Perhentian Islands, Malaysia, June 2035

  Still with Klaus Steiner, on the eve of his daughter's wedding to my best friend, he described the situation at the front in the spring of 2027.

  The Americans had pulled out of the northern salient, handing over St. Petersburg to the Russians, Finns and Chinese. It took them months to reposition their brigade-level force to Western Europe, where the newly reconstituted U.S. 12th Army Group was desperately holding fragments of the Low Countries and northern France, a line collapsing slower than expected, but collapsing all the same.

  The Chinese, on the other hand, had committed two full Army Groups. The first, more experienced, had evolved from the volunteer force deployed before the initial landings and was focused on stabilizing the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and southern Russian sectors. The second was fresher, comprised of newly raised battalions, hastily equipped and deployed across the northern front, stretching from north of Moscow to the shattered remains of St. Petersburg. The first group took care of everything south of Mosco all the way to the black sea.

  The Ukrainians and Russians were running on fumes. Their pre-invasion war with each other had gutted their militaries, and after a year of alien conflict, estimates put their combined military deaths at over a million. They had no real choice left. The Chinese came in, as did every other Eurasian army still standing along with the Koreans and Japanese, do both their numbers were dwarfed.

  The Germans and Poles were spent. Their standing forces had been the first to respond when the landings hit Central Europe, and they were the first to be broken. Months of continuous engagement further and further from home as they retreated had shattered their brigades, and by spring 2027, their armies were little more than shells propped up by fresh conscript battalions, hastily formed from refugees and displaced civilians. These units had heart, sometimes too much, but no real striking power. Little armor,air cover or more importantly logistics. No chance. Rellying on allied hand overs wasn't a viable strategy.

  France, meanwhile, was burning from within. After the initial shock, its government had tried to hold together a national response, but internal fractures, political, cultural, even military, had boiled over. The army was still technically standing, but it was running on fumes, with units understrength, under-equipped, and often more focused on maintaining civil order than facing the alien front.

  Outside of a few brave contingents from South America and Asia—nations punching above their weight out of solidarity or desperation—most of the world had offered little in the way of real reinforcements. Logistics, yes. Advisors, maybe. But fighting men and armor? Too little, too late. The Iberian and North African group was doing fine if it wasn't for the fact that they were holding back. It was hard to convince the Spaniards for example to send men in the meat grinder that was "Grand Est". Send their men to die a slow death at the German border while the Spaniards had the Pyrenees keeping them safe for a while even if France were to fall.

  And the so-called Earth Coalition Forces, a patchwork command formed in Brussels and renamed three times in six months, had no real authority. Coordination was a joke. Orders were ignored, radios jammed, lines redrawn without notice. In the end, the only real power belonged to the armies with the most troops on the ground and the nukes on standby.

  The U.S., the Chinese, Turks and their Middle eastern alliances, were the only ones who still had both. And everyone knew it. CENTAG, the army group made off countries of the Carpathian basin, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Romania were utterly spent. Bratislava in Slovakia and everything in between that city and Vienna looked like the surface of the moon. They were holding by a thread. That's why most ECF forces from abroad were sent there. The entrance of that plateau were the gates of hell. Not a patch of grass, not one tree left. Only constant artillery shelling and tanks rolling over corpses through endless miles of maze like trenches.

  He poured another glass of wine, his hand trembling just slightly, and looked out the window as if the numbers were etched into the darkened sky.

  “We’re talking millions,” he said flatly. “Not figuratively. Literally.”

  “By the start of spring, the U.S. had over five hundred thousand men deployed across the European theater. Three field armies under the 12th Army Group, with two more brigades in transit and another three sitting in England waiting for clearance. Their logistical chain is bigger than most countries’ entire militaries. They’ve got satellite uplinks, drone swarms, deep-strike bombers flying out of Iceland and Turkey, and at least two carrier groups somewhere in the Med. And behind every rifleman, there's a drone operator, an AI battlefield coordinator, a reactor-powered FOB. It’s the closest thing we have to an organized war machine. But for every slick M1A2 SEP V3 upgrade they were fielding older older M1 abrams and even M60 tanks from the 80s.”

  He took a long sip and continued.

  The Chinese committed a massive force. Combined, both Army Groups fielded an estimated 800,000 to 1,200,000 troops, do I'm sure even the Chinese likely didn’t know the exact number.

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  The First Army Group was the more experienced and better equipped of the two. It had integrated armor and long-range strategic bombing capabilities. Everything from ZTZ-99As to Dongfengs, with even J-20s providing close air support.

  The Second Army Group was greener, mostly conscripts, outfitted with older gear like ZTZ-88s and other Cold War-era equipment. Still, sheer numbers were enough to stabilize the front from Kursk up to St. Petersburg, which saw far less action than the southern front.

  They even took over some Russian command nodes, not officially, of course, but in practice? They ran the show.

