Operation Summer Storm: Part 2, Long March to Victory
- Location
- The Underdark
Operation Summer Storm: Part 2, Long March to Victory
The Initiative's offensive in the north started slowly. The armies stationed in the Himalayan Blue Zone, by the standards of nearly any other force in the Initiative arsenal, were fundamentally weird. Rather than the heavily mechanized forces found elsewhere, the mountain troops were some of the last true infantry in Initiative service, and were fielding a wild array of some of the most advanced and primitive systems in the Initiative arsenal. On one side, they had begun deploying the GLS-70 railgun not as a specialist sniper's weapon, but as a line infantry tool. Similarly, they had embraced orbital fires in a way that few other units had, especially with the difficulties that artillery faced in the steep mountain ranges and harsh conditions of combat in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush.
It was also an army deeply unused to offensive operations. All through the Third Tiberium War, and the Regency War, it had held its ground, but usually little more than that – restricting their offensive actions to infantry skirmishes and routine raiding activities to wipe out sapping operations. This would be the first major offensive operation for the force since the creation of the Blue Zone, and as such it should be completely unsurprising that they started very slowly. The conflict began moving by meters, a duel of spotters in most cases, calling down orbital strikes from kilometers distant. Here, in the rarified air of the Himalayas, the lack of precision and the communications difficulties created by the ion storm produced both dramatic inaccuracy and a slow overall response time.
One of the first assaults Avish Devi carried out was on yet another nameless mountain. Walking at the head of his squad, each with a GLS-70 in good repair, Avish muttered under his breath: "Allah willing, we will see another day." His private wish made, he turned back to his command. "Everyone ready?"
A salvo of greens and affirmatives were his only reply, the squad ready to push onward and take the offensive. In some ways, it was a moment of triumph. Finally, they were ready to take back homelands that many of them remembered losing as children. "Get moving then; dawn in an hour, no time to waste."
All around them, other squads were having similar conversations, before the go time was set. Squadrons of Hammerheads swept over the line, rockets and streams of autocannon tracers shooting out, their fire serving both to soften up the Nod positions ahead, and providing a welcome boost to the troops' morale. Predetermined hardpoints ate ion cannon shots as others were pounded into oblivion by tungsten rods streaking down from orbit.
The first climb was easy enough, relatively speaking. Hard work, to clamber up a mountain with forty kilos of supplies, armor, ammo, and the like – but at least they were not under fire every step of the way, with the outer layer of Brotherhood opposition shattered under overwhelming orbital fires. Avish had heard through the grapevine that the orbital fires that had been slated for the southern offensive had been reassigned, and, to be honest, he was grateful for their misfortune. The second climb turned into a nightmare. A swarm of gana emerged a mere hundred meters out from Avish's squad, and while the first snap-cracks of rifle fire saw a pair collapse, the rest began charging while laying into the squad with gun and laser. Two of Devi's men collapsed, as the rest hit the dirt, firing as fast as the capacitors on their guns would recharge. More gana fell, but then the survivors were among the infantry, and things went utterly to hell in short order.
Devi's railgun clicked empty as an Afanc's clenched fist hammered down towards him. Rolling to the left, he went for his backup pistol, scrabbling at the chest holster until it snapped open and the cold grip of the pistol was in his hand while the gana turned towards him.
The pistol blazed away as fast as he could pull the trigger. Rounds stitched red holes in a ragged line along the gana's body, each one higher than the last until the pistol locked open. The gana kept moving, now bleeding out, but not fast enough, not before Devi would himself be buried under the heap of meat and metal.
Then there was darkness and crushing weight – for how long, Devi didn't know until much later, but the next thing he saw was a couple of zone troopers lifting the gana corpse off his body, and medics moving in to see if the armor and landing had kept him alive despite being buried under one of the Afancs that had charged his squad. While he had survived, his war was over for now. He would be rotated to the back for long-term recovery. Maybe sent to the training camps, maybe elsewhere, once he got used to the cybernetic replacements that were in his future.
G --- D --- I
The Initiative fleet off the coast faced a fundamental problem: resupply. While the American Navy and other fleets of the mid to late 20th century had invested massively into underway replenishment capabilities, it was one of the capabilities that has since been found to be significantly less important. Ships were not spending weeks upon weeks operating at the far side of the world from a friendly base. Ships were, for the most part, only engaging once or twice, and were constantly making thirty knots or better. In a month, an Initiative ship can fully circumnavigate the globe.
In most cases since the Second Tiberium War, it has been dramatically safer and often quicker to simply sprint at flank speed to the nearest port, rather than trying to replenish missiles and munitions while underway, especially in an environment where there may well be a Brotherhood submarine lurking. Here in the Arabian Sea however, with Initiative warships remaining on station pouring out missile salvoes and acting as floating artillery batteries, their limited missile racks went from being a tradeoff to a liability, and even their railguns began facing significant constraint. In the later case, the constraints began to bite significantly faster than expected, as each fire mission began to eat up ever more shells due to the increasing CEP.
By the end of the first weeks of fighting, every ship in the Initiative fleet had been forced to return home at least once, with the Governor cruisers in particular emptying their missile silos time and time again – oftentimes slashing to a bare minimum of air defense missiles to make more space for the long-ranged bombardment designs that could find and reliably strike targets at the ranges they were fighting at. The main battle lines had penetrated to a hundred kilometers inland in some places by that point, and the railguns carried by the Governors and older Summit battleships would struggle to generate hits at that range even with fully intact rails – and the charge levels necessary for such ranges generated very high rates of wear, to the point where the CEP as much as doubled on some ships by the third or fourth day of conflict from the sheer number of shells they had put downrange.
At the same time, they were under the threat of chronic raids. While it rarely amounted to much – usually the occasional torpedo attack, or long-range missiles lobbed just regularly enough to ruin a night's sleep, and kept the missile defense crews on their toes – in many ways, it was simply hate, a constant message that the Shah was not defeated yet, and would still fight for every inch of what he claimed as his.
G --- D --- I
Indira Kohistani rolled off her cot in the middle of the night, the scream of a pulse jet jerking her from sleep. Rubbing her tired eyes, she glanced towards the alarm clock. Zero dark thirty, just like the last two weeks since her aid company had landed. But with bombs overhead, there was no way she would get back to sleep. So, wash up, get her jumpsuit on, and head over to the bakery, which was one of the few pieces of camp that just never slept.
The road down a line of shelters was quiet, dead, most of the inhabitants sleeping soundly through yet more hate being thrown. They had slept through weeks of this before Indira had even stepped on the C-35 that would take her to the Arabian staging grounds, let alone arrived in-country.
The bombs would not fall here. They were falling to the south, at the port blazing defiance away into the night, streaks of light and screaming contrails leaping forth as the arsenal of the Initiative cut through the missiles overhead.
