Onslaught

by Chris James

  He’d never considered that something like this might happen. The modern Royal Navy had never really been about war. It was about rescuing people and helping with international relief efforts as sea levels rose. A feeling of profound strangeness pervaded him as he understood that a vast, new war was starting here, tonight, in the Mediterranean Sea, and this fleet and its crews were to be its first casualties.

  The Comms Officer spoke loudly: “Naples is launching ninety-six PeaceMakers which will be in theatre in three minutes.”

  “Total number of approaching hostiles?” the First Officer asked.

  The Warfare Officer replied: “Over three thousand now, but the SkyWatchers are picking up new waves emerging from Caliphate territory at the rate of five hundred a minute.”

  “The reinforcements from Naples should help, a little,” the First Officer said, with no hint of understatement.

  “Yes, Sir. Two hundred and fifty-six enemy machines are breaking formation to converge with the reinforcements,” the Warfare Officer said.

  The Captain said: “The situation is not yet hopeless. If the ship can maintain power, the lasers can continue firing indefinitely.”

  The Warfare Officer announced: “The Americans have engaged the second wave. Hostiles will be in range in thirty seconds.”

  The Captain answered: “Very well. Fire to automatic when ready.”

  Bernard monitored the power flows and diagnostics in the ship’s systems as it began firing the Sea Striker laser canons on the port side. His heart rate crept upwards when he realised that the Caliphate’s ACAs were getting very close to all of the ships, and the thousands more of them piling in could only lead to one conclusion.

  Comms called out: “Sir, the Jarvis’s defences have been breached.”

  “So what happens when one of those things does get through?”

  After a pause, the Comms Officer said: “The Jarvis has foundered. She’s gone.”

  “So quickly? How?” the Captain demanded.

  “Wait… Two of the ACAs got through… And expelled multiple smaller devices which appear to be some kind of mobile bomblet. New data is being fed into Horatio.”

  Bernard heard the Captain scoff, “I don’t need a computer to tell me—” and stopped abruptly as something outside crashed against the hull and the Argent creaked. The Captain shouted: “Damage?”

  Bernard felt the ship roll a little from the impact, but saw at once from the data on his screens that the cause was debris rather than ordinance. Nevertheless, the unnatural movement strengthened the fear in him that worse was to come. He heaved in a breath, trying, wanting, to remain professional and composed, just as Royal Navy sailors had been through the centuries when facing such a ‘tricky’ battle. He pushed thoughts of his family and friends back in England to one side, determined to meet his and his ship’s fate with a decorum of which the Senior Service could be proud.

  “Two Sea Striker canons disabled—”

  “Helm, bring us about. We need to bring the starboard canons to bear.”

  “Aye, Sir,” the Weapons Officer answered, before adding, “The Mississippi and Ronald Reagan have gone, Sir.”

  “Our own PeaceMakers are lasting mere seconds; they’re completely outgunned,” the First Officer said, horrified.

  “Sir, Captain Wexley is on Comms.”

  The voice of the Hyperion’s Captain filled the bridge: “Attention, all ships. It looks like the Americans have bought it. But there is a chance. I’ve set our AI to vary the Sea Striker shot coherence length. If we adjust—even fractionally—this value, it reduces the number of shots required to burn through these bloody things’ shielding. Each captain must instruct his ship’s super-AI system to make this adjustment, and keep at it so as not to give their AI a chance to catch up. Good luck!”

  “Do it,” the Captain of the Argent shouted at his Warfare Officer.

  Bernard analysed the operational data running across his screen and saw the number of laser shots required to knock an enemy machine out decrease by more than ten percent. A flash of desperate hope rose within him before vanishing when he realised it would make no difference given the thousands of hostiles gathering above the rapidly sinking NATO fleet.

  The Warfare Officer spoke: “Captain, Horatio is predicting that our Sea Strikers will be overwhelmed with targets in five, four, three, two, one—”

  Bernard jumped when loud clangs came from outside the ship. Unnerving click-clacking sounds followed. He heard the Captain shout, “Abandon sh—” which ended in a vast popping explosion. Bernard felt his head go forward into the screen in front of him.

