XII) Supremacy
(2012-2090)
King William VIII
Born Willem Alexander van Oranje on April 27, 1967, served in the Senaat in his capacities as the Grand Prince of Norway, and on the United Provinces’ Olympic committee, securing the 2000 Olympics for Amsterdam, until December 21, 2012, when Beatrix, reigning for thirty-two years collapsed and was rushed to the hospital in Delft. She was announced dead on arrival from cardiac failure. The Dutch press picked up on the irony of their queen dying on the same day the ancient Mayan calender cycle ended.
William VIII graduated from the Naval Academy in Recife in 1989, the same year that the Balkan Wars died down. He rose to the rank of Commander, and was serving as Executive Officer on board the DCS King Maurice I, when news reached him that he was now King and would be crowned as soon as he returned to the United Provinces. William was first crowned Emperor of Brazil, when his ship returned to port in Recife, capital of Brazil. During the year of 2013, he traveled to each of the monarchies in personal union with the United Provinces and received their crowns as well.
On the issue of supporting business during the demographic bomb, King William VIII was on the opposite end of the debate from the Staaten-General. He did not wish to lend a single guilder to companies that dug their own holes. Regarding retirement, the King declared that is was the responsibility of the individual to prepare for their own jobless future. He further pointed out that the United Provinces, or any other member of the Dutch Commonwealth could not withstand the stress upon their budgets to support such a large class of nonproductive citizens. The people work their whole lives to make the world a better place for future generations, not so that they can twiddle their remaining years away.
In running his countries, William VIII had the cold heart of an accountant. He saw costs and benefits, and pushed the ordeal of the person from his mind. To survive the demographic bomb without crippling the United Provinces’ economy, he had to solve problems with his mind, not his heart. It was what the world needed, not what it wanted. Other countries faced similar crises. When Spain attempted to subsidize its retiring class, its entire economy collapsed as less than 40% of the population were able to be employed. The resulting chaos on the Iberian Peninsula was the first international crisis the new king had to face.
End of the Spanish State
The final collapse of the Spanish Republic during the 2010s had its roots following the Second World War. A new constitution was created by the victors, to replace the restored monarchy with a federal republic based on centuries old nationalities. Languages, such as that of the Basque, which were suppressed during the restored monarchy were brought back to the surface of day, often acting as one of, if not the, official language of the reconstituted states. Resurrection of medieval nationalities sparked division among the previous united Spanish people.
During the 1980s, the Basque were the first to leave the republic. The federal government in Madrid nearly sparked off a war in trying to prevent the Basque from departing. For their part, the Basque tried the diplomatic path first, presenting their case to the United Nations. They pleaded that this was part of their national self-determination, one of the points of the U.N. Charter, and the U.N. ruled in favor of the Basque. The Basque Republic was founded, and Madrid waited for the dominos to fall. They did not. In fact, the federal government ran smoother without the Basque obstructing legislation.
For nearly thirty years, Spain experienced a time of stability. This all changed in 2013, when the strongly Federalist president, Manuel Chavez, was assassinated while visiting Oporto. Reactionary elements within the Spanish military cracked down on the city. Across the state of Portugal, the people protested the unfair treatment and singling out of their own nationality because of the assassination, one that was later learned to be committed by a Catalonian. Active resistance to the occupation of Oporto resulted in further crackdowns inside Portugal.
In 2014, a Portuguese General, one Louis Ramalo, took control of the state assembly in Lisbon. Just how Portuguese Ramalo was is still debated, for his father was born in Seville, and he spent much of his youth in southern Spain. On August 14, 2014, Ramalo declared himself king of a restored Kingdom of Portugal. Portugal seceded from the Spanish Republic the following day. In a speech televised across Portugal, King Louis promised to restore Portugal’s former glory. The phrasing of his speech caught the attention of the Dutch Commonwealth, which member states of Brazil, Angola and Mozambique were centuries ago Portuguese colonies.
Portugal was not the only state to secede that year. Catalonia used the same national self-determination excuse as the Basque, and left the Republic on October 30, of that year. Madrid was quick to send in soldiers to Barcelona, bringing several of the Catalonian politicians into custody. Battle for the city and the surrounding countryside lasted well into 2015. At the start of the new year, the Leonese began to speak of their own self-determination. The New Years massacre in Tarragona of some three thousand Catalonian nationals caused the assembly in Leon to vote for dissolving their union with the Spanish Government on January 3.
With Leon in rebelling, soldiers in Catalonia were recalled closer to the capital to do battle with Leonese rebels. Leonese officers and soldiers within the army mutinied, taking control of a great store of military equipment. While Madrid was distracted closer to home, the Catalonian Army, numbering less than 100,000, made a move of its own. It invaded southwards into Valencia, committing its own atrocities in the meanwhile. These acts were nowhere near as violent as some carried out during the Balkan Wars (1948-89), but international communication and cable news networks brought them into houses around the world.
Fighting in Leon grew fierce enough that other nationalities began to fear they would be next. Even the Castillians, whose state was home to Madrid, were appalled by the heavy-handedness of Madrid. Tensions grew during March and April, until finally, on May 1, the national assembly voted to disband itself, after several attempts of the president to reign in the army had failed. The Spanish state abruptly ceased to exist.
This, obviously, did not stop the violence. War erupted between Castile and Leon, as Leonese soldiers crossed the border to take revenge on what they saw as lackeys to a now dead federal government. Castile retained control over the largest portion of the Spanish Air Force, and used it to bomb targets across Leon. Not just military targets of logistical ones, but general carpet bombing of cities. Leon’s air force attempted to match raid with raid, but was outfought by the Castillians.
Piracy erupted along the Atlantic Coast, as Portuguese sailors took once more to the sea. This time, they preyed upon the shipping lanes that entered northern Europe from the Mediterranean and African Coast. On July 19, two Portugese frigates made the monumental mistake of attacking a VOC convoy. VOC property was damaged, but no ships taken. The Company has a very strict no-tolerance policy when it comes to piracy, and the day after the attack the VOC Board voted to declare Lisbon a pirate den, opening the way for its private navy to attack the city.
The Staaten-General of the United Provinces was forced to intervene in Iberia just because of this. The VOC had destroyed many pirate dens, but most were in obscure places along the West African Coast, or some village the news networks never even notice. Lisbon was a well-known ans large European city. To raze it would bring much unwanted attention upon the Dutch Commonwealth. The Commonwealth agreed to move against Portugal, if only to keep the VOC from doing something they would all regret.
The Commonwealth expeditionary force arrived off the Portuguese coast, and landed north of Lisbon on September 11, 2015. There was little in the way of opposition, with most of the Portuguese Army attacking north into Galicia or defending the border with Leon. The following day, air strikes of Dutch carriers eliminated “King” Louis and his cabinet. The fall of Lisbon turned out to be little more than simply marching into the city. The elimination of its dictator through the country into disarray. At no point was an effective resistance organized, and early in 2016, the Dutch completed their occupation of Portugal. Shortly after, the Commonwealth placed a Protectorate over Galicia.
The Dutch Commonwealth was not the only non-Iberian state to intervene in the Iberianization of Spain. Shortly after the Dutch Protectorate, Italian Marines based in Majorca, landed near Barcelona. The Italian Federation placed its own protectorship over Catalonia. Not wanting to be left out of the picture, or lose a chance to extend its own influence, French soldiers crossed the border into Aragon. Fifty thousand were already staged on the border, to prevent a flood of Argonese refugees from stepping upon French soil. To give Iberians a place of refuge, they invaded Aragon and turned it into a protectorate, as well demilitarized it (or all non-French forces).
In southern Iberia, the Dutch moved in May of 2016, to occupy Gibraltar. To keep open the flow of oil from Armenia and Kurdistan, as well as to prevent piracy from plaguing a strategic trading nexus were the reasons cited for the occupation. For its part, Andalusia did not protest the occupation, or even oppose it. They had more problems with their neighbors to the north than the Dutch. Andalusia, despite its Moorish history, was not in anyway connected to its long forgotten Arab past. It was not the revival of Grenada, though its capital was in Malaga. Since Leon and Castile threw so much of their weight against each other, Andalusia managed to push its own frontiers as far north as the Guadaira River.
It was not until 2017, that the United Nations was able to motivate itself to act. With Security Council Resolution 2017-4, the U.N. voted to send in peace keepers to uphold the peace established by a resolution passed by the general assembly a few days before, calling for immediate cessation of violence. The bulk of the Peace Keepers were comprised of British, German, Swedish and Moroccan Army units, and ships of the Royal Navy were prepared to strike targets inside of both Castile and Leon if both countries did not stop the violence. They complied on March 2, 2017, bringing the brief but destructive war to an end.
The resolution also called for the Dutch Commonwealth to abandon its conquests, which King William VIII steadfast refused to do so. His decision was applauded back home, as was the final destruction of the United Provinces’ most ancient enemy, that of Spain. Despite the resolution, the Commonwealth, as well as France and Italy retained their protectorates and influence in the region.
Dwindling Resources
With more than two centuries of industrialization behind it, civilization soon came up against a barrier. The majority of resources required to maintain such a civilization that were easily obtained were nearly depleted. To gain more iron to feed the steel industry, mines must be dug deeper, and in more remote locations. Sweden had an advantage that none of the Commonwealth Members possessed; vast tracks of Siberia rich in mineral wealth. For the Dutch, mines in Brazil, New Holland and India were expanded, and new sources sought. These new veins were not as rich, and profits margins would shrink. More over, though resources gradually dropped in availability, demand continued to rise.
With over a billion inhabitants, China was the fasted growing consumer of steel, and most every other metal, in the world. The Indian Empire was in a close second, with its manpower potentials finally realized after a century of struggle. The United States, with its own resources dwindling and no sign of its industrial base weakening, also sought new sources of raw material. Despite its peace treaty with Britain, Americans looked northward to untapped sources in Canada.
Not all looked to their neighbors for new sources of material. William VIII looked up and outward. When showed the content of a near-Earth asteroid, he exclaimed that single rock had enough iron to supply the world’s steel industry for half a year. The reality that the nearly endless supply of metals in space would be the wave of the future. It would not solve the immediate fuel crisis, but it would be enough to allow society to continue. In 2025, an American mission to an Earth-crossing asteroid brought back samples of nickle, iron and even traces of gold.
The thought of hundreds of tonnes of gold being mined in space horrified Amsterdam’s financial community. Gold was valuable because it was rare. Flooding the market with new sources of gold would devalue the world’s currency. Many bankers were reluctant to authorize loans to any space-mining operation. Instead, they invested on underwater mining. Aside from oil and methane from the North Sea, several mining companies began to tap deposits of bauxite discovered off the coast of Brazil. With more exploration, veins of iron, chromium and bauxite were also discovered in less than fifty meters of water off the coast of Brazil.
City Beneath the Wave
With the opening of several mines off the coast of Cayenne, the first under water city was established in 2033. The city of Atlantis was little more than barracks, cafeteria and a supply store built from containers that were hauled out to the mines and sunk to the sea floor. Air locks connected the containers to the shaft mines. Space agencies and private companies seeking to establish themselves in space, invested in this land rush beneath the sea. Technology developed to allow humans to survive under the sea would also benefit those seeking to leave Earth all together.
The output of Atlantis was meager in comparison to open pit mines in Sweden and the United States. Despite its low but steady output and marginal profits, Atlantis proved it was possible to tap the sea floor. Within ten years of Atlantis’s opening, dozens of submarine colonies and thousands of colonists called the land beneath the Atlantic home. America’s frontier mentality allowed the Americans to take the lead in sea floor colonization. By 2050, over a hundred communities lived beneath the waves of the Gulf of Texas and the Carribean Sea, production ranging from mining to oil to aquiculture. A great deal of tourism spread through these cities, and as New Orleans was gradually reclaimed by the sea, the bulk of settlers came from that drowned city.
In the North Sea, the United Provinces did not look to settle the sea floor. Instead, they brought the sea floor to them. By 2030, the Ijsslemeer was nothing but a memory and Amsterdam was connected to the North Sea via a network of channels and artificial canals. In Friesland, the West Friesland Islands were connected to the mainland as the water was pumped out of newly reclaimed lands. In comparison with other European nations, the United Provinces paid a proportionally higher amount of their budget on infrastructure, mostly in the form of maintaining sea walls and levies against an increasingly angry sea.
Fuel of the Future
On September 17, 2033, the first commercial fusion reactor came on line in Mumbai, India. Where the United Provinces and Brazil already had an established power network, focused their attention on increasing efficiency and prevent power loss along the transmission lines. India’s power hunger increased nearly as fast as China, with projections in 2030 that a new coal-fired or fission reactor would have to be opened every two months in order to feed the demand.
A decade long research project from the University of Mumbai, funded by the Indian Government and energy companies, such as the VOC, set its goal of making fusion power economically viable. Since the dawn of the 21st Century, fusion reactors were online around the world. However, these experimental reactors seldom broke even in energy production, and when they did, they failed to generate enough power to be useful. In Mumbai, the researchers set their goal at a 50 MW generator.
Professor Hermann Vandjirasik, born some fifty years earlier, lead the project. He was not so much a brilliant engineer as an excellent salesman. He was the one who procured the funding for the fusion reactor, while those beneath him dealt with design and construction. On December 7, 2032, the reactor was turned on for the first time, and reached a 43 MW output. This deficiency delayed its official activation by several months.
Its eventual activation added only a minor amount of power to India’s total consumption. However, its design soon spread around the world and fifteen fusion reactors were operational by 2040. Another hundred were online before the middle of the century. Replacing thousands of coal-fired and oil plants would take decades, and that was not counting the continued increase in demand. Plans in India, Abyssinia, the Boer Republics and Brazil called for the fossil fuel powered plants to be replaced by fusion and even solar satellites, when their lifespans ended. Until then, which some coal-fire plants were designed to last a century, the would continue to add to the Carbon Dioxide content of the atmosphere.
Lunar Expansion
By 2030, some two thousand persons lived in an expanded Fort Recife. With fusion power around the corner, serious investment was put into extracting Helium-3 from the lunar regolith. Fusion fuels on Earth were limited, and once all of Earth’s power was generated by fusion, a large supply of hydrogen and helium isotopes would be required. Some dreamers saw the Outer Planets as an endless supply of fuel. Among these, even the most optimistic dreamers knew such plans would be a century away at the very least.
The initial limitations to colonizing the moon came from the cost of reaching orbit. Once in orbit, reaching Luna was relatively simple. In 2021, Lockheed-Convair produced a prototype Heavy Lifter. It was the first truly reusable spacecraft, not requiring any of its hull to be replaced for at least one hundred launches. It was also the largest rocket ever built. The Heavy Lifter had both the size and general shape of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The engines were so powerful, that upon launch, the Heavy Lifter would melt its own launch pad. The space craft is redesigned to have dozens of smaller engines instead of five larger ones. This allows for it to take-off and land at more ports, and allows for more backup in case an engine failed.
The Heavy Lifter’s true benefit came from its fuel efficiency. A Heavy Lifter was proven capable, in 2024, of taking off Earth, flying to Luna, landing, loading cargo, taking off for Earth and landing again without the need to refuel. Its only drawback was that it carried so much fuel that it limited its cargo capacity. Only fifty tonnes of cargo could be carried into and out of space one the first Heavy Lifters. The biggest gain off the Heavy Lifter was that it reduced launches by a factor of five.
For the first time, it became economically viable to launch tourists into space. Once that market opened, and enough entrepreneurs invested sufficient capital, space hotels began to spring up in low Earth orbit. The moon was still a ways off for any tourist who wished not to take a one way flight to the research colonies upon its surface. Space-based industry was not as successful as the scientific and entertainment ventures. It boiled down to cost. Why would a Netherlander, or any person, but a high quality product made in space, when they could purchase an adequate product made on Earth, for a fraction of the price.
Industry on the Moon was more local consumption than exportation to Earth. The research colonies, funded either by universities or private ventures, extract sufficient hydrates from the lunar regolith and polar regions to supply their own needs. Immigration to the moon was a rarity during the 21st Century. The only way anybody managed to voyage to Luna, was to join the communities growing there. Fort Recife was established in the late 20th Century, in search of new sources of metals and energies. By 2020, some five hundred people lived in the vastly expanded colony. The arrival of plasma torches on the moon allowed the colony to go underground. Manmade tunnels and caverns spanned two square kilometers around the surface installations.
In 2005, the first American colony on the moon was established by the Gates Foundation. The Foundation was created by Bill Gates, founded of Microsoft, and dedicated to progress in technology and expansion of humanity into new frontiers. These frontiers were not always physical ones, such as the sea floor and space; it also included new fields of sciences and new technologies, such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Gatestown started out as seven habitat modules landed in the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the Apollo XI landing site. The site was not chosen solely for patriotic sentiment; it was believed that tourism would eventually leave low Earth orbit and reach out to the moon. Any American who visited Luna would no doubt wish to visit that first landing.