Tapping her ID band to the door, and then baring an eye to the retinal scanner, she moved quickly through the airlock to the bakery. As soon as she stepped through, the smell hit her – yeast and flour and the stench of life. Loaf after standard issue loaf sat in their tins, racks of bagels and buns to serve with breakfast. Walking into the kitchen, there stood Caroline Miles, and (more importantly at the moment) a mug of tea and a short stack of oatcakes. "Just a minute dear. A batch will be coming out of the oven in a second, and then I need to put the next one in." Indira was too busy to respond immediately, having crossed the room and stuffed her mouth with warm oatcake and warmer tea, kudzu, creamer, and oats filling her mouth with toasted and spicy flavors.
As soon as the next batch was in the oven, Caroline flopped over, head in Indira's lap. "Long night, love?"
"Always, you know how it is. Two power outages, and constant Brotherhood bullshit." The odds of a Noddist strike getting through the defenses were low. They were not zero. The thought could normally be written off as simple anxieties but with the nuclear exchange still so recent it was stuck in Carloine's head.
Noticing the physical tension that came with such thoughts, Indira gently began stroking her lover's hair. "The lines are still moving, the barrages are getting shorter." Looking down, Caroline had closed her eyes and let out a drawn out breath.
"Ok." As her Caroline's wonderfully green eyes opened, Indira leaned down to place a gentle kiss on her lips. Finding one of her hands with one of her own she gave a reassuring squeeze that Caroline quickly mirrored.
Pulling back from the kiss with the deepest regret as Caroline made a face at the injustice, Indira rolled her eyes before speaking. "Alright that batch is in but the next needs to get started now. So get."
G --- D --- I
It was not until the second month of fighting – the front lines bogged down just north of the Hub River Dam, on the road to Hyderabad – that the storms cleared, and the war began in earnest. Aircraft stacked from the operational ceiling all the way down to the deck – sortieing from every airstrip in range, every carrier GDI could spare, all sending in strikes as quickly as the crews could manage. In a quite literal sense, the fighting raged in the shade of aircraft and bombs.
The air power combined with another angle of attack from the Initiative: airmobile forces, passing over the Red Zone, which then linked up with GDI-friendly Forgotten assets in the region, and staged massive strikes all along the Shah's western flank. ZOCOM strike teams, Forgotten auxiliaries, and airborne forces swept through many of the mining towns along the edge of the Red Zone. While the Shah's efforts to mine the Red Zone had been desultory, there were a number of areas where hardpoints were being actively protected from the crystal's constant encroachment, including multiple nuclear launch areas and critical airfields. While none still had nuclear devices by the time they were overrun by Initiative forces, the airfields at least did not manage to launch their craft before the wall of airpower and airmobile forces overran them.
However, it was not all roses. With the air clearing, the Shah could also bring in his forces, including a pair of Varyag-class airships. The skies over Pakistan soon became a furball, with heavy casualties on all sides, and neither side able to make significant efforts to pick up casualties – though with the increasing proliferation of supersonic aircraft in both the Initiative and the Brotherhood's arsenals, such rescue efforts would likely be in vain. An Apollo making an attack run can break Mach Five for instance, and at those velocities even a glancing hit becomes a nearly unsurvivable catastrophe.
When an operation grows sufficiently large, individual skill becomes yet another factor to plug into the spreadsheet, to calculate "how many missiles/lasers/etc. are needed to achieve a kill." With the sky clear, GDI has absolutely reached that scale. The forces of al-Isfahani, however, have their ways to tilt the numbers in their favor. The long-range lasers of the Varyag-class air cruisers are one, firing in support of the front-line interceptor and air superiority squadrons. This is something GDI strategists developed plans to counter, of course, but a plan's existence does not make it easy, or lacking in risk.
As soon as the two Varyags were detected, squadrons of Apollos and Firehawks shifted, forming into larger wings, armed with long-range missiles. This initial attack, launched from higher altitude and nearly maximum range, would present no real danger to smaller aircraft. The more limited maneuver capabilities of a Varyag meant that they were within the threat cone for this massed barrage of missiles. However, the missiles in question were also heavily constrained from defensive maneuvering. Many were burned from the sky by defensive fire or intercepted by long-range SAMs, with the few that threaded the needle leaving the heavy crafts' armor pocked from impacts, but demonstrably still combat-effective.
The second wave of GDI aircraft again changed plans, attempting to punch a hole in Nod air defenses. Apollos and Firehawks equipped with air-to-air missiles engaged Venoms and Barghests of various refits, while Orcas and other Firehawks engaged ground-based defenses, with a few strongpoints marked for glide bombs launched from Auroras or ion cannon bombardment. Into this brawl came GDI's third wave, Firehawks reinforcing the depleted second wave to further tie up anti-air assets, while the entirety of this wave's Apollo squadrons made a maximum-speed run towards the two Varyags and their escort squadrons.
Evasive maneuvering was limited, but not useless- even for a laser, aiming at a (relatively) small object moving almost 1.7km/second on a less-than-predictable course is not precisely easy. Incoming missiles were largely intercepted or dodged, but the sprint to a near-point-blank firing range took the squadrons about half a minute, during which nearly half the planes were destroyed. However, the tactic was successful; each air cruiser was hit by at least 30 plasma-warhead missiles, and one was also struck by two Apollos whose maneuvering surfaces were damaged. Neither airship survived the barrage, one crashing near the front lines and the other began to make the turn to head deeper into Al-Isfahani's territory before something in its power system gave way, and the aircraft detonated high in the skies, scattering debris and Tiberium across over a square kilometer.
The loss of both Varyags and a considerable amount of the Nod air wing led to the remainder retreating to rearm and repair. Ground-based air defenses attempted to hold off the depleted GDI air force, but with much less success. Brotherhood reserve squadrons arrived in-theater to re-engage, but they were noticeably on the back foot.
The Initiative comparatively, was able to maintain the pace. Over the course of 72 hours, the Initiative flew thousands of sorties, and delivered more than thirty kilotons of munitions across the region. With the highest value Brotherhood air assets destroyed in storms of plasma, the air forces of the Shah fell apart. First swept from the skies, and then overrun on the ground – in many cases being forced to land at sites that were actively being struck by Initiative forces, and in some few cases, were captured in the field by Initiative airmobile forces conducting bite and hold operations.
The battle of Hyderabad defined much of mid November. With the Brotherhood entrenched south of the city, and the Initiative still struggling to bring up enough shells, most of the artillery (both conventional and orbital) was dedicated to counter-battery fires. While a Specter battery, especially those armed with nuclear and RAP armaments, could fire and reposition quickly, it was something that required significant reconfiguring of their operational use. With the limits of Initiative artillery in the Third Tiberium War, it was (relatively) safe for the guns to take the time to set up, load shell, and fire multiple times. Now however, it was a different story. Most of the time, they would sprint up to firing range, shell already in the chamber, set up, fire, and then immediately scoot to a concealed position. And even those were no guarantee of safety. The Initiative had begun to litter the skies with loitering munitions, and while counterbattery fires from ground forces were few and far between, the air dominance of the combined forces of the Initiative fleet air arm, and ground based fighters has meant that oftentimes the Spectres were being struck during the set up phase.
