Chapter 466: History of the End, Part 3 - With Hardened Hearts
“Destruction is come upon thee that dwellest in the land: the time is come, the day of slaughter is near, and not of the joy of mountains.”
- Ezekiel 7:7
The new year was supposed to mark a dawning of a new era. The old year, with all of its baggage and history, would be sent off in darkness, but a new year, full of promise and possibility, would arrive cloaked in light. Yet January 2039 only brought more darkness. The war raged on across five continents and in three oceans. As bullets, missiles, bombs, and gas killed thousands on the battlefield, millions more would lose their lives in other ways.
Infrastructure collapses and strange weather patterns were reported everywhere across the northern hemisphere, where most of the nukes had gone off. Scientists estimated roughly 1 billion tons of dust, 20 million tons of smoke from biomass, and 60 million tons of smoke from manmade sources circulated in the atmosphere. Cloudy skies—their orange hue having given way to a dull gray by now—remained the norm, and likely would be for the next two or three years. The smoke remained extremely effective at absorbing sunlight, significantly reducing temperatures on the ground. Around the world, precipitation plummeted to almost 50% of 2038 levels, and the average surface temperature dropped about three degrees Celsius; this was expected to continue for at least a decade. Frost and cold snaps were still reported as far south as Hispania and Italia. Strange winds, carrying clouds of toxic dust, buffeted many coastal areas, forcing people to take shelter in their homes. Smog and “dry fog” covered cities in Kanata, Tsalagehi Ayeli, the Eimerican federal territories, Scandinavia, Britannia, and Hibernia; their red haze persisted for weeks and refused to be dispersed by wind or rain. Although these freak weather conditions remained somewhat dangerous, actual radiation levels had dropped and no longer posed a significant health risk. Still, paranoia gripped many communities, especially those near nuked cities, and the coincidental emergence of additional radiation sickness symptoms like temporary hair loss and leukopenia did little to assuage their fears.
The smoke also displaced ozone and caused interruptions in the ozone layer. As the scientific community feared, the ozone layer had been substantially reduced in many areas, particularly in the northern hemisphere. However, fears about an increase in solar ultraviolet radiation turned out to be overblown for now, as the smoke itself served a similar role as the ozone in blocking ultraviolet light. However, once the smoke dissipated, there would be little stopping the ultraviolet light from reaching the surface. Most proposals to restore or patch up the ozone layer were shot down for either being expensive, impractical, or outright impossible with the ongoing war. Although it was believed the ozone layer would naturally regenerate given enough time, the possibility of a nuclear summer in the immediate future was looking more and more likely now.
Famine and pestilence went hand in hand with war. Epidemics developing among the populations of southern Fusang were also seen in South Eimerica, Eurasia, and Africa. Famines gripped Afghanistan, India, Burma, Siam, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mali, and Mayapan, sparing nobody. As crop failures mounted and meager surpluses and emergency rations ran out, millions starved. Food poisoning, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, and influenza became normal in hundreds of Eurasian and African cities for the first time in nearly two hundred years. In regions underneath weak spots in the ozone layer, sunburns became common even with cloudy skies. The displaced and injured were particularly affected. Those whose immune systems had been weakened by radiation were even more susceptible. It seemed that humanity’s agricultural production was no longer capable of sustaining its pre-war population levels. The number of resources to go around went down, and the price of food went up. Despite the deaths of hundreds of millions so far, the population remained far larger than what could be supported. A Malthusian-style catastrophe was imminent.
Competition for resources intensified, and where there was competition, there was civil unrest. In Turkestan, crops were so moldy and unripe that they couldn’t even be used for animal feed. In India, thirty million starved to death over the course of two months. In Yavdi, the battles between warlords intensified. In Japan, ten million starved or froze to death. The armies of both the southern and northern regimes struggled to feed their troops. The southern Japanese National Republic, through a variety of means and a lack of morals, weathered this crisis much better than its neighbors. By mid-January, both the northern Republic of Japan and its ally, Ainu Mosir, stood on the brink of total military and economic collapse. In Scandinavia and occupied Russia, exposure became a serious problem, forcing survivors to use wood fires and boil foraged herbs for survival. In the former, a lack of central authority and widespread destruction of forests from warfare and logging resulted in conflicts between different groups of survivors trying to take each other’s heat sources. In the latter, Jerusalem seized all heaters and food for its own occupying forces, leaving the Russians to freeze and starve. Five million Russians would die over the next two months. In China, many agricultural regions were irradiated by nukes falling on cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chongqing, and Kunming. Although Han and his propaganda machine insisted everything was fine and the Chinese nation would endure, the reality was many Chinese would starve this winter. Millions of Chinese would have to resort to subsistence farming, as most of their farming technology had been destroyed or was now unusable. In farming provinces underneath gaps in the ozone layer, agricultural production was further reduced and would remain so for decades. Economists estimated the 2039 harvest would likely produce only 50% of 2037’s yield at the best. Fortunately, China still had the fertilizers, insecticides, and surpluses to alleviate the strain. Other countries which depended on others for these things, though, wouldn’t be as lucky.
The winter of 2039 was going to be a long and dark one. Millions died from the cold, disease, or unrest. Millions more were being killed on the front lines. The war raged on, with no end in sight. If anything, the ecological and economic pressures were only going to intensify the fighting even more. Even once the winter melted, that wouldn’t be the end of humanity’s problems. The spring would bring its own issues, which nobody was thinking about yet because they were too busy focusing on the crises happening right now.
There would be a lot more crises before the winter ended.
Rivers of Tears
“Who cares about the deaths of Diné in Ankuang Province? The Diné have never once contributed to our illustrious empire. When you look at our storied history, the names in the books are all Chinese. The Diné are barbarians who have rejected civilization every time it was offered to them. So why should we reach out our hand again, when they have always bitten it?”
- The chancellor of Fusang
In the Eimerican Federation, as federal forces painstakingly held off the Crusader onslaught in major population centers such as Tenochtitlan, Táyshá City, and Cuscowilla, the Eimerican peoples stood on the brink of famine and power outages. While the rest of the Eimericas tried to work together to solve their crises, Fusang stubbornly refused all aid or criticism, to the detriment of its people. Dams on the Ankuang River (Diné:
Tó Ntsʼósíkooh), the great river which irrigated arid southern Fusang, failed and ruptured due to either a lack of maintenance or repeated bombing raids from Jerusalem.
The Great Ankuang Dam of southern Fusang.
The collapse of the Great Ankuang Dam in January had catastrophic consequences for the entire region. At its peak, the Great Ankuang Dam boasted the largest artificial reservoir, Lake Ankuang, in all of North Eimerica, and its hydroelectric generators supplied electricity for thousands of settlements throughout Fusang. When the dam collapsed, the first thing people in southern and eastern Fusang noticed was a sudden interruption in power. Initially, authorities believed the blackout was due to Jerusalem’s physical and cyber attacks interfering with energy production; over the last several weeks, southern Fusang had been subjected to frequent widespread blackouts that would last a day or two. However, the problem was far worse, yet nobody who had the authority to address it did anything. The Chinese nationalist administration, now based out of Hongzhou, barely noticed when the contents of the artificial Lake Ankuang roared down the river and washed away dozens of towns before emptying into the Lesser Mexican Gulf. Most of these towns had majority Diné populations, and a majority of those directly killed by the floods were Diné. Historical precedent suggested the modern Fusang government’s indifference was nothing out of the ordinary.
Fusang’s Chinese population had long been culturally divided into three groups as a result of the Jin exiles settling all across the western North Eimerican coast and then gravitating towards the three largest settlements: Hongzhou, Jinshan, and Zhumasi. The most powerful clans and imperial claimants established rival courts centered around these three cities and sought the aid of local natives as allies and conscripts. In particular, the Zhumasi court relied heavily on the Diné, encouraging them to serve as mercenaries and shock troops with gifts of horses, guns, and land in the Great Golden Valley, as it needed manpower for its wars with the Triple Alliance. The Hongzhou court embraced many native traditions as a way to form alliances with native polities. The Jinshan court, having easy access to the natural riches of Jinshan Bay and the nearby Great Golden Valley, pushed for the Sinicization of the natives under its direct rule, as it did not need to rely on them as much as the other two. One way to achieve this was by funding the Pagoda Path. This was a long road running along the coast from Hongzhou through Jinshan to Zhumasi. Although the road was named after the dozens of Buddhist temples and monasteries that sprung up around it and those temples’ role in the spread of Buddhism throughout North Eimerica, its primary goal was to facilitate trade, commerce, and Jinshan’s diplomatic and economic hegemony over Hongzhou and Zhumasi. The Pagoda Path was instrumental in the Jinshan court prevailing over the other two courts and reunifying the Chinese settlers under a single imperial dynasty. The emperors of Jinshan favored their own Sinicized native allies and questioned the loyalties of those who supported the other courts, particularly the Zhumasi-allied Diné, who frequently rebelled against Jinshan rule and rejected Sinicization, though they had largely embraced Buddhism. This distrust persisted into the modern day as the Jinshan emperors gave way to Jinshan-based colonial, military, and civilian governments which all inherited the old sentiments, keeping the Diné marginalized within the empire.
The only significant outcry came from Caimei, long a bastion of intellectual discourse. Founded around the summer palace of the Jinshan court and a nearby resting stop for pilgrims along the Pagoda Path, Caimei attracted intellectuals, philosophers, artists, and theologians of all kinds, giving birth to many social and cultural movements over the centuries. In recent years, Caimei positioned itself as a leader in the anti-nationalist movement opposed to the increasing authoritarianism of Jinshan, and its community protested the treatment of the Diné and other native Eimericans during the war. However, the destruction of Jinshan, the surrounding cities, and regional road infrastructure due to the nuclear attacks led to the town’s isolation from the rest of Fusang, both physically and politically. Its loudest voices effectively shouted into the void.
The government started taking the crisis seriously once thousands of Chinese in the southern metropolitan area of Yanjia (Chumash:
Yaanga) and Xialahua (
Shalawa) complained about an interruption in water service. After Zhumasi was nuked, millions of survivors fled to Yanjia and Xialahua. The two smaller cities were barely equipped to feed and house Zhumasi’s large population. Soon, rifts developed between the ethnic Chinese of Zhumasi and the majority Chumash and Tongva inhabitants of the other two cities. The water crisis caused by the Great Ankuang Dam’s collapse exacerbated tensions on both sides. At the end of January, a mob of Chinese nationalists burned down the nearby city of Puvunga, sacred to the Tongva, and slaughtered hundreds of its people. In retaliation, Tongva separatists detonated bombs in Xialahua’s refugee camps, killing thousands of Chinese. Exaggerating the threat as a Jerusalem-sponsored coup, the government declared martial law. The crackdown against the Chumash and Tongva was one of heavy-handed repression instead of indifferent neglect as with the Diné. The military arrested thousands of Tongva and Chumash, even if they had no connections to the bombings. Meanwhile, diseases like dysentery, typhus, and even the bubonic plague and Pesah circulated in the camps. A lack of medical supplies, combined with freezing temperatures, led to high fatality rates among the ill.
Southern Fusang was one of many Eimerican regions affected by disease, infrastructure collapse, and food and water shortage at the beginning of 2039. But this region, as heavily dependent on water as it was, was uniquely susceptible to the perfect storm of destruction sweeping the New World.
(The Pagoda Path line will likely be redrawn when I get around to the full Eimerican infographic.)
(I regret drawing the black border for the river.)
So it was that the collapse of one dam in Fusang led to the immediate deaths of thousands and the slow deaths of millions.
Out of Many, One
“We, the united peoples of the Eimerican continents, recognizing that our similarities outweigh our differences, do hereby put for this Federal Statute to establish this FEDERATION OF THE EIMERICAS, so that we may work together as one people and forge our own, better future together.”
- Preamble of the Eimerican Federal Statute
The Eimerican Federation wasn’t dead yet. Going into 2039, many believed the supernation was on the verge of collapse back into its constituent nations. Fusang, long a thorn in the federal government’s side, had preoccupied itself with harsh crackdowns against its people and sent a massive fleet to conquer Hawaii. Kanata’s cities had been reduced to ashes. The interior states struggled with inflation, famine, and energy shortages. Mexico, Mayapan, Táyshá, Este Mvskokvlke, and Tawantinsuyu remained active warzones. But the federal government didn’t give up, and neither did the people. Popular approval of the federal government’s actions hovered at around 60-70%, and recruitment offices for federal forces continued to overflow with recruits. All understood that as bad as things were, it would be even worse if the Federation lost the war and Jerusalem had its way.
The Eimericans demonstrated just how charitable they were when the government tried addressing the supernational crisis. Unity formed the Federal Ministry for Common Relief, whose goal was to coordinate and distribute resources like food, heaters, medical supplies, and temporary shelters to those who needed it. The Ministry’s efforts were based on a tripartite collaboration between the government, the business sector, and private individuals. Although government and business stockpiles contributed significant amounts, private individuals surprisingly contributed even more, despite the shortages going around. The number of individual l donations was highest in the central states and lowest in Kanata. Even the Ministry itself was surprised by the amount of public donations it was receiving, and in the end it actually had to plead for citizens to stop giving donations they needed for themselves. The Ministry ended up delivering massive amounts of food and supplies across North Eimerica, helping reduce the effects of the nuclear winter by a not insignificant margin, preventing several hundred thousand deaths from disease or famine. However, Fusang refused to allow the Ministry to receive and distribute anything within its borders, while deliveries to Mexico, Táyshá, and Este Mvskokvlke were hampered due to the ongoing fighting there.
