A Darkness in My Soul

helping to escalate a mini-war into a major conflagration until our side was immune to attack behind its shield generators and victory was assured the West.
        Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.
        They made false promises that this was all the land they Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteriological war, for their population was so much greater than ours that it could not help but outlast us.
        The Alliance, furious, bided time.
        Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on Formosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China, the back door was entered and the house secured by the enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.
        But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans the rising sun, harbored in the islands.
        The following day, with even the peace criers united behind the government, the crash force working to erect electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched molecules in place and the generators backed with a second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war on China and Japan.
        We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.
        But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained intact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying captured territory, gone to the construction of "clean" bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and not decreased by that expansion.
        In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the countryside, people died, but even many of these were saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property damage, at this point, was zero.
        The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.
        The Japanese had already surrendered in order to protect what little unmolested lands the home islands still contained.
        The Chinese command center was discovered at last, destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and end. Or so everyone thought…
        "Thought?" I asked.
        "We have ambitious men for our military leaders,"
        Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.
        "Go on."
        "We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed military service laws," he said.
        "How so?"
        "Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Alliance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization -and because combat and planning for combat excites them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war, and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold war where guns were never fired. And before that, there were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit, they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and peace."
        I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth, the seeking together and the final