G---D---I
Willis Graham stalked forward, once more leading from the front. This was his third Zone suit since landing day, and even it was on its last legs. He walked with a limp, half of the myomers in the left leg having given out already. GD-3 cradled in his arms, the railgun for the suit having given up the ghost days ago, and an infantry rifle was available. His unit was equally ragged – none of them had a full load of ammo, and all of them had ablat plates covering at least one hole in their armored suits. The jetpacks were long gone, especially with the impact frames not being protective enough with the damages to the suits. Their operational tempo was too quick, and the supply of spare Zone armor too lean, for them to stop for more than critical maintenance or replacement.
An Orca screamed low overhead, missiles rippling off the racks as it made an attack run. Lower than it needed to – far, far lower. But at this point, the simple visual was more power than any weapon the craft could have carried. The striking eagle, coming in low and loud, a symbol of power that had lasted, nearly unchanged, since before Willis was even born.
G --- D --- I
Azad Barzani scrambled from rock to rubble, pausing every few yards to offer some words of support. The men of his unit were on the ragged edge - two thirds gone, dead, or too wounded to keep going, or captured since the battle at the Hub River dam. The cloak that marked him as a Confessor was long gone, shredded by the weeks of fighting on the front lines. His words sounded hollow even to himself: "Hold fast, for the prophet is watching over us."
Empty words, for a doomed defense.
A few yards down the line, an Initiative shell blew a gaping hole in the defenses. Azad fired a few streams from his particle gun into the gap as he rushed that way - suppressive fire, more than anything. Fill the gaps, keep the screen intact. He knew firsthand what the Initiative did with a breach in the line: zone armor shock troops would rush in first, followed swiftly by mechanized companies, relying on their armor and sheer bloody-minded contempt to keep them safe from fragmentation, right behind the curtain of shells.
The blast of an airbursting shell hammered him to the ground, insensate; a Zone Trooper smashed forward and past him mere seconds later, and then the world fell away.
Azad woke, still dirty, still in his armor, with an Initiative medic -- white patches, and a backpack full of medical supplies tagging them for safety -- kneeling over him. The sting of a spray of antiseptic and chill of first-aid gel were among the first things he felt, the medic then moving him to a recovery position before beginning to tap away at a forearm-mounted screen.
G --- D --- I
Willis kept moving, artillery and airpower screaming around him, as now desultory fire whipped past his armor. One of his fellows toppled over, dead as a beam of particles found its mark, taking him, and one of the few railguns left in the squad, down in a spray of blood and shattered faceplate. Willis scrambled over, grabbing the railgun, and with practiced efficiency stripped the corpse of power packs and ammunition. Railgun at the ready, he swung left, looking for any movement after he had punched through the last Brotherhood fighting position. A shredder position swung towards him – not fast enough though, and a half-dozen railgun rounds smashed it to pieces. But where there was one, there were always more, and he moved as quickly as he could toward the hardpoint, eyes scanning for the hub.
There, on his left, it was. Railgun to shoulder, snap off a shot, dive for cover as the air around him turned to shrapnel. A few pieces slipped past the armor, cutting myomer cords as Graham struggled to his feet, and put round after round into the hub, blasting it to scrap as the rest of his squad did the same.
Dropping down once more in the ruins of what had been a Brotherhood fighting position, Graham waited for the tanks to roll up behind his men, before pushing forward. Another line, another street. Just one more day on the offensive.
G --- D --- I
Strategic Area Defense Network Report: Success and Failures during Operation Summer Storm
The Strategic Area Defense Network at this point is in its final stages of being brought online. The biggest issue was, and remains, arming it. Sensor calibrations take time, but some of the last hurdles was sufficiently stocking the system with long ranged missile interceptors. These are both significantly expensive, and more importantly, rare. The SADN represents a rough doubling of demand for the munition type, and that has become something of a lasting problem.
While ASAT has assisted, mostly in support and sensor rather than kinetic roles, the system does need more work, with direct datalinks, rather than needing information to be actively passed down. The link as it stands is currently too slow, especially in the context of minimum velocities of five times the speed of sound, and often significantly higher for the strikes that managed to get through.
All of this must be understood in the context of a rapidly evolving offensive capability from the Brotherhood of Nod. With the Initiative achieving ever increasing conventional military capability, the historic methods of nuclear deployment had become increasingly nonviable. That historical standard – subsonic low-altitude cruise missiles, and even supersonic cruise missiles – has become effectively incapable of providing a substantial threat to Initiative assets, especially as the Initiative has begun fielding energy weapons in its interceptors, the deployment of increasingly effective GBAD including laser and in the near future particle systems, and similar increases in capability.
In point of fact, across all remote strikes, only those that included enhanced capability munitions achieved any success. With these strikes, the most notable element is speed, specifically, speeds high enough to begin to seriously degrade the ability of GDI's ion cannon and orbital networks to intercept.
The example of the early December strike on the Seattle shipyards is illustrative of the lengths that the Brotherhood of Nod has been forced to go to. The strike began without warning, with what has been provisionally termed the Alicorn class of submarine surfacing in a patch of the Pacific about three hundred kilometers off the coast. Over the course of the next seven minutes, it would fire fifteen rail-accelerated nuclear shells, six of which penetrated the Seattle Air Defense Network. Each one was flying at a low trajectory, with the systems having less than five seconds to engage between the projectile flying over the horizon, and it initiating. Each was an airburst shot, detonating above the shipyard complex.
Initial counterfires were directed long, around 350 kilometers out, beyond the submarine, and beyond effective range for water hammer effects from the fire. Fire assessment says that the six strikes called made no significant impact on the submarine. Similarly, rapid strike squadrons of the 112th air wing failed to find the submarine before their fuel tanks ran low enough to force them to return to base.
Seattle was also the last Alicorn strike so far. While Intelligence is unsure exactly how many of the type exist – at least two, but unlikely to be more than five – they seem to have expended their nuclear arsenals, and no strikes have occurred on what are now considered to be the typical trajectories. One has been found, interned in dockyards near Rio, found by InOps agents, and safe under both ion disruptors and a significant air defense network, which the Air Force is unsure of sending Aurora bombers over.
Comparatively, the attempted strikes on Europe, focused on sites like Bergen, faced significantly greater threats. Here, the Brotherhood utilized aircraft. Their flight plan could not be direct in the slightest. Rather, they were forced to divert significantly north, fly effectively over the north pole, and then turn west and south to come in towards Europe over the ocean. It was in this southern turn that they were detected by training flights from the 13th Cadet Air Wing, flying out of Peterhead. The two flights first detected them on their way back from a simulated bombing raid on Molde, doing night navigation above the north sea. With no live munitions loaded, Flight Instructor Vikram decided to make pursuit while calling in coordinates to the airbase.
The Firehawks were carrying targeting pods, standard issue for training, designed to feed targeting data back to central command computer systems. Those pods would take targeting and kinematic data in, feed them to the simulator, and determine whether or not the missile was a hit or not for air to air combat training. Those same pods were keystones for this operation, because instead of feeding that targeting data to a computer running a simulation, they were being fed to missile launchers scattered across the region: launchers on the Faroes, barrage hulks and former oil rigs across the coasts of Sweden and Scotland. All were being fed data from the eight Firehawks and some handful were able to make launches using that data, which would then handoff to the Firehawk midflight for terminal guidance. Many of the launchers in fact were already hooked up, having been playing OPFOR for the bombing raid.