The success of the Federal Ministry for Common Relief further legitimized the federal experiment. Detractors who had feared a single authority would be ill-equipped to handle the affairs of several Eimerican countries at the same time were satisfied with how Unity handled the latest crisis, even with a war raging, Kanata neutered, and Fusang uncooperative. Those calling for further integration gained more clout on both the federal and national levels. Integration hadn’t ended with the ratification of the Federal Statute in 2020. Even the late Thordarsson had believed the Federal Statute was only the beginning of the Eimerican integration process. His supporters in the Federal Assembly kept his dream alive long after his death. Controlling a supermajority in the legislature and given a renewed popular mandate by the people thanks to Common Relief, these federalists set about establishing and expanding other federal ministries—like the Pan-Eimerican Federal Court and the Federal Bank—and introducing pan-Eimerican economic and legal standards. With support from a majority of member states, the federalists added new amendments to the Federal Statute enshrining the Federation’s core beliefs and ideals, such as freedom of speech and press, separation of government and religion, a protection of workers’ rights, and an imperative to preserve the environment. Under their watch, the Federation would truly come into its own as a powerful singular political entity, without compromising the sovereignties of its member states. It was their hope the Eimerican people’s unity would persist long after the war ended. The charity they showed towards each other proved that when united, as a single people and not many, they could achieve even greater things.
Yet Fusang remained opposed to everything the federal government did. Despite being the first nation to join the Federation, its nationalist government now sought to extricate itself from the supernation and align with China in defiance of the Federation’s unification of foreign policies. Attempts to formally withdraw from the Federation were rejected and stalled in the Federal Assembly; even though Fusang’s delegation drastically slowed down policy making, it was better than letting it leave and giving China a military foothold in North Eimerica. Fortunately, Fusang seemed completely focused on the war in the Pacific. This bought Unity and the federalists time for their supernation-building plans, as well as focus their military forces on fighting Jerusalem. They could get around to dealing with Fusang once Jerusalem was dealt with.
January 2039 brought with it cold snaps across the New World. In North Eimerica, blizzards raged as far south as Mexico. The Battle of Táyshá City (Nabedaches) ended more due to the weather than to actual fighting, as over 70% of the Crusader occupation force of thirty thousand succumbed to frostbite and hypothermia, while the rest were killed by Eimerican federal forces. Similar setbacks were seen in Tenochtitlan, where 10 thousand Crusaders froze to death in a freak blizzard and the surviving 4 thousand were finished off by the Eimericans, and Tampa, where the Crusaders were forced to retreat to Cuscowilla.
(I really should get around to an Eimerican flag redesign soon.)
The cold weather even reached the Amazon itself, causing widespread deaths of tropical vegetation. A light snow fell on New Berlin, and parts of the Amazon delta even froze over. For the Crusaders, who already had to deal with the heat and humidity of the Amazon, a sudden plunge in temperature was even more unthinkable. The offensive of General Wilhelm Ludendorff stalled near the UPM-Tawantinsuyuan border, and Eimerican tacticians noticed cracks appearing in the enemy lines. On the other hand, federal forces received reinforcements from North Eimerica, both due to the latest recruitment wave and the collapse of many Crusader pockets in the north freeing up troops. Unity sought to capitalize on its advantage. By the end of the month, the Eimericans went on the offensive, not just in the UPM-Tawantinsuyu border region but all along the Neurhomanian border, down to the Silberfluss delta in the south. Still dealing with the unexpected weather, Wilhelm Ludendorff was caught by surprise. Although he managed to push back the initial Eimerican offensive using raw firepower, the Eimericans inflicted heavy casualties on his forces, including the divisions under his personal field command, significantly weakening his force projection.
Next, the Federation moved to safeguard the Caribbean. While Jerusalem’s naval presence had been pushed back to the eastern Caribbean thanks to the Mayan navy, its missiles and fighter jets still rained down destruction on coastal towns in Mexico and the UPM. Most importantly, missiles constantly fell on the Panama Canal, threatening to destroy its intricate canal locks and interrupt the flow of supplies between the western and eastern coasts of North Eimerica. Federal intelligence agencies further suspected that the Holy Marine might try to take the canal for itself as a staging ground for an invasion of the UPM and to deploy its Atlantic fleets into the Pacific Ocean, opening up Tawantinsuyu and western Mexico to attack. In order to avoid this, the ESOA directed Tawantinsuyuan, Mexican, Táysháian, and Mayan fleets to form a blockade east of Mayapan to prevent the Holy Marine from even entering the sea and targeting Panama. Simultaneously, ground forces in the UPM and Tawantinsuyu attacked Crusader positions in a bid to push them back into the northern Tawantinsuyuan corridor if not Kleinvenedig entirely. Both operations were largely a success. The Holy Marine was forced to retreat to the Neurhomanian coast and protect shipping lines to and from Europe, while the Crusaders were prevented from taking the canal by land.
This string of decisive setbacks in the Eimericas outraged the Regency in Berlin. Immediately, the regents began searching for someone to accuse. Several random colonels were arrested and immediately executed for treason. Wilhelm Ludendorff himself escaped suspicion on account of his surname, despite everything happening under his command. With that done, the committee turned to Jerusalem’s response. Due to developments on other fronts around the world, Jerusalem could not afford to send more troops and materiel to the Eimerican fronts. Yet the possibility of a united Eimerican Federation fighting with the full strength of one and a half continents was terrifying. With all that industry, manpower, and motivation, it could easily dispatch an invasion fleet to Europe to launch another Sunset Invasion. The Eimericans had to be culled before they could reach that level of power. To maintain Jerusalem’s hegemony, the Regency authorized the continued use of the special weapons used against Atoc Sopa Atoc’s fleet off the Muscogean peninsula. While most of these special weapons consisted of powerful chemical agents and thermobaric bombs, all paled in comparison to the trump card the committee now played all over the front.
The committee had spent the last several years researching weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons like highly enhanced viruses. Among these was smallpox, refined into a more contagious and lethal variant dubbed “Pesah,” or Passover in reference to the 10 plagues of Egypt—specifically the final plague, the Massacre of the Firstborn. Pesah had barely been tested within Jerusalem’s laboratories, even by its own creators who feared its power. The weapon was initially created as a proof of concept and not intended to be used, but changing circumstances in the Eimericas led to it being hastily rushed into service. Atoc Sopa Atoc’s fleet was the first to be infected with Pesah. Later, long-range bombers dropped Pesah canisters over Markland, Jinshan, Tenochtitlan, and Cusco. The initial Eimerican response was one of confusion. The bombers had gone out of the way to target major Eimerican capitals, sacrificing many of their number just to drop a couple dozen gas canisters that didn’t kill anyone. It did not occur to the federals that Jerusalem would resort to biological weapons until several dozen Marklanders came down with smallpox symptoms. Approximately 60% died within three weeks, and another 25% died by the end of the month.
(I wrote this a while ago, and the scenario has changed a lot since then. Although the description still technically applies, I added far more nuance that it no longer meets my standards. The penalty is also far steeper in-universe than in-game.)
Working with local, provincial, and national authorities, Unity immediately imposed quarantines in Markland and Cusco, but the fighting in Tenochtitlan prevented a quarantine from being enforced there, and Fusang refused to enforce a quarantine in Jinshan. News spread as fast as the virus did. By mid-February, the death toll had passed 200, the number of infected was estimated to be in the thousands, every Eimerican nation reported at least a hundred confirmed cases, and paranoia had gripped the public. Markland and Cusco’s quarantines ended up being useless as infections spread almost unchecked from Jinshan and Tenochtitlan, with a fatality rate of 80%-90%, particularly among those without significant Old World ancestry. Hospitals, already strained by enemy bombardments, population displacements, and war casualties, effectively collapsed from both a wave of confirmed Pesah cases and tens of thousands of panicking Eimericans fearing they had been infected. Ironically, these large panicking crowds only spread Pesah even further. The federal government immediately imposed a national quarantine, ordering all citizens to shelter in place while smallpox vaccines were produced, although many epidemiologists feared conventional smallpox vaccines wouldn’t be much help against the enhanced Pesah variant.
But even this quarantine order wouldn’t be enough to bring the coming epidemic under control. Fusang remained uncooperative, and the virus was allowed to circulate freely within its borders. Believing its citizens of Chinese descent had an innate resistance that native Eimericans didn’t have, the Fusang government was content with letting the virus spread if it could weaken the federal government and its biggest supporters among non-Chinese groups. Even outside Fusang, the quarantine order met with heavy opposition. Anti-federalist factions seized on the edict as an example of federal overreach and a hypocritical betrayal of the values enshrined in the Federal Statute. Nationalists called for their governments to withdraw from the Federation and handle the pandemic as they saw fit, which federalists feared would undermine the response to what was certainly a pan-Eimerican crisis. Some Eimericans even denied the epidemic’s existence altogether, either due to anti-federalist conspiracy theories or insisting biological weapons were beyond even Jerusalem’s standards and technological capabilities. Although the Pan-Eimerican Federal Court upheld the national quarantine order and allowed it to be enforced, the Federation had a long way to go before it would become effective. Unity still had to convince national governments to adhere to the same containment standards. Fusang remained in opposition to all federal efforts. And the general public itself was divided. Meanwhile, millions were about to die.
The Eimerican people were about to face their most dangerous threat. Would they face it as many, or as one?
A Dream of Africa
“We are all Africans here.”
- Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck
As soon as they learned of what was happening in the Eimericas, the peoples of the Old World took action. A couple weeks before the first cases were reported, Persian intelligence developed suspicions Jerusalem was working on biological weapons, and Shahbanu Gunduz had reached out to the Malian government for help developing a vaccine and treatment to Pesah. Mali had long been a hub of medical innovation. The University of Sankore in Timbuktu was a world leader in epidemiology, producing many of the world’s best doctors and medical researchers. Quickly understanding the danger Pesah posed, the Malian government granted Sankore almost unlimited funding and whatever resources the university needed to produce a vaccine as soon as possible. This unprecedented financial grant came at the cost of reduced budgets across the board. The Malian military wasn’t spared. Offensive operations into Westafrika were halted and changed to holding currently controlled territory. Malian militias focused on evacuating civilians from the front lines. Although there were substantial protests from military personnel of all ranks, most understood the importance of Sankore’s research.
The Crusaders, not knowing the finer details of the Malian budget, only saw the Malian military weakening its positions and not advancing further into Westafrika. High Command ordered its West African commanders to press their advantage. Having already pushed into northern Mali, Crusader forces swept aside Malian defenses and firmly occupied Timbuktu on January 16, forcing the government to relocate south to Lagos. Simultaneously, missile strikes and air raids from North Africa targeted both military bases and random towns across Mali, resulting in several hundred casualties. However, the Malian government refused to surrender. In fact, the loss of Timbuktu itself wasn’t that serious of a blow. Much of the city itself had already been destroyed on November 2, and Mali’s decentralized administration allowed the national government to continue functioning normally out of Lagos and provincial capitals. During the evacuation of remaining government agencies from Timbuktu, the military gave high priority to the evacuation of Sankore’s faculty and equipment. In Lagos, the university’s researchers simply continued their research out of a local campus.
Meanwhile, reinforcements came to Mali’s aid from all over Africa. With all three independent African nations under relentless assault from Jerusalem, the time had come for the peoples of Africa to come together just as the Eimericans did. Thousands of Abyssinian and Roman loyalist reinforcements arrived in Lagos before being deployed to the front lines to reinforce the Malian lines. In exchange, Malian volunteers journeyed to East Africa, where they participated in the emerging supernation’s struggle against the Crusader invasions. Ultimately, they contributed to Jerusalem’s defeat at Debre Tabor, Abyssinia, where almost thirty thousand Crusaders were killed as opposed to roughly five thousand Africans. The Regency had thought the Africans were savages who would be easily destroyed. They thought wrong.
The Roman loyalists found a new sense of kinship with their neighbors in Mali and East Africa. Although they had stood against the committee the entire time, for decades they had been dismayed at Berlin’s constant apathy and neglect of Africa in favor of Europe. Yet the Malians, Abyssinians, and East Africans showed nothing but kindness and support in opposition to Jerusalem’s cruelty and barbarism. The loyalists, both native Africans and the descendants of European settlers, found more similarities than differences with their neighbors. They shouldn’t consider themselves Malians, Abyssinians, East Africans, and Romans any longer. They were all Africans.
The emerging pan-African movement took many cues from the Eimerican federal movement. Its leaders believed in self-determination for all Africans; treatment as equals by the rest of the world; and, most importantly and radically, an end to direct and indirect Eurasian rule. Of course, the contributions Eurasian rule had brought to Africa weren’t overlooked. Although the Reich had neglected its African provinces and India had for centuries considered East Africa more of a status symbol than an integral part of the empire, the former at least tried to extend Romanitas to Africa and spent millions of marks on infrastructure, while the latter generously rewarded East Africa for its crucial role in saving the Paramara dynasty during the first two world wars. Still, the downsides were overwhelming. Roman Africa, although considered a part of the imperial homeland and not colonial possessions, consistently had lower standards of living and lagged behind Europe in many socioeconomic metrics. Roman Africans descended from European settlers were treated no differently from native Africans. Indian East Africa had similar issues. It was no wonder, then, that with the descent of the Reich into totalitarian genocidal insanity and the collapse of an internationally relevant India (and then some) that Roman and Indian Africans turned to their fellow Africans instead of to absent or hostile Eurasians.
Although the movement was popular and widespread on paper, on the ground the reality was much different. The sheer size of Africa and the diversity of its peoples led to many differing ideas on pan-Africanism emerging. West Africans generally supported either a Malian decentralization model or a focus on scientific research to make Africa a technological power on par with Eurasia. Those from Loango, which had previously received special treatment from Europe for being the first sub-Saharan polity to join the Reich centuries ago, suggested a federation of nations similar to the Eimerican model, all with equal standing under a single supernational authority. Those from Sudafrika, particularly the European-descended Bauers, called for a Roman-style system retaining some monarchical ties to the Hohenzollerns and Paramaras. East Africans from India’s former colonies were extremely divided in what they wanted, and ideological tensions from the civil war ten years ago flared up again. Abyssinians as a whole were not opposed to the idea of a pan-African supernation, but when it came to the details, a majority of Abyssinians strongly opposed anything they perceived as reducing Abyssinian sovereignty or international influence. It appeared nobody could agree on how Africa could be united.
