A Rising Star (Invite Only, see OOC thread)

[Iansisle]

From the Mansmouth Saturday Post

...the vast majority of Home Fleet departed the Roads on Thursday evening, leaving past the Nenton Lighthouse by the northern passage. Of major elements, only GFS Behemoth (undergoing routine maintenance and upgrade to radranger systems in drydock) and GFS Galloqui (laid up with boiler problems) remained behind. Although no comment has been forthcoming from the Admiralty, we may surmise that this development is due to the announced summer training off Cape Deliverance in Noropia...

Holapur, Gallaga
Near the Crooked Border; Camp of the 1st Vesshampton Regiment of Artillery

“Christ, you took long enough,” said Corporal Andrew Olson when his mate finally returned with the cigarettes. “Give me a smoke already.”

“You should have seen the line, Andy,” said Private Gary St. John. “God-damn heathen Gallers stretched as far as the eye could see. Smelled like the inside of a latrine and looked like one too.”

“That's why I'm staying upwind,” said Olson, lighting up. “At least they're not trying to blow us up any more.”

“Speak for yourself. Big brute of a fellow shoved his shoulder into me on my way back, almost knocked me down. He had a Rumbiak Brigade tattoo, I think.”

“You knocked him down for his impudence, I hope?”

“With five brutes just behind him, fists balled?”

“God damn it, Gary, and you wonder why they don't respect us any more. Get a few of the boys, we'll go teach this rat-eating Galler of yours a lesson or two.”

“I, uh, I don't know if the lieutenant would like that very much...”

“All the more reason not to tell him. What are you, a fucking coward Noropian running home to momma? One of them pushes you, you knock them on their ass. It's the only way to maintain the natural order.”

By this time, Olson was already on his feet, barking at several nearby soldiers to get up and come with him.

“I'm not sure this is a good idea,” said St. John, but he still scurried after his friend.

SS Margaret Huxton
Approaching the Walmingtonian Cape Colonies

There was nothing to distinguish Margaret Huxton from any of the other British-registered break bulk steamers plying the southern Gallagan Ocean. Her master spoke with a broad Midlands accent, her papers were all in order, she moved at a leisurely pace along established shipping routes. Nothing at all – save her cargo of weapons, ammunition, and explosives.

Margaret Huxton was one of the many innocent-looking steamers employed by Iansisle's Naval Intelligence Office and she was here, off Port Elizabeth, on a vital mission. For months, agents of the NIO had been making contacts within the Cape Colonies' separatist movement, one which had previously had the power to almost completely stop traffic within Port Mavis itself. If Ranalte's gambit with Gallaga were to succeed, then Walmingtonian and Crooked forces in Gallaga must be isolated from their home bases. Two critical resupply routes ran into the area: one through the Walmy Cape Colonies, the other through Crooked Timor.

Unfortunately, as Home Fleet could not be deployed to the area without raising major suspicions, the Navy only had the strength to directly strike at one of these targets. Timor, because of its closer proximity to resupply bases at Batam, had been the natural choice. A task force consisting of most of Iansisle's local presence – the battlecruiser Liberty, the large MAFD Veritas, a light MAFD squadron, a light cruiser squadron, and a destroyer flotilla – were on their way to Crooked Timor, although they had left Batam declaring they were bound for Davao and only diverted well out to sea.

That left the neutralization of the Cape Colonies to more nefarious means.

((ooc: WoS, since it's your separatist movement, I'll leave this more up to you. ))

Holapur

“And just what in the hell do you think you're playing at?”

“Well, you see, sir, that Galler went and tried to knock down one of my mates --”

“I don't care if he fucking impregnated one of your mates, Olson! A black eye and a cut lip is the last thing we need before moving out!”

“...moving out, sir?”

Nusheld, Gallaga
The Rhinoceros Gate, Palace of the Republic

“...and thus the Gallagan Republic, with the full backing of the Federation, must demand the immediate and unconditional end of Crooked* colonialism on and around the Gallagan subcontinent. If this is not agreed to within the next twenty-four hours, then the Republic shall have no recourse other than military action.”

Of course, the ultimatum was something of a formality and an answer was not expected. So confident, in fact, were the Gallagan and Iansislean planners that they intended to launch the initial strikes of Operation Star-Rise (raids into Crooked Gallaga and Ceyloba) within just two hours of the note's delivery. Questioned on the international stage, of course, the Republic would answer that they were responding to reports of Crooked fire across the border. Whether or not this fire actually existed was irrelevant.

