Endgame: July 2060 to March 2061
The Interstellar Age, S01E09
If, in 2025, US chiefs of staff had been asked to plan a land invasion of Mainland China, they likely would have laughed at the request.
As one of the largest, most populous, and climatically diverse countries on Earth, China posed unique challenges to any potential conqueror. Indeed, the very concept of invading China, like the concept of invading Russia, had long been a byword for military hubris. In earlier ages, foreign conquerors like the Mongols and the Manchus had sometimes succeeded in defeating and replacing the imperial regime—only to become “Sinicized,” succumbing to the irresistible force of Chinese culture and bureaucracy.
Only one attempt to conquer China had been made in the modern era. The Japanese Empire launched a series of invasions beginning in 1931, over time conquering large swathes of the most populous and economically vital areas of the country, including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing. The Japanese invasions began during a period of unique Chinese weakness, when the country was divided into a series of fiefdoms, only nominally ruled over by the corrupt and ineffectual nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, which was itself constantly distracted by a civil war against Mao Zedong’s communists. Japanese power, meanwhile, was at its peak, and the much more modern Japanese military consistently inflicted crushing defeats on far more numerous Chinese armies.
Yet after fourteen years of war and as many as twenty million Chinese dead, the Japanese Empire only managed to conquer about 25% of China, and failed to secure the surrender of either the nationalists or the communists before themselves being defeated by the United States in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War. If that had been the outcome in the mid-20th century, when China was arguably at its weakest, what chance did an invasion in the mid-21st century have, when a nuclear-armed China was, if not at the peak of its strength, at least unified, with one of the world’s largest and most modern militaries?
Indeed, any attempt by the Allies to conquer the entirety of China’s landmass would likely have ended in failure. Yet there were reasons to believe that this time, an invasion might have a chance at success. In the 1930’s and 40’s, Japan had been fighting alone against China, while much of the rest of the world, including the United States and the Soviet Union, had aided and supplied the Chinese before directly entering the war. This time, the paradigm was reversed: the People’s Republic of China fought alone against the world, with only a handful of conquests and puppet states in Asia to aid them—or, to consume military resources in occupation that might otherwise have defended the homeland.
And, while the CCP’s extensive cybernetic implantation regime granted them an unprecedented degree of direct control over their soldiers and citizens, it might also provide a unique opportunity to end the war without the conquest of the whole country. If the Allies could find a way to exploit it.
In any case—what choice did they have? The Chinese Empire clearly could not be left intact. Given time, it would only recover its strength and attempt another war for global dominion. Given the country’s vast resources, a blockade would not be sufficient to force its surrender. Annihilating it with nuclear weapons would only irradiate the entire region, killing hundreds of millions of innocent Chinese and Allied civilians. An invasion of some kind was the only recourse.
Allied High Command had recognized this fact early on, and began drafting the first plans along with those for the invasions of the Philippines and Taiwan. The overall operation, codenamed Victory Dawn, would consist of a series of subsidiary operations. The first, slated to begin in September, 2060, would be a series of special forces raids into Japan and South Korea, to aid and encourage the growing popular resistance movements against the largely North Korean occupiers.
Then, in early October, the Indian Army, reinforced by General Langworth’s 11th Army Group, and its own forces returned from the invasion of Iran, would launch Operation Varaha Parakram, a renewed push into Myanmar and Yunnan Province, intending, if possible, to ultimately reach Guangzhou and Hong Kong. At the same time, Operation Resolute Thunder would be launched: a series of Allied amphibious assaults concentrated on Qingdao, with the ultimate aim of driving on and capturing the capital at Beijing.
AHC hoped that maximum pressure on multiple fronts would cause the now-outnumbered PLA to crack. Then, if the capital could be taken and Chairman Shang’s government either captured or destroyed before it could escape—very big “ifs”—the war might be ended without devolving into a protracted insurgency in a vast country of over a billion people.
And of course, all of this assumed that Chairman Shang’s nuclear threat was a bluff—or, if it was not, that it was a threat which could be handled, without world civilization coming to an end.
