The Chimeran War was a worldwide conflict between humanity and the Chimera. The war began in December 1949 when the Chimera emerged from Russia and rapidly overtook Europe and Asia, eliminating or converting millions of the human population into Chimera in the process. The intentions of the Chimera other than global conquest were mostly unknown until the emergence of advanced alien artifacts and the so-called Chimeran tower network that led to the theory that the Chimera once inhabited Earth in prehistoric times and had motivations to use Earth for an unknown purpose.
The conflict had stretched for over forty years in which the Chimera made great stride in advancing and expanding across the planet for the purpose of activating the Chimeran tower network. In the wake of Operation Black Eden, the Chimera's intentions seemingly were to allow Earth to be reconquered by their parent species, the "Pure Chimera". By 1957, the Chimera had practically dominated Earth until recent events led to the destruction of the Chimeran tower in New York City, which was the hub for maintaining the wormhole for the Pure Chimera to enter, and causing the Chimera that are left stranded on Earth to lose cohesion and finally being defeated by the remnants of humanity.
Origins
About 60 million years ago, an alien parasitic race in which humanity referred to them as the Chimera, or their progenitor only dubbed as the "Pure Chimera," had once lived on Earth and was at war with another unidentified alien race. This conflict greatly defeated the Chimera; in which the Chicxulub crater was a remaining evidence of this massive, cataclysmic conflict. In the aftermath, the Chimera and its enemies abandoned Earth. All Chimeran and alien technologies, and other remnants of that war were left buried and undiscovered until the 20th century.
Prelude
By the early 20th century, the Chimera returned to seemingly reclaim Earth from humanity. It was widely agreed that the Chimera's presence on Earth was because of the Chimeran virus that was carried on the meteorite that caused the Tunguska Event in 1908. The virus then began to infect the local Siberians and other lifeforms; however, only one (local) account of the Chimera - a local shaman - was reported at this time, transforming after months of curious symptoms (the Crawler strain would eventually evolve to be rid of the months of symptoms and produce a faster result).[2]
Since their arrival in 1908, the Chimera were confined in Siberia, where they slowly built their strength and numbers by infecting the local people and wildlife around their point of origin. Sometime after the Great War, the Crawler strain evolved, and whole settlements began to be infected, which went unnoticed until the Chimera made their presence known to the Russian authorities in 1927. It was during this time that Russia entered into a stringent isolationist state after the Great War and rising paranoia of supposed "anti-imperialist" influences and insurgency seeping into the nation. Because of this, the Russian government did not appeal to the rest of the world for help in crushing the Chimera before they could amass their strength in full.
Early Russian military assault on the Chimera proved to be very costly in which the Russian government desperately turned to their scientists for a solution. Among those scientists was Doctor Fyodor Malikov, who managed to create a vaccine that allowed humans to becoming immune to the Chimeran virus. Russia's surviving soldiers were vaccinated with Malikov's vaccine, and became an initial success allowing the soldiers to fairly match against the Chimera. But gradually by 1930, the vaccine severely mutated the soldiers into crazed and feral cannibals that became known as the Cloven, who proceeded to desert and attacking humans. Within more than a decade, Russia was overrun by the Chimera.
The world remained ignorant and unaware of the Chimera's existence due to Russia's self-imposed isolationism, but several nations and organizations such as the United European Defence remained suspicious of the nation's sudden silence and had prepared a military stratagem should Russia ever invade Europe. Although European intelligence agencies and government higher-ups eventually became keenly aware of the Chimera's existence, but they erroneously believed them as the results of a Russian military experiment went wrong.
The United States government was also made aware of the Chimera. In response of the alien threat, the U.S. under President Franklin Roosevelt clandestinely built up its military and forging close alliances with the United European Defence. The U.S. military's Special Research Projects Administration was established in studying the Chimera and developing new advanced technology, and eventually creating an elite group of super-soldiers infused with Chimera DNA called the Sentinels. However, by the time of Noah Grace's presidential inauguration, the U.S. adopted a strong isolationist policy and cutting its ties with the UED. Although American military build-up continues, regardless.
Fall of Europe
Statistic of human military casualties during the Chimeran War.
In December 1949, the Chimera launched a full-scale attack on Europe in which their larger forces broke through Russia's Red Curtain and quickly bypassing Eastern Europe's static defenses, such as the Bratislava Line in Czechoslovakia. The Chimera's sudden invasion and appearance shocked and surprised UED military forces. Through the Chimera's swift devastation and advancement, the UED practically fell apart and the European nations were reduced to struggling to fend for themselves, and even against their own allies.