* -- or Walmingtonian, depending to which capital the note was delivered.

((ooc: OOC Thread here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=58688))

[The Crooked Beat]

Near the Gallagan Frontier, Yanam

News of Rhinoceros Gate's declaration had barely reached Lieutenant Wegner and his 37-man platoon by radio when the sound of automatic gunfire erupts from farther up the narrow jungle track, sending the Yanamese light infantrymen diving for cover right and left just in time to avoid an exploding mortar bomb. Wegner, recovering quickly from the initial shock of first contact, races forward with his submachine gun at the ready, barking orders to section commanders who are already in the process of organizing a flanking maneuver. Before long the sky is thick with tracer rounds and bits of flying foliage, shredded by machine gun fire and grenade explosions, to which Crooked mortarmen contribute as they attempt to walk 54mm high-explosive rounds onto enemy positions.

Wegner soon reaches Sergeant Ramlee's position, nearest to the point of initial contact and clearly under very heavy fire. Wegner, a veteran counter-guerrilla with several years in Drouhet's Rangers, is no stranger to combat, but it is immediately apparent that things are not going at all well, and he is greeted by a scene of grizzly carnage. Ramlee himself, propped-up behind a fallen log and still firing away with his M46 SMG, had been peppered with shrapnel from a mortar bomb that killed two of his immediate companions and made a tangled mess of their bodies, while a fourth trooper, also badly hit, was attempting to prepare a rifle grenade with one arm immobilized by a Gallagan machine-gun bullet. Automatic fire could be heard and muzzle flashes seen on either side of the track as, with Ramlee's rifle section and the platoon HQ holding the track itself, two other sections flank left and beat their way through heavy foliage, machine-gunners providing walking fire with their M31 LMGs until it becomes brutally apparent that the opposition is not about to be overcome. With flank attacks faltering, Wegner soon has no choice but to order a retreat, and within moments the platoon is running headlong through Yanam's border jungle in a desperate attempt to put some distance between itself and what Wegner can only assume are invading Gallagan troops. Ramlee, too badly wounded to walk and almost certain to bleed out before the platoon reaches anywhere near friendly positions, insists on being left behind to cover the retreat, but an enemy mortar bomb puts an end to both the Sergeant and his rifle-grenadier companion before Wegner has a chance to protest, covering the horrified lieutenant with blood and gore.

An anti-tank rocket streaks just overhead, exploding some distance forward as Corporal Mahathir, platoon anti-tank gunner, ducks back into the foliage where his no.2 is waiting to load another round. Wegner, wild-eyed and bloody, rises to his feet and shouts for them to get moving, motioning wildly until, suddenly, something knocks him flat on his face. He tries vainly to get up as the world around him loses focus, and the last thing Lieutenant Wegner sees is Mahathir, brandishing a machine pistol, running forward in an attempt to save his platoon commander, cut short when a Rumbiak Brigade bullet finds his heart.

Some distance to the rear

"Baker three, report! Come in, baker three!"

Regimental headquarters is in utter chaos as patrol after patrol reports heavy enemy contact, almost certainly the large-scale Gallagan invasion so feared by Crooked planners since Free Gallaga came into being, and now threatened explicitly by Rhinoceros Gate. Lieutenant-Colonel Muguet, commander of Drouhet's Rangers Regiment, finds his formation bearing the brunt of initial Gallagan attacks, and 9th Gallaga Brigade's support apparatus is soon overwhelmed by urgent requests for artillery and air cover. Muguet's headquarters, a jumble of canvas tents and radio trucks covered by what is perhaps an excessive amount of camouflage netting, is the scene of frantic activity as the Colonel attempts to best organize his regiment for its practically inevitable withdrawal into Yanam's flat, heavily-irrigated coastal plain, where it has always been hoped that an invasion might be stopped. Regimental artillery, reinforced to include a battery of 84mm medium howitzers, quickly runs out of ammunition as mortarmen in particular deliver inordinate fires to cover panicking rifle platoons and company headquarters under threat of being overrun, while close-support aviation is initially held-back by authorities in Fort Vasa, Yanam's capital and largest city, lest the Gallagan attacks be meant as a provocation.