Shang, for his part, had been awaiting this invasion for years. He had hoped that the Allies would launch it in 2058, when it would likely have been defeated. Nevertheless, he and his military chief, Marshal Bohai, remained confident that they could defeat an Allied amphibious assault, either destroying it on the heavily fortified beaches, or once it became bogged down fighting through China’s dense urban areas. If the Western forces could be destroyed, they hoped, Western will to continue the war would crumble. Without their support, the Indians could not hope to defeat the PRC alone, and would have to seek peace. Such a peace treaty would grant Shang and the CCP time to recover from their setbacks, and wait for the inevitable slide of the world’s democracies back into chaos.
The world’s democracies were not keen to give him the chance. Despite the risks, Victory Dawn would go ahead.
Allied special forces units had been landing in occupied Japan and South Korea for months by September, 2060. Teams participating in Operation Phantom Dagger were inserted by a variety of means, from stealth submersibles, to suborbital paradrops. In the latter case, the first ever military space dives, special operators and their equipment were carried up to the mesosphere by stealth aircraft and then dropped, making use of low-opening chutes and retro thrusters to slow their descent as quickly as possible. This method allowed Allied spec ops teams to bring heavier equipment into occupied territory without risk of detection.
Among the equipment smuggled in this way were next generation modular industrial printers and nuclear reactors to power them. These devices allowed the increasingly large and complex resistance cells in Japan and South Korea to spend months manufacturing weapons and ammunition for their fighters, and to hand out to civilians in the general uprising that was now planned to coincide with the invasions of China.
Aided by these augmented special operators, Japanese and South Korean insurgents ramped up attacks on their North Korean and Chinese occupiers throughout September, inflicting significant damage, and creating doubt in Shang’s mind about whether the Allies planned to invade China directly, or to first liberate Japan as a stepping stone. Then, in early October, just days before the main operations began, planned popular uprisings exploded throughout occupied Asia. As in Russia and Iran, Allied cyberwarfare efforts had successfully undermined the control mechanisms of many implanted civilians, particularly those who had been implanted by the North Koreans rather than the more effective Chinese.
The DPRK made every effort to crack down on these revolts, but they were already spread thin attempting to deal with the raging and sophisticated insurgent attacks—and most of their best units were already deployed to the Indian front to guard the flanks of the PLA on the vast lines of contact. Up against the massive numbers of the angry populace and the highly sophisticated tactics and weapons of Allied special operators, the North Koreans began to buckle.
Just then, the next phase of Victory Dawn began. Two Indian armies, plus the Allied Subcontinental Expeditionary Force, surged forward behind a massive artillery barrage and next-generation electronic warfare campaign. The meticulously planned operation focused on the vulnerable sections of the Axis line held by North Korean troops, shattering their poorly equipped divisions and rending huge gaps in the front. PLA forces had to retreat to avoid being surrounded, taking terrible casualties from Allied firepower as they abandoned prepared positions to move to rearward defensive lines.
Field Marshal Jin Tao, still commanding the PRC’s western defenses, was badly outnumbered. He begged for reinforcements from Beijing to stem the Allied tide, warning that despite the favorable terrain, he would soon have to retreat to Guangxi if he was not reinforced. But Shang would not be moved. He was now absolutely convinced that the Western Allies were about to land on the east coast, and he wanted to make sure that the PLA’s best augmech units were there to meet them.
Shang was right. On October 14, Operation Resolute Thunder began. The landings were preceded by a massive naval and air operation suppressing Chinese missile and air systems in the Shanghai and Jiangsu regions to protect the invasion fleet’s port flank, while special operators targeted similar systems in Kyushu and South Korea to protect its starboard. The PLA Air Force had already been badly degraded by this stage of the war, after a constant air campaign going back to 2058, but its remaining squadrons scrambled to do whatever they could to contest the attack.
Similarly, the remnants of the PLAN sailed out of their harbors in penny packets to harass the invasion fleet; while Chinese submarines and drones were able to inflict some losses on the transport vessels and their escorts, the PLAN’s remaining surface ships simply served themselves up for the slaughter.
