Chapter 16: The Fight to Save Earth

By the time our 7DCF arrived we’d already completely lost Africa and Australia. Well, both continents had a few holdout areas around the edges, but if you looked at a map you’d take some time finding them. We’d also lost the Middle East from Turkey to India. We’d lost a lot of South America and it looked like we’d lose the rest, since they were on their own. We were still fighting in northern Asia and North America, and that’s where we concentrated our efforts.

What was safe, secure? All of Oceania, for that matter all islands everywhere that were far enough away from the continents that the Sa’arm couldn’t dig to them were safe. All of southeast Asia was pretty safe; between the line of nukes, the active fault lines, the high mountains, the central deserts, and as many Chinese soldiers as it took the dickheads weren’t making any progress there at all.

I expect that most of the places the Sa’arm went, they were the superior soldiers. The few places where they were faced by higher technology, they could swamp the defenders with numbers. And then absorb that technology for their own use. Eastern India may well have been the first place they ever ran into an army that could fight, had at least marginally equal technology, AND had superior numbers.

All the ‘Stans were gone. The Russians were too busy defending their own homes to help them even if they would have. The Chinese were certainly not going to lift a finger to save Dar-es-Salaam from the Sa’arm. However, the Sa’arm couldn’t force their way through the wastelands surrounding the Gobi Desert, either, so again the Bamboo Curtain held in western China.

We THOUGHT we would be able to hold Europe, but the dickheads broke through at the Bosporus and also at the same time what was left of the African, Indian, and Siberian forces joined up in central Asia. The Siberian force was slowly expanding to the south and east, but could not penetrate the Russian defenses around the Urals to their west. Part of that force moved southwest and linked up with the African and Indian forces, then they swung east around the Black Sea and entered Europe through the Ukraine.

All of the plains fell quickly. The Europeans had nothing that could stop a horde of aliens armed with lasers, able to hit anything they could see, and kill anything they hit. When necessary the dickheads would call in heavier weapons, and no defensive line capable of stopping them could be built in the time available.

Only the Russians had such a layered system of defenses, and that was because they had been preparing to repel the Mongols, the Turks, the Chinese, the Swedes, the French, the Germans, the Americans, whoever was next to invade them, for hundreds of years. The Sa’arm attacked and probed and attacked and probed, and eventually stopped attacking and went around.

That did not match our understanding of their tactics. All of our experience with the dickheads told us that they would continue to reinforce any point of contact until they won or were wiped out. The only explanation the brains could come up with was that the dickheads in Africa and east India had seen enough of our defenses to decide that, for the Urals, the return on investment was not worth the cost in Swarmtroopers as long as there was easier food to collect. We figured that they planned to take the rest of the world, then come back to China and the Urals after they had gone through a few generations of expansion.

On the other hand, the Sa’arm couldn’t lay down. They turned out to not do very well at all in broken ground, anything that gave the defenders cover. In a city, forest, or rocky anything where we could hide behind something, we could just about guarantee that each defender would get at least one shot off before being located and fired back at.

If a defender had a weapon that killed or disabled the dickhead, he could last as long as it took the Sa’arm to get so many units there that the still-living units saw where the fire was coming from. Then, of course, he was toast if he didn’t move before they could fire back. Most of the human defenders didn’t have weapons capable of a one-shot kill, however. If it took three or four shots to kill a dickhead, in reality that meant we took three or four losses for every dickhead we downed.

Still, there were more defenders on the ground than dickheads. If they had carried weapons that gave them a high chance for a one-shot kill, we probably would have kept Europe. As it was we lost all of the lowlands in just a couple of months. The mountains took longer, between being gathering places for survivors and the improved cover available. And, we suspect, not being such good sources of whatever-it-was that the dickheads liked to eat.

When we finally started taking mainland Europe back a dozen years or so later, we still had human enclaves in quite a few high mountain valleys. Not that we were surprised; most of them were living off food and other supplies provided by replicators. The AIs knew where every single replicator was and what they were being used for, so that pretty well located all of the survivors.