During the early phase of the invasion, mass influxes of Eastern European refugees frantically move westward and interned in cramped refugee camps in Western Europe, mostly in Germany. Czechoslovakia and Poland fell to the Chimera in late 1949 and early 1950, respectively. It is then noted during this time that UED intelligence noticed a startling lack of refugees in cities that have fallen to the Chimera. Notably, less than a thousand people survived the fall of Poland's capital, Warsaw; a city of two million. This is attributed to the fact that many populated city centers were infected with the Chimeran virus through Spire missiles that carries the Crawler strains.
The Chimeran expansion led to Italy being the last European continental nation to be conquered. UED forces reestablished their line of defense at Genoa, culminating into the Siege of Genoa in January 1950. During the Siege, Italian soldiers were overwhelmed by the Chimera, whom they refer to as "the deathless plague." It is revealed here that Italian soldiers had their morale badly broken due to the Chimera's abilities and ferocity, in which hundreds committed suicide rather than to fight, die, and possibly become the "unholy" Chimera, contributing to the battle's loss (although it is unlikely it would have been won in the end). The end of the siege led to the Chimera taking control of Italy.
A map depicting the Chimeran invasion of Europe.
With the fall of mainland Europe in 1950, only the United Kingdom remained free from the Chimera. However, any hopes the U.K. might be spared were soon dashed when the Chimera found their way across the English Channel by burrowing under the English Channel in October 1950. The British military collapsed against the might of the Chimera; the primary headquarters of the British Army, Central Command, in London were taken out when, after failing to invade the base by conventional means, the Chimera re-diverted the River Thames into the sealed base, and leaving only two-hundred men of fourteen-thousand inside the facility survived. As the Chimera advanced across Britain, wiping out cities to infect and convert human, as well as establishing their infrastructure, the tattered remnants of the British military abandoned the major population centers and retreated to scattered military bases and outposts throughout the country. Though they pursued a vicious and determined guerrilla campaign, their efforts posed no major threat to the Chimera. Western Europe was lost; to all intents and purposes, the Chimera had won. However, the remnants of the UED in mainland Europe banded together and waged a guerrilla war under Chimeran occupation as a resistance group known as the Maquis.
Operation Morning Star
- Main article: Operation Morning Star
Following the fall of Europe to the Chimera, the British military desperately saw the United States as the only other powerful nation dependent for their aid. A negotiation between U.S. President Noah Grace and Captain Rachel Parker, the highest ranking surviving British military officer at that time, developed in an exchange for a total of 12,000 American soldiers being sent to reinforce the British war effort, which the British would provide the Americans with intelligence and information on the Chimera, and including a powerful Chimeran creature, an Angel, that was captured by British Intelligence, for the Americans to study. The campaign, known as Operation Morning Star, would become a key turning point in the war against the Chimera.
A VTOL crashing after being hit by a Chimeran missile during Operation Deliverance.
American and British forces initiated Operation Deliverance as the opening move of Morning Star; 5,000 American troops were to be flown into the city of York, where they intended to rendezvous with Captain Parker and exchange weapons, supplies and troops in exchange for the Angel. Unfortunately, Parker and her convoy were ambushed and taken prisoner by the Chimera in Manchester and taken to a conversion center in Grimsby while the rest of the British were engaged in a full-scale battle to keep the Chimera from reclaiming the Angel. The Americans at York were on their own, fighting an enemy they knew little.
York had been chosen as a landing zone due to little Chimeran activity in the area. However, unknown to all until too late, Cloven forces lured a substantial Chimeran force to York, which was lying in wait for the Americans as they arrived. The landing turned into a massacre, with most of the troops shot down by anti-aircraft guns as they tried to land. The surviving American soldiers regrouped under the command of Captain Winters and seized control of an abandoned bus depot. They were able to repulse the Chimera long enough for tanks to arrive to reinforce them, but the Chimera responded with a spire attack that wiped out the remaining forces in seconds. Of the 5,000 troops dropped into York, only one survived: a sergeant named Nathan Hale, who survived being infected due to a partial immunity he had gained as a result of being a test subject in Project Abraham.