Despite this, delegates from Mali, Abyssinia, Indian East Africa, Loango, Sudafrika, and the other African Länder refused to give up. They chose to hold a conference in the Sudafrikan city of Georgtown, far from all of the front lines. There, they spent weeks discussing every faction’s proposals. Progress was slow. At first, the delegates discussed things like official languages, economic standards, a combined military, a common currency, continental agencies, and tax rates. Eventually, they reluctantly agreed to use German, spoken by a majority of Africans, for ease of communication between the linguistically diverse factions. The Roman loyalists clashed with the East Africans over their economic standards, as the former preferred standards closer to the old Roman system while the East Africans favored their own supernational standards. Ultimately, the Malians convinced the two to compromise with a supernational model based around Roman-style economics. All factions were united on the need for a common military, though the Malians wanted to focus on local militias while the East Africans wanted an Indian-style standing army. Both sides were somewhat satisfied by a compromise based on the Eimerican troop-sharing system, where Mali, Abyssinia, the East Africans, and the Roman Länder would maintain their existing military forces but contribute a certain percentage to a continental standing army when needed. Most proposals for pan-African agencies fell through, but a few made it to the drawing table, among them an inter-continental court to resolve disputes, an anti-corruption watchdog, and an unnamed bicameral legislative chamber, one allocating delegates proportional to regional populations and the other providing one delegate per country or province, to discuss continental affairs much like the Eimerican Federal Assembly. The Malians, Abyssinians, and Loangans were placated by assurances that their monarchies would be allowed to remain, assuming their publics approved, within what was ostensibly a non-monarchical supernational framework. A common currency became one of the largest points of contention as nobody could agree on a fixed rate of exchange between the major African currencies. Ultimately, the delegates agreed to discuss it later on.
The conference concluded with the unveiling of several proposals for a pan-African flag. The two most popular designs were a green flag with an outline of the African continent, surrounded by stars for each of the countries and Länder in Africa, and a red-yellow-green horizontal tricolor, taken from the colors of the Malian, Abyssinian, East African national, East African supernational, and Roman flags. Although many liked the green continental design, most preferred the tricolor for its simplicity and representation of all of the major factions. The delegates went home without anything legally binding to show for their work, but they had laid the groundwork for future inter-continental cooperation.
The proposed African tricolor. Although it was almost identical to the Abyssinian flag, most delegates looked past that as at least one of red, yellow, and green could be found on every major African national and regional emblem.
One day, they hoped, all of Africa would be free to choose its own destiny.
The Butcher of Livonia vs the Russian Belisarius
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”
- Captain Bauer,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Lev Konstantinov wasn’t that religious. Although he acknowledged the gods of the Slavic peoples were facts of life, he rarely went to temple services, instead preferring to give thanks to the gods in his own home. He saw no reason to change that now. The great temples of Kyiv had been blown to pieces by nuclear fire, along with all of the high patriarchs of the faith, but his own shrine in his tent remained. Every day, he gave a quick prayer to the gods: to Perun for guidance on the battlefield; to Dazhbog and Yarilo to provide plentiful food and supplies for the troops; and to Veles to watch over the souls of the war dead. Unlike many of his soldiers, he didn’t blame the gods for not preventing the war and Russia’s ongoing suffering. Like many devotees of the faith, he believed the gods wanted humanity to find their own way in the world and would only intervene in a crisis if there was no other way out. It was a unique interpretation on the “king in the mountain” myths common to many cultures, where an ancient hero would emerge to save the nation in its darkest time. Most people believed that since none of the heroes had ever emerged at any dark moment in history, the myths weren’t true to begin with. That was an understandable point of view. Konstantinov saw it different. If those heroes had never appeared before, that meant none of those moments were truly the darkest days in any nation’s history, and thus the people could always recover on their own. It was like that with the gods. The fact that the gods had never once intervened in mortal affairs did not mean they didn’t exist. It meant humanity could still fix its own problems without divine assistance. Humanity could still find its own path towards a better future. The existence or nonexistence of gods and heroes wasn’t even relevant, only that humanity still had the potential to change. Konstantinov didn’t need the gods or any legendary heroes to save him and Russia. He could and would do it himself.
The situation in Europe in late January 2039 was dire. For the last three months, Scandinavia’s geography and navy had shielded Livonia from the brunt of Holy Marine attacks. However, Operation Judgment of Lindisfarne and Fylkir Knut’s unexpected unconditional surrender on January 23 opened the floodgates for a full Holy Marine offensive against Livonia. Joining forces with naval forces already in the Baltics, Jerusalem imposed a blockade on Livonia, cutting off all remaining supplies and reinforcements from Scandinavia and jamming communications with the rest of the world. From the west, the Holy Marine bombarded the Livonian coast, and from the east, the Crusaders formed the hammer to the Holy Marine’s anvil. Riga fell by the end of the month. Much of the Land Force was trapped in Riga and was wiped out with the city, allowing von Haynau to push deep into Vilnius once again. Bradziunas was forced to withdraw almost all Land Force units from Estonia and Latvia to reinforce Vilnius until Konstantinov returned.
Russia continued being the worst possible place on the planet for anyone to be, including Crusaders. Famine had reached every corner of the country, including even the cities themselves. Even the occupying Crusaders barely had enough food to sustain themselves. The Russian economy was nonexistent. All government and financial institutions had been destroyed, and Jerusalem did not bother replacing them with anything other than indiscriminate looting and plundering. The effects of the famine were made worse by the harsh winter, and vice versa. Millions had already died from starvation and subzero temperatures in the previous two months, and the death toll would only rise. The famine and winter created a negative feedback loop as food and warm shelter dwindled due to use or destruction by both Jerusalem and nature, forcing the Crusaders to resort to increasingly brutal and desperate measures to get more food and shelter, which caused more destruction which reduced supply even more. Every week, millions of Russians lay on the brink of death. Most died. Those were the lucky ones.
Konstantinov genuinely wanted to turn his troops around and march back to save Russia. He really wanted to do it. But he knew such a move was futile. He did not have the manpower or the firepower to take on the entrenched Crusaders, as malnourished and cold as they were, and the harsh environment would affect his men just as badly. He had no choice but to continue his work in Livonia. Pulling back his troops from Prussia, he rushed back to Vilnius as fast as he could. However, von Haynau had counted on this. In fact, his whole attack on Vilnius was built around that assumption. Despite his reckless use of chemical weapons helping even the playing field, von Haynau did not have the manpower and ammunition to fully take the city. The Land Force in Vilnius had been heavily reinforced by Commonwealth Rifle’s Union and the arrivals from Estonia and Latvia. Chancellor Bradziunas ordered his troops to set up barricades, trenches, and chokepoints around the city. Overlapping machine gun nests and drone patrols covered the entire city, steadily wearing down the Crusader forces. While Land Force units took the brunt of enemy attacks, they drew attention away from the militia, which snuck behind enemy lines and sabotaged supply lines, ammunition stockpiles, and communications equipment. Aware of this, and remembering what happened the last time he was in Vilnius, von Haynau adopted a different strategy, drawing on the tactics of Julius Caesar.
Due to heavy snowstorms in western Lithuania slowing him down, Konstantinov took two weeks to reach Vilnius, arriving in early February. Observing the situation, he noticed the battle lines were roughly the same. The Livonians controlled the neighborhoods north of the Neris River and everything east of the Old Town. Von Haynau had again boxed himself in between the Neris to the north and the Old Town to the east. Konstantinov thus completed the encirclement by attacking from the west and south. However, this was what von Haynau wanted. As soon as Konstantinov’s forces engaged, he revealed his trump card in the form of a second Crusader army which then attacked the Russians from behind. Quickly spreading out to cover any points of escape, von Haynau completed his own encirclement of the Russians, reversing the situation. Vilnius itself was a trap for Konstantinov. Since the Land Force’s defenses were impenetrable now, he had abandoned his plans to take the city. Instead, he played on Konstantinov’s sympathy and compassion to lure him into a trap.
Abandoning his positions in Vilnius, Von Haynau opened with a relentless chemical bombardment, using all of his remaining chemical weapons stockpiles to devastate the Russian Army. Thousands were killed in the opening hour of the attack before Konstantinov’s orders to equip protective gear spread out to the rest of the army. Next, von Haynau launched a conventional artillery bombardment from all directions, forcing Konstantinov to order the army to break formation and spread out. The Russians soon fired back, targeting the Crusaders’ artillery and tanks with their own. This bought time for the Russians to fortify themselves with trenches and improvised bunkers to escape the enemy barrage, just in time for Crusader infantry to rush their lines. For days, the Russians and Crusaders engaged in close quarters combat, with the Crusaders’ numbers and firepower evenly matched by the Russians’ sheer willpower. As the stalemate dragged on and ammunition ran low, the Russians started using bayonets and metal pipes instead of bullets and grenades. After a week, Bradziunas and the Land Force sortied out of Vilnius and attacked von Haynau from the north, forcing the Crusaders to pull back to their original lines. The siege has so far killed or incapacitated roughly 30% of von Haynau’s forces, far more than he had predicted. Konstantinov, though, suffered casualty rates of over 40% and had burned through most of his ammunition. It was a miracle he had lasted as long as he did. Yet another way he was like Wolfgang Ludendorff, he thought. Was the Miracle of Brünn happening again? He knew it wouldn’t if his current situation continued. So as soon as he saw an opening in the enemy lines, he launched an all-out attack to smash through it. Although he broke free of the encirclement, several hundred more men were killed. He ordered his forces to regroup in rural western Lithuania, where they would replenish their supplies and rebuild their strength to take on von Haynau again.
The Second Battle of Vilnius. Although it took place outside of city limits, it still heavily involved troops from Vilnius, and all sides’ objectives involved the city.
This was Konstantinov’s first major defeat. It was one defeat too many for him. His unique situation meant manpower and ammunition was in short supply, so he couldn’t afford to take too many casualties. In a single battle, he lost over thousands of irreplaceable soldiers. On top of that, he now faced an ammunition shortage and could only arm half of the survivors with modern weaponry. This was exactly the situation he wanted to avoid. But it had happened, and it fell to him to recover now. As long as he could still fight, the dream of a free Russia would not die. Many would call it callous and insensitive, as those who had barely survived Vilnius were forced back into the fire just after burying their dead comrades. Konstantinov did not deny these claims. At times, he privately wished he could find a better way. But a general had to lead by example. A general had to make the hard calls to ensure victory. So he rallied his troops and prepared for a counterattack. He expected it would take months before the Russian Army could fight again at full strength, but he would use all of the time he was given. He had been left with no other choice.
As long as his army could live to fight another day, there was still hope for Russia and Livonia.
The Horrors of Taurica
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
- Athanatoi Director Anne Frank
It was public knowledge that Saikhangiin Börte was a practicing Buddhist. Many found it weird, because Buddhism encouraged peace and enlightenment instead of war and the perpetuation of suffering that came with it. Börte found no such contradiction between her job and her beliefs. To her, the real contradiction would be not fighting the war at all. That way, Jerusalem would be allowed to spread its rule to the rest of the world and rule for centuries to come, spreading out the suffering across time and space. On the other hand, waging her war here and now meant the suffering would be compressed into a smaller part of the world and a shorter timeframe, lessening the amount of suffering caused. It was a necessary evil if it meant the future would be better off. In the mornings, she would often be seen meditating in her tent, shouting the Chinese word “Hè” (喝), also known in Japanese as
katsu. The martial shout was supposed to induce the experience of enlightenment in a student and was considered a part of the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of “skill-in-means.” Skill-in-means taught that even an action that seemed to violate Buddhist moral guidelines was permissible, or even preferred, as long as it was done with the aim of ultimately ending suffering and introducing others to Buddhism. Every morning, she shouted “Hè!” to remind herself that her fighting in itself was immoral, but her aim was moral. In a way, this served to ground her and not let her get swept up in the bloodlust of war. The shouts were a reminder of the immorality of war but the morality of using it to end Jerusalem. She did not let herself start fighting for the sake of fighting. That was something she also told to her troops. They were not fighting for its own sake, or for conquest or money. They were fighting to destroy Jerusalem and to stop it from inflicting untold eons of suffering onto all of humanity. That was their goal. As long as they kept that goal, they would not lose their way.
The Yavdians steadily pushed west through frozen Taurica. Jerusalem’s response to the invasion had completely crumbled, although any news was heavily censored. Defenses turned into retreats, and retreats turned into routs, and routs became stalled by unfavorable terrain and malfunctioning machinery that hadn’t been tested for normal winter conditions, let alone an intense nuclear winter. From Luganzig, Börte’s northern flank swept into Donetzig, weathering airstrikes from occupied Russia and further west in Taurica. The center traveled along the Black Sea coast and seized the harbors and manufactories at Marioúpoli, then moved to aid the north’s attack on Sich while it moved on the Isthmus of Perekop, which connected Crimea to the Taurican mainland. The south crossed the Bospor Strait to attack Crimea from the east, so that the center and south would bear down on the Crimean cities of Theodoro and Theodosia. A fourth flank moved south through the Caucasus, intending on opening a new front in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The bulk of Crusader resistance withered and evaporated under Börte’s rapid assault.
(Why was it so annoying to crop out the whitespace around this map?)
It was in the formerly Russian-majority regions of central Taurica that the Yavdians discovered more concrete evidence of Jerusalem’s crimes against humanity. There had been reeducation and labor camps further east in the Mongol regions, but here the camps grew to monstrous sizes and took on deadlier responsibilities. In urban areas, such as around Sich, the camps had been expanded from existing vocational schools, universities, dormitories, and other campuses, swallowing up the surrounding blocks with dedicated facilities and “housing.” In rural areas, camps were built from the ground up specifically for purposes of reeducation and extermination. All camps were guarded by Crusaders and Argus personnel and equipped with barbed wire, electric fences, concrete walls, and state-of-the-art surveillance systems. Designed to keep the inmates inside, these defenses were ironically ill-prepared for an attack from the outside, revealing the horrors within.
