I'm not a man prone to bouts of anger--anymore, I mean--and there are few whose name sparks as much rage in me as "Versad Montoya." There's not exactly much to like about a guy who got three billion human beings vaporized.
Let me set the stage. By the 2060s, shit has gotten pretty bad all over the globe. Climate change, factionalism, capitalism eating itself. If you look at what's going on around you right now, where it ends up hardly comes as a surprise.
What happened first was some countries breaking up and others forming new governments altogether. The United States fragmented after decades of civil turmoil, some of which turned quite violent. In practice this was a devolution of federal power down to the states, which then established informal regional councils to coordinate their efforts like the federal government would have, if it hadn't collapsed. In that sense, it was a rather smooth transition, even if the path to get there required a lot of legal wrangling, stochastic terrorism, etc. etc. In some ways it wound up being a distinction without a difference.
The problem was that you still needed large-scale coordination. Large governments breaking up into smaller states meant militaries couldn't be as big, coordinating research efforts was harder, things like that. Supranational bodies like the United Nations fell into irrelevance. Everybody still sent delegates, sure, but it was a token gesture. It didn't really matter. The European Union struggled to hold together, too. Even China faced major issues with breakaway provinces. Something had to give.
Several years of diplomatic haggling and people getting tired of the reality of such balkanization led to some, let's say, streamlining. Economic and legal integration led to full military union and before long you had two vast powers with at least nominal control over the planet. The Americas constituted the Western Alliance. Everybody else, essentially, belonged to the Eastern Confederation. It would be naive to imagine that these political entities represented their constituent peoples in some equitable way. The Eastern Confederation was basically China's show to run. Likewise, the Western Alliance was dominated by former US, Canadian, and Brazilian interests.
You can already guess that things get ugly when the two come to blows, but that took a while. Initially, they were pretty cooperative with one another. They hammered out trade agreements, ensured boundaries and territorial waters were defined such that nobody was going to stray into the other's turf unbidden, and so on. They even shared research on combating climate change, for all the good that did. Large areas became increasingly uninhabitable, causing refugee flows on a regular basis. You could say the two powers didn't have much time to fight each other because they were constantly putting out fires in their respective backyards.
One such brush fire was the Hammer of God, whose acronym is goofy as hell in English, but was more fearsome in the original Arabic. Their relationship with Montoya would not have been an obvious route to the near-extention of humanity. We're just a species full of surprises, aren't we? Except for our propensity for killing each other. That one doesn't surprise anybody, eh?
I'll step back and talk about Montoya for a minute. He came from the poorest of the poor in Venezuela. If not for where his life led later on, you could appreciate his grit and perseverance. As a child, he worked as a courier for Adalberto Cuerva, whom I mention because Cuerva's great niece was future Terran president Beatrice Cuerva. A funny observation here would be that despite a gruesome global war and the alleged shattering of global power structures, you still ended up with the same sphere of people running shit. Sad but true.
Anyway, Montoya rose through the ranks of Cuerva's criminal empire. His specialty was inciting fear, and anyone who didn't fear him enough wouldn't live long enough to learn better. He wasn't all bad, I must admit. He got rich off of crime and he used a lot of that money to improve impoverished communities. Cuerva was assassinated in 2041, maybe by some of Montoya's guys, maybe by competitors. Who's to say? Montoya filled the vacuum. He spent the intervening years positioning himself as a community organizer, businessman, philanthropist... got himself catapulted to the presidency of Venezuela by 2050. Eloy Cuerva, Beatrice's father, took over the Cuerva empire. Montoya was a big deal, clearly, and he knew it.
He managed to launder his past sufficiently that by the time he was elected to the presidency of the Terran Alliance in 2062, he was just a squeaky clean good guy who'd spent his whole life making his home a better place. Nobody pulls off this kind of ascent alone, obviously. He had friends and they had friends and everybody agreed someone like him was the ideal person to hold the Alliance together as some other problems began to intensify.
Shifting frame to the Confederation, Tai Hao was born in 2010 to a wealthy Hong Kong family. His upbringing was deeply enmeshed in both business and politics. He was groomed for power, just not in the same circumstances as Montoya. If Montoya rose up feeling rather indifferent about the ultimate role of the Western Alliance, Tai's opinion was that China could only be hampered by joining the Confederation. He was willing to accept he was wrong about that after China did join and became the new center of power for over half the globe. He Ning became Premier of the Confederation in 2050 and Tai was instrumental in that success, which led to the latter being hand-picked as He's successor when the premier's health declined. One of Tai's first acts was to oversee the accession of the United Kingdom of England and Wales into the Confederation--the final holdout of any significance.