After all, the replicators weren’t stand-alone units. They needed AI support to run. And transporters, to provide all the different elements the replicators needed. All those groups up in the European mountains were, in effect, advance scout or exploration parties for the Confederacy on a Sa’arm-controlled planet, helping us decide whether to commit the Marines or not.

Anyway, as soon as our fleet got into the system and we had ensured that we weren’t going to have to fight the local humans, Jack set up the same sort of englobement that we’d done at Gamma, Delta, and Alpha. It took us some time to set up real-time comms with the defenders on the ground, but while others worked on that our ships could start stomping on the confirmed Sa’arm facilities.

We didn’t want to kill humans. Our engagement rules were set up to minimize blue-on-blue incidents. All of our ships were given a database that could be viewed either as a globe or as a map, depending upon the scale, with a color-coded system for determining the rules.

Anything in dark blue was confirmed ‘our people’. We had Confederacy people on the ground, and we knew that area was secure. Anything in light blue was considered human-controlled if not necessarily Confed territory.

Green was water, safe for humans since the Sa’arm didn’t swim or use floating boats. White was “Not Applicable”, like Antarctica and Greenland. Anything in pink was neutral, contested, or unknown.

Anything in red was considered Sa’arm-controlled territory but may still have human refugees or holdouts, or other Earth-native life that we wanted to protect if we could. Anything in purple had been Sa’arm territory long enough that we had given up on recovery operations. Anything in black was confirmed to have Sa’arm operations, equipment, or dickheads operating in the area.

With that system set up, the fleet’s combat rules were simple. We would not fire on any area in green, white, or blue without a Confed person on the spot confirming the target. We would not use any weapon more destructive than a Baby Hero gun, in a pink or red area. If the proposed target was in a purple or black area, our ships were free to use any weapon that was available and appeared appropriate.

The fleet started with all the primary Sa’arm landing sites. And, since we’d brought enough ships, they did all six of them at once rather than do one and let the Sa’arm start evacuating the rest of them once they saw what was going on.

As we’d seen elsewhere, the Sa’arm defenders could shoot up our incoming titanium alloy slugs, but the bigger ones didn’t get deflected at all. The smaller ones may have been nudged some but the kill zone was still large enough to include the target. It didn’t matter if we hit the facility or not as long as the facility got splashed with lots of molten rock, metal, and whatever.

Each place that held the concentration of landed equipment from a colony ship got pounded until there was no effective return fire. Then we cut a circle 20 kilometers out with our ‘Real’ guns to ensure that there weren’t any escapees, and last we turned the inside of the circle into lava. It took a while, but it was a priority and what else did the battleships have to do?

We didn’t have any good way to know how deep the lava puddle was. Still, there were limits to how deep the Sa’arm could dig, right? Earth’s crust wasn’t that thick. Not that any of us knew anything about this, but the AIs knew everything that Earth had ever published, and that included data on the way the Earth’s temperature rose with depth. It varied with location, but generally the deeper you went the hotter it got.

We all knew this, Earth’s crust floated on molten rock, right? Volcanos were places where that molten rock came out. All of our mines had to deal with this, somehow keeping our miners cool while they worked on rocks that could be as hot as 50C or more, and that was in mines that were only 3 or 4 Km down.

So, we figured that the Sa’arm couldn’t really be that far down. The 20-Km radius circle should cut whatever the Sa’arm had built off from the rest of the world, and pounding the surface of that entire circle until it was molten would eventually kill whatever was down there. Their warren or base or whatever would be heated by the rocks below and around them, and however they had been keeping it cool should stop working with all their surface facilities destroyed and molten.

Surely the shock waves from all the pounding would cause their equipment some trouble. And maybe, no matter how deep a factory, nursery, or whatever it was had been sited, eventually the heat from the molten puddle above it would cause some trouble, too.

