The Dragon and the Bear: War in Space and Land

By Matthew W. Quinn

As the Alliance troops tore into the Domination earthside, the war continued in space.

On the lunar surface, Russian troops with their war-cats and German troops with their ghouloon-knockoffs descend into the tunnels of Nova Virconium and other Draka cities to finish them off. It's a brutal fight that sees enormous numbers of Alliance casualties, but eventually the Yoke is broken forever on the Moon. The last battles are fought in June of 2001.

On Mars, elements of the Alliance fleet in the asteroid belt are brought into Martian orbit to make it clear to the Draka commanders groundside that this is a fight they will not win. The Draka general, who has maintained a cease-fire since the destruction of virtually all Domination orbital assets short-circuited his planned offensive, surrenders. The general is no coward-he uses Draka advances in biotechnology, particularly those vital to the terraforming effort, as bargaining chips to ensure the personal safety/security of all Draka on Mars being included in the surrender terms.

Unfortunately, not all elements of the army honor the surrender, particularly the drakenses who, in addition to their inborn aggression, suspect that they're going to be killed out of hand as non-human when they go into captivity, the surrender treaty be damned. Several of the Draka's domed cities declare they intend to fight. The Alliance forces immediately move to occupy the Draka cities that have honored the surrender, freeing all serfs and interning all active-duty military personnel. Any captured adult or teen drakenses-they're aren't that many, due to their preference to go down swinging-are interned separately and closely watched, pending a final decision on what to do with them. Children are left, for the present, with their Draka parents-they're not old enough to cause trouble.

Then it comes time to make war on the elements of the Draka army that are intent on fighting. Orbital bombardment is used to crack the domes, followed by tunnel warfare similar to that taking place on Luna. By the end of July 2001, Mars is secure at a cost of 50,000 Alliance dead, 150,000 dead serfs, and 10,000 dead Citizens.

In the asteroid belt, the remnants of the Draka fleet that attempted to destroy Ceres have regrouped and have begun waging a hit-and-run campaign. The Alliance fleet eventually succeeds by dint of destroying almost every single inhabited Draka outpost in the belt to deny the Draka bases for resupplying and refueling, while building up heavy defenses on their own colonies in order to ensure no raiding for supplies takes place. The belt is not brought under full alliance control until October 2001 due to the prevalence of supply caches stashed on uninhabited asteroids by the Draka.

However, the growing ecological problems earthside—there is a nuclear winter, although it's worst in the Domination's territories-lead to the spaceborne Alliance forces having to play a major role in keeping the groundside nations supplied. The domes are rebuilt as quickly as possible and dedicated entirely to agriculture, to replace imports and even export food to Earth. New agricultural facilities are built as fast as possible, putting pretty much everyone not needed for military purposes to work. Water and other vital elements are gathered from the asteroid field and from the gas giants and/or their moons. After awhile, even trusted drakenses are put to work-imprisoned, they're just eating up scarce food and required manpower to guard. It's made abundantly clear that their conduct will help determine the fate of their entire species when the war is over.

It is this lifeline of supplies from space that will enable the Alliance to resume the offensive against the Domination in early 2002.

As that year dawned, the Draka (on Earth) found themselves in an unenviable position. In Europe, they had been reduced to Spain, while most of their trans-Suez provinces were lost or in imminent danger of being lost. Sizable chunks of western and eastern Africa had been occupied by the Alliance armies. More and more serfs fled to these enclaves every day, and efforts to stem the flood with the degree of force the Draka would approve of-aerial and artillery bombardment-tended to attract Alliance response from space.

So the Domination fell back on more subtle methods. The younger generation of drakenses was deployed with ghouloons to hunt fleeing serfs, to prepare them for the war they more than likely would be fighting themselves as the war eroded the older, more human generations of Citizens.

This the drakenses found themselves quite good at, since they were essentially bred to prey on Homo sapiens like Homo sapiens preyed on lesser animals. Losses on these missions tended to be low, as quick-moving drakensis/ghouloon squads did not attract orbital attention and the serfs themselves were largely unarmed and untrained. Plus it means food for the ghouloons and even the drakensis, who, since the serfs are not their species, don't have the same issues with eating them as a human-Draka would. This did not eliminate the escaping-serf problem, particularly in regions where the New Race and ghouloons were thin on the ground, but it reduced it.

Unfortunately, keeping the serfs out of Alliance hands meant they stayed on the Draka lands and ate up resources, both to feed them and keep them from bolting. Some Draka proposed that, in the interest of keeping the Citizen class and loyal and productive serfs fed, the disloyal and unproductive should be killed or driven into the Alliance-occupied areas where they'd eat up enemy resources and not their own.

The Draka government-such as it was at this point-roundly rejected killing serfs. The paternalistic planters in particular opposed this notion and thanks to the destruction of most urban centers in the Domination, they had a stronger hand than the city-born did. What was left of the urban elite, grown powerful thanks to the dominance of the Militants and the Security Directorate, found the political balance shifting against them at the worst possible time.

However, the urban/Security faction is not without arguments. Disloyal serfs could become new armies if there are enough of them.

Ultimately, the number of crimes for which death is the penalty is increased, serf human shields are used to deal with the disloyal, and enormous numbers of aged and sick serfs are rounded up and marched to the Alliance lines. The Alliance forces initially accept them, then begin turning them away as it becomes clear they won't be able to feed them either.

Famine begins to tighten its grip on the Domination as agricultural yields drop dramatically due to the combination of the nuclear winter and the destruction of most of the transportation system. The old and sick-especially among the serfs-begin to die. Food that would be considered fit only for serfs becomes a delicacy among Citizens. Human-Draka parents reluctantly begin to take their drakensis children's word that the meat on the table came from game and that any missing serfs had run away to the Alliance.

The Alliance leadership, meanwhile, debated what to do. Taking more territory meant taking responsibility for feeding its population, which the Alliance would not be able to do, and expending resources harder and harder to come by, even with the growing offworld imports. Some thought the Domination should be allowed to break down, as the Citizens and their loyalists hogging the food-with reports of the drakenses actually eating serfs-would provoke revolts by other serfs.

However, not doing so gave the Draka time to fortify and possibly produce newer and dangerous weapons. Nobody wanted the Draka to be able to scrape together enough nuclear material or antimatter to build even something resembling the "Fenris" that Eric von Shrakenberg warned them had been discussed in the Domination's ruling circles before his overthrow.

So in January 2002, as the nuclear winter began to wane, a second wave of offensives was unleashed against the Domination...