Hale was taken, along with his infected comrades, to the Grimsby conversion center, where he was able to escape the facility and rescuing Captain Parker in the process. The pair were able to summon a rescue, then flew directly to Manchester to join the battle in eventually recapturing the Angel. The creature was delivered to Northern Command in Cheshire, where it is only to find it under attacked by Chimeran forces. The Angel was forced to be killed by Hale. British forces continued their war effort with exceptional aid from Nathan Hale, in which during Operation Shear led to the partial discovery of a buried Chimeran tower in Nottingham, and soon to the extent of the Chimeran tower network discovered by Hale and Lieutenant Stephen Cartwright.
British and American forces during the Battle of London.
Given to the loss of Northern Command, Southern Command in Bristol was soon later attacked and destroyed, and forcing the British to retreat to one of their last remaining outposts in Cardiff where shortly after their arrival, they received a radio transmission from Hale (who had left on his own shortly after the evacuation of Southern Command to try and infiltrate into Chimeran territory) who had managed to infiltrate deep inside Chimera-occupied London that destroying the London Chimeran tower would eradicate the Chimera's presence in Britain. Captain Parker managed to convince the remaining American and British military forces under her command to launch a full-scale assault on London, culminating in the Battle of London. After arriving in London nearly unscathed, the joint forces advanced on the tower, pausing only to destroy Tower Bridge and Southwark Bridge so Chimeran forces from outside the city could not interfere, then began to lay siege to the tower. Simultaneously, Hale along with several other soldiers, infiltrated the tower to destroy it from the inside.
The battle was nothing short of a massacre, as human forces were swiftly routed, unable to hold back the unending legions of Chimera that emerged to defend the tower. However, the tide turned as Hale and the soldiers had managed to reach and overload the tower's main reactor, causing it to go into a critical meltdown and creating a large explosion which destroyed the tower. The tower's destruction had several major consequences: in the immediate aftermath, Chimeran forces in London collapsed and died within minutes of the tower's detonation, being unable to survive without the presence of the Angels that were killed inside the tower. The London tower's meltdown also triggered a chain reaction that destroyed every tower in Britain and creating similar results. For the first time in the war, the Chimera had suffered a major defeat. Britain was free from the Chimera's stranglehold on Europe, an event that marked a key turning point in the war.
With combat subsided, the British began to rebuild their country's infrastructure, search for human survivors and try to better understand their enemy. Nathan Hale, the man responsible for this victory, was declared killed in action by the Americans; though in truth, he was recovered a short time after the battle by SRPA Black Ops under the command of Major Richard Blake, who was under orders to reclaim any surviving personnel attached to Project Abraham, and was inducted into the Sentinel Program, which would become instrumental in preparing the United States for the inevitable Chimeran onslaught.
Despite the Chimera's losses in Britain, the Chimera would gained the alliance of the entity known as Daedalus, who become the de facto leader of the Chimera.
Operation Overstrike
- Main article: Operation Overstrike
Following the victory in London, the Maquis approached the British in requesting for their aid in destroying the central Chimeran tower in Paris, France that would liberate Western Europe from Chimeran control. At the same time, Lieutenant Raine Bouchard recruited disgraced British Lieutenant James Grayson, who had deserted some months before, after suffering a nervous breakdown following finding his brother Johnny Grayson half-converted into a Chimera, and gone on a personal vendetta to destroy every conversion center he could find, by offering Grayson a reprieve in exchange for serving as a mercenary under command of the Maquis and provide them with information on the conversion centers.
The British and the Maquis initiated Operation Overstrike on August 1951 which began to a disastrous start with much of the first wave of the operation was shot down by Chimeran Gun Towers built along the coast of the Netherlands. The combined British and Maquis forces were able to destroy these defenses and land in Rotterdam, and then reinforcing the Maquis' key stronghold in Luxembourg. The Chimera would later discovered the Luxembourg base and launched a full-scale attack. There Lieutenant Bouchard, along with her father Dr. Claude Bouchard were able to create a serum that would halt the Chimera's new conversion process by eliminating the Carrier strain, though Claude was killed, and James Grayson discovered that Raine had purposefully allowed herself to be infected with the Chimeran virus to perfect the serum. With Luxembourg lost, the British and Maquis fell back to their final stronghold in Reims, where they began to plan for their final attack on Paris. It was decided that humans forces are to be launch on two fronts: now Colonel Rachel Parker and Major Stephen Cartwright lead a full-scale attack on the Chimeran tower as a distraction for Raine Bouchard and Col. Roland Mallery to try to infiltrate a structure called the Chrysalis Lair, the central hub of the Chimera's new conversion process, and infected it with Claude Bouchard's serum and eradicating the Carrier strain.
