 2067, the only Port of Dover manager to survive the war, Felix Cartwright, committed suicide the day before the committee reported its findings, having anticipated that charges would be brought against him. In the event they were not, as the committee correctly assessed that no individuals could have performed any more prudently in the circumstances.
Nevertheless, this remains an egregious example of taking events out of context. On that night, innumerable conurbations came under sustained attack. As Victoire Tasse noted in
A History of Warfare in the 21st Century
: ‘The Caliphate’s armed forces took the principle of saturation attack further than it had ever been taken in the history of warfare. Every single device knew exactly where it was, what was beneath it, and had the knowledge to cause the maximum damage and casualties with its munitions. If one took a child’s mathematical compass and put the pin in a map of Europe at Munich, and then drew an arc from Dublin through Glasgow and Edinburgh, and on to Oslo, Stockholm and finally Helsinki, it is at least impressive to consider that, within the described quadrant, each city with a population greater than fifty thousand people suffered varying levels of destruction that night. The Caliphate had developed a way to maximise terror and demolition with the use of purely conventional munitions, and at no cost to its own citizens.’
In addition to the shocking loss of life in the Port of Dover, as well as similar chaos wrought on the ports at Calais, Ostend and Rotterdam, the Caliphate deployed a previously unknown ACA, at which the first report on the brain scan of the injured Caliphate warrior had hinted. Larger than the Blackswan, this new device did not boast any shielding, to carry a greater amount of ordinance. The target that night was the
Deltawerken
, the system of dams, dykes and barriers to protect the Netherlands from rising sea levels. The manoeuvre impressed on NATO leaders the Caliphate’s tactical aplomb. Four waves of Blackswans began the attack, each knocking out the defences for one of the four inlets. Waves of the new ACA then followed in from the North Sea, progressively destroying a layer of protection and allowing the sea to rush inland.
In the days after this attack, political leaders once again came under severe pressure to explain how the defences had not been more successful. But there were few answers: since the war began, NATO had been hopelessly outgunned; indeed, more sober commentators wondered how much greater the destruction might have been without the additional two thousand battlefield Pulsar lasers the US had supplied to Europe in the previous month. In addition, aggregated data showed that 56% of Blackswans targeted civilian infrastructure, of which a little under half hit monuments and other sites of historical importance. Twenty-three percent attacked the ports, and in addition to the thousands of civilian casualties, these rendered some nine refineries inoperable. Only 11% of Caliphate ACAs assaulted military targets: BAE Systems’ carbon-composite facility near Birmingham, England, which manufactured PeaceMaker and SkyWatcher shell parts, saw eight of its twelve production lines destroyed, while a number of smaller military parts and ammunition manufacturers suffered severe damage. Newly established army training facilities received no attention.