Anyway, we’ll never know for certain whether those six huge lava puddles really did anything to help win the Battle for Earth, but we think so and it certainly made everyone feel better.

Jack mostly pushed the publicity people onto others, but he did a couple of public appearances for the media down on Earth to reassure everyone on Earth that “we’ve got your back”. There was one time when an interviewer asked him about all the ecological damage these six lava pools were causing, and Jack went off on the poor guy.

Concern about ecological damage was all well and good, but in case the interviewer hadn’t noticed yet, Earth had been invaded by aliens, and our casualties to date were well over two billion humans. How many humans did the interviewer think his ecological damage was worth?

One of his comments was something about him not being in charge of Earth, just the Confederacy personnel in the fleet overhead, but if he had been in charge, any idiot who mentioned ecological damage to him would be handed a rifle, told that they had been drafted as a private, and sent into combat to go kill the Sa’arm without causing any ecological damage since they were too stupid to possibly help the war effort in any other way. Every idiot was entitled to his own opinion, but when the idiot was paid to tell people the news he wasn’t entitled to express his own idiot opinion along with the news.

That interview wasn’t aired immediately. In fact, it wasn’t aired by the sponsoring network at all. After a week or so, it got aired by the Confederacy PR office that dealt with non-Confed people on Earth, once it became clear that the sponsoring network wasn’t going to run it. I’m pretty sure that Jack told the PR people to give the network a chance to do it right, themselves, before we showed all their viewers what idiots they were. They waited until the next live news show with that interviewer talking about something, and added it to our own news feed.

The network tried squawking about the interview being the network’s intellectual property and the Confederacy stealing it, but that didn’t go anywhere. Jack had one of our PR spokesmen point out that that was a false statement on two different counts. Their recording was the property of their network, of course, but we hadn’t used their recording. We’d used our own recording. What part of ‘constant AI surveillance” do you not understand?

The other count was funny as hell. “You have no right to use the word ‘intellectual’ in any public statement...” involving that interviewer. He went on to say that this wasn’t a matter for free speech; they were a corporation that supposedly existed to provide news, and if they couldn’t do that honestly they didn’t need to continue existing under their current charter as a public service organization with tax breaks and special government dispensations. Further, they had used an inappropriate word in a legal accusation. This particular accusation would not be responded to unless they revised their text to ‘idiot property’.

So, their lawyers filed their lawsuit against the Confederacy in the US district court in California, where the network was based. Um, the US government had no legal jurisdiction over any member of the Confederacy, but I guess they had to follow their orders. Had someone forgotten that California had asked the Confederacy to leave? There had been no Confed presence in California for ten years.

Our PR people, who by this time were taking this as their own personal fight for truth, justice, and The American Way, quietly just dropped all of that network’s access to our communications systems. We had provided the comm arrays for the common good of all people still alive on Earth, back when we first showed up.

The Sa’arm, when they had taken out our defending fleet and landed all their ships a couple months before we got there, had taken the time while they were landing to destroy everything in Earth orbit that they could find. Several nations had lofted replacement satellites, but those had also been shot down fairly quickly. For free extra goodness, almost all of their launch facilities also got destroyed by a force of Sa’arm landing craft that went out looking for them.

The European Union’s launch facility, out in the middle of the Pacific, was the only one to survive. By the time they had a rocket ready to loft a new satellite, all the Sa’arm ships had landed or been blown apart and the Sa’arm had no eyes on it. Before long, everyone was using that to launch their own satellites, or asking the Confederacy to place their satellites for them. Sure, we could do that, but we couldn’t keep the Sa’arm from shooting those new satellites up, also.

In the end we had installed a ring of geosynchronous comm arrays that the Sa’arm couldn’t see, and tuned them to their predecessor’s uses. These channels for public broadcast, those channels for the US military’s seekrit communications, the Russians get those over there, and so on.