Initially, things looked like they were going well, the weapon pairing and handoff managed to shoot down a number of the bombers – well beyond the typical range of such munitions, with the terminal guidance from the Firehawks able to generate hits that would usually be impossible. However, very quickly things began to break down. The biggest issue was that as the relative positioning of the bombers, Firehawks, and incoming missiles changed, the Firehawks were directing missiles inbound on their own position, rather than at an oblique angle – meaning that in two cases, before Flight Instructor Vikram ordered them to break off, a missile that had been unable to make intercept with the bombers, made lock on one of the training Firehawks. While the missile was successfully overridden in both cases, a fairly simple procedure, but one that the cadets failed to undertake in time, Flight Instructor Vikram made the decision that continuing to call in fires was too dangerous for the flights to undertake, and ordered a return to base.
However, those young fliers had turned the bombers from a potential threat, to a turkey shoot. Scrambled squadrons of professionals, and the already engaging anti-aircraft sites, were able to eliminate the rest of the bombers long before they reached their release points.
Salvage recovered from two of the bombers that had crashed in Swedish mountains included one of their targeting computers, designating English port facilities as their target, and while most of the other bombers were not recovered, it seems most likely that they were targeting a litany of industrial, political, and military sites.
G --- D --- I
Battle of Islamabad
A battle enters history before the blood spilled in victory or defeat has finished drying. Regardless of whether it takes hours, days, weeks or more, helmet cameras and recording devices preserve these thousands of moments. This information is near-immediately pored over by EVAs and analysts, hunting for anything that might be turned into an advantage or reveal a weakness of the enemy. Unit historians work to stitch these moments together and individual soldiers tell their own stories.
The stories told by the 17th Indian Rifle Regiment as they press south towards and then around Islamabad down from the mountains are ones of change. As engagement ranges shorten and heights fade, veterans of mountain campaigns measured by securing individual peaks and ridges experience urban warfare for the first time. They are reminded quickly that railgun rounds penetrate through entire buildings as well as any unfortunate along their path. Air support and artillery sound completely different, echoing through streets and doorways instead of deep mountain valleys.
And in those streets the Shah's forces stand firm. They know the story they are writing in blood is one of a doomed last stand. There is no single unit or force that cannot be moved west either due to lack of supplies or lack of time. Purifiers hidden amongst buildings move from position to position as missiles and railgun fire chase them across the city. In some cases, Gana cling to their sides before leaping off to pounce upon blast-concussed infantry even as their impromptu transports begin to burn.
At truly critical points in the warlord's lines were a scattered band of Redeemers. Operating independently, only two remained in the city by the time GDI secured the eastern edge of the city. They had originally totaled three but the Vanguard of Light had been cut off from retreat while overextending in an effort to finish off a GDI mechanized platoon. Drawn into an ambush, it had been immobilized and then permanently silenced by a company of Predator tanks before any reinforcements could save its crew.
Driving north as their enemies drew back, the 5th Armored Division measured out the remaining supplies it had. Not yet combat ineffective, they pressed their momentum for all its worth to allow them to link up with the 17th IRR. Doing so would not only isolate the city from 3 sides, but see the 5th AD resupplied. It was with calculated desperation that carried them forward and into the guns of Nod. And through the continual sacrifice of the servicemembers of the Global Defense Initiative, the link between the two formations was achieved.
While GDI advanced and Nod retreated, the civilian populace of the city adapted as best they could. Displaced or worse by the fighting and exposed to the elements, approximately thirteen thousand civilians would die over the course of the unfinished fighting. Timely aid surged to those in need by GDI alleviated the worst of the tragedy for most of the city's nearly four hundred thousand population.
700 kilometers from the city that had birthed the invasion, the experience of the civilian population in Islamabad is typical of those near or at the front line of the conflict between GDI and the Brotherhood. Far away from the initial events that precipitated the violence that would eventually visit them, the city saw itself drawn into the conflict as military necessity. Now a contested area, Islamabad and its populace are unwilling participants in only the latest chapter of violence. Just as Białystok, Chicago, St. Petersburg, Rome, Cape Town, Niš, Munich, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Cairo and near countless more suffered, Islamabad joins Hampton Roads, Monrovia, and Johannesburg in the latest chapter of the global war being waged across Earth.
The story most easily told of the battle for Islamabad is one of numbers, unit markers, and clean military cause and effect. In that story, Islamabad is just another item in the growing list of places that Nod and GDI have fought over during the course of their war. That war and that story do not belong to or own the people of Islamabad. The people of Islamabad will, in the years to come, tell their own stories, eventually ones entirely free of the conflict currently visiting their city.
On January 3rd, 2065, the stories they tell are the sounds of battle, the feeling of hunger and cold, or are never told because those that would have spoken them are dead.
Requisition Order of GDI Quartermaster Staff Sergeant Dean Bautista of the 5th Armored Division
Date: January 2nd, 2065
....
Below items are of the highest priority and should be dispatched as soon as is possible.
30 Pallets prepared meals
15 Pallets prepared meals (child)
13 Pallets prepared meals (infant)
11 Pallets baby formula
3000 Exposure Suits
500 Body Bags
G --- D --- I
At the end of the first three months of operations, GDI sits astride a connected line between the coast and the Himalayan Blue Zone. But it is not an uncontested line, and came at far too high a cost. Almost half of the Initiative's battleships either need significant yard time, or scrapping. The OSRCT has proven itself in battle once again, but at a cost of nearly half its number either dead or invalid.
At the same time, the Shah is in the wind, holed up in mountain fastness northwest of the Initiative's line of advance, backed onto what is nominally still Krukov's territory, although the local warlords tend to be far enough away from the center of power for them to have significant operational independence. He has begun directing a steady drumbeat of strikes against the Karachi line, albeit with no major successes so far. Most of the fires are shot down before they impact, and those that do have so far failed to hit anything that requires more than 48 hours of downtime.
The line between the Initiative and the Bannerjees has become an uncomfortable, frozen battle line. On one hand, neither side particularly wants a conflict. On the other, the shifting dynamics have put major Bannerjee areas suddenly in range of the Initiative, and with that connection, as tenuous and vulnerable as it is, the Initiative has significantly increased its power over the whole of the region, turning the northern portion of the Indian ocean, into, if not an Initiative lake, a barrier to Brotherhood operations, with no stretch of the coastline free of Initiative operations anywhere beyond the Indian subcontinent itself.
Broader consequences are still asserting themselves, both within and without the Initiative's borders. However, it does put a stop to one of the more bleeding sores that has been a problem for the Initiative since before the Third Tiberium War.
A/N1: Resultspost tomorrow, Q1 Tuesday. I can't give a timeline at the moment for the next update after that, because partner is going into surgery next week, and I will need to balance a masters program, a job, and taking care of her with any hobbies.