A handful of friendly aircraft do finally appear as the day wears on, with most of Muguet's companies managing to hold their sectors if only tenuously. About a dozen DF.22 ground attackers, ungainly-looking aircraft with pusher propellers and spatted tricycle landing gear, buzz low over the jungle canopy and deliver their rather modest ordnance loads with pinpoint precision, though the coordinates given them by ground controllers, pilots are well aware, aren't always to be trusted. 9th Gallaga Brigade, Yanam Defense Command's most forward-deployed large formation with close to 8,000 personnel, is ordered to hold its sector against the large-scale ground attack that is almost certain to come, and its efforts, commanders know, will be vital in thinning-out enemy forces as they enter the more open terrain further east. Free Gallagan forces, particularly members of the Rumbiak Brigade, are thought to be highly-effective soldiers whose stamina and fieldcraft is likely to exceed that of local Yanamese troops, but it is also believed that their equipment is inferior to that of Yanam Defense Command's infantry formations. By relying on its heavier firepower, so the thinking in Fort Vasa goes, Yanam Defense Command might make the taking of vital crossroads, rail junctions and jungle passes costly enough that the Free Gallagan attack will lose substantial momentum in its opening stages.

Fort Vasa, Yanam

Crooked Gallaga's erstwhile capital, a city of handsome whitewashed stone architecture and palm-lined boulevards, begins preparations for a siege as news of fighting along the border becomes public. Sandbagged emplacements spring-up across the urban landscape, manned by smartly-dressed gendarmes and auxiliaries, while long-standing civil defense plans, first drawn-up in the aftermath of the Pyekian crisis, are dusted-off and put into action. More ominously, squads of plainclothes gendarmes and Section 19 counterintelligence operatives lead a round-up of suspected Federation spies and local fifth-columnists, men and women that government house had avoided taking-in for fear of provoking reprisals against Crooked nationals abroad, but matters had seemed to reach a critical point and no chances could be taken with potential saboteurs and propagandists running around Yanam Defense Command's primary logistical base.

General Emil Landsman, tucked away in a bunker deep beneath Fort Vasa's army garrison with hundreds of staff and communications personnel, knows full well the odds stacked against him as he takes stock of initial reports from the front. Invasion by Free Gallaga, possibly with Iansislean assistance, had long been a worst-case scenario for planners and politicians in Fort Vasa and Kingston alike, and few believed that a garrison numbering less than 50,000 personnel, even counting metropolitan forces, could hold out for long against Rhinoceros Gate if it brought its full resources to bear. Yanam did, however, have to be defended, and General Landsman had received word via submarine cable from Timor that, while Kingston would desperately pursue a diplomatic solution, Yanam Defense Command was expected to do its utmost. And Landsman did have some cause for hope, if not outright optimism.

Though Yanam had not received the same level of fortification as Timor had following the Pyekian scare, it would be a tough nut to crack. Roughly rectangular in shape, two hundred kilometers long at its greatest width and about 110 kilometers deep, Yanam brushes-up against jungle-covered plateau in its far western section, which in turn gives way to a flat, irrigated plain cut-through by rivers and canals reaching all the way to the coast. It is good terrain, in Crooked estimation, for defending, with plenty of bridges to be blown-up and plenty of areas where YDC's assumed superiority in mechanization might be brought to bear. Fort Vasa, Yanam's only major city and home to nearly half the population, is on one hand a sprawling, messy town, but Timor-style hardened fortifications were built covering its water supply, and its electrical plant is housed in what basically amounts to a huge concrete blockhouse. Factories within Fort Vasa itself can keen YDC self-sufficient in terms of ammunition and small kit items, while a series of four concrete artillery emplacements, using old eight-inch cruiser guns, covers landward approaches. As long as Fort Vasa's harbor can be kept open for vital food supplies, the city itself might hold-out even if the rest of Yanam is taken.

Landsman also, vitally, has a very large airforce at his disposal, some 238 combat types split between four aerodromes around Fort Vasa, all of them equipped with at least some hardened aircraft shelters. These sites begin to sprout AA guns in worrying quantity, most of them older, manually-directed 20mm Madsen and 40mm Bofors, but some of the modern radar-directed 76mm automatics are in evidence as well, along with a handful of AAR4 surface-to-air missile systems on trailers. Crooked fighters maintain a constant CAP around Fort Vasa while AG.470 jet bombers are armed and fueled for a planned raid against enemy marshaling areas, with H.77 and D.94 turboprop ground-attackers await permission to fly CAS and interdiction missions.

