TheEvanCat

The Ghost of Napoleon

Qajar Persia

The diplomatic flag of Mohammad Shah Qajar. A red background on the flag signifies wartime use, while a green background is for peacetime.

Official Name: Sublime State of Iran (دولت علیّه ایران – Dowlat-e Âliyye-ye Irân)

Leader: Mohammad Shah Qajar (محمد شاه قاجار)

History:

The Russo-Persian wars defined the perilous state of the Qajar dynasty at the turn of the 19th century. Territories in the Caucasus traditionally belonging to Iran had swapped hands at the end of the 18th century as the Georgian monarch Erekle II pledged allegiance to Russia instead of the Persians. Infuriated, the reigning monarch of Persia, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, declared war on the Russians in 1804. Despite early victories against the Russians, the Persians were quickly outmatched by superior Russian technology and military organization once advanced Tsarist weapons were shipped to the theater.

To this end, the Qajars tried to strike a deal with the British in exchange for assistance in the war. Yet they were denied, as their previous agreements only included help against French invasion, not Russian. Fath-Ali Shah turned to the French, striking a deal with Napoleon in 1807. French forces arrived in Iran to modernize and instruct the fledging Qajar tribal military, in exchange for direct support to a potential French invasion of British India. This invasion never happened, as the French were far more tied up in Europe than anticipated. In 1807, the French schemes to diplomatically pacify the Russians and focus on the British threat were disrupted when Napoleon reneged on agreements made at the Treaties of Tilsit.

Russia, believing that France was in violation of the treaty after its agreements about the Prussian monarchy fell through, was infuriated. No armistice with the Russians was ever signed, and the French continued to work with the Persian military to equip and train them with great haste. Napoleon recognized Fath-Ali Shah’s claims to Georgia in the Caucasus, keeping the Persians on good diplomatic terms while he prepared for continued war with Russia. In the Caucasus, the Perso-Russian War came to a standstill as small fronts of elite French-trained Iranian forces put up fierce resistance against Russian invaders.

In 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia once again, the situation for the Tsarist kingdom was dire. Napoleon burned down Moscow, sending the Russian state into panic. The Iranians retook large parts of Armenia and Azerbaijan, though were kept from Georgia and Dagestan in the north. A truce between the two countries was settled as the Iranians consolidated their gains and Russia caused great losses against Napoleon’s armies.

Fath-Ali Shah, bolstered by this victory, celebrated all things French. Bribing French diplomats and officials with lavish gifts, gold, and large tracts of land, he declared himself a Francophile and praised the character of the Franco-Persian alliance. French scientists, educators, generals, doctors, and bureaucratic professionals were encouraged to modernize all facets of Persian society. Upper-class Tehranis dressed like Parisians, adopting French slang and language as high fashion. The military changed out their tribal garb for Napoleonic uniforms, organizing their armies after the French.

With French influence in the Persian systems of bureaucracy, the Qajars consolidated their hold over Iran. Traditionally, the Persians lacked a form of centrally controlling the tribes in their borders. The concept of the gendarmerie, imported from France, rapidly improved the reach of the Qajars’ rule. The long arm of the law could now stretch from Tehran to the most remote corners of Persia, thanks to ruthlessly efficient gendarmes patrolling the rural areas by the 1820s. Systems of industrialization, capital employment, and trade turned the Persian Gulf into a series of boom towns. Fath-Ali Shah was, however, criticized for his tendency to allow very high shares of these companies to be owned by the French.

When Napoleon suffered his defeat in Europe and exiled to Elba, it was said that Fath-Ali Shah mourned. Diplomatic relations with the Bourbons were often tense, the Persians refusing to cooperate on much. French companies, weakened from the Empire’s decline, lost their grip to entrepreneurial Persians. Napoleon in Elba, of course, plotted his return to France and eventually succeeded: the Persians were happy to see their friend return, watching the anti-Napoleon coalition’s rout at Waterloo with great interest. They approached France with a proposition: an invasion into the underbelly of Russia utilizing their French-trained military, to take advantage of the postwar chaos. Napoleon agreed, publicly asserting Iranian rights to Georgia and Dagestan.

The Iranians continued their Francophile regime even after Napoleon's final defeat. Encouraged again by the decade-old proclamation by the Emperor of Europe, the Persians took to arms and invaded the Caucasus again in 1832. The war brought some territorial gains to the Persians but was severely hampered by the death of Fath-Ali Shah in October of 1834. His designated heir, Abbas Mirza, had passed away in 1833. His 24-year-old son, Mohammad, was selected to take the throne instead. Drama struck the Peacock Throne shortly after Fath-Ali Shah’s death, as his son Ali Mirza attempted to take the throne in defiance of his father’s choice of heir. Ali Mirza reigned for forty days before being deposed by a court loyalist to Fath-Ali Shah. Mohammad was crowned king: Mohammad Shah Qajar.

This turbulence had distracted the Persian military, who were left defending battle positions in the Caucasus for almost three months in the winter of 1834-1835. The Persians could ultimately not muster the momentum to push fully into Georgia and Dagestan and settled for an armistice slightly more beneficial than a white peace. Some territories were recaptured, but the goal of marching Persian troops into Tbilisi was not accomplished. Napoleon fell to the British coalition during his invasion of the United Kingdom shortly thereafter: the uncertainty put a pause to Persian military ambitions.

Mohammad Shah Qajar had lived his life almost entirely under the Francophile craze in Iran and was no different than his predecessor. Humiliated and disgraced French officers, who could not stand what was being done to France, were gladly accepted by the Qajar dynasty in Persia. French advisors were popular with Mohammad Shah, and he gladly took anyone he could get. With some leverage, Mohammad Shah permanently employed these French expatriates in exchange for loyalty to the Persian monarchy. Such activities concerned the former coalition in Europe, who would rapidly become concerned that the Shah sought to become a Napoleon of his own.

The grand aspirations of the Persian state, headed by the sickly but devoted Mohammad Shah, are enough to trigger interest from the European powers. Mohammad Shah eyes the east, the French advisors to the throne seeking to further Napoleon’s late plan of taking India from the British. Russia, too, is on edge for a Persian reinvasion of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Ottomans, always wary of their traditional rivals, are on guard against the Iranians.

Inside Iran, the Westernization is enough to drive fault lines between the traditional Shia beliefs and newer Western ideals. The old guard of clergy, bazaaris, and feudal lords eye the new “progressive” Shah with intense hesitation and resentment. At any time, he may feel bold enough to take away their traditional sources of wealth and power. The French foreigners in Tehran are replacing the Iranian tribes, angering those far from the capital. As Persia seeks to play the “great game” at the behest of its Francophile tendencies, many at home are not happy with the choice. How they choose to act out remains to be seen.

The Ghost of Napoleon

I flipped a coin and landed on Persia, so I'll probably have to get that together at some point.