The Allies conducted a massive preparatory bombardment of the entire Qingdao region, destroying thousands of missile launchers and defensive positions and leveling whole city blocks within a kilometer of the coast. No attempt was made to preserve the port facilities, as it was correctly assumed that the PLA would already be prepared to sabotage them. Instead, as in previous landings, temporary harbors would be erected to resupply the beachheads until the port could be repaired. The devastation inflicted upon the city of twelve million, once named China’s most livable, shocked even the Allies who landed there. The CCP’s refusal to evacuate the coastal areas of Qingdao and other likely invasion points meant that civilian casualties were high, even in the initial bombardment. They would continue to rise throughout the battle, in circumstances that grew increasingly ghastly.
Behind this terrible bombardment, Allied troops stormed ashore at several points on either side of the city port. The two main landing zones were centered around Shilaoren Beach at the northeast of the city, and Lingshan Bay in the southwest. Secondary landings were also conducted north of Rizhao, to divert attention from the main landings, and to later protect the flank of the main advance.
Given the extremely heavy resistance expected, Resolute Thunder called for the initial landings to be carried out exclusively by marines and other specialized amphibious assault troops. As such, Lieutenant General Arthur Choi’s US Marine Assault Corps bore the brunt of the landing operations. 1st and 3rd Marine Divisions came ashore at Shilaoren with support from the Royal Australian Regiment (Marines), while 2nd and 5th Divisions stormed Liangshan Bay. 4th MarDiv remained in reserve in case a followup landing should be required. The landings near Rizhao were conducted by Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Division (ARDD), with support from the US Marine Raider Regiment.
Finally, in a first for the Third World War and a callback to the Second, the invasion was supported by divisional-scale air deployments into the enemy rear. The US 82nd Airborne inserted into the Laoshan Mountains via helicopter, seizing the highways through the passes to protect the right flank of the invasion beaches at Shilaoren, and to destroy PLA defensive positions that had escaped bombardment. Meanwhile, the 101st—reconstituted from reserve battalions after being destroyed in Ukraine in 2053—paradropped from high altitude onto the Taitou Plains north of the city to interdict PLA reinforcements inbound for the beaches. In support of the landings at Lingshan Bay and Rizhao, the reactivated British 1st Airborne Division, along with the Australian and Canadian parachute regiments, landed near Jiujiushan and Polizhen. Elite special forces units from all major Allied powers also inserted in these regions, and even further behind the lines, via suborbital drop, sowing chaos and confusion among the PLA in the hours before the invasion forces hit the beaches.
The airborne divisions, despite advanced survivability, suppression, and diversion capabilities, took heavy losses to PLA anti-air fire on the way into their drop zones. But enough made it to ground to complete their objectives, inflicting widespread destruction in PLA rear areas, and effectively blocking off major reinforcements for several days while the marines secured the landing beaches.
Combat in and around Qingdao took place in varied terrain: mountains and ridgelines, open plains, suburbs, dense urban core. All of it was brutal, unforgiving—more so than any the Allies had yet experienced in an already brutal war. The PLA infantry divisions tasked with defending the port fought and died for every inch, standing and being blasted to pieces by naval gunfire and artillery just to slow the marines down and inflict a few more casualties. Augmech reinforcements threw themselves at airborne defenders dug into mountain passes and forests, with no thought for their own lives.
Finally, and most horrifically, as the Allied marines advanced into the city itself, Qingdao’s citizenry began throwing themselves into the battle. Under the influence of their behavioral control implants, tens of thousands of ordinary people—including the elderly, and some children—charged Allied lines wielding improvised weapons in grisly human wave attacks. Allied troops were forced to cut the unfortunate people down in droves. In some cases, the distraction and additional ammunition expenditure actually halted Allied advances, or allowed PLA counterattacks to regain ground. Others joined groups of refugees attempting to pass through Allied lines and then detonated explosive devices, killing and maiming their fellow Chinese, and Allied troops alike.
Unlike in Iran, Russia, and the occupied territories, nearly all citizens of the PRC had long since received control implants. While only a fraction of these—unknown, but somewhere in the region of 10 to 20%---obeyed their instructions to suicidally charge Allied lines, this still meant that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in the Qingdao region alone might be expected to expend their lives in the battle for no other reason than to waste Allied ammunition and create opportunities for the PLA to exploit.