Timor

Orders from the Armed Forces Ministry in Kingston send Admiral John De Grasse, veteran of the Pyekian crisis and by now in his late-eighties, racing to sea with a force that would have put his earlier command quite to shame. The Navy anchorage at Kupang, a veritable soup of ships protected by a ring of anti-aircraft emplacements and landed 8-inch guns in hardened concrete emplacements, first empties of its submarines, twelve in all, which strike-out to the north and west before the day is out. Destroyers and light cruisers also depart the harbor at a steady pace throughout the day to join the carrier Rodney Stripe and its escorts Leopard, Tiger, and Jaguar on maneuvers in the Savu Sea. News that an Iansislean squadron had departed Batam had been picked-up by Section 19 by one means or another, and few now had any doubts about where it was most likely headed. De Grasse's fleet was, on paper, a very formidable force, but it would not do to have it caught in port, and, in the few days since Batam had emptied, it could have come very close. Timor's maritime patrol assets, five of the Air Force's very-long-range AG.445s and no fewer than ten H.32 flying boats, are airborne as soon as they can be armed and fueled, and quickly fan-out to monitor Timor's traditional seaward approaches while a number of smaller H.86s monitor shipping closer to Rodney Stripe as it races for Kupang to rendezvous with the fleet.

[Walmington on Sea]

"I beheld the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and at the heavens, and they had no light
I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled; and the hills moved to and fro.
I beheld and lo, there was no man; and all the birds of the heavens were fled
I beheld, and lo the fruitful field was a desert; all all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord, before His fierce anger.
For thus sayeth the Lord: 'The whole land shall be desolate, though I will not make a full end.
Therefore the earth will mourn and the heavens above grow dark, because I have spoken and will not relent, I have decided and will not turn back.'
At the sound of horsemen and archers every town takes to flight. Some go into the thickets; some climb up among the rocks.
All the towns are deserted; no one lives in them.
What are you doing, O devastated one?"
-From Jeremiah, Godfreyite Version

Location 32, outback Vazimbaland Viceroyalty

Location by name, no-such-location by nature, L.32 had history and, as its bunkers, billets, and on-going bedlam suggested, perhaps a future, too. Organised from what once had served as quartering for Calarcan and Iansislian scientists, Project Peabody was supposed to put their wartime efforts in the shade. Better yet, to bury them.

After a string of frustratingly indecisive military engagements with those who advocated the upturning of a right and proper Britannic Protestant order in the world -be it in favour of Fascist control or free-market frivolity- the Godfreyite Empire -or at least its armed forces- both requested and required the means by which to head-off further stalemates. Since the historic electoral triumph of the long-marginal Social Labour Party at the head of a frail government barely supported by minority partners largely connected to regional interests in Norbray and the lesser isles, this work had been relegated to a scope less broad and a location less intrusive than had previously been the case.

Oh, in the years immediately following the Anti-Fascist Wars, Walmington had been a wonderland of gadgets and gimmicks! The quirky 'tinkerers' paradise' aura was only finally shattered when a prototype Contra-Aeroplane Device, Bomb, Project-by-Rocket, Detect-and-Steer-via-Radio lost control and crashed into a historic branch of the Marigold Tearooms near Special Operations Wing's Norbray Proving Grounds, killing several well-heeled patrons. The new government was having none of this 'warmongering workshop' as SOW's NPG had been called during the election campaign and, as funding was cut, the number of projects dedicated to finding decisive war-winning technologies declined and relocated to the remotest parts of the empire.

And where could be more remote than the site at which the Antananarivo Device was first tested?

In happier times for the top brass Vazimbaland had played host to a tri-national effort to unlock the power of the atom and apply it to a war-winning end. Walmington, Iansisle, and Calarca had co-operated, and had triumphed, all be it perhaps a little too late to influence the outcome of a conflict in which all belligerents had long since lost sight of their initial aims. Despite this co-operation everybody knew that it had been Walmingtonian brains that did the difficult thinking, Walmingtonian hands that finessed the finer engineering points. Why else was the project based in a Walmingtonian dominion when the other two powers had all the Pacific in which to practice exploding things?

True, the Ians had since become independently capable with the device, but, well, monkey-see, monkey-do, eh?