The camps contained all manner of people. Russians, Mongols, seniors, children, religious and sexual minorities—anyone Jerusalem considered non- and anti-Christian. Some soldiers found children as young as eight or seniors as old as ninety. Others found prisoners so emaciated their skin barely covered their bones. Those who could and were willing to talk told various horror stories. Brainwashing through forced studying of the Bible and Regent Josiah Burkard’s works. Cult-like lectures where all in attendance were forced to recite the national anthem and pledge their allegiance and faith to the Regency and its permanently empty throne. Forced sterilizations and abortions. Torture by electrocution, waterboarding, searing hot metal, hanging, cutting, suffocation, pulling out fingernails and salting or pouring alcohol on the wounds, being strapped to a chair or put in handcuffs for hours, vivisection and organ removal without anesthetic. Forbidding the use of languages other than German. Being forced to eat and drink foods their religions did not permit. Collective cruel punishments like being forced to eat feces and drink urine. Unhygienic living conditions which led to various diseases, including the bubonic plague, running rampant. Forced unpaid labor to produce various products for export—manufactured goods in Donetzig, Luganzig, and Marioúpoli, agricultural products in Sich, fish in Crimea. Worst of all were the extermination camps, where Jerusalem disposed of all those it did not want. Former Romans, Russian refugees, prisoners of war, civilians captured from Livonia and Scandinavia for “processing,” inmates from other camps…all were sent through facilities specifically geared around genocide on an industrial scale not seen since the Angeloi and Rasas a hundred years earlier. Inspecting the bodies of the guards, many were shocked to see the vast majority of them were teenagers armed with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes, and other melee weapons due to an apparent weapons shortage. Mass graves were scattered within a mile of each camp, each holding at least 100 bodies. There was no definitive death toll because nobody wanted to count all of the bodies. The stench of the dead and rotting persisted even after many weeks and through harsh blizzards, causing hundreds of Yavdians to feel sick and request a psychological evaluation. Dozens committed suicide.
Börte wrote down her feelings on the camps in her personal diary, but she refused to publicly voice them. In public, she steeled herself as best as she could. After all, the khans of old and the Yavdian generals of today led by example. If she expressed revulsion and broke down, it would demoralize the troops. She had to keep fighting no matter what. The dead were dead and had already moved onto their next lives. What was left was only an empty shell. The best way she could deal with them was by taking on Jerusalem, the cause of their suffering in life. There were many more victims of Jerusalem in more camps across Europe. They could still be saved. She knew she had to do whatever it took to liberate those camps, even if it would initially go against her beliefs. No, there was no contradiction. As long as her cause was just, the means were justified, and she would not lose her way. General Saikhangiin Börte would cut a path forward, and she would save Jerusalem’s victims from their suffering, no matter what.
A Deadly Game of Chess
“The Angeloi escalated this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Constantinople, Vienna, Damascus, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
- Arthur "Bomber" Harris, Baron von Godwinson, Roman loyalist Air Officer Commander-in-Chief in World War II
Gunduz was not a good chess player. As children, she and Princess Wilhelmina would rather play various video games, to her brother’s dismay. The oldest variants of chess originated in India and Persia, and Persia claimed many world grandmasters. However, she did know the basics. Chess was about moving and sacrificing pieces to ultimately checkmate the enemy king. It was the same as in war. This war like a game of chess, only the board was the entire world and her armies were the pieces. She needed a strategy that would ensure checkmate for Jerusalem. Samarkand was the first piece in her strategy. Move her troops to lure out the enemy, then destroy them to create an opening. Now it was time to cross the board.
Fighting Jerusalem on its own turf was different from defending Turkestan against it. Gunduz had to adapt to counter her enemy’s firepower and technological advantages. The Livonian and Taurican fronts showed that Jerusalem’s high tech army could be defeated not by out-engineering it but by doing the opposite: using the tactics and equipment of the past. She divided her invasion force into three flanks, which would assault the border at various points from the Caspian coast in the north to Basra in the south. Each army would take no armor or air support with it, instead traveling on foot or horseback for mobility and relative stealth. Armored units and aircraft would follow once a path was secured. First, they would take the cities of Hamadan, Khorramabad, and Kermanshah. Then, reinforcements would help them push deeper into Mesopotamia. The northern flank would link up with Börte’s southern flank and form a united eastern front. The souther front would take Basra and eliminate the military bases there. Finally, all forces would converge on Baghdad. Not only would Baghdad’s liberation secure much of Mesopotamia for Persia, but it would also put pressure on Jerusalem’s core cities in Syria and Anatolia: Damascus, Antioch, the city of Jerusalem, Ancyra, even possibly Constantinople itself. The plan was dubbed Opeartion Huma, after the Persian equivalent of the phoenix, in honor of the late Russian chancellor Olga Kirova.
Gunduz decided it was time to deploy her most important piece: the missing Roman princess Wilhelmina herself. Naturally, she consulted her friend first. Wilhelmina was onboard, feeling the morale boost outweighed the personal risks to her life. Still, there wasn’t much fanfare around her reappearance. Gunduz knew neither of them liked the spotlight that much. The news broke in a quick announcement on evening news, and then they stepped back to let the people figure everything else out themselves. Roman exile communities in Isfahan broke out in celebration, setting off fireworks and proudly waving old Roman flags. Older Persians felt reassured that a granddaughter of Otto the Great, a friend of post-World War II Persia, was still alive. Nationalists and the royal-obsessed couldn’t help but gossip that all Hohenzollern rulers from the twelfth century on had Seljuk blood, so really it was the Seljuks and Persia coming to save the world. They welcomed Wilhelmina as a long-lost family member coming home and a sign that Persia was once again a major power. The dozens of Jerusalem supporters still in Persia seethed that the loyalists’ claim to the imperial throne had strengthened yet again. Remaining Shepherds of the Future cells panicked and improvised assassination plans, but their incompetence and impulsiveness was their undoing, and they were all taken down by Persian intelligence agencies. Upon further investigation of these cells, Wilhelmina found out the Shepherds had been behind the frequent abduction of Persian and exile children to Jerusalem and had almost captured her grandson, Prince Friedrich, on one occasion. But they wouldn’t threaten him again. The only way Jerusalem would get its hands on him or Wilhelmina was by invasion, and Gunduz had already dealt with that.
The nascent restored Roman government in exile welcomed Wilhelmina with open arms. All of its members had secretly known she was alive for weeks before the announcement, but they had not announced it for her safety. Now that they could go public, they formally declared Wilhelmina the true Kaiserin of the Romans, not the Regency’s permanently vacant chair. Wilhelmina’s cabinet was ready to go. For her chancellor, she chose Senator Izinchi Ochimeca. A Caledonian Nahua from Edinburgh, Ochimeca had been the only pre-2030 Diet politician to survive Bloody Tuesday. Her left-wing policies had been marginalized in the old mainstream-dominated Diet, but here she had found a supporter in Wilhelmina, who saw her as the ideal ideological opponent to the far-right Jerusalem. As Vice Chancellor and a second opinion to balance out Ochimeca, Wilhelmina chose the young Julian Anniona. Anniona was the brother of the late Mayor Eva of Bremerhaven, who had led the city’s resistance in the early Jerusalem era and was presumed dead when Bremerhaven was nuked. For her Megas Domestikos, she chose General Gebhard Remmele, who had protected her on the long road from Yavdi and was now her highest ranking military officer. Other exiles would soon join the burgeoning government, picked by Wilhelmina and Ochimeca based on their merits. They could not afford to have corruption and incompetence in their ranks at a time like this.
Wilhelmina’s first task was to help plan Operation Huma. Huma was actually her idea, though most of the work was done by Gunduz due to the Persian government having far more resources on hand. This was supposed to be a multinational operation including both the Artesh and the remnants of the Heer. She knew this was her only chance at retaking the Reich. Everything had to be perfect. Every variable had to be in the right place. Logistics, tactics, technology, everything mattered. The invasion force could not take armor or aircraft with it, so she had Remmele bring mobile artillery and anti-aircraft guns. They would not travel on the main roads, so she brought in cavalry units from across Central Asia. They were going up against Crusaders augmented with cybernetics, so she had Remmele take along experimental technology designed to neutralize them. Finally, Wilhelmina, Gunduz, and Remmele chose their troops for the mission. Jerusalem would defend its homeland with its most elite troops, which meant they needed to bring along professional soldiers, ideally with prior battlefield experience. Volunteers were appreciated, but they lacked experience, and Operation Huma could not primarily rely on them. Remmele expected casualties would be high, and the enemy would resort to all sorts of brutal and psychologically demoralizing tactics. Anyone who did not want to participate in the operation for whatever reason was permitted to request a reassignment to another front. Remmele and the Persian military leadership anticipated up to 40% of soldiers assigned to Operation Huma would request a reassignment, but in the end, only a few dozen out of the entire invasion force, less than 1%, actually filed the papers.
Although every single detail was meticulously planned out, Operation Huma had one strange outlier: Wilhelmina herself. The 56-year-old princess had insisted on accompanying Remmele and the combined army, becoming the first Hohenzollern Kaiser to personally go into battle in centuries (in Otto’s case, the battle had come to him). Normally, everyone would have thrown a fit and demand she stay in Isfahan for her own safety. There had been many tales of national leaders—particularly Scandinavian fylkirs and Persian shahs—who had been killed on the battlefield by stray bullets and caused years of internal strife. But even though she was still concerned for her friend, Gunduz let her join Operation Huma, because she believed Wilhelmina wouldn’t end up like those dead battlefield monarchs. There was something special about Wilhelmina. Ever since Samarkand, rumors had popped up about her strange abilities.
For centuries, magic and psychic abilities had been dismissed as scientifically impossible and a figment of the imagination. Thousands of people had claimed to be or been accused of being witches, psychics, and the like, but none of those claims withstood scientific scrutiny. Wilhelmina, though, wasn’t like any of them, and the scientific method backed her up. It seemed she had awakened to this power during the attack on the Yavdian bunker where she had been presumed dead and used it to escape. Gradually, she made her way south, teaching herself how to use her power to help people along the way before turning up in Isfahan. After convincing Gunduz about what had happened to her, she went to Samarkand and used it to turn the battle in Persia’s favor. The soldiers’ rumors turned out to be true. Her only weapon was her family’s ancestral blade Enonon, forged by Friedrich the Great almost a thousand years ago. On the battlefield, that ancient sword proved more than a match for modern machine guns, tanks, and helicopters. Countless soldiers watched as the glowing blade cut through thick metal armor, deflected bullets, and disabled tanks like stabbing a dragon’s heart. An ethereal energy circled around the princess, which she channeled into energy blasts and telekinesis. The Crusaders folded before her unexpected onslaught, allowing conventional Persian forces to break through. Although none of this information was disseminated through official channels, it spread through word of mouth on account of how sudden, unexpected, and convenient this was. Persia had been barely surviving the war, and now a single woman coming out of nowhere was poised to tip the scales in their favor? Seemed a bit contrived. But like when she announced her survival to the world, she didn’t care. She had no time to dwell on it, and neither did Gunduz. What mattered was Operation Huma.
Operation Huma was a three-pronged assault into Mesopotamia, targeting underdefended locations along the border to break through Crusader lines and close in on important cities before Jerusalem could reach.
Thanks to Wilhelmina’s assistance, Hamadan fell quickly, followed by Khorramabad and Kermanshah, securing a Persian foothold in Mesopotamia for the first time since World War II. Unlike in Taurica, the Crusaders here were elite troops and fought fiercely to keep their cities, inflicting substantial casualties on Operation Huma, but they were eventually driven back by the arrival of Persian armor and air support. In the streets of Mesopotamian cities, Persian tank columns surrounded and overwhelmed malfunctioning and poorly performing Crusader tanks, allowing infantry and cavalry to advance. In the skies over Mesopotamia and Persia, Gunduz’s aces squared off against Jerusalem’s air fleet to protect ground forces and guard Persia’s airspace. Jerusalem’s air squadrons typically consisted of conventional fighter jets aided by combat drones connected to each jet’s computer, with the goal of increasing each pilot’s individual range and firepower. Acknowledging that they would never be able to produce enough drones with as much technological sophistication to match Jerusalem, the Persian air force instead focused on jamming the enemy’s drone network and engaging at greater distances. Taking advantage of almost constantly overcast skies, Persian pilots hid in the gray clouds and ambushed their opponents in hit and run attacks. Still, these tactics were not without risk, as the drones were still particularly effective in finding and shooting down many Persian pilots who weren’t careful enough.
On the ground, the Crusaders, as expected, grew more brutal as the Persians pushed deeper into Jerusalem. State propaganda invoked the legacy of thousands of years of war waged by Athens and Sparta, Alexander the Great, the First and Second Empires, and the old Reich against perfidious Persia, always the constant thorn in western civilization’s side. This was only another idiotic attempt to destroy the glory of Rome, and God willing, Persia would be driven back. Thousands of eager volunteers reinforced the Crusaders’ ranks, and High Command welcomed them and their enthusiasm. However, High Command did not stop to consider the issues Remmele had anticipated. These new recruits were inexperienced, disorganized, undisciplined, and extremely eager to fight. The only thing these brainwashed men—both young and old—had going for them was their pure zealotry. Hastily throwing together in makeshift barracks across Mesopotamia was a recipe for disaster, even before they went into battle. Recruits who were weaker, smaller, or otherwise stood out were viciously brutalized; hundreds were killed in a twisted interpretation of survival of the fittest. When they ran out of targets within the barracks, the men turned their bloodlust on the surrounding communities. Murder, arson, looting, and other violent crimes terrorized dozens of settlements around the barracks. Bysandros Malecares’ propaganda could only go so far to downplay the violence. He demanded that High Command deploy the recruits as soon as possible. The generals obliged, out of a mix of Malecares’ pestering, fear of committee retaliation, genuine pressure from the Persians, and just plain indifference to the well-being of the recruits.