N.E.O. - New Earth Oracle

HMS Fearless

Capitaine Fillion was busy puking her dinner out over the railing of the HMS Fearless when she sensed someone approaching from behind. She finished with the last of a dry heave, barely saving herself from collapsing over the thin chain barrier as the ship bounced over yet another whitecap in the cold, rough seas of the North Atlantic. Wiping her mouth and catching her breath, she shakily turned around to see Stabshauptmann Arthur Kohl chuckling at her as he lit a cigarette in the chilly air. Under combat conditions, smoking was technically not allowed on the ship’s exterior: Stabshauptmann Kohl simply pretended not to understand whenever a British sailor told him off for it.

“You don’t like the ocean?” he asked, prodding her. Fillion shook her head, sweeping hair out of her face and trying to tuck her bun back together.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t keep any food down, I can’t do anything!” she complained. The taste of vomit in her throat almost made her sick again, but she knew she had nothing left to throw up.

“We should be done soon. Maybe a day or two,” Kohl said. “The new order is being published: we’re scheduled to land at dawn on the twenty-seventh.”

“And getting shot at is preferable to sea sickness?” wearily asked Fillion.

“Seems to be for yourself,” chuckled Kohl.

Fillion scowled, but a sudden crack in the sky stopped her before she could say anything else. A pair of twin-engine jets with swept-back delta wings screamed across the cloudy grey sky, leaving behind a sonic boom that shook the Army officer to her vulnerable stomach. They raced west towards the coast, seeking targets that had been identified in the days prior to the invasion.

The Mirage fighters, painted a slick light grey and launched from the Charles de Gaulle carriers trailing behind the troop vessels in their own OTAN battlegroups. The Mirages were advanced fighter-bombers, derived from years of the Dassault company’s aviation developments. Painted green for the Armée de l’Air, they flew over thick jungles and vast deserts to deliver precision strikes against terrorists and insurgents in Vietnam or Mali. Painted grey for the Marine, they carried long-range missiles designed to hunt and kill both American and Soviet ships. These latter planes were carrier-borne, designed and customized specifically for the newest French carriers.

The Charles de Gaulle class, constructed quickly during the 1980s, represented the bleeding edge of France’s power projection capability. Weening from American naval might, OTAN required the Europeans to fill in the gaps. Almost immediately, the naval question was actioned by the high command. French military industry expedited planned designs of novel warships and carriers, feverishly pushing their shipyards to the limit with requests and funding for new hulls in an arms race against the Americans. A new emphasis on combined naval task forces emerged, the French Navy and the Royal Navy were now the combined backbone of OTAN’s mission force.

The Mirages didn’t have to fly far beyond the fleet to find what they were looking for: Canadian radar installations, built and jointly integrated into the American NORAD system, were built in the fringe tundra wastes of the east coast. With a good anti-radiation missile, these airspace defense radars were easy targets. The Mirages coasted for a few minutes, carefully validating their targets, before letting their payload loose and immediately breaking back east to return to their fleet. The missiles dropped from the wings, their own rocket engines bursting into a roaring flame, and raced towards their targets.

Like clockwork, the missiles hit their targets. On the ground, nobody was hurt: the sparsely populated bases maintained only a few watchstanders at most and far away from the physical location of the radars. But they saw the missiles impact, shattering the immaculately crafted and sensitive radomes in a careless ball of fire and shock. Millions of dollars of investment vaporized as the French missiles decimated the radars’ heavily engineered facilities. One by one, the Canadian air defense radars were disabled. In command centers across the country and in NORAD itself, phone lines begin to ring.

The Canadians knew that the Americans were coming, of course. The mobilization of dozens of ships was far too obvious to miss. The knockout of radar capabilities obscured the tactical movements of French jets as they sought to maneuver to more specific points of military significance. Controlled by technicians on ground, in the air, and in orbit, the Armée de l’Espace launched a simultaneous disruption attack against Canadian and American satellites. The risk of escalation was significant and the orders had come down from higher: no lethal force was authorized.

Reconnaissance satellites were targeted by lasers and optical blinding devices from French attack satellites. Aboard les Quais, Armée de l’Espace personnel mobilized for their first combat mission: they proved pivotally important in launching small spacecraft and shuttles posturing themselves to aggressively disrupt American satellites. In a game of strategic chicken, the manned French shuttles won and forced the adversary’s satellites to redirect orbits and camera views while the fleet crossed the Atlantic. The battle in orbit played out bloodlessly and harmlessly: even the laser dazzlers were tuned to not permanently damage equipment. The OTAN fleet below was clouded by the fog of war once more.

Capitaine Fillion watched the fighters sailing off over the horizon. The delta-wing fighters disappeared into the Atlantic’s misty fog. She sighed again, steadying herself against the barrier. Turning to Kohl, she gestured that they should both go inside. Her stomach demanded the outdoors, but she knew there was nothing left to do except sit and wait for the OTAN force to start their operations. It became a purgatory, stuck on a rocking ship with nothing to do. They watched movies on the berthing’s VCR player or played board games or worked out in the gym, but the soldiers could do nothing but wait.

The OTAN fleet neared the coast within the next twenty-four hours, its task forces splitting into the planned sequence of attack. The landing sites chosen in the east of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had access to highways and small airports to immediately facilitate the military convoy towards Quebec City and Montreal. The problem, however, was the appearance that running military equipment through the “Anglo” portions of Canada would violate the OTAN mandate on Quebec. This politically sensitive maneuver had been discussed at echelons far higher than Capitaine Fillion’s staff shop, and the plans had come back down.

Canada’s east was divided into two areas of responsibility: the primary area, encompassing all of Quebec, was led by French military commanders supporting the Quebecois government in exile. The second, a supporting area, would be under the direct control of British units. The British had been surprised by OTAN’s offer of dual command and took up the mantle in stride. As a result, the British were first off the ship to secure the land needed for the French. Once the British Army made its rounds and secured vital infrastructure, the French would merely need to offload at the landing sites and drive themselves into Quebec itself.

In a makeshift command post set up aboard the HMS Fearless, Fillion and Kohl stood and observed a digital map with blinking icons move slowly further towards the Canadian coast. Each icon was named and numbered according to their nationality. British battalions, a few French brigades, and supporting units from the Belgians and West Germans: OTAN solicited support from everyone to prove its multilateral commitment to Canadian security. It helped obfuscate the French desire to put its Quebecois allies back in charge in the province.

One by one, the units began moving. Clambering into big hovercraft and landing vessels, the first of the Royal Marines slipped away from their amphibious assault ships. Even below in the well deck of the Fearless, troops were piling into ships and speeding out of the stern to their formations. The map controller zoomed in, the GALILEO GPS transponders broadcasting their every move. Battalions were split into the more accurate location of companies, and then into the individual discretized landing craft. Their green icons blinked against the black screen, casting a sickly glow on the command post. Radio communication blared on speakers in the background.

