For various reasons having to do with Old Earth politics, Australia was given no award on the new world though New Zealand was. The population of Australia, such as wished to settle elsewhere, tended to gravitate either to Anglia, New Wellington, the Federated States, the Republic of Northern Uhuru, or-as a distant last choice-Secordia in South Columbia.
A final subcontinental sized island, dubbed Atlantis, lies in the Mar Furioso, midway between the Columbias and Taurania. This is the enclave of United Earth…
Chronology, History of, Part VII:
Time on Terra Nova, on the other hand, is measured since Anno Condita, 'the year of the founding.' This would not be 2037, the year in which the robotic exploratory vessel, Cristobal Colon, actually found the rift and the planet. Rather, AC is the year in which the first, sadly failed, colonization attempt was made from Earth, in the Old Earth year, 2060.
Establishment of a local calendar spelt a considerable problem for those early settlers who followed after the Cheng Ho disaster (qv). The Terra Novan year corresponded very closely to the Terran year, there being 31,556,926 seconds to an Old Earth year and 31,209,799 seconds in each orbit of the new world about its sun.
For the Salafi settlers this presented even more of a problem, one made worse by the fact that, rather than the one moon of Earth by which the Islamic calendar ran, Terra Nova had three, none of which quite ran to any schedule that suited the traditional Islamic calendar. The Islamics settled this more or less mathematically, by adding a fourteenth month, to commemorate the 'Second Hejira,' or Pilgrimage, adding days to some months, and creating a complex set of calculations to keep this calendar in synchronization.
One advantage to the new Islamic calendar was that now, at least, it matched the actual year for the world on which it was practiced.
From all parties-Secular, Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, etc-there was strong pressure to maintain the twenty- four hour day, of which Terra Nova had three hundred and fifty-five, and the sixty minute hour. This was done by increasing the length of the Terra Novan second to 1.017533901 Earth seconds. Ten months (basically the original months of the Roman Republic) of five weeks each were established, with an intercalary period of five or, rarely, six days between 35 December and 1 Martius.
It has worked about as well as any calendar system ever has, and perhaps a bit better than most.
Chapter Sixteen War is too important to be left to generals. -Georges Clemenceau
War is too important to be left to the politicians. -Colonel Jack Ripper (in Dr. Strangelove)
Hamilton, FD, 6/1/461 AC
It would be wrong to say that Campos was personally planning the invasion of Sumer. After all, that was not the secretary of war's job. Instead, SecWar was responsible for administration, for expenditures, for procurement and the like.
On the other hand, when the secretary of war is convinced that he is quite the cleverest man ever to live, that most of his subordinates- indeed most of the human race-are idiots, in short when the secretary of war is something of an arrogant blockhead, one can expect him to take a hand, and perhaps an unduly heavy hand at that, in overseeing the detailed planning.
It was all water off a duck's back to Virgil Rivers. He'd been in the Army for better than two decades, been raised in the army, for that matter. Arrogant overbearing assholes were all in a day's work, provided they were at least reasonably competent.
That much one had to give Campos. He was at least reasonably competent.
Competence, however, was not infallibility. This was a problem for Campos. He aspired to not much more than competence but, since he equated himself with competence and competence with infallibility, he had rather a difficult time of it when things went wrong.
'What the hell do you mean, Virgil?' Campos fumed. 'The Kemalis won't let the Fifth Division unload at their ports and won't permit them to cross the country? We need that division, plus the 731st Airborne Brigade, to hit Sumer from the south. Howellson from State assured me that the Kemalis would knuckle under.'
Rivers, who had not been privy to any such conversation and knew the secretary of state, Howellson, extremely well, rather doubted that. But Campos tended to hear what he wanted to hear. Rivers also had good cause to know the Kemalis, immigrants from Turkey on Old Earth, were altogether too proud to knuckle under to anyone. Moreover, they had domestic political problems with being used as a base to attack another Islamic state, even though their own was only nominally Islamic and largely secular. Indeed, the settlers to Kemali had come largely to escape the increasing fundamentalism of their native Turkey.
