Chapter 38
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Chapter 38
Ulysses Kobold’s death came as a massive shock to the Empire of Drakia.
While an older man, he had been in good health and it was anticipated that he would remain in power for another decade and a half at least- likely quite a bit longer. In the hopes of avoiding another power struggle such as the one that had followed Stoker’s death, the second supreme leader of Drakia had publicly designated a successor before his death- General Kenneth Swadling, a fellow career soldier and long-time personal friend, as well as a distant cousin of Kobold’s. Swadling promptly assumed power, not releasing the news of the other man’s death until he felt that he was securely positioned in Aurica. He then delivered a televised address in which he proclaimed that Ulysses Kobold was to become “Eternal Polemarch” of the Empire, joining Stoker in perpetual office, and that Swadling himself was assuming the office of “Dictator-for-life” in homage to Julius Caesar. The new Dictator-for-life was a moderate Societist like his predecessor, determined to preserve the peace while the Pact of Blood waited for the Alliance for Democracy to slide into the inevitable decay and weakness that its political and economic system would surely engender. His administration began as a continuation of the previous one.
It lasted all of six weeks.
The Militarists had been swelling in numbers as new generations of radicalized Agoge graduates reached adulthood and rose through the ranks of the military and the state. They were true believers in the Societist ideology of “might makes right”, they had been raised to expect the coming of the Final Society all their lives, and they were frustrated by an establishment that held them back from the victories they believed rightfully belonged to them. They considered world conquest their duty, both obligatory and achievable, and were convinced a war with the Alliance was not just inevitable but necessary. While the Eternal Polemarch had done what he could to reign them in and keep them from doing too much damage, favoring “Rationalists” who shared his more pragmatic outlook for promotion, the Militarists were a generational phenomenon and they made up the overwhelming majority of the lower ranks in the Imperial armed forces. When the movement struck against Swadling it did so in the form of a junior officers’ coup aided by a trio of senior commanders who hoped to use the coup as a vehicle to take power themselves. Instead the Militarists turned on them once the Dictator-for-life was out of the way, and it was Colonel Jeremy Dart who secured control over the state as “Archon”.
Archon Jeremy Dart was thirteen when he first saw "combat" massacring Turkish civilians at the tail end of the Second Draco-American War, and he was in his forties by the time he took power. It was this picture of him as a young man that he insisted the Bureau of Propaganda use, however.
Dart was a fanatic but not a Homo Drakensis and as a student in the Agoge he had served in an auxiliary capacity during the Second Draco-American War. He had seen for himself that Drakia’s enemies were dangerous and was determined to destroy them before they could destroy the Empire. The Archon considered himself a hard man capable of making the hard decisions and sacrifices that the Noble Race needed to bring about the Final Society. He believed that once Societism embraced the whole world Drakia’s internal problems- like the increasing dissatisfaction of the Honorary White Citizens- would largely resolve themselves and that it would be possible to begin the Societist quest towards eugenic apotheosis in earnest.
Standing in his way was the Alliance for Democracy.
In 1980 the Alliance embraced ~1.8 billion people (the Earth had 3.3 billion total), the majority of the world’s economy, and had a presence on every continent other than Africa. It was a globalized, interconnected, cosmopolitan, loose confederation of allied countries pushing the forefront of technological progress and flirting with the first stages of transhumanism. It had Lunar colonies whose populations were in the thousands and was working on a mission to Mars (which had been visited by robots, but not yet humans). Allied militaries had finally cracked the battery issues needed to make genuine power armor practical (in certain contexts, not all) and had largely transitioned away from landcruisers- which were more vulnerable to airpower and less mobile than ultra-heavy infantry. There were internal divisions in the Alliance, some of which were quite contentious, such as those between Brazil and La Plata, France and India, East Asia and India, the Tasman Twins and India, and America and the Muslim Allies, but when they all stood together, they wielded an unprecedented degree of power.
Welcome to the Alliance for Democracy. Big, cosmopolitan cities that are hubs of high technology and home to body-mod subcultures pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human with technology. The pollution isn't great though, but there are enviro groups like W.I.T.C.H pushing against that with growing support.
The Pact of Blood (0.5 billion people, not counting Colombia or Centroamerica) had an advantage in terms of space guns which at this point were capable of putting large numbers of rounds into orbit that could then propel themselves back through the Earth’s atmosphere to strike terrestrial targets with low single-digit kilotons of force. In fact, they already had close to two thousand rounds waiting in orbit (as did the Alliance). These were powerful weapons against which no practical defense existed, but space guns were hard to hide and made for big stationary targets for space bombers, although the Empire did have a few space guns that had never been used and would hopefully be unknown to the Alliance until they started firing. The Alliance for Democracy had an edge in terms of space bombers, which like space guns could strike anywhere in the world. Individual space bombers payloads- which ranged from kinetic projectiles to chemical and biological munitions, to traditional explosive bombs (Drakia even had made it as far as dirty bombs using Iridium-192)- generally lacked the raw destructive power of space gun rounds (or kinetic projectiles fired from orbital space stations, which existed), but they were a much more versatile weapon and promised to be devastating in large numbers. Unlike space gun rounds, space bombers were vulnerable to countermeasures in the form of space fighters capable of shooting them down when they descended back towards the atmosphere to begin their bombing runs, and both sides of the Secret War had invested in large numbers of the latter.
Most major cities hosted extensive networks of bunkers and shelters to protect citizens from kinetic, chemical, and biological attacks, while concealed military bases and weapons stockpiles existed in the countryside where they would hopefully avoid the fate of the cities. Drakia even had a network of small, hidden factories theoretically capable of producing ammunition and basic parts if its primary industrial base was destroyed.
Welcome to the Pact of Blood. Relatively non urban, with neo-classical brutalist cities breaking up the countryside, each ringed by industrial slums of crumbling Bonded housing.
This was the superweapon paradigm that existed in 1981 in the Separate-verse. When seismographs picked up a strange and intensely power explosion in western China in 1976, and reports began to circulate of a strange flash of light, the Free Chinese government reported that it had invented a new type of thermobaric bomb and most of the public accepted this. The Black Chamber and the Bureau for Social Defense did not accept this, but they were still unravelling the mystery of RUYI JINGU BANG when things went hot.
The two geopolitical blocs also had extensive conventional armies, but the assumption was that any war would be decided one way or another by WMDs. Drakia had a considerable advantage in terms of biological weapons and conducted annual blind vaccinations to provide its population immunity against whatever new thing it had invented. However, most Allied war-planners believed that biological weapons would be deployed by bombers and would predominantly consist of toxins and less-lethal or non-lethal epidemic diseases as had been the case during the Great Wars. To be sure, there were contingency plans in place against the possibility that the Pact of Blood might deploy more-lethal epidemic diseases in a strategic manner, or even as a pre-emptive strike. But given the myriad of ways in which such a tactic could backfire, surely not even the Drakians would be insane enough to do that.
In any case, the Alliance for Democracy was confident in the deterrent power of its own arsenal of WMDs. Why would Aurica commit suicide by starting a war it couldn’t win?
