daedalus_x
Experienced
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2007
- Posts
- 80
"Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain" - Mikhail Bakunin
[Extract from 'Multilateral conflict in the early 21st century' University of Pacifica Press, Vancouver, 2078. Susan Behrendt (ed)]
2038 saw the climax of the violent struggle between MASC - the Multilateral Alliance for Stability and Co-operation - and the organisation it had been designed to destroy, the umbrella nihilist terrorist organisation known as the Ninth Symphony. Large scale ground wars would occur as late as 2044, desultory conflict would continue well into the 2050s, and few at the time would have seen the year as a turning point. But 2038 marked one of the few moments in the history of human conflict, along with 1916 and 1941, when two major power coalitions with opposing universalist goals stood in roughly equal balance...
The previous 30 years of conflict had seen the rise of the Ninth Symphony. The origins of the name were obscure to all but the organisation's inner circle; the most popular theory is that they were drawn from an obscure quote by 19th century Russian noble and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Ironically, Bakunin's writing intended only to express his love for the eponymous Beethoven work, but it was appropriated by the Symphony for more sinister means - a declaration, albeit a subtle one, of their intent to destroy all existing structures of human society down to the most rudimentary level, and to build an enduring, and presumably utopian, society to replace it.
The Ninth Symphony's origins can be said to begin in 2004, when the youngest Captain in the Royal Australian Army, Garrett James Cook Blaine, the youngest son of multimedia tycoon Dorsett Blaine, was stationed in Iraq as part of the ongoing American occupation of the country. Blaine was quickly seconded to Coalition military HQ in Baghdad, where he seems to have become involved with a secretive joint CIA-MI6 operation, calling themselves the Cutters, who performed black operations to keep Iraqi resistance to a minimum. Exactly what Blaine did when working for the Cutters is unknown, but it confirmed in him a nihilistic view of human society that was totally unshakeable and, coupled with his considerable charisma, extremely eloquent.
In 2008, when the last Australian troops withdrew from Iraq, Blaine returned to Australia. Within four years his father had died and his elder siblings had relinquished their shares in Presslink, the world's largest media holding company, to him. In 2013, at the young age of 33, Blaine retired from his chairmanship of Presslink and disappeared from the public eye. At the time, he claimed he was retiring to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Later it became clear that Blaine had in fact submerged himself in the global underground of terrorists, organised criminals and arms dealers, where he would use his tremendous wealth, brilliant tactical skills and continued control by proxy of 40% of the world's print and visual media to begin creating the most terrifying destructive force in the world - the Ninth Symphony.
By 2019 the international commentariat was fretting over the massive upsurge of revolutionary violence in the third world. By 2023 several major third world nations, including Nigeria, Peru, Indonesia and Iran had collapsed, their governments overturned by seemingly disorganised revolutionaries who nonetheless had access to extremely sophisticated weaponry. The wealthy nations universally proclaimed the need for unity in the face of growing global disorder, but continued to suspect one another of formenting dissent for their own geopolitical needs - the Argentinian government suspected US manipulation in chaos in Chile, Russia and the European Union accused one another of formenting unrest in the Balkans and Turkey, while China remained sure that the Indian government was behind the fall of several pro-Chinese governments in South Asia.
In December of 2027, the wake up call came. A dirty nuclear bomb detonated in Cairo, Egypt, the capital of one of the few third world governments able to retain control of its territory, although not without brutal repression. Millions died of leukemia as the Nile river was contaminated with radioactive waste, and millions more died when the Egyptian harvest failed due to crops dying and farmers fleeing the Nile valley to escape radiation sickness. After a month of humanitarian horror filling the TV screens of the world, on January the 15th - the anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the world's first self-proclaimed anarchist - communications satellites across the world, almost all of them owned or rented by Presslink, broadcast a 25 minute message from Captain Garrett James Cook Blaine (ret), now calling himself 'Legion'.
To the accompaniment of Beethoven's Ninth, Blaine carefully explained how he had been driving the planet towards economic, political and social collapse in order to build a blank slate. Blaine simultaneously appealed to the world's dispossessed and threatened the world's leaders. To the former, he proclaimed, your time has come. "I will tear down the walls, but only you can build a new palace for humanity" he told them. To the latter, he offered a starker choice - "a quick death after your surrender, or a long and painful death at the hands of those you have oppressed". He knew that the superpowers would fight until the end, but he was, he calmly informed them, relying on the fact that the brutality of their counter-attack against the Symphony would only provoke the outrage of the masses.