The first child born on the moon was born in Gatestown in 2016 to a couple of Italians astronauts. The birth of children on a new world made colonization real. Some concern existed on whether or not the child would be able to return to Earth because it was born on Luna. It was only the worst case scenario, though evolving on Earth, the human species are well adapted to survive in its climate. The first natural born Lunars did not grow tall in low gravity, but did have under-developed skeletons. With extensive conditioning, they were capable of returning to the homeworld, though none chose this course of action.
A third nation established a research colony upon the moon by 2020. The German Empire founded Braunstadt in early 2010. It was smaller, and far more spartan than either American or Commonwealth city. However, it was built at the south pole, where solar cells could be left in perpetual sunlight, and higher concentrations of water was defused from the regolith. Braunstadt was not as much a research station like Fort Recife or Gatestown. When Braunstadt was inaugurated, it immediately began exporting high quality aluminum and titanium back to the Fatherland.
Fierce Competition
By 2030, newly industrializing countries were looking to expand their borders, the same way European nations did two centuries before. The largest menace to stability came from the every-hungry industry of China. In 2029, the Chinese invaded Korea after a revolution the previous year toppled its former Beijing-friendly communist regime. Much protest came from around the world, and the United Nations voted to condemn the act of aggression. However, since the most powerful countries in the world never signed the Outer Space Treaty, and overtly have laid claims on the moon the UN lacked the authority and prestige it once possessed.
In response, the People’s Republic of China, along with the reinstated People’s Republic of Korea, Indochina, Burma and Kamchatka, withdrew from the United Nations. China began treating its minor allies as colonies. The most aggressive act was the annexation of Sakhalin from Kamchatka. China moved operations into the Sea of Ohkost, in search of oil and methane deposits beneath the sea floor. Such actions forced Japan to begin arming its oil platforms and beef up patrols in the seas to its north.
The Dutch Commonwealth viewed China’s expansion with suspicion and caution. Indonesia and Java were still producing oil, and gas deposits between Hainan and Formosa might also tempt the Chinese to look south. It would not be the first time; the Japanese did the exact same thing nearly a century earlier. Sweden took far more drastic actions, by sealing its long frontier with China. Not all the resources in Siberia were depleted, and hundreds of thousands of Swedish soldiers moved into the area to see that those resources go to Stockholm, not Beijing.
Sweden also fought a series of short wars against its southern, Turkish neighbors, seizing tracks of lands and immediately exploiting them. This drew further international condemnation, which caused Sweden to leave the United Nations. With two of the largest countries no longer members, many began to wonder if the UN was about to go the way of the League of Nations. The rest of the World Powers seldom heeded UN resolutions if they impeded their own progress.
Riga Conference
With the world’s oil supply dwindling, and hydrogen economy still in its infancy, the World Powers met in Riga on April 15, 2038, to divide the rest of the world’s oil amongst themselves. None of the countries that would be divided were invited. China would receive rights to drill in Kamchatka. Sweden the same in Central Asia. The United States was given a free hand in the Carribean, which is took full advantage of when it invaded Mexico in 2040. The French were granted rights to West Africa, the Germans granted rights to whatever supplies remain in the Balkans. Canada had sufficient reserves to supply the whole of the small British Commonwealth. The Dutch required no divisions, for Indonesia and Angola gave sufficient supplies to the Commonwealth and the North Sea directly to the United Provinces.
All nations agreed to share the Middle East, declaring the whole area a neutral zone. The Dutch Commonwealth abided by this, withdrawing supporting units from the United Arab Emirates to India. The UAE, United Arab Republic, Kurdistan and Armenia established the Petroleum Export Commission to regulate the remaining flow of petroleum to the World Powers. Antarctica was declared off limits. The United Provinces was at the forefront of this declaration, not so much because of environmental concerns as to the concerns of causing the ice cap to break, sea levels to rise, and flooding of the United Provinces. By 2038, the United Provinces had invested significantly in a sea wall defensive network.
The Riga Conference was the final nail in the coffin of the United Nations. When the UN Council voted in favor of a resolution denouncing the Conference, all parties to it withdrew membership. Without the funding and support of the World Powers, the UN became little more than a meeting room, now in Geneva, where minor countries could complain about how the big boys ignore them at best. The final session of the United Nations was held on August 30. 2039. Almost immediately upon its disbanding and disappearance of peace keepers, a dozen small wars broke out in Africa and South America. In the latter case, Brazil was able to restrain its neighbors. However, Central Africa exploded in violence, and the West African nations of Biafra, Nigeria and Benin were invaded by France.
These wars were local, and based more on ancient ethnic hatreds than hard economic reasoning. Massacres became so routine during the 2040s that the world’s news networks no longer bothered reporting on them. Africa plunged into a new dark age, with refugees trying to flee north across the Sahara, east to Abyssinia, and south to the stable southern Africa. Wars among the World Powers also became a reality, after nearly a century of peace between them. One point of the Riga Conference that was never, truly resolved was the rationing of the North Sea’s hydrocarbon supplies.
The United Provinces claimed access to the whole area, as did the British. The Conference did grant it to the United Provinces, but did not grant it exclusive rights. The British and Dutch governments attempted to demarcate the sea, dividing the sea floor between the two powers. However, with Norway part of the United Provinces, the British believed the Dutch were relieving and unfair slice of the oil pie. In March of 2039, the two nations met at Calais, in an attempt to permanently divide the North Sea. The British already had to colonies on the sea floor, some ten kilometers and seventeen kilometers off its shores respectively. Seatown, the latter of the two, sat near the straight of Dover, and close enough to the continent that it would fall under Dutch influence.
To the British, surrendering one of their expensive, underwater colonies was not an option. To the Dutch, allowing a maritime rival to have its fingers in the United Provinces’ pie, was equally unacceptable. Tensions between the two nations peaked in April as the British began to drill in an area clearly marked as Dutch. Their platform tapped the Dutch oil field via slanted drilling. This way, the British stayed on their side of the proposed line, while still tapping the fuel its own island economy required. An emergency summit held in Bremen failed to resolve the issue, as King William VIII told Britain’s own William IV, that only by ceasing operations could the crisis be resolved. Both Williams left Bremen without resolving the issue. Both also knew that war was imminent.
The Third Anglo-Dutch War
In response to the diagonal drilling, the VOC, on September 11, 2039, sent the VOC Golden Hind, a frigate, along with several hovercraft, to seize the oil rig and shut it down. Acting without consent or even informing the Staaten-General, the VOC acted to save its own oil wells. There was little resistance on the platform, and it fell without casualties. In London, Britain’s parliament was in an outrage. The fact that sovereign British territory was under foreign occupation was enough to galvanize the often disagreeable assembly to action. Royal Marines struck back at the VOC, only to be repelled.
One week after this failed attack, the VOC had sealed the well and destroyed the platform, before retreating back to its own platform. This act of piracy on the high seas caused the United Kingdom to recall its ambassadors to the Dutch Commonwealth. By Christmas, the Dutch had closed their embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. By the start of 2040, oil companies were fighting each other on the North Sea, using their own security or hiring mercenaries to defend their assets and attack their competition. These attacks did not always cross borders. To rival British petroleum giants, BP and the North Sea Corporation, traded their own shots over an oil field off the coast of Scotland. On the Dutch side, the VOC regulated the minor Dutch drillers, who had little choice but to sell what they extract to VOC Oil.
On January 12, 2040, London sent an ultimatum to the Hague; cease piracy in the North Sea in forty-eight hours, or we will do it for you. It was a similar warning the Dutch sent to the former Emperor of Ethiopia in the 19th Century, when pirates threatened trade through the Suez Canal. Unlike that ancient African kingdom, the Dutch were in a position to stand up to British threats. There were already calls in the Staaten-General to police the North Sea, but the fact that the British, an age old rival, was making demands, had an opposite effect on the Dutch people.
Two days passed without incident. Then the third. On the fourth day a BP tanker crossed the demarcation line and was fired upon by a Dutch oil platform. The tanker suffered only slight damage and no loss of cargo. For London, this was the final straw. On January 18, the United Kingdom and its own miniature commonwealth declared war upon the United Provinces. The Royal Air Force wasted no time in attacking Dutch platforms near its sector of the North Sea. Attacking Dutch platforms in Dutch water sparked a similar declaration from the Dutch Commonwealth. After more than three centuries, a Third Anglo-Dutch War had begun.
During the first two weeks of the war, the Royal Navy massed at its anchorage in Scapa Flow. The Royal Air Force had already sank three empty Dutch tankers and disabled four of their drilling platforms. Skirmishes between patrol boats happened on a daily basis, with casualties adding. The Commonwealth High Command knew that if the Royal Navy sortied into the North Sea, the losses would be tremendous. On February 1, King William VIII approved a plan of attack on the Royal Navy’s primary base of operation. The Commonwealth Navy hoped to completely clear the Royal Navy from the North Sea in a single afternoon.
The Commonwealth fleet, consisting of two aircraft carriers, two battleships, four cruisers and a dozen destroyers, along with three submarines scouting ahead, set sail from Rotterdam on January 30. The 1st Fleet, stationed in the United Provinces, went to full alert once the ultimatum was delivered. The High Command knew that the Commonwealth would not abide by demands of foreign powers, and that war would result. Nearly a century of peace between the European powers had not dulled their responses, however, the Commonwealth Navy spent the past decades battling pirates around the world. Not since World War II, had the Dutch Commonwealth Navy been involved in a major fleet-vs-fleet engagement.
The initial assault came in the form of over one hundred multi-purpose missiles launched from the DCS Prince of Oranje and King William III. The missiles were smaller than anti-ship missiles, but still caused considerable damage to the British anchorage. Two cruisers were destroyed outright, along with three destroyers and demolished the tank farm. Fires from burning petrochemicals obscured Scapa Flow from a follow up attack by aircraft off the DCS Karl Doorman. The air raid succeeded in destroying an addition cruiser and gutting an older British carrier in dry dock.
Despite damage caused to the British fleet and facilities, the raid on Scapa Flow was not the outstanding success that Dutch media announced. Commonwealth casualties were limited to a handful of aircraft shot down. British casualties, on the other hand, numbered over two thousand dead and as many wounded. The Royal Navy was not knocked out of the North Sea and the High Command had desired. Their ability to attack Dutch platforms was limited, but not halted. Two days later, the Royal Navy sortied and destroyed three oil rigs off the coast of Norway.
The next time the two fleets met was on October 17, 2040, off the Yorkshire Coast. The Commonwealth fleet sortied in hopes of neutralizing British assets in the area and clearing the sector for furthering War Plan Rose. Admiral Count William van Holland hoped to force the Royal Navy into a single decisive battle, similar to those sought by the Royal Navy against the Germans during the Great War. Unlike that early 20th Century war, the Battle of Spurnhead was fought mostly over-the-horizon, with little visual contact.
At 0843, the Commonwealth Navy detected the lead elements of the Royal Navy steaming south. The first volley of anti-ship missiles were fired from a pair of leading Dutch destroyers. Most of the twenty missiles were shot down, with only one scoring a hit on a British destroyer. The Ajax had a ten meter hole punched in its hull, but remained afloat, albeit out of the battle. The British responded with its own missile salvo, sinking one of the Commonwealth destroyers.
The main fleets did not engage each other until 1042, when a squadron of JC-40s commenced a low-level attack against the Royal Navy. The JC-40, a stealth aircraft, was not detected until hands on the HMS Royal Oak’s flight deck spotted them visually. By then, the fighters were within anti-ship missile range. Each of the eight fighters carried a pair of short-range anti-ship missiles. Though most were shot down, two did score hits on the Royal Oak, including one that set off secondary explosions beneath the carrier’s flight deck, and blew off the forward twelve meters of the hull. The Royal Oak lost its ability to launch its own aircraft, which was van Holland’s intent.
At 1200, the Commonwealth launched a two hundred missile barrage at the Royal Navy. Ninety percent of the anti-ship missiles were downed by the British, with the remainder damaging most of the ships. Three hit the Royal Oak, gutting the ship and causing it to capsize. A British cruiser was blown apart when a warhead detonated within its own arsenal. After this barrage, van Holland saw victory just over the horizon.
At 1220, the Royal Navy launched its own missile barrage. Commonwealth ships shot down a higher percentage of British missiles, but not before six of them zeroed in on the DCS Prince of Java. The guided-missile battleship snapped in half, sinking with only fifteen survivors. Other Dutch ships suffered damage, including all the remaining battleships, and the catapult of the Maarten Tromp. At this point, van Holland could have pressed the attack and won. He would have lost more than the lone battleship, but it would have ended the war after only a year of conflict.
Instead, van Holland decided to cut his loses. From satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance, the Admiral knew the British were as badly hurt as he. Though their carrier was sunk, van Holland was in range of the Royal Air Force’s own bombers. The Commonwealth had with it two carriers and enough air power to secure air superiority in the immediate vicinity of the fleet, however the Royal Air Force could put up over two hundred aircraft. At 1240, van Holland ordered the fleet to withdraw deeper into the North Sea and areas were the Commonwealth Air Force could cover it.
More than a year passed before the main fleets of the British and Dutch Commonwealths met again in battle. Following the indecisive battle off Spurnhead, the air forces of both sides exchanged fire, raiding each others’ space and targeting airfields and other strategic military targets. With advance and accurate “smart” weapons, neither side suffered many civilian deaths. Secondary raids against armament factories and shipyards resulted in little stoppage for the Commonwealth war effort. With so much of its industrial power in Brazil and now India, the British could only hope to launch carrier-borne raids against such targets, with too high a cost to their own ranks.
On July 27, 2041, Admiral van Holland against sought to force the Royal Navy into a clearly decisive victory. More over, the Duke of Brabant had assembled an army of three divisions to make the initial landings of War Plan Rose. To invade Britain, the North Sea must become a Dutch lake. Following previous attacks, the Royal Navy in Britain’s home waters was somewhat reduced. One carrier and four cruisers were all that stood in the way of van Holland’s fleet of two carriers, two battleships and now seven cruisers. British Admiral Lesley Birken had hopes of striking the Dutch before they were ready. His hopes were quickly dashed.
Flying at wave-top levels, over one hundred anti-ship missiles, launched by the Commonwealth fleet, intercepted the Royal Navy some four kilometers off Flamborough Head at 0740. The missiles flew under radar, that coupled with the fact they were made from a slightly radar-absorbent material, made their early detection impossible. When the Royal Navy finally detected the missiles, they were less than a minute from impact. Anti-missiles and point-defense weaponry chewed through most of the missiles, as was custom in modern naval engagements, but as before, some breached the defenses. Four missiles struck the carrier, HMS Resolution, causing the ship to break into three pieces and quickly sink in the shallow waters.
All four cruisers were damaged by the initial attack, but none sunk. By the time their fires were under control, and weapons back on line, the Commonwealth Fleet was already in visual range. A rarity in the 21st Century, the two fleets engaged in close-range combat, using missiles and guns. The Commonwealth, with their two hundred millimeter chain guns had a decisive advantage over the Royal Navy’s cruisers. Three of the cruisers were chewed to pieces by a stream of 200mm shells hitting them two each second. The fourth cruiser was sunk by missiles while trying to escape, along with an addition four destroyers. For the first time in its history, the United Kingdom’s home fleet was destroyed, paving the way for invasion.
Raids
On August 2, following the victory at Flamborough Head, the 2nd Commonwealth Fleet, out of Brazil, launched an attack against the British Naval Base at Plymouth. Aircraft off the Michael de Ruyter and Prince Mandrick succeeded in destroying docks, and most of the shipyard, including a cruiser and two frigates nearing completion. Addition damage was done to Britain’s merchant fleet at dock, including two container ships left as burning hulks.
On August 8, the Royal Air Force retaliated with a large-scale attack on Amsterdam. Two hundred fighters flew over the city, causing havoc for the better part of an hour. The Commonwealth Air Force intercepted a number of the British fighters, and further numbers were downed by air defenses, but not before causing significant damage to the network of shipping canals that connect now land-locked Amsterdam and its facilities to the open sea. The shipyards in Amsterdam were completely destroyed. A few dikes were breached during the attack, flooding portions of the city. Most distressing of all, the Royal Air Force destroyed the four hundred year old VOC headquarters, killing a number of the Company’s executives.
Smaller raids continued for the remainder of August. The surviving executives of the VOC wanted to launch their own attack against government and financial targets in London, but were prevented by the Commonwealth High Command. The government made it clear that if a corporation attempted to take off from Dutch territory and attack civilian targets, not a single VOC fighter would be allowed to land. The High Command pushed ahead the time table for War Plan Rose, if for no other reason than to neutralize British airfields.
War Plan Rose
On August 15, 2041, an armada of hundreds of ships were spotted through the morning fog off the Yorkshire Coast. With the Royal Navy swept from the North Sea, the century-and-a-half war plan was finally activated. The initial landings of three Commonwealth Army divisions, under the command of the Duke of Brabant, Simon Meinkeil and Abdul Rajisiva, were virtually unopposed. A small observation post near the city of Bridlington surrendered at 0812, some forty-two minutes after the first Dutch soldier stepped foot upon British soil.