'Mr. Secretary, no how, no way, are the Kemalis going to let us bring the Fifth Division through.'
'Can General Thomas shift a force down to the southern part of the country?' The secretary asked.
'He says no, that everything he has he needs for the major attack from the north.' Since the northern attack was already being done on a shoestring, largely as a result of Campos' unceasing nagging to reduce costs, Rivers thought that Thomas had a good argument for not being stripped of forces. Whether Campos would accept that or not…
'Can we fly in something to the area of Sumer we control from the Oil War?'
'Yezidistan? There are airfields there that can take heavy lift, yes. Unfortunately, Mr. Secretary, most of the heavy lift we have we need for the major operation in the north. Even more unfortunately, with Fifth Division's armor loaded on ships and essentially untouchable for anything from weeks to about a month and a half, we would have to fly a unit, along with all its supplies, in from the Federated States. That would take a lot more lift than we can spare, tens of thousands of tons.'
'Allies?' Campos asked, hopefully.
'Besides the Yezidis, none,' Rivers answered. 'The Anglians and the other small packets from our allies are either needed for the major attack or are too small to be of any effect. And the Yezidis just aren't up to it even though they've been supplemented by our own Special Warfare people.'
The Yezidis were a caste-based Kurdish group that had left the area of Mosul, Iraq, en masse early in the 22nd century. They practiced what appeared to be a pre-Islamic-pre-Zoroastrian, as a matter of fact-religion with elements of Islam grafted onto it. They had never been accepted by the majority Moslem population who thought them 'devil worshippers' and among whom they had lived-usually not amicably-for centuries. The Moslems, mainstream as well as Salafi had often fought with the Yezidi, much to the disadvantage of the latter.
With the opening up of mass emigration to the new world the Yezidi had jumped at the chance to be on their own. They had a reputation as fine warriors. Reputation notwithstanding, they had been continuously stomped into the dirt by their neighbors and had seen their original colony parceled up among the Kemalis, Sumeris, Alawis and Farsis in the area. Even the Volgans had, at one time, had a piece of them. Rivers, who had worked with them in the past, thought they were posturing swine but, since the secretary had great expectations from the Yezidi, he kept his own counsel. He couldn't keep a look of contempt off of his face, however, and Campos saw it.
'What? You don't think the Yezidi will come through for us?'
Rivers sighed. Time for some honesty, after all, it seemed.
'Mr. Secretary, everything you need to know about the Yezidi is explained by their conduct during and after the Oil War. We told them if they arose in rebellion, in other words if they helped us by drawing off some of the Sumeri troops, we would help them. They rebelled all right, but they waited until after we had stomped the crap out of the Sumeri army on our own. They only rebelled when it seemed perfectly safe to rise up in the vacuum we created, and after we didn't need their help any more. Then they whined when even the shot-and-bombed-to-shit rump of the Sumeri Haris al Watini was able to crush their chicken-shit asses. They will do nothing for themselves or for us. Trust me on this. Politically they're unreliable and militarily they're worthless.'
Campos started to object but… he's been there. He should know.
Eager to divert the subject before he said something truly career damaging, Rivers asked, 'What about the Balboans? Could we use them down in Yezidistan?'
'One medium-light brigade to do the job of a heavy division, Rivers? I don't think so. Besides, that colonel we sent down, Ridenhour, has very mixed reports on them.'
Rivers, who had read the same reports, looked nonplussed. 'I don't understand, sir. Ridenhour was very clear that he thought they'd put up a good fight.'
'But what about their losses to friendly fire in training, Virgil? According to Ridenhour they've killed nearly one and a half percent of their own people just in training and just in the last year?'
'Well… yeah,' Rivers replied. 'Losses are not something that would deter Pat Hennessey from going ahead.