By the end of January representatives of all of the major world powers had met in Tokyo, Japan and signed an agreement that would later be made official in the form of the MASC organisation. Although their distrust of one another remained, they were all in no danger and could not afford not to cooperate. Few doubted that all envisaged their own country emerging triumphant from what was bound to be a long struggle, but few also doubted that they could not afford not to combine together. The next ten years were marked by as much of a struggle within MASC to agree on strategies and combine resources as a struggle to defeat Ninth Symphony forces in the field.
Between 2028 and 2038 a vicious struggle dwarfing even that of World War III enveloped the globe. Ninth Symphony forces had effective military control over a vast swathe of territory - everything between Uruguay and Veracruz in the Americas and a belt of instability stretching from Morocco to Papua New Guineau and from Kazhakstan to Mozambique. Rarely did the Ninth Symphony deploy major field armies, but on a few notable occassions battles equal to any of the major battles of the 20th century, such as the two year siege of a beleaguered MASC garrison in Singapore or the massive tank battle on the Kazakh-Uzbek border of 2031 occurred, with accompanying loss of life. Even the atmosphere was not spared. Using Presslink's increasing monopoly of commercial space travel, Legion had filled the earth's atmosphere with deadly space weapons concealed as innocuous television and radio satellites. Nearly 80% of all military satellites were destroyed during the first months of the open war, and a major part of the war involved the efforts of the space powers to rebuild their presence in earth's atmosphere. Even those areas far removed from the front line were not spared. Despite increasingly repressive strategies and the militarisation of policing, throughout the war the Ninth Symphony proved consistantly able to infiltrate small gangs of operatives into major cities to wreak havoc, usually sacrificing their own lives in the process but nonetheless inflicting major damage on MASC morale and logistics. In 2031 three snipers paralysed London for a month before being killed by the Metropolitan police in a bloody shoot out in a Brixton squat. In 2032 an airliner landing at Sydney international airport was shot down by a shoulder-launched SAM missile, crashing into a suburb and killing hundreds. In 2034 a hybrid strain of anthrax and the common cold was distributed over Los Angeles, leading to an epidemic that was not brought under control for nearly six months.
But MASC forces were not without their successes. Their greatest achievement was a lightning raid in 2035 by a combined US-Russian special forces team on a remote Soviet era bunker on the Turkmen-Iranian border. Years of patient intelligence gathering had revealed the holy grail of the war effort - Blaine's secret command centre, located on the slopes of the Ahal Velayet mountain. Parachuted into hostile territory under the cover of a massive air raid on Symphony positions around Tehran, nearly 300 troops trekked for days through hostile mountainsides in small groups of a dozen to avoid detection. In what satellite pictures had considered to be just another 1980s relic, they discovered a massive underground complex bristling with high tech security and manned by a fanatical bodyguard. Overwhelmed and outnumbered, they called on the ultimate strike. Tracing the troop's guidance flares, a relentless barrage of bunker-buster nuclear missiles fired from a silo in Archangelsk devastated the entire mountainside. Astonishingly, two survivors crawled exhausted into a MASC cantonment outside Astana a month later. They had seen Legion killed as nuclear fire blew a crater the size of Lake Champlain into the mountainside. Blaine was dead.
Of course, after the Battle of Ahal Velayet his minions only redoubled their fervour, making Legion, their Captain, a martyr as well as a messiah. But without Blaine's tactical expertise and access to the communications network he had set up using his father's company, his lieutenants scattered around the globe were unable to co-ordinate, and some began to feud with one another. One by one, MASC forces began to reclaim territory. By 2038 a large part of Latin America, most of South East Asia and part of the Arabian Peninsula had been occupied and resistance had subseded to minor, although still bloody, irregular warfare.
