Newport News, Virginia
Alexis Shah walks me through the No. 3 Dry Dock of the United States’ largest shipyard. Here the final touches are being put upon the latest generation of Seawaymax merchant vessels. The batteries, composite sails, and crew quarters are all installed, all that remains is the enormous retractable roof of solar panels. Mx. Shah is the Crew Chief for No. 3’s day shift, but began their career in Chicago.
We were under siege for four months. The NDF had the city surrounded, swelling their ranks with every beer gut and skinhead from Naperville to Paducah. They barricaded the roads, cut fiber optic and power liners. I know a lot of people today, and even during the war, like to say their plan was to starve us out. Make life hard enough until we surrender. No. They wanted to destroy Chicago, plain and simple.
They laid into us with artillery, homebuilt drones, even fighter jets they’d captured.
What about the Air Force?
The rebs had anti-aircraft missiles and interceptor drones they made off with. We’d occasionally see jets trading missiles overhead, and then streaks of exhaust or the high pitched zip of an interceptor. The pilots would either turn around, or…
They shelled us for about a month before the Air Force managed to do something about it. The rebs were killing people seemingly at random. Military, civilian, it didn’t matter. Nowhere and no time of the day was safe, it was a constant barrage. Schools, hospitals, food distribution centers, they’d hit all of it.
I remember when it really hit me just how bad it had gotten. I was riding back from Navy Pier with groceries. The place was crawling with military and relief workers, it was probably the safest place in the city with all the anti-drone systems. The minute our bus passed Michigan Avenue we could hear them. Ours and theirs buzzing and exploding like some demented hornet’s nest.
The kids on the bus were completely silent. They didn’t cry, didn’t make any fuss at all. They sat in silence with their parents with the same vacant expression I’d developed. The driver made plenty of noise. Ms. Ruiz was cursing or praying in rapid fire Spanish as she tried to get us away from the swarm, while we all just waited and wondered, “will this be it?”
It took our side about a month to move in enough anti-drones into town to knock out the NDF’s main batteries. I’d see them lifting off at all hours of the day, trying to get through to the other side. Day by day, the shelling started to taper off. And then, a day came and went, and there were no bombs, no shells, and no mortars.
I don’t think anyone even realized it until PBS announced that the USAF had regained air superiority over Chicago. I remember watching it on my phone on my way to work with a couple dozen other people on the Green Line. When I got back to my block, everyone was pulling out speakers and whatever junk food and booze they managed to save or homebrew. Me and my roommates had a couple bottles of mixers, and by the time I got back down stairs the city had erupted into a party.
Every speaker in the city blasted a cacophony of music celebrating what we thought was the breaking of the siege... it went on for two wonderful hours. First time anyone had been able to relax in weeks. The party was interrupted by another wave of drone attacks, and people ran into their houses, trampling anyone who got in their way. That moment of relief was stolen from us, just like everything good about the old world was stolen from us by those bastards.
The next day I went down to South Deering and got a job helping to reactivate the old harbor on Lake Calumet. I’d never worked construction before, I’d only ever worked in food service. But I wanted to do something that might actually get those fuckers out of my town.
Before the war, the harbor had been gradually abandoned and turned into a public park after shipping through the St. Lawrence never grew to what the city had expected. Now the military was scrambling to restore the old harbor to make it easier for them to move in troops and equipment. When the 3rd Marine Division “landed” in July, they came aboard boats that put them to port on Calumet. The concrete wasn’t even dry in a few places, but we got it built. That was the second time I felt like things might actually turn around. I was a lot more sure of it.
The strikes from the NDF had been reduced to a trickle compared to the deluge from a few months ago. This old timer I worked with, Nate Person, had been in Afghanistan and called it “shoot and scoot” campaign. The NDF didn’t have secure positions anymore, so they’d hit us by launching a handful of drones from the backs of trucks or mortar us from bombed out houses before moving just before our side could respond.
The military’s solution was to take Seawaymax commercial freighters and convert them to launch helicopters and heavier drones, either vertical take-off or launched by catapult.
The Robert Smalls-class expeditionary transfer docks.
Right. They’d ship in choppers and bigger drones from back East to give more air cover for the grunts. The first one rolled up not long before the Marines.
Every day more Marines arrived, and every day they moved deeper into the suburbs. At first, especially down South like I was, you could hear the firefights. But each day it was like the war moved a little further away. Food was less scarce, and the new offshore wind farm was going up so fast I often wondered how the ships would make it to our harbor soon. They’d even started replacing all the glass that had come off the skyscrapers.
After four months under siege the city’s high-rises were naked hulks of concrete and steel. The glass had either been shattered by the NDF’s bombardments or removed to avoid further risk to the people below. Many of the smaller buildings outside of downtown had been destroyed or abandoned. That wasn’t unusual in the Midwest, and we were luckier than most. Starvation had been avoided thanks to resupply by sea and I-80, but the average resident of the city was a lot skinnier by the middle of summer. I’d dropped around 20 pounds, I think more from the stress than anything.
By Fall, the Army and Marines had made it all the way to Marseilles and Rock Island. Some people, usually younger guys, would watch the helmet cam footage, but I always tried to avoid it. But you couldn’t avoid the aftermath. Those who were badly wounded always came through Chicago, and those that had died were flown out of O’Hare. I tried to ignore it, and just focus on work.
Thankfully, work was always busy in those days. The docks were always crammed with ships, either taking people out of the city, bringing it with supplies, or exchanging raw petroleum for refined product in the city’s refineries. The war had turned Chicago into an oil town, and the refineries were working at peak capacity while the Gulf Coast was still coming back online.
I think for every merchant ship you had at least one military vessel ferrying in troops and vehicles.
From the shore, Lake Michigan all but disappeared from the ETDs, freighters, and tankers. Attacks from the air had pretty much stopped, but you couldn’t step outside without hearing a low hum from the thousands of propellers from our side’s drones. With the end of the siege, Chicago had gone from a dreary reminder of the human cost of war, to the safest port in the storm for soldiers, sailors, and marines rotating through the city.
Bars and restaurants that had been boarded up all spring and summer filled with troops and civilians alike. You couldn’t get a table on a Wednesday night! It got so bad that the city had to impose a 4-drink maximum policy per business, just to keep any one location from being overcrowded. Offshore wind turbines, solar panels, and deep-well geothermal equipment were being shipped in from the Green Zones to restore power, just to keep up with all the industrial activity so close to the front.
Anytime you meet a former or current resident of Chi-Town, 2029 is always remembered as “The Year of Whiplash.” We’d gone from bad, to worse, to good, to bad, to great… And then the cold rolled in.