Operation Red Dawn and the Siege of Europe

DARPA

Once the Chinese main army reached the American defensive positions at Cooper Landing in the south of Alaska, and Susitna in the north, they established their own lines of defense and began to settle in while the rest of their army and equipment was offloaded. The PLAAF continued to establish more manned and fighter drone airbases across the captured portions of Alaska, while the Russians continued to fight for control of northern and central Alaska. Because the U.S. Marines had established a wide network of firebases all throughout key strategic areas of central and northern Alaska, it was forcing the Russians to have to take them out one at a time if they wanted to continue to advance further into the interior of Alaska.

The reprieve from the continuous Chinese assaults was both a blessing and a curse. It provided US Forces the time needed to bring in additional reinforcements and refit General Gardner’s Third Army, but it also meant the Chinese had more time to offload hundreds of thousands of soldiers and armored equipment. The PLA forces in Alaska now stood at 950,000 soldiers, with more arriving each week.

Despite months of heavy fighting in the air, neither side had established full dominance of the skies. Just as the PLAAF and Russians were starting to secure the air war, the Americans began to introduce the newest and most advanced fighter ever seen. The Archangels (F41s) with their EmDrive propulsion and “angelic” power system. The U.S. had few of these aircraft in service; the material requirements to build one was immense, but so too was their impact on the war thus far. America had not lost a single F41, and had already shot down over 430 drones and 93 manned fighters with just ten of these aircraft in service.

Leveraging the new angelic power system, the F41 was the first aircraft to make use of an air-to-air laser. When enemy drones or fighters would fire a missile, the F41 would simply shoot the projectile down and then target the enemy fighters or drones, destroying them at ranges as far as 150 miles. Because the F41 did not run on a conventional fuel system, they could stay aloft for as long as the pilot and weapons systems could handle, making them a very unique weapon (particularly if they could be produced in greater quantities).

What American defense manufactures lacked were the rare earth elements needed in a host of advanced manufacturing. These rare elements were becoming harder and harder to come by, with China owning nearly 90 % of all known rare earth element deposits. The need for America to be able to extract lunar minerals was becoming more and more apparent as the war continued. The Moon contained a host of these rare elements, along with a new mineral called Veldspar, which could be found in the asteroid rocks that impacted the Moon quite often. The Veldspar could be refined down to create Tritium4, which was a critically rare element that right now was being synthetically produced, albeit in small quantities.

With the advent of the angelic power system and the EmDrive propulsion system, the President directed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop a prototype deep space mining starship that could leave and reenter Earth’s orbit and fly to the Moon with the specific intent of locating these rare elements and bringing them back. The angelic power source would provide the power needed to run the first continuous thrust propulsion system. Once in space, it would leverage an improved ion engine that could propel the craft from Earth to the Moon in 16-hours. Once on the Moon’s surface, the mining astronauts would immediately begin the process of establishing the first lunar base of operations and begin to identify, move and process the required materials and then arrange them for transport back to earth.

DARPA had been tinkering with the designs for such a ship for decades, and once the appropriate power source had finally been identified, they immediately set to work on building a craft around it. The ship was called the HULK, mostly because of its size. The ship would be 5,100 feet in length, 400 feet in width, and 600 feet in height, broken down into multiple cargo holds and an onboard smelter.

The ship would be run by a crew of six engineers, three communications specialists, two navigators and four other members to include the pilots. It would also carry twenty space miners from a company called Deep Space Industries, who would manage the smelter and actual mining operations. Because most of the ship would be automated, the large ship could get by with just fifteen full-time crew members to run the actual day-to-day operations. It also had a decent sized living and recreation area built in for the crew and miners to live in, and a set of laboratories, in which the scientists on board could conduct their space research and experiments. It could also be configured to carry any number of different types of cargos and equipment loads. A similar version for actual deep space exploration was also in development.

When the initial design had been shown to the President and his science team in July, he had immediately signed his approval to move Operation Pegasus forward. The construction of the HULK started immediately in Kentucky, and would take approximately nine months to complete. The location had been chosen because of its close proximity to a number of other manufacturing sites; plus, the President had promised to bring additional manufacturing to Kentucky to augment the loss in coal jobs.

During the past four years of the Stein Administration, the President had stayed true to his word on revamping the American energy program by expediting the conversion of coal-fired plants to natural gas and increasing the use of solar, wind, geothermal and wave energy. Of course, this transformation also meant a lot of Americans in the coal industry had lost their jobs, and the President was determined to ensure every one of them was able to cross-train into another career field, paid for by the government.

