Days of Bitter Strength

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Where did it all begin? When was the first step taken on that downward path that led to Armageddon? Perhaps it was on that fateful June day in 2043 when President James B. Griffin, last of the sixty two presidents of the United States of America, was assassinated while attending a baseball game at Chicago's Comisky Park.

The collapse of the 69 States of the American Empire that followed and the subsequent disintegration of the allied Western economies brought a decade of chaos. What had begun as "The Pacific Century" was quickly renamed "The Century of Blood" - a period in which the only stability was to be found within the borders of China. It was from there - from the great landlocked province of Sichuan - that a young Han named Tsao Ch'un emerged.

Tsao Ch'un had a simple - some say brutal - cast of mind. He wanted to create a Utopia, a rigidly stable society that would last ten thousand years. But the price was high. In 2062 Japan, China's chief rival in the East, was the first victim of Tsao Ch'un's idiosyncratic approach to realpolitik when, without warning - following Japanese complaints about Chinese incursions in Korea - the Han leader bombed Honshu, concentrating his nuclear devices on the major population centres of Tokyo and Kyoto. When the dust cleared, three great Han armies swept the smaller islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, killing every Japanese they found, while the rest of Japan was blockaded by sea and air. Over the next twenty years they would do the same with the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, turning the "islands of the gods" into a wasteland while the crumbling Western nation states looked away.

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