Liberation: 2058
The Interstellar Age, S01E07
On New Year’s Day, 2057, as the strategic initiative was slipping from the Authoritarian Axis’s fingers, Allied High Command had already begun planning what they would do once they seized it.
Two basic courses of action presented themselves: the Allies could focus on liberating occupied territory, or strike at the heart of one of the main Axis powers with a full-scale invasion. Two major factors made invasion a less attractive choice, despite the theoretical potential it offered of ending the war sooner. First, geography made any direct attack on enemy territory without first liberating nearby bases—in Eastern Europe or the Baltic in the case of Russia, the Levant in the case of Iran, or Japan-Korea-Taiwan in the case of China—immensely risky.
Second, friendly nations continued to suffer terribly under Axis occupation, both from brutal population filtration measures, and from mass cybernetic implantation—though the latter had slowed after the CCP takeover of GeneTech and EnHuman in March. In addition to the moral imperative this created, by this point in the war, the Allies owed a great deal to the exiled military forces of the conquered European and East Asian powers; these would not sit idly by while their people continued to be brutalized and dehumanized.
The choice was clear, then: Liberation. But where?
The Allies seemed at first glance to be spoiled for choice. By mid-2057, all of Continental Europe was under Axis occupation, as were Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Israel, and large parts of Brazil. In theory, the Allies could start in any of these places. In fact, their practical options were extremely limited. The Brazilians had yet to submit to invasion, still holding off the Venezuelan and Argentinian forces consigned to that brutal, but peripheral, theater of war. As such, their need was not so great—and, taking back the rest of Brazil would provide the Allies little strategic benefit for a future campaign against the Axis.
Israel and the Levant, meanwhile, could only be reached through the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, both of which were fully or partially controlled by enemy forces. Other campaigns would first be required to clear a path through these areas. Again, the small country would provide only a base for an attack against Iran, the weakest Axis partner—and a poor base, at that.
With Japan and the Philippines under enemy control, South Korea and Taiwan also posed insuperable challenges for an amphibious invasion. That left two options, and of these, one seemed at first to be the most logical—but became increasingly unfeasible the more Allied planners looked at it. Japan, if liberated, would provide an ideal base to not only liberate Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, but also to attack or even invade China itself, potentially bringing the war to an end. Provided the immense challenges of war in that land could be overcome, that is.
But Japan was on the other end of the Pacific from the United States, which had lost all of its overseas bases in the Western Pacific early in the war. Australia could serve as a “forward” base for the invasion—but enemy control of the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Banda Arc would severely complicate any such logistical operation. Without an initial, major campaign to gain control of these island countries, resupply fleets from Australia would have to navigate through the Coral Sea on a wide course as long as that from Hawaii. And while the PLA Navy had been humbled by its defeat at the Panama Canal, it had not been destroyed. Instead, it had largely retreated to home waters, and would ferociously contest any operation in the Western Pacific, likely dooming a large scale invasion to failure without significant preparatory operations.
That left, effectively, one option. With the easing of the Siege of Britain, the UK was on its way to becoming a viable base from which large scale operations could be launched—and one right off the occupied coast of Europe, not thousands of sea miles away. At this point, the task of contesting any invasion at sea would have fallen largely upon the Russian Navy, which was a much less formidable foe than the PLAN. While PLA air forces were still based in Europe, and would be a significant challenge to overcome in any cross-Channel invasion, this paled in comparison with the challenges posed by Axis air power in Asia.
So, it would be Britain, and it would be Europe. If the Allies could gain a foothold on the continent, they could then exploit it to strike at Russia. To keep their weaker but vital partner from dropping out of the war, the Chinese would have to divert significant forces to Europe, at the end of long supply lines. If the Allies could degrade these forces and defeat the Russians, they would be in a much stronger position for future operations against China. It was the only logical choice.