In truth, High Command did not care for the recruits at all. The generals saw no reason to spend money and time training and organizing the zealous mobs when they could just throw them into the meat grinder as cannon fodder. They would conduct suicide missions and human wave assaults, while professional Crusaders and Argus would handle the real battles. Given little more than a gun, a single magazine of ammunition, and an assurance that God would bless the faithful with complete invincibility, they were unceremoniously thrown into the meat grinder and left to their own devices. Owing to their zeal and fanaticism, the volunteers were devastatingly effective. They fearlessly rushed the Persian lines while screaming Bible verses and committee slogans at the top of their lungs before setting upon their enemies in ferocious close quarters combat, letting loose their pent up frustrations and state-encouraged hatred on their unfortunate victims. Remmele’s forces suffered heavy casualties. Operation Huma, which until then was advancing at roughly 10 miles west a day, ground to a halt while Remmele struggled to adapt. Ironically, where he had hoped to dumb down his strategy to below what Jerusalem had anticipated, Jerusalem was now doing the same to him.
General Remmele pulled back several armor divisions and air squadrons from offensive operations, slowing down his timetable so that he could turn their firepower against the mobs. What ensued was a massacre by any definition. Hundreds of Crusader volunteers blindly rushed Persian tank columns at the same time without any organization, common sense, or their own personal safety. Running out in the open straight towards their enemies, they made easy targets. Only a handful of volunteers reached the tanks and tried to pry open their hatches to attack their crews, but all failed due to lack of strength or expertise and were summarily picked off. Those were the lucky ones. Most volunteers never made it within a mile of the tanks as Persian aircraft obliterated them with their bombs and machine guns. The grisly sight of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies lying across the arid plains of eastern Mesopotamia evoked memories of Mexico in 1991 and 2003 for older exiles, including Remmele, who had overseen the occupation and reconstruction of Mexico after 2003. Although the enemy combatants were armed and hostile, the perception of these skirmishes implied another thing: that the Artesh deliberately targeted innocent and defenseless Jerusalemites and slaughtered them with overwhelming firepower. Malecares seized on this narrative, declaring the Persians truly were barbarians seeking to finish Xerxes and Alp Arslan’s barbarian conquests of western civilization. Han Xianyu also used this narrative for his own purposes to demonize the so-called leader of the free world and defender of meritocracy as just as bad as Jerusalem, again positioning himself as the one true liberator of humanity from the barbarism of Christianity and the western world. Even within Schengen/UN-aligned countries, these narratives found many supporters, chiefly among anti-war activists, opposition parties, and opportunists. Protests broke out in Isfahan demanding Remmele be charged with war crimes and brought before the International Criminal Court. Some even called for Wilhelmina and Gunduz’s abdications. A handful went as far as to call for a negotiated peace with Jerusalem, ostensibly in the interest of saving lives and preventing more war crimes from being committed on both sides.
These calls only intensified as Jerusalem started running out of cannon fodder. To nobody’s surprise, throwing thousands of untrained men at the enemy in human wave tactics resulted in massive casualties. All volunteer units suffered fatality rates of at least 95%, and the remaining 5% were either captured or otherwise unable to continue fighting. Although there was no shortage of Jerusalemite volunteers eager to give their lives for the glory of God, the rate at which volunteers came in was far lower than that at which they were being killed. There weren’t enough of them to make up for the casualties sustained so far. As a result, High Command drew on another source of easy cannon fodder: Jerusalem’s concentration camps. Prisoners of war, political dissidents, captured refugees, criminals (including many citizens of Jerusalem unfortunate enough to have angered the regime in any way), non-citizens, and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities were all hastily conscripted, put in Crusader uniforms, given empty or fake guns, and shipped off to the front. Still expecting the same zealous volunteers as before, Remmele ordered his aircraft and tanks to drive back the new offensive. Whereas the volunteers at least had extreme zeal and a desire to fight the enemy, these new conscripts only marched on pain of being remotely blown up by explosives surgically implanted in their bodies and sewn into their uniforms. Without knowing any of this, the Persians attacked and slaughtered the conscripts. Fatality rates reached 99%, and the remaining 1% had their explosives detonated to prevent defection or warning the enemy. It took until inspecting the bodies for Remmele and Persia to realize they were shooting at Scandinavians, Livonians, Russians, Mongols, children, the elderly, and civilians. While the Artesh troops processed this revelation, the bombs of the 99% detonated. Hundreds of Artesh personnel—scouts, medics, biohazard teams, engineers, coroners, and religious chaplains—were killed. Hundreds more were traumatized and would seek out therapists in the coming weeks. The cruelty of such a strategy was almost incomprehensible to many Persians. It was already terrifying enough that there were many Jerusalemites who were so brainwashed they would proudly throw themselves in front of Persian tanks for almost no reason. Then Jerusalem replaced them with victims of the committee’s rule. These victims were next implanted with bombs to either kill them if they resisted or to kill more Persians if they inspected the bodies, in violation of international laws of war. Finally, Malecares and Han used doctored footage to claim Persia was executing civilians and doing all of the above, “proving” Persia was the true evil empire.
Remmele realized there was no easy way out. No matter what he did, Jerusalem would continue spinnning it against Persia. He had no choice but to continue. If he slowed down or stopped to reconsider his tactics, he would risk losing all of the gains he had made so far. He had gone into this operation knowing Jerusalem would do anything to destroy him. Now he had proof of that. He couldn’t let it get to his head. What he had to do was steel himself and push on. He ordered his troops to continue their advance. If they spotted any enemy formations that appeared disorganized, they were to target and destroy them to the last man. They were to take no prisoners. They could not negotiate or wait to determine what they were. These formations were dangerous threats to be eliminated. If just one volunteer or conscript unit made it behind their lines, they could flank and encircle them, allowing professional troops to finish them off. All enemy combatants were to be destroyed. He expected his order to meet significant pushback from both his officers and his rank-and-file soldiers. However, less than 5% of all military personnel assigned to Operation Huma voiced concerns or objected in any way. Despite this solidarity, many Artesh soldiers would still hesitate when actually fighting Crusaders, fearing they would kill prisoners or children. High Command ruthlessly exploited this hesitation and fielded more prisoners and children. Persian casualties skyrocketed.
In addition to these tactics, High Command went full scorched earth. Crusaders laid down land mines, improvised explosive devices, and booby traps everywhere they could, on roads, in homes, on vehicles and random items, and even in their own dead and wounded. Fields were burned and salted. Sewage and chemical weapons were dumped into the Tigris and Euphrates to make them impossible to cross. Oil fields in Persia’s direct path were burned to both cover the area in thick noxious smoke and to deny the oil to the enemy, worsening the already bad effects of nuclear winter in the area. Retreating Crusaders destroyed any usable infrastructure and mined the rest. This would deprive Persia of anything that could aid it, and High Command hoped to ultimately stall and starve the attack through attrition, then encircle it with a sortie from Basra.
Gunduz had expected Jerusalem to resort to such tactics. She and Wilhelmina had planned accordingly. The latter was flown back to Isfahan for her own safety, while Remmele continued his advance as he had planned. At home, Gunduz consolidated her other fronts. Her task was made significantly easier due to having obtained Jerusalem’s encryption codes from Ryukyu, which had seized them from the captured
Miracle of Galilee during the Battle of Sumatra. Now she could monitor Jerusalem’s troop movements and communications. Although she could not exploit this too much to avoid High Command catching on, she could at least make Remmele’s job a little easier by letting him know if he was fighting conscripts, volunteers, or Crusaders. While she could have easily encircled the Crusaders attacking Chinese-controlled Bishkek and targeted all of their weak points to minimize casualties, she instead opted for deploying her troops in such a way that the Chinese would be manipulated into inadvertently attacking those weak points, then hitting the Chinese from behind to retake the city. Next, she convinced Kabul and Samarkand to mobilize the rest of their reserves and solidify their gains so that more Persian troops were freed up for Mesopotamia.
Although she appreciated how Gunduz looked out for her, Wilhelmina desperately wanted to go back to the front, believing it was her duty to help take back the Reich and free the Romans under Jerusalem’s rule. Gunduz cautioned her against it, reminding her of what the Crusaders had done so far and what Remmele had been forced to go through. It would only escalate in the coming weeks. News from India would only confirm her worries. Yet Wilhelmina remained adamant. She was done running from Jerusalem. It was time for her to stand and fight alongside her people. It was time for her to come home. After all, she was Kaiserin of the Romans, and she had a duty to look after her people. Gunduz was unable to dissuade her and gave in. She began drawing up plans to let Wilhelmina return to the front, although she reserved the right to pull her out if she needed to.
The pieces had moved into their proper places on the world’s chessboard. Gunduz had made hard and risky calls in Central Asia to ensure victory in Mesopotamia. Whereas Jerusalem sacrificed Crusaders left and right with little thought put into why, Gunduz planned all of her moves carefully, only sacrificing her pieces if she needed to. Now, with everything placed where she wanted, she made her move against the enemy’s king. In a game of chess, this would be called the endgame. And in the real war, Gunduz believed it was time for the endgame to begin.
For someone who hadn’t played much chess, she was surprisingly good at it.
The Bloodstained Ganges
“Execute Plan Sodom and Gomorrah.”
- The five words that ended India
Casualty rates were highest on the Indian front. For three months, the remains of the Indian Army struggled to retake Delhi and other occupied cities from the invading and occupying Crusaders. In the aftermath of the government’s collapse and Delhi being cut off from the rest of the country, the generals and brothers Ranjit and Banda Ahluwalia rallied their troops and repeatedly launched attacks on Delhi. However, despite having the advantage in numbers, home terrain, and morale, the Crusaders always drove them back with raw firepower and brutality. Delhi became a trap for any Indian offensive, drawing troops away from other front lines across India. Crusader reinforcements airlifted in from Arabia established footholds in Karachi, Surat, and Goa and from there pushed inland. Local resistance was fierce. Aware of the fates of Scandinavia, Russia, and Yavdi, Indians armed themselves to the teeth and formed militias to fight back, not wanting the same thing to happen to them. In just three months, India’s culture of pacifism and opposition to violence, developed in the aftermath of the Rasas’ crimes, completely vanished. Now there was a real enemy seeking to destroy Indian civilization. The Hindutvas would have capitalized on this change in sentiment had they not been completely wiped out by both Crusaders and the vengeful public, which viewed them as puppets and collaborators.
For three months, the Ahluwalias hit Crusader divisions which strayed too far into Indian-controlled territory, while gradually building up strength for new attempts to retake Delhi and free the imprisoned Samrat Chakravartin, Jayasimha. Working together with civilian militias, they managed to inflict severe casualties on the enemy. Civilians gathered information on and sabotaged enemy supply hubs and machinery, then let the Ahluwalias take them out. Indian naval ships attempted to break the enemy’s blockade and intercept transports and supply ships heading for India from Arabia, Aegyptus, and Mesopotamia. In the skies, what remained of the air force struggled to protect India’s airspace from Jerusalem’s incursions. It was a losing battle. India no longer had the manpower or the equipment to hold the line. The Ahluwalias’ troops slowly ran out of fuel and ammunition, forcing the brothers to significantly scale back their operations. This resulted in Indian divisions at least three times larger than their Crusader counterparts still being routed and shattered, their remaining equipment captured to fuel Jerusalem’s war effort. All the Ahluwalias could do was delay the inevitable, hopefully long enough that Jerusalem got tired and left. That was unlikely, though. The committee had spent too much money and time to simply give up on conquering India. If anything, all that investment made them commit even further to the front.
In Berlin, High Command deliberated on a new strategy that would bring victory much faster. Although Jerusalem had enough resources to outlast the Indian military remnants in a war of attrition, the committee had grown tired and wanted to move the Crusaders in India to the Persian and Central Asian front, if not open up a new front against China and Srivijaya in the Himalayas and western Burma. A troop surge was out of the question, as surges were required in Taurica, Mesopotamia, Livonia, Scandinavia, Russia, and Yavdi. Volunteers and conscripts would have helped in India, had the short-sighted committee not had High Command deploy them all in Mesopotamia. Left with no other choice, regents Elias Anhorn, Philemon Moria, and Josiah Burkard decided the best way to minimize Crusader casualties while maximizing enemy annihilation was to deploy special weapons, as had been done in Scandinavia and North Eimerica. However, due to the sheer size of India’s land and population, High Command scaled up the plans accordingly.
February 5, 2039 started like any other day: overcast and chilly. That morning, the Crusaders had strangely paused all offensive operations and withdrawn to their controlled territory. Based in Agra, Banda called for pressing the advantage and hitting the enemy now, but Ranjit suspected a trap and convinced his brother to instead use the lull to shore up defenses and reposition troops to prepare for another attack on Delhi. Ranjit’s suspicions were only increased when radar stations in Agra picked up unusual air traffic coming from the southwest. Fighter jets sent to investigate the unknown aircraft reported their communications were being jammed shortly before being destroyed, leaving the strange signals unknown. Banda speculated that the aircraft could be Persian reinforcements. However, Ranjit realized that if they were really Persian aircraft, they would have approached from the northwest instead. He barely had time to suggest another theory before the first thermobaric missiles hit Agra.
Jerusalem’s Plan Sodom and Gomorrah marked over a thousand targets—ranging from civilian settlements to agricultural regions and rivers to military bases to government facilities—for complete and utter annihilation. It was a combined operation by the army, navy, and air force from both within India and outside of it. Missiles launched from Arabia and submarines off the coast relentlessly rained down on military installations as far east as Dhaka, their sheer number overwhelming radar systems and smashing Indian defenses to pieces. While the dazed survivors dug themselves out of the wreckage, the air force struck. Jerusalem’s aircraft rained down napalm, Neuspartikoi-A and -B, LSDM, nerve gas, Pesah, and conventional bombs and missiles. The enemy barrage was unrelenting. So many thermobaric bombs fell on Indore that for hours the entire city was continuously engulfed in a single gigantic fireball. Jaipur was blanketed in thick clouds of nerve gas and Pesah. Mumbai became a raging napalm inferno which spread despite everybody’s efforts to douse the flames. Melted flesh and blood littered the streets of Kolkata. The ruins and Holocaust memorials of Vijayanagara were reduced to useless ash, no longer able to caution future generations about the mistakes of the past. In eastern India, which was further from the Crusader front lines and on the edge of missile ranges, Pesah warheads were preferred to conventional, thermobaric, or chemical ones. Landmarks of historical and religous significance were particularly targeted. Bihar’s Nalanda University, a 5th century Buddhist monastery and one of the world’s oldest centers of higher education, had its entire library thrown out onto the streets and burned in large bonfires before the university itself was razed from the air by hundreds of repeated airstrikes. Although immediate casualties were relatively lighter in the east, over the next several weeks Pesah infections would skyrocket and spread throughout much of South Asia. Very few of Jerusalem’s aircraft were destroyed during this stage of the operation, and those that did go down were the result of pilots underestimating the size of thermobaric explosions or accidentally being exposed to their own chemicals.