The turning point came in 2038 when a routine satellite sweep of a Symphony controlled dockyard in Myanmar revealed the arrival of one of the Symphony's few Mao Zedong class submarines. The stealthiest and most lethal submarines in the world, only six Mao Zedong class vessels were produced in 2019. Two were captured by terrorists, later revealed to be Symphony operatives, during an attack on a naval dockyard in Hainan island in 2022. At the time they were thought to have been destroyed, but in 2036 they reappeared, rechristened the Volin and the Nestor Makhno, mostly used to ferry Symphony leaders around the world in an attempt to maintain communications in the wake of the Battle of Ahal Velayet. At first MASC naval forces tried to track them, but their high stealth profile and the reluctance of the Chinese navy to share their sound buffering technology made this an effort not worth the resources expended, particularly when the Mao class submarines were not able to significantly counter the decline in Symphony organisational capabilities.
That changed when a MASC operative in the dockyard radioed an urgent message to MASC regional HQ in Singapore. He had seen a small group of Symphony leaders under heavy bodyguard board the Nestor Makhno, which departed in the middle of the night, a period when MASC satellite coverage was light. And among that small group was none other than Garrett Blaine - a weakened, even anaemic looking Blaine, but one who was unquestionably, despite the Velayet raid, alive.
Immediately MASC naval forces scrambled. Was Blaine really alive? If so, what was he doing onboard the Makhno? And if so, where was it going? All major MASC operations worldwide suddenly became subordinate to one operation - locating the Makhno and capturing Blaine alive. In Atal Velayet capturing the Symphony leader had been a luxury MASC forces could not afford, but with him isolated in a single submarine - albeit a submarine that had consistently evaded all attempts by MASC forces to track it - offered an opportunity to not just remove Blaine from the equation, but to capture him - and if Blaine dead had been a propaganda victory in 2035, Blaine captured, paraded in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs, would be ten times the victory.
There was one piece of luck. Deployed to the MASC Central Pacific flotilla patrolling the Indonesian archipelago was the pride of the MASC navies, the USS George W. Bush. Designed primarily for hunting gun runners and light raiders in the Indonesian archipelago, the 'Dubya' had the best sensor suite and the fastest clipping rate, not to mention the best stealth profile, of any surface vessel in the world. The first of its class to see service, the Dubya was close to the operations area, and if any vessel could locate the Makhno, it could. At 800 hours, on the 8th of June, 2038, at the beginning of a vicious monsoon season, the Dubya pulled in to Singapore for a routine period of shore leave - only for the Captain to find himself summoned to fleet HQ and given a new mission... a mission which might well determine the course of the entire war.
[Extract from 'Multilateral conflict in the early 21st century' University of Pacifica Press, Vancouver, 2078. Susan Behrendt (ed)]
2038 saw the climax of the violent struggle between MASC - the Multilateral Alliance for Stability and Co-operation - and the organisation it had been designed to destroy, the umbrella nihilist terrorist organisation known as the Ninth Symphony. Large scale ground wars would occur as late as 2044, desultory conflict would continue well into the 2050s, and few at the time would have seen the year as a turning point. But 2038 marked one of the few moments in the history of human conflict, along with 1916 and 1941, when two major power coalitions with opposing universalist goals stood in roughly equal balance...
The previous 30 years of conflict had seen the rise of the Ninth Symphony. The origins of the name were obscure to all but the organisation's inner circle; the most popular theory is that they were drawn from an obscure quote by 19th century Russian noble and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Ironically, Bakunin's writing intended only to express his love for the eponymous Beethoven work, but it was appropriated by the Symphony for more sinister means - a declaration, albeit a subtle one, of their intent to destroy all existing structures of human society down to the most rudimentary level, and to build an enduring, and presumably utopian, society to replace it.
The Ninth Symphony's origins can be said to begin in 2004, when the youngest Captain in the Royal Australian Army, Garrett James Cook Blaine, the youngest son of multimedia tycoon Dorsett Blaine, was stationed in Iraq as part of the ongoing American occupation of the country. Blaine was quickly seconded to Coalition military HQ in Baghdad, where he seems to have become involved with a secretive joint CIA-MI6 operation, calling themselves the Cutters, who performed black operations to keep Iraqi resistance to a minimum. Exactly what Blaine did when working for the Cutters is unknown, but it confirmed in him a nihilistic view of human society that was totally unshakeable and, coupled with his considerable charisma, extremely eloquent.