Unfortunately, the Axis could see that logic just as easily as the Allies. As their positions in North America collapsed, the PLA began preparations to defend their gains in Europe. Forces evacuated from Canada and later from Central America, once the lines there stabilized, were sent to France and the Low Countries for reconstitution under the command of the formidable General Jin Tao, with the intent that they would support the Russians in resisting a cross-Channel invasion. More air, drone, and missile forces were rebased to Central Europe, but held back from attacking the UK. They would be kept fresh for the counterstrike. Russia similarly began concentrating more forces in the west, pulling some from occupation duties, with little choice but to accept the threat this opened up to their supply lines and rear areas.
That said, the Chinese could not fully commit to defending Europe. The Allies might still roll the dice on an invasion of Japan, or even a sequential campaign through Indonesia and the Philippines. This would pose a much greater threat to China itself. Crucially, though PLA Chief of Staff Fang Wenyan was convinced the Allied blow would fall in Europe, Chairman Shang believed that it would come in Asia, specifically Japan.
The Allies did all they could to reinforce this strategic ambiguity, launching special forces raids, air and missile attacks, and naval probing operations from the North Sea, to the Banda Arc, to the Mariana Islands. This was particularly important, as the actual invasion—codenamed Overlord II—would not be possible until Spring 2058 at the earliest. The Allies still needed to rebuild significant shipping capacity lost in the early years of the war if a massive invasion of this kind was to be supported. New air and ground forces needed to be assembled, trained, and prepared—and in the final analysis, the weather needed to cooperate. The winter storms in the Channel and the North Sea would pose far too great a risk to the Allies, who could not afford a major strategic setback at this stage of the war. Delay was considered preferable to defeat. So, while Allied ground forces rested and prepared, their air and sea forces stayed busy through the winter, keeping the Axis on its toes.
The next conundrum Allied planners faced was the operation itself. Where should the massive Allied forces being mustered land? The logical choice was the same one a previous Western alliance had made more than a century earlier: France. But the Allies already had to do one thing their enemies expected—invade Europe. If at all possible, they didn’t want to compound their difficulties by landing in the specific part of Europe that the enemy would most anticipate.
Nor did the Allies want to make the same mistake the Chinese had in 2056 and ‘57—an overcomplicated operation all but doomed to failure. So, Allied High Command settled on a deceptively simple plan—deceptive being the operative word. Harassing operations in the Western and Southern Pacific would continue up until the moment of the actual invasion, being bolstered in the preceding month by false signals intelligence and ship movements suggesting a major buildup in Australia. This, hopefully, would keep PLA air assets fixed in Asia until well after the real invasion began.
At the same time, a similar operation would take place in Southern England and the East Coast of North America. False intel leaks, phantom communications and internet traffic, ersatz divisions—bolstered by a significant number of real British and exiled French divisions—would appear to be aimed squarely at Northwest France. Specifically, at simultaneous landings in Calais and Normandy.
In reality, the invasion fleet departing from North America would turn north once inside the mid-Atlantic gaps in the Axis satellite net created by a long-term Allied ASAT campaign. Its arrival in Southern England would be mimicked by repurposed, drone-piloted civilian transport vessels. The real fleet would not stop, but would instead sail well north of Scotland. Its target was not the Channel Coast at all, but Denmark and Northern Germany.
The operation began in mid-March, 2058, so early in the season that the weather still posed a risk. But Allied planners, with input from their AI meteorological and strategic advisers, determined that the risk would be greater if they granted the Russians and Chinese another two or three months to prepare for the attack. So, they went, trusting to fate to carry them through.
Operational command of the invasion was given to the newly promoted General Langworth, who took command of 11th Army Group, a mixed Allied formation including US Second Army, Langworth’s former command, US First Army, and First NATO Army, a conglomeration of the European armies in exile, along with two Canadian armored divisions. This massive force, totaling well over half a million soldiers, would land in waves, with further reinforcements preparing to make the Atlantic crossing in the weeks and months that followed.
The first part of the operation went near-perfectly. The Axis no longer had any human intel sources in Allied territory; the Allies had by this point developed filtration methods to detect Chinese cybertech, which the CCP continued to insist on implanting all their agents with. These might have been able to report what PLA signals, cyber, and limited satellite intelligence could not: that the invasion preparations occurring in Southern England were mostly for show.
