Aerospace III - The Inuit Cycle

Aerospace III - Tasiilaq

Aerospace III : The Inuit Cycle

Tasiilaq

Gordon Best

This story and others are all over the place and please don't expect everything like events and times to line up.

Chapter 1 : Tasiilaq

Sondre Sermilik fjord was the entrance point for us chinese infantry ground troops. We had entered the Atlantic via the Suez Canal and moved fast in our large catamaran troop ships. We made an average speed of 50km an hour. In July we still hit rough weather and high winds as we approached Greenland.

Many of us were seasick and it was not a pleasant sight, in the rows of bunks on our side of the Cat. The men soldiers were living like us, but on the other side, and when we finally sailed up the fjord and beached the craft we got all the equipment off. Our clothing did not have that fresh scent of spring. You could say it was the best five days of our expedition because things were going to get worse.

We had left China, 20 troop ships strong. Huan and I, (my name is Lan) had been pulled out of school in May just before graduation. Every high school in Hainan Province had a cadet program and we were in it to get better credits. It meant we had weapons training and a morning run of 10km. We got extra time in the gym to tone up our bodies.

Someone in China, at the time I was training, had the idea that conquering Greenland would be a piece of cake. Some leader who is without a job or dead now. Dead like many of my friends are.

I figure we were 20,000 troops, 16,000 students and 4000 professionals. We all boarded on that day. Seven unmarked military ships left for the west and the Suez Canal. The other 13 ships were on their way to the Bering Sea and would pass over the Arctic Sea to come down on Greenland from the north.

We were an army traveling light. Most of us used mountain bikes with electric assist. Sondre Sermilik fjord was only a few hours sailing. The troop carriers unloaded on the shallow beach. Motorized carriers were set up to recharge the bikes at rest stops. Other small all-terrain vehicles carried heavier gauge weapons. I had a high powered sniper rifle and four kilos of shells on my back. The land was unbelievably sharp and at first I was sure we were going to be trapped by the tall mountains. But our leaders had the latest satellite maps and terrain information about this new land.

And it was new. Not many years before, this country had been covered by icecaps, glaciers. And the ground was hard in permafrost. Now gone, melted and new growth, grasses, moss and small trees were growing everywhere in the valleys. We passed spots where someone was doing reforestation. A road had been built north and bridges put in places to allow light traffic.

We must have lost 400 bikes in hidden sinkholes in the road. There was no warning when we hit them. I barely missed two.

And at first we did not see anyone. We were a regiment of 6000 troops. There were other regiments coming in from the east and the western coasts over the pole. Our regimental goal was to capture the region and the nursery domes. Others would capture coastal towns on the east and west shores. We had a few drone reconnaissance planes flying out in front of us. They were monitoring the airwaves and trying to see any movement on the ground.

And news got to us at the close of the first day of movement north of us. But the road continued as a rough gravel pathway and it was the direction we wanted to go. We were making 17km an hour and it was only after 15 hours that we heard the call to make camp. But it was eerily quiet. It was also midnight and there was no sign of it getting dark. So we bedded down for a few hours of restless sleep.

There are only 120,000 people in Greenland maybe 12,000 where we were going. They are students and tree planters. But it seemed our approach was so far unnoticed. If we had control of only three locations then we had the country.