01-17-2007, 12:33 AM
This isn't exactly fanfiction, but ... well, imagine Bubblegum Crisis without boomers, hardsuits, or beautiful women....
(Edit: This isn't a story, per se, but background for a potential story.)
Is anything here too improbable?
Historical Overview
In the early to mid-2030s, the Russian government collapsed. So many ethnic Russian refugees took up residence in New York City that the city acquired a new nickname, all but universal though never officially accepted: Novii Yorkgrad.
In the early 2040s, what developed into World War III broke out. Although professing neutrality, Peoples China in fact sponsored and provoked much of the conflict, particularly the India-Pakistan nuclear exchanges and the brutal guerilla war between the Union of Arab Africa and the Lagos Pact. With Japanese (mostly financial) assistance, the Chinese had developed bio-regulator weapons, allowing epidemics targeted against specific genetic groups. The worst atrocity of the war came when Peoples China simultaneously sold such weapons to two opposing religious extremist factions: a Muslim group which arranged for its weapon to attack those with the genetic markers for blonde hair and/or blue eyes, and a Christian group which sought to destroy Arabs.
The results devastated both sides. The Middle East was almost completely depopulated, between the effects of the targeted epidemic and the missiles launched by dying nations desperate to take their foes with them (any surviving Muslim extremists may have taken a bitter comfort in the fact that the State of Israel had at last ceased to be). Scandinavia, by some estimates, suffered over 90% fatalities, while the rest of Europe lost between 50% and 60% of its population. Australia and North America were hit nearly as hard as Europe. Even those of European descent who didnt actually have blonde hair or blue eyes often had enough of the genetic markers to doom them. Likewise, the exceedingly loose parameters of the epidemic against Arabs killed many non-Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East. Berbers, Kurds, Iranians, and Pashtuns and Jews were all too often close enough to Arabs to die of the plague.
Governments crumbled. France had managed to establish the most effective quarantine, and had the most survivors of any nation with a high percentage vulnerable to the epidemics. In the aftermath, French forces swept out to restore order in the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, restore order, as the enraged French now interpreted it, involved the suppression genocide, in fact of all Muslim elements (as well as several Jewish, Hindu, and even Sikh populations). By the opening of the 22nd Century, Europe was the French Empire in fact though not in name. Only Iberia, the Balkans, and Turkey retained most of their independence (Greece, in fact, refused to let the French cross its territory to attack Turkey). Berlin, London, Moscow, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna were now French cities. But the Sixth Republic was overstretched, exhausted by its efforts, and unable to project any significant power beyond Europe.
The United States of America split into regional administrations, not as a result of secession but simply because the central authority had collapsed. Most of these claimed to be the sole rightful U.S.A. Eventually 4 U.S. governments coalesced. The northeastern was nicknamed The Empire, the southeast Dixie, the region between Chicago and the Rockies became known as Heartland, and the Pacific Coastal U.S. acquired the sobriquet Pax. (The Empire, Heartland, and Pax also included some Canadian territory Canadas central government had broken down as well, and border areas more-or-less merged as people refused to simply stand by watching their neighbors, no matter what flag they flew, starve or be murdered by bandits. The Canadian regional governments which developed likewise included some formerly U.S. land.) Although none of these nations at first recognized the others as legitimate, all were unwilling to attempt reunion by conquest. The joker in the deck was the near-fascist regime of Texas, which aggressively sought to unify North America under the Lone Star rather than the Stars and Stripes.
The motivation of Peoples China in selling the designer plagues to fanatics had been to deplete populations which could then be more readily overrun by Chinese colonists. The secret was not kept as closely as it should have been, however, and discovery of Chinese culpability actually came while the epidemics were still running their course. The Indians and Pakistanis didnt so much put aside their differences as independently decide to launch the majority of their remaining nuclear weaponry at China. Although this did notable damage to southern Chinese transport and power systems, far more significant was a biological attack, one of the last actions of the United States as a whole. Not targeted directly at humans, this instead wiped out the Chinese rice crop. Peoples China had enough food sources other than rice to have fed the entire pre-war population of the U.S.A. The Chinese pre-war populace, however, was more than 5 times the size of the American. Wracked by famine and accompanying disease, China descended into warlordism.
