Chapter 14: Year 15: Meanwhile on Earth

Once Ark was on its way to Saturn I could go to Earth. Well, the Moon. That was as close as I got to Earth for a long time. Unless we were doing something that required our presence, like an extraction, once we were picked up and got our upgrades we weren’t allowed back on Earth again. Jack wanted me on the Moon anyway, to supervise dismantling the rest of DECO, but I wanted to see the battleships used. Besides, we couldn’t completely shut DECO down. The people actually doing the extractions were still needed. Now more than ever, with the dickheads advancing on every front.

You children have all studied Earth geography, right?

We had completely abandoned Africa. That was, if you went far enough back, mankind’s original home, but with landings everywhere else we just didn’t have the resources to hold any part of it. We kept Madagascar and held onto parts of South Africa for a while, and the Sa’arm didn’t seem too interested in the Sahara Desert, but all the national militaries that had been in Africa helping out had been pulled back home to deal with closer problems.

Australia had fallen almost overnight. There had been a lot of refugees, but mostly the rest of the world was mumbling “Serves you right, you dumb fucks.” Australia had been one of the first nations to declare that they didn’t believe the Sa’arm were coming and to formally ask the Confederacy to stay out of their land. At least California had a land border on three sides and anyone could leave the state without leaving the country.

They couldn’t completely bar the Confederacy, since we had a ‘treaty’ with the UN and had diplomatic access everywhere, but extractions were out. After a while, CAP testing was out, too. Fine. New Zealand had publicly offered to take in any Australian who believed in the Sa’arm, and Royal New Zealand Air Lines had promptly bought a bunch of mothballed airliners and started daily service to most Australian cities. It’s no one’s business how they came up with the money to buy all those planes.

If all those Boeings, Airbuses, and Antonovs were often full on their flights east, but almost empty on their flights west, well, there wasn’t much that the Australian government could do beyond saying “Good riddance.” Besides, all of the RNZAL personnel seemed to be uncommonly large and fit men and women. Even the ground crew and terminal personnel always seemed ready for trouble.

Wait ten years or so, and just about everyone in Australia who wanted to be part of the Confederacy had left. Of course, once the dickheads landed in Africa the idiots started to change their tune, but who wanted to go back to a place that had thrown them out once already? For being guilty of having integrity, intelligence, and courage?

No, wherever the Australian ex-pats went, they congregated in cities that had New Zealand, US, or UK embassies or consulates. The embassy and consulate personnel, in turn, spent a lot of time organizing “Assimilation Seminars” for the Australians. If those somehow seemed to get hit by Confed pickup teams every other day, well, that wasn’t the consulate’s fault, now, was it?

Australia had a lot of land to defend, and not much time or resources to prepare with. When one of the Sa’arm colony ships and its swarm of escorts and landers set down in Australia there was an awful lot of “Gee, that’s a darn shame, innit?” everywhere else. Certainly, no one volunteered to send troops to Australia to help them stop the invaders.

The Australian Army held the dickheads out of the ports long enough for several million civilians to be taken off by anything that would float, but that didn’t make the escapees safe. Australia is a continent, and it has open ocean in every direction. The Sa’arm had landed right in the middle of the southern hemisphere’s winter, and that meant cold water, storms, and big waves. Probably half of Australia’s casualties happened at sea, in ‘boats’ that should never have been out there. And in real boats that were simply overloaded.

Even if they made it to safety, the refugees had a hard time with assimilation elsewhere. They weren’t the only refugees looking for homes. The rest of the world considered them idiots, and on top of that cowards who didn’t have the integrity to deal with a problem that they themselves had created.

Everywhere else, the Sa’arm were advancing. Slow or fast, we didn’t seem able to stop them as long as there was a land path. SEATO was trying to blockade Australia to protect southeast Asia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. As part of that, both Indonesia and Papua New Guinea had agreed to Japan fortifying all of the islands in the Torres strait. The Australian Army made their last stand at the end of the Cape York Peninsula, and their efforts gave everyone else time to prepare. Say what you will about the rest of the Australians, but their army stood to their salt and gave everyone else time to evacuate and prepare.