Unlike the raid on Medway, almost four centuries before, this invasion force had no intent on settling for the destruction of a shipyard. Its purpose was conquest. The first contact between Dutch and British land forces came on August 17, when a British armored battalion encountered the Armor of Rajisiva southeast of York. The skirmish was brief, ending with twice as many British tanks lost than Dutch. Commonwealth helicopters accounted for a majority of the armored kills.
Royal Air Force airfields in Yorkshire were pounded from the outset of the invasion until August 22, when the last field was in Dutch possession. The Royal Air Force ground crews put up a valiant fight, but where ill equipped to deal with full scale invasion. The city of York was declared open by its inhabitants, and fell to the Commonwealth on August 22. With the capture of proper port facilities in Yorkshire, the Commonwealth had two hundred thousand men ashore by the end of the month.
Dutch armor lead the spearhead across the island of Britannia. As was called for in the original War Plan Rose, the island was cut in half, England separated from Scotland. Dutch tanks rolled into Liverpool on October 3. The British were slothful in countering the invasion, for many in London believed the landings in Yorkshire were a sham, an attempt to draw British land forces north from a real invasion directed at London itself. This delay of full redeployment allowed for the United Kingdom to be cut in half. The Commonwealth did launch raids against targets around the Thames River, to foster this belief from Britain’s Generals.
During the winter months, little advance was made by the Dutch. This was partially do to the uncharacteristically abysmal weather of the winter of 2041-42. The previous decades saw much of the climate warming, with limited snowfall. The Commonwealth’s invasion force did not anticipate the blizzard that struck the island in November, and brought their drive southwestward on London to a halt. If not for this freak storm, the Commonwealth might have ended the war by Christmas. Instead, it drug on during the winter, with the Dutch making slow gains and the British digging in.
An attempt to cut off Commonwealth supplies was made in December, by a joint British-Canadian fleet sailing from Halifax. This fleet met up with the Commonwealth 2nd Fleet throughout the month of December, battling each other in the choppy North Atlantic. The advance of this fleet prompted Commonwealth Marines to land and secure the wrecked base at Scapa Flow, denying the British any access to the North Sea. The British-Canadian fleet lost only a destroyer in the month of combat, but expended sufficient ammunition to force it to return to Halifax. The Commonwealth suffered damage to the de Ruyter and an addition destroyer. Neither side attacked with the same ferocity of the engagements in the North Sea.
By the start of February 2042, the weather had improved to the point where Dutch armor could continue its advance on London. By this date in the war, the British had organized an impressive ring of defenses around the capital. Blocking the advance of Rajisiva, was Field Marshall Bernard Vernon and the British Armored Corps. Vernon outnumbered Rajisiva in tanks and armored-personnel carriers, however by February, the Commonwealth Air Force achieved air superiority over central Britain.
The two forces met each other outside of Oxford on February 7, 2042. The British foresaw an easy victory, planning to ambush the Dutch tanks north of the city. However, the Commonwealth learned of this ambush from an observation satellite in low orbit. It was launched at the start of the year, and the British did not detect it until three days after the armored engagement, when they promptly shot it down. In mid-morning of February 7, some one hundred sixteen Commonwealth aircraft took off and converged on the British armor, carefully concealed just inside the suburbs of Oxford. The proceeding fight was a slaughter, with two hundred tanks destroyed from above, including the command center and Vernon. Leaderless, the British Armor Corps were in a state of confusion when Rajisiva attacked at noon.
The armored stage of the battle saw British tanks forced back into the suburbs of Oxford. Over the next two days, most of the British tanks were either destroyed, crippled or spent of ammunition and abandoned. The armored assault on Oxford was one of the largest catastrophes in British history, and only the beginning of the Battle of Oxford. One February 12, Commonwealth Armored Dragoons entered the city. Dismounting from their APCs, these dragoons fought the British defenders house-to-house and at a great loss to their own. Four thousand Commonwealth soldiers were killed taking the city.
As the suburbs fell into Dutch hands, the British fell back into the city proper, forcing the Dutch to conquer the city one block at a time. Despite widespread use of precision ordinance, Oxford suffered thousands of civilian casualties. The British media decried the attack on Oxford, and the world through its various news networks, received their first look at urban combat in the mid 21st Century. After decades of being feed footage of precision strikes, the public was appalled to see war up close and personal. Despite the outcries, both the Hague and London sent more soldiers into Oxford.
The British were forced to admit defeat by the start of March as the last of their forces were driven out south of the city and sent packing to Reading. With the fall of Oxford, the British government knew that it was only a matter of time, and a great deal of lives, before the Commonwealth banner flew over Buckingham Palace. The Dutch were not interested in annexing the island or reducing it to a colony. Nor did William VIII wished for the British people to suffer hardships. Two weeks after the fall of Oxford, Britain’s King William IV sent envoys to the Hague to seek terms to cession of hostilities.
The Third Anglo-Dutch War was not limited to the North Sea. In shipping lanes across the North Atlantic, both sides used commerce raiders to break the other’s economy. A few minor fleet engagements happened over the vast stretches of the ocean. British ships operating out of Canada and Bermuda even launched raids against northern Brazil, the largest raid hitting Cayenne and damaging the war industry there. An attempt to shut down the Suez Canal by the British met with dismal failure and brought condemnation by the Egyptian government. The British dared not attempt the same with the Panama Canal, which though the Dutch had a large stake of it, was clearly in American territory.
Aside from Britain, land battles also took place on the Australian-New Holland frontier. The Outback offered wide tracts of territory, some of it ideal for armored engagements. An engagement between armored dragoons of both nations occurred at Schmidten Springs, twenty kilometers inside the border of New Holland. The British and Australians won this engagement and occupied the small town. The New Hollanders fought the Third Anglo-Dutch War almost entirely on the defensive, trading desert for time.
A more dangerous theater of war took place hundreds of kilometers above Earth’s surface. Since there was no British installations or colonies on the moon, Luna was in no danger of turning into a battlefield. Low Earth Orbit was unique in the war, for it suffered no loss of life. Instead, the war was fought by satellites and anti-satellite missiles. The Commonwealth deployed small boosters in orbit, that would attach themselves to British satellites and deorbit them. The British would fire missiles from aircraft in the stratosphere and completely obliterate Commonwealth spy satellites. The complete destruction of orbital devices was denounced by other spacefaring nations. When a satellite was reduced to hundreds of pieces of debris, each one of those pieces was a threat to other orbital installations. Large, rotating space stations (one operated by Sweden and another by the United States) were high enough above Earth to avoid the shooting gallery of micro-meteors, but other stations were not so safe. A German space station was abandoned when it became clear it would pass through a debris field, which punctured the station. The Germans safely deorbited their space station, which splashed down in the Indian Ocean.
Treaty of Leicester
During April of 2042, British and Commonwealth delegates met in Leicester to spell out the terms of Britain’s surrender. The Dutch were relatively lenient in terms, wanting little from the British. They did not demand reparations from the British, nor cession of land. The Commonwealth had only three demands from the British; 1) The United Provinces will receive exclusive rights to the resources of the North Sea; 2) The Royal Navy will be limited in size of to the Commonwealth’s 1st fleet by a ration of 3:2 in favor of the Dutch; 3) England itself would be occupied for a period of ten years. The Commonwealth would not send occupation forces to Scotland, Wales or even Cornwall.
The Treaty did not assign guilt for the war. Nor did the VOC have their own wish to bill London for damages to company property. The three terms were simple, and the Commonwealth made it clear that if the British did not sign, the war would continue and His Majesty would not be so generous with his next set of terms. Britain’s Parliament debated the issue for two weeks, before reluctantly agreeing to terms. The Commonwealth Assembly ratified the treaty after only an hour. On April 30, 2042, the Treaty of Leicester was signed, bringing the Third Anglo-Dutch War to an end. Occupation duty in England was light, and the British offered no resistance. Nor did they prove to be particularly helpful to the occupiers. Instead, they endured and patiently waited for the Dutch to return home.
International Breakdown
Following the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and the dividing up of the world’s resources between the major powers, international organizations such as the United Nations began to lose influence. Their ability to act as a mediator and the endless, unenforceable resolutions passed during the 2030s caused much dissolution with the organization. Attempts by representatives from Biafra, Grand Colombia and Mexico to introduce the Outer Space Treaty, one that would prohibit any nation from claiming a piece of extraterrestrial real estate as their own. The final session of the U.N. was held in 2039, coincidentally, one of the sponsors of the Outer Space Treaty was in a fight for its life against oil-hungry France.
An attempt to restore the United Nations in 2042 failed, when not a single World Power and most of the Middle Powers failed to show up in Geneva. This Second United Nations was short lived. Not a single attending state had the ability to make resolutions binding in the face of overwhelming opposition from the World Powers. The fact that France was engaged in West Africa made many of the lesser states fear that a new age of colonialism was upon them. The first age was driven by lusts for spices and gold; this new one was driven by an insatiable thirst for petroleum.
One of the last acts of the United Nations before its disbandment was to compile a world census for the middle of the 21st Century. Proposed by Ambassador Xavier Salvador of Grand Colombia, following the disastrous Siege of Bogota, its goal was to tally the world’s population, employment rate, literacy rate and other vital statistics. At the time of the proposal in 2043, the World Powers had already withdrawn from the United Nations. Despite this obstacle, the motion was passed and in the waning days of the U.N., the project went through. Due to lack of funding from the poor members of the U.N. the project took several years to complete, meeting the 2050 deadline by a mere seventeen days. What it discovered was that 6.3 billion humans were alive, a number lower than ten years ago. For the first time in centuries, the world’s population was declining. The cause was two fold; 1) In advance nations, lower birth rate and the death of the Baby Boom generation greatly reduced the populations, with the United States declining by 12% between 2000 and 2050. 2) In less advance nations, the cause was mostly famine, brought on by constant warfare and a shifting climate.
With the fall of the United Nations came an end to organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. For post-colonial states that owed great deals of capital to the World Bank, this was a mixed blessing. Though the U.N. was gone, the World Powers that helped bankroll it were looking to collect on their investment. When Egypt attempted to default on a lone that was partially funded by the Bank of Amsterdam, the Dutch Commonwealth seized control of the Suez Canal. With the breakdown and collapse of international organizations, much of the world began to slide into violence that permeated the latter half of the Twenty-first Century.
Queen Katerina
Katerina, born Catharina Beatrix Carmen Victoria van Oranje on December 7, 2007, was the first of three daughters born to King William VIII. As with all of the Princes of Oranje, she attended the most illustrious university in the United Provinces, earning a degree in law. While at university, she met a student from Germany, one Viktor Manfred, who was neither royal or even the least bit noble born. Nonetheless, being a young woman, Catharina fell in love with Viktor and they intended to marry. However, the Staaten-General refused flat out to grant him any title should he marry the Princess, and further stated that should she marry a commoner that the Staaten-General would not allow her to sit upon the throne of the United Provinces. Along with the United Provinces, India, Abyssinia and Ceylon made similar statements. As is such with royalty, the decision was taken out of her hands. She and Viktor parted, though they kept in contact for the rest of their lives.
Instead, in 2033, Catharina married Leopold van Brabant, the thirty-two year old Duke of Brabant. This was a match that the Staaten-General approved of, though the Senaat had reservations about one of its own gaining to much influence on the throne. Catharina was crowned Queen Katerina on July 14, 2052, and inherited a world slowly decaying. Despite the centuries of wealth accumulated by the United Provinces, and the Commonwealth as a whole, the new queen had a challenge before her unlike any her predecessors have faced.
Economic hardships faced all the Dutch peoples as demand for oil continued to rise, yet its limited supply was on an ever downward spiral. Some members of the House of Electorates suggested opening up Antarctica to exploitation. The Queen dismissed this. Aside from having a major in law, she also held a minor in economics. When comparing the costs of drilling in Antarctica to the cost of simply phasing out oil, the latter won out by a wide enough margin. It was not just the monetary cost. Any activity in Antarctica ran the risk of breaking off a large chunk of the ice cap. With the glaciers in Greenland already retreating, the threat of flooding was severe. Add a melting South Pole to the equation, and the United Provinces may join the few sea floor cities beneath the waves.
The Queen organized and the Staaten-General funded a new generation of sea walls and ocean barriers to surround the United Provinces. The two most endangered Provinces were the Counties of Holland and Zeeland, with much of their land either below sea level or reclaimed from the North Sea. Some of her advisors suggesting relocating the Royal Court from Delft to a more secure location, far enough away that a single storm would not drown it. Katerina refused to leave the home of the House of Oranje for the past four centuries.
Through the first decade of her reign, environmental concerns were great. The first of a series of droughts began to impact the breadbasket of Africa, Abyssinia, and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers threatened India’s well being. The age old engines of industry, coal and oil, were slowly losing favor in the Dutch Commonwealth. New fusion reactors, still lacking in the efficiency output, were coming on line. When one of these reactors turned on, an old coal-fire plant was shut down and its load transferred over to the new reactor. Obtaining the fuels for fusion proved very problematic. Deuterium extraction on Earth would last for centuries, but with a growing demand for power, these resources would soon be fought over. Mining Helium-3 on Luna proved economically unfeasible, the cost of extracting and shipping the fuel back to Earth could not compete with cheaper and dirtier fuels sources.
One benefit of the warming was an increase in ocean activity. Normally, flooding of one’s homeland was a bad thing. In the case of the United Provinces it would be down right fatal. However, the currents pushing from the North Sea through the Strait of Dover increased in intensity. The Dutch tapped this energy potential by constructing tidal turbines along its cost, as well as in the estuaries of major rivers, such as the Rhein. Solar power was not particularly useful in the Provinces, but did come into favor in New Holland, Abyssinia, parts of India and the Boer Republics. The Boer Republics in particular benefitted. The Staaten-General of Transvaal passed its own law requiring all future houses and buildings to have roofs made from solar panels.
Treaty of Kyoto
The conference on climate change and pollution in Kyoto during the month of August in 2058, finally lead to a consensus on the state of the planet by the World Powers. One of the key points of the treaty called for the end of fossil fuel power plants worldwide by 2075. The biggest obstacle to this clause was, of course, China. Being the latest to industrialize, China spent the better part of the 21st Century developing its own industry, and the monestrous demand for electricity created by its more than one billion inhabitants. Aside from great engineering feats, such as the Three Gorges Dam, the Chinese government sanctioned the cheapest form of power generation; coal.
When China was pressured by the other worlds powers, who have slowly been switching over to orbital solar power and bulky fusion reactors, it resisted. Despite it industrial might, and as the largest single economy in the world, it still lacked the ability to build solar power satellites fast enough to keep up with demand. Despite the population peak in 2039, China still has a ravenous demand for power. During the conference, it was Queen Katerina who suggested that the Dutch Commonwealth could work with China to furnish its own fusion reactors. The negotiations were tenuous, but when Her Majesty made it clear that the only other option was for the Dutch Commonwealth to either blast China’s coal-fired plants off the map or face flooding of the United Provinces when the ice caps melted, or practically giving China the ability to create fusion reactors, China saw it had little option. Attacking China would result in retaliation from China. Such an exchange, even if it were but conventional, would be disastrous.
China would cease construction on coal or methane powered turbines and shift its resources into building fusion reactors. However, this would cause a quick rise in the prices of hydrogen and helium isotopes, and drive the prices of fusion power even higher. Even start-up ventures on the moon, to extract Helium-3 from the regolith, despite their lack of profit, would not be able to cover the demand. A second point addressed was removing the artificially produced carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even if all greenhouse gas production were to stop, the planet would continue to heat, and the sea level was projected to rise at least three meters within a century. This would spell doom to coastal areas around the world. The city of New Orleans was already abandoned, and much of the budget for the Counties of Holland and Zeeland were poured into keeping back the North Sea.
Canada and the United States both agreed to start reforestation projects. As populations begin to shrink and agricultural production rises in efficiency, much of the old farmlands in the eastern United States were going feral. Federal programs for planting forests on farmlands no longer in use were started in 2060. Of the World Powers, only Sweden, with its vast tracks of untouched Siberian wilderness, still had large, unbroken forests. Despite being off-limits for exploitation, the Amazonian Royal Preserve began to suffer from climatic change as early as the 2050s, as savanna and open forest began to creep into the rain forest.
Even with the banning of fossil fuel powered power plants, oil and coal were still extracted for other industrial uses, such as plastics and production of fuel cells. Only the Dutch and British, both surrounded by water, used that same water to produce their own fuel cells and hydrogen. The Treaty of Kyoto was a plus for atmospheric health, but still did not address the issue of dwindling resources and inevitable conflict between World Powers as they compete for the remaining deposits. Nonetheless, the treaty was signed by all participants on September 1, and was returned to their respective governments were debates over ratification would continue for months.
First Earth Station
At the start of 2060, the Dutch Commonwealth entered into an agreement with the United States, German Empire and Japan, to cooperation on the construction of the first true space station. Unlike previous “space stations”, made from modules shipped up from Earth, Earth Station would be a true engineering marvel. Though initial designs called for a wheel some twenty kilometers in diameter, the scaled back version of five kilometers was still quite impressive. It was sold as the way station to the planets. The station called for the importation of aluminum and titanium from the Lunar surface, to have it launched towards the First Lagrange point, between Earth and Luna.