A/N2: Buy ithillid a Coffee. ko-fi.com/ithillid if you want to help out.
The Initiative's offensive in the north started slowly. The armies stationed in the Himalayan Blue Zone, by the standards of nearly any other force in the Initiative arsenal, were fundamentally weird. Rather than the heavily mechanized forces found elsewhere, the mountain troops were some of the last true infantry in Initiative service, and were fielding a wild array of some of the most advanced and primitive systems in the Initiative arsenal. On one side, they had begun deploying the GLS-70 railgun not as a specialist sniper's weapon, but as a line infantry tool. Similarly, they had embraced orbital fires in a way that few other units had, especially with the difficulties that artillery faced in the steep mountain ranges and harsh conditions of combat in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush.
It was also an army deeply unused to offensive operations. All through the Third Tiberium War, and the Regency War, it had held its ground, but usually little more than that – restricting their offensive actions to infantry skirmishes and routine raiding activities to wipe out sapping operations. This would be the first major offensive operation for the force since the creation of the Blue Zone, and as such it should be completely unsurprising that they started very slowly. The conflict began moving by meters, a duel of spotters in most cases, calling down orbital strikes from kilometers distant. Here, in the rarified air of the Himalayas, the lack of precision and the communications difficulties created by the ion storm produced both dramatic inaccuracy and a slow overall response time.
One of the first assaults Avish Devi carried out was on yet another nameless mountain. Walking at the head of his squad, each with a GLS-70 in good repair, Avish muttered under his breath: "Allah willing, we will see another day." His private wish made, he turned back to his command. "Everyone ready?"
A salvo of greens and affirmatives were his only reply, the squad ready to push onward and take the offensive. In some ways, it was a moment of triumph. Finally, they were ready to take back homelands that many of them remembered losing as children. "Get moving then; dawn in an hour, no time to waste."
All around them, other squads were having similar conversations, before the go time was set. Squadrons of Hammerheads swept over the line, rockets and streams of autocannon tracers shooting out, their fire serving both to soften up the Nod positions ahead, and providing a welcome boost to the troops' morale. Predetermined hardpoints ate ion cannon shots as others were pounded into oblivion by tungsten rods streaking down from orbit.
The first climb was easy enough, relatively speaking. Hard work, to clamber up a mountain with forty kilos of supplies, armor, ammo, and the like – but at least they were not under fire every step of the way, with the outer layer of Brotherhood opposition shattered under overwhelming orbital fires. Avish had heard through the grapevine that the orbital fires that had been slated for the southern offensive had been reassigned, and, to be honest, he was grateful for their misfortune. The second climb turned into a nightmare. A swarm of gana emerged a mere hundred meters out from Avish's squad, and while the first snap-cracks of rifle fire saw a pair collapse, the rest began charging while laying into the squad with gun and laser. Two of Devi's men collapsed, as the rest hit the dirt, firing as fast as the capacitors on their guns would recharge. More gana fell, but then the survivors were among the infantry, and things went utterly to hell in short order.
Devi's railgun clicked empty as an Afanc's clenched fist hammered down towards him. Rolling to the left, he went for his backup pistol, scrabbling at the chest holster until it snapped open and the cold grip of the pistol was in his hand while the gana turned towards him.
The pistol blazed away as fast as he could pull the trigger. Rounds stitched red holes in a ragged line along the gana's body, each one higher than the last until the pistol locked open. The gana kept moving, now bleeding out, but not fast enough, not before Devi would himself be buried under the heap of meat and metal.
Then there was darkness and crushing weight – for how long, Devi didn't know until much later, but the next thing he saw was a couple of zone troopers lifting the gana corpse off his body, and medics moving in to see if the armor and landing had kept him alive despite being buried under one of the Afancs that had charged his squad. While he had survived, his war was over for now. He would be rotated to the back for long-term recovery. Maybe sent to the training camps, maybe elsewhere, once he got used to the cybernetic replacements that were in his future.
G --- D --- I
The Initiative fleet off the coast faced a fundamental problem: resupply. While the American Navy and other fleets of the mid to late 20th century had invested massively into underway replenishment capabilities, it was one of the capabilities that has since been found to be significantly less important. Ships were not spending weeks upon weeks operating at the far side of the world from a friendly base. Ships were, for the most part, only engaging once or twice, and were constantly making thirty knots or better. In a month, an Initiative ship can fully circumnavigate the globe.
In most cases since the Second Tiberium War, it has been dramatically safer and often quicker to simply sprint at flank speed to the nearest port, rather than trying to replenish missiles and munitions while underway, especially in an environment where there may well be a Brotherhood submarine lurking. Here in the Arabian Sea however, with Initiative warships remaining on station pouring out missile salvoes and acting as floating artillery batteries, their limited missile racks went from being a tradeoff to a liability, and even their railguns began facing significant constraint. In the later case, the constraints began to bite significantly faster than expected, as each fire mission began to eat up ever more shells due to the increasing CEP.
By the end of the first weeks of fighting, every ship in the Initiative fleet had been forced to return home at least once, with the Governor cruisers in particular emptying their missile silos time and time again – oftentimes slashing to a bare minimum of air defense missiles to make more space for the long-ranged bombardment designs that could find and reliably strike targets at the ranges they were fighting at. The main battle lines had penetrated to a hundred kilometers inland in some places by that point, and the railguns carried by the Governors and older Summit battleships would struggle to generate hits at that range even with fully intact rails – and the charge levels necessary for such ranges generated very high rates of wear, to the point where the CEP as much as doubled on some ships by the third or fourth day of conflict from the sheer number of shells they had put downrange.
At the same time, they were under the threat of chronic raids. While it rarely amounted to much – usually the occasional torpedo attack, or long-range missiles lobbed just regularly enough to ruin a night's sleep, and kept the missile defense crews on their toes – in many ways, it was simply hate, a constant message that the Shah was not defeated yet, and would still fight for every inch of what he claimed as his.
G --- D --- I
Indira Kohistani rolled off her cot in the middle of the night, the scream of a pulse jet jerking her from sleep. Rubbing her tired eyes, she glanced towards the alarm clock. Zero dark thirty, just like the last two weeks since her aid company had landed. But with bombs overhead, there was no way she would get back to sleep. So, wash up, get her jumpsuit on, and head over to the bakery, which was one of the few pieces of camp that just never slept.
The road down a line of shelters was quiet, dead, most of the inhabitants sleeping soundly through yet more hate being thrown. They had slept through weeks of this before Indira had even stepped on the C-35 that would take her to the Arabian staging grounds, let alone arrived in-country.
The bombs would not fall here. They were falling to the south, at the port blazing defiance away into the night, streaks of light and screaming contrails leaping forth as the arsenal of the Initiative cut through the missiles overhead.
Tapping her ID band to the door, and then baring an eye to the retinal scanner, she moved quickly through the airlock to the bakery. As soon as she stepped through, the smell hit her – yeast and flour and the stench of life. Loaf after standard issue loaf sat in their tins, racks of bagels and buns to serve with breakfast. Walking into the kitchen, there stood Caroline Miles, and (more importantly at the moment) a mug of tea and a short stack of oatcakes. "Just a minute dear. A batch will be coming out of the oven in a second, and then I need to put the next one in." Indira was too busy to respond immediately, having crossed the room and stuffed her mouth with warm oatcake and warmer tea, kudzu, creamer, and oats filling her mouth with toasted and spicy flavors.