The Japanese lost the whole Thursday Island group, but between the SEATO ships and the Japanese expedition, they held onto Moa and Badu Islands. That was, I think, the first place on Earth that humanity actually stopped the Sa’arm.

That was like Midway Island and Guadalcanal and Stalingrad in World War II, Gallipoli in WW1, or even Gettysburg in the American Civil War or Waterloo before that. Before the war, no one except the inhabitants knew where those places were. No one cared. Nowadays, everyone on Earth knows where Moa and Badu Islands are. The Japanese soldiers fought, and a lot of them died, to defend a bunch of non-Japanese civilians, and that finally put to rest the last few cultural ghosts from WW2.

Some of the reports from the Thursday Island group had been that the defenders had been surprised by dickheads who were already on the island with them. Unless they had some sort of stealth field, they hadn’t come by air and the dickheads didn’t use floating boats.

The whole Torres Strait area is shallow. After all, during the last ice age New Guinea and Australia were connected by a land bridge. Most of the Strait’s islands are really mountaintops from a mountain range that crosses the Strait. It just so happens that the current ocean level is higher than most of the mountains. The obvious conclusion was a tunnel to the islands under the water.

After the Thursday Island group fell, the Japanese government sent delegations to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and New Zealand to verify that they were authorized to do whatever it took to hold the remaining islands. Of course all three governments agreed! Several days later, it became clear what that had been all about. There were a series of underground, actually underwater, nuclear explosions in an east-west line between Thursday Island and Moa Island, from deep water in the east westward to well past all the islands.

Eventually they extended that line all the way to the Sumatra Fault, far to the west. The whole Arafura Sea was shallow continental shelf, and that line of nukes was the only way to keep the Sa’arm from eventually tunneling to New Guinea.

No one asked too many questions about where those nukes came from. We were just glad that the Japanese had them, as well as the tools to bury them under the Strait. Yes, it caused horrible damage to the ecology of the Strait’s waters and coral reefs, but it certainly stopped the Sa’arm!

Our 7th District Combined Fleet arrived soon after that original line of nukes went off, before the dickheads had really started to press the defenders at Moa Island. The defenders at Moa Island could shoot down anything too small to have a shield. Our ships could disrupt any concentration of dickheads in the Cape York Peninsula, and they could also shoot down any dickhead aircraft large enough to carry a shield. With tunneling prevented that was the only help the defenders needed from us.

Unless we lost everywhere else, New Guinea, at least, was safe, and by extension so was New Zealand and all of Oceania.

Once the Japanese at Moa Island had shown the way, the Indian Ocean Defense Group, an Indian-led coalition formed to fight the dickheads in Africa and probably the only time that the Dar-es-Salaam and Indian militaries ever co-operated well, did the same thing to protect Madagascar. The water separating Madagascar from Africa was deeper, but who knew how deep the Sa’arm could tunnel? They mined the shallowest path and used a good many nukes to ensure that Madagascar also would never be tunneled to. That, too, used more nukes than anyone else had thought that India and Pakistan had built. Maybe they came from Iran’s old stockpile.

Of course, by that time neither India nor most of the Islamic nations existed any more. All that was left of either group was refugees who had made it to the human ‘free’ zones and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the IODG. Those people had originally been assigned to the IODG because of their ability to get along with foreigners, and they set their religious differences aside and vowed to hold Madagascar for humanity. With tunnels prevented and the Confederacy’s OWPs overhead to shoot down any aircraft large enough to make the trip, they never faced a serious threat.

Unfortunately, the idea came too late for Sri Lanka. It may not have worked, anyway. It was too close to India and the dickheads had no need to tunnel. When they got to south India they just swarmed over the few defenders.

That line-of-buried-nukes tactic was used several more times. At Istanbul the attempt failed. The charges weren’t set off until the Sa’arm had already gone through the tunnels, and in any case they were soon reinforced by more Sa’arm coming around the Black Sea.

In the English Channel and the North Sea, it was done far too late but it cut off the Sa’arm actually in Great Britain from supplies and reinforcement and eventually the defenders won after a terrible fight that destroyed much of southern England. Across southern Panama and off Trinidad, the line of nukes was set off far earlier than needed and that angered many of the people nearby, but I agree with Washington on that one. Too early was much better than too late.

