Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (2 page)

Glossary

ACA
: Autonomous Combat Aircraft, a generic term which covers all unmanned, super-AI controlled military aircraft, whether armed with missiles or lasers, deployed by all combatants during the war

Blackswan
: NATO reporting name for the most common ACA deployed by the Caliphate, each of which was armed with fifty Spiders

Caliphate
: also known as the New Persian Caliphate and the Combined African, Saudi and Persian Caliphate, the isolationist political entity first formed in 2042 after the civil wars in the countries formerly known as Iran, Iraq and Syria

Falarete
: NATO anti-Spider single-shot portable missile system (a combination of the ancient Greek word for ‘shining’ and the Latin for ‘net’)

Footie
: NATO troop colloquialism for the FT-23/D anti-personnel smart-mine

Lapwing
: NATO reporting name for the Caliphate’s primary laser-equipped ACA

Moose
: NATO reporting name for the only autonomous battle tank the Caliphate deployed during the war

NATO
: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

PeaceMaker
: inferior combat ACA with which NATO forces began the war

Pickup
: NATO troop colloquialism for the PKU-48 smart assault rifle

Pulsar Mk. III
: NATO’s main offensive laser weapon, fitted to surface ships, vehicles, and ACAs

SACEUR
: Supreme Allied Command Europe

Scythe
: the range of ACAs developed by NATO during the war, and including the X-7, X-9, Omega and Alpha

SHAPE
: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe

Siskin
: NATO reporting name for the improved ACA which the Caliphate deployed in the closing stages of the war

SkyWatcher
: inferior, low earth-orbit battle management ACA with which NATO forces began the war, superseded by the
SkyMaster

Spider
: the Caliphate’s autonomous cylindrical bomb with eight articulated claws

Squitch
: NATO troop colloquialism for the SQCH-77B super-AI controlled battlefield management system fitted to each soldier

Super AI
: super artificial intelligence

Tawny Eagle
: NATO reporting name for the Caliphate’s main warrior air transport craft

Prelude: The View from the West

I. SLEEPWALKING TO CATASTROPHE

For more than thirty years, historians have argued over when the war with the New Persian Caliphate became inevitable.  Although at first glance the issue may appear pedantic, the analysis of certain events before hostilities broke out yields important indications of the disaster that was to overtake Europe, but does little to aid identification of a precise date on which the war became an immutable certainty.  The Caliphate made no formal declaration; the suddenness of the attack on Europe was superseded only by its ferocity.

In his history
The Great European Disaster
, G. K. Morrow asserts: ‘Informed individuals understood when the Third Caliph announced his accession in 2055 and the talk of peace and compromise took on darker undertones, that, sooner or later, there would come a reckoning with the West in general, and Europe in particular’.  He goes on, unfairly, to lambast the political and military leaders of NATO member countries for failing to realise the seriousness of the situation and reacting accordingly.

However illuminating hindsight can be, it is vital for any student of history to consider the context of events: the people who lived through that period had to base their assessments and judgements on the information they had to hand.  In all cases bar one, the data were woefully incomplete, and it cannot be the role of posterity to judge the rightness of these individuals’ actions in the light of subsequent knowledge to which they had no access.  We are each of us subject to human fallibility, and determine our actions with the information available in the instant we are obliged to cast our decision.  Thus it was for those involved in the most brutal conflict Europe had experienced in nearly four centuries.

In
The Rise of the New Persian Caliphate
, David Benn attempts to prove the Caliphate’s genesis in the first decades of the twenty-first century; but, again, this is disingenuous.  The final defeat of Daesh in 2020 paradoxically did much to undermine Western credibility, as the campaign had been handled with the utmost political incompetence.  Nevertheless, despite the widespread unrest and terrorist outrages of the time, it is no more reasonable to claim the inevitability of the New Persian Caliphate’s rise than it would be to insist that the Treaty of Versailles led directly to the Second World War.  In the three decades which preceded the war, there were many personalities who directed events instrumental to the onslaught Europe would eventually suffer.  But at no time until the day before the Rape of Turkey could it be claimed that the New Persian Caliphate’s intentions would not adjust to prevailing circumstances.  As is well established, the Caliphate chose its moment to attack based on military expediency: superior weaponry and an overwhelming numerical advantage in both arms and warriors.