The British reported their positions and sped forward under the cover of helicopter and close air support. The planes swept the coast, firing their afterburners and cracking sonic booms across the landscape. Helicopters kept watchful guard with thermal optics, seeking out their opposition. But nobody came to meet the British at the beach, despite their predictions, and the first Royal Marine vehicles rolled onto the rocky and pebbled beaches of New Brunswick without incident. They spread out and rolled slowly yet deliberately off the beach, infantry trailing behind in light jogs as they used their armored tracks for protection.

The landings continued unopposed all day, the Canadian military conspicuously absent from any suspected lines of contact. British formations maneuvered out to establish security as the rest of the OTAN troops landed. Capitaine Fillion led her own section onto the beach by mid-afternoon, with her landing craft dropping ramp at low tide. In a cargo truck towing a tent trailer, she sat in the passenger seat. The body armor and helmet she wore felt awkward and heavy: she hadn’t been to the field since she was a company commander back in France. In between her legs awkwardly balanced between her rucksack and the dashboard was her service rifle. Hopefully she didn’t need to fire it.

The truck grumbled, its engine thrumming as the truck drove off the landing craft and onto the beach. Ahead was a traffic lane marked by bright orange and pink panels with spray painted arrows directing them to the assembly point. A military policeman started to wave vehicles off with brightly lit batons, a glorified traffic cop in the early stages of a new war. On Fillion’s truck, a trailer held an OTAN command post that was to be set up later. Her driver, a young private, shifted the gears on the truck’s transmission and they both heard a loud hiss of air as the pneumatic brakes disengaged. Slowly, they rolled forward off the landing craft.

Around them, the beach looked like any other beach in France. Vibrant green forests lay ahead of them, a well-kept grassy park lay to their right. Military vehicles lined up in vacant parking lots, personnel running between them to check with each other. Troops in combat uniforms slinging rifles over their shoulder meandered about, performing their duties in the logistical chaos of an amphibious landing. Now on the beach, Fillion’s truck crunched the grey pebbles below its heavy-duty tires. As they traveled off the beachhead, a musing came to her. It didn’t look like a great place to take a family out, that’s for sure: the beach looked far too sharp and cold.

Precipice Of War: The Reboot of a Reboot

Hattieville, British Belize
August, 1955

The Mexican troops had taken two days to march the fifty kilometers up the east-west highway in Belize’s central corridor. The terrain was remarkably flat, almost textbook so, allowing Captain Lopez to spread the company out in even platoon wedge formations. The four platoons evenly split around the road, an ancient-looking paved throughfare with no frills beside a drainage ditch. It reminded the commander of a Napoleonic line battle: they were to march up the corridor in a straight line until they received contact with the British. Other companies in the battalion were methodically clearing sections of the road around Sibun Forest. Though they spaced themselves out, occasional radio communications yielded no significant news.

By the time the paratroopers marched carefully into Hattieville, a small village less than twenty kilometers from the capital, the only British they had seen were still the captured platoon in tow guarded by a detail from headquarters company. Lopez’s troops were ordered to halt in the town and set up a perimeter around it in the same sugarcane fields that they had snuck through at Belmopan. Villagers peered at the soldiers, saying nothing as they walked through the streets to investigate potential defensive positions. A general air of complacency had settled upon the company after their engagement with the British: they weren’t known for guerrilla tactics, so the lack of initial contact probably meant that there was nobody here either.

That assumption proved correct as the platoons settled into a ring around the village within an hour and Captain Lopez set up his command post in another farmer’s barn. The British prisoners were herded into an empty cattle pen with a waist-high fence. Not enough to stop an escape, but by now where was there to escape to for them? The commander sighed as Lieutenant Mun͂oz and First Sergeant Kan gathered around his map. “Based on the plan,” said Lopez, “we’re ahead of schedule. We didn’t have to fight through La Democracia or Churchyard. Or here, apparently.”

From a sleeve on his map case, he withdrew a blue poker chip with his company “A/2” written on it in marker. He placed it down on Hattieville, the chip almost completely covering the small town’s footprint on the map’s 1:50,000 scale. A handful of other poker chips, each for the battalion’s four companies and headquarters element, were placed on nearby towns. The battalion headquarters was set up at Belmopan with another company in the guard south to Santa Marta. One was screening the Sibun Forest directly to Lopez’s south while the fourth patrolled the Belize River.

“The problem,” he explained as he placed down red poker chips on Belize City and its suburbs, “is that the main effort of the armored brigade has not pushed down yet… at least according to the timetable.”

“Do we have communication with battalion headquarters,” asked First Sergeant Kan, arms crossed as he studiously examined the map.

“Reyes is working on it,” Mun͂oz replied. He gestured to the metallic antenna pieces that the radio operator was busy snapping together out of a green carrying case.

“Once we get in touch with them we can figure out where the hell those guys are,” Lopez explained. With a pen, he pointed out multiple British companies templated in the towns to the west of Belize City. “Until then we’re vulnerable. That’s why we’re in a security position here. Until I get word from battalion, I don’t want to advance any further until we’re back on the timetable.”

The company settled in for the day, repeating the waiting that they had experienced in Belmopan two days prior. They set up positions, rested a bit, and ate their canned rations at a leisurely pace. Non-commissioned officers whipped the paratroopers into improving their gun positions throughout the day, berating them for lacking camouflage, for not digging foxholes deep enough, or for taking off their uncomfortable steel helmets while they sat. “The Brits could be here at any minute!” they shouted to the grumbling soldiers. An engineer squad that had been attached to them for the operation milled about as they surveyed the town to prepare defenses.

Lopez had found some time to himself to finally sit for the first time that day, perching on a wooden crate in a barn that had been emptied of its animals. His boots and socks lay on the floor as he touched up the sore spots on his feet with a special medicated ointment. His wife scoured the markets in Puebla for the latest pharmaceutical treatments, even if most of them were bunk. He kept telling her that real medicine from an actual drugstore was fine, and that her protests of expense were mitigated by his officer’s salary. Regardless, the foot ointment seemed to work for him: he rarely developed blisters on the march.

Satisfied with his footcare, the commander put his socks and boots back on and stood up again. Dusk was approaching, the orange sun beginning to set below the jungle canopy beyond the town’s fields. Beautiful, but unnerving.

A sharp burst of automatic gunfire shocked the commander, nearly making him drop the helmet that he had been adjusting the leather straps on. From throughout the town, people started shouting. Personnel at the command post buckled up their helmets and ran off into the dimly lit streets as more people started yelling. First Sergeant Kan emerged from a nearby building, infuriated: “I swear to god I will kill a motherfucker if they just accidentally discharged!”

Another burst of gunfire made it clear that it wasn’t a careless private falling asleep on his weapon. Rifle fire followed it, paced gunshots ringing out in the still summer air. Reyes’s radio burst to life, crackling with a report from a platoon leader: “Contact! Five hundred meters, bearing north! Tracked vehicles!”