  Moscow had already descended into a free-for-all, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, right at the start of the war, after the president took a bullet from his body guard standing behind him during that televised speech. We were lucky the situation there had reorganized so quickly.

  He looked back at me.

  The Russians had maybe half a million troops left in active field units. Most of them ended up folded into Chinese command structures.

  The Ukrainians were in even worse shape, but only because they’d hit the wall. For both there was simply no one left to recruit. They were literally scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  Unless you were willing to wait seventeen years for the orphans of the last wave to grow up, pick up a rifle, and figure out how to operate a BMP-1. Not that there were many of those left anyway.

  They were brave as hell, but broken. Their armored corps was wiped out in the first year.

  “And the rest?” I asked.

  France had maybe five hundred thousand troops scattered across three sectors: their border with Germany, some in Belgium, and others in the Alps. Mostly reservists and conscripts. They still had a few elite units—paratroopers, marines, special forces—about four thousand by then. But there was a reason those troops were stationed in Paris, circling a government barely holding onto power.

  Germany and Poland combined could barely muster fifty thousand.

  Britain’s Expeditionary Force was holding a corridor south of Antwerp, twenty thousand strong, bolstered by Commonwealth volunteers.

  The South Americans sent units, all of them. And God bless them for it. But we’re talking brigade strength, not divisions. Vietnam sent a full mechanized brigade. Indonesia sent three. Malaysians, Indonesians. Sorry If I don't remember everyone. But they weren’t plugged into the main network. No shared command. No interoperability. Nothing.

  We were all too busy figuring out how to fight each other to ever think about the alternative.

  He set the glass down, no longer interested in finishing it.

  The Earth Coalition has a logo, a slogan, and a website. That’s about it. Real power belongs to whoever has boots on the ground and nuclear missiles in reserve. Everything else is theater.

  We’re past the point of speeches and solidarity. All that’s left is mass, momentum, and mutually assured destruction.

  If an American or Chinese general storms into your office—or the prefab shack pretending to be one—and tells you to move your battalion twenty kilometers south, you do it. And you shut up.

  Scandinavia was another beast entirely. The fighting in the strait of Denmark around it was brutal but it wasn't Vienna for sure. Plus the navies did an ok job trying to keep it clean of Tripods or sub water incursions. That lot there, along with the tens of millions of refugees who had arrived overnight were saved by geography.

  “The crabs, they had reserves like we’d never seen before. It wasn’t just the initial numbers, they didn’t run out of bodies. It was like they were endless. Again, took us 18, or 16 years if you cut corners to have an able bodied soldier. Just needed hatcheries, bio mass and heat. And they had a string of fighters out of the furnace and onto the meat grinder. We thought our airforces did a good job bombing them, until we realized most of their hatcheries were deep underground for the heat. Be it subways, factories, tunnels, mines. You name it.

  They wore us down. Slowly, deliberately. We weren’t fighting for victory. We were fighting just to keep going. à l'usure as the french call it. And that’s how they wanted it.

  His voice lowered, more intense now.

  “Every day, we sent our men out, and they kept coming. We’d fight for a town, a sector, a ridge, and the next day, they’d be back. Even when we wiped out one of their forces, there was always more. It wasn’t about winning battles for them. It was about making us fight forever. They didn’t care how many of their forces we killed. They just needed to keep us exhausted. And we were. For all we knew they probably fought a war that killed trillions of them on that rock they fled desperately.”

  He fell silent for a long moment before looking me in the eye.

  And in the end, they didn’t need to win. They just needed us to run out of steam.

  You want to know what finally made the other countries get serious about sending people? It wasn’t about liberating Europe. Plenty of Third-Worldists were against that anyway. It wasn’t about breaking the enemy before more showed up, either.

  In my opinion, it all came down to checks and balances. Global trade collapsed overnight. Sure, weapons factories ran around the clock, but huge parts of the world economy just vanished. People lost their jobs, their homes. They were hungry, out in the streets.

  And that’s dangerous if you're a leader who wants to keep making fifty grand a month, buy your fat wife some jewelry, spoil your mistresses even more, and send your kids to the world’s top universities so they can pretend to study.

  Then an option opened up. Instead of letting your men rot in the streets until they decide to come for your head, you give them a rifle. You send them to Europe. Three meals a day, something to do, and if you're lucky, they won’t make it back to ask for veteran benefits or look for work.

  One less guy on the dole.

  We needed a solution, and we needed it fast. Giving up Europe, pulling back to the Pyrenees, the Turkish mountains, or the Russian steppe wasn’t a solution. Neither were nuclear weapons.

  Over a hundred nukes were used in the first year. We were lucky we didn’t end up in a full nuclear winter.

  But we barely had a unified front. That’s where the North Koreans came in.

  Crazy bastards forced our hand. No one saw it coming. The most insane Hail Mary in the history of mankind. And it came from North Korea, of all places. A pariah state. Give me a break."