Only when the invasion fleet turned south and headed toward the Northern European coast was it finally reacquired by Axis reconnaissance. The Russian Northern Fleet, now bolstered by several PLAN squadrons, sailed to intercept it, while a smaller PLAN and Iranian force sailed out from Spain and the Mediterranean in an attempt to divert Allied naval effort south. The diversion was a failure, and once again, an Allied fleet under the command of Royal Navy Admiral Preston Shaw delivered the Russians a stinging defeat in the Battle of Skagerrak.
At the same time, the largest air battle in history was playing out in the skies over Europe and the North Sea. PLA and Russian Air Force squadrons scrambled to attack the Allied invasion fleet, while Allied planes and drones based in the UK, flying from carriers in the North Sea and the Atlantic, and supported by ap huge drone fleet launched from Canada and refueled in transit via autonomous replenishment aircraft, tried to stop them. Intermediate and short range missiles streaked through the skies in both directions, most being shot down by ground and air based defenses, but some finding their targets.
Under the cover of this enormous battle, Allied forces stormed ashore in Germany. Units from US First and Second Armies landed at Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven, while First NATO Army landed near Büsum. This daring plan separated the Allied forces on both sides of the Elbe estuary; the intent was that they would advance quickly down the estuary to surround and capture Hamburg, immediately opening one of Europe’s largest ports to support the campaign. Langworth hoped that surprise, if achieved, would outweigh the risks of splitting the Allied force.
Surprise was achieved. Though the Axis knew the attack was coming, they had less than 24 hours notice that it was to fall in Germany, not France. Nearly all PLA units in Europe had been stationed in France in anticipation of an invasion there. Germany was defended almost exclusively by Russian conventional forces, with only a few of their remaining augmech units held in reserve. These were completely unprepared for the ferocity of the Allied assault; defenses near the landing sites were obliterated, and shattered Russian units retreated or surrendered as more Allied troops came ashore. US and Allied Mobile units raced down the Elbe toward Hamburg.
Command of the combined Chinese forces in Europe lay with the former general of the Eastern Army Group, Jin Tao, recently elevated to the restored PLA rank of Field Marshal. Jin had proven himself the most effective field commander the PLA had, and one of the only ones that had held a major command at the beginning of the war who had not yet been defeated, killed in action, or executed for treason. When the landings in Germany began on May 5th, Jin frustrated Allied hopes for delay and indecision by immediately ordering all his augmech forces east to contest what he correctly guessed was the primary Allied invasion effort. He left his infantry divisions, and the Russian forces under his command, in France to deal with any raids or secondary attacks that might fall there.
Russian forces in Europe were under the command of Field Marshal Vasily Shevchenko, a personal, political appointee of President Lavrov. Shevchenko had retained his overall command despite a weak performance in the Second Russo-Ukrainian War, prior to Chinese entry into the conflict in 2053. He had ridden the PLA’s coattails to victory over the Allies in that year, and retained his cushy theater command ever since, presiding over brutal crackdowns on resisting populations, but seeing little actual combat.
Now, he once again proved himself unequal to his high rank. Rather than conducting a strategic and orderly withdrawal, Shevchenko ordered his units to hold their ground at all costs, and to counterattack immediately to regain any lost territory. Russian field and junior officers obliged, throwing their men into the teeth of an Allied juggernaut they were simply not up to the task of fighting on equal terms. Russian casualties in the first week of the battle were debilitating. Whole companies took whatever opportunities they could to surrender rather than follow their suicidal orders.
But despite the near-perfect execution of the first phase of the Allied plan, the capture of Hamburg would be no easy matter. Jin Tao’s augmech forces began arriving at the battlefront within days. The task of holding them off fell to US Second Army, while US and NATO First Armies moved on Hamburg itself. Their first major engagement took place at Zeven on May 11th, and it was clear that Second Army remembered its lessons learned fighting the PLA in Texas. Jin Tao’s forces, on the other hand, mostly Eastern Army Group units, had no direct experience fighting the new-pattern Allied armies, since the Allies had gained their own invaluable combat experience. Zeven was a sharp rebuke for Jin Tao, stopping his lightning advance toward Hamburg and forcing him to consider other options.