However, Grayson tried to warn of Raine's infection and feared the worst that she will compromised. His warnings went unheeded by the Maquis in which Col. Mallery had him locked up for insubordination. However, Grayson was freed by his two former commanding officers, Rachel Parker and Stephen Cartwright, to stop Raine Bouchard, who listened to him and gave him a second vial of Bouchard's serum in case she failed and orders to infiltrate the Chrysalis Lair. Grayson succeeded in infecting the Chrysalis Lair, but at the cost of Mallery and Bouchard's lives. Though the Chimera's new conversion process was stopped, but in her last moments, Bouchard's human identity overcame her Chimeran persona and warned Grayson this was but a temporary victory at best, for the Chimera had already evolved a third method to convert humans; not only that, but they had already conquered worlds beyond Earth and they were simply too advanced to defeat.
Along with the eradication of the Carrier strain, the Paris tower was destroyed and, just as similar in London, set off a chain reaction that freed much of Western Europe from the Chimera, though they still retained the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and Russia. Even more concerning, the Chimera began constructing fleets of airborne battleships preparing for a new assault. European forces would renew their offensive into Eastern Europe, with intentions of reaching Russia and uncovering the source of the Chimera's invasion, in the hope it might yield some yet-undiscovered information or insight into their enemy.
Intermediate Years
From 1952-1953, not long after the conclusion of Operation Overstrike, British and Maquis forces under the command of Colonels Parker and Grayson launched a full-scale attack on Warsaw with the intent of liberating the city, and Poland, from the Chimera. The battle ended in a human victory; the tower was destroyed on June 12, 1953, but at a great cost to the British and Maquis, who suffered severe losses, notably James Grayson, who disappeared in the battle and has since been declared missing in action. However, unknown to all, Grayson survived and managed to infiltrate Russia, though he was somehow infected with the Chimeran virus. His fate, at present, remains unknown.
Concurrently, the Chimera, despite the loss of the tower network in Europe, launched attacks on both Axbridge and Bracknell, hoping to both regain a foothold in Britain and force Rachel Parker to divert troops back to the defense of Britain, causing a reduction of troop numbers in Europe that the Chimera could overwhelm at their leisure. Fortunately, the actions of SRPA's Specter Team thwarted the Chimera's plan in Operations Allied Shield and Viper Pit, both preventing them from starting a new invasion of Britain and weakening the defenses of the Chimeran towers in Europe.
By 1952, the Chimera launched new incursions into Africa at a staggering pace. The Chimera launched a series of initial attacks via airships along the northern coasts on April 6. At the time, military analysis believed that Africa would prove too hot for the Chimera to survive beyond the coastal regions; however, the Chimera have evolved newer strains of the Chimeran virus along with more advanced heat radiation implants that allow their troops to withstand much higher temperatures.[3] Once the Chimera established footholds along the African coastlines they were able to quickly build large quantities of infrastructure, including conversion centers, and factories for their war machines. In the last few days the Chimera have swept across Africa with truly unimaginable speed. According to British aerial reconnaissance, Chimeran forces have already begun excavation of at least twenty-three towers across the continent. Although their fuel reserves were dangerously low, the British have used naval aircraft carriers to evacuate over 170,000 African civilians from the Northern and Western coasts in the past twelve days.[3]
On July 30, U.S. military forces in Panama City sighted four Chimeran airships flying southeast toward Colombia. In the ensuing three days the airships blanketed South America with wave after wave of spire missiles. U.S. reconnaissance estimated that the Chimera targeted every city with population over 100,000. The Chimera then proceeded to excavate the Chimeran towers across South America.[4]
Invasion of the United States
- Main article: Invasion of the United States
In August 14, 1951; the Chimera finally invaded the United States when nearly the entire New England area was besieged by Spire missiles. American military forces were able to withstand the Chimeran assault long enough to quarantine the infected areas. Months before, Canada was invaded by the Chimera with similar results to New England, but on a greater scale.[5] This posed a greater threat to America's Northwestern regions.
