Sean Patrick Hazlett
The term “Thucydides’ Trap” has often been used to characterize the evolving relationship between the United States and China. The phrase describes a situation where an emerging power threatens to displace a dominant one. It harkens back to a time when the rise of Athens and the Spartan fear of that rise made the Peloponnesian War inevitable. Whether China’s ascent truly represents a Thucydides’ Trap, it is fairly obvious that the United States and China are currently on a collision course.
In late October 2022, China’s ruling Communist Party awarded President Xi Jinping an unprecedented third five-year term as general secretary, eschewing a tradition of a two-term limit established since the death of Mao Zedong, the last leader to rule China for more than a decade.
Xi’s break with custom is an ominous sign of things to come for China. The elevation of Xi and the increased concentration of power in his hands have almost certainly increased the likelihood of future conflict. His calls for faster military development and defense of China’s interests abroad, as well as retrograde notions of a return to the past “glories” of Mao’s China are concerning. As I write this, the people of China are bravely resisting an oppressive lockdown in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Chengdu, among others, to protest the country’s zero COVID policy at a time when the rest of the world has long since returned to some semblance of normality.
His crackdown on Chinese entrepreneurs and shift backward toward a state-controlled economy could be especially damaging, particularly for a country that has one of the fastest-growing ageing populations in the world. According to the World Health Organization, 28 percent of China’s population—an estimated 402 million people—will be over age sixty by 2040. With a proportionally declining labor force, that rapid growth will require an adaptable approach to support this demographic shift; an approach that will challenge a China hamstrung by an inflexible and corrupt economy composed of state-controlled enterprises.
At the same time China’s domestic concerns are growing increasingly unstable, the country has become progressively bellicose abroad. Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea’s Spratly and Paracel Islands has involved a patient but inexorable march to steadily establish footholds on uninhabited islands claimed by multiple nations in the resource rich expanse using a strategy akin to slowly peeling away multiple layers of skin from an onion.
Not only do the Chinese employ this strategy at sea, but also on land. Since 1962, the Chinese military has been carefully creeping forward along its Indian border to seize contested land from its neighbor in the Himalayan foothills around the Line of Actual Control.
The Chinese have also ramped up military shows of force near the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which Japan also claims. The threat there is dire enough that Japan’s ruling party has proposed doubling its defense budget as a share of GDP from one percent to two percent over the next several years.
China’s military sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone to wear out Taiwan’s air defense forces have not only been provocative, but also have dramatically increased the likelihood of a war over the island. Chinese jingoistic rhetoric prior to US Speaker Pelosi’s 2022 trip to the island nation, and its simulated blockade and live-fire exercises afterward, represent yet another instance of concerning adolescent behavior by a rising power. And with more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity concentrated on Taiwan, such an attack would force the United States to intervene, not just to protect that island nation, but to defend its vital national security interests. In fact, the US National Security Council projects that the loss of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company could cause a one-trillion-dollar disruption to the global economy.
Most recently, in February 2023, the Chinese government went as far as sending a surveillance balloon over the continental United States, violating US sovereignty. The situation ended with US aircraft shooting down the object over the Atlantic Ocean and the US Air Force conducting an ICBM test in the Pacific Ocean as a show of force.
The infiltration of American society by Chinese interests is also a major cause
for concern. As of July 2020, the FBI was opening one new China-related counterintelligence case every ten hours, and half of the FBI’s five thousand active counterintelligence cases involved China. Chinese intelligence ran an extensive operation between 2011 to 2015 to influence and compromise local, state, and national politicians, including several members of Congress. One suspected intelligence operative, Chinese national, Fang Fang or Christine Fang, targeted rising politicians in the Bay Area and nationally, like Representatives Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Tulsi Gabbard, and Mike Honda.
The Chinese have also established unauthorized “police stations” in numerous countries around the world to include the US and Canada, possibly to pursue influence operations, spread propaganda, and harass Chinese nationals living in these countries.