Once Jerusalem achieved total air superiority, the Crusaders resumed their offensive. Delhi’s occupation force sortied out and descended upon Agra, easily annihilating its weakened garrison and forcing the Ahluwalias to flee. Scattered Indian divisions across India came under attack, and with the chain of command and supply lines decimated, they succumbed within hours. By the end of the day, the Indian Army’s presence in southern and western India had been completely eradicated. With no military targets left, the Crusaders turned to civilian ones. The committee had decided it was too much work to implement the Herem Doctrine as had been done in Scandinavia, so High Command issued orders to take no prisoners and shoot every Indian on sight. Millions of refugees fleeing the burning cities became target practice. State-of-the-art aerial and ground drones capable of infrared and night vision easily located remote villages and other hiding spots, allowing either Crusaders to march in and put everything to the torch or call air support to incinerate them from above. When the sun rose on February 6, the Ganges River literally ran neon red with blood and chemical runoff.
Delhi suffered the worst of all of India’s cities. Once Agra fell and was put to the torch, the Crusader garrison returned to Delhi and proceeded to indiscriminately loot and pillage the ancient capital. Delhi’s population attempted to flee, but the Crusaders had surrounded the city and locked down every entrance and exit. With their superiors’ encouragement, the Crusaders organized competitions to see who could kill the most Indians, the most in a certain timeframe, the most with one weapon or attack, the most with a bayonet, the most with their bare hands, the youngest, the oldest, and so on. Many of these killing games were streamed online in Jerusalem, where they were watched by millions of eager citizens who placed bets on their favorite Crusaders. The rewards ranged from cash to women to houses. Once a neighborhood had been completely cleared of life, it was razed with napalm or nerve gas so thoroughly that they would remain uninhabitable for decades. Museums, temples, and palaces were destroyed with remotely detonated thermobaric wareheads in grand spectacles filmed and aired by Malecares’ propaganda. Crusaders posed for selfies in the halls of the Sansad Bhawan before blowing it up and then spraying nerve gas over the rubble.
The imperial palace itself was temporarily spared the devastation being inflicted on the rest of the city, if only for Crusaders to glamorously storm its gates and raise the Jerusalem cross standard over its roof. High Command then turned to the bunker underneath the palace. Here, the Neta Gandhi and his few remaining supporters had taken refuge as Rasa India fell to the combined forces of the Reich and China during World War II. Today, the Samrat Chakravartin Jayasimha, his gender abomination of an heir, and the remains of his civilian government hid here, or rather they had been trapped there since the beginning of the war. High Command decided it was time to put an end to their misery. The Crusaders deployed chlorine triflouride, a powerful chemical agent that was extremely reactive, corrosive, and combustive, to literally melt a hole through the palace’s foundations and several feet of reinforced bunker concrete and steel. This caused entire wings of the palace to collapse first into giant sinkholes and then into the bunker below. But the Crusaders didn’t care. They descended down the newly created holes and stormed the bunker, easily wiping out its demoralized and weakened security forces and then turning their guns on the civilians. It took one hour to slaughter what was left of the Indian government. Remaining bureaucrats and political figures unfortunate to have found themselves outside the bunker at the time were brutally hunted down and murdered by Crusader drones.
Jerusalem trumpeted news of its victory in Delhi far and wide, making sure everyone knew of what happened at the giant crater that was once the imperial palace. At the center of their propaganda and victory declarations was one core theme: that the horrors and brutalities of the Rasa regime had finally been repaid with interest, and India had finally been punished for its past crimes after decades of being excused by the partel cartel. This twisted declaration of justice, juxtaposed with images and video of Jerusalem’s own horrors and brutalities being inflicted on hundreds of millions of people who had little to do with a war from almost a century ago, caused something to snap in the collective psyche of the Indian people. To say that Indian civilization as a whole gave in to despair would massively understate the pure chaos that engulfed the subcontinent in the following months. By February 7, India effectively ceased to exist as a political entity. Yet Plan Sodom and Gomorrah continued without remorse. To the rest of the world, Plan Sodom and Gomorrah would be officially remembered as the Indian Genocide, but most would poetically call it the Scouring of India, to represent the brutal murder of not only the Indian nation but also the very soul of its civilization.
Refugees lucky enough to reach the borders fled in all directions. Those in eastern India went to Burma, but Burma was little better off. Neo-equalist insurgents had seized many major Burmese cities and massacred the refugees, considering them the vanguard for an imperialist invasion. Those in western India crossed into Persia and Afghanistan. In the former, Gunduz tried her best to process the arrivals, but her attempts to screen them all for smallpox resulted in gridlock, frustration, and finally rioting and stampedes which killed several thousand and led to the spread of Pesah throughout Afghanistan. Crusader drones which had pursued the refugees to the border killed thousands more before being driven back by the Artesh. The refugees weren’t much safer in Persia, because High Command simply expanded the targets of Plan Sodom and Gomorrah to include cities in Persia, Turkestan, Afghanistan, and even parts of Yavdi. While Persia easily shot down all of the missiles and aircraft attempting to breach its airspace, the other three could not. There was some solace in the fact that High Command focused on conventional attacks in those three nations, having deployed most of its drones and weapons of mass destruction in India. Still, several Pesah and nerve gas warheads fell on Kabul, Ghazna, Herat, Bishkek, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, killing not only native Afghans and Turks but also invading Chinese and even Crusaders who weren’t told of the change in plans. Hundreds of thousands died, and many more would die over the next few months as Pesah’s spread intensified.
To those who couldn’t reach the western or eastern borders, there was only one direction to go: north. Nobody knew how the whole thing began. Perhaps it was a rumor that radiation and the chemicals would stick to lowlands and not reach higher elevations. Or another rumor that Indian troops had established safe havens in the Himalayas, based around old Cold War-era nuclear bunkers. As February unfolded, thousands of Indians surged north, desperate to escape the drones, missiles, and gas. Among them were the Ahluwalia brothers, having rallied their remaining troops to cover the civilians’ escape. Their biggest concern was finding a place for the civilians to hide. The western Himalayas was a death trap, as the Crusaders had razed the cities of Dehradun and Srinagar and had one of their major military hubs in Simla. However, Nepal completely controlled the eastern Himalayas. Bhutan had crumbled in late January. As Nepalese troops marched through Thimphu, Kathmandu declared the rebellious Bhutanese regions returned to tne Nepalese fold.
The Indians were confronted with a choice between the scoured west and the Nepalese east. Banda wanted to take his chances in the west, perhaps take back Simla from the Crusaders. Then they would march on Delhi and free the devastated capital. He dubbed it Operation Ramayana, after the Hindu epic in which the hero Rama rescued his wife Sita from the demon Ravana. Ranjit, though, considered something crazier: invading and taking over Nepal so it could become a safe haven for the refugees. In his view, the conquest and occupation of Nepal was the lesser of two evils, and the overthrow of the Paulluist regime would be a net positive anyways. He called his plan Operation Shambhala, referencing the legendary Himalayan kingdom in Buddhist tradition. The two brothers argued for days on end about their options, each considering the other’s a suicide pact for themselves and the refugees. Ultimately, they agreed to split their forces and carry on individually. The two armies split up and marched west and east, respectively, with the refugees following behind Ranjit’s army. Only time would tell if the brothers would succeed.
The world predictably reacted to the Scouring of India with outrage, but the news had been so inundated with reports of war crimes and atrocities from every single nation—especially Scandinavia—that an increasing number of people had become completely numb and normalized to everything. It seemed like every single atrocity had its spotlight for 24 hours before another took its place. National governments put out their standard denunciations. Han Xianyu again reveled in Jerusalem making his own propaganda for him and delighted in the annihilation of one major geopolitical rival. At least twenty different political organizations subscribing to various ideologies arrived in Isfahan claiming they were the legitimate Indian government in exile, not unlike the situation with the Roman government in exile before Wilhelmina. Gunduz was unable to determine which organizations had ties to the old regime and which ones were simply opportunists. For his part, Han simply picked the smallest and most radical faction to legitimize so it would split the resistance movement even more, just as he had done with the Roman government in exile.
Not wanting Han to take the lead as he had done after Scandinavia, it fell to Gunduz to set the narrative and give a response for the free world. No amount of talking would change anything at this point, so she turned to the Artesh. Having already breached into Mesopotamia, she ordered a massive troop surge and called on Afghanistan and Turkestan to send as many divisions as they could to reinforce the front lines. While the initial spearhead required professional troops and combat veterans to break through the enemy’s border defenses, she believed she could start reinforcing with new recruits now that she had established a foothold. Recruitment offices were again overwhelmed by thousands of enraged Persians, Afghans, Turks, and Indians eager for vengeance. Upon being processed into training camps, they were given the same talk Gebhard Remmele gave to his original troops, that the next phase of Operation Huma would be incredibly dangerous and the enemy would resort to all sorts of brutal tactics to fight back. Any soldier who believed their moral or religious codes would be violated through participation in Operation Huma was allowed to request reassignment out of the operation without impacting their record. As with the original troops, fewer than 1% of the newcomers filed such requests.
Not a month later, a not insignificant number of the other 99% would regret their decision. The others, though, remained eager to repay what Jerusalem did to their friends and family, with interest.
Securing the Western Pacific
“Without a doubt, this has been the weirdest battle we’ve fought so far.”
- Admiral Higa Ryunosuke of Ryukyu
The Pacific theater was far removed from the fierce fighting raging across mainland Eurasia, but the vast ocean and scattered islands would play host to many crucial battles that would still shape the direction of the war. Buoyed by news of Princess Wilhelmina’s survival, the Roman loyalists of Hawaii pulled themselves back from the brink of self-destruction, but now they had to contend with the forces of the entire Sinosphere bearing down on them.
From the east, Fusang fielded one aircraft carrier, the
Yingzhou, backed up by its carrier group. Their progress towards Hawaii had been repeatedly delayed by hit-and-run attacks from federal fleets commanded by Mitteleimerica, Mexico, and Tawantinsuyu and ground-based aircraft. This forced the fleet to either retreat to the safety of the Fusang coast and its patrol boats and aircraft or divert north out of the federals’ range, though this would also put it out of range of land-based or coastal defenses and require more fuel to get back on track to Hawaii. The admiral in charge was an older veteran named Zhang Jianzhou. He had first been commissioned as an officer in the 1980s during the equalist insurgency, Roman intervention and occupation of Jinshan, and the restructuring of the recently independent nation as a hybrid meritocratic-democratic state. The country he served today was not the same one he swore an oath to defend 50 years ago. Privately, he was disappointed in the direction the nationalists had taken Fusang. He feared for his family in Yanjia and equally worried about both the radical separatists and government crackdowns feeding off each other’s chaos. However, he had still sworn his oath as an admiral of Fusang, and he would faithfully serve to the best of his ability. If only there was another way.
From the west, the Imperial Chinese Navy had made quite a big deal about the size and strength of its Central Fleet, which was the largest armada assembled by any single nation since World War II. The Central Fleet was really two Imperial Chinese Navy battle fleets folded into the same chain of command—the original Central Fleet and the East Fleet. Together, they comprised of eight carrier battle groups. Each of these groups boasted the most advanced naval technology China had. The flagship carrier
Xi Wangmu—sister ship of Ryukyu’s
Ōryu, formerly
Yinglong—was the pride of the nation, intended to be China’s answer to the military and cultural power projection of the Reich’s
Helmut Kohl-class carriers. Unlike
Yinglong,
Xi Wangmu was equipped with better systems and hardware designed to stand against the
Helmut Kohl-class’ Aegis computer network and air wing. It and its fellow carriers were backed up by dozens of cruisers, destroyers, and tankers. To counter the Reich’s overwhelming firepower doctrine, each of these support ships was designed to be agile and defensive, using laser-guided gun turrets to intercept incoming missiles while cyberwarfare teams jammed the enemy’s targeting systems and radar to provide an opening for Chinese air wings.
The Chinese commander, Admiral Liu Shaokang, was a younger officer who had spent a year studying at the naval academy in Ryukyu. Liu had studied many of the same tactics Higa did and was not as beholden to the ideological dogma embraced by older Chinese admirals. First tasked with pushing the fleets of the Japanese National Republic out of the East China Sea, he had earned a reputation for cleverly dispatching his foes, no matter how disadvantaged he was, with minimal losses on his side. Off the coast of Jeju Island, he had dealt a devastating blow to the Japanese National Liberation Navy through clever use of electronic countermeasures, radar jamming and spoofing, decoy ships, and then overwhelming airpower and missile strikes which wiped out the enemy fleet. As a result, Sakamoto pulled back his ships to focus on shelling the coasts of the crumbling Republic of Japan and Ainu Mosir, while Liu was hailed as a hero by Chinese state media. Impressed by his success in the East China Sea, Han placed him in charge of the Pacific campaign, expecting him to repeat the same thing with Hawaii.
Liu, however, quickly spotted two glaring weaknesses in the armada he had been given. First, the forty submarines assigned to the Central Fleet were all Han Xianyu could spare. The rest of China’s submarine fleet had been wiped out on November 2 when they attempted to fire off their second strike against Jerusalem, only for SVI to shoot down their nukes, trace them back to the subs, and then decimate the fleet from orbit. The only survivors were those that weren’t armed with nukes. These submarines were kept close to the Central Fleet and assigned to defensive operations, as even the loss of one submarine would be devastating. As a result, he could not use his submarines to scout out as far as he would have wanted or supplement his surface fleet in normal operations. He was forced to adapt his doctrine to prioritize submarines instead of carriers. The other weakness was that despite the Central and East fleets being consolidated together, Han had kept the East Fleet back in the western Pacific while the Central Fleet pushed east. He believed the Central Fleet’s success would only be assured if the East Fleet was there to protect its supply lines from China. These supply lines would run through various Pacific islands seized from Vietnam, Nusantara, the Reich, and Penglai. One such island was Guam, a loyalist-aligned Roman overseas territory which had fallen to China in the early weeks of the war. The Imperial Chinese Navy used Guam’s airports to fly in supplies and equipment for the Central Fleet, while the East Fleet provided protection. Of course, this made Guam a major target. Liu expected Higa to hit Guam next.
