Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
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.’
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 tight 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.’
Although these details were not known on 4 August, it required only hours for NATO investigators to establish the bulk of what the Select Committee heard after the war. This caused a flurry of communications among the military and political leaders of the democracies. Sir Terry Tidbury ordered a temporary halt to Repulse, much to the US generals’ chagrin as their Marines were spreading rapidly deeper into France. On being informed of the development, Napier contacted Coll and told her she would release details to the media as soon as sufficient proof came to hand. Coll responded by urging caution lest this provoke the Caliphate into attacking NATO forces on the battlefield with such weapons. Napier demurred to take advice from the military. In
In the Eye of the Storm
, Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘That evening became one of the tensest thus far in a war which did not lack for tension. My first concern was the safety of the troops, which is why I ordered the halt. We had to establish the probability of the enemy having more of these Spiders and whether he would deploy them. My second concern was how quickly we could develop and manufacture our own stockpile. If the war was going to take this route, I saw no reason not to repay them in the same currency.’
The global implications of the enemy using a powerful and merciless weapon set a precedent which could, at length, precipitate the war expanding into a wider confrontation. Since the war began, the Caliphate had been scrupulous in adhering to employing only conventional armaments. As Victoire Tasse wrote in
A History of Warfare in the 21st Century
: ‘It is important to consider that throughout the century, most nation states regarded nuclear and chemical/biological weapons as unusable because any revenge meted out to them in response would be deemed a just punishment. It was as if, in the hundred years of their existence, an unspoken agreement had come into being that no country would be the first to use them. This explains the Caliphate’s tactical genius in responding to Israel’s nuclear attack at the beginning of the war, which suffered the added ignominy of failing absolutely, with purely conventional weapons. Technology had indeed rendered nuclear and chemical/biological weapons obsolete, although not in a way their early creators could have imagined.’
On 5 August, the political leaders of the US and the British Isles told the world of how the Caliphate used a lethal nerve agent a year previously to destroy the Paris resistance. By implication, NATO assumed that the resistances in Berlin and Warsaw had suffered the same fate, which would indeed transpire to be the case. Global condemnation was swift and unanimous. This was not so much a question of ethics or humanity. As noted above, many disinterested countries displayed indifference or hostility to Europe’s plight due to little more than economic necessity. However, the Caliphate’s open use of a virulent nerve agent caused material damage to the rest of the world’s tolerance for its expansionist adventures. Moreover, every country in the world which saw even the remotest prospect of some form of confrontation with either the Caliphate or China, now realised that its own populations might be dealt with in a similar manner as the resistors in those far-off European capital cities. Thereafter, a number of citizens in African and South American countries with large Chinese investments took matters into their own hands. For example, between 5 and 10 August, some twenty-two hapless Chinese officials were lynched in protest at Beijing’s support for Tehran. This did not go unnoticed in China.
Tehran countered the global media storm in an entirely predictable manner. The Council of Elders issued an edict on behalf of the Third Caliph insisting that London and Washington had engineered the entire episode. The Caliphate attempted, in the crudest way, to claim it would never permit the use of such weapons. It went so far as to use the immolation of Israel as an example of its ‘honour’ in conducting warfare. Such protestations drew little sympathy as in the following days, the NATO powers produced overwhelming evidence of the Caliphate resorting to the most hideous weapons to subdue populations who in any event represented no material threat to its territorial ambitions. However, as had already occurred many times in the war, over the next few days events would overtake the participants to remove the wittering of the rest of the world to the level of background noise.
The Caliphate’s initial practical response to the publicising of its use of the nerve agent in Paris was to mount a vast air attack on the advancing NATO formations. As battle-space monitor Corporal Donna Butler said from her station in Portsmouth, England: ‘By this stage, the problem wasn’t a battle in the conventional, historical sense. For a start we had no supply lines to worry about, because the forward units all carried their own replicators. Dumps were created as they advanced to ensure ammunition and weapons’ supplies, but, for example, a mobile medical facility with the forward units could stabilise almost any injury, so there was no panic to get the injured troops to the rear areas. Also, we had the SkyMasters defending the airspace above the territory we’d gained. The problem came down to - as it always had during this war - the numbers. We had a front over a thousand kilometres long. By 6 August we had half a million in troops in theatre, and probably the same number again in support personnel and returning refugees. At all times we had upwards of twenty-k Scythes in the air, but we knew they could hit us with ten times that number of machines if they wanted to. It seems to me they were too shocked by the invasion to respond properly, in an organised manner. But when the news broke about the Paris nerve agent, it seemed to wake them up.’
Although the reasons for the Caliphate’s lacklustre response to the invasion in the first few days of August would not become fully understood until after the war, enough indications existed at the time to allow NATO’s leaders to proceed with measured confidence. This confidence would only be shaken once, on Monday 6 August. At her station in Portsmouth, Butler described an unwelcome development: ‘The SkyMasters began tracking thousands of approaching Caliphate machines. At first I don’t think anyone was too worried - this was exactly what should happen in a war. Interestingly, SkyMaster #267 above Tours reported that some of the waves further back were originating from North Africa. The super AI at once flagged up the implication that either these were new and potentially improved devices, or the Caliphate’s stockpiles on the European mainland had been depleted to the point where machines had to be thrown into battle as soon as they came out of the factory.’
Both suppositions were correct. As would be revealed after the war, the Caliphate’s organisation and chain of command suffered handicaps due to its dictatorial construct. The Caliphate equivalent of generals and other commanders did not enjoy any facility for debate or a forum in which to express their own ideas or suspicions. Thus restricted, when presented with a dilemma, all eyes turned to the Third Caliph and his Council of Elders. As noted above, the Third Caliph regarded Europe as defeated, and chose to dismiss historical precedents of British resilience because of his forces’ superiority in technology and arms in 2062. However, one year constituted a long time in the presence of super artificial intelligence, which could design, anticipate, forecast and develop to a degree not seen before in history.