Conquistadors!, page 30
“We do not know they have hostile designs on our country,” the President pointed out. “Or do you have some reason to fear otherwise?”
“They have vast power, that much is clear,” Vladimir said. “If they win, they can dominate us; if they lose, we’ll be left to face American wrath alone.”
“The Americans did everything in their power to support Ukraine,” the President said. “Everything short of sending their own troops. They lost.”
It was more like a draw, Yuri corrected, mentally. And when we consider just how much it cost us to eke out a stalemate ...
“I doubt we’re the only ones they’ve approached,” he said, instead. “If we don’t come to terms with them quickly, the Chinese might instead. Or the Poles. Or even the French.”
The words hung in the air. China might be an ally, at least on paper, but no one had any illusions about the relationship being based on anything other than a desperate need to balance the United States. China had designs on Russian territory – everyone knew it – and the invaders could easily help them take control. The more he thought about it, the more he feared it was quite possible. Hitting Taiwan would be hellishly risky, even if the Americans were too busy elsewhere to come to the island’s defence. The Chinese would risk far less if they went north instead.
His eyes narrowed as he studied the map. Poland was rearming with terrifying speed. Yuri didn’t believe the Poles would try to invade Russia – the two nations didn’t share a land border, save for the Kaliningrad enclave – but their growing military power put limits on Russia’s freedom to act. The French were even more unlikely enemies, on paper, yet France and Russia had had a handful of minor – and deniable – skirmishes in Africa. They were dreaming of their lost glory too, their political castes looking for distractions as their country rotted away from within. The fighting on the streets should be enough to keep them busy, but it wouldn’t be the first time a government fought a supposedly short victorious war to stem the tide of revolution. Nicholas II had nearly lost his throne in 1905 and gone on to lose it completely in 1917. Yuri liked to think he could have given the Tsar proper advice, if he’d lived back then ...
But then, he never listened to anyone anyway, he reflected. The Tsar’s brutal murder had been horrific, but far less than he deserved. And the motherland paid the price.
“The Chinese need them more than us,” Vladimir added, quietly. “They have good reason to dicker.”
Yuri couldn’t disagree. China and America had been trying to decouple their economies for years, but what little they’d done had come too late to prevent disaster when the American economy nose-dived, taking the Chinese economy down with it. Large parts of the Chinese economy had simply evaporated, the house of cards tumbling so rapidly that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Chinese had lost their jobs or would lose them in the coming weeks. The Chinese Government pretended high confidence – and was lying to its own people about just how bad things had become – but Yuri knew it was only a matter of time before the country fell apart. The government was shifting troops around frantically, getting ready to either start a war or suppress a revolution. But what would happen if the troops themselves could no longer be paid?
His earlier thoughts came back to haunt him. Nicolas II had never questioned the loyalty of his troops; his poorly-led, poorly-equipped and – in the end – betrayed troops. The Chinese knew better. If the government had to order troops onto the streets, they might easily turn their guns on their leaders instead. Or worse.
Vladimir pressed his point. “The navy looked at the problem of invading Taiwan and decided it would be one hell of a gamble,” he said. “It would be far more dangerous than a simple river crossing. But if the invaders clear the way, the Chinese could get an entire army on the ground fairly quickly. The terrain is shitty, but ...”
He shrugged, expressively. “We may not have much time to close the deal.”
The President looked at Yuri. “Do you agree?”
“The risks are great, but so are the rewards,” Yuri said. “The only other option is helping the Americans.”
“No,” Vladimir said.
Yuri kept his face under tight control. The invaders were relatively concentrated. Russia’s nuclear arsenal wasn’t as effective as Moscow claimed – far too many missiles and warheads were dangerously outdated – but they could still launch enough nuclear missiles into Texas to scorch the state from one end to the other, destroying the invaders and the American economy in a single blow. There were analysts in the Foreign Ministry insisting that was exactly what Russia should do, helping the Americans save their country while ensuring they’d need to spend years rebuilding their power. Who knew what Russia could do, if the Americans were distracted? They wouldn’t even be able to complain about Russian nukes striking their soil.
But we’d disarm ourselves, he thought. He had few illusions about how tricky it would be to replace the expended nukes, even if the Americans graciously offered to pay for them. Which they wouldn’t. The Chinese would have more freedom to push against Russia, if the threat of nuclear retaliation was reduced ... The military would never go along with it.
“The Americans are unlikely to be grateful,” he agreed. There was no point in playing out a losing hand. “But the question becomes ... can we make a proper alliance with the invaders, or will we become their serfs?”
He gritted his teeth. An alliance was one thing. Selling out for the best terms he could get, terms he had no way to enforce, was quite another. The invaders might be content to leave Russia, and her sphere of interest, alone ... or they might not. It was difficult to say. The internet was full of speculation, from the sensible to the downright insane, but the lack of hard data made it impossible to be sure of anything. If the invaders were from a very different world, even if they weren’t extraterrestrials, it might be impossible to guess at their motives. Or their capabilities.
“Alliances are based on mutual interests,” the President said. “They’ve certainly paid highly for this discussion, in advance.”