The danger this posed was very real, and potentially disastrous. Again, unlike in Russia and Iran, Allied cyberwarfare had so far been unable to penetrate the CCP’s behavioral control network in order to mitigate its effectiveness. Until such a solution could be found, only one answer to the problem presented itself. All Chinese civilians would have to be treated as potentially hostile; heavily populated areas the Allied armies intended to pass through or nearby would have to be leveled to the ground, killing or disabling as many of these potential suicide combatants as possible, regardless of how many innocents would be killed along with them. It was an utterly horrific policy, and would have been unthinkable to Allied soldiers and populations even a decade ago. Now, at the bloody end of the Third World War, it was accepted as a grim necessity, much as the indiscriminate bombing of Axis cities had been in the last world war.
As the fight for Qingdao was reaching its terrible crescendo, Chairman Shang made his final ultimatum. The Allied armies must get back on their ships and go home by November 1st, 2060. If they did not, not only would they be forced to kill their way through all 1.5 billion of China’s inhabitants, but each of their major cities would be reduced to radioactive ash. His intent was that the human wave attacks of Qingdao’s implanted inhabitants would show that China—or at least, Chairman Shang—was willing to commit national suicide by nuclear immolation rather than submit to the hated democratic alliance.
The Allies ignored this ultimatum, as they had the last one. The timing that followed was almost too perfect to be true. On October 30th, after more than two weeks of continuous, bloody combat, Allied marines and airborne forces from the two beachheads linked up near the Jihong Tan Reservoir. A devastated, depopulated Qingdao and its port were fully in Allied hands. Over the preceding days, advance units from the US, Australian, Japanese, and Canadian armies had begun debarking behind the marines. Hundreds of thousands more would follow over the coming weeks. The advance northwest could soon begin.
Two days later, Shang’s ultimatum expired. At midnight, November 1st, the supreme leader ordered a strategic nuclear launch against the Allies.
Even today, it remains unclear what Shang hoped to achieve by this launch. Only about a third to a half of the PRC’s strategic nuclear stockpile was deployed. Had all of it been launched, not only would the successful destruction of more targets have been likely, but its purpose would have been obvious: to annihilate world civilization in a final paroxysm of nuclear death, as Shang must have known that the likely Allied counterlaunch would have destroyed China, and spread radioactive dust and debris around the globe.
A more limited launch could be explained in one of two ways: either Shang simply meant to keep some weapons in reserve for a second launch, with the same goal of global suicide in mind; or, he knew that a significant number of the missiles would be destroyed or diverted by Allied defenses, and only intended that a few of them should strike and destroy their urban targets. In that scenario, perhaps, he believed that a more limited Allied counterstrike would similarly destroy a few Chinese cities—a loss he had no qualms about absorbing. Then, maybe, horrified by the destruction of some of their greatest cities and quaking at the prospect of continuing a war against the whole of the Chinese populace, the weak peoples of the Allied democracies would demand their governments seek immediate peace.
Instead, the launch simply revealed that over the past decade, Allied missile defenses had advanced even more rapidly than any outside observers had realized. Indeed, it was the war itself that had permitted that advancement; free from pre-war concerns about a defensive imbalance leading to nuclear escalation, the Allied powers rushed to complete development on a number of cutting edge systems that had been languishing through the 2040’s. After the Axis defeats in the winter of 2056-57 gave them some breathing room, they began quietly deploying these systems in strategically vital areas.
New space launches began in 2058. The massive debris field in low-Earth orbit proved both a hindrance and an advantage; launches had to make use of brief, risky windows that opened in the field at certain times and places, but when they did, it was difficult for the enemy to detect the new satellites before they came online, with so much clutter for ground-based observation platforms to sift through.
These satellites formed one part of a massive, distributed network of advanced, AI-coordinated detectors and kill systems based on land, at sea, in the air, and in space. Allied High Command activated the automated system well in advance of Shang’s deadline. The moment the launches were detected, it sprang into action. Laser and electronic warfare-based platforms with the Allied fleet and throughout the Pacific targeted some missiles in the launch phase; satellites and stealth drones loitering at high altitude fired on ICBMS and hypersonic missiles in the mid-course phase; finally, ground-based laser, missile, and kinetic impactor batteries activated as the weapons entered the terminal phase.