Japanese complicity in the development and sale of the bio-regulator weapons wasnt discovered until approximately 20 years later, by which time the governments most affected had ceased to exist. What international outrage still arose was mitigated somewhat by the quite evident outrage the Japanese displayed. Televised images of high officials dragged from their limousines by their own angry people and forced to commit seppuku muted any calls for Japan to suffer the same fate as China. Still, Japanese citizens in several other countries were rounded up and deported en masse. Armed picket ships (later robots) took post around the Home Islands of Japan to ensure no Japanese would ever again leave. Nor could any commerce enter. Cut off from the levels of food, fuel, and other resources needed to sustain a thoroughly industrialized high-population society, Japan decivilized with horrifying speed. Satellite imagery showed entire cities aflame.
With Europe, North America, China, and Japan no longer in position to be world leaders, Brazil, Indonesia, and, to a lesser extent because of the damage it had suffered, India became the big winners and rising powers. Africa, for all its resources, was too divided and ravaged after more than 70 years as a battleground to lead anything, and instead continued in its pattern of victimization.
Because those who used the plagues had been religious extremists, religious faith fell into some disrepute, especially in the former United States and Europe. U.S. politicians in the early part of the 21st Century had been rather obnoxiously prone to trumpeting their piety as part of seeking votes. Now, however, open religious belief, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, or whatever else, came to be regarded as, at the very least, in the worst of taste, a gross social error. By the end of the century, while it wasnt actually illegal to be religiously observant, it also wasnt illegal in most parts of the former U.S.A. to fire an employee without notice simply and solely because he or she was found to be an active churchgoer (synagogue-goer, mosque-goer, coven member, etc.).
By the mid-to-late 2090s, Dixie was skirmishing with both Texas and Brazil for influence in the Caribbean, and the 4 U.S.A.s were making slow and unsteady progress toward merger. Corporate policymakers in The Empire, their catspaws or outright accomplices holding many if not most high government positions, worried that reunion might bring greater regulation of their robber-baron activities. They manipulated the government into an attempt to seize strategic territory in Central America while the main powers of the region were distracted. The Texans and Brazilians were not nearly so preoccupied as the corporations had claimed. The war swiftly degenerated into a meatgrinder, going on, and on, and on. And the corp-rats made out like bandits, selling overpriced and usually shoddy equipment to the military, and preying upon the poverty-stricken civilians at home.
In the early 2110s, after some 15 years of war, Empire units 2nd Fleet Force (Joint) in Central America discovered how the corporations which instigated the war are prolonging the conflict both to profit from it and to keep troops from returning to their impoverished homes and agitating for political refom. The command formed Coup de Main, composed of troops listed as killed in action, and sent them Stateside (supposedly with crippling physical or psychological injuries) under the names of actual dead personnel with no families. Under the cover of being a mercenary assassin force, the team identifies and kills corporate policymakers responsible for the present corruption, often planting false evidence to indicate that the latest victim had on past occasions hired Coup de Main to murder his/her competitors. More such groups were planned (such as Schwerpunkt and Force Majeure), but for reasons of operational security, Coup de Main has no confirmation of their existence.