“They gave away American secrets, not theirs,” Yuri said. He’d given away American and European secrets before, using them as bargaining chips to convince his audience that Russia could be a better partner. “They had nothing to lose and much to gain by exposing enemy spies within our government.”
“They also proved they could read our signals,” the President added. “Giving that away could easily be taken as a sign of trust.”
Yuri doubted it. The invaders had launched a massive cyber-attack on America's electronic infrastructure. The sheer scale of the attack was clear proof their computer tech was at least an order of magnitude ahead of America’s, let alone the rest of the world. They’d hacked secure databases, including some that had been – supposedly – isolated from the internet ... it was obvious, just from the hacking spree, that they could crack modern encryption so rapidly the messages might as well have been sent in the clear. If they could do that to America, they could do it to Russia too. There was no point in trying to keep it a secret. They might as well have tried to cover up the night sky.
“If we make contact, and agree to an alliance, we might benefit,” the General said, summing up the argument. “If not, someone else might benefit too – at our expense.”
“We would also learn from them,” the President said. “If we looked tough, they might leave us alone.”
They might, Yuri thought. The risk of making an alliance was considerable – but so too was the risk of doing nothing. If someone else gets in ahead of us ...
The President looked at him. “Open contact,” he said. “Quietly. There’s no reason to let anyone know we’re making contact, not yet. See what they have to offer, and what they want in return, and then we can decide if we wish to take the plunge.”
His tone was light, but Yuri could hear the concern underneath. The President was far from stupid. He’d clawed his way to power in a world where the slightest mistake could leave you dead, or exiled, or rendered utterly powerless. The days of mass purges were long gone – Khrushchev deserved credit for that, if nothing else – but it was still dangerous to make a mistake. And yet, Russia was slowly sliding into the abyss. The war with Ukraine might have saved the nation, if it had been short and victorious, but it had been neither. The President needed to gamble, and yet if he failed the consequences would be severe. Yuri had never met anyone who believed the last President had committed suicide, and he doubted such naïveté existed. It certainly didn’t exist anywhere in Moscow.
“Yes,” he said. The President might already be considering him as a possible scapegoat, if the alliance went badly, but it wouldn’t last long. There was no way anyone would believe he’d acted alone. “I’ll see what they have to offer.”
“They wouldn’t be trying to make contact if they didn’t need us,” the General pointed out, lightly. “That says interesting things about them, doesn’t it?”
Chapter Thirty-One: Texas, USA, Timeline F (OTL)
You, Antonio Lopez thought to himself, are a fucking traitor.
He cursed under his breath – you never knew who might be listening these days – as he drove the giant hauler down the interstate, following the rest of the convoy as it headed north. His father had migrated to the United States years ago, raising a family of Hispanic-Americans and becoming, in so many ways, more American than the Americans. He’d never been entirely clear on why he’d left Mexico as a very young man, but his father’s love for his adopted country had been clear. He’d certainly never had any truck with identity politics and made damn sure the young Antonio had never been seduced by them either. And he’d been proud beyond words when Antonio had joined the army to serve his country, before coming back to work as a trucker. If the old man were still alive ...
Antonio gritted his teeth. The invaders and their quislings talked a good game, and he’d heard quite a few people praising the medical care they’d offered freely, but there’d been no mistaking the iron fist hidden inside the velvet glove. If he’d had a chance to fight ... there hadn’t been any chance, not when the invaders had come out of nowhere and seized the town before anyone could grab their weapons and fight back. It was humiliating to admit they’d been beaten, but they had. He’d told himself to wait for a chance to fight back and yet ... they’d put him to work. And they had his family.
It was infuriating. His family were being treated well, housed in a settlement thrown together to protect them from terrorists, but he knew full well they were hostages. A couple of truckers had vanished, abandoning their vehicles or simply driving them to the front lines to surrender their contents to friendly troops; their families had vanished too, vanished so completely no one knew what had happened. Antonio had wrestled with his conscience for the last few days, wondering if he was betraying his country by working for the invaders ... invaders who would happily murder his family if he stepped out of line. His wife, still pretty after three children; his two daughters and lone son ... what would happen to them, he asked himself, if he tried to fight back? The invaders were marginally more civilised than the Islamic State, but the bar wasn’t set very high. They had killed everyone who refused to collaborate ...
He cursed again and again as the convoy roared onwards. The invaders needed them to carry supplies, which would have been encouraging if he wasn’t the one driving the truck. It had been easy, back in the Sandbox, to condemn men who’d been intimidated into serving the terrorists, but here ... he swallowed, remembering an Iraqi who’d been forced to watch as terrorists raped his daughter right in front of him. The man had betrayed his American employers, and who could blame him? Antonio wondered what he would do, if the invaders raped one of his daughters and threatened to do the same to the other. Would he say no, and condemn his daughters to a horrific experience, or would he surrender? He honestly didn’t know what he’d do, if the threat was made explicit. It had been easier to say he wouldn’t surrender before the prospect of being forced to decide had suddenly become very real.