Knowledge among the NATO allies of the Caliphate’s armaments programme was at all times subject to intentional obfuscation and faulty intelligence.  The Third Caliph found himself in a remarkably fortunate situation: as the first brutal dictator of the new technological era, he utilised scientific advancements to mask the extent of his domain’s industry.  For example, thousands of workers in the Caliphate’s military, technology and other key sectors had implants put into their bodies which were geo-sensitive.  If the subject strayed more than twenty kilometres outside the borders of the Caliphate, the implant released nano-bots which made their way through the subject’s bloodstream to the heart, where thousands of them bound together to shred the tissue.  When rumours of this incentive reached other affected workers, it is little surprise that defectors to the West became more than scarce.

From January 2058 until the outbreak of war, the USAF lost no fewer than two hundred-and-fifty-three super-AI surveillance satellites in attempts to establish to what degree the Caliphate was producing arms.  At the US Congressional hearings after the war, Vice Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, Gen. Mark Cody, expressed the sense of frustration: ‘Every time we told a satellite to take a look, it just vanished.  These were very clever machines, and they should’ve been able to tell us what was destroying them before they got destroyed, but it didn’t work out like that.  Finally, we had to conclude the Caliphate’s lasers must be more powerful than we thought, but it wasn’t a simple process.’

Indeed, this confusion in western military hierarchies is the hallmark of those years, but cannot bear material responsibility for the disaster which followed.  At the same US Congressional hearings, Col. Kenneth Partridge spoke for many when he declared: ‘Hell, we guessed their lasers were more powerful than we wanted, we guessed they were building independent weapons’ systems as fast as they could, but we didn’t and couldn’t know the true extent.  The Caliphate hid too much from us; it’d been closed to outsiders for decades.’  When pressed on how he thought NATO’s military technology could fall behind that of a totalitarian dictatorship, Col. Partridge replied: ‘Ask the geeks.  They told us we were ahead in tech and arms, and they were wrong.’  This plain-speaking colonel had articulated with unerring clarity the key reason why the onslaught was so effective, but the causes were many and varied.

English government security files recently released under the thirty-year rule underscore how endemic disbelief held sway over the West.  These reveal that in November 2061, a twenty-seven-year-old Caliphate subject called Kaliq Zayan boarded a Chinese container ship at Jeddah.  When it left Caliphate waters, Zayan’s implant duly released the nano-bots which shredded his heart.  A search of his possessions yielded a small data-pod, whose contents the ship’s captain dutifully transmitted to Beijing.  There it was shared among that country’s intelligence and military communities, but otherwise suppressed.  At the end of the year, however, a young British diplomat, who had been having an illicit affair with a high-ranking member of Chinese intelligence, became aware of the data-pod’s existence and used his wiles to obtain a copy.

Thus through this circuitous route did the only certain evidence of the extent of the Caliphate’s preparations for war reach MI5 and the English government.  At a COBRA meeting on 17 January 2062, English Prime Minister Dahra Napier expressed her initial disbelief that the figures in Zayan’s data-pod could be accurate, but the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury, insisted they should be taken seriously.  A fractious debate ensued.

In the seventh year of her premiership, Napier’s analytical mind realised what the likely outcome would be in the event of any confrontation, if the data were true.  One of her aides, Crispin Webb, confided afterwards in a diary which has recently come to light: ‘The boss shook that raven head back and forth, refuting, but I saw a glimmer of real fear in her eye.  First.  Time.  Ever.’  Napier refused to accept the Caliphate could have produced so many ACAs, or that this force could be supplemented by the alleged three million warriors.

General Sir Terry Tidbury was in 2062 a taciturn fifty-three-year-old ex-paratrooper, with piercing eyes which seldom blinked.  As had many others, over the preceding seven years he had come to view the Third Caliph as the greatest threat to world peace.  But he also comprehended the Caliphate’s full potential in a way few of his peers in the democracies were willing to.  In his seminal post-war memoir,
In the Eye of the Storm
, he recalls this meeting with: ‘We’d had some intel[ligence] which confirmed my fears, but I still couldn’t get the PM to increase ACA production any further.’  This was another key mistake, only a few weeks before the Caliphate struck.  With the recent release of previously secret security files, it is plain that Napier and her cabinet considered Zayan’s data-pod a diversion, deliberately planted with no purpose other than to cause panic in the West.

When Defence Secretary Phillip Gough resigned later in the year, once the scale of the disaster began to unfold, he told a packed House of Commons: ‘I stress at no time has His Majesty’s Government misled the House.  However, the tragedy unfolding in Europe today could not have reasonably been foreseen.’  Despite the tremendous uproar this statement caused, the most of which Gough can be accused is that he made an oversimplification.

