Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (14 page)

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.

The casualties SE-07 incurred and the distance from the mainland at which they were inflicted caused a flurry of communications among the NATO powers.  Abrupt concern that Caliphate ACAs could reach mainland America led media outlets in the US to demand assurances of safety from the White House.  Coll knew that no such guarantee could be given; at once her advisers suggested that the Caliphate may be improving the capabilities of its ACAs.  Initial research into downed Blackswans by NATO military scientists from a number of countries reached the same conclusion: that the propulsion unit should be capable of generating for more power than it appeared to.  Louis Reyer, the French scientist who made the original deduction that Caliphate ACAs must have a muon-based fusion power source, now led a team based at Aldermaston which focused on developing countermeasures as well as a similar power unit for an as-yet planned new generation of NATO ACAs.

Writing after the war, Reyer described the pressure with which these young men and women had to cope: ‘We had furious rows in the team.  There could be no doubt the power source was muon, but Jill kept arguing that a different type of lepton would be better for the new-gen NATO weapons, specifically the tau neutrino, as its heavier mass would be more potent.  Of course, I respected her and felt obliged to concede her point, but time was of the essence, and, at least to me and several of the others, we didn’t need to go down the tau-neutrino road because the existing Blackswan power unit appeared to have a significant design flaw which we could exploit by coming up with a similar but better unit, which we obviously could be confident would actually work.  I felt unable to take the issue any higher, as I didn’t expect non-scientists to be able to follow the subtleties of Fermi-Dirac statistics.  Moreover, I didn’t want to lose Jill from the team.  She knew an awful lot, probably more than me.  Finally we had a private conversation.  Both of us relented to some degree, she knew as well as I that millions of people were relying on us.’  It was fortunate indeed that Reyer had such a wise head on his young shoulders.  Within only three weeks, this team would produce the initial design for the power unit which would form the core of the next generation of NATO ACAs.  However, these machines would take six months to bring to full production.

IV. A PICTURE OF THE ENEMY

On Tuesday 13 June, the
Institut Neuropsi
delivered its first summary from the memories of the injured Caliphate warrior.  This memorandum, provided to all NATO military and political leaders, constitutes one of the most significant documents of the war, and with the benefit of hindsight goes some way to exonerating the leaders of the day for the moral ambiguity of condemning the injured warrior to a certain death.  Called Farhad Oveisi, he had been born in a sector fifty kilometres south of Tehran province, and his parents sold him into the Caliphate military aged ten as part of a tribute the local headman owed to the district
majlis
.  Oveisi was one of a group of thirty boys and young men collected together from a number of villages which had benefited from the completion of civil engineering projects.  The memo included an image taken from Oveisi’s memory of a network of water replicators in the desert, and a snippet of conversation the boy overheard of the village headman explaining to his parents that as the father had three other sons, he should spare the young Farhad for the good of the Caliphate.

Oveisi was then transported to a military school in Tripoli province, where he underwent several years of indoctrination and training.  At age fifteen he failed a number of aptitude tests and was assigned to the infantry (the
Institut Neuropsi
’s super AI stated that at the time of scanning, Oveisi’s IQ was 68.278).  There his training consisted almost entirely of weapons proficiency, while indoctrination predictably included vehement religious instruction to promote hatred for all non-Muslims.  However, in the weeks preceding the war, Oveisi was assigned as an assistant to a general in Warrior Group East, where in his duties he handled sensitive data blocks concerning the invasion of Europe.  The memo contained more images where Oveisi had seen plans, timetables and available forces for the forthcoming war.  The data these images contained finally shattered the last of NATO’s illusions.  In addition, the
Institut Neuropsi
’s super-AI had isolated fragments of conversations which indicated key centres of Caliphate weapons production facilities.  The bulk of its Blackswans, it transpired, were produced at a Libyan town called Tazirbu, an oasis deep in the desert.  Disbelief among the memorandum’s recipients was soon tempered by the summary of a conversation Oveisi had with a senior officer, which described how the town had expanded since the accession of the Third Caliph, and construction and water replicators had made Tazirbu into a vast new city whose economy centred on producing and assembling thousands of ACAs a week.