COUP DE MAIN
Call sign Panzerblitz (MSG Vasil Damiani)
Standard armor (comparable to early 21st-Century Interceptor body armor)
Weapons: MAE 95 semi-auto UHV flechette rifle (35-round magazine) with underbarrel 8-chamber grenade revolver
Texas Armaments ATM-12 fire-&-forget anti-armor missile in backpack launcher
7 x hand grenade
Very large knife (almost a machete)
Punch dagger
MAE 95 stands for Manufacture dArmes de Enfield model of 2095. France makes most of the finest infantry weapons of the late 21st and early 22nd Century. Almost all of Coup de Mains weapons and equipment are foreign-made, not only because of their quality but to support the cover story of being international mercenaries free-lancing assassination. In the case of Brazil (IMBEL) and Texas, the weapons are from nations actively hostile to the U.S. The grenade revolver typically holds a mix of UHE shaped-charge, UHE frag, thermipalm, and/or direct-fire flechette spread, and can be set to skip every other chamber when firing. The rifles targeting computer can set frag and thermipalm grenades to airburst at a selected range.
Call sign Overwatch (GySgt Zindor Baricki)
Flight armor
Weapons: IMBEL M472 laser rifle
H&K USP large-caliber semi-auto pistol (12-round magazine)
Field knife
Flight armor includes a VTOL rocket system with enough thrust to lift 100kg at 1 meter/sec for 55 seconds. If merely hovering, duration is slightly greater, and almost 90 seconds if only used to slow descent. Further, the wearer can quickly don or remove an battery-powered ducted-fan wingpack: a 1-person glide-capable airplane with nearly an hour of powered flight. The wingpack is not used for aerial combat or strafing, but merely as transportation. Weight constraints make the laser rifle the primary weapon. The laser isnt powerful enough to do significant damage to flesh (due to the ablative effect of water in the tissue), but it transmits an electric jolt selected to be lethal or incapacitating along a path ionized by the beam. The lethal version also acts like a directional EMP to disrupt electronic systems. The laser does serve as an effective cutting tool against non-living material.
Call sign Total (PO1 Edyth Ellis)
Standard armor
Weapons: MAE 95
ATM-12
7 x hand grenade
Field knife
Stiletto
Call sign Magnafire (SSG Brack Saint-Steele)
Heavy weapons armor
Weapons: Ultimax 120 Mk3a LMG/sniper rifle firing ramjet bullets (120-round magazine) with underbarrel Metal Storm Personal Cannon
2 x ATM-12
12 x hand grenade
Replacement barrel for Personal Cannon or 5 x breaching charge
Field knife
The most readily available loads for the Personal Cannon are UHE frag (5 per barrel), directional-fusion plasma (5 per barrel), and binary-UHE FAE (3 per barrel). The frag round has approximately 8x the lethal radius of the revolver-launched frag grenade and 5x that of the hand grenade. A DFP round has about 6x the armor-penetrating power of a rifle flechette, 4x that of a revolver-fired UHE shaped-charge grenade, and perhaps 2/3 the punch of the anti-armor missile.
Call sign Jackknife (SSgt Arvin deLancey)
Stealth/recon "spooksuit"
Weapons: Daewoo DP87c non-metallic compressed-gas large-caliber semi-auto pistol (10-round magazine & gas cartridge)
Daewoo DP101 non-metallic compressed-air pistol firing Hypnotene darts (2 shots double-barrelled)
Monomolecular glass shortsword
2 x monomolecular glass dagger, balanced for throwing
Scarf garrote
More effective than the standard chammies, the spooksuit renders a motionless or very slow-moving wearer virtually invisible under all but the clearest viewing conditions.
Hypnotene produces near-instant but short-term unconsciousness, voluntary-muscle locking, and, upon waking, no memory of the last few seconds before losing consciousness. It is thus excellent for operations in which the commando wishes to conceal his penetration of the area.
Call sign Strafe (SGT Lera Deane)
Flight armor
Weapons: IMBEL M472
PAMAB 07 small-caliber semi-auto pistol (20-round magazine)
2 x hand grenade
Punch dagger
Call sign Bodycount (CPL Moss Trant)
Standard armor
Weapons: MAE 95
ATM-12
7 x hand grenade
2 x field knife
The team also uses voicemask technology. Voiceprint ID would indicate they are, from the top, actor James Mason, newsman Walter Cronkite, singer/actress Lacey Devereaux, President Colin Powell, President John F. Kennedy, actress Nichelle Nichols, and actor Fletcher Somerset.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
(Edit: This isn't a story, per se, but background for a potential story.)