Each NATO member received a summary of the data-pod’s contents, marked low priority as the data were considered unreliable.  As such, few noted it, much less took the warning seriously.  One who did was Lt. Gen. Studs Stevens of the USAF.  Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury related a conversation that took place between the two men during the emergency NATO summit two days before war broke out: ‘Studs came over to me and asked if I agreed with the official position.  I told him certainly not, but without hard evidence what could we expect?  Studs mentioned the data-pod which, he said, everyone else thought was planted.  He and I agreed that if it were true, things could get very tricky.  It gives me no satisfaction now, after the war, to know that this warning should have been taken much more seriously - if only to save thousands of lives in the navies.  But at that time the war was almost on us, in any case.’

In this Sir Terry is correct.  At this late stage, little could have been done to avert the disaster.  In addition, in the weeks and months leading up to hostilities the Third Caliph publically used his dominion’s apparent lack of military might to play down speculation in the global media.  Many highly respected outlets in the West cast doubt on the rumours of Caliphate mobilisation.  Since the war, historians have attempted to explain how the West could have been so wrong-footed; indeed, many of the war leaders endured substantial opprobrium at its conclusion.  However, it is necessary to take a more nuanced view.

In the 2050s, for example, replication technology was still in its infancy.  Food replicators cost a disproportionate amount of average annual salary, and remained either playthings for the wealthy, or, more prosaically, a means for entrepreneurs to turn an easy profit.  While the economic upheaval non-organic replicators wrought on Westerns societies continued apace, for the ordinary citizen these devices merely delivered a supply of cheap, unhealthy food.  In result, a wide-ranging survey by the WHO in 2058 found that 68.1% of the British population were clinically obese.  This figure rose to 72.3% in the US, while France and Germany registered 67.8% and 65.2% respectively.  Despite the wealth of medical evidence known by that time which linked obesity with reduced cognitive function, in the years leading up to the war, the governments of the democracies appeared reluctant to rein in technology’s simple way to feed their populations cheaply.

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that Europe had enjoyed more than a century of peace.  Its peoples had found much common ground, despite their cultural differences.  The Middle-Eastern lessons of the first two decades of the century had been forgotten, and the prospect of some far-off enemy threatening them seemed implausible to many.  Confiding to his diary in the summer of 2061, twenty-two-year-old undergraduate Sean Dowell articulated an important sentiment of the period: ‘Everyone knows the Persian Caliphate’s isolationist stance - it says again and again it wants nothing to do with the rest of the world, but it beggars belief when the hawks in NATO keep hammering on about the danger from them.  I was having a glass with a couple of the guys last night, and we agreed that even if the hawks were right - and not just whining to help increase the arms manufacturers’ profits, as they usually do - our militaries are more than capable of handling the Caliphate.’

The cynicism of Dowell and his friends typified the feelings of many.  While some since the war have tried to suggest that the Caliphate employed spies inside NATO governments to promote the view of an isolationist but otherwise harmless political entity, no evidence has come to light to support this.  A far more likely explanation can be found in the aggregated media reports of the period.  In the five years before the war began, 77.3% of popular media articles which mentioned the Caliphate also used either the words ‘poverty’, ‘chaos’, ‘hopeless’, or ‘starvation’.  By contrast, 81.2% of articles in the same period which mentioned NATO additionally used either the words ‘certainty’, ‘security’, or ‘safety’.

Total immersive gaming also played an important role in the democracies’ sleepwalks to catastrophe.  Led by an Australian corporation called Innerscape, which enjoyed nearly two billion subscribers around the world by 2061, the five largest providers offered a form of escape unknown to previous generations.  In combination with intravenous feeding, these virtual gaming worlds allowed participants to exist almost permanently outside reality.  The British charity Gamers Anonymous published a report in late 2060 estimating that some twelve million Britons spent ‘all or substantially all’ of their lives immersed in virtual gaming.  Despite protests, the English, Scottish and Welsh governments were reluctant to legislate as they collected significant tax revenues from gamers.  This pattern was repeated in other NATO countries, with only France passing legislation obliging corporations such as Innerscape to cap the amount of time for which gamers could immerse themselves.

Innerscape and its competitors, however, also introduced a permanent virtual existence for their customers.  Originally designed as an alternative to the critically flawed and discredited cryogenic suspension fad, elderly and terminally ill patients could have their corporeal selves put into stasis and live in a virtual universe through an avatar.  The extensive popularity of this service caused its rapid expansion, and at length began to attract otherwise healthy younger people with the promise of near immortality in a virtual universe of their own design.  (In the event, a number of Innerscape’s European facilities were overrun, costing the lives of more than six thousand of their ‘residents’.)