We hadn’t given those arrays to anyone though, we’d just allowed their use as replacements. And if we decided that one particular use was not in the best interests of the Confederacy, well, that one particular use wouldn’t get allowed any more. End of story, right?

One of our Civil Service guys had gotten stuck as the public face of our side of this tiff, and he had to endure his own set of interviews with stupid people about this. We’d learned our lesson, though. Every such interview was shown live on one of the comm array’s channels. Anyone on Earth who wished -and had a satellite receiver- could watch it as it happened. No encryption, no DishCorp subscription required.

In fact, this was the very first subject of the next “Meet the Confederacy” interview, who owned their recordings and when this interview would be shown. Our guy told the questioner that he wasn’t yet proven to be an idiot, but there was a growing suspicion, so he might want to actually do some thinking about the stupid questions he asked. The interview, his question, and the Confed PR guy’s response were all going out to everyone on the entire planet LIVE, and all the people he wanted to impress with his incisiveness were listening to him admit he didn’t have the slightest clue about the subject of the question he’d asked or even the conditions under which he did his own job.

Another interviewer got the next question, about the financial collapse of the network that had been cut off, and how that would affect all the employees. She mentioned the actors who starred in one of her favorite shows as being out of work now.

“Are they good actors? Are they good comedians? Are they funny, and entertaining to watch? Then they shouldn’t have any trouble getting another job, right? It wasn’t THEIR fault that their network executives chose, of their own free will, to antagonize the people who are keeping them alive.”

“But what about all the other employees, the camera crews and set carpenters and makeup artists?” At least she had the courage of her convictions.

Our guy just looked at her for a minute. “Did you know that I grew up in Bismark, North Dakota? Not many people got out of that town, when the Sa’arm landed. Everyone who couldn’t get out, got eaten by the Sa’arm. Those were my childhood friends. My FAMILY, in some cases. Do you really seriously think I should care about whether a hairdresser can make his next Jaguar payment or not? If those people are out of work, and you want to help them, go suggest that they join the Earth Defense Forces and help defend this planet.”

“Look, right now EDF is pouring every warm body they can scrounge into Illinois in hopes of saving Chicago. The EDF would LOVE to have your favorite actors join the fight. If we win this fight, then years from now they can tell their grandchildren that they were heroes, that they helped save Chicago. If we don’t win, there will never again be a network sitcom anyway.”

“This is the real difference between Confederacy Volunteers and everyone else. We see what needs to be done, and we try to do it. You just stand there and wring your hands and whine ‘but why doesn’t someone do something?’ You, ma’am, the AIs tell me you’re about a 4.6, is that right? Well, that’s why. You’d rather whine than do, and that means that no one with any common sense would accept orders from you.”

Man, that created a shit-storm! Well, it may not have been the whole truth, but it was at least part of the whole truth. We thought. The AIs still wouldn’t tell us what-all went into the CAP test, but being willing to act on your own conscience had to be part of it.

You kids have all heard of the Einherjar, right? Right, everyone knows of them now. I’d never heard of them before we went back to Earth. Well, I’d heard of them, but I thought they were part of “Earth First”. “Ein” is German for “One”, so Einherjar was just the German name for Earth First, right?

No, not right. The Einherjar were much different. It turns out that they got their start in Iceland, and Einherjar is the Icelandic and old Norse word for “Hero” or “Champion”. Didn’t know that, did you? The word meant something like ‘first warrior’. The Einherjar weren’t troublemakers, they were defenders of the people.

The Einherjar were people like me and your great-uncle Kevin, who passed the CAP test and could join the Confederacy and go fight the Sa’arm out here among the stars. However, instead of going to the stars, they decided to stay home and fight for Earth when the Sa’arm came.

Iceland was first. When the Confederacy first came, Iceland was split on whether to support us or not. Many Volunteered and joined us out here. Everyone who stayed behind turned Iceland into the biggest fortress they could build, and they vowed to invite the Sa’arm to attack them.

Guam was second. That was a US military base, and just about everyone on the island was either military, a dependent, or retired military. They did the same thing.