Demands for cheap building material drives the economic development of Luna. Unlike the opening of new markets in the past, the flow of immigrants to the moon was very specialized. However, the amount of material required by Earth Station soon outstrips the occupancy capacity of Lunar settlements such as Fort Recife and Gatestown. The make-do extensions to the original research stations, by 2061, already housed some seven thousand people. The influx of workers, technicians and engineers in itself created an addition demand for labor to build the habitation units and dig the tunnels to house the Earth Station crews.
The first mass driver, an electromagnetic railgun capable of launching objects at high enough velocity to exceed escape velocity of Luna, was constructed forty-three kilometers south of Fort Recife. Construction of the mass driver and its continued maintenance brought in dozens of immigrants. Gatestown constructed its own mass driver, with its own influx of immigrants. The two German settlements, and even the small Japanese research outpost, had their own mass drivers built, and their own influx of immigration. The outposts on the moon began to realize that what they required was a true city, not improvised extensions to old modules. The sudden growth spurt in the 2060s made the Earthbound nations realize they need to apply more control to the private ventures on the moon.
Earth Station was originally intended to house some fifty thousand, but technical difficulties in the life-support systems, and the low yield of the small aeroponic farms reduced the supportable population of a self-subsisting space city to just under ten thousand. To the populations of the participant countries, Earth Station was sold as a waystation to the planets. Even with Heavy Lifters, half of the journey (in respect to fuel) was just getting off of Earth. When Earth Station was completed, and its first permanent residents moved in, in 2074, the first serious proposal for a nuclear-powered spacecraft capable of finally sending man to Mars appeared in Germany. Aside from a waystation, Earth Station proved an ideal place for companies to begin developing zero gravity manufacturing. Several companies invested in the station, carving out their own workspaces in the zero gravity hub of Earth Station.
The Moon Council
With the construction of Earth Station well underway, and an influx of highly skilled immigrants to the Moon, the spacefaring nations on Earth decided it was time to take control of the chaos. For the first half-century of human inhabitation on Luna, there was little to no government oversight to organize society. The handful of privately funded research outposts and small settlements were expanded as needed with little in the way of planning that did not involve staying alive. When new housing was required, the Lunars would simply bore out a new tunnel, insert inflatable habitat modules, and voila! Instant modules. With the influx of workers, Luna could not longer produce all the food, water and oxygen on their own. More over, with the demand for workers high, there was little choice but to bring them in, and import the lacking supplies at high price.
Some of the settlements turned back to Earth and ask for aid. The spacefaring nations knew that alone the taming of the Lunar Frontier would tax them to their limits. In order to better develop the moon and regional Earth space, the Dutch, Americans, Germans, Swedes, Chinese, French and Italians formed the Moon Council. The Council operated as the governing board, with three delegates from each member, over the moon as a whole. The Moon Council would regulate what little trade that existed between settlements, set import/export prices, set quotas for immigration and to fund the further exploration of the moon.
Of all the issues, the Lunars resisted attempts at immigration control. Without enough resources to support themselves self-sufficiently, they refused to allow anybody who was not useful to move into the old settlements. To defeat this, Gabriel Giopauli, proposed the construction of the first, true city on the moon. The formation of the Council also worked to standardize the moon and integrate the scattered settlements. Many of the spare parts were designed with their creator nation in mind. American parts could not be interchanged with Chinese and Dutch could not be with the Swedes. On Italy and France could interchange parts, and this was only due to the fact that the two countries were already cooperating. The Dutch people were not thrilled to know that the Commonwealth could not tackle the project on its own. With a history of self reliance, the idea of a project that not even the Dutch could afford came as a shock.
Queen Katerina fought against popular opinion to defend membership in the Moon Council. In 2062, when the Moon Council was formed, the first of many droughts struck at India. Though the monsoon was late in 2062, it did eventually arrive and save India from famine. For the previous sixty years, little of benefit to the Dutch people was derived from the Commonwealth’s activity in space, leaving many wondering just why such money was invested in the program. The Dutch people were use to investing, even long-term, but with nothing appreciable coming from this investment, the people wondered if it was time to cut and run. The VOC operated two new mining outposts on the moon, to extract metals and launch them into space. With the great potential for future technology and markets, the VOC invested in the Moon Council, and would even open a new office in the new city, Avalon.
Avalon
With an influx of workers to the already taxed and crowded towns that built up and under the original outposts, the Moon Council decided that it was high time for Luna to have its first, true city. Of several sites considered for the city, Shackleton Crater at Luna’s south pole, not that far from Braunstadt, was chosen for the site of Luna’s first city; Avalon. With the Peak of Eternal Light, which is always bathed in sunlight, nearby, Avalon would have a ready supply of solar power. Mirrors were constructed upon the peak to reflect sunlight during the crater’s night down upon greenhouses built on the surface. The city itself would be constructed beneath the surface. The greenhouses, covering a square kilometer of the surface, housed vastly improved aeroponic gardens. The greenhouse structure itself was covered with a recently developed invention, the plasma window. This primitive version of a force field uses charged particles to deflect particle radiation and incoming dust and micrometeors. The city would be carved from rock, with small living quarters and cramp workstation, but a central plaza the size of a grand railroad station of one of Earth’s major cities.
Since the city’s construction was a project of the Moon Council, tensions between the Earthbound bureaucracy and the Lunars quickly rose. The second- and third-generation Lunars wanted tight control on immigration, particularly having the tight control in their hands. They only wanted useful people to be allowed to move into Avalon, such as workers and technicians. Decades living in the spartan conditions of the first settlements with limited resources have given the Lunars a very dim view on freeloaders. So dim was it, that the original settlers, though some in their nineties, have not retired from their fields. The Moon Council, on the other hand, wished to open Avalon to any who could afford to move there, even if they were rich old persons who would do nothing but breath oxygen, drink water and take up space.
A second, more serious from the Moon Council’s view, controversy arose from the project. On Earth, with environmental catastrophe and poverty on the rise, many of the poorer nations asked how the rich could justify settling the moon when so many problems still existed on Earth. Clearly, it never occurred to them that said problems were the driving force behind migrations throughout human history. Of all the Moon Council members, the United States took the most flak from its own populace. Why are they so willing to pay for this Lunar city while Earth is falling apart? The Socialist Party was demanding that the resources invested in Avalon instead go to providing welfare for the impoverished. The United States, with climatic shifts and aging infrastructure, have already invested much into massive public works projects, that employs literally millions of Americans, and the Progressives and Libertarians question why the Socialists’ poor should simply be handed checks without doing any work. In a way, the infighting in the United States resembled the immigration argument between Earth and Luna. Queen Katerina also received much flak from Abyssinia, India and even the United Provinces, over perhaps better usage of resources. Despite opposition, construction of Avalon began in 2065.
Nanotech Revolution
As early as 2007, the ability to manipulate matter on the molecular scale existed. At the time, these were little more than laboratory experiments in making nanoscopic motors. By 2070, the field of nanotechnology had reached its holy grail; the nanite. In short, nanites are the first artificial lifeforms created by man. They are cell sized robots capable of doing what any bacterium can do, including replicate itself. Unlike cells, nanites use silicone as its largest component. The nanites, once released into a system, can take individual molecules and atoms and rearrange them into exact replicas. However, nanites were not developed with this purpose in mind.
Nanotechnology was slated to revolutionize manufacturing and solve some of Earth’s climatic problems. Just release the nanites into the air, and they can start sequestering, or even dismantling the excess carbon dioxide that threatened to melt the ice caps. It was this very proposal, along with proposals to clean up oil spills and other biological disasters that sparked a panic all over the world. If just one of the nanites malfunctioned, or “mutated” it might spawn a species of nanites that would dismantle all hydrocarbons across the planet, including biology. The idea of microscopic robots eating all living organism caused nanotechnology to be banned in several countries outright.
Other reasons, including those of religious revivals in some parts of the world in the wake of climatic changes, forced more enlightened countries to ban nanotechnology. In the southern United States, new fundamentalists declared these artificial lifeforms an affront to God, and enough of the United State Congress, fearful of losing elections, moved to outlaw the use of Nanites in American territory. Any nanotechnician operating within the United States after 2071, was subject to arrest, fine and even imprisonment.
Americans got off easier than many around the world. In some of the lesser nations, anybody practicing in nanotechnology was executed, or just simply lynched by the mob. A witch hunt against the technology, which was declared “evil” began in the Central African states, with some engineers even suffering from the savage method of execution, burning at the stake. Nanotechnicians had only two places to flee for their lives; a welcoming country or space. Despite the potential, no nation dared attempt to weaponize the nanites. Without complete control over the little creatures, there was no guarantee that the nano-plague would not turn on its creators when the wind blew it back towards the aggressor.
Accepting nations on Earth comprised of China, Japan and Sweden. The Swedes and Chinese used them in medicine, while the Japanese used them in manufacturing. With so much of its 20th Century population dead and long gone, Japan suffered for decades from a labor shortage. Nanites were seen as the ultimate labor-saving device. They also transformed raw materials into finished products at a fraction of the price; the largest expense in being programing the nanites. By 2080, Japanese goods were flooding the world market, causing China to switch over its nanotechnology program into its industrial base.
The largest benefactor of nanotechnology was Luna. For decades, the only way to expand living space was to blast out a new cavern. Not only could nanites eat out a new cavern, with every detail of construction programed into them, it could also produce next generation alloys capable of supporting large tent-like structures over the craters. Since the time humans first stayed on the moon, there was a dream in the futurist community that craters could be domed over, and the interiors turned into self-sufficient ecologies. It was terraforming on a small, and reasonable scale.
Nanotechnology on the moon, and around Earth Station, was used more for construction. New life-support systems were designed, using the nanites to break up waste waters into clean water and organic material for the farms, along with breaking up carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. The carbon could be used in the farms or producing new composite alloys. The nanites were contained within the life-support systems, with a fail-safe. They would be fried by ultraviolet radiation. UV lights were built around the units to disable any nanites that escaped. This also prevented nanites from escaping the settlements and evolving out of control on the Lunar surface.
The Turbulent 80's
Earth reached a tipping point during the decade of the 2080s, both ecologically and politically speaking. It was by then that the sea level was already a meter higher than it had been in the previous century. Global warming caused much of the Greenland glacier to slowly melt away. This flooding of the North Atlantic by large amounts of freshwater caused a great fear that the Gulf Stream would break down. In the ultimate irony, global warming could potentially turn parts of Europe into extensions of Siberia.
The first disaster of the decade happen in 2081, when massive flooding hit the Bengal region of India. The flooding was caused by a combination of large glacial melt running off into the Ganges at the same time as the Monsoons hit the region. During the height of the flooding, more than 30% of Bengal was under water. Death toll from the flooding exceeded one million, and the destruction to the region’s infrastructure prevented relief aid from reaching the Bengalis before an addition million died due to poor conditions. Sadly, this was the last time the Monsoon was to hit India until 2084. For three years after the flooding, a severe drought hit India, causing famine conditions across Northern India. It was the first time in centuries that famine had hit an industrialized nation.
Along with India, Abyssinia was hit by successive waves of drought. The breadbasket of Africa quickly dried up, causing further near-famine conditions within the Kingdom of Abyssinia. Only a well organized emergency relief plan prevented mass starvation. However, many of Abyssinia’s neighbors were reliant upon her food their own importation of food stuffs. Famine hit eastern Africa, and with the shortages came internal strife. Civil wars further destroyed arable lands outside of Abyssinia, causing millions to die between 2081 and 2090. Drought also hit Brazil, but did little to affect its agricultural output. Instead, despite wide scale conservation for the past two centuries, the Amazon was drying up and starting to turn into open woodlands similar to the savanna of Kenya. Loss of glaciers in the Andes began to turn the Amazon into a more seasonal river, drying up to half its width at the height of the dry season.
Where droughts wracked some parts of the planet, others had the opposite problem; too much water. The sudden oncoming of storms in the North Sea during the 2080s hit the United Provinces severely. In 2082, the dikes failed in the County of Holland, flooding the relatively recently reclaimed lands, causing thousands of deaths. Though the dike was repaired and water pumped out, many Hollanders left the previous flooded land. Islands off the coast of Friesland simply vanished beneath the battering waves. In 2084, more dike failures caused the flooding of Middelburg. Again, after repairs, Zeelanders left the city in droves.
During the turbulent decades, more than half the population of the United Provinces left in a mass exodus. A majority of these climatic refugees resettled in Brazil or the Boer Republics. The loss of population, and the disproportionally high amount of old people remaining wrecked the economy of the United Provinces. Along with ecological disasters, the aging of the population caused a drop in productivity and caused the United Provinces’ Gross National Product to be reduced by 50% over the course of the decade. Queen Katerina was advised to relocate permanently to Recife. She refused, stating that she was not about to abandon the land her ancestors have held for centuries. This was a declaration Katerina made repeatedly over her reign.
Warming of the atmosphere and increase of water vapor caused more typhoons, more and of greater strength. Formosa, Hainan and Ceylon were hit by 1.5 times as many storms per year as they were during the previous century. In the Caribbean, Hurricane season grew a month in length, with Category Four hurricanes hitting the American Gulf Coast, destroying the ruins of an already abandoned New Orleans. The environmental disasters had the effect of causing the Fundamentalist movement in the southern American states to grow, with many believing that the End of the World is approaching.
With a general warming of the climate, tropical diseases began to spread across parts of the middle latitudes. Malaria and Dengue Fever began to spread through Mexico and into the United States. Obscure and lethal viruses from the Congo Basin spread southward into Angola and the Boer Republics. India began to experience the Bubonic Plague once again, only this time on epidemic scales. Hundreds of thousands died of the Plague in Bengal alone during the decade. India was hit again, when the Monsoon skipped 2087 and 2088. With glaciers in the Himalayas vanishing, the Ganges River actually ran dry in sections during the Summer of 2088.
Not only was the climate out of control, but the world’s resources were nearly depleted. The remaining oil supplies, mostly in Kamchatka and Swedish Siberia sparked a war between Sweden and China over sole access to the oil. Shale oil in the Canadian province of Alberta sparked off a Fourth Anglo-American war when the United State invaded Canada to seize control of the oil sands. France and Germany began to fight over the remaining iron deposits along their common border, threatening to drag the ruined United Provinces into their war. China eyeing both the industrial bases of Formosa and Hainan also threatened to drag the Dutch Commonwealth into war in the western Pacific.
Through the year of 2089, the wars continued to escalate, threatening the plunge the nations of Earth into yet another world war. By the autumn of the year, Sweden and China began to conduct strategic bombing raids on each others’ centers of population. Not all these attacks were aimed at destroying the industrial base. Several precision guided munitions were turned on the civilian population, destroying supermarkets and shopping malls, along with large apartment buildings used to house the workers of munition plants. In November, a fifty bomber raid out of Canada struck Chicago, not only destroying the railroad hub, but killing thousands of civilians. In retaliation, missiles launched from Lakoda razed portions of Winnipeg. By December, the wars were spiraling out of control. Chemical weapons were used for the first time since the Great War by France against a German thrust in Lorraine. Total war appeared only just over the horizon.
Doomsday
Nobody knows for certain who started, who was the first to press the button, but when the Swedish-Chinese war finally escalated into a nuclear exchange, the launched of ballistic missiles tripped the alarms in all the nuclear powers. When missiles were launched from China and Sweden, one of China’s missiles overshot its target and burst in Germany. This triggered a general attack by Germany against China, and France. Old hair trigger defenses caused the United States, France, Italy and the Dutch Commonwealth to release its own stockpile.
On February 6, 2090, over one thousand nuclear warheads detonated within Earth’s atmosphere. The electromagnetic pulse fried every piece of electronic equipment on the planet along with power transformers, breaking the global power network. Over a billion people died that day. The loss of so many people was almost as devastating to the human race as the lost of centuries of history in the great cities of Europe and Asia.
The United Provinces was virtually destroyed during the exchange. Two of the Provinces, the Counties of Holland and Zeeland were quite literally wiped off the map. Nuclear explosions flattened cities and broke flood walls. Dikes were vaporized and the rising North Sea came into to submerge the radioactive ruins of Dutch Civilization. Because of the high population density, the destruction of only a few cities would wipe out the population. Every major city in the United Provinces were destroyed, and most of its population was killed on Doomsday.
Across the world and through history, the End of Days was sought after for centuries. At first, Fundamentalist cults of Christianity and Islam were gleeful that Armageddon appeared to be just around the corner. When it came, they, or rather the survivors did not see a Second Coming, did not see the dawning of a Thousand Years of Paradise. Instead, they saw nothing but ruin and desolation. It would not be as predicted by religious figures over the years. The years following Doomsday would end with another billion dead of radiation poisoning and starvation. The worst effects were yet to come. As was covered, the Gulf Stream was breaking down in the 2080s leading to the fear of new glaciation. The nuclear exchange and the amount of fallout and ash in the atmosphere accelerated the cooling. Though Doomsday set the world aflame, its aftermath would lead to an Atomic Ice Age.