By that time all of the nuclear powers had problems closer to home and Tasmania got left out. Tasmania is also on the same continental shelf as Australia, if farther out than Moa Island, and it probably would have been eventually tunneled to and lost in the long run. When we showed up, however, that changed their options. They asked us for help.

Those were some goofy negotiations, and I did everything I could to stay out of them. The Governor and Premier of Tasmania, two politicians who shared being in charge somehow, petitioned the Confederacy for military and economic assistance. The main thing they wanted was help repelling the dickheads but they also asked for help housing and feeding well over ten million Australian refugees.

A strong third request was to somehow do both of those without destroying Tasmania. They made a big deal about having officially been environmentalists even longer than the New Zealanders, although they weren’t quite as rabid about it.

I think that everyone in the Confederacy agreed that these were reasonable requests, but the AIs had long placed limits on what the Confederacy could do for people not in the Confederacy. Okay, their reason was pretty simple and just as valid; they didn’t want Confed tech in the hands of people like, well, your average human.

The urge to fear anything we didn’t understand and the urge to destroy anything we feared were both instinctive to us. Add in the fact that your average human didn’t understand the Confederacy and giving a human a gun was pretty much equivalent to saying “okay, now shoot me”. The Confederacy hadn’t survived for more than half a million years because the AIs made stupid mistakes. The AIs agreed that saving what was left of Earth should happen if it could be done without endangering the rest of the Confederacy, and they sat down to figure out what could be done.

What both sides really wanted was to admit Tasmania into the Confederacy as an already-established breeding colony that just happened to be in the same system as an uncontrolled planet, but there were a lot of obstacles to cross first. The AIs weren’t that worried about the dickheads on the other side of the Bass Strait in Australia. The real problem to them was all the ‘wild’ humans in Tasmania, the ones that couldn’t pass the CAP test and wouldn’t agree to become a Concubine.

Still, with all the Australian refugees Tasmania had almost 15 million people, and it would be a great breeding colony if they could make it work. It happened eventually, but I don’t think that the Tasmanians will ever forgive Iceland and Guam for getting admitted first. THEY were the ones who thought of it, they were the ones who worked it out, etc, etc, etc. Yes it was their own fault that they had taken in all those bloody useless Australians, but sooner or later they would become helpful.

To start with, the Confederacy asked to open an embassy in Hobart, and the Premier formally turned over to them a section of industrial real estate, several large blocks worth, down by the river. It was suggested that he turn over Government House, that sprawling residence the Governor used, on the grounds that it had never done anything useful for the Tasmanians yet, but the Confederacy didn’t want it. All we wanted was some land we could build our own facilities on.

Our people set up a ship-type hemispherical shield that extended down to the ground inside that grant, and then set up some permanent ports, the same way we did the weapon-ports in our ship’s shields, at ground level to use as access points. The engineers claimed that they couldn’t do the complete spherical shield that our ships used, because of all the mass in the ground. The shield couldn’t be set up with mass in the way. They could only extend the shield down to the ground. Sure, whatever.

Inside the shield was Confederacy land. Outside the “official” grant boundary was Tasmanian land. The space between the rectangular grant boundary and the circular shield was sorta neutral, with both sides having police authority. The shield was clear like our ships’ shields, instead of grey like the normal extraction shields, and every day for a week the people of Hobart got to see what happened when some idiot tried to fly through it.

What happened was that the front of the airplane stopped when it hit the shield, but the rest of the plane kept going until it hit the shield, too. The collision ended, and the remains of the plane -and pilot- slid down the shield to the ground in no-man’s land. The first ‘accident’ was caught by several private cameras, and after that the formal news agencies kept cameras on the shield all the time. They had clear video of all the other ‘accidents’.

How can you call it an accident when everyone smarter than a carrot knew what was going to happen? We told them our embassy was protected by a shield. Of course, one of the differences between a passing and failing CAP score was the ability to tell the truth, as well as the ability to trust people you knew didn’t lie. It was more of that integrity thing. If you didn’t have it yourself, you didn’t believe in it.