Meanwhile, Canadian, Swedish, and Finnish forces defeated a significant Russian counterattack on the eastern flank of the Allied line at Bad Segeberg on May 12th, while German, French, and Polish mobile units smashed through the main Russian defensive line at Elmenhorst on the 13th. Shevchenko had thrown most of his available mobile forces into the counterattack, where they had been effectively destroyed. More forces were on the way from occupation duties in Ukraine, but would not arrive in time to prevent the encirclement of Hamburg from the east.
The Axis’s only hope was that Jin’s augmechs could flank the Allied advance and reach the city from the south. The field marshal threw all his efforts into this drive, taking direct command of the Russian forces in his sector, ignoring Marshal Shevchenko’s vociferous objections. The race between the Allies and this Sino-Russian force ended at Lüneburg on May 20th. Lead elements of US First Army clashed with the PLA on the outskirts of the city. Each side threw massive reinforcements into the battle over the next eight days, reducing much of the city to rubble. Slowly, Jin Tao’s forces began to gain the upper hand—but every day the fight went on, NATO forces advanced further on the east bank of the Elbe, while US Second Army advanced closer and closer to the Axis supply hub at Bremen.
Finally, on May 29th, German forces reached the Elbe at Geesthacht. On the same day, US forces captured Rotenburg, a road hub east of Bremen that opened the way south toward Hanover and Central Germany. If he remained locked in battle at Lüneburg any longer, Jin Tao risked being cut off from his forces in France. Even if he captured Lüneburg now, his objective of preventing the Allied junction had failed. US reinforcements advanced toward Marschacht for a link up with NATO forces on that same day, and aside from long range missile fire, there was little Jin Tao could do to stop it. On May 30th, he withdrew his exhausted forces to a more defensible line south of Lüneburg.
The Battle of Hamburg was effectively over. Surrounded, the remaining Russian forces in the city surrendered, despite Schevchenko’s orders for them to fight to the death. The city’s port facilities had been badly damaged by a combination of sabotage and combat, but as had been the case in PLA landings in Australia and Canada, this would only delay the Allied advance a short time. Axis command could only hope the delay would be long enough that sufficient reinforcements rushed from Ukraine, Iran, and Asia would be able to bottle up the Allied beachhead in Germany and Denmark.
But the Allies were not interested in waiting. On June 3rd, a second invasion streamed across the English Channel to land in Normandy. Second NATO Army consisted primarily of British units, and the real Allied formations that had been stationed in Southern England to bolster the deception effort for Overlord II. With the air battle over Europe having turned against the Axis, the denuded Sino-Russian forces in France could not hope to contest an invasion of this size.
Meanwhile, popular uprisings and insurgencies in Axis-occupied Europe reached a new intensity. Many of these insurgencies were now directly supported by Allied special forces, which had been slowly infiltrated into occupied territory over the previous year and a half. Axis land supply routes came under strain, and occupation forces which might have been rerouted to the battlefront became tied down in counterinsurgency efforts.
By mid-June, the Axis position in France and Germany was already becoming untenable. Allied engineers got the port of Hamburg back up and running with incredible speed. General Langworth had already begun pushing his forces onward before the port was fully operational, having no intention of letting the summer slip away from him. US Second Army captured Bremen in early June after Russian forces abandoned the city and fled south. Correctly assessing the weakness of the Axis position in Europe, Langworth chose to focus his effort on a drive eastward toward Poland, leaving only enough forces to hold the line at Bremen and Hamburg and protect his supply base from roving Axis units. Allied forces were already advancing from France with astonishing rapidity, pursuing the collapsing Russians across Europe. Langworth knew that they would soon be able to link up with his base in Germany, and if he kept the enemy on the defensive with a drive in the direction of the Russian heartland, they would have no choice but to respond.
Jin Tao tried to make the best use of his augmechs to attack US/NATO supply lines during this drive, but there were simply too few PLA forces in Europe to effectively contest the invasion. Significant reinforcements could only be moved by land or sea from Asia; both routes would have provided major challenges, had they even been attempted. But Jin Tao’s repeated pleas for major reinforcements were being ignored by the leadership in Beijing, which was just then undergoing a significant shakeup.
