Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (21 page)
Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
At the lunch with Hastings in early December, Sir Terry outlined the problem: the Caliphate could not be allowed to continue producing armaments unhindered if Repulse were to have any chance of success. However, given the extensive defences that must be employed around its key installations, interfering with them was a challenge of the highest order. Sir Terry recorded that Hastings merely listened, ate, thought for some moments, and replied that he would ‘deal with it’. In the New Year, Sir Terry received a list of items and personnel Hastings would require. When Sir Terry questioned him on his plan, he declined to explain. Sir Terry elected to trust him, a choice which would transpire to be the correct one.
IV. THE LONG WINTER OF 2062/63
The winter of 2062/63 saw much freezing weather and little military action. From November to April, the Caliphate dominated the European mainland, and as would become clear after the war, the survivors’ ranks were progressively thinned through cold and starvation. On 4 January 2063 a depression over France brought the mercury as low as minus twenty-three degrees Centigrade in places. Brain scans of injured Caliphate warriors later taken during Repulse would describe in intimate detail their disdain for such weather. However, at the time the population of the British Isles remained under the threat of attack at a moment’s notice. Typical was nineteen-year-old fire-watcher Oscar Knowles, who spent many long nights in Rochester Cathedral waiting for an assault which would not arrive until the spring. He recalled: ‘The stress kept you on edge constantly. At absolutely any moment you knew the super AI could light up the readouts with a thousand of the bastards incoming. Sure, the Falaretes were there, ready to nail them, but you only needed one Blackswan to get through the screen, and that meant a thousand dead - what if one of those was someone you loved and cared for?’
Although at the time many commentators saw the lengthening silence as portending something worse than that which had gone before, NATO intelligence quickly revealed that the Caliphate military had already begun developing countermeasures to deal with the Falarete. Over the winter, western super AIs produced a wealth of potential forecasts based on giving due weight to all of the variables that the future directions of the war offered. One trouble-shooting technician bemoaned to his friend: ‘We have to deal with ridiculous percentages here. It’s worse than poker: there might only be a one-in-two-and-a-half-million chance of a royal flush being dealt, but they still get dealt. We can’t discount any of the tons of potential outcomes. It’s giving me a headache.’
Not for the first time in history did a technological advancement or discovery fail to live up to the expectations its inventors or discoverers initially believed. At the outset, super artificial intelligence was thought to be the ultimate achievement of the computerisation which had begun nearly a century earlier. With the sum of human knowledge at each super-AI unit’s disposal, its advice would be infallible. Many failed to foresee that the sum of human knowledge was quite a different thing from the sum of all potential knowledge. As noted above, super AI enjoyed many useful applications in numerous areas of human affairs, including transport, energy production, agriculture, social management, and the military. However, it had yet to attain the hoped-for goal of making accurate, reliable predictions. In the event, the development of super AI towards this target soon resembled an attempt to reach the speed of light: more and more energy was required to accelerate in ever-lessening increments. As the knowledge available to super AIs increased, so their forecasts became more qualified, albeit in diminishing percentages.
This led to an overwhelming range of options for NATO’s military’s leaders to consider. It is perhaps unsurprising that many balked at the prospect of analysing the output to its ultimate depth. In addition, super AI’s abject failure to predict the Caliphate’s European campaign had stained its reputation in military circles. As Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘I still didn’t trust it. I knew I never would. But I thought it important to consider what it suggested. It did come up with some good ideas, I have to admit. The suggestion to adapt the Falaretes to make them something mobile infantry could use, was one idea we probably would have thought of ourselves, but it still helped.’
Unsurprisingly, the design of weapons caught a sizable share of attention. The super AI at Aldermaston produced thousands of suggestions concerning the Falarete and how it could be adjusted to any battle situation to defeat Caliphate ACAs, assuming the Caliphate’s own super AI did not first design a way to negate the Falarete’s advantage. Throughout most of 2063, hundreds and then thousands of military technicians and analysts would pore over results of comparisons, before sending the best projections up the chain of command for final approval. Super AI could calculate and project endless potential results, but like all artificial constructs, it remained incapable of feeling the fear of a defeat which it could easily estimate, but from which it would never suffer.