King William VIII
Born Willem Alexander van Oranje on April 27, 1967, served in the Senaat in his capacities as the Grand Prince of Norway, and on the United Provinces’ Olympic committee, securing the 2000 Olympics for Amsterdam, until December 21, 2012, when Beatrix, reigning for thirty-two years collapsed and was rushed to the hospital in Delft. She was announced dead on arrival from cardiac failure. The Dutch press picked up on the irony of their queen dying on the same day the ancient Mayan calender cycle ended.
William VIII graduated from the Naval Academy in Recife in 1989, the same year that the Balkan Wars died down. He rose to the rank of Commander, and was serving as Executive Officer on board the DCS King Maurice I, when news reached him that he was now King and would be crowned as soon as he returned to the United Provinces. William was first crowned Emperor of Brazil, when his ship returned to port in Recife, capital of Brazil. During the year of 2013, he traveled to each of the monarchies in personal union with the United Provinces and received their crowns as well.
On the issue of supporting business during the demographic bomb, King William VIII was on the opposite end of the debate from the Staaten-General. He did not wish to lend a single guilder to companies that dug their own holes. Regarding retirement, the King declared that is was the responsibility of the individual to prepare for their own jobless future. He further pointed out that the United Provinces, or any other member of the Dutch Commonwealth could not withstand the stress upon their budgets to support such a large class of nonproductive citizens. The people work their whole lives to make the world a better place for future generations, not so that they can twiddle their remaining years away.
In running his countries, William VIII had the cold heart of an accountant. He saw costs and benefits, and pushed the ordeal of the person from his mind. To survive the demographic bomb without crippling the United Provinces’ economy, he had to solve problems with his mind, not his heart. It was what the world needed, not what it wanted. Other countries faced similar crises. When Spain attempted to subsidize its retiring class, its entire economy collapsed as less than 40% of the population were able to be employed. The resulting chaos on the Iberian Peninsula was the first international crisis the new king had to face.
End of the Spanish State
The final collapse of the Spanish Republic during the 2010s had its roots following the Second World War. A new constitution was created by the victors, to replace the restored monarchy with a federal republic based on centuries old nationalities. Languages, such as that of the Basque, which were suppressed during the restored monarchy were brought back to the surface of day, often acting as one of, if not the, official language of the reconstituted states. Resurrection of medieval nationalities sparked division among the previous united Spanish people.
During the 1980s, the Basque were the first to leave the republic. The federal government in Madrid nearly sparked off a war in trying to prevent the Basque from departing. For their part, the Basque tried the diplomatic path first, presenting their case to the United Nations. They pleaded that this was part of their national self-determination, one of the points of the U.N. Charter, and the U.N. ruled in favor of the Basque. The Basque Republic was founded, and Madrid waited for the dominos to fall. They did not. In fact, the federal government ran smoother without the Basque obstructing legislation.
For nearly thirty years, Spain experienced a time of stability. This all changed in 2013, when the strongly Federalist president, Manuel Chavez, was assassinated while visiting Oporto. Reactionary elements within the Spanish military cracked down on the city. Across the state of Portugal, the people protested the unfair treatment and singling out of their own nationality because of the assassination, one that was later learned to be committed by a Catalonian. Active resistance to the occupation of Oporto resulted in further crackdowns inside Portugal.
In 2014, a Portuguese General, one Louis Ramalo, took control of the state assembly in Lisbon. Just how Portuguese Ramalo was is still debated, for his father was born in Seville, and he spent much of his youth in southern Spain. On August 14, 2014, Ramalo declared himself king of a restored Kingdom of Portugal. Portugal seceded from the Spanish Republic the following day. In a speech televised across Portugal, King Louis promised to restore Portugal’s former glory. The phrasing of his speech caught the attention of the Dutch Commonwealth, which member states of Brazil, Angola and Mozambique were centuries ago Portuguese colonies.
Portugal was not the only state to secede that year. Catalonia used the same national self-determination excuse as the Basque, and left the Republic on October 30, of that year. Madrid was quick to send in soldiers to Barcelona, bringing several of the Catalonian politicians into custody. Battle for the city and the surrounding countryside lasted well into 2015. At the start of the new year, the Leonese began to speak of their own self-determination. The New Years massacre in Tarragona of some three thousand Catalonian nationals caused the assembly in Leon to vote for dissolving their union with the Spanish Government on January 3.
With Leon in rebelling, soldiers in Catalonia were recalled closer to the capital to do battle with Leonese rebels. Leonese officers and soldiers within the army mutinied, taking control of a great store of military equipment. While Madrid was distracted closer to home, the Catalonian Army, numbering less than 100,000, made a move of its own. It invaded southwards into Valencia, committing its own atrocities in the meanwhile. These acts were nowhere near as violent as some carried out during the Balkan Wars (1948-89), but international communication and cable news networks brought them into houses around the world.
Fighting in Leon grew fierce enough that other nationalities began to fear they would be next. Even the Castillians, whose state was home to Madrid, were appalled by the heavy-handedness of Madrid. Tensions grew during March and April, until finally, on May 1, the national assembly voted to disband itself, after several attempts of the president to reign in the army had failed. The Spanish state abruptly ceased to exist.
This, obviously, did not stop the violence. War erupted between Castile and Leon, as Leonese soldiers crossed the border to take revenge on what they saw as lackeys to a now dead federal government. Castile retained control over the largest portion of the Spanish Air Force, and used it to bomb targets across Leon. Not just military targets of logistical ones, but general carpet bombing of cities. Leon’s air force attempted to match raid with raid, but was outfought by the Castillians.
Piracy erupted along the Atlantic Coast, as Portuguese sailors took once more to the sea. This time, they preyed upon the shipping lanes that entered northern Europe from the Mediterranean and African Coast. On July 19, two Portugese frigates made the monumental mistake of attacking a VOC convoy. VOC property was damaged, but no ships taken. The Company has a very strict no-tolerance policy when it comes to piracy, and the day after the attack the VOC Board voted to declare Lisbon a pirate den, opening the way for its private navy to attack the city.
The Staaten-General of the United Provinces was forced to intervene in Iberia just because of this. The VOC had destroyed many pirate dens, but most were in obscure places along the West African Coast, or some village the news networks never even notice. Lisbon was a well-known ans large European city. To raze it would bring much unwanted attention upon the Dutch Commonwealth. The Commonwealth agreed to move against Portugal, if only to keep the VOC from doing something they would all regret.
The Commonwealth expeditionary force arrived off the Portuguese coast, and landed north of Lisbon on September 11, 2015. There was little in the way of opposition, with most of the Portuguese Army attacking north into Galicia or defending the border with Leon. The following day, air strikes of Dutch carriers eliminated “King” Louis and his cabinet. The fall of Lisbon turned out to be little more than simply marching into the city. The elimination of its dictator through the country into disarray. At no point was an effective resistance organized, and early in 2016, the Dutch completed their occupation of Portugal. Shortly after, the Commonwealth placed a Protectorate over Galicia.
The Dutch Commonwealth was not the only non-Iberian state to intervene in the Iberianization of Spain. Shortly after the Dutch Protectorate, Italian Marines based in Majorca, landed near Barcelona. The Italian Federation placed its own protectorship over Catalonia. Not wanting to be left out of the picture, or lose a chance to extend its own influence, French soldiers crossed the border into Aragon. Fifty thousand were already staged on the border, to prevent a flood of Argonese refugees from stepping upon French soil. To give Iberians a place of refuge, they invaded Aragon and turned it into a protectorate, as well demilitarized it (or all non-French forces).
In southern Iberia, the Dutch moved in May of 2016, to occupy Gibraltar. To keep open the flow of oil from Armenia and Kurdistan, as well as to prevent piracy from plaguing a strategic trading nexus were the reasons cited for the occupation. For its part, Andalusia did not protest the occupation, or even oppose it. They had more problems with their neighbors to the north than the Dutch. Andalusia, despite its Moorish history, was not in anyway connected to its long forgotten Arab past. It was not the revival of Grenada, though its capital was in Malaga. Since Leon and Castile threw so much of their weight against each other, Andalusia managed to push its own frontiers as far north as the Guadaira River.
It was not until 2017, that the United Nations was able to motivate itself to act. With Security Council Resolution 2017-4, the U.N. voted to send in peace keepers to uphold the peace established by a resolution passed by the general assembly a few days before, calling for immediate cessation of violence. The bulk of the Peace Keepers were comprised of British, German, Swedish and Moroccan Army units, and ships of the Royal Navy were prepared to strike targets inside of both Castile and Leon if both countries did not stop the violence. They complied on March 2, 2017, bringing the brief but destructive war to an end.
The resolution also called for the Dutch Commonwealth to abandon its conquests, which King William VIII steadfast refused to do so. His decision was applauded back home, as was the final destruction of the United Provinces’ most ancient enemy, that of Spain. Despite the resolution, the Commonwealth, as well as France and Italy retained their protectorates and influence in the region.
Dwindling Resources
With more than two centuries of industrialization behind it, civilization soon came up against a barrier. The majority of resources required to maintain such a civilization that were easily obtained were nearly depleted. To gain more iron to feed the steel industry, mines must be dug deeper, and in more remote locations. Sweden had an advantage that none of the Commonwealth Members possessed; vast tracks of Siberia rich in mineral wealth. For the Dutch, mines in Brazil, New Holland and India were expanded, and new sources sought. These new veins were not as rich, and profits margins would shrink. More over, though resources gradually dropped in availability, demand continued to rise.
With over a billion inhabitants, China was the fasted growing consumer of steel, and most every other metal, in the world. The Indian Empire was in a close second, with its manpower potentials finally realized after a century of struggle. The United States, with its own resources dwindling and no sign of its industrial base weakening, also sought new sources of raw material. Despite its peace treaty with Britain, Americans looked northward to untapped sources in Canada.
Not all looked to their neighbors for new sources of material. William VIII looked up and outward. When showed the content of a near-Earth asteroid, he exclaimed that single rock had enough iron to supply the world’s steel industry for half a year. The reality that the nearly endless supply of metals in space would be the wave of the future. It would not solve the immediate fuel crisis, but it would be enough to allow society to continue. In 2025, an American mission to an Earth-crossing asteroid brought back samples of nickle, iron and even traces of gold.
The thought of hundreds of tonnes of gold being mined in space horrified Amsterdam’s financial community. Gold was valuable because it was rare. Flooding the market with new sources of gold would devalue the world’s currency. Many bankers were reluctant to authorize loans to any space-mining operation. Instead, they invested on underwater mining. Aside from oil and methane from the North Sea, several mining companies began to tap deposits of bauxite discovered off the coast of Brazil. With more exploration, veins of iron, chromium and bauxite were also discovered in less than fifty meters of water off the coast of Brazil.
City Beneath the Wave
With the opening of several mines off the coast of Cayenne, the first under water city was established in 2033. The city of Atlantis was little more than barracks, cafeteria and a supply store built from containers that were hauled out to the mines and sunk to the sea floor. Air locks connected the containers to the shaft mines. Space agencies and private companies seeking to establish themselves in space, invested in this land rush beneath the sea. Technology developed to allow humans to survive under the sea would also benefit those seeking to leave Earth all together.
The output of Atlantis was meager in comparison to open pit mines in Sweden and the United States. Despite its low but steady output and marginal profits, Atlantis proved it was possible to tap the sea floor. Within ten years of Atlantis’s opening, dozens of submarine colonies and thousands of colonists called the land beneath the Atlantic home. America’s frontier mentality allowed the Americans to take the lead in sea floor colonization. By 2050, over a hundred communities lived beneath the waves of the Gulf of Texas and the Carribean Sea, production ranging from mining to oil to aquiculture. A great deal of tourism spread through these cities, and as New Orleans was gradually reclaimed by the sea, the bulk of settlers came from that drowned city.
In the North Sea, the United Provinces did not look to settle the sea floor. Instead, they brought the sea floor to them. By 2030, the Ijsslemeer was nothing but a memory and Amsterdam was connected to the North Sea via a network of channels and artificial canals. In Friesland, the West Friesland Islands were connected to the mainland as the water was pumped out of newly reclaimed lands. In comparison with other European nations, the United Provinces paid a proportionally higher amount of their budget on infrastructure, mostly in the form of maintaining sea walls and levies against an increasingly angry sea.
Fuel of the Future
On September 17, 2033, the first commercial fusion reactor came on line in Mumbai, India. Where the United Provinces and Brazil already had an established power network, focused their attention on increasing efficiency and prevent power loss along the transmission lines. India’s power hunger increased nearly as fast as China, with projections in 2030 that a new coal-fired or fission reactor would have to be opened every two months in order to feed the demand.
A decade long research project from the University of Mumbai, funded by the Indian Government and energy companies, such as the VOC, set its goal of making fusion power economically viable. Since the dawn of the 21st Century, fusion reactors were online around the world. However, these experimental reactors seldom broke even in energy production, and when they did, they failed to generate enough power to be useful. In Mumbai, the researchers set their goal at a 50 MW generator.
Professor Hermann Vandjirasik, born some fifty years earlier, lead the project. He was not so much a brilliant engineer as an excellent salesman. He was the one who procured the funding for the fusion reactor, while those beneath him dealt with design and construction. On December 7, 2032, the reactor was turned on for the first time, and reached a 43 MW output. This deficiency delayed its official activation by several months.
Its eventual activation added only a minor amount of power to India’s total consumption. However, its design soon spread around the world and fifteen fusion reactors were operational by 2040. Another hundred were online before the middle of the century. Replacing thousands of coal-fired and oil plants would take decades, and that was not counting the continued increase in demand. Plans in India, Abyssinia, the Boer Republics and Brazil called for the fossil fuel powered plants to be replaced by fusion and even solar satellites, when their lifespans ended. Until then, which some coal-fire plants were designed to last a century, the would continue to add to the Carbon Dioxide content of the atmosphere.
Lunar Expansion
By 2030, some two thousand persons lived in an expanded Fort Recife. With fusion power around the corner, serious investment was put into extracting Helium-3 from the lunar regolith. Fusion fuels on Earth were limited, and once all of Earth’s power was generated by fusion, a large supply of hydrogen and helium isotopes would be required. Some dreamers saw the Outer Planets as an endless supply of fuel. Among these, even the most optimistic dreamers knew such plans would be a century away at the very least.
The initial limitations to colonizing the moon came from the cost of reaching orbit. Once in orbit, reaching Luna was relatively simple. In 2021, Lockheed-Convair produced a prototype Heavy Lifter. It was the first truly reusable spacecraft, not requiring any of its hull to be replaced for at least one hundred launches. It was also the largest rocket ever built. The Heavy Lifter had both the size and general shape of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The engines were so powerful, that upon launch, the Heavy Lifter would melt its own launch pad. The space craft is redesigned to have dozens of smaller engines instead of five larger ones. This allows for it to take-off and land at more ports, and allows for more backup in case an engine failed.
The Heavy Lifter’s true benefit came from its fuel efficiency. A Heavy Lifter was proven capable, in 2024, of taking off Earth, flying to Luna, landing, loading cargo, taking off for Earth and landing again without the need to refuel. Its only drawback was that it carried so much fuel that it limited its cargo capacity. Only fifty tonnes of cargo could be carried into and out of space one the first Heavy Lifters. The biggest gain off the Heavy Lifter was that it reduced launches by a factor of five.
For the first time, it became economically viable to launch tourists into space. Once that market opened, and enough entrepreneurs invested sufficient capital, space hotels began to spring up in low Earth orbit. The moon was still a ways off for any tourist who wished not to take a one way flight to the research colonies upon its surface. Space-based industry was not as successful as the scientific and entertainment ventures. It boiled down to cost. Why would a Netherlander, or any person, but a high quality product made in space, when they could purchase an adequate product made on Earth, for a fraction of the price.
Industry on the Moon was more local consumption than exportation to Earth. The research colonies, funded either by universities or private ventures, extract sufficient hydrates from the lunar regolith and polar regions to supply their own needs. Immigration to the moon was a rarity during the 21st Century. The only way anybody managed to voyage to Luna, was to join the communities growing there. Fort Recife was established in the late 20th Century, in search of new sources of metals and energies. By 2020, some five hundred people lived in the vastly expanded colony. The arrival of plasma torches on the moon allowed the colony to go underground. Manmade tunnels and caverns spanned two square kilometers around the surface installations.
In 2005, the first American colony on the moon was established by the Gates Foundation. The Foundation was created by Bill Gates, founded of Microsoft, and dedicated to progress in technology and expansion of humanity into new frontiers. These frontiers were not always physical ones, such as the sea floor and space; it also included new fields of sciences and new technologies, such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Gatestown started out as seven habitat modules landed in the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the Apollo XI landing site. The site was not chosen solely for patriotic sentiment; it was believed that tourism would eventually leave low Earth orbit and reach out to the moon. Any American who visited Luna would no doubt wish to visit that first landing.