He was right. Guam was next on Higa’s checklist. It was on the way from Sumatra to Hawaii, and taking back the island would both strengthen the loyalists and substantially cripple China’s naval presence. Furthermore, if he could inflict enough damage on the East Fleet, he could prevent its ships from reinforcing the Central Fleet and make things easier in Hawaii. But he was aware of Liu Shaokang’s presence. The East Fleet’s maneuvers around Guam used patterns characteristic of Liu. Although this would have appeared an advantage, Higa knew that if he knew what tactics Liu would use, Liu would know the same of Higa. After all, they had studied together for several months. Unlike Higa’s previous opponents, Liu knew just what Higa was capable of and was capable of turning the tables with unorthodox strategies of his own. Yet Higa had no choice but to commit to taking Guam. The East Fleet had to be weakened and the supply lines had to be cut if Hawaii and the grand Pacific coalition were to prevail against the Tianxia.
Unlike many of the Chinese admiralty, Liu had taken the time to review footage and reports from Hoang Sa so he could study Higa’s fleet and tactics. He was aware of the five battleships at the heart of the Ryukyuan fleet and the almost spiritual significance they held. In addition, they were 90 years out of date. There was a reason battleships had become obsolete during World War II: they were too slow, and their range paled in comparison to that of a carrier’s air wing. He requested permission from the admiralty to send his submarines to sink the battleships and deal a massive blow to Ryukyuan morale. However, he was denied. The submarines were not to be deployed in risky operations, especially not to sink five ancient tin buckets. Improvising, Liu instead turned to his air wings stationed on both Guam and his three carriers—
Tianhou,
Mazu, and
Xi Wangmu’s sister ship
Dong Wanggong. He had 170 aircraft in total, ranging from fighter jets to ground-based bombers. The East Fleet included ten transport ships carrying 4000 Chinese marines. These transports were escorted by two cruisers and eight destroyers. Liu planned to lure out the battleships using the transports and their escorts, then wipe them out with overwhelming airpower from a carrier group waiting over the horizon. Aware of the outcome of Hoang Sa, he also understood the need to keep his ships as far away from the enemy as possible.
Unbeknownst to him, Higa had a slight advantage. Having broke the encryption codes and seized the communications hardware of the formerly Chinese
Ōryu, the Ryukyuans had managed to partially decrypt Chinese communications. Full encryption was not possible as
Ōryu’s capture by the Ryukyuans had led the Imperial Chinese Navy to change its encryption protocols and other electronic security measures. However, some Chinese commanders had not yet switched over to the revised protocols yet, and their communications could at least be partially decrypted and read by the Ryukyuans. Although specific details remained out of reach, Higa was aware Liu intended to hold his submarines back, rely on overwhelming airpower, target the battleships, and keep his distance from the Ryukyuans. Hong suggested the Ryukyuans hold back the battleships and attack Guam without them, but Higa refused, predicting Liu would predict that and send a fleet to destroy them, then flank the Ryukyuans from behind. He suggested another plan: if Liu wanted to keep his distance, then Higa would get in close. This meant they had to use their electronics countermeasures (ECM) and the local weather to disguise their movements. Fortunately, the Srivijayan and Japanese reinforcements brought many electronic warfare platforms with them.
Early on February 1, Liu’s long range radar picked up the signatures Ryukyuan fleet approaching Guam. An hour later, the signatures disappeared as Higa activated his ECM. In response, Liu sent out reconnaissance drones. However, cloudy skies and light rainfall reduced visibility and functionality, and they returned empty-handed. Meanwhile, the Ryukyuans drew closer, and Higa began deploying his ships into offensive formations. The next day, as the weather improved and the sky partially cleared up, Liu sent out his drones again. This time, one Chinese drone encountered a Ryukyuan combat air patrol (CAP), which shot it down immediately. Knowing Liu would instantly deduce the general area the SZI was hiding in once that drone failed to return, Higa ordered full steam towards Guam. Liu ordered land defenses on Guam to be reinforced. Anti-aircraft guns and missile batteries were set up next to bunkers and communications arrays. Liu signaled the mainland, informing the admiralty that he was about to engage the Ryukyuan fleet. The marines were sent to reinforce the island’s defenders, but recurring sabotage and guerrilla attacks from Roman loyalist soldiers and civilians kept their attention divided. That afternoon, Higa’s submarines reported back with the approximate location of the Chinese fleet, which were spread around Guam but had most of its ships due east of the island. With this information, Higa ordered his western forces—comprising of
Noguchigera and
Yanbaru Kuina’s battle groups—to launch airstrikes the following morning.
On February 2 at 0600, 80 aircraft from
Noguchigera and
Yanbaru Kuina launched four airstrikes against sea- and land-based targets on the western half of Guam and the surrounding waters. The sudden assault, taking place in the early morning, quickly sunk one Chinese destroyer and three patrol boats and damaged three transports. Within fifteen minutes, Liu scrambled his own CAP and engaged the Ryukyuan airplanes. Caught between the Chinese anti-aircraft weapons and the fighter jets, the Ryukyuans were forced to withdraw, losing 17 aircraft in the process as opposed to Liu’s 5. Believing the airstrike in the west was a diversion from a possible offensive in the east, Liu withdrew his eastern ships to the north. Next, he executed his plan to lure out the Ryukyuan battleships by having the empty transports apparently sortie out to the northeast, as if making a break for Hawaii. Higa suspected a trap and decided to set one of his own.
Sakishima and its escorts broke formation and moved north to apparently engage, with
Amami and its group following at a distance. All five Ryukyuan carriers prepared the rest of their aircraft for combat.
At 1000, one of Liu’s recon drones sighted
Amami and relayed its position to Liu. However, at that moment he was still moving his ships into position and refueling some of them, so he was not ready to battle yet. He calculated, based on the drone’s findings, that the SZI had taken the bait. However, he could not ascertain the strength of
Amami’s escorts, as the two battleships and their escorts were under a low-hanging overcast left over from yesterday’s rain. Still, he gave ordered
Tianhou and its escorts to change course and intercept. At their current speed, they would be in a position to attack early next morning while the rest of the East Fleet finished refueling. Meanwhile, for the remainder of the day, Ryukyuan bombers flying out from the home islands, together with Higa’s fighters launched from the carriers, attacked targets across Guam.
Opening stages of the Battle of Guam. Higa launched airstrikes against Chinese ground targets, while his main fleets closed in on the Chinese fleet. Liu attempted to lure out the Ryukyuan battleships with a fake transport sortie, but his plan was already expected.
At 0625 on February 3, Hong Wuchang and
Ōryu moved northeast to provide air cover for
Sakishima and
Amami and counter
Tianhou’s air wing. Ryukyuan electronics countermeasures succeeded in disguising the true location of the ships from conventional radar. Liu instead deduced where the battleships were by sending out drones and marking down the locations of any that lost signal or were destroyed. However, Hong had expected this and had put a radar jammer and basic close-in weapons system (CIWS) on a single fuel tanker manned by a skeleton crew. Its only escort was a single Ryukyuan destroyer. Believing he had found the carriers, Liu immediately launched all of his aircraft. 80 fighters launched from
Tianhou and
Mazu over the next hour and set a course for the tanker.
At 0815, a Chinese drone captured an image of
Yanbaru Kuina and immediately reported it back to Liu. Although he was confused by the conflicting reports, he believed Higa had split his carrier groups and meant to flank the East Fleet, cutting in between the main fleet and the transport decoys and the island and the main fleet. He ordered
Dong Wanggong to launch its fighters against the new contact while the attack against the first contact continued. At 0920,
Tianhou’s air wing reached the tanker and destroyer, which opened fire with their now Aegis-improved CIWS. 32 Chinese fighters were shot down and the tanker was sunk before Liu ordered a retreat, realizing the deception. The destroyer suffered some damage and casualties but remained ready for battle.
At 930, Ryukyuan recon planes sighted
Tianhou a short distance northeast of
Sakishima and
Amami. As most of its planes had been sent out to the tanker’s location, the Chinese carrier was protected by a light CAP while it prepared to launch the rest of its aircraft. Liu’s cruisers surrounded
Tianhou in a wide V, part of the Imperial Chinese Navy doctrine of covering as much surface area as possible. The two battleships immediately changed course to intercept it, aided by aircraft from
Ōryu and
Yanbaru Kuina. Reaching their targets first,
Ōryu’s aircraft immediately attacked with a missile salvo against the cruisers, keeping their point defense distracted while
Sakishima and
Amami closed in. Once close enough, the two battleships turned to port to bring all of their guns to bear against
Tianhou, shredding its hull and flight deck with powerful armor-piercing shells. The cruisers broke formation and attempted to converge around
Tianhou, but the wide V formation proved detrimental, allowing each cruiser to be picked off by fighter jets or cruise missiles from
Yanbaru Kuina’s group. 12 Ryukyuan aircraft were destroyed in this engagement. Attempted Chinese counterattacks against the battleships failed due to interference from the Aegis system of
Prince Horst von Hohenzollern, which hung back at the edge of Aegis’ range, and the quick thinking of the Ryukyuan air wings. Succumbing to the missile and artillery barrage,
Tianhou sank at 1023. The survivors of the battle group withdrew north.
Sakishima and
Amami and their escorts remained in the area for several hours to rescue any survivors from the water. At 1100, the commander of
Sakishima radioed Higa: “One mountain climbed.”
The next day of the Battle of Guam began with a combined Ryukyuan assault against Tianhou and its battle group, resulting in the sinking of Tianhou.
By noon, all Ryukyuan aircraft had been recovered from this engagement and readied to launch against the main East Fleet. Higa remained concerned that he had no concrete positions for
Mazu and
Dong Wanggong. Although he knew the general area they were likely in, he needed exact coordinates to avoid any surprises. Ryukyuan intelligence sources believed Liu may have deployed a fourth carrier at Guam, possibly to mount an attack on the Ryukyuan home islands. Hong suggested waiting until tomorrow to resume the attack, arguing their scout planes and drones would not find anything today. However, Higa realized he could use the night to attack as well. He sent out his planes, drones, and submarines to find the location of the carriers and prepared his air wings for nighttime combat.
Informed of
Tianhou’s loss, Liu ordered the main fleet, including the transport decoys, to regroup off the coast of Guam. As the decoys and their escorts changed course, Ryukyuan submarines intercepted them. Three transports, 1 cruiser, and 2 submarines were sunk with Ryukyuan torpedoes and missiles before being driven off with depth charges. One Ryukyuan submarine was destroyed in the process. However, the path of the transport decoys was mapped out and relayed to Higa, who used it to narrow down the carriers’ location. The two groups of the Ryukyuan fleet—Higa’s main fleet of
Sanzan,
Noguchigera, and
Yanbaru Kuina and Hong’s group of
Ōryu and
Prince Horst von Hohenzollern—set a course for the northeastern coast of Guam. To maintain the element of surprise, the two groups maintained radio silence after confirming their orders.
Shortly after 1700,
Mazu monitored radio transmissions from a Ryukyuan drone that falsely reported Hong was heading north, not west. Liu’s staff assumed the drone was following Hong and that if it continued on its current course, it would open itself up to an attack from the rear and enter striking range before nightfall. Liu sent 8 aircraft to sweep the general area the drone had reported from. However, before they spotted anything,
Prince Horst von Hohenzollern activated its LC defense systems and shot down all of them with concentrated plasma bursts.
As the sun set, the Ryukyuan battleships accelerated to full steam, while Higa and Hong spread out their carriers for maximum air coverage. As Higa waited for the next step in his plan to begin, he remarked to his officers, “Without a doubt, this has been the weirdest battle we’ve fought so far.” On the Chinese side, Liu directed his commanders to make sure they destroyed the Ryukyuans in the morning, believing the Ryukyuans were in no position to attack at the moment. He spent his evening ordering repairs and preparations to be made for the resumption of operations in the morning. Confiding in his own officers, he complained, “We’ve been so unlucky today I feel like I want to quit.”
At the end of the day, Liu gathered the majority of his forces off the northern coast of Guam. Having intercepted his communications, Higa learned where the Chinese fleet was heading and prepared all of his ships for a nighttime attack.
At 2015, one Chinese patrol boat sighed SZI
Hokuzan fast approaching the East Fleet. Before it could alert the rest of the fleet, it was destroyed by the battleship’s secondary guns. Other patrol boats and outlying Chinese ships were similarly sunk, disabled, or had their communications jammed with ECM. At 2100, Liu noticed a suspicious and increasing lack of communications from his fleet. Suspecting an attack, he immediately ordered his aircraft launched, but it was too late. While his flagship
Dong Wanggong had fortunately been positioned further north, all five Ryukyuan battleships—
Hokuzan,
Chūzan,
Amami,
Nanzan, and
Sakishima—had closed to within 4000 meters of
Mazu and the ships at the core of the East Fleet and opened fire at effectively point blank range. The battleships’ shells tore clean through the hulls of over a dozen ships, even piercing clean through
Mazu’s hull and exiting the other side. The Chinese destroyers and cruisers attempted to mount a counterattack, but at 2105 all of Higa’s air wings arrived and launched their missiles against the scattered enemy formation. Fought at such close range, the battle looked like nothing the Ryukyuans had seen before. Some pilots witnessed entire cruiser main guns and missile launchers torn off by explosions and tossed high into the air. After just ten minutes, the bulk of the East Fleet, including 33 of China’s precious submarines, had been destroyed.
Mazu sank at 2130.