Is anything here too improbable?
Historical Overview
In the early to mid-2030s, the Russian government collapsed. So many ethnic Russian refugees took up residence in New York City that the city acquired a new nickname, all but universal though never officially accepted: Novii Yorkgrad.
In the early 2040s, what developed into World War III broke out. Although professing neutrality, Peoples China in fact sponsored and provoked much of the conflict, particularly the India-Pakistan nuclear exchanges and the brutal guerilla war between the Union of Arab Africa and the Lagos Pact. With Japanese (mostly financial) assistance, the Chinese had developed bio-regulator weapons, allowing epidemics targeted against specific genetic groups. The worst atrocity of the war came when Peoples China simultaneously sold such weapons to two opposing religious extremist factions: a Muslim group which arranged for its weapon to attack those with the genetic markers for blonde hair and/or blue eyes, and a Christian group which sought to destroy Arabs.
The results devastated both sides. The Middle East was almost completely depopulated, between the effects of the targeted epidemic and the missiles launched by dying nations desperate to take their foes with them (any surviving Muslim extremists may have taken a bitter comfort in the fact that the State of Israel had at last ceased to be). Scandinavia, by some estimates, suffered over 90% fatalities, while the rest of Europe lost between 50% and 60% of its population. Australia and North America were hit nearly as hard as Europe. Even those of European descent who didnt actually have blonde hair or blue eyes often had enough of the genetic markers to doom them. Likewise, the exceedingly loose parameters of the epidemic against Arabs killed many non-Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East. Berbers, Kurds, Iranians, and Pashtuns and Jews were all too often close enough to Arabs to die of the plague.
Governments crumbled. France had managed to establish the most effective quarantine, and had the most survivors of any nation with a high percentage vulnerable to the epidemics. In the aftermath, French forces swept out to restore order in the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, restore order, as the enraged French now interpreted it, involved the suppression genocide, in fact of all Muslim elements (as well as several Jewish, Hindu, and even Sikh populations). By the opening of the 22nd Century, Europe was the French Empire in fact though not in name. Only Iberia, the Balkans, and Turkey retained most of their independence (Greece, in fact, refused to let the French cross its territory to attack Turkey). Berlin, London, Moscow, Rome, Stockholm, and Vienna were now French cities. But the Sixth Republic was overstretched, exhausted by its efforts, and unable to project any significant power beyond Europe.
The United States of America split into regional administrations, not as a result of secession but simply because the central authority had collapsed. Most of these claimed to be the sole rightful U.S.A. Eventually 4 U.S. governments coalesced. The northeastern was nicknamed The Empire, the southeast Dixie, the region between Chicago and the Rockies became known as Heartland, and the Pacific Coastal U.S. acquired the sobriquet Pax. (The Empire, Heartland, and Pax also included some Canadian territory Canadas central government had broken down as well, and border areas more-or-less merged as people refused to simply stand by watching their neighbors, no matter what flag they flew, starve or be murdered by bandits. The Canadian regional governments which developed likewise included some formerly U.S. land.) Although none of these nations at first recognized the others as legitimate, all were unwilling to attempt reunion by conquest. The joker in the deck was the near-fascist regime of Texas, which aggressively sought to unify North America under the Lone Star rather than the Stars and Stripes.
The motivation of Peoples China in selling the designer plagues to fanatics had been to deplete populations which could then be more readily overrun by Chinese colonists. The secret was not kept as closely as it should have been, however, and discovery of Chinese culpability actually came while the epidemics were still running their course. The Indians and Pakistanis didnt so much put aside their differences as independently decide to launch the majority of their remaining nuclear weaponry at China. Although this did notable damage to southern Chinese transport and power systems, far more significant was a biological attack, one of the last actions of the United States as a whole. Not targeted directly at humans, this instead wiped out the Chinese rice crop. Peoples China had enough food sources other than rice to have fed the entire pre-war population of the U.S.A. The Chinese pre-war populace, however, was more than 5 times the size of the American. Wracked by famine and accompanying disease, China descended into warlordism.