The first child born on the moon was born in Gatestown in 2016 to a couple of Italians astronauts. The birth of children on a new world made colonization real. Some concern existed on whether or not the child would be able to return to Earth because it was born on Luna. It was only the worst case scenario, though evolving on Earth, the human species are well adapted to survive in its climate. The first natural born Lunars did not grow tall in low gravity, but did have under-developed skeletons. With extensive conditioning, they were capable of returning to the homeworld, though none chose this course of action.
A third nation established a research colony upon the moon by 2020. The German Empire founded Braunstadt in early 2010. It was smaller, and far more spartan than either American or Commonwealth city. However, it was built at the south pole, where solar cells could be left in perpetual sunlight, and higher concentrations of water was defused from the regolith. Braunstadt was not as much a research station like Fort Recife or Gatestown. When Braunstadt was inaugurated, it immediately began exporting high quality aluminum and titanium back to the Fatherland.
Fierce Competition
By 2030, newly industrializing countries were looking to expand their borders, the same way European nations did two centuries before. The largest menace to stability came from the every-hungry industry of China. In 2029, the Chinese invaded Korea after a revolution the previous year toppled its former Beijing-friendly communist regime. Much protest came from around the world, and the United Nations voted to condemn the act of aggression. However, since the most powerful countries in the world never signed the Outer Space Treaty, and overtly have laid claims on the moon the UN lacked the authority and prestige it once possessed.
In response, the People’s Republic of China, along with the reinstated People’s Republic of Korea, Indochina, Burma and Kamchatka, withdrew from the United Nations. China began treating its minor allies as colonies. The most aggressive act was the annexation of Sakhalin from Kamchatka. China moved operations into the Sea of Ohkost, in search of oil and methane deposits beneath the sea floor. Such actions forced Japan to begin arming its oil platforms and beef up patrols in the seas to its north.
The Dutch Commonwealth viewed China’s expansion with suspicion and caution. Indonesia and Java were still producing oil, and gas deposits between Hainan and Formosa might also tempt the Chinese to look south. It would not be the first time; the Japanese did the exact same thing nearly a century earlier. Sweden took far more drastic actions, by sealing its long frontier with China. Not all the resources in Siberia were depleted, and hundreds of thousands of Swedish soldiers moved into the area to see that those resources go to Stockholm, not Beijing.
Sweden also fought a series of short wars against its southern, Turkish neighbors, seizing tracks of lands and immediately exploiting them. This drew further international condemnation, which caused Sweden to leave the United Nations. With two of the largest countries no longer members, many began to wonder if the UN was about to go the way of the League of Nations. The rest of the World Powers seldom heeded UN resolutions if they impeded their own progress.
Riga Conference
With the world’s oil supply dwindling, and hydrogen economy still in its infancy, the World Powers met in Riga on April 15, 2038, to divide the rest of the world’s oil amongst themselves. None of the countries that would be divided were invited. China would receive rights to drill in Kamchatka. Sweden the same in Central Asia. The United States was given a free hand in the Carribean, which is took full advantage of when it invaded Mexico in 2040. The French were granted rights to West Africa, the Germans granted rights to whatever supplies remain in the Balkans. Canada had sufficient reserves to supply the whole of the small British Commonwealth. The Dutch required no divisions, for Indonesia and Angola gave sufficient supplies to the Commonwealth and the North Sea directly to the United Provinces.
All nations agreed to share the Middle East, declaring the whole area a neutral zone. The Dutch Commonwealth abided by this, withdrawing supporting units from the United Arab Emirates to India. The UAE, United Arab Republic, Kurdistan and Armenia established the Petroleum Export Commission to regulate the remaining flow of petroleum to the World Powers. Antarctica was declared off limits. The United Provinces was at the forefront of this declaration, not so much because of environmental concerns as to the concerns of causing the ice cap to break, sea levels to rise, and flooding of the United Provinces. By 2038, the United Provinces had invested significantly in a sea wall defensive network.
The Riga Conference was the final nail in the coffin of the United Nations. When the UN Council voted in favor of a resolution denouncing the Conference, all parties to it withdrew membership. Without the funding and support of the World Powers, the UN became little more than a meeting room, now in Geneva, where minor countries could complain about how the big boys ignore them at best. The final session of the United Nations was held on August 30. 2039. Almost immediately upon its disbanding and disappearance of peace keepers, a dozen small wars broke out in Africa and South America. In the latter case, Brazil was able to restrain its neighbors. However, Central Africa exploded in violence, and the West African nations of Biafra, Nigeria and Benin were invaded by France.
These wars were local, and based more on ancient ethnic hatreds than hard economic reasoning. Massacres became so routine during the 2040s that the world’s news networks no longer bothered reporting on them. Africa plunged into a new dark age, with refugees trying to flee north across the Sahara, east to Abyssinia, and south to the stable southern Africa. Wars among the World Powers also became a reality, after nearly a century of peace between them. One point of the Riga Conference that was never, truly resolved was the rationing of the North Sea’s hydrocarbon supplies.
The United Provinces claimed access to the whole area, as did the British. The Conference did grant it to the United Provinces, but did not grant it exclusive rights. The British and Dutch governments attempted to demarcate the sea, dividing the sea floor between the two powers. However, with Norway part of the United Provinces, the British believed the Dutch were relieving and unfair slice of the oil pie. In March of 2039, the two nations met at Calais, in an attempt to permanently divide the North Sea. The British already had to colonies on the sea floor, some ten kilometers and seventeen kilometers off its shores respectively. Seatown, the latter of the two, sat near the straight of Dover, and close enough to the continent that it would fall under Dutch influence.
To the British, surrendering one of their expensive, underwater colonies was not an option. To the Dutch, allowing a maritime rival to have its fingers in the United Provinces’ pie, was equally unacceptable. Tensions between the two nations peaked in April as the British began to drill in an area clearly marked as Dutch. Their platform tapped the Dutch oil field via slanted drilling. This way, the British stayed on their side of the proposed line, while still tapping the fuel its own island economy required. An emergency summit held in Bremen failed to resolve the issue, as King William VIII told Britain’s own William IV, that only by ceasing operations could the crisis be resolved. Both Williams left Bremen without resolving the issue. Both also knew that war was imminent.
The Third Anglo-Dutch War
In response to the diagonal drilling, the VOC, on September 11, 2039, sent the VOC Golden Hind, a frigate, along with several hovercraft, to seize the oil rig and shut it down. Acting without consent or even informing the Staaten-General, the VOC acted to save its own oil wells. There was little resistance on the platform, and it fell without casualties. In London, Britain’s parliament was in an outrage. The fact that sovereign British territory was under foreign occupation was enough to galvanize the often disagreeable assembly to action. Royal Marines struck back at the VOC, only to be repelled.
One week after this failed attack, the VOC had sealed the well and destroyed the platform, before retreating back to its own platform. This act of piracy on the high seas caused the United Kingdom to recall its ambassadors to the Dutch Commonwealth. By Christmas, the Dutch had closed their embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. By the start of 2040, oil companies were fighting each other on the North Sea, using their own security or hiring mercenaries to defend their assets and attack their competition. These attacks did not always cross borders. To rival British petroleum giants, BP and the North Sea Corporation, traded their own shots over an oil field off the coast of Scotland. On the Dutch side, the VOC regulated the minor Dutch drillers, who had little choice but to sell what they extract to VOC Oil.
On January 12, 2040, London sent an ultimatum to the Hague; cease piracy in the North Sea in forty-eight hours, or we will do it for you. It was a similar warning the Dutch sent to the former Emperor of Ethiopia in the 19th Century, when pirates threatened trade through the Suez Canal. Unlike that ancient African kingdom, the Dutch were in a position to stand up to British threats. There were already calls in the Staaten-General to police the North Sea, but the fact that the British, an age old rival, was making demands, had an opposite effect on the Dutch people.
Two days passed without incident. Then the third. On the fourth day a BP tanker crossed the demarcation line and was fired upon by a Dutch oil platform. The tanker suffered only slight damage and no loss of cargo. For London, this was the final straw. On January 18, the United Kingdom and its own miniature commonwealth declared war upon the United Provinces. The Royal Air Force wasted no time in attacking Dutch platforms near its sector of the North Sea. Attacking Dutch platforms in Dutch water sparked a similar declaration from the Dutch Commonwealth. After more than three centuries, a Third Anglo-Dutch War had begun.
During the first two weeks of the war, the Royal Navy massed at its anchorage in Scapa Flow. The Royal Air Force had already sank three empty Dutch tankers and disabled four of their drilling platforms. Skirmishes between patrol boats happened on a daily basis, with casualties adding. The Commonwealth High Command knew that if the Royal Navy sortied into the North Sea, the losses would be tremendous. On February 1, King William VIII approved a plan of attack on the Royal Navy’s primary base of operation. The Commonwealth Navy hoped to completely clear the Royal Navy from the North Sea in a single afternoon.
The Commonwealth fleet, consisting of two aircraft carriers, two battleships, four cruisers and a dozen destroyers, along with three submarines scouting ahead, set sail from Rotterdam on January 30. The 1st Fleet, stationed in the United Provinces, went to full alert once the ultimatum was delivered. The High Command knew that the Commonwealth would not abide by demands of foreign powers, and that war would result. Nearly a century of peace between the European powers had not dulled their responses, however, the Commonwealth Navy spent the past decades battling pirates around the world. Not since World War II, had the Dutch Commonwealth Navy been involved in a major fleet-vs-fleet engagement.
The initial assault came in the form of over one hundred multi-purpose missiles launched from the DCS Prince of Oranje and King William III. The missiles were smaller than anti-ship missiles, but still caused considerable damage to the British anchorage. Two cruisers were destroyed outright, along with three destroyers and demolished the tank farm. Fires from burning petrochemicals obscured Scapa Flow from a follow up attack by aircraft off the DCS Karl Doorman. The air raid succeeded in destroying an addition cruiser and gutting an older British carrier in dry dock.
Despite damage caused to the British fleet and facilities, the raid on Scapa Flow was not the outstanding success that Dutch media announced. Commonwealth casualties were limited to a handful of aircraft shot down. British casualties, on the other hand, numbered over two thousand dead and as many wounded. The Royal Navy was not knocked out of the North Sea and the High Command had desired. Their ability to attack Dutch platforms was limited, but not halted. Two days later, the Royal Navy sortied and destroyed three oil rigs off the coast of Norway.
The next time the two fleets met was on October 17, 2040, off the Yorkshire Coast. The Commonwealth fleet sortied in hopes of neutralizing British assets in the area and clearing the sector for furthering War Plan Rose. Admiral Count William van Holland hoped to force the Royal Navy into a single decisive battle, similar to those sought by the Royal Navy against the Germans during the Great War. Unlike that early 20th Century war, the Battle of Spurnhead was fought mostly over-the-horizon, with little visual contact.
At 0843, the Commonwealth Navy detected the lead elements of the Royal Navy steaming south. The first volley of anti-ship missiles were fired from a pair of leading Dutch destroyers. Most of the twenty missiles were shot down, with only one scoring a hit on a British destroyer. The Ajax had a ten meter hole punched in its hull, but remained afloat, albeit out of the battle. The British responded with its own missile salvo, sinking one of the Commonwealth destroyers.
The main fleets did not engage each other until 1042, when a squadron of JC-40s commenced a low-level attack against the Royal Navy. The JC-40, a stealth aircraft, was not detected until hands on the HMS Royal Oak’s flight deck spotted them visually. By then, the fighters were within anti-ship missile range. Each of the eight fighters carried a pair of short-range anti-ship missiles. Though most were shot down, two did score hits on the Royal Oak, including one that set off secondary explosions beneath the carrier’s flight deck, and blew off the forward twelve meters of the hull. The Royal Oak lost its ability to launch its own aircraft, which was van Holland’s intent.
At 1200, the Commonwealth launched a two hundred missile barrage at the Royal Navy. Ninety percent of the anti-ship missiles were downed by the British, with the remainder damaging most of the ships. Three hit the Royal Oak, gutting the ship and causing it to capsize. A British cruiser was blown apart when a warhead detonated within its own arsenal. After this barrage, van Holland saw victory just over the horizon.
At 1220, the Royal Navy launched its own missile barrage. Commonwealth ships shot down a higher percentage of British missiles, but not before six of them zeroed in on the DCS Prince of Java. The guided-missile battleship snapped in half, sinking with only fifteen survivors. Other Dutch ships suffered damage, including all the remaining battleships, and the catapult of the Maarten Tromp. At this point, van Holland could have pressed the attack and won. He would have lost more than the lone battleship, but it would have ended the war after only a year of conflict.
Instead, van Holland decided to cut his loses. From satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance, the Admiral knew the British were as badly hurt as he. Though their carrier was sunk, van Holland was in range of the Royal Air Force’s own bombers. The Commonwealth had with it two carriers and enough air power to secure air superiority in the immediate vicinity of the fleet, however the Royal Air Force could put up over two hundred aircraft. At 1240, van Holland ordered the fleet to withdraw deeper into the North Sea and areas were the Commonwealth Air Force could cover it.
More than a year passed before the main fleets of the British and Dutch Commonwealths met again in battle. Following the indecisive battle off Spurnhead, the air forces of both sides exchanged fire, raiding each others’ space and targeting airfields and other strategic military targets. With advance and accurate “smart” weapons, neither side suffered many civilian deaths. Secondary raids against armament factories and shipyards resulted in little stoppage for the Commonwealth war effort. With so much of its industrial power in Brazil and now India, the British could only hope to launch carrier-borne raids against such targets, with too high a cost to their own ranks.
On July 27, 2041, Admiral van Holland against sought to force the Royal Navy into a clearly decisive victory. More over, the Duke of Brabant had assembled an army of three divisions to make the initial landings of War Plan Rose. To invade Britain, the North Sea must become a Dutch lake. Following previous attacks, the Royal Navy in Britain’s home waters was somewhat reduced. One carrier and four cruisers were all that stood in the way of van Holland’s fleet of two carriers, two battleships and now seven cruisers. British Admiral Lesley Birken had hopes of striking the Dutch before they were ready. His hopes were quickly dashed.
Flying at wave-top levels, over one hundred anti-ship missiles, launched by the Commonwealth fleet, intercepted the Royal Navy some four kilometers off Flamborough Head at 0740. The missiles flew under radar, that coupled with the fact they were made from a slightly radar-absorbent material, made their early detection impossible. When the Royal Navy finally detected the missiles, they were less than a minute from impact. Anti-missiles and point-defense weaponry chewed through most of the missiles, as was custom in modern naval engagements, but as before, some breached the defenses. Four missiles struck the carrier, HMS Resolution, causing the ship to break into three pieces and quickly sink in the shallow waters.
All four cruisers were damaged by the initial attack, but none sunk. By the time their fires were under control, and weapons back on line, the Commonwealth Fleet was already in visual range. A rarity in the 21st Century, the two fleets engaged in close-range combat, using missiles and guns. The Commonwealth, with their two hundred millimeter chain guns had a decisive advantage over the Royal Navy’s cruisers. Three of the cruisers were chewed to pieces by a stream of 200mm shells hitting them two each second. The fourth cruiser was sunk by missiles while trying to escape, along with an addition four destroyers. For the first time in its history, the United Kingdom’s home fleet was destroyed, paving the way for invasion.
Raids
On August 2, following the victory at Flamborough Head, the 2nd Commonwealth Fleet, out of Brazil, launched an attack against the British Naval Base at Plymouth. Aircraft off the Michael de Ruyter and Prince Mandrick succeeded in destroying docks, and most of the shipyard, including a cruiser and two frigates nearing completion. Addition damage was done to Britain’s merchant fleet at dock, including two container ships left as burning hulks.
On August 8, the Royal Air Force retaliated with a large-scale attack on Amsterdam. Two hundred fighters flew over the city, causing havoc for the better part of an hour. The Commonwealth Air Force intercepted a number of the British fighters, and further numbers were downed by air defenses, but not before causing significant damage to the network of shipping canals that connect now land-locked Amsterdam and its facilities to the open sea. The shipyards in Amsterdam were completely destroyed. A few dikes were breached during the attack, flooding portions of the city. Most distressing of all, the Royal Air Force destroyed the four hundred year old VOC headquarters, killing a number of the Company’s executives.
Smaller raids continued for the remainder of August. The surviving executives of the VOC wanted to launch their own attack against government and financial targets in London, but were prevented by the Commonwealth High Command. The government made it clear that if a corporation attempted to take off from Dutch territory and attack civilian targets, not a single VOC fighter would be allowed to land. The High Command pushed ahead the time table for War Plan Rose, if for no other reason than to neutralize British airfields.
War Plan Rose
On August 15, 2041, an armada of hundreds of ships were spotted through the morning fog off the Yorkshire Coast. With the Royal Navy swept from the North Sea, the century-and-a-half war plan was finally activated. The initial landings of three Commonwealth Army divisions, under the command of the Duke of Brabant, Simon Meinkeil and Abdul Rajisiva, were virtually unopposed. A small observation post near the city of Bridlington surrendered at 0812, some forty-two minutes after the first Dutch soldier stepped foot upon British soil.