  He blinked and gasped, realising he’d been unconscious for several seconds. Warm liquid ran down his face and his ears hurt. Flames crackled around him. Voices shouted, some in pain, some extolling escape, but the pressure damage to his eardrums added to his confusion, creating a sense of numbed distance. He pulled himself out of his chair and peered at the smoke and steam and fractured lights. His training told him to leave the ship via the aft section, so he took a step forward but fell over.

  Pain came to him with his senses, and again he heard the strange click-clacking of metal on metal. The sound faded, there came another vast popping noise, and the deck beneath him seemed to first move away, then instantly return to smash him hard in the face. The other voices stopped. Bernard pulled himself upright again. He knew he had eighty metres to cover to reach the ‘garage’ aft of the ship, but the pain screaming from his head and his leg told him this would not be possible. The ship listed to port, and surfaces which should have been vertical or horizontal now leaned to port disconcertingly. He limped and pulled himself out of the bridge area and into a corridor which led to the sleeping quarters and mess deck. After struggling for ten metres, he had to step over a crumpled body that he did not recognise. Then he heard the gentle sighing of seawater. Bernard turned back and stared in fascination as the water came towards him in a leisurely, almost comforting, surge. The ship groaned acceptance of its fate, and from the bridge area he heard hisses, crackles and metal shearing as the Argent sank.

  In an instinctive reaction, Bernard glanced above him and saw an access tube which, he recalled from his training, also led to an escape hatch, topside. The water swirled around his legs and chilled them.

  It brought the body of the Captain into the corridor, where his arm snagged on a bent flange, and the swirl made his legs appear to paddle as though he were swimming instead of dead.

  Bernard caught his breath when the water reached his waist, and he suddenly felt intense stinging from the injuries to his leg. The ship continued to list and the power went out, plunging Bernard into darkness. When this happened, part of his spirit rose up in a refusal to simply lie back and drown for England. His head stung and the bones in his face felt as though they were burning, but he told himself to count his blessings. He switched on the bright torch in his life vest and grabbed hold of a pipe among the dancing blue shadows. The Argent listed a few more degrees and the power of the surging water threatened to pull him away from the access tube. He dragged himself into it as the corridor filled with water.

  Bernard abruptly realised that the ship would soon turn turtle and his escape route would point downwards, towards the seabed. Ignoring the agony from his injuries, he pulled himself along the tube, which had now come almost horizontal. The water gurgled and rushed and swirled around and submerged him. He flipped open the mouthpiece of the tube he held and bit down a second before the sea engulfed his head. As long as he kept water out of his own respiratory system, the tube contained sufficient oxygen for thirty minutes under water.

  After what seemed like minutes instead of seconds, Bernard reached the escape hatch. His light led him to the lever. He broke the seal, slid the glass panel back, and pulled the lever with all his strength. The equalisation of water pressure when the hatch opened surprised him, and he chided himself for not realising the different pressures between the water flooding into the ship from above, an
d the water outside. He hung on to the lever for a moment, then when he judged it safe enough, with his one good leg he kicked himself outside the Argent.

  Bernard rolled into the cold blackness of the open sea as his ship finally turned over and began its last twisting journey to the seabed, some two thousand metres below. His light penetrated the water to create little more than a shimmer of deep blue around him. He could not establish which way was up, nor how far away the surface might be. He pulled the cord to inflate his life vest, and felt himself moving in a direction which he decided must be up. At the same time, he also felt the pull of his ship, and of his shipmates. He felt the wrench of five thousand other souls who this night had been dragged unwilling to a death they neither expected nor felt they deserved, merely due to the foibles and eccentricities of their political masters. For a few brief moments, as the Argent continued in one direction and he travelled in the opposite, he could almost touch the sense of a terrible, unjust sacrifice.