The days of the good threesome were long gone and, despite the supposedly all-encompassing embrace of Social Labour's utopian vision, it was slowly becoming acceptable in come circles to begin saying what everyone had thought since the late nineteenth century perhaps, and the late nineteen-thirties at least (when the friendship became formalised with all that New Highlands malarkey and the Kriegsmarine conflict). They were a lot of tricky, covetous papists, weren't they? Not only Catholics -allies of convenience at their very best!-, but Catholics who would kill their own king! What next, would they start eating their horses and writing poems about feminine love instead of natural science, drinking wine instead of ale, coffee instead of tea? No wonder their empire was crumbling. And nobody said much of anything about the Calarcans these days.

Anyway, the need for strategic allies had faded with the life-or-death threat once posed by Fascism, and while Social Labour pushed its view that this made disarmament not only a strategic option but a social obligation, SOW and the military had to figure-out how to do more with less.

Ivor Comstive, once a socially inept and perpetually terrified 'Documentary Engineer' within SOW itself and now... well, no longer a Documentary Engineer Junior Grade at least, had lead Project Peabody to the ultimate solution, or so he thought and, as was his Walmingtonian wont, very much feared. Zero-hour was come, and Ivor's over-bite featured quiverring lip and stammering aplenty as his fingers, from which such a fumbling genius of scratchings had come as to enable this thing's construction, endlessly twisted and untwisted his monogrammed handkerchief. And he chunnered to himself.

"...my wrath shall break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done, burn with no one to quench it."

Comstive's colleagues had long-since given-up trying to get any real-time co-operation out of the damned Welshman whose periodic and seemingly divine surges of inspiration had exasperated them so over the years.

"...Flee for safety without delay! For I am bringing disaster from the north, even terrible destruction! A lion has come out of his lair; a destroyer of nations has set out. He has left his place to lay waste your land. Your towns will lie in ruins without inhabitant. So put on a sackcloth, lament and wail, for the fierce anger of the Lord has not turned away from us!"

Well, forget about him, he'd done his part, Godfrey knows not how, and the practical application was a matter for better men, Anglo-Saxons of course. Oh, and somebody get this damned lemur out of here! Can't you see we're trying to blast a ruddy great hole in this warped country?

"Then I said, 'Oh, Sovereign Lord, how completely you have deceived this people and Jerusalem by saying, "You will have peace" when the sword is at our throats!' At that time this people and Jerusalem will be told, 'A scorching wind from the barren heights in the desert blows toward my people, but not to winnow or cleanse;
a wind too strong for that comes from me. Now I pronounce my judgments against them!'"

Exclamations of stiffled alarm and restrained joy filled the bunker, and Ivor, stammering more than ever, continued in his church-mouse tone, uninvolved in the rapture as the earth shook and something previously unseen by Walmingtonian eyes now loomed above, casting unfamiliar light on the concrete caverns of L.32.

"Look! He advances like the clouds, his chariots come like a whirlwind, his horses are swifter than eagles! Woe to us! We are ruined! O Jerusalem, wash the evil from your heart and be saved! How long will you harbor wicked thoughts?"

Ivor was becoming louder, now, and people were starting to notice, throwing daggers and ploughing their brows as his chattering niggled in the side of their celebrations.

"A voice is announcing from Dan, proclaiming disaster from the hills of Ephraim. 'Tell this to the nations, proclaim it to Jerusalem: "A besieging army is coming from a distant land, raising a war cry against the cities of Judah. They surround her like men guarding a field, because she has rebelled against me!"' declares the Lord. 'Your own conduct and actions have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart!..'"

"Look, Ivor, it's worked, you must stop fretting! You know that wasn't like any of the others! It will be nine times bigger, like you said. You felt that, didn't you? For Godfrey's sake, do be quiet! Come and have a whisk... well, come and have a cup of tea, anyway, you tee... What are you fussing about, damn you, Comstive? Will you stop that while I'm trying to... oh, that tears it, boyo! Get your hands off me!"

The engineer was now frantic, stumbling about and grabbing at his colleagues, still reciting scripture as the blast wave rolled on towards the sea.

"...Disaster follows disaster; the whole land lies in ruins! In an instant my tents are destroyed, my shelter in a moment! How long must I see the battle standard and hear the sound of the trumpet? 'My people are fools; they do not know me! They are senseless children; they have no understanding! They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good!'"