Unlike the raid on Medway, almost four centuries before, this invasion force had no intent on settling for the destruction of a shipyard. Its purpose was conquest. The first contact between Dutch and British land forces came on August 17, when a British armored battalion encountered the Armor of Rajisiva southeast of York. The skirmish was brief, ending with twice as many British tanks lost than Dutch. Commonwealth helicopters accounted for a majority of the armored kills.
Royal Air Force airfields in Yorkshire were pounded from the outset of the invasion until August 22, when the last field was in Dutch possession. The Royal Air Force ground crews put up a valiant fight, but where ill equipped to deal with full scale invasion. The city of York was declared open by its inhabitants, and fell to the Commonwealth on August 22. With the capture of proper port facilities in Yorkshire, the Commonwealth had two hundred thousand men ashore by the end of the month.
Dutch armor lead the spearhead across the island of Britannia. As was called for in the original War Plan Rose, the island was cut in half, England separated from Scotland. Dutch tanks rolled into Liverpool on October 3. The British were slothful in countering the invasion, for many in London believed the landings in Yorkshire were a sham, an attempt to draw British land forces north from a real invasion directed at London itself. This delay of full redeployment allowed for the United Kingdom to be cut in half. The Commonwealth did launch raids against targets around the Thames River, to foster this belief from Britain’s Generals.
During the winter months, little advance was made by the Dutch. This was partially do to the uncharacteristically abysmal weather of the winter of 2041-42. The previous decades saw much of the climate warming, with limited snowfall. The Commonwealth’s invasion force did not anticipate the blizzard that struck the island in November, and brought their drive southwestward on London to a halt. If not for this freak storm, the Commonwealth might have ended the war by Christmas. Instead, it drug on during the winter, with the Dutch making slow gains and the British digging in.
An attempt to cut off Commonwealth supplies was made in December, by a joint British-Canadian fleet sailing from Halifax. This fleet met up with the Commonwealth 2nd Fleet throughout the month of December, battling each other in the choppy North Atlantic. The advance of this fleet prompted Commonwealth Marines to land and secure the wrecked base at Scapa Flow, denying the British any access to the North Sea. The British-Canadian fleet lost only a destroyer in the month of combat, but expended sufficient ammunition to force it to return to Halifax. The Commonwealth suffered damage to the de Ruyter and an addition destroyer. Neither side attacked with the same ferocity of the engagements in the North Sea.
By the start of February 2042, the weather had improved to the point where Dutch armor could continue its advance on London. By this date in the war, the British had organized an impressive ring of defenses around the capital. Blocking the advance of Rajisiva, was Field Marshall Bernard Vernon and the British Armored Corps. Vernon outnumbered Rajisiva in tanks and armored-personnel carriers, however by February, the Commonwealth Air Force achieved air superiority over central Britain.
The two forces met each other outside of Oxford on February 7, 2042. The British foresaw an easy victory, planning to ambush the Dutch tanks north of the city. However, the Commonwealth learned of this ambush from an observation satellite in low orbit. It was launched at the start of the year, and the British did not detect it until three days after the armored engagement, when they promptly shot it down. In mid-morning of February 7, some one hundred sixteen Commonwealth aircraft took off and converged on the British armor, carefully concealed just inside the suburbs of Oxford. The proceeding fight was a slaughter, with two hundred tanks destroyed from above, including the command center and Vernon. Leaderless, the British Armor Corps were in a state of confusion when Rajisiva attacked at noon.
The armored stage of the battle saw British tanks forced back into the suburbs of Oxford. Over the next two days, most of the British tanks were either destroyed, crippled or spent of ammunition and abandoned. The armored assault on Oxford was one of the largest catastrophes in British history, and only the beginning of the Battle of Oxford. One February 12, Commonwealth Armored Dragoons entered the city. Dismounting from their APCs, these dragoons fought the British defenders house-to-house and at a great loss to their own. Four thousand Commonwealth soldiers were killed taking the city.
As the suburbs fell into Dutch hands, the British fell back into the city proper, forcing the Dutch to conquer the city one block at a time. Despite widespread use of precision ordinance, Oxford suffered thousands of civilian casualties. The British media decried the attack on Oxford, and the world through its various news networks, received their first look at urban combat in the mid 21st Century. After decades of being feed footage of precision strikes, the public was appalled to see war up close and personal. Despite the outcries, both the Hague and London sent more soldiers into Oxford.
The British were forced to admit defeat by the start of March as the last of their forces were driven out south of the city and sent packing to Reading. With the fall of Oxford, the British government knew that it was only a matter of time, and a great deal of lives, before the Commonwealth banner flew over Buckingham Palace. The Dutch were not interested in annexing the island or reducing it to a colony. Nor did William VIII wished for the British people to suffer hardships. Two weeks after the fall of Oxford, Britain’s King William IV sent envoys to the Hague to seek terms to cession of hostilities.
The Third Anglo-Dutch War was not limited to the North Sea. In shipping lanes across the North Atlantic, both sides used commerce raiders to break the other’s economy. A few minor fleet engagements happened over the vast stretches of the ocean. British ships operating out of Canada and Bermuda even launched raids against northern Brazil, the largest raid hitting Cayenne and damaging the war industry there. An attempt to shut down the Suez Canal by the British met with dismal failure and brought condemnation by the Egyptian government. The British dared not attempt the same with the Panama Canal, which though the Dutch had a large stake of it, was clearly in American territory.
Aside from Britain, land battles also took place on the Australian-New Holland frontier. The Outback offered wide tracts of territory, some of it ideal for armored engagements. An engagement between armored dragoons of both nations occurred at Schmidten Springs, twenty kilometers inside the border of New Holland. The British and Australians won this engagement and occupied the small town. The New Hollanders fought the Third Anglo-Dutch War almost entirely on the defensive, trading desert for time.
A more dangerous theater of war took place hundreds of kilometers above Earth’s surface. Since there was no British installations or colonies on the moon, Luna was in no danger of turning into a battlefield. Low Earth Orbit was unique in the war, for it suffered no loss of life. Instead, the war was fought by satellites and anti-satellite missiles. The Commonwealth deployed small boosters in orbit, that would attach themselves to British satellites and deorbit them. The British would fire missiles from aircraft in the stratosphere and completely obliterate Commonwealth spy satellites. The complete destruction of orbital devices was denounced by other spacefaring nations. When a satellite was reduced to hundreds of pieces of debris, each one of those pieces was a threat to other orbital installations. Large, rotating space stations (one operated by Sweden and another by the United States) were high enough above Earth to avoid the shooting gallery of micro-meteors, but other stations were not so safe. A German space station was abandoned when it became clear it would pass through a debris field, which punctured the station. The Germans safely deorbited their space station, which splashed down in the Indian Ocean.
Treaty of Leicester
During April of 2042, British and Commonwealth delegates met in Leicester to spell out the terms of Britain’s surrender. The Dutch were relatively lenient in terms, wanting little from the British. They did not demand reparations from the British, nor cession of land. The Commonwealth had only three demands from the British; 1) The United Provinces will receive exclusive rights to the resources of the North Sea; 2) The Royal Navy will be limited in size of to the Commonwealth’s 1st fleet by a ration of 3:2 in favor of the Dutch; 3) England itself would be occupied for a period of ten years. The Commonwealth would not send occupation forces to Scotland, Wales or even Cornwall.
The Treaty did not assign guilt for the war. Nor did the VOC have their own wish to bill London for damages to company property. The three terms were simple, and the Commonwealth made it clear that if the British did not sign, the war would continue and His Majesty would not be so generous with his next set of terms. Britain’s Parliament debated the issue for two weeks, before reluctantly agreeing to terms. The Commonwealth Assembly ratified the treaty after only an hour. On April 30, 2042, the Treaty of Leicester was signed, bringing the Third Anglo-Dutch War to an end. Occupation duty in England was light, and the British offered no resistance. Nor did they prove to be particularly helpful to the occupiers. Instead, they endured and patiently waited for the Dutch to return home.
International Breakdown
Following the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and the dividing up of the world’s resources between the major powers, international organizations such as the United Nations began to lose influence. Their ability to act as a mediator and the endless, unenforceable resolutions passed during the 2030s caused much dissolution with the organization. Attempts by representatives from Biafra, Grand Colombia and Mexico to introduce the Outer Space Treaty, one that would prohibit any nation from claiming a piece of extraterrestrial real estate as their own. The final session of the U.N. was held in 2039, coincidentally, one of the sponsors of the Outer Space Treaty was in a fight for its life against oil-hungry France.
An attempt to restore the United Nations in 2042 failed, when not a single World Power and most of the Middle Powers failed to show up in Geneva. This Second United Nations was short lived. Not a single attending state had the ability to make resolutions binding in the face of overwhelming opposition from the World Powers. The fact that France was engaged in West Africa made many of the lesser states fear that a new age of colonialism was upon them. The first age was driven by lusts for spices and gold; this new one was driven by an insatiable thirst for petroleum.
One of the last acts of the United Nations before its disbandment was to compile a world census for the middle of the 21st Century. Proposed by Ambassador Xavier Salvador of Grand Colombia, following the disastrous Siege of Bogota, its goal was to tally the world’s population, employment rate, literacy rate and other vital statistics. At the time of the proposal in 2043, the World Powers had already withdrawn from the United Nations. Despite this obstacle, the motion was passed and in the waning days of the U.N., the project went through. Due to lack of funding from the poor members of the U.N. the project took several years to complete, meeting the 2050 deadline by a mere seventeen days. What it discovered was that 6.3 billion humans were alive, a number lower than ten years ago. For the first time in centuries, the world’s population was declining. The cause was two fold; 1) In advance nations, lower birth rate and the death of the Baby Boom generation greatly reduced the populations, with the United States declining by 12% between 2000 and 2050. 2) In less advance nations, the cause was mostly famine, brought on by constant warfare and a shifting climate.
With the fall of the United Nations came an end to organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. For post-colonial states that owed great deals of capital to the World Bank, this was a mixed blessing. Though the U.N. was gone, the World Powers that helped bankroll it were looking to collect on their investment. When Egypt attempted to default on a lone that was partially funded by the Bank of Amsterdam, the Dutch Commonwealth seized control of the Suez Canal. With the breakdown and collapse of international organizations, much of the world began to slide into violence that permeated the latter half of the Twenty-first Century.
Queen Katerina
Katerina, born Catharina Beatrix Carmen Victoria van Oranje on December 7, 2007, was the first of three daughters born to King William VIII. As with all of the Princes of Oranje, she attended the most illustrious university in the United Provinces, earning a degree in law. While at university, she met a student from Germany, one Viktor Manfred, who was neither royal or even the least bit noble born. Nonetheless, being a young woman, Catharina fell in love with Viktor and they intended to marry. However, the Staaten-General refused flat out to grant him any title should he marry the Princess, and further stated that should she marry a commoner that the Staaten-General would not allow her to sit upon the throne of the United Provinces. Along with the United Provinces, India, Abyssinia and Ceylon made similar statements. As is such with royalty, the decision was taken out of her hands. She and Viktor parted, though they kept in contact for the rest of their lives.
Instead, in 2033, Catharina married Leopold van Brabant, the thirty-two year old Duke of Brabant. This was a match that the Staaten-General approved of, though the Senaat had reservations about one of its own gaining to much influence on the throne. Catharina was crowned Queen Katerina on July 14, 2052, and inherited a world slowly decaying. Despite the centuries of wealth accumulated by the United Provinces, and the Commonwealth as a whole, the new queen had a challenge before her unlike any her predecessors have faced.
Economic hardships faced all the Dutch peoples as demand for oil continued to rise, yet its limited supply was on an ever downward spiral. Some members of the House of Electorates suggested opening up Antarctica to exploitation. The Queen dismissed this. Aside from having a major in law, she also held a minor in economics. When comparing the costs of drilling in Antarctica to the cost of simply phasing out oil, the latter won out by a wide enough margin. It was not just the monetary cost. Any activity in Antarctica ran the risk of breaking off a large chunk of the ice cap. With the glaciers in Greenland already retreating, the threat of flooding was severe. Add a melting South Pole to the equation, and the United Provinces may join the few sea floor cities beneath the waves.
The Queen organized and the Staaten-General funded a new generation of sea walls and ocean barriers to surround the United Provinces. The two most endangered Provinces were the Counties of Holland and Zeeland, with much of their land either below sea level or reclaimed from the North Sea. Some of her advisors suggesting relocating the Royal Court from Delft to a more secure location, far enough away that a single storm would not drown it. Katerina refused to leave the home of the House of Oranje for the past four centuries.
Through the first decade of her reign, environmental concerns were great. The first of a series of droughts began to impact the breadbasket of Africa, Abyssinia, and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers threatened India’s well being. The age old engines of industry, coal and oil, were slowly losing favor in the Dutch Commonwealth. New fusion reactors, still lacking in the efficiency output, were coming on line. When one of these reactors turned on, an old coal-fire plant was shut down and its load transferred over to the new reactor. Obtaining the fuels for fusion proved very problematic. Deuterium extraction on Earth would last for centuries, but with a growing demand for power, these resources would soon be fought over. Mining Helium-3 on Luna proved economically unfeasible, the cost of extracting and shipping the fuel back to Earth could not compete with cheaper and dirtier fuels sources.
One benefit of the warming was an increase in ocean activity. Normally, flooding of one’s homeland was a bad thing. In the case of the United Provinces it would be down right fatal. However, the currents pushing from the North Sea through the Strait of Dover increased in intensity. The Dutch tapped this energy potential by constructing tidal turbines along its cost, as well as in the estuaries of major rivers, such as the Rhein. Solar power was not particularly useful in the Provinces, but did come into favor in New Holland, Abyssinia, parts of India and the Boer Republics. The Boer Republics in particular benefitted. The Staaten-General of Transvaal passed its own law requiring all future houses and buildings to have roofs made from solar panels.
Treaty of Kyoto
The conference on climate change and pollution in Kyoto during the month of August in 2058, finally lead to a consensus on the state of the planet by the World Powers. One of the key points of the treaty called for the end of fossil fuel power plants worldwide by 2075. The biggest obstacle to this clause was, of course, China. Being the latest to industrialize, China spent the better part of the 21st Century developing its own industry, and the monestrous demand for electricity created by its more than one billion inhabitants. Aside from great engineering feats, such as the Three Gorges Dam, the Chinese government sanctioned the cheapest form of power generation; coal.
When China was pressured by the other worlds powers, who have slowly been switching over to orbital solar power and bulky fusion reactors, it resisted. Despite it industrial might, and as the largest single economy in the world, it still lacked the ability to build solar power satellites fast enough to keep up with demand. Despite the population peak in 2039, China still has a ravenous demand for power. During the conference, it was Queen Katerina who suggested that the Dutch Commonwealth could work with China to furnish its own fusion reactors. The negotiations were tenuous, but when Her Majesty made it clear that the only other option was for the Dutch Commonwealth to either blast China’s coal-fired plants off the map or face flooding of the United Provinces when the ice caps melted, or practically giving China the ability to create fusion reactors, China saw it had little option. Attacking China would result in retaliation from China. Such an exchange, even if it were but conventional, would be disastrous.
China would cease construction on coal or methane powered turbines and shift its resources into building fusion reactors. However, this would cause a quick rise in the prices of hydrogen and helium isotopes, and drive the prices of fusion power even higher. Even start-up ventures on the moon, to extract Helium-3 from the regolith, despite their lack of profit, would not be able to cover the demand. A second point addressed was removing the artificially produced carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even if all greenhouse gas production were to stop, the planet would continue to heat, and the sea level was projected to rise at least three meters within a century. This would spell doom to coastal areas around the world. The city of New Orleans was already abandoned, and much of the budget for the Counties of Holland and Zeeland were poured into keeping back the North Sea.
Canada and the United States both agreed to start reforestation projects. As populations begin to shrink and agricultural production rises in efficiency, much of the old farmlands in the eastern United States were going feral. Federal programs for planting forests on farmlands no longer in use were started in 2060. Of the World Powers, only Sweden, with its vast tracks of untouched Siberian wilderness, still had large, unbroken forests. Despite being off-limits for exploitation, the Amazonian Royal Preserve began to suffer from climatic change as early as the 2050s, as savanna and open forest began to creep into the rain forest.
Even with the banning of fossil fuel powered power plants, oil and coal were still extracted for other industrial uses, such as plastics and production of fuel cells. Only the Dutch and British, both surrounded by water, used that same water to produce their own fuel cells and hydrogen. The Treaty of Kyoto was a plus for atmospheric health, but still did not address the issue of dwindling resources and inevitable conflict between World Powers as they compete for the remaining deposits. Nonetheless, the treaty was signed by all participants on September 1, and was returned to their respective governments were debates over ratification would continue for months.
First Earth Station
At the start of 2060, the Dutch Commonwealth entered into an agreement with the United States, German Empire and Japan, to cooperation on the construction of the first true space station. Unlike previous “space stations”, made from modules shipped up from Earth, Earth Station would be a true engineering marvel. Though initial designs called for a wheel some twenty kilometers in diameter, the scaled back version of five kilometers was still quite impressive. It was sold as the way station to the planets. The station called for the importation of aluminum and titanium from the Lunar surface, to have it launched towards the First Lagrange point, between Earth and Luna.