The gunfire picked up as Captain Lopez looked back to his First Sergeant. He commanded him to stay at the command post with the XO while he took off in a sprint towards the sound of the fighting. He ran through the dirt roads of Hattieville, ducking between farmhouses and jumping over its small wooden fences. He emerged at the edge of a field when he heard the snapping of bullets whizzing over his head. The commander swore and dove to the ground, hitting with a hard thud that knocked the wind out of him.

Fifty meters to his front, a Mexican soldier racked the charging handle on a steaming water-jacketed machine gun and let off another burst. It had been oriented almost directly upwards in a technique called plunging fire. Derived from the Great War, where machine guns were hidden in protected bunkers, plunging fire pointed he guns skyward and used them almost like indirect weapons. The hope here was that they could graze a greater area of the enemy position without frontally engaging armor.

“Sir!” called out someone. Captain Lopez rolled to his side to get a better look: the platoon sergeant was crouched behind a horse-drawn wagon with his carbine in hand. “Get over here, sir!”

Lopez crawled clumsily towards the cart. It had been many years since he had learned the basics of low crawling but the fundamentals were the same: stay low to the ground and don’t get up for any reason. He dragged himself across the dirty ground, smearing his uniform with mud and grass until he felt like he could get up into a kneel by the platoon sergeant. “Contact?” he asked redundantly. The platoon sergeant affirmed that they were taking fire.

“I heard tracked vehicles!” yelled Lopez over another round of gunfire. “Tanks?”

“Not tanks!” replied the platoon sergeant, to Lopez’s relief. “They’re personnel carriers! Take a look!”

The sergeant opened up a satchel on his hip and handed Lopez a pair of binoculars. He cautioned the commander to wait until the gunfire had gone over his head, holding down on his sleeve until he pushed him up. Lopez brought the field glasses to his eyes and hastily focused them on the black silhouettes in the distance. Two squat, boxy metal vehicles on treads slowly crawled along the road with a single machine gun belching fire. The outlines of British soldiers in their Tommy helmets were clearly visible over the lip of the armor. Lopez sat back down and handed the binoculars off.

“Personnel carriers,” he agreed with a sigh of relief. They looked like simple Bren carriers, supporting infantry vehicles that were armored only with thin steel armor. “Where is your weapons squad?”

“They have to move the projector,” the platoon sergeant laid out calmly. It had been positioned along the most likely enemy approach - to the west. The sergeant had seen action before and knew how to handle it. He had spent the first few minutes of the engagement calming down his overexcited lieutenant and how had to handle the commander’s questions. “I sent a team off to go get it! But they gotta come in closer first, they’re out of range. Four hundred meters and closing.”

“What’s the range on the grenade projector?”

“Three hundred!”

Lopez turned around to see a soldier with an awkwardly large tripod shuffling from behind a wooden house to their covered position. He laid down the heavy tripod into the ground and kicked it into the dirt, where its legs firmly made contact with the soil. “I’m sorry, sir!” he told the commander. “This is the only spot where we can move it easily! You and big sarge gotta move!”

“There’s a berm over there we can rush to,” the platoon sergeant said to his commander, again taking a fistful of fabric on the officer’s sleeve. He pointed to a pile of dirt that some farmer had left in his yard, complete with a shovel stuck spade-first into the soil. Lopez agreed and, after another exchange of gunfire, the pair rushed forward to the mound. They both hit the ground on their backs and rolled to see a pair of paratroopers rushing forward to the tripod with a device that looked like a potbelly stove.

With efforted grunts, the soldiers fitted the projector to the tripod behind the wagon. One of them dropped a rucksack to the ground that spilled out what looked like a dozen grenades on a cloth belt. The grenade projector had never been used in combat before, being a novel design brought about by the Mexican Army. It fed projectiles not dissimilar to their rifle grenades through a breech on the left side like a belt-fed machine gun. The operator depressed a trigger and cranked a handle on the right side to fire, reminding Lopez of old gatling guns from the 19th century.

With some effort to move the machine’s unlubricated mount, the gun crew adjusted the grenade projector as high as it would go: they could shoot out from behind the covered position and drop explosives down onto the enemy with the aid of a spotter. The gun’s tripod-man quickly withdrew a similar set of binoculars as Lopez’s platoon sergeant and poked his head up above the edge of cover. The British personnel carriers continued to approach: their doctrine was focused on dismounting infantry at the operational range of their own weapons, or around three hundred meters.

The enemy infantry were, in theory, protected against long range attacks until they could begin their fight. From his position, Lopez observed that the Mexican machine gun fire was not effective. What rounds did find their target often bounced off the armor of the carrier after losing a considerable amount of velocity over the distance. But the grenade projector was dialed in and sighted: the spotter raised his hand up in a “wait” signal. For a precious few moments, he held it there, then dropped it with the force of an axe chop. The grenade projector’s gunner squeezed the trigger and cranked the handle three times, feeling the force of three grenades burst out of the barrel.

The grenades spent seconds in the air, flying in a high arc over the heads of the Mexican firing line until they landed in a dispersed group just short of one of the British gun carriers. “Adjust fire! Add fifty!” screamed the spotter. The projector’s crew cranked another lever on the tripod mount and slowly inched the gun’s bore higher into the air.

“Ready!” the ammunition handler yelled. The spotter gave the signal again and another three grenades were cranked off. Each belt of ammunition held twenty, with every man in the projector team carrying a belt except for the ammo bearer, who had two. Eighty grenades to launch.

These projectiles were much more accurate, finishing their arc’s dive directly to the side of one personnel carrier. With a ferocious whipping motion, the track became broken and the carrier outran itself. What remained of the track’s length raced out behind the carrier and unspooled itself flat into the field. The vehicle stopped in its tracks as the British soldiers raced to jump over the sides of its hull and rush forward. Now the Mexican riflemen could engage more freely, firing at the British as they bounded forward. The machine gun in the platoon’s line continued to rake the area, now having been brought down to waist-level fire.

The enemy’s fire became much more intense as it became clear that the two Bren carriers were not the only enemy forces. Another platoon’s worth of figures emerged from the horizon, racing through the fields in an effort to flank the Mexican line. One of Lopez’s other platoons caught them, beginning an attack by fire through the crops to discourage their approach. Some of the British soldiers were hit by this incoming fire but continued nonetheless. In the distance, shrill whistled blasted. Two blasts: keep going.

The gunfire picked up, all parties engaging each other in rapid firefights. Bullets landed dangerously close to the Mexican defensive positions, some even finding their marks on exposed men. Medics from the command post emerged from behind the buildings with stretchers, sprinting through the fields to find the source of screaming wounded men. The smell of acrid gunpowder filled the air and gunfire rendered any attempt at communicating further than face-to-face impossible. The grenade projector finished off its first belt of ammunition and sat, barrel steaming, as the gunner handed his assistant another belt.