The success rate of the integrated system exceeded even Allied expectations. Of all the PLA missiles launched, only three escaped destruction or disabling before reaching their targets; even these were thrown off course by electromagnetic jamming and damage to their guidance systems. One detonated near Los Angeles, another in the desert north of Melbourne, and the other over the ocean near Kolkata. Tens of thousands still died in the detonations and from the immediate effects of radiation, while hundreds of thousands would suffer from radiation poisoning in the months that followed. But given the hundreds of millions that could have died from such a strike, the losses were negligible.
At a stroke, the specter of global nuclear annihilation, which had hung increasingly heavy over the world as the century had gone on, all but vanished. Allied populations, and those few neutrals who remained, breathed a collective sigh of relief.
It was followed, in the Allied nations, by a fresh surge of anger. With evidence that Shang’s CCP had been willing to take the entire world with it in its death throes, the last vestiges of moral resistance to extreme wartime measures the Allies might need to take vanished. With the consent of the AHC, the Indians launched a retaliatory series of tactical nuclear strikes against PLA rear areas in Yunnan, precipitating the collapse of another series of Chinese defensive lines. Allied commanders lifted the last restrictions on bombardment of civilian areas in Mainland China, and targeted all urban centers in Shandong Province, systematically blasting them into rubble, while a similar series of attacks targeted Shanghai.
The GDA now issued an ultimatum of their own: any further Chinese nuclear launches would not only be defeated, but would be responded to in kind, with the systematic destruction of every major Chinese city, either by nuclear or conventional means. The CCP was further called upon to surrender, or face a similar level of devastation throughout China.
Predictably, the call for surrender was ignored—but nor did Shang order the rest of his nuclear stockpile to be launched. Instead, he ordered the PLA to hunker down and prepare for a final battle on the route to Beijing. His last hope was that the advancing Allied armies could be bogged down and overwhelmed by the PLA, and by tens of millions of implanted Chinese citizens. If the Allied armies could be drowned in blood, an exhausted world might, somehow, accept an end to the war that left the CCP in charge of some Chinese rump state. Even that, in Shang’s mind, would be enough to guarantee his ideology’s eventual victory, decades, or even centuries hence.
This hope was not completely unfounded. Allied commanders recognized the danger that such a strategy might succeed, even with their restrictions on targeting civilian areas lifted. Even if the minimum estimate of 10% of the population followed implant-orders to attack Allied lines, that might theoretically add 150 million bodies to the Chinese defensive effort. The sheer weight of flesh, even unarmed, would pose a significant challenge to the Allies if the whole of China needed to be subdued, to say nothing of the PLA itself, and the varied and difficult terrain in much of the country. Anger and the scent of victory fueled the Allies now—but exhaustion would set in sooner than later, if such a grinding battle of bloody attrition were allowed to drag on.
The battles through the rest of 2060 bore out this fear. Allied forces’ progress to the northwest was slow. They had to fight their way through each blasted mile, overcoming PLA defenses, fighting off waves of zombie-like civilians, and dealing with augmech counterattacks on their western flanks all the way. By January, 2061, the Allies had only pushed as far as Binzhou, barely halfway to their ultimate objective of Beijing. All the while, their own casualties continued to mount. At this rate, it might take another six months or more just to take the capital, and god only knew how many Allied casualties. In the meantime, Shang’s government would have plenty of time to evacuate the city, if it believed it might soon be lost. All the while, the Indian offensive in the west continued to make progress, but even together, it would take many years of hard fighting to subdue the entire country—if it was even possible to do so.
Another strategy was clearly needed; something audacious enough to decapitate the CCP regime if it succeeded, but not so risky that it would doom the Allied war effort if it failed. AHC briefly considered simply nuking Beijing, but even if that worked, it would only achieve one goal: killing Shang and his loyalist ministers. In that event, it was believed that the fanatical PLA augmechs would continue the war, and that the implanted PLA soldiers and citizenry would also, at their direction, keep fighting.
But the very mechanisms that made this phase of the war such a challenge provided the means by which it might be rapidly ended. If the Allies could somehow take Beijing—particularly Shang’s new, combined CCP and PLA headquarters district—quickly enough that Shang’s personal control mechanisms over the vast PRC behavior network could be captured intact, the war might be all but ended with a few keystrokes. The regular PLA could be stood down, and the horrific suicidal attacks of the citizenry could be immediately halted. The PLA augmechs would likely continue to resist, but without the support of the rest of the country, they would have no hope of victory.