As soon as the next batch was in the oven, Caroline flopped over, head in Indira's lap. "Long night, love?"
"Always, you know how it is. Two power outages, and constant Brotherhood bullshit." The odds of a Noddist strike getting through the defenses were low. They were not zero. The thought could normally be written off as simple anxieties but with the nuclear exchange still so recent it was stuck in Carloine's head.
Noticing the physical tension that came with such thoughts, Indira gently began stroking her lover's hair. "The lines are still moving, the barrages are getting shorter." Looking down, Caroline had closed her eyes and let out a drawn out breath.
"Ok." As her Caroline's wonderfully green eyes opened, Indira leaned down to place a gentle kiss on her lips. Finding one of her hands with one of her own she gave a reassuring squeeze that Caroline quickly mirrored.
Pulling back from the kiss with the deepest regret as Caroline made a face at the injustice, Indira rolled her eyes before speaking. "Alright that batch is in but the next needs to get started now. So get."
G --- D --- I
It was not until the second month of fighting – the front lines bogged down just north of the Hub River Dam, on the road to Hyderabad – that the storms cleared, and the war began in earnest. Aircraft stacked from the operational ceiling all the way down to the deck – sortieing from every airstrip in range, every carrier GDI could spare, all sending in strikes as quickly as the crews could manage. In a quite literal sense, the fighting raged in the shade of aircraft and bombs.
The air power combined with another angle of attack from the Initiative: airmobile forces, passing over the Red Zone, which then linked up with GDI-friendly Forgotten assets in the region, and staged massive strikes all along the Shah's western flank. ZOCOM strike teams, Forgotten auxiliaries, and airborne forces swept through many of the mining towns along the edge of the Red Zone. While the Shah's efforts to mine the Red Zone had been desultory, there were a number of areas where hardpoints were being actively protected from the crystal's constant encroachment, including multiple nuclear launch areas and critical airfields. While none still had nuclear devices by the time they were overrun by Initiative forces, the airfields at least did not manage to launch their craft before the wall of airpower and airmobile forces overran them.
However, it was not all roses. With the air clearing, the Shah could also bring in his forces, including a pair of Varyag-class airships. The skies over Pakistan soon became a furball, with heavy casualties on all sides, and neither side able to make significant efforts to pick up casualties – though with the increasing proliferation of supersonic aircraft in both the Initiative and the Brotherhood's arsenals, such rescue efforts would likely be in vain. An Apollo making an attack run can break Mach Five for instance, and at those velocities even a glancing hit becomes a nearly unsurvivable catastrophe.
When an operation grows sufficiently large, individual skill becomes yet another factor to plug into the spreadsheet, to calculate "how many missiles/lasers/etc. are needed to achieve a kill." With the sky clear, GDI has absolutely reached that scale. The forces of al-Isfahani, however, have their ways to tilt the numbers in their favor. The long-range lasers of the Varyag-class air cruisers are one, firing in support of the front-line interceptor and air superiority squadrons. This is something GDI strategists developed plans to counter, of course, but a plan's existence does not make it easy, or lacking in risk.
As soon as the two Varyags were detected, squadrons of Apollos and Firehawks shifted, forming into larger wings, armed with long-range missiles. This initial attack, launched from higher altitude and nearly maximum range, would present no real danger to smaller aircraft. The more limited maneuver capabilities of a Varyag meant that they were within the threat cone for this massed barrage of missiles. However, the missiles in question were also heavily constrained from defensive maneuvering. Many were burned from the sky by defensive fire or intercepted by long-range SAMs, with the few that threaded the needle leaving the heavy crafts' armor pocked from impacts, but demonstrably still combat-effective.
The second wave of GDI aircraft again changed plans, attempting to punch a hole in Nod air defenses. Apollos and Firehawks equipped with air-to-air missiles engaged Venoms and Barghests of various refits, while Orcas and other Firehawks engaged ground-based defenses, with a few strongpoints marked for glide bombs launched from Auroras or ion cannon bombardment. Into this brawl came GDI's third wave, Firehawks reinforcing the depleted second wave to further tie up anti-air assets, while the entirety of this wave's Apollo squadrons made a maximum-speed run towards the two Varyags and their escort squadrons.
Evasive maneuvering was limited, but not useless- even for a laser, aiming at a (relatively) small object moving almost 1.7km/second on a less-than-predictable course is not precisely easy. Incoming missiles were largely intercepted or dodged, but the sprint to a near-point-blank firing range took the squadrons about half a minute, during which nearly half the planes were destroyed. However, the tactic was successful; each air cruiser was hit by at least 30 plasma-warhead missiles, and one was also struck by two Apollos whose maneuvering surfaces were damaged. Neither airship survived the barrage, one crashing near the front lines and the other began to make the turn to head deeper into Al-Isfahani's territory before something in its power system gave way, and the aircraft detonated high in the skies, scattering debris and Tiberium across over a square kilometer.
The loss of both Varyags and a considerable amount of the Nod air wing led to the remainder retreating to rearm and repair. Ground-based air defenses attempted to hold off the depleted GDI air force, but with much less success. Brotherhood reserve squadrons arrived in-theater to re-engage, but they were noticeably on the back foot.
The Initiative comparatively, was able to maintain the pace. Over the course of 72 hours, the Initiative flew thousands of sorties, and delivered more than thirty kilotons of munitions across the region. With the highest value Brotherhood air assets destroyed in storms of plasma, the air forces of the Shah fell apart. First swept from the skies, and then overrun on the ground – in many cases being forced to land at sites that were actively being struck by Initiative forces, and in some few cases, were captured in the field by Initiative airmobile forces conducting bite and hold operations.
The battle of Hyderabad defined much of mid November. With the Brotherhood entrenched south of the city, and the Initiative still struggling to bring up enough shells, most of the artillery (both conventional and orbital) was dedicated to counter-battery fires. While a Specter battery, especially those armed with nuclear and RAP armaments, could fire and reposition quickly, it was something that required significant reconfiguring of their operational use. With the limits of Initiative artillery in the Third Tiberium War, it was (relatively) safe for the guns to take the time to set up, load shell, and fire multiple times. Now however, it was a different story. Most of the time, they would sprint up to firing range, shell already in the chamber, set up, fire, and then immediately scoot to a concealed position. And even those were no guarantee of safety. The Initiative had begun to litter the skies with loitering munitions, and while counterbattery fires from ground forces were few and far between, the air dominance of the combined forces of the Initiative fleet air arm, and ground based fighters has meant that oftentimes the Spectres were being struck during the set up phase.