Several other islands followed suit. Several of the Indonesian islands joined, as did some of the Philippines. Japan ceded the entire island of Shikoku to the Japanese chapter of the Einherjar, and by the time the Sa’arm actually did land they had effectively added Kyushu and Hokkaido. New Zealand was the same way. They never formally declared New Zealand to be Einherjar fortresses, but probably more than half the men in New Zealand were members.

The Einherjar were never bulked up like our Marines are. They had to make do without Confederacy medical support. So, they trained. They practiced. They learned everything they could about warfare, both defensive and offensive.

And they sent out missionaries. No, they weren’t a religion, but they acted like one. They sent out teams of people to other areas, to form Einherjar colonies and teach others how to defend themselves. By the time the Sa’arm landed in Africa, the Einherjar had offices and schools in every city in the world. Most towns, too.

They got support from the Confederacy whenever we could get away with it. We told those guys everything we learned about the Sa’arm. We didn’t tell Earth everything, but we told the Einherjar EVERYTHING we learned. We recognized those guys as our partners. We were doing everything we could to slow the Sa’arm down, and they were doing everything they could to stop them if they got to Earth.

They didn’t really hit their first internal crisis until the Sa’arm landed in Africa. Do they go help fight the Sa’arm there, or do they sit tight in their fortresses and be ready if more Sa’arm land elsewhere? As I understand it they finally decided that both answers were right. They needed to hold their fortresses, but they also needed to take the fight to the enemy. The Einherjar sent several divisions to Africa, and used them to both fight the Sa’arm directly, learning what worked and what didn’t, as well as indirectly by training the locals to fight.

Africa had been overrun with civil wars, imperial wars, religious wars, and just flat-out banditry for longer than most people had been alive. It seemed that every village had a dozen automatic rifles, but no one knew how to do anything with them beyond closing their eyes and spraying bullets. The Einherjar brought ammo, and they taught the villagers how to use their guns.

The Einherjar taught their own troops, too. They rotated troops home after a couple of months in the fire, allowing more and more of their people to get some combat experience.

They also organized and taught the legions of volunteers that went to Africa from all over the globe to fight against the aliens. Many died, but many absorbed all they could learn, killed some of the aliens, and eventually returned home again. Those, too, later became the nucleus of thousands of small home-defense teams that made the Sa’arm pay in blood for every farm, every village, every town they captured all over the world.

The Einherjar still argue about whether they could have kicked the Sa’arm out of Africa or not, if they’d put everything they had into it. Of course they could have! We eventually beat that invasion as well as five more, right? Surely one was easier than six?

They split their efforts, though, as they had no way to know if there would be more landings. When events proved them right, though, none of the landings were anywhere near any of their fortresses. Again, each Einherjar colony, school, and office became a magnet for people who wanted to fight but needed leadership, training, and weapons.

It wasn’t until we showed up from the Seventh District with our fleet, that the Einherjar agreed that their fortresses would not be needed. Earth would not receive any more Sa’arm ships, and all of their trained fighters and equipment could be released.

So, it wasn’t just an amorphous ‘the people of Earth’ that Jack was talking to, when he said “We’ve got your back. There won’t be any more landings here on Earth.” He was telling the Einherjar that their fortresses, however wonderful they might be, were in places that the Sa’arm would never reach. That wasn’t their fault, having safe island strongholds was a great idea, but without ships the Sa’arm would never get to them. The rest of Earth needed them, and the Einherjar responded.

Indonesia was one of Earth’s most populous countries, and it was overwhelmingly Moslem. They never formally joined the Caliphate, not with several Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu nations separating them, but they had the same religious beliefs. When you combine the Einherjar training with the Moslem need to recover the Ka’aba, well, Indonesia provided almost as many soldiers as China had.

And those soldiers went wherever they were needed. China’s armies just defended Greater China. The Einherjar went wherever they were called. Japan also sent millions of soldiers, under Japanese leaders but with Einherjar training and overall direction. The Philippines did, too.