It was a good deal more than nine times bigger than Walmington's largest Antananarivo event to date. A good deal. three and a half million tons of dynamite hole-digging had been done in an instant, and Ivor Comstive had shot himself right in front of his peers. But he hadn't done that quite as planned, either, and was still alive, all be it unconscious and missing a quarter of his skull. Perhaps he looked a little like Vazimbaland.

City of Walmington

Just as SOW would have it, there was no reporting back home on the matter of Vazimbaland's exciting day, though the Viceroyalty was coming in for a few mentions since the Social Labour-lead government dared to raise in parliament the prospect of decolonisation. After all, this was the nineteen sixties, not, er, the nineteen fifties! Adolescents were going longer between haircuts, one or two things were made out of plastic -before too long we might not even need Ceyloba's natural rubber-, Elliot's had sold a record-breaking twenty-three television sets in the last quarter of the previous financial year, and church attendances were down a fraction of a percent. Why not re-think the concept of Empire?

Honestly, some outposts almost seemed to be giving more trouble than they were worth, and the old Walmingtonian notions were resurfacing. No matter how hard you tried to civilise the peoples of the hot countries, the only way to really make a success of it was to take them somewhere cool, otherwise you'd pick-up more of their slovenly habits than your sun-addled self could manage to beat out of them.

Walmingtonian humanitarianism always turned out to be less honourably motivated than observers might have hoped. Slavery was brought to a prompt end when fears arose that the small population of early pioneers would struggle to attract more British settlers if wages were brought down by use of unpaid labour, and now it was being suggested that perhaps Walmington should withdraw from the colonies before too many Walmingtonian settlers and missionaries were turned 'funny' by the climate. Apparently Waynesia and the Cape were rife with corruption and cronyism (which would never happen back home!), not to mention petty street crime and, heaven forbid, casual racism, while some of the nation's finest entrepreneurs had come to ruin in trying to make Vazimbaland profitable.

But wasn't Ceyloba the exception? Viceroy Admiral the Governor Sir James Frazer was, after presiding over a whole generation in the life of the Viceroyalty, still popularly known amongst the predominantly Ceylobe masses as the Great White Prince and generally was afforded the proper respect. The uptake of Godfreyite Protestantism was at a rate far in excess of figures in other outposts, and the three pronged export strategy of tea, spices, and rubber meant that the economy was out-stripping growth in Mauretania and Saharaland -despite their bounty in phosphates-, Togoland and St.Thomas & Prince's Island -despite their own phosphates and their cotton, coffee, and cocoa-, and Vazimbaland, despite its... vanilla and very best efforts. Only the Cape and Waynesia were doing better industrially, and Ceyloba's levels of perceived corruption weren't even half of Southern Africa's.

Apparently none of this was enough for the new government, which was hosting community leaders from the distant island for no other reason than to discuss their country's place within the Godfreyite fraternity. The Conservatives were up in arms, Geoffrey Square directly accusing the Prime Minister of Bolshevist sympathies in a most un-Walmingtonian display of frankness, and asking whether the House of Walming should prepare itself to join the MapGelerts and Callahans.

Ceyloba

Out here -as in Africa- things looked a little different. A hundred thousand white Walmingtonians, chief amongst them Admiral the Governor Sir James Frazer, Viceroy of Ceyloba and the Gallagan Ocean's last great White Prince, who must by now have been incredibly old but had looked so for decades in any case, represented the bulk of the island's elite. They were joined by some twenty thousand other whites from here and there, mostly the rich or the would-be rich looking for their share of the imperial bonanza that had been paying out for just over two centuries. But the island's largest population group, as recognised by Walmingtonian authorities, remained those six million native Ceylobes who had, in those two hundred years, joined the Godfreyite Church.

Amongst their communities feelings on Empire were very much mixed. A good deal were prepared to see it the Whigs' way: the Empire was a Godfreyite family, and there was no honourable reason for anyone to go against the family. Sometimes life was tough, but wasn't that how life had always been? At least the Walmingtonians always kept the Churches in good shape, and brought cake.

Others, of course, noticed that while it was not unreasonable to suppose that a tough life was a Godly life, many of the island's whites, even the self-professed Godfreyites, didn't seem to be doing it all that tough at all. Usually this did not mean that they were to be envied, though some would seek to emulate them and often find themselves frustrated, rather it seemed to suggest that they should be corrected or even rejected as un-Godly.