In January 2063 rumours began to circulate in Washington that some high-level diplomatic contact had been re-established with Beijing. The objective appeared to be to find out if there existed a possibility of the Third Caliph declaring a public end to his territorial ambitions. While this may seem naive today, it is important to consider the extensive loss of life which had taken place in 2062. It is understandable that saner and more conciliatory minds would explore every avenue to diffuse the situation, with the final aim of avoiding the bloodshed which any NATO attempt to retake the European mainland must incur. However, in one of the less honourable episodes of the war, the Fox media outlet exposed Senator Timothy Robinson and his unauthorised attempts to sound out the Chinese government. On Friday 26 January, while on public transport leaving Washington D.C., a member of the public shot Senator Robinson twice in the chest, killing him before medical aid could be effected. In a further twist, a fellow passenger then accosted and physically beat the assailant to death before law enforcement arrived. As Robinson’s widow told reporters on the day: ‘Why do we think violence will solve anything? It’s like we’ve learned nothing in the last ten thousand years. Tim only wanted to try, he didn’t think anything would come of it, but he believed we should try. He thought too many have already died, and he only wanted to see if he could maybe find out if there was even the smallest chance of stopping more deaths. And an ill person killed him for it.’
Despite his armies’ failure to subdue the British Isles, in public the Third Caliph made every effort to publicise the war as a complete victory, which in many senses it was. Millions of the infidel had been slain, the historic home of the Christian church lay in ruins, and even Allah Himself had stepped in to ensure severe suffering was carried across the oceans. Among the billions Muslims outside Caliphate territory, public opinion covered the whole range from implacable opposition to considered support. By this stage of the New Persian Caliphate’s existence, it had become rare for fervent supporters to be found outside its borders, as most had long-since taken their families and themselves on the one-way journey to live permanently inside Caliphate territory.
However, as with most conflicts throughout history, the primary role of religion was to obscure the baser instincts acting as the true driving forces behind the leading personality. One recurring theme throughout the war was the lack of general intelligence among Caliphate warriors. All captured warriors whose brains were scanned had IQs between 48 and 87; moreover, areas of the brain associated with reasoning, empathy and inquisitiveness showed underdevelopment of up to 25% compared with median values in western subjects. During and after the war, commentators in the media repeatedly claimed that the Caliphate must be using an agent, likely a type of nano-bot, to engineer areas of the warriors’ brains. However, since the war no evidence has come to light to support this. A secret English government memo circulated in Whitehall in February 2063 summarised the results from the brain scans of nearly fifty injured Caliphate warriors: ‘Cultural, social and patriarchal influences appear to be the deciding factors, according to the data retrieved by the
Institut Neuropsi
. There is no indication of medical intervention directly in the brain tissue. Instead, repeated indoctrination and intentional restriction of education govern their childhoods, while in adolescence military training alone appears to be responsible for the enthusiasm of their battlefield performance. An important part of this concerns the reward principle. A number of warriors’ memories include training battles where the reward for the best-performing unit included a slave who was invariably raped and then killed.’
Of greater interest to the English government were stronger recollections of fear, danger and violence. It soon became clear that the Third Caliph’s reign had suffered at least six attempted coups d’état, each of which drew in response extensive purges of the clerical and military hierarchies. The structure of the Caliphate military grew in definition, and followed a similar pattern as other historical dictatorships. The general army was overseen by members of an elite force answerable only to the Caliph. Each equivalent of a regiment in the Caliphate army had an elite liaison officer attached to it who operated completely outside the chain of command. Retrieved memories showed that these officers wielded more actual power than the Caliphate equivalent of a colonel, simply because a hint at doubtful loyalty would lead to the execution of any regular soldier, whatever his rank. At this point in the war, no members of this elite corps had been captured alive, but the data suggested the numbers purged during the Third Caliph’s eight years in power ran into the millions. Any NATO hopes of a successful coup to change the direction of the war remained wishful thinking, as the Third Caliph’s success in the European campaign was almost complete, and the western political and military leaders therefore assumed, correctly, that his position was unassailable. The only potential respite came from intelligence that the Third Caliph considered Europe defeated and victory complete. In result, his attention now turned to considering in which other territories he could employ his vast armies, balanced against the toleration of the world’s other military superpowers.
