I would like to thank Sable Cold for taking on the impressive job of being the Beta Reader for this book. As always reviews are welcome. If you find this is easier to read and follow. Thank Sable Cold and all of his hard work
I do not own Battlestar Galactica or have any connection with them, other than I have seen the shows. And it was a long time ago. I also do not own or have input into the game of Rifts. I don't even play the game. But I do own copies of some of the books, and I have used them for this story.
Chapter 2 Opening Moves
The border areas around mainland China were still listed as high threat areas by most countries around the world. Countries all along that long border were buying and selling weapons on the black and gray markets to buyers on both sides of the conflict. They were buying local built weapons, Colonial inspired weapons, and Colonial supplied weapons as well as ammunition for all of them. A lot were being smuggled into the different areas deeper into China, but a lot of them were also staying in the border areas for local defense against the Chinese Warlords.
It was not only military weapons that were being sold on this planet. The first few Colonial consumer electronics were coming on the market at a low but very steady rate. There were very few in general listed as being used before coming to the planet. That is, once you got off the two islands they controlled. After that, they were listed any number of different ways, and most of them were even legal. Just like the sale of weapons, they were spreading all over the world. None of the Colonial made military items were spreading faster than those had. That was mainly due to the lower cost and higher output of these devices coming out of New Kobol compared to what even the first world nations were putting on the market.
Taiwan was buying more weapons and whole weapons systems than the other players in the local area. They had both more money and more friends to leverage for these acquisitions. Taiwan had two goals that they were driving for, and they hoped these weapon acquisitions would help them with these goals. The main one was to live and protect itself from any of the mainland warlords who might want to take over the island for their own use. China still had a huge military compared to the small island country.
The other main issue was that the people who called the island home were long term thinkers. The original island leadership had fled from mainland China after losing the last civil war that China had endured. That one war had heated up after the Japanese had been defeated and the Chinese went back to old issues. The idea that some of the current leadership might be able to take some of the mainland back, that was too tempting to at least not think about. After all, it was only a plan. It's always good to have plans just in case something happens. The island nation had even started building the second of the six planned upgraded 160 meter long Landing Platform Docks that could act as command ships for smaller vessels and support an idea more than a real plan.
The heightened alerts caused by the nearby civil war had been keeping the country's military on a knife's edge. The list of 'cross border issues' submitted to the UN with just Taiwan alone was over three pages long, and it was growing every few days. When that document hit twenty pages long, senior leadership had asked for and the Colonials had agreed to send small groups of ground personnel to cross train with them. It was not unlike what they had been doing with the Australians who were worried that more nuclear weapons might be sent in their general direction. Flying assets were a bit harder for the Colonials to support with any real combat effectiveness long term out on Taiwan, but it was concluded that every few months, a pair of Vipers or Raptors would rotate through both of those countries for a week or so.
The newer weapons coming out to the island were cutting or bleeding edge technology for the Earthborn and one or two were almost as good as what the Colonials had for sale. The Colonials were still selling the same old handheld weapons along with the 30mm KEW's. The Colonials could build them cheaper, more reliable, and just better than anyone on the planet had been able to so far. The armor plate coming out of the small on planet foundries were a lot better than what was coming from the more high-tech locations, and that was with techniques that were slowly spreading to the rest of the world.
The Colonials were not selling the best armor that they could make. They were keeping the items for sale at about ten percent better than what the locals could make in the amorphous steel alloys, but the Colonials could only make so many tons of it a year for export. It was now known that the Colonials had walking tanks and all kinds of other super high-tech weapons to go with their spaceships and Viper space fighters. It was not much of a shock to the average person on this planet who had been watching the Colonials since the first few years.
It was kind of like hitting your thumb with a hammer. Eventually you stop noticing the pain.
After all, they had interstellar space travel. Why not have lasers and rail guns as well? To counter the higher technology of the weapons used by the Colonials, all of the first world militaries were fielding other weapon types alongside Colonial supplied or based weapons and armor. They and other countries were working on fixed site or ship-based lasers and rail gun type weapons. Those were not the only areas they were looking at to try to level the playing field with the Colonials. Liquid propellant heavy weapons were quickly replacing other types of large powder charges in tank and ballistic artillery weapons in the best frontline units. The second-generation solid rocket fuel coming out of Utah was pushing space exploration, ATGM, and SAM development at a rapid pace.