“I don’t see no shield, Jacko. They’re lying to us. I’ll show you.”

Anyway, Jack had some of the Moonbase engineers clear out the old industrial buildings -their materials and contents got digested for later use- and start putting up our own buildings. Meanwhile, they had a bunch of nanites start stabilizing the ground underneath the embassy surface. The goal there was to ensure that, even if the Sa’arm made it onto Tasmania, they wouldn’t be able to tunnel into the embassy.

Well, they probably could, but not without us knowing about it. If we had to, we could fight them in the tunnels.

While the embassy was getting set up, Jack also had some of our 3rd fleet people set up some more breeder reactors out on some of Uranus’ moons where they wouldn’t cause any trouble. Within a few months, those things were producing enough nuclear charges to supply anyone on Earth who wanted to stop dickheads from tunneling.

Oh, apparently the Australian Outback had the world’s largest deposits of Uranium. I think I knew that once, back in the dark ages when I was a serving officer in the US Navy. Very little of it had been mined because of environmental concerns, so it was all still there for the Sa’arm to use. Great.

Bass Strait got the first line of charges specifically designed for this, built to cause the maximum rock strata fragmentation -they called it ‘gravelling’- with minimum radioactive contamination. Oh, and size was important, too. The charges had to be big enough to gravel the surrounding area, but not so large that the line of charges cracked the planet’s crust and caused a fault line between Australia and Tasmania, with volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and all.

Although, if the Sa’arm were coming through tunnels even a new fault would be preferable. Would the lava flow through their tunnels and back to their hives?

It took over two hundred charges but when they set them off Tasmania was safe from tunneling too. Naturally, the Tazmanians bitched the whole time that we were placing those charges across the Bass Strait that if the Australians had kept their shit together, they could have made everyone’s graveling charges without coming to us. So? What’s your point? If Central Command had been able to keep their shit together, no one would have NEEDED any graveling charges.

After that most of the gravelling charges went to Asia for a long time. The Russians used thousands to help keep the dickheads out of the Urals, and the Chinese used thousands more to make an impenetrable barrier to tunneling, about a hundred miles wide from the Bay of Bengal to the high mountains of Bhutan.

That’s a fascinating story, I hope I get to talk to one of the Chinese soldiers who were there someday. Not that many of them survived, but there were a few. And that’s relative, of course, “a few survivors” from an army with more than a hundred million soldiers is still many millions of soldiers.

India and China both had concerns about invasions, and kept most of their armies close to their borders. India worried about Pakistan and China, while China worried about Viet Nam, India, the Dar-es-Salaam, Russia, and Korea. Us westerners always thought that if the Chinese weren’t such assholes they wouldn’t have needed to garrison their southern borders. India and Viet Nam weren’t the aggressors, there. China was.

Anyway, when India got landed on and immediately lost containment on the Sa’arm, they had to swallow their pride and ask for help, basically inviting the Chinese to invade. However, speed was important and there was no quick way to move troops through the Himalaya Mountains. That was the real reason there had never been a major war between India and China. Both nations had far too many people and needed more room, but their only point of contact was between their client states of Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, up in the Himalayas where modern mechanized warfare didn’t work.

China’s forces surged forward at all points. There were incidents, yes, but for the most part the Indian forces were headed south, too, and both sides had been given orders to not fight humans until this threat was over. Most of China’s mountain garrisons did little more than occupy the abandoned Indian positions.

The vast majority of the Chinese army had to go around, to the east, through Myanmar, which I still think of as “Burma”. Myanmar didn’t give China permission to go through their territory, and the Chinese didn’t ask. There were more incidents before the Chinese government got through to the Burmese that, yes, this was an invasion and yes, the Chinese would probably be staying when it was over, but the primary goal here was to stop the Sa’arm so either start moving west to help the Indians, or at least get the hell out of the way.

Fifty years before, the Chinese had used the Western consumer economies to build up their industry, and when the Confederacy came they started switching over to making war materials. Even more than before, I mean. They had always had large sections of their industry dedicated to the military, but now with the alien threat it became much more of their capacity. The Chinese had been stockpiling war materials almost as long as the Russians had.