With domination of the European landmass achieved and America battered by the tsunami, Caliphate forces spent the winter rotating units and shipping any treasures the warriors could lay their hands on back to their home villages, towns and districts. Intercepted communications in February 2063 reassured NATO leaders that Caliphate forces planned no imminent attack on the British Isles. Thus, all of the surviving European military on the islands could throw themselves into preparing for Operation Repulse. Unknown to the West, however, knowledge of NATO’s intention to retake Europe had already been passed to the Caliphate. NATO had unwittingly become locked in a race against time to prepare Operation Repulse before the Caliphate could design and implement a response.
Operation Repulse: Preparation
The winter finally broke in the middle of March 2063. Although temperatures on the European mainland spent much of the preceding four months below zero, on the British Isles the last vestige of the fading Gulf Stream kept the weather at a chilly but damp consistency. Twenty-one-year-old Ian Pratt, a former immersive gamer who had answered his country’s call and joined the British Army, spoke later of his basic training as an infantryman: ‘My senses came alive, really. There’s nothing in gaming to compare with the feel of a real gun, the smell of real cordite. The change in air pressure when you fire your rifle is more disconcerting than the noise. How many hours did I spend playing make believe? And it was nothing like the real thing, nothing at all.’
Pratt’s experience was far from unique. Across the country, thousands of recruits underwent a life-changing period of instruction during which many discovered abilities they had not known they possessed. Men and women from all walks of life had their natural talents assessed and were assigned to battalions and regiments where those skills would be best utilised. The government’s initial fears concerning the rejection rate were well-founded: between October 2062 and March 2063, the monthly figure of rejected applicants seldom fell below 20% of the total who volunteered. The leading cause of rejection was obesity and related conditions. As one colour sergeant at a recruiting station in the city of Hull bemoaned to regional headquarters in a summary report: ‘There’s no shortage of goodwill, people are scared of the enemy and want to do something, but the quality coming in the door does leave something to be desired. Only yesterday a little round blob with stubby limbs sticking out wobbled up to me and said she wanted to apply for a signals battalion. What could I tell her? To get down to the Humber and help plug up the sea defences with some of that spare blubber? I told her to come back when she’d lost sixty pounds. It’s ridiculous that people who’ve spent their whole lives doing nothing more strenuous than blink their eyes suddenly think they can take part in a war.’
As the British Army expanded to a level of manpower not seen in over a century, some recruits found their military careers became a whirlwind of progression. The experience of twenty-four-year-old sergeant Sean Bolton was not untypical: ‘I joined the army on 21 August 2062 and did my basic training. I was assigned to infantry because my reaction speeds were supposedly good. I got pulled off in October to help on the south coast with deploying Falaretes. My unit was involved in the skirmishes around Hastings. Then, in December, my CO told me a promotion was on offer if I transferred to training. So within a few months of me joining, I found myself training the new recruits.’
Unlike previous wars, logistics in the build-up to Repulse did not present significant problems. Nearly all construction requirements were met by replicators, which also supplied uniforms. British Army guidelines stipulated minimum amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables per soldier per day, food which could not be replicated. These requirements were lowered in the winter as supplies became scarce. Despite diplomatic pressure applied through political channels, many global food producing corporations were reluctant to trade with the British Isles, and thus be seen to support its defence, lest they lose more lucrative contracts in far larger markets. Of the few that did, shipments had to be paid for in foreign currencies and were predictably more expensive, to compensate for the perceived risk. As the war progressed, the US and Canada would use their relative economic strength to supply more essentials.
Weapons and other munitions still for the most part had to be manufactured. All of NATO’s infantry and armoured weapons employed propellants which would continue to resist replication for years ahead. Certain components, especially carbon-composite body parts for ACAs and land vehicles, could be replicated where they were needed, which occasionally led to stockpile jams as replicated equipment awaited key manufactured items before assembly.