Japanese complicity in the development and sale of the bio-regulator weapons wasnt discovered until approximately 20 years later, by which time the governments most affected had ceased to exist. What international outrage still arose was mitigated somewhat by the quite evident outrage the Japanese displayed. Televised images of high officials dragged from their limousines by their own angry people and forced to commit seppuku muted any calls for Japan to suffer the same fate as China. Still, Japanese citizens in several other countries were rounded up and deported en masse. Armed picket ships (later robots) took post around the Home Islands of Japan to ensure no Japanese would ever again leave. Nor could any commerce enter. Cut off from the levels of food, fuel, and other resources needed to sustain a thoroughly industrialized high-population society, Japan decivilized with horrifying speed. Satellite imagery showed entire cities aflame.
With Europe, North America, China, and Japan no longer in position to be world leaders, Brazil, Indonesia, and, to a lesser extent because of the damage it had suffered, India became the big winners and rising powers. Africa, for all its resources, was too divided and ravaged after more than 70 years as a battleground to lead anything, and instead continued in its pattern of victimization.
Because those who used the plagues had been religious extremists, religious faith fell into some disrepute, especially in the former United States and Europe. U.S. politicians in the early part of the 21st Century had been rather obnoxiously prone to trumpeting their piety as part of seeking votes. Now, however, open religious belief, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, or whatever else, came to be regarded as, at the very least, in the worst of taste, a gross social error. By the end of the century, while it wasnt actually illegal to be religiously observant, it also wasnt illegal in most parts of the former U.S.A. to fire an employee without notice simply and solely because he or she was found to be an active churchgoer (synagogue-goer, mosque-goer, coven member, etc.).
By the mid-to-late 2090s, Dixie was skirmishing with both Texas and Brazil for influence in the Caribbean, and the 4 U.S.A.s were making slow and unsteady progress toward merger. Corporate policymakers in The Empire, their catspaws or outright accomplices holding many if not most high government positions, worried that reunion might bring greater regulation of their robber-baron activities. They manipulated the government into an attempt to seize strategic territory in Central America while the main powers of the region were distracted. The Texans and Brazilians were not nearly so preoccupied as the corporations had claimed. The war swiftly degenerated into a meatgrinder, going on, and on, and on. And the corp-rats made out like bandits, selling overpriced and usually shoddy equipment to the military, and preying upon the poverty-stricken civilians at home.
In the early 2110s, after some 15 years of war, Empire units 2nd Fleet Force (Joint) in Central America discovered how the corporations which instigated the war are prolonging the conflict both to profit from it and to keep troops from returning to their impoverished homes and agitating for political refom. The command formed Coup de Main, composed of troops listed as killed in action, and sent them Stateside (supposedly with crippling physical or psychological injuries) under the names of actual dead personnel with no families. Under the cover of being a mercenary assassin force, the team identifies and kills corporate policymakers responsible for the present corruption, often planting false evidence to indicate that the latest victim had on past occasions hired Coup de Main to murder his/her competitors. More such groups were planned (such as Schwerpunkt and Force Majeure), but for reasons of operational security, Coup de Main has no confirmation of their existence.
COUP DE MAIN
Call sign Panzerblitz (MSG Vasil Damiani)
Standard armor (comparable to early 21st-Century Interceptor body armor)
Weapons: MAE 95 semi-auto UHV flechette rifle (35-round magazine) with underbarrel 8-chamber grenade revolver
Texas Armaments ATM-12 fire-&-forget anti-armor missile in backpack launcher
7 x hand grenade
Very large knife (almost a machete)
Punch dagger
MAE 95 stands for Manufacture dArmes de Enfield model of 2095. France makes most of the finest infantry weapons of the late 21st and early 22nd Century. Almost all of Coup de Mains weapons and equipment are foreign-made, not only because of their quality but to support the cover story of being international mercenaries free-lancing assassination. In the case of Brazil (IMBEL) and Texas, the weapons are from nations actively hostile to the U.S. The grenade revolver typically holds a mix of UHE shaped-charge, UHE frag, thermipalm, and/or direct-fire flechette spread, and can be set to skip every other chamber when firing. The rifles targeting computer can set frag and thermipalm grenades to airburst at a selected range.