The convoy blasted past a small town, seemingly abandoned. Antonio guessed most of the locals were staying firmly indoors, trying not to be noticed by the invaders or the criminal gangs running riot on the far side of the border. Antonio cursed them too, wondering how many had been subverted by the invaders. The cartels had been smuggling people across the borders for years, often exploiting them ruthlessly on the way, and there was no reason why they wouldn’t work for the invaders. Bastards. They’d never given a damn about anything, save for money. God knew they’d made life harder for perfectly legal migrants such as his father. The less said about the trouble they’d caused for him, indirectly, the better.
The convoy slowed as it neared the waypoint, heading towards a service station in the middle of nowhere. The invaders had secured the place, then turned it over to a militia ... Antonio had no idea if the gun-toting losers had willingly betrayed their country or if their families were held hostage too, but it hardly mattered. There were normally dozens of trucks passing through, the drivers spending the night in seedy motels or at the back of their trucks, yet now it was almost deserted. The diner was open, but everything else looked closed. He couldn’t help feeling cold, despite the heat. The world had changed, in so many ways, even though it had only been three weeks since the invasion had begun. He was still reeling.
He parked, then scrambled down to join the rest of the truckers. A couple were heading off to catch a smoke; others were fuelling up or milling about, heading to the diner in hopes of getting something a little tastier than ration bars. The invaders were more advanced in many ways, Antonio had noted, but their ration bars made MREs look like a luxury food, something he would have sworn impossible. Eyes flickered from side to side, eying the distant – and empty – road. The invaders had cut down sharply on road traffic – they’d told everyone to stay off the roads unless they had permits – but their control was far from absolute. There were roving insurgents in the countryside, planting bombs and harassing collaborators ... willing or no. The truckers were normally armed – Antonio had made a practice of being armed at all times, even in places where carrying a gun could land you in jail – but the invaders had put a stop to that too. Bastards. They hadn’t exactly searched the occupied zone for guns – there were a lot of firearms in Texas – but they’d arrested everyone caught with a gun and taken them away. It was enough to make Antonio wonder if some of the more extreme rumours were true ...
Lots of shit being slung about, he thought, coldly. Crazy tales had always been part of the community. He’d told a few himself, all true ... from a certain point of view. We may never know the truth.
His heart sank as he surveyed the other truckers. Some would be planning trouble, he was sure; some would be working out how to fake their deaths, to get out of the occupied zone or become insurgents. Others ... some hated the government so much they’d sign up with anyone who promised to bring it down, something that had killed far too many of his distant relatives in Mexico. And some were too broken to care. He didn’t dare try to reach out to them, not now. His earlier thoughts returned to haunt him. You just didn’t know who might be listening.
He looked up as he heard an engine, spotting a small van as it drove into the roadside stop. It was tiny compared to the big trucks, not the sort of vehicle he’d expect to see outside the big cities. Something moved behind it, heading towards them ... motorcycles? He cursed under his breath. Some biker gangs were decent folk – he’d been a biker himself, when he’d been younger – and others were little better than thugs, cruising around trying to look tough. The van moved into the gap between two larger trucks ... ice ran down his spine as something dawned on him, a moment too late. He was halfway to the ground when the van exploded, the fireball tearing through the trucks and throwing waves of shrapnel all over the place. Truckers were caught in the debris, killed or wounded; other trucks exploded as sheets of fire followed the debris, a wash of heat so powerful he knew it would maim or kill anyone caught in the open. He forced himself to look up, wondering if he could get back to his truck, as the biker gang arrived ... no, not bikers. Insurgents. They unslung their weapons and opened fire, mowing down truckers and the diner staff with practiced ease. More explosions followed, shaking the ground. Antonio forced himself to lie still, cursing under his breath as automatic weapons fire echoed through the air. The insurgents were patriots, while he was a damned traitor. It made no difference, not to them, that he’d been forced to work for the invaders. They’d kill him, as mercilessly as he would have killed them if their places had been reversed. They were free to strike at the invaders, while he ...
The firing died away. He rolled over and forced himself to stand, keeping as low as he could. The scene was a nightmare. The trucks were burning merrily, dead bodies lying everywhere ... he shuddered as he saw a face he recognised, on a body that had been chewed to pieces by machine gun fire. They’d all been taken for collaborators and sentenced to death ... if there were any other survivors, he couldn’t see them. And the invaders might kill them just for surviving. They’d never believe their lives hadn’t been spared purposely.
Fuck. Antonio sagged, nearly falling to his knees. What the hell do I do now?
***
“Everything appears to be proceeding well,” Sally said, calmly.
James nodded, although he knew it wasn’t entirely true. The nuclear attack had failed so completely they hadn’t even noticed it was a nuclear attack, at least not until his operatives had passed on the word and recovery teams had examined the remainder of the enemy missiles. They’d been quite advanced by local standards, the techs had noted; they’d have been missed completely if the orbiting drones hadn’t been scanning constantly for potential threats, then blasted them out of the air before they got close enough to strike their targets. It was disturbing. James didn’t share the local taboo against nukes – the Protectorate had used nine in the Second Global War, and two more since then – and the fact the enemy government had risked a nuclear strike was clear proof the taboo was losing its force.