G---D---I
Willis Graham stalked forward, once more leading from the front. This was his third Zone suit since landing day, and even it was on its last legs. He walked with a limp, half of the myomers in the left leg having given out already. GD-3 cradled in his arms, the railgun for the suit having given up the ghost days ago, and an infantry rifle was available. His unit was equally ragged – none of them had a full load of ammo, and all of them had ablat plates covering at least one hole in their armored suits. The jetpacks were long gone, especially with the impact frames not being protective enough with the damages to the suits. Their operational tempo was too quick, and the supply of spare Zone armor too lean, for them to stop for more than critical maintenance or replacement.
An Orca screamed low overhead, missiles rippling off the racks as it made an attack run. Lower than it needed to – far, far lower. But at this point, the simple visual was more power than any weapon the craft could have carried. The striking eagle, coming in low and loud, a symbol of power that had lasted, nearly unchanged, since before Willis was even born.
G --- D --- I
Azad Barzani scrambled from rock to rubble, pausing every few yards to offer some words of support. The men of his unit were on the ragged edge - two thirds gone, dead, or too wounded to keep going, or captured since the battle at the Hub River dam. The cloak that marked him as a Confessor was long gone, shredded by the weeks of fighting on the front lines. His words sounded hollow even to himself: "Hold fast, for the prophet is watching over us."
Empty words, for a doomed defense.
A few yards down the line, an Initiative shell blew a gaping hole in the defenses. Azad fired a few streams from his particle gun into the gap as he rushed that way - suppressive fire, more than anything. Fill the gaps, keep the screen intact. He knew firsthand what the Initiative did with a breach in the line: zone armor shock troops would rush in first, followed swiftly by mechanized companies, relying on their armor and sheer bloody-minded contempt to keep them safe from fragmentation, right behind the curtain of shells.
The blast of an airbursting shell hammered him to the ground, insensate; a Zone Trooper smashed forward and past him mere seconds later, and then the world fell away.
Azad woke, still dirty, still in his armor, with an Initiative medic -- white patches, and a backpack full of medical supplies tagging them for safety -- kneeling over him. The sting of a spray of antiseptic and chill of first-aid gel were among the first things he felt, the medic then moving him to a recovery position before beginning to tap away at a forearm-mounted screen.
G --- D --- I
Willis kept moving, artillery and airpower screaming around him, as now desultory fire whipped past his armor. One of his fellows toppled over, dead as a beam of particles found its mark, taking him, and one of the few railguns left in the squad, down in a spray of blood and shattered faceplate. Willis scrambled over, grabbing the railgun, and with practiced efficiency stripped the corpse of power packs and ammunition. Railgun at the ready, he swung left, looking for any movement after he had punched through the last Brotherhood fighting position. A shredder position swung towards him – not fast enough though, and a half-dozen railgun rounds smashed it to pieces. But where there was one, there were always more, and he moved as quickly as he could toward the hardpoint, eyes scanning for the hub.
There, on his left, it was. Railgun to shoulder, snap off a shot, dive for cover as the air around him turned to shrapnel. A few pieces slipped past the armor, cutting myomer cords as Graham struggled to his feet, and put round after round into the hub, blasting it to scrap as the rest of his squad did the same.
Dropping down once more in the ruins of what had been a Brotherhood fighting position, Graham waited for the tanks to roll up behind his men, before pushing forward. Another line, another street. Just one more day on the offensive.
G --- D --- I
Strategic Area Defense Network Report: Success and Failures during Operation Summer Storm
The Strategic Area Defense Network at this point is in its final stages of being brought online. The biggest issue was, and remains, arming it. Sensor calibrations take time, but some of the last hurdles was sufficiently stocking the system with long ranged missile interceptors. These are both significantly expensive, and more importantly, rare. The SADN represents a rough doubling of demand for the munition type, and that has become something of a lasting problem.
While ASAT has assisted, mostly in support and sensor rather than kinetic roles, the system does need more work, with direct datalinks, rather than needing information to be actively passed down. The link as it stands is currently too slow, especially in the context of minimum velocities of five times the speed of sound, and often significantly higher for the strikes that managed to get through.
All of this must be understood in the context of a rapidly evolving offensive capability from the Brotherhood of Nod. With the Initiative achieving ever increasing conventional military capability, the historic methods of nuclear deployment had become increasingly nonviable. That historical standard – subsonic low-altitude cruise missiles, and even supersonic cruise missiles – has become effectively incapable of providing a substantial threat to Initiative assets, especially as the Initiative has begun fielding energy weapons in its interceptors, the deployment of increasingly effective GBAD including laser and in the near future particle systems, and similar increases in capability.
In point of fact, across all remote strikes, only those that included enhanced capability munitions achieved any success. With these strikes, the most notable element is speed, specifically, speeds high enough to begin to seriously degrade the ability of GDI's ion cannon and orbital networks to intercept.
The example of the early December strike on the Seattle shipyards is illustrative of the lengths that the Brotherhood of Nod has been forced to go to. The strike began without warning, with what has been provisionally termed the Alicorn class of submarine surfacing in a patch of the Pacific about three hundred kilometers off the coast. Over the course of the next seven minutes, it would fire fifteen rail-accelerated nuclear shells, six of which penetrated the Seattle Air Defense Network. Each one was flying at a low trajectory, with the systems having less than five seconds to engage between the projectile flying over the horizon, and it initiating. Each was an airburst shot, detonating above the shipyard complex.
Initial counterfires were directed long, around 350 kilometers out, beyond the submarine, and beyond effective range for water hammer effects from the fire. Fire assessment says that the six strikes called made no significant impact on the submarine. Similarly, rapid strike squadrons of the 112th air wing failed to find the submarine before their fuel tanks ran low enough to force them to return to base.
Seattle was also the last Alicorn strike so far. While Intelligence is unsure exactly how many of the type exist – at least two, but unlikely to be more than five – they seem to have expended their nuclear arsenals, and no strikes have occurred on what are now considered to be the typical trajectories. One has been found, interned in dockyards near Rio, found by InOps agents, and safe under both ion disruptors and a significant air defense network, which the Air Force is unsure of sending Aurora bombers over.
Comparatively, the attempted strikes on Europe, focused on sites like Bergen, faced significantly greater threats. Here, the Brotherhood utilized aircraft. Their flight plan could not be direct in the slightest. Rather, they were forced to divert significantly north, fly effectively over the north pole, and then turn west and south to come in towards Europe over the ocean. It was in this southern turn that they were detected by training flights from the 13th Cadet Air Wing, flying out of Peterhead. The two flights first detected them on their way back from a simulated bombing raid on Molde, doing night navigation above the north sea. With no live munitions loaded, Flight Instructor Vikram decided to make pursuit while calling in coordinates to the airbase.
The Firehawks were carrying targeting pods, standard issue for training, designed to feed targeting data back to central command computer systems. Those pods would take targeting and kinematic data in, feed them to the simulator, and determine whether or not the missile was a hit or not for air to air combat training. Those same pods were keystones for this operation, because instead of feeding that targeting data to a computer running a simulation, they were being fed to missile launchers scattered across the region: launchers on the Faroes, barrage hulks and former oil rigs across the coasts of Sweden and Scotland. All were being fed data from the eight Firehawks and some handful were able to make launches using that data, which would then handoff to the Firehawk midflight for terminal guidance. Many of the launchers in fact were already hooked up, having been playing OPFOR for the bombing raid.