Despite his heavy losses, Liu continued fighting. At 2140,
Dong Wanggong’s air wing arrived at the battlefield and engaged the Ryukyuan aircraft, shooting down 10. This allowed Higa to deduce Liu’s flagship’s general location, and he sent an air group to deal with it while the rest of his aircraft finished off the remains of the East Fleet. The Chinese carrier put up a fight with both its own defenses and its CAP, which shot down most of the inbound Ryukyuan jets and their missiles. However, a few missiles hit their targets, heavily damaging
Dong Wanggong’s flight deck and killing 84 crewmembers. At the same time,
Dong Wanggong’s own air wing approached
Sanzan. At 2155,
Sanzan’s radar detected the inbound Chinese aircraft and scrambled its CAP to intercept.
Sanzan’s point defense and CAP shot down all 14 of the enemy fighters. However, one Chinese jet managed to launch its missiles, and two missiles made it past
Sanzan’s CIWS. One hit the carrier’s propulsion mechanism and rudder, drastically reducing its speed and mobility. The other hit the flight deck with an armor-piercing warhead that penetrated four decks before exploding, causing severe structural damage to an aircraft hangar and killing 55, as well as inflicting minor damage on the carrier’s nuclear reactor. Neither Higa nor Liu were injured in these attacks, but the two flagships were forced to withdraw. Their escorts followed suit, and the battle effectively concluded with neither side in any position to keep going.
The Battle of Guam ended with the destruction of much of the Chinese fleet and Liu being forced to withdraw from Guam. However, the Ryukyuans suffered significant casualties, and many Ryukyuan ships were heavily damaged.
Despite neither side managing to fully destroy the other, Ryukyu claimed victory in the overall battle, as the SZI had maintained its position around Guam while the Chinese retreated from the island. Furthermore, the Chinese had suffered greater losses, losing two out of their three carriers and preventing much of the East Fleet from reinforcing the Central Fleet. However, Liu and
Dong Wanggong, the East Fleet’s most important assets, had escaped. On the Ryukyuan side, not a single ship escaped unscathed, and
Sanzan had taken a heavy beating. Higa had also suffered high fighter losses and would need to replenish them with new pilots and aircraft from the home islands. Fortunately, he could now use Guam as a staging ground. After Liu’s withdrawal, most of the Chinese ground forces on Guam surrendered with little resistance, and those who kept fighting were routed by revitalized Roman loyalist resistance forces. Now he could make use of the island’s airfield to fly in supplies, reinforcements, and equipment from the Ryukyu islands. In addition, the Chinese defensive systems left on the island could be used for his own fleet.
(No joke in this wikibox.)
Higa spent the rest of the month conducting repairs and giving his crews much needed rest.
Sanzan and the Ryukyuan battleships suffered heavy damage and would need weeks to repair their hulls, armor, and weapons. As soon as the airfields were secured, Ryukyu flew more fighter jets and supply planes into Guam. These pilots, however, did not have the same combat experience as those who had fought at Hoang Sa and in Sumatra, and they needed time to integrate into the crews. It felt horrible to stop and rest in Guam while the loyalists of Hawaii were about to fight their most important battle yet, but it was necessary to regain morale and get every ship back in working condition. He hoped Hawaii could survive long enough. Using the powerful communications array Liu had installed to contact the mainland, he reached out to Hawaii and to the other fleets rushing to its aid so they could coordinate a unified strategy. The Eimericans had reached Hawaii first, after Zhang’s fleet was temporarily forced back to Fusang to make repairs after repeated Mexican, Mitteleimerican, and Tawantinsuyuan airstrikes and submarine attacks. Now the three fleets reinforced the Kaiserliche Marine, but they alone wouldn’t be able to stand up to Liu’s Central Fleet combined with Zhang’s fleet once both arrived. The northern Japanese and Ainu fleets which joined the Ryukyuans at Guam were small and operated with little direction from their homelands, which couldn’t be helped due to the worsening situation in the Japanese home islands, but they made up for their disadvantages with high morale and, more importantly, equipment and systems based on Chinese designs, which would help counter Liu’s ECM and further break through their ciphers. The Srivijayan fleets arriving in Guam also had the same lack of direction from their home countries, again due to the situation in Southeast Asia as a result of the chemical attacks of January 11. But like the northern Japanese and Ainu crews, the Southeast Asian crews were fully committed to saving Hawaii, both to prevent total Chinese domination of the Pacific and to, in a way, return the favor Prince Horst did for them. In addition, the Srivijayan fleets were more support oriented, focusing more on mobile ECM and drone platforms, supply and logistics ships, and submarines. It was exactly what Higa needed for Hawaii.
He just hoped there was still a Hawaii by the time he got there.
Sakamoto’s Ambition
“Japan is one and indivisible. We must no longer entertain the fiction of partition, of three nations imposed on us by the Chinese and Korean imperialists nine decades ago. It is time for all Japan to once again be united, as we once were. There can be no compromise with the imperialists and their puppets. They must all be eradicated without mercy from our glorious islands so that Japan’s sun may rise once again.”
- Sakamoto Shinzo, President of the Japanese National Republic
The war in Japan was effectively over by the end of January. The Battle of Shizuoka on November 22, 2038 had wiped out most of the northern Republic of Japan’s army, and what remained was ill-equipped to take on the emboldened southern Japanese National Liberation Army. President Sakamoto knew it and continued his offensive. Three days after Shizuoka, the National Liberation Army took Mount Fuji. By December, Sakamoto’s forces had reached the outskirts of Yokohama, which fell after a month of brutal urban combat, and Sakamoto immediately moved on Edo. His strategy was to launch a single overwhelming offensive against the northern capital to finish off the north in one blow. Despite having known of this plan for weeks, there was nothing the northern President Hayabusa could do about it. His troops were scattered, demoralized, and most importantly hungry. The famine gripping Japan devastated his supply lines. Of his remaining soldiers, the vast majority of deaths came from starvation or food poisoning. Sakamoto’s army had the same problem, but it had found a solution by looting the north’s towns for their own food, which had a side effect of worsening Hayabusa’s situation. Hayabusa refused to stoop to such lows, and as a result his army saw mass desertions, defections, and even mutinies. Sakamoto capitalized on this by making alluring promises of food, money, and amnesty to any northern soldier who defected. Thousands desperately took his offer. His ranks thinned even more, Hayabusa barely had enough left over to defend Edo itself, even with Ainu reinforcements. Ainu Mosir, too, was on its last legs. Unwilling to deploy troops that far north to Ezo Island, Sakamoto instead blanketed it with chemical weapons bought from Jerusalem. On January 24, a chemical attack on Sapporo wiped out 70% of its population and decapitated what remained of its central government. Ainu Mosir surrendered hours later and submitted to occupation by the National Liberation Army. Almost immediately, Sakamoto began moving troops to Ezo Island and ordering them to invade the Republic of Japan from the north.
From his office in burning Edo, Hayabusa recognized the futility of the situation. Once Shizuoka was lost, the fate of the northern republic and Ainu Mosir had been sealed. He instead ordered his remaining troops to continue evacuating civilians from the front lines to safer zones further north, those these were now threatened by the northern offensive. He remained in his office to lead the defense of the capital, not wanting to fuel Sakamoto’s propaganda by fleeing. He knew he would die, but he didn’t care. He would fight to the end for the ideals he stood for. In his later years, Hayabusa had regretted the more extreme actions his Paulluists had taken when seizing power in the former shogunate. He had joined the northern Paulluists to protest the corruption and stagnation of the old democratic regime, but he drew the line when they overthrew the shogun and established a one-party dictatorship. Before the war started, he had been working from within the party’s ranks to reform the republic back into a democracy. But that was no longer possible. The best he could do was set up contingency plans so that his work would endure long after his death, hopefully.
On January 25, the National Liberation Army pushed into the center of Edo, sweeping aside what little resistance remained, and seized Edo Castle. Several soldiers confronted Hayabusa in his office and immediately executed him. His body was tossed onto the street and broadcast all across Japan as an example to all those who would defy Sakamoto’s will. In a speech later that day, Sakamoto declared the end of both the northern republic and Ainu Mosir. No longer would Japan be partitioned into three. For the first time in centuries, Japan would be united. Sakamoto proclaimed that the sun had risen for Japan, and it would not set as long as he lived.
The end of the war in Japan did not change much outside Japan, though. The Japanese National Liberation Navy was unable to break through Ryukyu’s defenses and force it to submit to Sakamoto. The northern republic and Ainu fleets sent to help Higa had already known this would happen and folded themselves into the Ryukyuan chain of command, devoting themselves to making sure Hawaii didn’t suffer the same fate as their homelands. Korea had descended into anarchy and would remain so for a while. Han Xianyu was more focused on Siberia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, and the Pacific. To him, the situation in Japan was a distraction from the real fighting happening elsewhere. The annihilation of the Roman loyalists in Hawaii was the only thing standing in the way of total Chinese hegemony in the Pacific. As long as Sakamoto kept to his islands, he didn’t care about Japan.
But would Sakamoto be satisfied now?
Nothing To See Here
“I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest German he's better than the best Nahua, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
- attributed to Ludwig Erhard
Jerusalem carried on, as it always did. The mastermind behind this war was an enigma to the rest of the world. Little information escaped its borders. But the opposite also held true. To the people of Jerusalem, all they knew about the outside world was what Bysandros Malecares and the committee told them. To them, Russia was a barbarian nation in need of Christianity and civilization; Persia was the ancient enemy of western civilization that must be destroyed at all costs; the Scandinavians were still bloodthirsty Vikings; the Indians were traitors and pagans who had never once answered for the crimes of the Holocaust; and the Chinese were bent on conquering the world and imposing their will on humanity. This was a war for humanity’s soul and salvation. Victory must be achieved, whatever it took.
Public support for the war remained overwhelmingly high. Although the pool of volunteers had dried up significantly as a result of the human wave tactics in Mesopotamia, Jerusalemites still contributed in other ways. Many donated their remaining life savings and rations to the war effort, putting the well-being of the Crusaders on the front lines ahead of their own. Supporting the troops had become one of the driving principles of Jerusalemite life. All of Jerusalemite society had been restructured around the war effort, in an extension of total war to its logical conclusion. The economy was organized to produce military hardware and supplies at breakneck pace, though this focus on quantity came at the expense of quality, though Regent Theodor Tesla had no objections as this brought in record profits. Daily life was also organized around military themes and activities. Children in school were not only taught daily updates on the war but also put through comprehensive training courses so they could be deployed on the battlefield if necessary. Culture, too, became focused on war. Gone were the movies and video games about events from the Bible. Now the average Jerusalemite watched propaganda films about the war’s progress (namely that Jerusalem was winning every single battle so far) and consumed media depicting brave Crusaders fighting against demonic heathen foreign armies, then baptizing the grateful civilians they liberated. Nobody saw any issue with this. To them, this was natural. The committee was only providing what the people wanted. Indeed, these films made hundreds of millions of marks at the box office and dominated discussion online and offline for weeks at times. The economy was doing very well as businesses raked in cash and consumers received what they needed at “affordable” prices. Many citizens graciously chose to work for low pay (if at all) in dangerous occupations to contribute to the war effort. All of the donations going to the troops created a sense of civic pride and community. Jerusalemites felt proud to be contributing to a worthy cause, to something greater than themselves. They had faith that they were building a better world, not just for themselves but for their children and even non-Jerusalemites. As the rest of the world burned, Jerusalem remained a bastion of stability and order. The nation was firmly united behind the Regency, and there was nothing it could not accomplished as long as that continued.
But these times wouldn’t last forever.
---
For anybody who’s reading this in the future and didn’t catch my posts in the last couple weeks, I redesigned the Fusang and Russian flags to what you see here, and I chose in-universe appropriate flags for Persia and Mexico.
The Japan and Jerusalem segments are pretty short since there’s not much else I can say there and the Ryukyu segment really burned me out. As of September 17, I have only finished the first three story chapters of the next batch both due to burnout and real life.
I’m sorry for hyping up the Hawaii battle last chapter but not actually talking about it here. That was the original plan, as evident from the lore dump on the Fusang navy that I felt too lazy to cut out, but I decided the Hawaii battle would thematically make more sense in the next chapter. You’ll see what I mean.
I don’t have a good picture of the fall of Bhutan as I think I used the console command to annex it. Same goes for the Republic of Japan and Ainu Mosir’s fall.
The Diné are the Navajo. I know I used “Navajo” earlier in this story arc, but I did more research and found Diné is more appropriate for them in the context of their history here. Táyshá City is Tejas City, because as of 9/7/22 I realized “Tejas” is Spanish in origin, based on the Caddo word Táyshá. In-universe, I assume the names differ depending on who you ask. “Tejas City” is used by Europeans, Táyshá by the Mexicans and the Caddo/Nahua-majority national government (which should also be called Táyshá now), and Nabedaches by the non-Caddo locals. I’ve changed all references to “Tejas” in this chapter to “Táyshá” and will maintain it in the future.
I’m thinking of giving better names to most of the pagan religions. I am inclined to keep Romuva and Suomenusko for now since the former was at least attested to in the medieval era and the latter literally means Finnish faith, but I want to change the names for Slavic and Norse paganism. The former I was thinking of naming
Vera, or faith in Russian. For Norse paganism, I already have the Asatru and Vanatru faiths, but I’ve since learned the modern neopagan movements of those names have ties to white supremacists. The same thing happened with the previous name I occasionally used, Odinist. Currently I’m thinking of using
Sidr/
Sið, which means “custom,” I’ve seen it used as “Forn Sið” (old custom) in a couple CK2 mods before, and that name has been attested to in the medieval era. I didn’t use the “Forn” because in real life “Forn Sið” was only given to Norse paganism after Christianization. The Norse and European pagans in general had no word or concept of religion as an institution before Christianity, as they saw their gods and rites as an established fact of life not requiring belief. Naturally after Christianity they would have had to define paganism in terms of a religion. It also wouldn’t make sense to call a currently practiced faith old. Zunism and Tengriism will remain as they are for the sake of convenience and the fact that I can’t find any period-appropriate names for them right now.
Music name in case original is DMCA'd: Roar of Dominion - Embers (Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes)