  Suddenly, he broke the surface. The swell was slight but enough initially to obscure his view of any fellow survivors. Bangs and explosions and the shrieks of ACAs filled the night as the waves tossed him hither and thither. He spat the breather from his mouth and it bobbed in the water on its lanyard. He gulped in breaths of real, fresh air for the first time in days, dazed that he should be on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea when so many of his shipmates had perished. His view changed as the swell lifted and lowered him, and at the high point, he saw orange fires on the horizon. In the sky, numerous streaks of light zoomed and flashed overhead, and he marvelled at the technology, lost in amazement first that he should have survived, and second that there could be ACAs with shielding capable of absorbing so much energy.

  Soon Bernard picked out cries and salutations from other survivors in the water, both near and far. Elation sparked inside him that he would live, to be first crushed by guilt, and then by the abrupt realisation that he might not survive after all. A flare burst overhead some distance away, above a life raft. It shone orange over the black and blue of the ocean, and when the swell lifted him, he saw a black shape swoop out from the sky and down to the life raft. There came an explosion and a truncated scream, and a gout of water leapt upwards. The life raft and its broken occupants fell and hit the water with loud slaps.

  Bernard saw more black shapes in the glow from the flare and realised that the Caliphate machines intended to leave no survivors. As quickly as he could, he pulled on the lanyard and bit down on the breathing device. With his other hand, he searched under his life vest and found the release valve. He twisted it and the air hissed out from the vest. He ducked underwater and silently thanked god that his arms were not injured. Despite the pain from the cracked bones in his face and the shredded skin on his leg, under the surface Able Seaman Bernard Rowley pulled himself down through the water and swam for his life.

  Chapter 10

  03.35 Tuesday 7 February 2062

  TURKISH ENGINEERING STUDENT Berat Kartal woke with a start when bright colours exploded in the darkness of sleep. He’d programmed the lens in his eye to alert him to a number of potential events, all of which were highly unlikely but each of which he had to know about at once if they actually happened.

  These events included natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and excessive flooding, and manmade catastrophes ranging from lost contact with the joint Chinese/US colony on Mars to noteworthy accidents which involved multiple deaths. Regarding Mars, speculation abounded as to what had happened to an unmanned supply ship with which contact had been lost the previous Thursday. Regarding accidents, Berat and many of his student friends speculated that the Boeing 828-600, the newest sub-orbital passenger aircraft used by several operators, was overdue for some kind of drama, as it still boasted an unblemished record after seven years of service, and even the Chinese A17 didn’t have that.

  Now, however, his lens told him that something violent and involving many deaths had happened in the Mediterranean. Groggy from the interrupted sleep, at first he couldn’t see the reason. With hard blinks of his eye, he nevertheless traced the cause back to a ‘What if?’ game he and his fellow students had played the previous year, concerning an imaginary surprise attack on India by the New Persian Caliphate. Such an attack, military strategy insisted, would first require the subjugation of Turkey. He wondered how the lens could be right. If true, this would completely upend the accepted world order.

  The Caliphate had existed for nearly all of Berat’s young life. The earliest recollections of his parents talking about the Second Caliph leapt from his memory. He recalled the tension when the New Persian Caliphate was still forming, and then his parents’ relief as the violence headed southwards, not north, and their conviction that Turkey would be safe. He remembered all the fuss at home and in school when China announced to the world that the establishment of the Caliphate had finally brought peace to a vast area that had suffered strife and bloodshed for decades.

  But in the last few years, local stresses and tensions had returned anew with the election of Yagiz Demir and his Allah Her Yerdedir party. Berat’s parents warned him to be careful to whom he voiced his opinions, and the previous semester at university had seen many arguments between lecturers and students concerning the direction in which Demir planned to take the country. Rumour of a referendum to accede to the Caliphate had gained much currency, and until this moment, represented the single issue of stress in Berat’s otherwise ordinary, mundane life.

  He got out of bed and padded to the bathroom. He looked past the data that the lens in his left eye scrolled at the front of his vision, to the mirror on the bathroom wall. The night’s stubble shadowed his small, round face. He would normally shave now, before going for a run. Then he would shower, eat a breakfast of bread and honey washed down with black tea, and spend ten or more hours researching for and writing his thesis. How could he keep to his normal routine now, after this news? Brown eyes stared back at him, doubting the data’s accuracy, questioning reality, suggesting he’d woken inside a dream and should now awake for real.