In 2008, when the last Australian troops withdrew from Iraq, Blaine returned to Australia. Within four years his father had died and his elder siblings had relinquished their shares in Presslink, the world's largest media holding company, to him. In 2013, at the young age of 33, Blaine retired from his chairmanship of Presslink and disappeared from the public eye. At the time, he claimed he was retiring to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Later it became clear that Blaine had in fact submerged himself in the global underground of terrorists, organised criminals and arms dealers, where he would use his tremendous wealth, brilliant tactical skills and continued control by proxy of 40% of the world's print and visual media to begin creating the most terrifying destructive force in the world - the Ninth Symphony.
By 2019 the international commentariat was fretting over the massive upsurge of revolutionary violence in the third world. By 2023 several major third world nations, including Nigeria, Peru, Indonesia and Iran had collapsed, their governments overturned by seemingly disorganised revolutionaries who nonetheless had access to extremely sophisticated weaponry. The wealthy nations universally proclaimed the need for unity in the face of growing global disorder, but continued to suspect one another of formenting dissent for their own geopolitical needs - the Argentinian government suspected US manipulation in chaos in Chile, Russia and the European Union accused one another of formenting unrest in the Balkans and Turkey, while China remained sure that the Indian government was behind the fall of several pro-Chinese governments in South Asia.
In December of 2027, the wake up call came. A dirty nuclear bomb detonated in Cairo, Egypt, the capital of one of the few third world governments able to retain control of its territory, although not without brutal repression. Millions died of leukemia as the Nile river was contaminated with radioactive waste, and millions more died when the Egyptian harvest failed due to crops dying and farmers fleeing the Nile valley to escape radiation sickness. After a month of humanitarian horror filling the TV screens of the world, on January the 15th - the anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the world's first self-proclaimed anarchist - communications satellites across the world, almost all of them owned or rented by Presslink, broadcast a 25 minute message from Captain Garrett James Cook Blaine (ret), now calling himself 'Legion'.
To the accompaniment of Beethoven's Ninth, Blaine carefully explained how he had been driving the planet towards economic, political and social collapse in order to build a blank slate. Blaine simultaneously appealed to the world's dispossessed and threatened the world's leaders. To the former, he proclaimed, your time has come. "I will tear down the walls, but only you can build a new palace for humanity" he told them. To the latter, he offered a starker choice - "a quick death after your surrender, or a long and painful death at the hands of those you have oppressed". He knew that the superpowers would fight until the end, but he was, he calmly informed them, relying on the fact that the brutality of their counter-attack against the Symphony would only provoke the outrage of the masses.
By the end of January representatives of all of the major world powers had met in Tokyo, Japan and signed an agreement that would later be made official in the form of the MASC organisation. Although their distrust of one another remained, they were all in no danger and could not afford not to cooperate. Few doubted that all envisaged their own country emerging triumphant from what was bound to be a long struggle, but few also doubted that they could not afford not to combine together. The next ten years were marked by as much of a struggle within MASC to agree on strategies and combine resources as a struggle to defeat Ninth Symphony forces in the field.
Between 2028 and 2038 a vicious struggle dwarfing even that of World War III enveloped the globe. Ninth Symphony forces had effective military control over a vast swathe of territory - everything between Uruguay and Veracruz in the Americas and a belt of instability stretching from Morocco to Papua New Guineau and from Kazhakstan to Mozambique. Rarely did the Ninth Symphony deploy major field armies, but on a few notable occassions battles equal to any of the major battles of the 20th century, such as the two year siege of a beleaguered MASC garrison in Singapore or the massive tank battle on the Kazakh-Uzbek border of 2031 occurred, with accompanying loss of life. Even the atmosphere was not spared. Using Presslink's increasing monopoly of commercial space travel, Legion had filled the earth's atmosphere with deadly space weapons concealed as innocuous television and radio satellites. Nearly 80% of all military satellites were destroyed during the first months of the open war, and a major part of the war involved the efforts of the space powers to rebuild their presence in earth's atmosphere. Even those areas far removed from the front line were not spared. Despite increasingly repressive strategies and the militarisation of policing, throughout the war the Ninth Symphony proved consistantly able to infiltrate small gangs of operatives into major cities to wreak havoc, usually sacrificing their own lives in the process but nonetheless inflicting major damage on MASC morale and logistics. In 2031 three snipers paralysed London for a month before being killed by the Metropolitan police in a bloody shoot out in a Brixton squat. In 2032 an airliner landing at Sydney international airport was shot down by a shoulder-launched SAM missile, crashing into a suburb and killing hundreds. In 2034 a hybrid strain of anthrax and the common cold was distributed over Los Angeles, leading to an epidemic that was not brought under control for nearly six months.