In collaboration with Deep Space Industries, DARPA had developed, a rock crushing machine that could bust up rocks in the near zero-gravity found on the surface of the Moon. The plan was for several Moon excavators to gather the identified minerals and then bring them to be broken down; once crushed, the ground materials would move through a conveyor belt system into a specialized loading bay where the materials would be processed through an onboard smelter and then turned into an initial refined material ready for transport back to the U.S.

In collaboration with DARPA, SpaceX had built a smaller cargo ship, which would gather the refined material and transport it back to the US before returning back to the Moon for another pick up. The smaller cargo ship was 1,200 feet in length, 200 feet in width and 300 feet in height, and built purely for hauling cargo. It could transport up to 120 tons of refined material from the Moon to the earth. It would also be used to transport necessary supplies from Earth to the Moon on its trips up. Key scientists had estimated that once the mining operations were fully operational, and materials started to consistently arrive on Earth, the defense manufacturers would be able to produce upwards of 1,000 Pershings and 200 F41 fighters every month.

Of course, the U.S. would not be watching anything in the daily news cycle about all of these space missions for quite some time, because the hope was that by keeping the whole operation clandestine, America would finally have a true leg up on their adversaries. All of the scientists and astronauts that were directly involved in the project had been assigned Secret Service details, and had been required to sign nondisclosure forms longer than the Great Wall of China.

Many of the scientists involved in Operation Pegasus were single, career-minded individuals who were able to leave for some time and easily explain their absence as business trips. Dr. Karl Bergstrom, who would be the lead geological astronaut in charge of planning the excavations on the surface of the Moon, did have a wife and two children. He felt horrible about it, but he had led them to believe that he was in the CIA; it was the only way to really explain why they were also being assigned Secret Service protection. His wife Amy, who was an independent and adventurous sort of woman, decided that the best way to handle this intrusion in her life would be to move to a more remote town in the mountains, where she could homeschool the children and work on her botany experiments in peace. While she didn’t know the full truth of the situation, Amy did know that her husband’s sacrifices were for the good of the nation; that was enough to keep her going.

The communications were a bit spattered (no Skype or FaceTime sessions would be available for them, even during the training period while he was still in the United States), but Karl did the best he could to send messages back home, and he would even sometimes create videos of himself reading books to send back for the children. Every time he would come back home, he would be surprised by how much his children had grown; these sacrifices were deep (like many made by members of the military and their families throughout generations), but they were crucial to ending the conflict in the world. Karl dreamed of a day in which his children would no longer live in a planet at war.

To further hamper the American war efforts, the Chinese continued to unleash wave after wave of cyber-attacks across all aspects of American life. Since the Chinese’s successful attack against the American communications grid at the outset of the war, the government had quickly broken the energy grid down into dozens of smaller nodes to ensure that no one node or group of nodes could cause a cascading event that could spread across the entire nation. The Chinese had continued to target the grid on multiple occasions; some nodes had been taken down, temporarily knocking out power to a single state (or a portion of a state), but that was it.

The US was also waging a cyber war against China; however, they were not having even a shred of the amount of success that the Chinese had been having in disrupting the American way of life. So, to play to their strengths, the U.S. was trying another way to combat these attacks; whenever an opportunity presented itself, the US Navy would launch a series of Tomahawk cruise missiles at the locations where the cyber-attacks were originating from. In some cases, they were successful and hit the targeted compound, but at other times the cruise missiles were shot down before they hit their mark.

The Navy’s Swordfish Underwater Drones (SUDs) were also starting to have a greater influence in the Pacific. The Navy still only had a small number of these underwater drones, but they began to seek out and hunt specifically for PLAN transports, fuel tankers and cargo ships. The four SUDs in operation were sinking (on average) nine ships a month, which was starting to have an impact in the volume of supplies and equipment the PLA was receiving in Alaska.

While the Americans had introduced the SUDs in the Pacific, the Russians had introduced a very similar type of underwater anti-ship drone in the Atlantic. Like the SUDs, the Russians only had a limited number of these underwater vessels, but they were becoming extremely effective in finding enemy ships and sinking them. This was starting to cause a shortage in materials and other essential equipment needed for the war in Europe as key transports were starting to be sunk.

The war in Europe had become bogged down in Germany; the Russians had captured large portions of eastern Germany, while the Allies sustained their hold on the rest of Germany, as well as the region down through Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. The Russians continued to train hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and kept the pressure on the Allies; they had not been able to force a breakout since their initial attack that captured Berlin and nearly captured Hamburg.