Call sign Overwatch (GySgt Zindor Baricki)
Flight armor
Weapons: IMBEL M472 laser rifle
H&K USP large-caliber semi-auto pistol (12-round magazine)
Field knife
Flight armor includes a VTOL rocket system with enough thrust to lift 100kg at 1 meter/sec for 55 seconds. If merely hovering, duration is slightly greater, and almost 90 seconds if only used to slow descent. Further, the wearer can quickly don or remove an battery-powered ducted-fan wingpack: a 1-person glide-capable airplane with nearly an hour of powered flight. The wingpack is not used for aerial combat or strafing, but merely as transportation. Weight constraints make the laser rifle the primary weapon. The laser isnt powerful enough to do significant damage to flesh (due to the ablative effect of water in the tissue), but it transmits an electric jolt selected to be lethal or incapacitating along a path ionized by the beam. The lethal version also acts like a directional EMP to disrupt electronic systems. The laser does serve as an effective cutting tool against non-living material.
Call sign Total (PO1 Edyth Ellis)
Standard armor
Weapons: MAE 95
ATM-12
7 x hand grenade
Field knife
Stiletto
Call sign Magnafire (SSG Brack Saint-Steele)
Heavy weapons armor
Weapons: Ultimax 120 Mk3a LMG/sniper rifle firing ramjet bullets (120-round magazine) with underbarrel Metal Storm Personal Cannon
2 x ATM-12
12 x hand grenade
Replacement barrel for Personal Cannon or 5 x breaching charge
Field knife
The most readily available loads for the Personal Cannon are UHE frag (5 per barrel), directional-fusion plasma (5 per barrel), and binary-UHE FAE (3 per barrel). The frag round has approximately 8x the lethal radius of the revolver-launched frag grenade and 5x that of the hand grenade. A DFP round has about 6x the armor-penetrating power of a rifle flechette, 4x that of a revolver-fired UHE shaped-charge grenade, and perhaps 2/3 the punch of the anti-armor missile.
Call sign Jackknife (SSgt Arvin deLancey)
Stealth/recon "spooksuit"
Weapons: Daewoo DP87c non-metallic compressed-gas large-caliber semi-auto pistol (10-round magazine & gas cartridge)
Daewoo DP101 non-metallic compressed-air pistol firing Hypnotene darts (2 shots double-barrelled)
Monomolecular glass shortsword
2 x monomolecular glass dagger, balanced for throwing
Scarf garrote
More effective than the standard chammies, the spooksuit renders a motionless or very slow-moving wearer virtually invisible under all but the clearest viewing conditions.
Hypnotene produces near-instant but short-term unconsciousness, voluntary-muscle locking, and, upon waking, no memory of the last few seconds before losing consciousness. It is thus excellent for operations in which the commando wishes to conceal his penetration of the area.
Call sign Strafe (SGT Lera Deane)
Flight armor
Weapons: IMBEL M472
PAMAB 07 small-caliber semi-auto pistol (20-round magazine)
2 x hand grenade
Punch dagger
Call sign Bodycount (CPL Moss Trant)
Standard armor
Weapons: MAE 95
ATM-12
7 x hand grenade
2 x field knife
The team also uses voicemask technology. Voiceprint ID would indicate they are, from the top, actor James Mason, newsman Walter Cronkite, singer/actress Lacey Devereaux, President Colin Powell, President John F. Kennedy, actress Nichelle Nichols, and actor Fletcher Somerset.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.