Through talent recruitment programs like the Thousand Talent Programs, the Chinese government paid scientists at American universities to secretly establish parallel research programs in China, sometimes involving US federally funded research. In fact, one estimate suggests that over the past decade, the Chinese government spent two trillion dollars on such efforts—a sum larger than its military budget over the same period.
China has also been active in the cyber realm. Beginning in 2009, Chinese hackers infiltrated US corporate networks and stole trade secrets from dozens of US companies ranging from Morgan Stanley to Google. In 2014, Chinese intelligence hacked into the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel Management, stealing the personnel files of all current and former federal employees as well as all security clearance applications, affecting more than 22 million people, including the editor of this very anthology. In 2017, the Chinese military hacked Equifax and stole the sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans—nearly half the US population.
Chinese intelligence has also attempted to use its commercial technology as a Trojan horse to penetrate the telecommunications infrastructure of the United States and its allies. In 2012, Australian intelligence officials discovered malicious code in a Huawei software update that had infected that country’s telecommunications systems.
Even today, the FBI warns that video-sharing app, TikTok, owned by the Beijing-headquartered ByteDance, could be used by the Chinese Communist Party to influence users, control their devices, and even spy on US federal employees by hoovering up data about their location, preferences, and salacious details about their private lives that might make them vulnerable to compromise. In November 2022 and prior to the US midterm elections, Twitter uncovered three covert Chinese operations spanning nearly
two thousand user accounts to stoke partisan discord.
While the looming great power competition between the United States and China is only starting to heat up, the myriad histories of the next world war are now in your hands. What strange circumstances precipitated the Great Sino-American Conflict? Was it triggered by an ultrasecret US occult computer that hurled American soldiers backward in spacetime to thwart a Chinese-summoned eldritch horror or does an extraterrestrial intelligence spur an arms race that leads the two countries to war? Did a US military campaign in mainland China awaken a supernatural force that could move mountains and rend continents or did World War III begin with a bomb sent from the future to erase the past? To find out, gaze through the kaleidoscope of multiple realities and bear witness to the disturbing visions of World War III from today’s greatest minds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
Larry Correia and Steve Diamond
Three pairs of children’s shoes rested on top of a small, folded pile of clothes.
Considering the things I’d seen in various timelines, across several centuries, on more eldritch hunts than I could count, I don’t know why that sight bothered me so much.
Two members of my squad stood silently beside me, each staring down at the threadbare rags on the edge of a road outside a small town in the middle of podunk China. I could tell it bothered them too. I took a deep breath and knelt down, poking the clothing with my M5’s suppressor. We’d learned the hard way not to touch suspicious stuff with our hands.
“Careful there, Sarge,” Lieutenant Cicero warned. He nodded his head at a barely visible swirl of black dust. “That looks like the same residue that got on—”
“Private White and melted his face in Vietnam. Yeah, I know.” I heard one of the boys make a noise. “You all right, Mok?”
Specialist Mok had his eyes closed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Getting launched through time and space could be both mentally and physically degrading. “Yeah, Sergeant Cainho. Massive migraine. I feel hungover.” He wiped his nose and showed me his bloodied hand. “I don’t know how you down timers do this.”
“Lots of practice, kid.” I’d done this more times than I could remember. Mok was the new guy, on his first jump, attached to this mission as our linguist because none of my boys knew Bai, the primary Chinese dialect spoken in these parts. “You good for now?”
“Sure. I just traveled back to 2028 because the Pentagon’s top-secret occult computer warned us the PRC government in this timeline was about to summon some ancient elder god whose name no one knows how to pronounce to start World War III so they can conquer the world . . . before I was born. Yep. Totally good. Anyone got a Snickers?”
I remembered when Snickers had been invented—1930. “They still have those?”
Cicero pulled out a small piece of glass and scrolled through strings of data. We’d been born in the same era, but unlike me, the LT had adapted to all the crazy technology people took for granted now. “Looks like Snickers bars stopped being sold in 1987 in this deviant timeline.”