How such an incredible coup could be achieved was another question. PLA air and missile defenses concentrated around Beijing were even more formidable than those that had protected Qingdao. Both sides had learned from the airborne assaults that had accompanied the landings in October, meaning that any similar operation around the PRC capital would likely be just as costly, if not more so. Such an operation would be complicated by the fact that there were fewer ideal landing zones around Beijing, that a major ground effort to relieve the airborne troops would have to fight its way past the metropolis of Tianjin to the south—and the fact that Shang’s command bunker complex was right at the center of the vast urban area, built directly beneath the old Forbidden City.
To overcome these challenges, Allied High Command formed an entirely new force in January 2061: The First Allied Aerospace Army. This army brought under its command an eclectic array of airborne and mobile forces, including the US 82nd and 101st and the British 1st Airborne Divisions, the Japanese Airborne Brigade, and the Australian and Canadian airborne Regiments, as well as a number of special forces units with air and suborbital drop experience.
The F-Triple A also included a brand new formation of its own: the re-activated 1st Special Service Force (Aerospace), a joint US-Canadian unit. The heavily augmented “Devil’s Brigade,” its namesake from the Second World War, was pieced together from several US special forces units, and the virtual entirety of Canada’s JTF2. After being assembled in the fall of 2060, it trained for five months to do one thing: conduct the first ever brigade-level suborbital combat drop onto the center of Beijing, then capture and hold the CCP’s central command complex until relief arrived.
Command of the Aerospace Army was granted to Lieutenant General Elin Breckenridge, a veteran of JTF2 with an extensive combat record stretching back before the start of the war. With her appointment, Breckenridge became the only Canadian—and the only special operator—to hold an Army command during the war. Her experience made her uniquely suited to plan and command such an audacious and unconventional operation as the drop on Beijing.
In support of 1st SSF’s daring suborbital insertion, Breckenridge planned a series of parachute drops, heliborne landings, and next-gen stealth glider insertions in and around the outskirts of the city. The full-scale airborne divisions would fly over Allied lines, then drop at various points south and southwest of Beijing, securing the approaches to hold off PLA reinforcements and wait for Allied relief. The Japanese, Australian, and Canadian regiments would land via stealth glider around the city’s suburbs, their mission to sow chaos amongst PLA positions, and fight their way into the center of the city to link up with the 1st SSF, forming a daisy chain back to the airborne divisions, and thence, hopefully, to the Allied main force. Finally—actually, first—small squads of highly augmented special operators would be suborbitally dropped into the Yanshan Mountains to the north of the city, their mission to destroy camouflaged PLA air defense positions, and then hold the passes through the mountains against enemy reinforcements for as long as possible.
At the same time, the Allied armies, now under the overall command of US Marine General Choi, would launch a major offensive from their start line north of Cangzhou, hoping to reach the 82nd Airborne near Langfang within five days. Even this would require an enormous effort and a weight of firepower as-yet unseen even in this theater, particularly to suppress Chinese counterattacks out of the city of Tianjin. Breckenridge thought that the 1st SFF would be able to hold out for a maximum of seven days before they would need to be relieved—likely less.
The operation, codenamed Stormfall, began on March 12th. A massive artillery and naval barrage–including tactical nuclear munitions–preceded the ground advance, leveling Tianjin, while a relentless air, drone, and missile campaign suppressed Beijing’s formidable air defenses. Once again, the airborne units took heavy losses on the approach.
But the massive suborbital drop came off as well as could have been hoped for. Several squads managed to land directly on top of the central command complex, while the rest were scattered throughout the core of the city. These attempted to fight their way to the main complex through streets that were rapidly choked with frenzied, implant-controlled citizenry. A number of SSF units were cut off and destroyed by the mobs, but others managed to make it through to their objective.