By the beginning of the year, the US had completely recovered from the tsunami in material terms. With the Eastern Seaboard ports repaired, the Atlantic Convoys resumed on 10 January with Convoy SE-118, protected by elements of the
USS Abraham Lincoln
carrier group, withdrawn from its usual Pacific station for the purpose. On board was Christopher Anderson, then a young war reporter working for the
Washington Post
. In his memoirs of the war,
A Blade of Grass in the Storm
, he wrote: ‘The endless grey water merges with the sky. The white fluffs of cresting waves catch my glance, and I feel a connection to a past I have only seen in old movies and newsreels. I stare at the heaving, surging mass of nature all around me and try to imagine some of the lives this monster has swallowed. Then I wonder if it will swallow me and all of the people on this ship. When will it be time for the monster to feed again? Will the machines come hurling out of the sky at this moment, or the next, or at some unknown future moment? The Petty Officer says we are quite safe from the machines, but his faith finds little anchorage in me.’
While Anderson conveys the sense of danger, his lack of trust is misplaced. By this stage, all warships and merchantmen had been fitted with copious batteries of Falaretes. For the military vessels in particular, this rendered them very difficult to sink with the Caliphate’s existing range of ACAs. In the event, however, further convoys would suffer attack and incur losses. For example, on 2 March the Caliphate launched three thousand Blackswans at Convoy SE-134, which they found fifty kilometres off the coast of Ireland. The attack was repelled for the cost of two destroyers and a supply vessel sunk. All of the merchantmen successfully defended themselves. Only a few months earlier, the losses would have been significantly higher, although this likely meant little to the sailors on SE-134 who perished.
At the beginning of April, field tests began of the new Scythe X-7 ACA, on which much of the success of Operation Repulse would depend. A number of generals and other military leaders arrived at Keswick in England’s Lake District. Among them was twenty-seven-year-old Tobias Booth, adjutant to Gen. Sir Patrick Fox, commander of the British First Corps. He later confided to his diary: ‘They say that if an aircraft looks beautiful, it will fly beautifully, and when the boffins pulled the covers off the X-7, it looked very beautiful indeed. The French scientist and his team were there, and he explained - shouting to us above the wind coming off the lake - that the muon power unit required a few minutes to reach full reaction. I glanced at Fox as he stood with the Field Marshall. They chatted inaudibly but I could see they felt confident. Then the X-7 took off and flew several passes over the hills and along the lake. A construction replicator had thrown up a row of houses which the X-7 approached. A few invisible bursts from its Pulsar laser and the dwellings exploded, the pops and crashes taking a few seconds to reach our ears on the other side of the lake, but sounding impressive for having travelled over water. The French scientist and his people were tapping furiously at the screens on small devices they held in their hands, before glancing back at the machine with concentrated frowns. The X-7 made me think of happier times, before the war. Lizzie and I had a wonderful evening at the Royal Opera House watching Swan Lake. The X-7 pirouetted and pitched and danced around the sky in exactly the same manner as the principal dancer that night, who had so enchanted Lizzie and me.’
Booth is worth quoting at length because his feelings summarised those of many concerning the Scythe X-7. Sir Terry Tidbury himself referred to the same test flights as: ‘… the first day I truly believed we might have a chance against the enemy.’ However, the French scientist Louis Reyer and his team had their doubts as the testing continued. He later said: ‘I believe we had constructed a device of which we could be proud. But it needed some minor refinements before we could be sure. Due to the heat from the propulsion system, we had a gap of four degrees on the Y axis. It infuriated me that we could not eliminate this shortcoming, but the machine’s manoeuvrability had to be considered. This device not only had to eliminate the filthy warriors, but also had to be able to attack the enemy’s own machines and be victorious. There were many such difficult compromises.’
In addition to the Pulsar-armed X-7, the USAF and NASA also led development of its variant the Scythe X-9, a larger version with a more squat body armed with missiles. Given the prohibitive cost of fitting each Scythe with its own super AI, NATO required a battle-management unit with an altitude limit of low Earth orbit. It was decided to upgrade the SkyWatcher ACA with a muon-crystallised power unit and enhanced shielding. Christened the SkyMaster, tests began over the Arizona desert in the third week of April.