They all tended to specialize. Iceland helped keep Scandinavia free, and helped the British kick the Sa’arm back out of England. Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Tasmania probably landed on Australia twenty times before they wore the Sa’arm down enough that they could stay and spread out from their bridgehead. Most of those troops had originally grown up in Australia, of course, and were just trying to go home.

The Koreans and the Japanese defended eastern Siberia, keeping the Asian Sa’arm from linking up with the North American Sa’arm. That freed the Canadian, US, and Mexican militaries to concentrate on the Sa’arm in front of them.

Japan also helped the South Americans. For whatever reason, Japan had long had a presence in western South America, with so many immigrants that Peru’s president often had a Japanese name. When the Sa’arm came around the Andes from the north the defenders lost the fight for Ecuador and Bolivia and Peru, but they helped keep the Sa’arm out of southern Chile and Argentina.

The Philippines also divided their efforts. With no one nearby to fight, they sent troops to both North America and Africa. Between them, the Indonesians, and the IODG working out of Madagascar, they kept the Sa’arm from treating southern Africa as a pacified area. After three or four years, with the Sa’arm bogged down everywhere and unable to move outside of their tunnels, they were even able to start ‘colonizing’ southern Africa again. It was a long time before any non-combatants were allowed in Africa, though.

The Filipinos were a big help in North America. The war there, like the other continents, didn’t have a fixed line like the World War I trenches. Instead, the Sa’arm could pop out anywhere that they had tunneled to. That meant that we didn’t have to man fixed lines, but we had to have huge reserves available throughout the entire battle zone.

Americans can be pretty racist, and a lot of them didn’t take well to the idea that they needed help defending their own turf. Especially from a bunch of foreign niggers, right? So, the Filipino Einherjar got spun as payback for the help the Americans gave the Philippines almost a hundred years before, back during World War Two, and that worked pretty well. “Oh, yeah, sure, buddy. Thanks!”

There was no reason to remind everyone that, until WW2 came around and turned the Americans into their best friends and liberators, the Filipinos had regarded Americans as hated invaders themselves. Nobody cares about ancient history, right?

Anyway, the destruction of those six landing sites was the last real job we needed the battleships for. Anything else that Earth’s defenders called in a fire support mission for could be handled by smaller ships with smaller guns that didn’t cause as much collateral damage.

The AIs started getting much more pushy about breaking the fleet up, and I was pretty sure I understood why. Sure. As long as Earth was covered, I could support their agenda.

So, as the Saturn yards started commissioning OWPs, we started releasing the battleships to go to wherever their crews called home. The carriers, too. We’d never found any use at all, for them.

In a naval battle against a huge Sa’arm fleet with an assortment of large and small ships, the bomber squadrons would have been invaluable. We use our big guns on the big ships, and the bombers on the small ships, and our fighters on the Sa’arm small craft. Everything the Sa’arm could throw at us was covered.

There at Earth, though, with no Sa’arm ships at all? Our fighters and bombers were useless. Worse than that, they were deathtraps. Our moon-bases had each started with several squadrons of small craft, fighters and bombers and ground support gunships, but actually using them against the Sa’arm on the ground had ... not worked well.

They were all too small to generate the power that our newer, better shields took, and the standard Mark I Sa’armtrooper carried a beam weapon that could take out anything light enough to fly if it wasn’t shielded. We lost almost every light craft we sent against them, before we realized that it was just suicide to approach the Sa’arm in such small craft.

It was the same old story. If they could see it, they could hit it. Hell, the Sa’arm had a bad tendency to shoot artillery and mortar shells out of the sky. The only way to get any use out of a mortar battery was to make it big enough to throw so many mortar shells at them at once, that they couldn’t shoot them all down. Anyway, our small craft were a lot bigger targets than artillery or mortar shells. If they could hit it, and it didn’t have armor or shields, they could kill it.