Now, back to those brush fires. The Hammer of God was far from the only such problem, they were just one of the most unusual. The fragmentation that plagued the first half of the 21st century showed no sign of abating. There were indigenous decolonization movements, religious fanatics, definitely some packets of assorted fascists and racists who wanted their own ethnostates. It was getting out of control and the supranational governments ostensibly in charge of security were proving inadequate to the job, albeit not for lack of trying.
The Hammer of God was an odd case. They originated in Tunisia but they weren't strictly Muslim or anything. They concocted their own brand of syncretic religion that borrowed a little from everything, was deeply apocalyptic, and their message of impending global annihilation was appealing to a generation of people fed up with governments moving chess pieces around the board without doing anything to actually improve anyone's lives. I can't condone their methods--they did things like blow up sporting events and assassinate low level political figures who defied them--but they were pulling in a fair number of sympathizers and they had to be dealt with.
Initially, their growth was stymied by Islamists who wanted roughly the same patches of land, but in a handful of years the Hammer had... hammered them.
That was terrible.
Yeah, well. Here comes the fun part. Their founder was a guy named Izz Gaffari, definitely a crank as religious zealots who found violent death cults tend to be, but he started turning over a new leaf and considered moving the Hammer toward a more humane course. An Olive Branch of God, if you will. That obviously pissed off the true believers, including one Ullah Haseeb, who arranged Gaffari's assassination while blaming it on foreign agents. Haseeb took Gaffari's place and set his sights on recruiting among the Western Alliance. He got the ear of Arnold Strucker, a sympathetic defense analyst working for the Alliance, and they bided their time.
Montoya's popularity hit the skids due to hard times and a handful of scandals. He needed a win, and the best place to look for that is against an outside enemy. He couldn't attack the Confederation head-on, nor did he want to, but rogue terrorist elements? Sure, why not? Strucker's advice floated up the chain and they funneled arms and money to the Hammer of God to carry out some strikes in Arabia against some other unsavory groups the Alliance had it in for. Unfortunately, they were too good at their jobs and Montoya got nervous. He knew how to give a good speech and rally people, but the contours of international relations were a little beyond his expertise. He feared what would happen if the Confederation learned he'd bankrolled fanatics on the latter's soil. So, he did what any smart leader would, and ordered that his pawns be burned as soon as possible.
Strucker caught wind, tipped off Haseeb, who then ordered Strucker to put a bullet in the president's head. As sleazy as he was, Strucker couldn't bring himself to do that, so instead he confessed everything. Montoya understandably lost his shit. He warned Premier Tai that the Alliance was making a preemptive strike against a terrorist base in Tunisia. Tai wasn't thrilled and he said so, but that should have been the end of it.
Haseeb turned out to be a hard man to kill, though, and he and a handful of his acolytes made it to Beijing, where they tried to kill Premier Tai since they couldn't get to Montoya. At the same time, more Alliance strikes were made against suspected Hammer targets on Confederation territory.
I personally don't blame the Premier for giving the order to strike the Alliance. The information at hand suggested the Alliance, and Montoya personally, were trying to decapitate the government of the Confederation. We know now that that wasn't the case, but at the time you had a Premier who narrowly survived assassination by a fanatical group being funded by the Alliance at the same time the Alliance seemed to be engaged in a coverup of that very fact. Tai panicked and gave the order.
The nukes, as they say, were flying. There are a lot of mythical concepts about new life, new worlds, new ideas being "born from the ashes." They aren't wrong, but stopping to think about what those ashes used to be is a hell of a thing.
It's a small comfort, maybe, that Tai and Montoya didn't live to see the new world be born. I got to see it, and was born anew in some ways, myself.
People used to ask, "if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler?" As a matter of fact, I took a crack or three at baby Montoya. It barely made any difference. When the world is on a course for oblivion, it takes more than one person to steer it. It takes a whole system--many interlocking systems, even. You replace one cog in the machine, another takes its place.
You could say it's unfair of me to hate Montoya, then, knowing he was just a piece in a much larger puzzle. But I have to hate somebody for all this, and it's him or me.