Mok sniffed at the light nosebleed. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
I flipped over some of the clothing, revealing more shiny black dust. A lot more. There was a certain feel to the stuff. It made the hair on your arms stand up. My team knew it well.
“Elder residue.” Cicero made the sign of the cross.
“All right.” I checked the countdown on my watch. “We’ve got two hours to stop these godless heathen communists from accidentally destroying the universe. This is where the wormhole dropped us. Where the hell are we?”
Cicero tapped on his datapad. “Shengcun.” Leave it to the miracles of future technology to make it so a West Point grad could actually do land nav. “It’s in . . . Yunnan Province. That mean anything to you, Specialist?”
“Yes, sir,” Mok answered. “It’s where they speak Bai.”
“No shit. Any notes on that toy of yours?” I asked Cicero.
“This area used to be known for rice terraces and markets. Some of these pictures make it look quite beautiful.”
I glanced around at the abandoned houses and empty, trash-strewn streets. The place stank like oil smoke and decay. “Yeah. Real tourist trap, LT.”
“That data packet say anything about, oh, I don’t know . . . giant, world-killing monsters?” Mok had backed away from the children’s clothes slowly as if they could explode at any moment. “This isn’t how I imagined visiting the land of my heritage, but, since we’re here, I suppose we should save it from being destroyed.”
“That’s the plan,” I lied, because poor Mok wasn’t cleared to know about this particular unit’s standard response for this kind of threat.
“Sensors are registering huge amounts of energy from that direction.” Cicero pointed. “An elder god might already be in this plane of existence.”
“Just our rotten luck. It’s Normandy all over again.” I gave a hand signal. The rest of the squad picked it up and passed it along. Riflemen rose from their covered and concealed positions. Time to move out.
Glancing over my squad, I could see exhaustion etched on their faces. How many missions was this? Twelve? Eighteen? Fifty? They all tended to blend together. Each trip through time and space ate at our minds. Each time we died and came back, things got a little stranger.
Most of these poor bastards had been in the 101st Airborne when we’d made a fateful jump into France, stumbling across a Nazi experiment that had gotten us stuck in an endless time loop. Our world hadn’t survived the unleashing of Yog-Sothoth at Mont Saint-Michel, but there were plenty of other Earths, so my squad had been plucked from the time stream and put to work. It hadn’t been the first time we’d been drafted. We were in an endless war where the eldritch gods feasted on our misery and loss.
Now we were all going slightly insane from cellular degradation caused by jumping back and forth in time, but the risks were fairly well known to us. The big brains back at HQ had machines that registered anomalies across timelines. These attacks were coming more and more regularly. My squad was a nothing more than a Band-Aid. Chewing gum plugging a hole in a dam. The scientists were trying to figure out why the number of timeline-killing events was accelerating . . . but not fast enough for my liking.
We moved toward the town, quick and quiet like.
Private Lunden gave the signal to freeze. Our machine gunner was a big, quiet fella, who’d been working lobster boats in Maine before the war. He had a gift for casual violence the likes of which I’d never seen. Sometimes I figured Lunden did so well in our current assignment because he’d been a little crazy before all this weird shit had started, so he’d had to make less of an adjustment than the rest of us.
I moved up to Lunden, and he pointed at the middle of the road. “If you tilt your head so the sun hits the dirt just right, you can see a black glimmer, like something left a trail.”
Signaling for Farris to check, I hunkered down to wait. Farris was a Jewish kid, who’d grown up in Idaho, guiding elk and wolf hunts. If there was a sign, Farris would find it.
Sure enough, Farris gave us the signal for tracks. Then he ran back to report to the LT. “Barefoot, and lots of them. Also, some animal tracks.”
“What kind?” Cicero asked.
“Don’t know, but whatever made them’s got claws.”