With the force of a truck, First Sergeant Kan emerged from the smoky air and slammed himself into the dirt berm where the commander was posted. “Sir!” he called out. “I’ve been looking for you. Casualties are coming to the collection point, XO is in charge back at the CP! What’s it looking like?”

“A lot of shooting,” Lopez answered simply. “We’re too pinned down to look!”

The explosions continued as the British advanced, slowly but surely. They were up against a company, pressing into a platoon to exploit its weak point. Captain Lopez rolled over from where he was watching the projector team launch another burst of grenades into the British line and told First Sergeant Kan: “Pull second platoon off the rear guard! Collapse third in to fill the circle and bring second’s weapons up front! And get weapons platoon, I want the AT rifles on those Bren carriers!”

Kan acknowledged the order and pushed off from the ground, racing back into the town. A bullet nipped at his heel and sprayed dirt into the air as he almost tripped in front of it. The commander endured the onslaught with the platoon sergeant for a few minutes before he made the decision to find the platoon leader. He asked the sergeant where his lieutenant was, and the answer was on the line.

Lopez kneeled down behind the berm until there was a lull in the speed of the gunfire and rushed into the crops. He clutched his carbine in front of him as he almost fell into the uneven planted rows of sugarcane that had been ripped to shreds by bullets flying through the plants. In the shade of the bush, he stumbled through piles of spent brass and emptied magazines, searching for the lieutenant on the line. Crouched low, Captain Lopez headed towards a machine gunner who was sawing through the engagement with his barrel red from heat. With a sucking noise coming from his boot, Lopez looked down and saw a pool of blood dragged off towards the town. Bloodied bandages and medical waste littered the scene. He continued forward.

Lopez’s lieutenant lay in the prone with a rifle squad, shouting furiously on the radio with Reyes back at the command point. He was directing fires, relaying locations of the enemy, and requesting support. He paused as he saw his commander treading carefully towards the line as a British round whipped by uncomfortably close. “Sir, we’re hitting them with all we’ve got. Where’s our support?”

“On the way, son, just keep it up.”

The second platoon arrived a few minutes later, rushing in to reinforce the position and plus up the defense. The sergeants directed their squads to fill in gaps, replace the wounded, and increase fire on where they thought the enemy could be. With this rush of personnel and weapons, the balance tilted. The British, now two hundred meters away, were stalled. In an attack, the common wisdom was that the attacker needed three-to-one odds on the defender. A company with additional mechanized assets pushed against a platoon could break through and penetrate the enemy lines, but not two platoons. The British had already suffered losses, both in personnel and equipment.

One short blast and a long blast of the whistle sounded. The British had been stuck, pinned down by the intense Mexican fire for an uncomfortable amount of time. The British commander had realized that, without momentum, they would be massacred. One by one, squad by squad, the British infantry covered their retreat and fell back. They rushed, bounding through the fields and disappearing back into the crops as they fell to a covered position. Captain Lopez’s company kept up the fire, shooting them in the back as they rushed off to the safety of distance. Through the crucible of rifle fire, the grenade projector, and the plunging fire of the Mexican machine guns, the British withdrew into the darkness.

As the British fell back, Captain Lopez stood up cautiously. The sounds and smells of battle were still harsh on his senses. He turned to his platoon leader and shook his head. "It's like the Great War all over again," he stated mournfully. The platoon leader frowned and stared at his boots. He had lost men. Captain Lopez knew that feeling all too well, and reached his hand out to the young officer's shoulder in a wordless moment of comfort. He left without continuing the conversation.

The Mexicans remained at arms for the next hour, scanning the night at full security in anticipation of a counterattack. But that counterattack never came, and Lopez slowly released the paratroopers back to their regular security posture. Second platoon was split up between first and forth at the north and east quadrants of the line, while third platoon kept up the back half of security. The wounded, of which there were fourteen, were taken back to the casualty collection point. Two men were killed in the skirmish. Captain Lopez, after sufficiently reorganizing the defensive line, finally trudged back to his command post as his watch struck midnight.

First Sergeant Kan and Lieutenant Mun͂oz were hard at work. Kan was tallying supplies, ammunition, and medical equipment used up and lost. He had both the supply sergeant and head medic at his beck and call to report on distributing the company’s supplies. Mun͂oz, meanwhile, was talking rapidly to his counterparts at battalion to report information and request resupply. Back at Belmopan, the battalion was receiving resupply by glider flights from Mexico proper. They would need to truck the supplies forward to deal with A Company’s engagement.

Lopez relieved Mun͂oz of his radio duty, telling the young lieutenant to go get some rest. The details of the resupply had been coordinated and motions were underway at Belmopan to load up and head out in the morning. The commander got onto the radio, specifically requesting an audience with the battalion commander from the adjutant.

“Sir,” Captain Lopez reported tiredly. “I’m sure you’ve heard the reports. We’re dug in for the night. What is your guidance for tomorrow?”

The battalion commander paused. “Hold fast, Captain. 2/a Brigada Blindada has begun their motor march. The Brits aren’t going to bother you anymore. Keep in contact: we’ll let you know when to march to Belize City.”

War Never Changes III: Annals of the East

<Snipped quote by ClocktowerEchos>

opinions on supermutants?

@Andreyich

Yonkers is an explicitly mentioned ghoul neighborhood/colony (ha ha, World War Z reference!) so I could see a Jacobstown-like settlement in or around it. Not that they would be too accepted downtown, as per standard human feelings about the mutants.

War Never Changes III: Annals of the East

@TheEvanCat Want to have any sort of lore overlap with the retcon now that Philly isn't a blank spot on the map? I'd definitely imagine they'd hear about this new religious wave over taking the area early on and especially once they got settled in.

@ClocktowerEchos

It'll probably get teased out in posts. The general idea would be an awareness of what's gone down there but a hesitancy to actively reach out. Too unpredictable.

I'm sure some of the ghouls you've kicked out will show up too... with less than stellar reviews.

War Never Changes III: Annals of the East

<Snipped quote by TheEvanCat>

Especially given how they literally didn't know up until this point.

Although in its defense, it probably never had to factor in "religious movements and spiritual awakenings" into stock market calculations.

@ClocktowerEchos

There will probably have to be slight retconning on my end - NYC has been formally where it's at since 2249. Philadelphia and the homies living there is pretty obviously a known quantity to them since it's so close.

War Never Changes III: Annals of the East

I'm sure The Economist is going to be plenty weirded out by a cult in Philly like a few days away.

War Never Changes III: Annals of the East

Port Newark, Newark

With a gloved hand, Clifford Smith carefully reached for the control panel of Generator #4. He turned a knob slowly to the left, its dial ticking down as it went down the percentages marked along its circumference. Generator #4’s whining quieted and the glow from inside dimmed. The bank of eight whirring fusion core generators were nestled side-by-side in a dimly lit concrete room underneath the old port administration building on the south side of Newark. There were once ten generators, each supplying power to the largest American prewar port on the East Coast. #3 and #8 were lost to time and disrepair, but the others could still produce a power output for the community that lived there.