Initially, things looked like they were going well, the weapon pairing and handoff managed to shoot down a number of the bombers – well beyond the typical range of such munitions, with the terminal guidance from the Firehawks able to generate hits that would usually be impossible. However, very quickly things began to break down. The biggest issue was that as the relative positioning of the bombers, Firehawks, and incoming missiles changed, the Firehawks were directing missiles inbound on their own position, rather than at an oblique angle – meaning that in two cases, before Flight Instructor Vikram ordered them to break off, a missile that had been unable to make intercept with the bombers, made lock on one of the training Firehawks. While the missile was successfully overridden in both cases, a fairly simple procedure, but one that the cadets failed to undertake in time, Flight Instructor Vikram made the decision that continuing to call in fires was too dangerous for the flights to undertake, and ordered a return to base.
However, those young fliers had turned the bombers from a potential threat, to a turkey shoot. Scrambled squadrons of professionals, and the already engaging anti-aircraft sites, were able to eliminate the rest of the bombers long before they reached their release points.
Salvage recovered from two of the bombers that had crashed in Swedish mountains included one of their targeting computers, designating English port facilities as their target, and while most of the other bombers were not recovered, it seems most likely that they were targeting a litany of industrial, political, and military sites.
G --- D --- I
Battle of Islamabad
A battle enters history before the blood spilled in victory or defeat has finished drying. Regardless of whether it takes hours, days, weeks or more, helmet cameras and recording devices preserve these thousands of moments. This information is near-immediately pored over by EVAs and analysts, hunting for anything that might be turned into an advantage or reveal a weakness of the enemy. Unit historians work to stitch these moments together and individual soldiers tell their own stories.
The stories told by the 17th Indian Rifle Regiment as they press south towards and then around Islamabad down from the mountains are ones of change. As engagement ranges shorten and heights fade, veterans of mountain campaigns measured by securing individual peaks and ridges experience urban warfare for the first time. They are reminded quickly that railgun rounds penetrate through entire buildings as well as any unfortunate along their path. Air support and artillery sound completely different, echoing through streets and doorways instead of deep mountain valleys.
And in those streets the Shah's forces stand firm. They know the story they are writing in blood is one of a doomed last stand. There is no single unit or force that cannot be moved west either due to lack of supplies or lack of time. Purifiers hidden amongst buildings move from position to position as missiles and railgun fire chase them across the city. In some cases, Gana cling to their sides before leaping off to pounce upon blast-concussed infantry even as their impromptu transports begin to burn.
At truly critical points in the warlord's lines were a scattered band of Redeemers. Operating independently, only two remained in the city by the time GDI secured the eastern edge of the city. They had originally totaled three but the Vanguard of Light had been cut off from retreat while overextending in an effort to finish off a GDI mechanized platoon. Drawn into an ambush, it had been immobilized and then permanently silenced by a company of Predator tanks before any reinforcements could save its crew.
Driving north as their enemies drew back, the 5th Armored Division measured out the remaining supplies it had. Not yet combat ineffective, they pressed their momentum for all its worth to allow them to link up with the 17th IRR. Doing so would not only isolate the city from 3 sides, but see the 5th AD resupplied. It was with calculated desperation that carried them forward and into the guns of Nod. And through the continual sacrifice of the servicemembers of the Global Defense Initiative, the link between the two formations was achieved.
While GDI advanced and Nod retreated, the civilian populace of the city adapted as best they could. Displaced or worse by the fighting and exposed to the elements, approximately thirteen thousand civilians would die over the course of the unfinished fighting. Timely aid surged to those in need by GDI alleviated the worst of the tragedy for most of the city's nearly four hundred thousand population.
700 kilometers from the city that had birthed the invasion, the experience of the civilian population in Islamabad is typical of those near or at the front line of the conflict between GDI and the Brotherhood. Far away from the initial events that precipitated the violence that would eventually visit them, the city saw itself drawn into the conflict as military necessity. Now a contested area, Islamabad and its populace are unwilling participants in only the latest chapter of violence. Just as Białystok, Chicago, St. Petersburg, Rome, Cape Town, Niš, Munich, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Cairo and near countless more suffered, Islamabad joins Hampton Roads, Monrovia, and Johannesburg in the latest chapter of the global war being waged across Earth.
The story most easily told of the battle for Islamabad is one of numbers, unit markers, and clean military cause and effect. In that story, Islamabad is just another item in the growing list of places that Nod and GDI have fought over during the course of their war. That war and that story do not belong to or own the people of Islamabad. The people of Islamabad will, in the years to come, tell their own stories, eventually ones entirely free of the conflict currently visiting their city.
On January 3rd, 2065, the stories they tell are the sounds of battle, the feeling of hunger and cold, or are never told because those that would have spoken them are dead.
Requisition Order of GDI Quartermaster Staff Sergeant Dean Bautista of the 5th Armored Division
Date: January 2nd, 2065
....
Below items are of the highest priority and should be dispatched as soon as is possible.
30 Pallets prepared meals
15 Pallets prepared meals (child)
13 Pallets prepared meals (infant)
11 Pallets baby formula
3000 Exposure Suits
500 Body Bags
G --- D --- I
At the end of the first three months of operations, GDI sits astride a connected line between the coast and the Himalayan Blue Zone. But it is not an uncontested line, and came at far too high a cost. Almost half of the Initiative's battleships either need significant yard time, or scrapping. The OSRCT has proven itself in battle once again, but at a cost of nearly half its number either dead or invalid.
At the same time, the Shah is in the wind, holed up in mountain fastness northwest of the Initiative's line of advance, backed onto what is nominally still Krukov's territory, although the local warlords tend to be far enough away from the center of power for them to have significant operational independence. He has begun directing a steady drumbeat of strikes against the Karachi line, albeit with no major successes so far. Most of the fires are shot down before they impact, and those that do have so far failed to hit anything that requires more than 48 hours of downtime.
The line between the Initiative and the Bannerjees has become an uncomfortable, frozen battle line. On one hand, neither side particularly wants a conflict. On the other, the shifting dynamics have put major Bannerjee areas suddenly in range of the Initiative, and with that connection, as tenuous and vulnerable as it is, the Initiative has significantly increased its power over the whole of the region, turning the northern portion of the Indian ocean, into, if not an Initiative lake, a barrier to Brotherhood operations, with no stretch of the coastline free of Initiative operations anywhere beyond the Indian subcontinent itself.
Broader consequences are still asserting themselves, both within and without the Initiative's borders. However, it does put a stop to one of the more bleeding sores that has been a problem for the Initiative since before the Third Tiberium War.
A/N1: Resultspost tomorrow, Q1 Tuesday. I can't give a timeline at the moment for the next update after that, because partner is going into surgery next week, and I will need to balance a masters program, a job, and taking care of her with any hobbies.
A/N2: Buy ithillid a Coffee. ko-fi.com/ithillid if you want to help out.