It was four months before the first Colonials and Rifters with their high-tech weapons rotated out to Taiwan, and every move they made while on the ground was watched by unfriendly eyes. It had been a small group of only a dozen personnel who had been deployed off of the Colonial controlled islands. They were the test case, and it had worked out very well for both parties. The mix of Colonials and Rifters had been leading training on how to fight Cylons for the first few weeks on the large island. Afterwards the locals would lead training on countering a larger number of lighter armored attackers that were common in this part of the world. They also lead training in how to fight in jungles and mountains against an enemy that was very human. The next rotation was already in the final planning stages by both governments by the time the first group had left the island.
The second major cross training event had almost fifty offworlders attending, and they were landing on the island for cross training complete with live ammunition to work with. They were led by a much older Rex Gordon. The plan was for this group to be on a 180 local day training cycle with the local Taiwan military. Not all the time would be spent in the field. That would have caused issues on both sides. He was only going to be working with groups as small as ten personnel and as large as twenty-five under his command out in the field at any one time. Later, in a pre-planned major exercise that would change. Then it would be lotty dotty everybody out in the woods for five days of training. Two of those larger training events were scheduled for this half year.
What they did not know was that all of the second training rotation was being very closely watched by some people over on the mainland. None of the Warlords had liked it that Taiwan was now called ROC in legal documents all over the world. They had grown used to the One China Policy that the world had used for the last few decades. The Warlord of the Nanjing province and the acclaimed leader of the Beijing area was working on plans all on his own. He was thinking that maybe he could do something about this rich breakaway territory so close to his own.
While the Colonials had caused all transoceanic trade in Chinese owned hulls to come to a screeching halt, local traffic was just fine, if not as profitable as the larger and longer transoceanic routes they had dominated before the Colonials came to this planet. The Colonials had hit all the major bases for the Chinese navy and had taken out almost every nuclear-powered boat and their supporting oceanside bases but they had overlooked some things and so had most of the world for that matter. China had the third largest submarine fleet in the world at the time of the Colonials finding this planet. Most of those were not nuclear powered, and they even used different bases than the larger warships did. She also had lost almost none of her shipbuilding capability in those attacks. She did lose some, but it had only been a very small fraction of her entire shipbuilding and support capabilities. And that massive attack by the Colonials had been a few years ago. Not all of it had been rebuilt, but the Chinese Warlords had learned a few things in those limited rebuilding efforts.
Those facilities were now listed as being civilian controlled and it would be a war crime to bomb them into scrap metal. The Warlords could not replace the massive 13,000-ton Destroyers or 30,000-ton LHD classes of warships or aircraft carriers they had lost. Not in this short of a time frame after the attacks but they were building what they could when they could.
The Warlord of Nanjing had almost all the surviving shipbuilding yards and support bases that China had left. He used whatever he took and skilled craftsmen that he could find to keep them and the support they offered confined to his little empire exclusively. He even traded with other Warlords for items that he could not make. All to keep the People's Liberation Army Navy and its much smaller cargo shipping fleet in operation. He would trade small river capable gun and missile boats to those other warlords, and anyone else who had enough cash or something he might need for that matter.
You would be surprised what even a smaller Panamax sized tanker or cargo ship would bring on the open market. He also had lot of long-range surface to surface missiles in many storage bunkers. The area had been pre-stocked with them for the Central Committee's eventual plan to invade its breakaway island province. He even had five of the seven fully operational IRBM brigades wholly under his command.
What he was working on now was rebuilding the 1st Amphibious Mechanized Infantry Division. It had been gutted when the first invasion of the Colonial island had failed. They had not lost any people from that formation at first but like everything else in the PLA after the loss of the Central Committee, it had shattered like glass. Also, it had not been fielded with as up to date equipment or training as the lost division had been. It had been filled with most of the troops that had been returned to China, or more to the point, the ones that were cleared for the elite assignment. That had left many without a unit assignment until they were rehabilitated and sent to other combat units.