Port Newark was an early settlement in the New York City metropolitan area after the war. It provided several benefits to wayward refugees: the military had hardened and secured the port against possible sabotage during the old world’s war with China, which offered protection from raiders and looters after the bombs fell. Indeed, a half dozen sentry bots bearing the faded orange and blue striped service mark of the US Coast Guard still patrolled outside the perimeter. Settlers broke open the mountains of shipping containers inside for their old world goods, hoping to find food and technology to survive.

The resulting settlement of mid-rise dwellings cut into shipping containers and ringed with scaffolding, balconies, and walkways, resembled something like a building under construction. But a fully functional community became fiercely independent and isolationist while the rest of the city burned in post-atomic chaos. The settlers of Port Newark fought with the city government for years, including skirmishing with the mighty General James Hastings. Eventually, however, after Hastings’s capture of Newark Airport and the encirclement of Port Newark by the SecDiv, the community acquiesced and was annexed. Their supply needs were alleviated, except for power.

Nuclear energy supplied by fusion reactors was common before the war. Every office or industrial park had a fusion generator or two, much like the ones Cliff was tweaking in the port administration building. These were great answers to saving money on electrical bills, as generating your own power was always preferable to paying the grid. But they simply were not able to provide energy robustly across an entire settlement. Port Newark was a slight exception, with its massive industrial power generation needs translated to the lesser concerns of domestic heat and lighting for its denizens in makeshift container homes. Despite this, they suffered frequent blackouts for over a hundred years prior to their annexation.

Cliff finished his work, stepping into the generator room’s antechamber to strip off his gloves and lab coat before washing his hands in a sink and returning to the control room. His assistant, Anna Pawlowski, sat at a computer desk with the green monitor illuminating her face. “The reactivity has gone down to appropriate levels,” she assessed calmly. “We should be good for the night.”

Cliff stepped over to her, passing shelves and bins littered with tools and spare parts and drained fusion cores. It was a messy co-use space, often occupied by technicians trying to repair old world pieces to keep the ragged generators running. From over her shoulder, Cliff saw the data streams on the RobCo terminal’s ghastly screen. All according to plan. Every day, they had to manually tweak the reactors to provide as much electricity as the settlement needed. No more, no less. Running the fusion cores at a hundred percent efficiency all the time would drain them faster than turning down the reactivity at night when less power was needed.

Cliff nodded at Anna: “Alright. You good from here?” he asked. His tone of voice was professional, like a teacher to a student.

“It should be,” she replied as she tapped the screen. “According to our data, 59% fusion rate should suffice for the night. It’s not quite winter, the heating in most units won’t kick on tonight.”

“Good work, then,” said her mentor. Cliff smiled. She was learning quickly. He had been letting her make the calls on night shift reactor decisions: he still manually changed the settings on the generators for now, but planned on disconnecting one from the Port Newark grid and giving her a class later.

“Yep. You enjoy your night, Cliff,” said Anna. Keeping an eye on the computer, she leaned over to her briefcase and unlocked it to withdraw a book she had been reading. The Big Book of Science: a classic textbook. It looked new, lacking the yellowed paper and peeling covers of prewar books. Cliff knew the Wasteland Aid Society had just come to town with their portable printing press to deliver some books to the school.

He bid her a good night and headed for the exit. Dimly illuminated by an emergency sign that had long since been relevant, Cliff dressed himself in an overcoat and fedora. It was getting cooler out there and Cliff had never liked the cold. The man pushed open the door to the building and stepped outside. The streets of Port Newark were lit only sparsely: partially because of the power restrictions and partially because the streetlamps had long since been broken. He made his walk towards the stacks of shipping containers where he now lived. Following a winding path through “streets” and “avenues”, Cliff reached the stairs up to his residence. His container was stacked on top of four others and was quite the workout to walk to.

Cliff reached his place, swinging the wooden door open to the same container that he came back to every day. It was a “double-wide”; two containers with a wall cut out between them and supports added in. The interior was almost entirely plywood, with “rooms” made from partitions and the exterior walls stuffed with improvised insulation held behind the simple boards. A window had been cut out to the walkway to let in light. A meager kitchen space, bathroom with improvised plumbing, and bedroom were all he had. Humming a tune, Cliff turned on his radio next to the window and reached into his refrigerator to find something to cook. Squirrel stew it was. Cliff went to bed early that night.

He awoke to a knock on the door earlier than his alarm. The man grumbled, rolling over on his twin-sized mattress to check the clock hung crookedly on his wall. 7:12 AM? He usually woke up at eight to get ready for work. Grumbling to himself, Cliff put on some decent clothes and walked his way towards the entrance to his home. He opened the door and felt his heart sink to his stomach. Standing there in the dawn’s light was a man he had not seen in five years: a former colleague named Arthur Morales.

“Can I come in, Cliff?” asked Arthur plainly. Cliff couldn’t answer the question, staring in confusion at the man who had come all the way from Manhattan to visit him.

“Arthur?” he asked, shocked. “What? I? It’s been years.”

“I know, I know,” said Arthur with a hint of solemn regret. “And I apologize. We’ve done you dirty. But I hope you know I never wanted it to be that way.”

“It took you five years to apologize?” Cliff asked, his shock turning to frustration. His hand clenched around the door handle.

“Listen, Cliff, let me in,” pleaded Arthur. “I can explain.”

“You better,” said Cliff through gritted teeth. He stepped away from the door, motioning for Arthur to come in and sit on his ancient and stained sofa. The man, dressed in a grey suit, obliged and sat wordlessly while Arthur came over with a porcelain cup of coffee from his counter. He didn’t offer any to the visitor.

“NucDiv sent me with a job offer,” Arthur explained.

Cliff cocked his head, gripping the coffee mug in his hand. NucDiv had fired him so many years ago. They fired him with, as the manager said, “extreme prejudice.” They never would have wanted him back in a hundred years.

“What the fuck, Arthur?”

“I… Well, we… We know it wasn’t your fault,” said Arthur as he wringed his hands together.

“Then why did you do that to me?”

Cliff had worked for NucDiv before. He hadn’t always been in Port Newark. A long time ago, he had been born in the Bronx and was brought up through the Wasteland Aid Society’s schools for technology and science in the borough. Clearly talented, NucDiv hired him on as a nuclear engineer for a variety of projects. Cliff ran reactors for NucDiv in the Bronx until a fateful day when a radiation storm had overwhelmed the cooling units on a fusion reactor. There was an explosion. An entire building was leveled. The manager told him people had died. He was brought before the NucDiv supervisors, berated for his role, and fired. Cliff was suddenly left homeless and jobless. He lost everything.

“I tried to tell them. It was the radstorm, not you. But they didn’t listen,” explained Arthur. He frowned. “The Council wanted blood.”

“I blew up a building, Arthur!” exclaimed Cliff. “And I killed Honda. They said he turned into a ghoul in the core.”