In October, the American Northwest fell to the Chimera from massive Spire bombardments.[6] In late 1951, no longer believing a military victory to be possible against the Chimera, President Noah Grace enacted Project Omega, a top-secret contingency plan that proposed negotiating a truce with the Chimera. The plan required Daedalus, since he was the only Chimeran entity capable of intelligent communication, and so he was captured and brought to the negotiations at a secret military facility in Sheridan, Wyoming. Negotiations began in December, culminating on December 25 when Grace made Daedalus the ultimate offer: the Chimera could have the rest of the world, provided they left the United States in peace, unaware that Daedalus had no intentions of keeping any such bargain and was amused by Grace's presumption. However, seconds later, Nathan Hale, having returned from a hunt for Henry Walker, the Secretary of War, whom Grace had labelled a traitor, and whom Hale had found dead in a conversion center in Madison, Wisconsin, broke into the proceedings. Having learned the truth about Project Omega from Walker's recordings, and knowing what Grace intended to do, Hale executed Grace on the spot for his planned betrayal of humankind, while Daedalus made good use of the confusion to escape. In the aftermath of this debacle, Grace's death was covered up as a sudden illness and was succeeded by Vice-President Harvey McCullen.[7]
From 1952-53, the United States began making preparations for the inevitable Chimeran onslaught. By July 1952, the Liberty Defense Perimeter, a safe zone in the middle of America for the American population to outlast and defend against the invasion, was completed, and plans were drawn up to begin evacuating civilians to within it. Many other measures were taken, including a repeal on the immigration ban to help bolster troop numbers, the enactment of Operation Aloha that enforce the evacuation of several hundred thousand civilians to Hawaii, and numerous military strikes into gray territory to slow the mobilization of Chimeran forces.
Finally, on May 15, 1953, the Chimera to launched a full-scale invasion on the U.S. through a large fleet of airships under the command of Daedalus. The fleet served with the intended goal of unearthing and activating the Chimeran towers within America. Though SRPA and the American military fought hard, and made the Chimera pay dearly for every inch of ground they gained, by May 28, the Liberty Defense Perimeter fell to the invaders, causing the deaths of 63-80 million people, including President McCullen and his cabinet.[8]
Operation Black Eden
- Main article: Operation Black Eden
By June 1953, the Chimera had all but overrun America. The remnants of the American military and government took refuge, along with three million civilians, in their last stronghold at the Baton Rouge Protection Camp in Louisiana. Having seemingly achieved victory, the Chimeran fleet traveled to the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, where the power from the Chimeran tower network across the world was being channeled into Daedalus's flagship.
Although SRPA have no knowledge on the Chimeran towers and their purposes, at the direction of Dr. Fyodor Malikov, SRPA organized a desperate gambit in destroying the Chimeran fleet with a nuclear weapon and thwart whatever plan the Chimera intended to enact, known as Operation: Black Eden. Led by Major Richard Blake, he and Sentinel Team Echo, consisting only Nathan Hale and Joseph Capelli, infiltrated Daedalus' flagship and planting a fission bomb. However, Daedalus discovered their infiltration and killed Blake and attempted to dispose of the bomb. Nathan Hale was able to prevent Daedalus and killing him in the process. Hale and Capelli evacuated the flagship seconds before the bomb detonated. The flagship and the fleet was obliterated in a nuclear explosion. Unfortunately, however, humanity discovered too late that the nuclear detonation created a large surge throughout the tower network to New York City, where the city's hub tower was charged with enough power to open a wormhole to another part of space leading to presumably the "Pure Chimera's" home world.
Post-1957
Following the events of Operation Black Eden resulted in a spell of humanity's downfall, as by 1957, 90% of the human population were killed or converted in the conflict and any sense of a united military resistance to the Chimera was hopelessly non-existent, except for certain pockets of human survivors that was forced into a guerrilla war in an effort for survival. The Chimera were the dominant force on the Earth. Without the need for human hosts for conversion, the Chimera began a extermination campaign in wiping out what is left of the human race and furthering that by initiating a terraforming operation in cooling Earth into a harsh, colder environment from utilizing the tower network powered by the wormhole.
Though the Chimera remained unstoppable until recent events led to the destruction of the New York tower by a lasting effort by former Sentinel Joseph Capelli, in which the destruction of the tower allowed the wormhole becoming closed off from the Earth. The loss of the wormhole seemed to have nullified the Chimera's victory, proving to be the turning point of the war as without their tower and the cold climate to support them, the Chimera began losing their advantages against humanity. In an undetermined time, humanity have finally won the war and began to rebuild their civilization.