There were small, empty shoes on piles of clothing lining the path. That seemed somehow . . . profane. We didn’t see a single sign of life. No birds flew overhead. No squirrels fled from our approach. Even the sound of insects was absent. A light breeze caused the occasional door or window shutter to creak. The trail of black residue led through
the empty town, then further through the rice terraces. The sun reflected off the water, making each of the irrigated fields look like liquid gold. In another time, in better circumstances, this place might have been as pretty as the LT’s little machine claimed it was.
But now . . . now I could feel anxiety and paranoia clawing at my chest. The men were no different. I could see the death-grips on their M5s, tensed shoulders, and rapid breathing. There was evil in the air. With any other squad I would have been worried, but these boys had seen some things. We’d fought everything from Roman legions to dinosaurs. We’d watched unspeakable horrors devour the stars, died, and then gone back to work the next day.
“Trail narrows ahead,” I warned.
“That glare off the water is killing me. Can’t see a damn thing. Anyone got better eyes than me?” When no one spoke up, Lieutenant Cicero said, “Good spot for an ambush. The sensor is showing massive energy spikes. We’re heading in the right direction, in case anyone needed extra verification.”
“This feel too easy to anyone?” Farris asked. “Last time things were this obvious we got jumped by that shoggoth in the Civil War.”
The memory was hazy, but I remembered being dragged by tentacles into a mouth full of teeth, and then being chewed as I pulled the pins on every grenade I carried. It wasn’t the worst way I’d died.
The squad moved faster than I would have liked, but time was of the essence. The future Army had issued us a whole bunch of fancy doodads and gizmos to spot landmines or lurking snipers, but there was no substitute for good old-fashioned human intuition. Too bad neither man nor machine functioned properly under the influence of the old gods.
“Hold up,” Mok said. “LT, there’s somebody in that field. Shit. It’s just a kid. Looks like a little girl. She’s in bad shape. I’ve gotta help her, sir.”
The new guy splashed out into ankle deep water before Cicero could stop him.
“Mok, wait!” The linguist was normally smarter than this, but time travel messes with your head, especially for first timers. I rushed after him, but the kid had a lead. “Lunden, help me.”
Sure enough there was somebody lying in the mud. It looked like an average Chinese child. Rail thin. Filthy clothes. Specialist Mok closed on the body and started speaking in rapid Bai. I couldn’t understand a word of it.
I wasn’t going to fault any of my soldiers for wanting to protect a kid. But something was off. The girl was shivering violently, like a terrified dog. No, not shivering. Vibrating. Rhythmically. “Damn it, Mok!”
The girl leapt and spun. Her body convulsed in midair, and her hands suddenly doubled in size, transforming into massive claws. She swiped at
Mok, who fortunately had his rifle held before him. The girl’s claws struck the barrel as Mok threw himself backward. The girl’s mouth split into a wide grin exposing massive, pointed obsidian teeth. Her jaw unhinged like a giant snake as she threw herself on top of him.
I raised my M5 but didn’t have a clear shot. Then Lunden tackled her the instant before her claws could rip into Mok. The monster hissed and spat, clawing at the big man. A knife appeared in Lunden’s hand, and blood spattered from both of them as they rolled through the mud.
Lunden maneuvered behind the creature, then stabbed it in the throat and ripped the blade outward in a spray of arterial blood. Where it hit the ground, it landed more like tar than blood. Night black, thick, and it seemed to . . . move. The new necktie hadn’t stopped the monster in child’s skin, but it gave me a brief window, and I shot it in the chest repeatedly, before Lunden was back in the way, plunging his knife into the monster’s right eye. When the thing continued thrashing and tearing at him, he grabbed its head and wrenched it to the side as hard as he could. We all heard the wet crack as the monster’s neck snapped.
The creature went still.
I rushed forward and pulled the child’s body off Lunden. He was covered in black blood. The thing was far heavier than I expected. From the looks of it, it shouldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds, but felt like one-fifty.