“Well… no.”

Cliff’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Honda was evacuated and saved a week later. We pumped pretty much our entire stock of Rad-X and RadAway into him, but he lived. His hair all fell out and he can’t run marathons like he used to, but he’s alive. NucDiv thought he was dead at the time… not sure why. He was in Bellevue the entire time getting worked on by the Society.”

“So… then…” Cliff sat the cup down angrily. “This was all for nothing?”

Arthur shook his head. “The Council wouldn’t let us out of their microscope. You must understand. We were shut down in the Bronx, we had to use fission reactors for fuck’s sake. And I set you up here! I knew a position was open in Port Newark and I got someone to hire you. It sucks, yeah, but you were starving on the street.”

Cliff narrowed his eyes at Arthur. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t push you off my balcony. Make it look like you tripped.”

“Caps,” sighed Arthur. “Lots of them.”

He reached carefully for his brown leather briefcase and unclasped it. With a deliberate motion, he turned it around and set it down on Cliff’s coffee table. Inside, Cliff couldn’t even count the number of blue Quantum caps inside. Each cap, popped from a Nuka Cola Quantum, was officially recognized as worth one hundred regular caps. An entire system of denominations had developed in New York City as the financial system made reforms to deal with the increasing amount of economic activity. It was easily a small fortune staring him in right in the face. All courtesy of the division that had scorned him so many years ago.

Cliff’s mood changed from anger to confusion again. “What do you want me to do? I don’t get it.”

Arthur left the briefcase on the table and clasped his hands back in his lap. “The Economist made a publication the other day. It was sent straight from the Council to NucDiv. They want us to go reactivate Indian Point.”

Indian Point, as many in the city knew, used to power New York. Featuring an advanced, high-output fusion reactor, it was the pinnacle of American nuclear engineering. At the center, a system of “toroidal containment cells” – tokomaks renamed by the government because the sounded “too Communist for domestic use” – provided unimaginable amounts of energy to the entire region. Indian Point had been secured by SecDiv, but nobody had entered the facility since the war. It was dormant, ready to go, and waiting for someone to turn it back on.

It was no secret that New York had an energy problem. Port Newark was no exception to what many boroughs and neighborhoods faced. An assortment of small generators both fusion and fission simply couldn’t join together in an ad hoc electrical grid with enough energy to power the city’s ambitions. As the Council mulled expansion northward and eastward on the Long Island Sound, it became clear that resources were going to be the limitation on this growth. Indian Point was key to unlocking the full potential of the city’s systems. It was even hypothesized that The Economist could use this to fully interface with the computer networks and automated functions that prewar New York thrived from.

“Why me?” said Cliff simply.

“We know you’re the best. You ran that plant well. You run this plant well. We know you’ve studied toroidal containment cells. And most importantly, we know it was you who stopped the Bronx disaster from wiping out an entire borough.”

Arthur stood up from the couch and smoothed out his suit jacket. He left the briefcase on the table. “I know there’s a lot going through your head right now,” he said reassuringly. “NucDiv is sending a courier next week to take your answer back to the office. It’s a simple yes or no. But if it’s a yes, you’ll need to sort out your affairs. Find someone else to run Port Newark while you’re gone. Goodbye for now, Cliff.”

Arthur walked towards the door while Cliff stared wordlessly. Arthur nodded at his former colleague and excused himself to the balcony. Cliff waited for the door to close and the figure of the NucDiv man to descend the stairs in front of his home before turning his eyes to the briefcase full of caps. The Quantum caps glowed a faint blue in the dimness of his sitting space, as if to lure him further in. Cliff shook his head and closed his eyes, cursing the universe that had ruined his life for the last half decade before suddenly deciding to give him a second chance.

He made up his mind as he sat wordlessly eating a small breakfast. Anna would need to get trained on Port Newark’s fusion generators. The crash course would have to begin that day.

Our World in Turmoil: Revamped

Kaesong, Republic of Korea
March, 2040

Inside a pit lined with concrete barriers on all four sides, a row of artillery shells had been stacked neatly in the middle. One on top of the other, these artillery shells were hand placed by a pair of men in bright yellow exoskeletons. One of the two held a bundle of half a dozen shells in his arms like comically oversized firewood while the second stacked each one gently on top of the other. A row of rounds twenty-long and stacked two-high had been carefully placed down after a careful few minutes of work by the mechanically-assisted workers.

Outside, a group of figured huddled around a folding table where a soldier in a sage green digital camouflage uniform carefully jotted down calculations on a sheet of paper. He punched in numbers to a calculator on his cell phone according to an equation on a laminated card in front of him. On his head was a lazily perched black ballcap that read “Explosive Ordnance Disposal.” An old civilian next to him in a high-visibility vest studied the EOD soldier’s equations carefully. After some quick math checking, the civilian gave the EOD soldier a thumbs up. His demolitions calculations were good for the ordnance in the pit.

For another twenty minutes, the EOD soldier went back to his waiting truck and withdrew all the tools he needed for the operation. Packages of C4 explosive in neat blocks, sandbags, and blasting caps for initiation. They wordlessly retrieved their kit from the seats of the armored car: plate carriers, helmets, eye protection, and ear protection. Munitions disposal at the pit was a routine operation, but safety always came first when working with explosives. Under the watch of their safety inspectors, the EOD soldiers got to work placing blocks of C4 in carefully measured amounts along the line of ordnance. Sandbags were emplaced carefully to help direct the blast.

After a once-over by the safety inspectors, the EOD soldiers trudged their way through on a path leading up a slight hill to a concrete bunker a hundred meters away. One of them unspooled a shock tube spool behind him as he walked up the dusty slope until he reached the bunker. A civilian, the range manger, was leaning up against the bunker and nodded as the EOD soldiers reached him. He checked off once more on the initiator before the soldiers and civilians herded themselves into the cramped bunker. Inside, they all put on their ear protection and sat down on wooden benches behind the ballistic glass window.

The range manager, Mister Yim Nam-gi, was an old veteran of the Korean Army engineers and an old hand with explosives. While he had retired before the war, he was brought back in at his former rank of Lieutenant Colonel as part of Korea’s general mobilization. He ran a munitions depot in Chuncheon during the war, behind the front lines but close enough to see combat with North Korean infiltrators seeking to disrupt supply lines. He did his job and hung up the uniform shortly thereafter. Upon his second retirement in 2033, Mister Yim was offered a special job with the Ministry of Unification.

He had worked in Kaesong since 2034, overseeing the Ministry’s largest munitions disposal facility. Located on the outskirts of the town’s old industrial district where environmental studies had determined that the land wasn’t fit for pollution rehabilitation, the government had deemed it an acceptable spot for the detonation of millions of tons of bombs and ammunition. Mister Yim managed the throughput and destruction of large depots of the former KPA’s stockpiled ammunition. Many facilities, often underground and heavily camouflaged, were still being located nearly a decade after the war. Their tanks, shells, and bullets mostly came to Kaesong to be destroyed.