Chief of Staff Fang Wenyan, long-time ally of Chairman Shang and the mastermind of the early Axis victories, had already begun to fall out of favor following the failure of the 2057 campaigns. Shang, despite having been as enthusiastic about the invasions as Fang, blamed his chief’s poor planning for the defeats—but Fang had remained too popular and connected to simply replace. Shang had instead started to ignore his chief’s advice, taking more and more personal control of the PLA.
The conflict between them came to a head with the Allied invasion of Europe. The landings in Germany did not vindicate Fang’s conviction that Europe would be the Allies’ target; instead, Shang became more defensive, absurdly blaming Fang for being unprepared for the invasion, and falling for what he still believed was an elaborate Allied ruse to draw the PLA out of Asia.
The last straw came when Fang approved Jin Tao’s request for major reinforcements following the landings in Normandy. He had just signed the transfer order for the entire Southern Army Group from China and Southeast Asia to Jin Tao’s command when Shang ordered Fang’s arrest. Just two years earlier, Shang had personally awarded his long-time partner and friend the August 1 Medal, the PLA’s highest award, for his orchestration of China’s great victories. Now, without ever showing Fang his face, he ordered the PLA commander shot for treason. The sentence was carried out hours after the arrest, by augmented members of the resurrected Red Guard, unquestioningly loyal to Shang himself.
In a propaganda release hours after the execution, Shang paraded the Southern Army Group’s transfer order as evidence of Fang’s betrayal, characterizing it as an effort to leave China defenseless against a coming Allied invasion. In the same missive, he named Field Marshal Bohai Liu as Fang’s successor, a party man whose loyalty—if not his abilities as a general—were never in doubt. Bohai immediately rescinded Fang’s last order. Jin Tao would receive only minimal PLA reinforcements by air. The Axis would have to rely on Russian and Iranian troops to defend their European conquests.
Iranian forces began arriving in Europe in July, falling under Jin Tao’s command. But the Ayatollah, like Shang, had elected to keep his elite, augmented Revolutionary Guard units back in Iran to protect his own regime. He permitted only regular Iranian army units—although a great many of them—to be sent to Europe to help the Axis cause. Despite their numbers, these had been unable to overcome tiny Israel from 2053-55, and had undergone no significant reorganization since then. Disgusted by their performance in early engagements, Jin Tao quickly relegated them to rear areas and, in exigency, protection of flanks and less important areas, while he used his dwindling PLA augmechs to hammer away at the right flank of Langworth’s drive into Poland.
This drive was proceeding with astonishing rapidity. Still obsessed with fighting to the death and making wasteful counterattacks, Marshal Shevchenko continued to feed his units into the battle piecemeal as they arrived from Ukraine and Russia. Allied forces with superior training and equipment smashed them aside as they drove further and further east. Lead Allied formations entered Poland in mid-July, and captured the major city of Bydgoszcz in central Poland by the end of the month. This put Langworth in a position to threaten both the port of Gdansk and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to the north, and to make a drive into Belarus to the east—and thence, potentially, to Moscow.
Poland was still a long way from the major cities of Russia, of course, and the summer would not last forever. But 2058 was not 1941. The Allies were well prepared to fight through the winter, if necessary; they had proved they could do it, and win, on the battlefields of Canada in 2057. Nor were they waging a campaign of conquest and genocide, as the Nazis had been in that earlier world war. Instead, it was the Russians and their Axis partners who had been waging such a war; where the Allies went in Europe, they were welcomed as liberators, and behaved as such. President Lavrov and the Russian general staff began to fear that, after years of an increasingly unpopular war, they might even be so welcomed in Russia—or at least, that the Russian people would not willingly rise up against the invaders, as they had so many times before.
Besides which, the Russian army was in disarray, increasingly ineffective against an ever-more effective foe. They had no massive reserves of strength from which to draw as the old Soviet Union had. They might raise millions more soldiers, if the people would let them. But arming them with old 20th century weapons would only make them cannon fodder against the efficient war machine of the Allies. They needed augmechs to keep up the fight—and these, they could not get enough of in time.