Demands for cheap building material drives the economic development of Luna. Unlike the opening of new markets in the past, the flow of immigrants to the moon was very specialized. However, the amount of material required by Earth Station soon outstrips the occupancy capacity of Lunar settlements such as Fort Recife and Gatestown. The make-do extensions to the original research stations, by 2061, already housed some seven thousand people. The influx of workers, technicians and engineers in itself created an addition demand for labor to build the habitation units and dig the tunnels to house the Earth Station crews.
The first mass driver, an electromagnetic railgun capable of launching objects at high enough velocity to exceed escape velocity of Luna, was constructed forty-three kilometers south of Fort Recife. Construction of the mass driver and its continued maintenance brought in dozens of immigrants. Gatestown constructed its own mass driver, with its own influx of immigrants. The two German settlements, and even the small Japanese research outpost, had their own mass drivers built, and their own influx of immigration. The outposts on the moon began to realize that what they required was a true city, not improvised extensions to old modules. The sudden growth spurt in the 2060s made the Earthbound nations realize they need to apply more control to the private ventures on the moon.
Earth Station was originally intended to house some fifty thousand, but technical difficulties in the life-support systems, and the low yield of the small aeroponic farms reduced the supportable population of a self-subsisting space city to just under ten thousand. To the populations of the participant countries, Earth Station was sold as a waystation to the planets. Even with Heavy Lifters, half of the journey (in respect to fuel) was just getting off of Earth. When Earth Station was completed, and its first permanent residents moved in, in 2074, the first serious proposal for a nuclear-powered spacecraft capable of finally sending man to Mars appeared in Germany. Aside from a waystation, Earth Station proved an ideal place for companies to begin developing zero gravity manufacturing. Several companies invested in the station, carving out their own workspaces in the zero gravity hub of Earth Station.
The Moon Council
With the construction of Earth Station well underway, and an influx of highly skilled immigrants to the Moon, the spacefaring nations on Earth decided it was time to take control of the chaos. For the first half-century of human inhabitation on Luna, there was little to no government oversight to organize society. The handful of privately funded research outposts and small settlements were expanded as needed with little in the way of planning that did not involve staying alive. When new housing was required, the Lunars would simply bore out a new tunnel, insert inflatable habitat modules, and voila! Instant modules. With the influx of workers, Luna could not longer produce all the food, water and oxygen on their own. More over, with the demand for workers high, there was little choice but to bring them in, and import the lacking supplies at high price.
Some of the settlements turned back to Earth and ask for aid. The spacefaring nations knew that alone the taming of the Lunar Frontier would tax them to their limits. In order to better develop the moon and regional Earth space, the Dutch, Americans, Germans, Swedes, Chinese, French and Italians formed the Moon Council. The Council operated as the governing board, with three delegates from each member, over the moon as a whole. The Moon Council would regulate what little trade that existed between settlements, set import/export prices, set quotas for immigration and to fund the further exploration of the moon.
Of all the issues, the Lunars resisted attempts at immigration control. Without enough resources to support themselves self-sufficiently, they refused to allow anybody who was not useful to move into the old settlements. To defeat this, Gabriel Giopauli, proposed the construction of the first, true city on the moon. The formation of the Council also worked to standardize the moon and integrate the scattered settlements. Many of the spare parts were designed with their creator nation in mind. American parts could not be interchanged with Chinese and Dutch could not be with the Swedes. On Italy and France could interchange parts, and this was only due to the fact that the two countries were already cooperating. The Dutch people were not thrilled to know that the Commonwealth could not tackle the project on its own. With a history of self reliance, the idea of a project that not even the Dutch could afford came as a shock.
Queen Katerina fought against popular opinion to defend membership in the Moon Council. In 2062, when the Moon Council was formed, the first of many droughts struck at India. Though the monsoon was late in 2062, it did eventually arrive and save India from famine. For the previous sixty years, little of benefit to the Dutch people was derived from the Commonwealth’s activity in space, leaving many wondering just why such money was invested in the program. The Dutch people were use to investing, even long-term, but with nothing appreciable coming from this investment, the people wondered if it was time to cut and run. The VOC operated two new mining outposts on the moon, to extract metals and launch them into space. With the great potential for future technology and markets, the VOC invested in the Moon Council, and would even open a new office in the new city, Avalon.
Avalon
With an influx of workers to the already taxed and crowded towns that built up and under the original outposts, the Moon Council decided that it was high time for Luna to have its first, true city. Of several sites considered for the city, Shackleton Crater at Luna’s south pole, not that far from Braunstadt, was chosen for the site of Luna’s first city; Avalon. With the Peak of Eternal Light, which is always bathed in sunlight, nearby, Avalon would have a ready supply of solar power. Mirrors were constructed upon the peak to reflect sunlight during the crater’s night down upon greenhouses built on the surface. The city itself would be constructed beneath the surface. The greenhouses, covering a square kilometer of the surface, housed vastly improved aeroponic gardens. The greenhouse structure itself was covered with a recently developed invention, the plasma window. This primitive version of a force field uses charged particles to deflect particle radiation and incoming dust and micrometeors. The city would be carved from rock, with small living quarters and cramp workstation, but a central plaza the size of a grand railroad station of one of Earth’s major cities.
Since the city’s construction was a project of the Moon Council, tensions between the Earthbound bureaucracy and the Lunars quickly rose. The second- and third-generation Lunars wanted tight control on immigration, particularly having the tight control in their hands. They only wanted useful people to be allowed to move into Avalon, such as workers and technicians. Decades living in the spartan conditions of the first settlements with limited resources have given the Lunars a very dim view on freeloaders. So dim was it, that the original settlers, though some in their nineties, have not retired from their fields. The Moon Council, on the other hand, wished to open Avalon to any who could afford to move there, even if they were rich old persons who would do nothing but breath oxygen, drink water and take up space.
A second, more serious from the Moon Council’s view, controversy arose from the project. On Earth, with environmental catastrophe and poverty on the rise, many of the poorer nations asked how the rich could justify settling the moon when so many problems still existed on Earth. Clearly, it never occurred to them that said problems were the driving force behind migrations throughout human history. Of all the Moon Council members, the United States took the most flak from its own populace. Why are they so willing to pay for this Lunar city while Earth is falling apart? The Socialist Party was demanding that the resources invested in Avalon instead go to providing welfare for the impoverished. The United States, with climatic shifts and aging infrastructure, have already invested much into massive public works projects, that employs literally millions of Americans, and the Progressives and Libertarians question why the Socialists’ poor should simply be handed checks without doing any work. In a way, the infighting in the United States resembled the immigration argument between Earth and Luna. Queen Katerina also received much flak from Abyssinia, India and even the United Provinces, over perhaps better usage of resources. Despite opposition, construction of Avalon began in 2065.
Nanotech Revolution
As early as 2007, the ability to manipulate matter on the molecular scale existed. At the time, these were little more than laboratory experiments in making nanoscopic motors. By 2070, the field of nanotechnology had reached its holy grail; the nanite. In short, nanites are the first artificial lifeforms created by man. They are cell sized robots capable of doing what any bacterium can do, including replicate itself. Unlike cells, nanites use silicone as its largest component. The nanites, once released into a system, can take individual molecules and atoms and rearrange them into exact replicas. However, nanites were not developed with this purpose in mind.
Nanotechnology was slated to revolutionize manufacturing and solve some of Earth’s climatic problems. Just release the nanites into the air, and they can start sequestering, or even dismantling the excess carbon dioxide that threatened to melt the ice caps. It was this very proposal, along with proposals to clean up oil spills and other biological disasters that sparked a panic all over the world. If just one of the nanites malfunctioned, or “mutated” it might spawn a species of nanites that would dismantle all hydrocarbons across the planet, including biology. The idea of microscopic robots eating all living organism caused nanotechnology to be banned in several countries outright.
Other reasons, including those of religious revivals in some parts of the world in the wake of climatic changes, forced more enlightened countries to ban nanotechnology. In the southern United States, new fundamentalists declared these artificial lifeforms an affront to God, and enough of the United State Congress, fearful of losing elections, moved to outlaw the use of Nanites in American territory. Any nanotechnician operating within the United States after 2071, was subject to arrest, fine and even imprisonment.
Americans got off easier than many around the world. In some of the lesser nations, anybody practicing in nanotechnology was executed, or just simply lynched by the mob. A witch hunt against the technology, which was declared “evil” began in the Central African states, with some engineers even suffering from the savage method of execution, burning at the stake. Nanotechnicians had only two places to flee for their lives; a welcoming country or space. Despite the potential, no nation dared attempt to weaponize the nanites. Without complete control over the little creatures, there was no guarantee that the nano-plague would not turn on its creators when the wind blew it back towards the aggressor.
Accepting nations on Earth comprised of China, Japan and Sweden. The Swedes and Chinese used them in medicine, while the Japanese used them in manufacturing. With so much of its 20th Century population dead and long gone, Japan suffered for decades from a labor shortage. Nanites were seen as the ultimate labor-saving device. They also transformed raw materials into finished products at a fraction of the price; the largest expense in being programing the nanites. By 2080, Japanese goods were flooding the world market, causing China to switch over its nanotechnology program into its industrial base.
The largest benefactor of nanotechnology was Luna. For decades, the only way to expand living space was to blast out a new cavern. Not only could nanites eat out a new cavern, with every detail of construction programed into them, it could also produce next generation alloys capable of supporting large tent-like structures over the craters. Since the time humans first stayed on the moon, there was a dream in the futurist community that craters could be domed over, and the interiors turned into self-sufficient ecologies. It was terraforming on a small, and reasonable scale.
Nanotechnology on the moon, and around Earth Station, was used more for construction. New life-support systems were designed, using the nanites to break up waste waters into clean water and organic material for the farms, along with breaking up carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. The carbon could be used in the farms or producing new composite alloys. The nanites were contained within the life-support systems, with a fail-safe. They would be fried by ultraviolet radiation. UV lights were built around the units to disable any nanites that escaped. This also prevented nanites from escaping the settlements and evolving out of control on the Lunar surface.
The Turbulent 80's
Earth reached a tipping point during the decade of the 2080s, both ecologically and politically speaking. It was by then that the sea level was already a meter higher than it had been in the previous century. Global warming caused much of the Greenland glacier to slowly melt away. This flooding of the North Atlantic by large amounts of freshwater caused a great fear that the Gulf Stream would break down. In the ultimate irony, global warming could potentially turn parts of Europe into extensions of Siberia.
The first disaster of the decade happen in 2081, when massive flooding hit the Bengal region of India. The flooding was caused by a combination of large glacial melt running off into the Ganges at the same time as the Monsoons hit the region. During the height of the flooding, more than 30% of Bengal was under water. Death toll from the flooding exceeded one million, and the destruction to the region’s infrastructure prevented relief aid from reaching the Bengalis before an addition million died due to poor conditions. Sadly, this was the last time the Monsoon was to hit India until 2084. For three years after the flooding, a severe drought hit India, causing famine conditions across Northern India. It was the first time in centuries that famine had hit an industrialized nation.
Along with India, Abyssinia was hit by successive waves of drought. The breadbasket of Africa quickly dried up, causing further near-famine conditions within the Kingdom of Abyssinia. Only a well organized emergency relief plan prevented mass starvation. However, many of Abyssinia’s neighbors were reliant upon her food their own importation of food stuffs. Famine hit eastern Africa, and with the shortages came internal strife. Civil wars further destroyed arable lands outside of Abyssinia, causing millions to die between 2081 and 2090. Drought also hit Brazil, but did little to affect its agricultural output. Instead, despite wide scale conservation for the past two centuries, the Amazon was drying up and starting to turn into open woodlands similar to the savanna of Kenya. Loss of glaciers in the Andes began to turn the Amazon into a more seasonal river, drying up to half its width at the height of the dry season.
Where droughts wracked some parts of the planet, others had the opposite problem; too much water. The sudden oncoming of storms in the North Sea during the 2080s hit the United Provinces severely. In 2082, the dikes failed in the County of Holland, flooding the relatively recently reclaimed lands, causing thousands of deaths. Though the dike was repaired and water pumped out, many Hollanders left the previous flooded land. Islands off the coast of Friesland simply vanished beneath the battering waves. In 2084, more dike failures caused the flooding of Middelburg. Again, after repairs, Zeelanders left the city in droves.
During the turbulent decades, more than half the population of the United Provinces left in a mass exodus. A majority of these climatic refugees resettled in Brazil or the Boer Republics. The loss of population, and the disproportionally high amount of old people remaining wrecked the economy of the United Provinces. Along with ecological disasters, the aging of the population caused a drop in productivity and caused the United Provinces’ Gross National Product to be reduced by 50% over the course of the decade. Queen Katerina was advised to relocate permanently to Recife. She refused, stating that she was not about to abandon the land her ancestors have held for centuries. This was a declaration Katerina made repeatedly over her reign.
Warming of the atmosphere and increase of water vapor caused more typhoons, more and of greater strength. Formosa, Hainan and Ceylon were hit by 1.5 times as many storms per year as they were during the previous century. In the Caribbean, Hurricane season grew a month in length, with Category Four hurricanes hitting the American Gulf Coast, destroying the ruins of an already abandoned New Orleans. The environmental disasters had the effect of causing the Fundamentalist movement in the southern American states to grow, with many believing that the End of the World is approaching.
With a general warming of the climate, tropical diseases began to spread across parts of the middle latitudes. Malaria and Dengue Fever began to spread through Mexico and into the United States. Obscure and lethal viruses from the Congo Basin spread southward into Angola and the Boer Republics. India began to experience the Bubonic Plague once again, only this time on epidemic scales. Hundreds of thousands died of the Plague in Bengal alone during the decade. India was hit again, when the Monsoon skipped 2087 and 2088. With glaciers in the Himalayas vanishing, the Ganges River actually ran dry in sections during the Summer of 2088.
Not only was the climate out of control, but the world’s resources were nearly depleted. The remaining oil supplies, mostly in Kamchatka and Swedish Siberia sparked a war between Sweden and China over sole access to the oil. Shale oil in the Canadian province of Alberta sparked off a Fourth Anglo-American war when the United State invaded Canada to seize control of the oil sands. France and Germany began to fight over the remaining iron deposits along their common border, threatening to drag the ruined United Provinces into their war. China eyeing both the industrial bases of Formosa and Hainan also threatened to drag the Dutch Commonwealth into war in the western Pacific.
Through the year of 2089, the wars continued to escalate, threatening the plunge the nations of Earth into yet another world war. By the autumn of the year, Sweden and China began to conduct strategic bombing raids on each others’ centers of population. Not all these attacks were aimed at destroying the industrial base. Several precision guided munitions were turned on the civilian population, destroying supermarkets and shopping malls, along with large apartment buildings used to house the workers of munition plants. In November, a fifty bomber raid out of Canada struck Chicago, not only destroying the railroad hub, but killing thousands of civilians. In retaliation, missiles launched from Lakoda razed portions of Winnipeg. By December, the wars were spiraling out of control. Chemical weapons were used for the first time since the Great War by France against a German thrust in Lorraine. Total war appeared only just over the horizon.
Doomsday
Nobody knows for certain who started, who was the first to press the button, but when the Swedish-Chinese war finally escalated into a nuclear exchange, the launched of ballistic missiles tripped the alarms in all the nuclear powers. When missiles were launched from China and Sweden, one of China’s missiles overshot its target and burst in Germany. This triggered a general attack by Germany against China, and France. Old hair trigger defenses caused the United States, France, Italy and the Dutch Commonwealth to release its own stockpile.
On February 6, 2090, over one thousand nuclear warheads detonated within Earth’s atmosphere. The electromagnetic pulse fried every piece of electronic equipment on the planet along with power transformers, breaking the global power network. Over a billion people died that day. The loss of so many people was almost as devastating to the human race as the lost of centuries of history in the great cities of Europe and Asia.
The United Provinces was virtually destroyed during the exchange. Two of the Provinces, the Counties of Holland and Zeeland were quite literally wiped off the map. Nuclear explosions flattened cities and broke flood walls. Dikes were vaporized and the rising North Sea came into to submerge the radioactive ruins of Dutch Civilization. Because of the high population density, the destruction of only a few cities would wipe out the population. Every major city in the United Provinces were destroyed, and most of its population was killed on Doomsday.
Across the world and through history, the End of Days was sought after for centuries. At first, Fundamentalist cults of Christianity and Islam were gleeful that Armageddon appeared to be just around the corner. When it came, they, or rather the survivors did not see a Second Coming, did not see the dawning of a Thousand Years of Paradise. Instead, they saw nothing but ruin and desolation. It would not be as predicted by religious figures over the years. The years following Doomsday would end with another billion dead of radiation poisoning and starvation. The worst effects were yet to come. As was covered, the Gulf Stream was breaking down in the 2080s leading to the fear of new glaciation. The nuclear exchange and the amount of fallout and ash in the atmosphere accelerated the cooling. Though Doomsday set the world aflame, its aftermath would lead to an Atomic Ice Age.