Another innovation developed at this time concerned improving the shielding around the Scythes. Jill Hayes, part of Reyer’s team, explained years later how she came up with the idea: ‘The problem with shielding was the masculinity in the design. All shielding had to be ballsy, like a tough guy who’s always ready for action, you know? So the ACA goes to battle stations and activates its shielding, and it arrives in the action to say, “Hey everyone, see? My shielding is up, like a big cock, and I’m ready to fight!” I thought this unnecessary, and looked at the issue with a more feminine slant. The shielding around any device is generated by a soft-plasma power-source directed to two opposing pads, a few millimetres apart, and then projected around the subject vehicle. Now, these pads are actually two cryo-magnets. They use power to keep the shielding stable, which can run down if the subject vehicle is over the battlefield for a long time and takes a lot of hits. But, you know, this is a “man” thing - he’s always got to be ready. Anyway, when the shielding is hit, either with a laser pulse or a missile, the kinetic energy absorbed causes a degradation in the cryo-magnets’ efficiency. More hits cause more degradation till the cryo-magnetic field dissolves and the shielding goes down. I asked myself a simple question: why not keep the shielding down till the instant it was needed? It would obviously not be a problem for the managing software to active the shielding to the billionth of a second before the device got hit. Instead of being all butch, why not be a bit more subtle? Each device’s shielding would stay down until right before it got hit. I ran the idea into the super AI and it came back with an increasing efficiency curve heading up from 17%. So with a bit of lateral, feminine thinking, I’d improved the durability of our shielding by one-fifth. Of course, I didn’t tell it like that to Louis or any of the other men, I made it out to be something I’d thought up.’
Armoured formations received similar attention, as NATO could not afford a repetition of the lessons learnt during the Caliphate’s swift subjugation of Europe. Arthur Ford, a twenty-seven-year-old tank company commander in the newly recreated 4th Royals, wrote to his brother in the infantry: ‘They’re assigning variant Falaretes to all of the Challengers as well as upgrading the software. The Yanks were full of themselves with how effective their Abrahams are, until the CO reminded them that we invented the Falarete, which was going to make them last as long as a whole minute before they brewed up.’ This improved technology necessitated a comprehensive review of tactics: super AI forecasts produced innumerable scenarios concerning how Caliphate warriors might defend the territory they had gained. Any attempt to retake the European mainland had to begin with a clear plan of combining NATO forces in the most effective manner. Scythes, battlefield Pulsars, tanks and infantry would be required to attack the defenders in a manner which would minimise flesh-and-blood casualties. Certainly, Sir Terry Tidbury and the other generals of May 2063 had no intention of restaging similar beach landings as in June 1944. Repulse called for the Scythes to clear significant coastal landing areas before land-based armour and troops could be deployed by air.
Much of the spring of 2063 was taken up with these tactical and strategic considerations. All the while, NATO forces built up: on 2 May the final designs of the Scythe ACAs were approved and the machines went into full production; the British Army expanded to a size not seen since the First World War; more Atlantic Convoys survived Caliphate interference and docked at British ports, full of equipment, munitions and US Army troops. The US Marines finally discarded the failed exoskeletons. As Gen. Pearce later told the US Congressional hearings: ‘Maybe we’d all seen too much goddam science fiction in the movies, I don’t know. What we did know was that those exoskeletons were a death-trap. In the early part of the war we lost too many good Marines because of the mechanical shortcomings. Oh, sure, they looked great. Problem was, they just didn’t work in a real battle situation. Jesus, we’d spent billions designing and testing these things, but against the targeted smart bullets the enemy used to freeze up the joints, those boys might as well have been naked.’
On 4 May the head of MI5, David Perkins, crossed the river Thames in London to meet Sir Terry Tidbury at the Field Marshall’s headquarters in the Ministry of Defence. He carried news which would again alter the course of events. Although both men in their respective memoirs recalled this meeting with different impressions, they agreed on the key development: the English diplomat in Beijing, who had supplied the copy of Zayan’s data-pod before the war, now told London that knowledge of Repulse had reached the Chinese government, and he assumed therefore that Tehran would also shortly find out. Perkins explained that the mole could not provide evidence without compromising his diplomatic cover. Sir Terry was reluctant to take action without certain evidence. As he wrote: ‘I told Perkins it wasn’t the cleverest thing to go to the PM and cabinet and begin a conversation with: “We’ve heard a rumour…” By this point, I had developed a measure of respect for the head of MI5, but this war didn’t offer much scope for espionage.’