The real crisis point of the invasion came at the beginning of August, 2058, as Allied forces advanced toward Kaliningrad and Belarus. President Lavrov and his cabinet debated their options, which as they saw it were threefold: seek a separate peace with the Allies; deploy Russia’s nuclear arsenal to slow or halt the Allied advance; or some combination of the two. The situation was complicated when Chairman Shang, either anticipating the Russian strategic position, or informed by sources in Lavrov's cabinet, expressly forbade the Russians from using nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
Despite the Axis’s deteriorating fortunes, Shang still believed that China could defeat the Allies, even if it was deprived of its Russian partners—who many, Shang included, had begun to feel were more of a burden than an asset. Shang was perfectly prepared to allow the Russians to be defeated, and feared that a full-scale nuclear exchange would only descend the world into chaos, destroying his chances of creating the global utopia he still dreamed of. So, he threatened that if the Russians should play the last card in their hand, he would withdraw all remaining Chinese support from Europe and leave them to be defeated alone.
This placed Lavrov in an all-but impossible position. He and his Prime Minister, Anatoly Nabokov, were leaning toward an escalate-to-deescalate strategy, deploying a nuclear weapon in an under-populated area simply to show their willingness to take the war to that level. At the same time, they would open secret back channels to the Allies through diplomatic contacts in the still-nominally neutral African Union. It was hoped that this would enable them to make a separate peace with the Allies, retaining control of Russia and avoiding the fall of its existing regime.
But before they could finalize this plan, the choice was taken away from them. On August 11th, a panicking Field Marshal Shevchenko ignored orders to the contrary from the President’s office, circumvented standard command channels, and launched the stockpile of tactical nuclear missiles under his control into the path of the Allied advance.
All of them were shot down. Not a single one of the nuclear-tipped warheads was able to detonate; Allied point defenses had made leaps and bounds over the course of the war, meeting and then exceeding the high standard set by PLA defenses in the battles of 2053 and ‘54. Russia’s aging tactical nuclear stockpile didn’t stand a chance. With no nuclear detonations occurring, the Allies issued a condemnation of the attack, but elected not to respond in kind, or even change their operational plan. The troops rolled on into Kaliningrad and Belarus.
President Lavrov was furious at Shevchenko’s betrayal. The Field Marshal was immediately relieved of command and ordered back to Moscow. But the damage had been done. Chairman Shang was apoplectic; he immediately ordered Marshal Jin Tao to stop all attacks on Allied forces driving toward Russia, and had his staff halt deliveries of crucial augmech-related supplies to Russia for daring to disobey him.
The rapidly devolving strategic situation left Lavrov with few options. Even his chosen escalate-to-deescalate strategy could not be effective if Russia could not even detonate a nuclear weapon, and with Chinese support reduced, Russia would have no hope of continuing the war. Still unwilling to commit national suicide by ordering a full strategic nuclear strike—the effectiveness of which was now, suddenly, in doubt—Lavrov ordered his new military commander to dig out Russia’s stockpile of ancient, Cold War-era nuclear shells, which they had reported destroyed in accordance with now long-dead arms control agreements in the 1990’s.
Russian field forces launched a massive nuclear artillery barrage at advancing Allied forces in Kaliningrad and Belarus from August 20th - 21st. Many of these decades-old shells failed to explode; many more were shot down in the terminal phase by Allied laser interception systems. But even these spread nuclear material over the surrounding area when destroyed. And a few, by sheer weight of numbers, got through the point defense screen and detonated.
The weapons were small, each having a yield of around half a kiloton, a small fraction of the destructive power of the weapons used against Japan in the Second World War. Yet they still caused extensive, if localized, damage to the leading Allied units on both axes of advance. Though radiation gear had already been issued to frontline units in preparation for such an attack, it finally halted Langworth’s relentless advance across Europe, even if only for a week or so. It also drew a fresh series of condemnations from the GDA, the African Union, and India, and sent Chairman Shang into another apoplectic fit—even though, once again, Allied high command elected not to respond in kind.