Ultimately, while Frazer remained in charge, the malcontents amongst Ceylobe Godfreyites would remain a minority. The White Prince of Ceyloba was a good sort of king, dour but not really aloof, a thick-skinned old mariner with a certain pessimism about his disposition that appealed to the often devoutly Godfreyite natives more than to the often romantic Walmingtonians themselves. There just wasn't a great clamour for decolonisation from a people who thought the Empire was about faith not finances.

Then, some hundred and eighty thousand other Christians. Relics of Catholic visitation prior to and earily in Walmingtonian colonisation, misguided victims of on-going mission work by foreigners and the odd Newrian, too. They rarely seemed significant in the day to day life of the Viceroyalty. They knew better than to pipe up and be made to shut up.

More vocal were a hundred and fifty thousand Ceylobe Muslims, forty-thousand Hindus, and two hundred and ten thousand Gallagans, that is ethnic mainlanders, most of them Hindu, forty-thousand Christian, and a few who worshipped Godfrey-knows-what. These communities were becoming more agitated by the day as this squealer of a century pushed on. Allah this, Rumbiak that, Igo the other and some infernal nonsense about the Pope, too.

All these groups left a considerble hole in Ceyloba's population, of course, and into that fell some three and one third million Ceylobe Buddhists, a few of whom took their faith quite seriously while the rest, authorities worried, may not necessarily be disposed to non-violence. The progress of the Godfreyite Church into their communities was usually seen as a good thing, but of course it also served to harden the resolve of some followers of the island's pre-colonial faith, and a few even continued to claim descent from the native princes whose last hurrah had come after the 1750 defence of the Walmingtonian Trade Mission at Vollumbo. Even the Viceroy couldn't be certain about which way the wind blew through the remaining population of Ceylobe Buddhists. They weren't Godfreyites, but they weren't Gallagans either, not if you asked them.

The Cape Colonies

Well, we've heard all about this place. Beef? Great! Gold? Great! But do you need all these prostitutes? And, good Lord, what has happened to your accent, Sir? It puts one in mind of the cockney crook disguising his mischievous intentions from the local constable, and that makes one nervous, Sir!

The Margaret Huxton's cargo, contraband and all, was unloaded without trouble on reaching Port Mavis, and not just because on-looking RWA soldiers and Colonial Police were unable to understand half of what the dockers said while they worked. The uniformed men were there chiefly to make sure that work continued, and continued quickly. It was strikes, not smuggling, that now concerned imperial authorities, and nobody wanted to risk sparking another industrial action by interrupting work that was, for once, progressing smoothly.

This approach, since it only worsened the Cape's problems with criminal vice, was already backfiring at home, reinforcing the notion that climate zones had something to do with a population's moral fibre and charging the campaign for decolonisation. But was Social Labour, being the party at the heart of that agenda, destroying its own foundations by failing to address the military's strike-breaking policy in the colonies?

Ceyloba

And then, without warning, these internal struggles were cast in new light as an ultimatum came out of Nushield.

There was precious little chance of anyone getting close to formulating a response from Walmington within the two hour window of which they remained plainly ignorant. In fact, by then, the King still wouldn't know that a communiqué had been received, and the Prime Minister would still be scratching his head and giving it a tenth re-read.

Frazer would be almost alone in acting at all, and he only roused himself after reassuringly informing an aide that, "We're doomed, laddy, doomed."

The Viceroyal Ceyloban Army was alerted in the vaguest terms of a possible threat from the mainland only ninety minutes after the ultimatum's issue, and by then the RWA's liaison staff in the Viceroyalty had been sent a note on the matter but had not got so far as conveying its implication to field units concentrated near the capital. Frazer's continued role as Admiral in charge of Ceyloba Station at least enabled him to have the boilers fired aboard the battleship Prince Edryd and the station's lone first-rate carrier and trio of cruisers, and to issue orders for assessment of the Reserve Fleet at Kalle for the reactivation potential of its Eden Class battlecruiser, Chaspot Class heavy cruiser, its three submarines, and other light vessels.

But while the station had a third-rate carrier and a handful of escort vessels training not far to the island's south, and a few sloops ambling between here and the Cape also received word of a possible increase in the threat level, the bulk of the fleet remained at anchor in and around Vollumbo and to some extent the island's lesser ports. A few score RWN aircraft aboard the two carriers and at the major military ports might shortly be in some condition to react to threats, but the RWAF's contingent was as immobile as the Royal Walmingtonian Army, and Ceyloba had no air force of its own...