With a quick call to the main control center, they requested a blast window. One of the EOD soldiers pulled the initiator from it housing and grasped his hand around the plunger. With a practiced shout, he yelled “fire in the hole!” three times before depressing the plunger into the tube. Instantly, a jolt of electricity was sent through the shock tube down the hill and into the blasting caps nestled inside the C4. All of them detonated flawlessly, the stockpile bursting into a gigantic ball of flame shooting up into the air. The shockwave, mostly contained by the concrete pit, still washed over the edges and broke up against the bunker where Mister Yim waited out the blast. An instant later, a trickle of dirt and sand rained down on top of their roof.

After a moment to check if all the explosives had properly detonated, the EOD soldier yelled out “all clear!” to Mister Yim. The range manager and his civilian cadre emerged from the bunker and thanked the EOD soldiers. They were already starting to pack up their equipment and collect the dunnage from their explosives: they had other ranges to go to and more explosives to dispose of. One of the safety inspectors would stay on site to make sure all of the debris was cleaned up while Mister Yim bid the soldiers farewell and walked out of the range.

Down the dirt road and past the gate where an EOD soldier stood guard, Mister Yim’s SUV waited. Out here in the north, especially in the rugged terrain of the hills around Kaesong, SUVs and pickup trucks were a favorite of Korean government workers. His grandkids, urbanites in Seoul, were driving tiny cars or not even owning a vehicle at all. They didn’t like the outdoors much either, he found; nobody ever wanted to go camping with grandpa. Maybe he was old, but the feeling of hopping into his two-door truck and flying down the bumpy dirt roads of Kaesong was liberating to him.

The five minute drive back to the command post passed by a flurry of activity. A train bearing munitions from the far north, a former KPA munitions depot south of the Yalu, had just arrived. Army trucks loaded with stacks of bombs and shells were crowding reservations at the Kaesong disposal site’s ranges. His staff were working overtime to get through the rush: none of the Army commanders wanted to store KPA ammunition in their depots for an extended period, as they all had their own concerns to manage in garrison. The government, too, would rather not have to deal with storing old captured ammo when their budget was on the line.

Mister Yim wheeled his SUV into the gravel parking lot of the command center, the crunching of gravel underneath his heavy-duty tires drowning out the electric whining of his truck’s engine. He cut it off after pulling into his parking spot with a distinctly marked yellow curb: “DIRECTOR.” He emerged from the truck and stretched his legs, arthritis be damned, before heading through the headquarters building and up to his operations center. Inside, an innocuous group of old civilians just like him were sitting around typing on computers or talking on the phone. Each of them had their own sections of range to report on and manage, all feeding information to a central registry of what came in and what was destroyed.

Mister Yim greeted each one of them with a crisp good morning, instinctively heading over to the coffee machine in the corner. A full pot had been brewed by one of the other civilians and he poured a cup into his thermos. Another quirk of an office filled with old retirees: the smart coffeemaker that recognized an individual by facial identification and prepared a custom mix had been replaced by an industrial-sized pot of steaming black coffee. With his priorities in line, Mister Yim redirected himself to the adjacent office where all munitions were tallied up on a spreadsheet projected to a monitor on the wall.

“Mister Yim!” came a familiar voice, speaking in accented English. As the range manager turned a corner, he nearly ran into Suzie Grimm in her characteristic khaki photographer’s vest. Velcroed to the front was the baby-blue crest of the United Nations. Despite her name, Suzie was one of the most cheerful Germans that Mister Yim had ever met. With no shortage of chatter, Suzie was eager to keep up with the goings-on of the facility. To be fair, it was her job: Suzie was the appointed UN inspector for the destruction of excess war armament in Kaesong. “How was it? You haven’t been to a range in a while, right?”

“I always think it’s fun,” Mister Yim grumbled, “but it’s a lot more of a pain in the ass than I remember. You know, back in my d-“

“Yeah, yeah, back in your day you used to blow everything up you saw wearing shorts and a t-shirt,” Suzie finished. She had heard the old man’s ramblings before. “But that’s terribly unsafe,” she said as she wagged her finger.

Mister Yim rolled his eyes. That’s just what he had grown up with in his old Korean Army days in the early 2000s. There was word back then that robots would replace humans for demolitions tasks precisely due to their propensity to do dangerous things like that, but nobody had quite been able to make a machine that replicated the human touch when it came to explosives handling.

“So anyways, how many was that?” she asked. “I mean, I’m sure the report will come in eventually. But I figure I’ll just update the sheet while you’re here.”

“Forty rounds of 152mm howitzer shells… M-1985 type,” Mister Yim rattled off, referring to the artillery rounds fired out of the KPA’s copy of a towed Soviet howitzer. They were everywhere in the underground facilities, portable enough to be trucked or rolled through incredibly restrictive terrain and housed in compact bunkers. Many were left behind by the KPA’s collapse and even interrogated veterans of the war had no idea where all the underground bunkers were.

The greatest fear of the military and the government were that KPA holdouts, communist sympathizers, and other disaffected northern Koreans could find and use these weapons to harass Korean Army soldiers stationed in the north. Incidents involving small arms and IED attacks were uncommon but not unheard of, but access to heavier weaponry like howitzers and tanks could cause dramatic casualties in a region already struggling under the weight of North Korea’s collapse. Mister Yim set his coffee down as Suzie went into the spreadsheet on the screen with her laptop and quickly changed the numbers. All of the data was sent to a weekly presentation to UN officials about the process of disarmament.

She finished quickly: Suzie had finished her degree in computer science in Germany, accepting a scholarship to work with the German government in exchange for tuition money. Her work later found herself taking an assignment to Korea as a “data analyst” for the UN mission there. Somewhat to her chagrin, data analysis often turned out to be updating a spreadsheet for other people to draw conclusions from. But it paid well for a new university graduate and gave her plenty of time to explore Korea. She had already submitted a leave packet for the next week so she could go to Seoul with her boyfriend for a concert.

Before Suzie could reengage Mister Yim in another bout of conversation, another boom sounded in the distance as another cache of munitions was disposed of. The windows of the thickly built headquarters facility rattled slightly and after a few minutes a phone went off in the other room. Mister Yim returned to his regular office, brushing past another official who had jotted down a new number of munitions that had been detonated: apparently the range officer had just decided to call his friend in the headquarters instead of report to Suzie directly.

So Mister Yim sat down at his desk and set his coffee aside once more, sighing as he leaned his sore back against the lumbar support of his office chair. The fingerprint sensor embedded within his mouse button instantly unlocked the computer for him, displaying a stock government wallpaper and two dozen notifications on his email client. With a sigh, he clicked open the window and checked his email. Mister Yim shook his head slightly and took another sip of the hot coffee. Explosives might be boring nowadays, but email and desk work was even more so. But what is a government without paperwork?