But the nuclear barrage had a much more devastating effect—within Russia. The shells had all detonated within Russian territory, and many of those destroyed in flight had spread nuclear material over cities and towns in Kaliningrad and western Belarus. The barrage killed tens of thousands more Russian civilians than Allied soldiers, and many more would suffer and die from radiation poisoning over the following months and years.
Russian internal propaganda tried to portray the strike as having been carried out by the Allies—but even the Russian people were not taken in by this absurd fiction. For practical reasons, Lavrov’s government had never been able to embark on as aggressive and thorough an implantation regime as the CCP. Most of Russia’s rural population was still not subject to direct behavioral control—and the government’s control over implanted urbanites had been eroding since before the invasion, as Allied cyberwarfare began to penetrate the control network.
A wave of unrest had been boiling beneath the surface of Russia for years, since long before the war began. After the loss of the REF in Canada—so massive that even Russian propaganda could not conceal it from the populace—that wave had roiled closer and closer to the surface. Now, it broke. As Allied propagandists beamed images of Russian civilians dying of radiation poisoning from their government’s own weapons into Russia, popular protests began flaring up in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and even in smaller towns throughout the country. Army units began to mutiny, either surrendering to the Allies en masse, or joining the protestors and rioters. Resistance to the Allied advance collapsed; US and NATO troops surged forward almost unopposed, racing through Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania, and into Russia itself.
By early September, 2058, the last Chinese support was being withdrawn from Russia by an enraged and increasingly paranoid Chairman Shang. The Russian military was in the process of collapsing, and the country was on the verge of a mass uprising, even a revolution, against the government. Lastly, Lavrov’s closest confidants told him that senior military officers were planning a coup against him. What they would do once in power was unclear.
The Russian President now had only two choices: surrender to the Allies, or else order a strategic nuclear launch.
Lavrov could not make the choice. Instead, he accepted responsibility for Russia’s defeat, and its “mistakes,” and resigned the presidency. It would be up to his successor, Anatoly Nabokov, to do what must be done. In late September, Nabokov made an offer of conditional surrender to the Allies through the African Union, promising to stand down Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons and remaining field forces and submit to a limited Allied occupation, provided that the Russian military and government would be immune from prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The offer kicked off a brief debate in the GDA. A hardline faction, led by the Poles, wanted to reject the terms and push for unconditional surrender. With Allied forces already in Russia, and still facing little resistance, there was some cause to consider such a course—but in that case, the Russian leadership would have little incentive, save concern for humanity itself, not to launch their strategic nuclear weapons. And while Allied missile defense, even at the strategic level, had significantly improved, it would only take a handful of those weapons getting through to potentially kill millions of Allied civilians.
In the end, very few Allied governments were willing to take that chance. The moderates, led by US President Hanson, preferred to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible, without another nuclear exchange, so that the real threat—the PRC—could be focused on. Swayed by these arguments, on October 1st, the GDA officially accepted the Russian terms of surrender. No Russian generals or politicians would be prosecuted in any Allied or international court for the atrocities they had ordered, or the war they had begun. And the Nabokov government would remain in power, for now—if they could hold it.
With their terms accepted, the Russians officially surrendered to the Allies the following day, October 2nd, 2058—just five months after the Allied invasion of Europe had begun. Allied troops entered Moscow two weeks later, to a reserved, and relieved, reception.
The Allies had knocked out one of the chief members of the Authoritarian Axis, and won a major strategic victory. With just as much dash and speed, they had reversed the stunning Axis victory in Europe five years earlier. But this did not end the war—not even in Europe.
On the day the Allies accepted the surrender terms, Chairman Shang ordered that all Russian troops under PLA command be disarmed and detained. But these once-friendly troops would not be herded into POW camps, as the Italians had by their erstwhile German partners in 1943. Instead, they would be subjected to forcible implantation, swelling the ranks of the PLA’s infantry divisions. Marshal Jin Tao would be ordered to add these zombie forces to his already hodgepodge army group and hold whatever line in Southeast Europe he was able to, resisting every Allied advance with everything at his disposal.
Victory in Europe or no, the world war would go on, until one side claimed total victory—or until there was no world left to fight over.