The equipment used in the continuing efforts to rebuild this one-time elite division was whatever the Warlord could come up with at any given time. He was fighting on a long front with many enemies that wanted what he had been able to keep under his control. What was working out for him was that before the Center Committee had its terminal interview with a Colonial delivered weapon, they had ordered all defense industries to start ramping up to full wartime production levels for most weapons systems they were capable of building. They also had both started the rebuilding of that unit by earmarking heavy equipment and updated the stockpiles all over the country. Most of those factories and stockpiles fell under the control of the Nanjing Warlord at one time or another. That was why he was the most powerful of the mainland's leaders.
Now he was burning and losing equipment faster than he could replace it, even with all of the factories under his control. It still took money and resources to run those manufactory sites to make replacements. That did even count what needed to be replaced whenever one of those sites was attacked by one of his many rivals. If the pace of his equipment losses kept up for another year, he would have to somehow reduce those combat losses or come up with a way to get newer and/or better equipment shipped to him. That would still leave him with the problem of getting all that new equipment to the forces under his command. He did not need the new equipment spread out in penny packets all across his domain. What he needed was a large mass infusion of it to tilt the balance of power back in his direction all at once. So far, all he could do was modify major systems on a catch as catch can method to keep up with his opponents.
The Warlord had been very upset about the Colonials cross training with the breakaway island off his coast. It was more of a problem that it had been allowed into the news streams that the people of his domain could view. Even before the Colonials had started landing the first group of advisers, he had ordered his surviving intelligence apparatus to do an updated deep dive and comprehensive study on the nearby island. That took only a few months to complete. When the updated briefing came back to him, he was quite surprised at the low number of troops that the breakaway island had along with its odd mix of weapons.
They were fielding older tanks and a few but rapidly growing number of small warships. Unfortunately to his eyes, more and more Colonial hand weapons were starting to come into common use. He was even able to find the planned roll out schedule for those powerful weapons from a well-placed spy. He was also surprised at the manufacturing and shipping network the island country held under its thumb. He did not need long to figure out how all of those things would benefit him in his current situation very nicely. All he needed to do was take it.
After a day and long night of really thinking about what he had been briefed on, he put his staff to work on figuring out a way to take over the island from its current legal leadership. It needed to be done in such a way that it and its capabilities would fall under his control with as little damage as possible to those key HVT or high value targets. The first item his staff addressed was how to get an invasion force across the 130 to 180 kilometers wide Strait of Taiwan.
China had been building up its power projection capabilities before the Colonials bought those two islands. They had since lost a good part of that capability to the Colonials. After the second wave of attacks launched by China led to all Chinese flagged ships being stopped in the middle of the ocean those ships were now helping the Warlord with his plans. The Chinese still had a massive fleet of large vessels for trading that were not being used. Just under half had been outside of a Chinese friendly port when the Colonials announced they were taking them over.
It had been hard for ships interned in those harbors to be transferred to their new owners, but some had. That still left a lot of capacity slowly rusting away tied up in ports or rocking at anchor within the reach of this Warlord's manipulations. As time passed the Colonials seemed to have lost some of their near godlike vigilance over most places on the planet. Sales of those ships had been a huge of infusion of money that he and his staff had enjoyed. There was not too much on the black market, that could not be bought with the 100 to 160 million dollars a ship they were getting in sales. By hook or by crook, he had quietly gained access to about a thousand ships in that class.
The Warlord approved the plan that was at the core just a slight modification of a long-standing plan to take over the breakaway island. They would leave the smaller islands in the area alone. At least, until they had been able to digest the huge chunk that was the old island of Formosa. Slowly, his staff moved units and equipment around the territory he controlled. They were very careful about these moves, but they were not hiding it from the world. They just wanted to hide the moves from some of the other Warlords who might take advantage of the shifting forces.
The intelligence agencies of Taiwan did pick up on these moves and did let their leadership know that something was up across the small strait. They just did not know how bad or how long it was going to be until it happened. After a few months of waiting the government of the ROC was split in half about what to do. One part thought it was just the local Warlord shifting forces to refresh or refit combat units that had been in heavy combat over the last year. The other part of the leadership still thought that it was the Warlord getting ready to invade the island. Both sides had a lot of data to support their different points of view and ideas. As time went by, the issue fell out of the news cycle, even for the locals.