Those that had dropped onto the complex itself engaged in a running battle with the heavily augmented Red Guards defending it, while bureaucrats and high ranking officers and party men either tried to destroy vital material, or threw themselves at the invaders with whatever weapons they could find. But after two hours of chaotic combat, several squads managed to reach the primary and secondary control hubs for the implant network. The first, being too heavily guarded for the small force to capture, was destroyed by a laser-guided orbital strike. The second was stormed and taken. Within minutes after the hub was captured, the special operators had linked it to the Allied military net. Minutes after that, codebreaker AIs had cracked the system, and the stand-down commands were issued.
In an instant, the war changed. The crazed mobs swarming through the streets and throwing themselves at Allied weapons stopped, dazed. PLA regular infantry units across China began laying down their weapons and surrendering to nearby Allied troops. As expected, only the PLA augmechs were willing to continue the fight—which they did, gunning down nearby infantry as they attempted to follow their new instructions and surrender before resuming their attacks against the Allies.
But now, despite their still-formidable capabilities, their defeat was only a matter of time—unless they could recapture the control centers and rescind the stand-down commands. The fight for the capital went on for another four days, as the die-hard, bitter augmechs sold their lives dearly in the hopes of delaying General Choi’s advance to the city. But General Breckenridge’s predictions had been dead on. The embattled 1st SSF was besieged in the old Forbidden City for three days, before Australian and Japanese paratroopers managed to fight through augmech lines to reach them, mere hours before the special operators ran out of ammunition. The following day, the US 2nd Marine Division made contact with the 101st Airborne west of Langfang, and 82nd Airborne troops linked up with Japanese and Canadian paratroopers in Daxing District. The chain was complete; while augmech resistance in the city would go on for another week, by March 18th, the Battle for Beijing was effectively over.
In the western theater, seeing his lines crumbling and realizing what the sudden, unprompted surrender of the regular infantry must mean, Field Marshal Jin Tao made preparations to stand down the remainder of his force. Several of his augmech officers attempted to assassinate him—but Jin Tao was far more respected and popular than other commanders. His loyalists defeated the brief coup, and his orders were followed. When word arrived that Beijing had fallen, Western Army Group finally surrendered to the Indian Army on March 19th. General Bao Gong, commanding the remaining Axis forces in South America, made a similar decision on the same day, surrendering to American forces in the north while his Venezuelan and Argentinian counterparts surrendered to the Brazilian Army in the south a few days later. With that, the Third World War was effectively over. But there would be no great surrender ceremony for the CCP, such as that which had occurred on the battleship Missouri in 1945.
Chairman Shang was dead. The fact that no body was recovered led to conspiracy theories, ranging from the simple–that he had somehow escaped–to the outlandish, such as theories that he and his senior advisors had attained the fabled “Singularity” just before the bunker’s destruction, merging their minds with an experimental, superintelligent AI. But genetic material found in the CCP complex later suggested that he had been in the primary control hub when it was destroyed, killed instantly even as he clung to the last vestiges of his power.
Much of the CCP’s leadership had died with him, and what little remained had been heavily reliant on cybernetic implants tied to Shang’s personal control; these were in no shape to take the reins of government, even to surrender it to the Allies. Field Marshal Bohai, the PLA chief of staff, was also dead, having committed suicide in his personal quarters as the 1st SFF fought its way through the command complex. Field Marshal Feng Gao, who had commanded the defense of eastern China after being evacuated from the Central American front, was killed in the fighting under circumstances equally unclear as those which had claimed Chang Liao in 2057.
The last Axis nation, North Korea, could not survive without its CCP masters; with its control over the South and Japan crumbling, and facing the prospect of new Allied landings or a ground campaign against them, the Kim regime offered terms of surrender. The Allies would accept none; it would take another two months of fighting and negotiations before the DPRK accepted reality and surrendered unconditionally, but in the end, they had little choice.
It would take almost until the end of 2061 for the last cohesive PLA augmech units to be destroyed in the mountains of Central China, but major combat was over by July—even if scattered squads and individual augmechs would cause trouble for years after the war ended. The forces of the Global Democratic Alliance had done what seemed impossible just a few years earlier: win a total victory over the augmented, nuclear-armed Authoritarian Axis. For the first time in almost a decade, the world was once again at peace.
But the end of major combat only marked the beginning of an equally formidable challenge: preserving that peace.