“I’m sorry, Lunden,” I heard Mok saying behind me. “I didn’t . . . I mean . . .”
“Don’t worry about it, kid. I should’ve seen it coming. I . . . shit . . . I’m not feeling so good.”
I knelt next to Lunden. His arms were cut to ribbons and covered in the monster’s blood. As I checked his wounds, I found a hot patch of red blood under his left arm. I pressed my hand against the wound, but from the rapid flow, I knew it was too late. At some point the thing had pierced him through the armpit.
“That you Sergeant Cainho?”
“Yeah, Lunden?”
“Can you tell my sister . . . tell her . . .”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, even though Lunden’s sister had died of lung cancer in 1967.
And then he was gone.
The LT was shouting for the squad to set up a perimeter, and sending men to help me. He was no stranger to fixing goat ropes.
“Shit, shit, shit.” Mok collapsed against one of the terrace pool’s retaining walls. “How could I have been so stupid? How—?”
“Get your head on straight, Mok.” Where the monster’s blood had got on my gloves, my hands felt suddenly heavy. I ripped the gloves off and rubbed my hands together in the irrigation water. I felt . . . unclean. Like I needed to see a priest urgently. “We only have a few minutes before the trackers in his blood transmit a flatline back to HQ. He’s gonna blink back real quick here. Help me drag him.”
More men had reached us, and they barely paused when they saw Lunden was dead. We’d all seen it before. “Bishop, grab the MG. Milton, help Mok
drag him onto dry ground. Hurry.”
Farris met me at the monster’s body. He knew what to do. The thing’s hands were still massive claws. They weren’t covered in human skin, but rather were more like bone growths. He threw a loop of paracord around one of those claws, pulled it tight, then did the same with the other arm. We each grabbed a cord and struggled to pull the monster’s body back to lay it next to Lunden’s. We only had a few minutes until his body returned to HQ, and when it did, the monster’s corpse would go with him now. The scientists back there would want to study the creature. The girl. I forced myself to not think of the monster as what it used to be.
As we got the monster back onto the path, Flynn, our medic, was working on Lunden, but we all knew he was just going through the motions. Farris tapped my arm. “Sarge, I think only one of the monster’s legs worked.”
Sure enough, he was right. One of the legs was twig thin. The knee joint was bent backward in extreme hyperextension. Given the thing’s impossibly increased mass, the leg had probably given out.
“Maybe that’s why it was out here alone. Whoever turned the girl into . . . this . . . left her behind.” I thought back to the empty shoes lining the path here and had a sobering thought. A thought so sobering it made me want to drown it eternally. “Any of you see any adult shoes on the way here? Or just kids?”
Cicero turned a little green, while Farris just looked sad. The ancient gods couldn’t come into a world unless they were invited. Which was why they whispered promises of power to the worst men in history, telling them all they had to do was read these forbidden tomes, brew up this ancient potion, perform this specific ceremony when the planets align, that sort of thing. I hated when they used children as guinea pigs.
“We’ve got to see what we can learn from this body before they blink.” Cicero grabbed our medic and pulled him away from Lunden. “No surgical scars, but there’s something at the base of the neck. Flynn! Get over here and help me roll it over.” From their grunting and straining, the body was still impossibly heavy. Cicero gestured at the spine. “Looks like an IV port of some sort. They were giving her some kind of transfusion.”
“I bet that means there’s gonna be more,” Farris whispered to me.
The smell of burning rubber suddenly filled the air. “Everyone get back!”
Electricity arced all over Lunden’s body, then from his to the monster’s. Soon they were covered in a writhing ball of the stuff, then with an audible pop, they vanished.
“Sir, would you kindly check your glass,” I urged. “What’re his odds?” Cicero checked his device to see if any new messages from the future had passed through the wormhole. “There’s not a very good connection to his last place on the timestream, so Lunden’s only got a fifty-fifty chance at resurrection.” The LT took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