  He refocused back to the data and twitched small muscles around his eye to control the flow. One of the data feeds came from a clandestine bot which could listen in on government channels. This piece of software rarely worked well, and often not at all, but for fourth-year engineering students, Berat and his best friend Omer were proud of their little forbidden bot, even if it wasn’t very good. Now, however, Berat felt his heart slow as he willed the software to work properly. He read written fragments in English which mentioned a massive assault on the NATO naval battle group stationed in the Mediterranean, and then that thread faded for a few seconds before another came up which carried Turkish Army icons, but whose text was encrypted.

  He swore, left the bathroom and went to the small desk by the window of the living area. He tapped a screen in the surface of the desk. When the link went through, the data from the lens transferred to the screen, which gave Berat more options for investigation. It was a minor source of frustration that the human eye was managed by a mere six muscles, which with various blinking options limited how effectively data in the lens could be manipulated.

  He tapped and swiped at the screen, trying to expand the volume of feeds, trying to search for encryption key codes. But the bot’s performance became more erratic, and Berat’s heart rate increased. He licked his lips and the metallic saliva in his mouth tasted the way the fear in the pit of his stomach felt. Abruptly, the bot grabbed an unencrypted data packet and splashed the contents over the screen.

  “Sikme,” he swore as the translation software transformed a report from an Italian Reuters stringer in Rome. Berat saw the raw statistics of the Caliphate’s attack on the NATO ships and shivered. He looked at the time in the corner of the screen, and the digits read ‘03.44’. He told himself it must be a nightmare, he was in bed, sleeping in peace, and this was one of those very realistic dreams he sometimes had. But as hard as he tried to wake up
, too many other senses told him that he was already awake.

  Then, something more frightening happened: the bot latched on to local police force comms close to the demilitarised zone, the buffer between Turkey and the Caliphate. From the ancient Mesopotamian city of Mardin, local police reported thousands of machines descending from the sky, and then the comms ceased. Berat’s eyes widened as he watched the bot report similar urgent calls from towns and cities spanning a line almost four hundred kilometres from Mardin in the east to Iskenderun in the west. From his studies, Berat realised at once why the comms were ending so abruptly. He deduced that the Caliphate must be attacking his country with a massive wave of thousands of machines, to subdue it and protect the Caliphate’s northern flank before it invaded India. And their leading machines had one very important job: to disable Turkey’s communications.

  Berat withdrew the image on the screen to an overview map of the demilitarised zone and Turkey’s eastern rump. The pattern of disruption to comms took the form of a surge; a fractured, broken wave, as the bot struggled to track and collect the sudden explosion of data. Seconds later, a definitive undulation emerged from the east and swept across the land. Berat’s heart almost stopped. The mass of machines rode behind a leading edge of microwave disruption. To subdue his country, its electronic infrastructure must first be obliterated by powerful, precisely targeted microwave bursts to burn out the physical equipment on which so much of the virtual universe relied.

  With a deft flick of his left index finger, Berat removed the lens from his eye, understanding that it would soon be useless. He looked down at the screen in the desk and waited. A voice in his head urged him to use the last few seconds to contact and warn his parents in Istanbul and his university friends, scattered around the country on the winter study break. His left finger dabbed a comms icon. A blank message resolved and he began loading contacts. He dared to hope he was wrong, that he still slept in his bed and was dreaming these unthinkable things. As he entered his parents’ address, the screen went blank. Berat swore aloud again. Suddenly, the screen came back to life with: ‘No connection—use offline services?’ and Berat let out a scoff of frustration. He stepped back from the small desk and his throat constricted. He knew with certainty that the microwave pulses with which Caliphate forces blasted his country were burning through the very physical components that carried so much virtual traffic. These node burnouts would cripple infrastructure, render civic functions inoperable, and remove from the population the ability to know or find out what was happening.