But MASC forces were not without their successes. Their greatest achievement was a lightning raid in 2035 by a combined US-Russian special forces team on a remote Soviet era bunker on the Turkmen-Iranian border. Years of patient intelligence gathering had revealed the holy grail of the war effort - Blaine's secret command centre, located on the slopes of the Ahal Velayet mountain. Parachuted into hostile territory under the cover of a massive air raid on Symphony positions around Tehran, nearly 300 troops trekked for days through hostile mountainsides in small groups of a dozen to avoid detection. In what satellite pictures had considered to be just another 1980s relic, they discovered a massive underground complex bristling with high tech security and manned by a fanatical bodyguard. Overwhelmed and outnumbered, they called on the ultimate strike. Tracing the troop's guidance flares, a relentless barrage of bunker-buster nuclear missiles fired from a silo in Archangelsk devastated the entire mountainside. Astonishingly, two survivors crawled exhausted into a MASC cantonment outside Astana a month later. They had seen Legion killed as nuclear fire blew a crater the size of Lake Champlain into the mountainside. Blaine was dead.
Of course, after the Battle of Ahal Velayet his minions only redoubled their fervour, making Legion, their Captain, a martyr as well as a messiah. But without Blaine's tactical expertise and access to the communications network he had set up using his father's company, his lieutenants scattered around the globe were unable to co-ordinate, and some began to feud with one another. One by one, MASC forces began to reclaim territory. By 2038 a large part of Latin America, most of South East Asia and part of the Arabian Peninsula had been occupied and resistance had subseded to minor, although still bloody, irregular warfare.
The turning point came in 2038 when a routine satellite sweep of a Symphony controlled dockyard in Myanmar revealed the arrival of one of the Symphony's few Mao Zedong class submarines. The stealthiest and most lethal submarines in the world, only six Mao Zedong class vessels were produced in 2019. Two were captured by terrorists, later revealed to be Symphony operatives, during an attack on a naval dockyard in Hainan island in 2022. At the time they were thought to have been destroyed, but in 2036 they reappeared, rechristened the Volin and the Nestor Makhno, mostly used to ferry Symphony leaders around the world in an attempt to maintain communications in the wake of the Battle of Ahal Velayet. At first MASC naval forces tried to track them, but their high stealth profile and the reluctance of the Chinese navy to share their sound buffering technology made this an effort not worth the resources expended, particularly when the Mao class submarines were not able to significantly counter the decline in Symphony organisational capabilities.
That changed when a MASC operative in the dockyard radioed an urgent message to MASC regional HQ in Singapore. He had seen a small group of Symphony leaders under heavy bodyguard board the Nestor Makhno, which departed in the middle of the night, a period when MASC satellite coverage was light. And among that small group was none other than Garrett Blaine - a weakened, even anaemic looking Blaine, but one who was unquestionably, despite the Velayet raid, alive.
Immediately MASC naval forces scrambled. Was Blaine really alive? If so, what was he doing onboard the Makhno? And if so, where was it going? All major MASC operations worldwide suddenly became subordinate to one operation - locating the Makhno and capturing Blaine alive. In Atal Velayet capturing the Symphony leader had been a luxury MASC forces could not afford, but with him isolated in a single submarine - albeit a submarine that had consistently evaded all attempts by MASC forces to track it - offered an opportunity to not just remove Blaine from the equation, but to capture him - and if Blaine dead had been a propaganda victory in 2035, Blaine captured, paraded in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs, would be ten times the victory.
There was one piece of luck. Deployed to the MASC Central Pacific flotilla patrolling the Indonesian archipelago was the pride of the MASC navies, the USS George W. Bush. Designed primarily for hunting gun runners and light raiders in the Indonesian archipelago, the 'Dubya' had the best sensor suite and the fastest clipping rate, not to mention the best stealth profile, of any surface vessel in the world. The first of its class to see service, the Dubya was close to the operations area, and if any vessel could locate the Makhno, it could. At 800 hours, on the 8th of June, 2038, at the beginning of a vicious monsoon season, the Dubya pulled in to Singapore for a routine period of shore leave - only for the Captain to find himself summoned to fleet HQ and given a new mission... a mission which might well determine the course of the entire war.
