The Jade Falcon economy had overcorrected during their expansion bust, reacquiring the public facilities sold to private benefactors and sporting a healthy economy afterwards. So healthy, the Egyptian demands were laughable to a nation drowning in Kerenskies.
The tribute was denied.
The Egyptians, despite their peaceful ways, were really pissed about that. War-level pissed.
The Urbanmechs who had stood saluting the venerable Egyptian people for so long were brushed aside by Egyptian helicopter contingents, The undefended Baghdad was immediately seized by an Egyptian general thirsty to strike from a base so close to the heart of The Falcon. Finally, satellite photos brought back to Dinot by German astronauts revealed the true magnitude of the Egyptian holdings. They were magnificent:
Egyptian cities and Jade Falcon cities, with The Sea of Khans to the West, separated from the Trell Wan Sea to the East by the Straight of Pharaohs.
Everything else ceased for the Jade Falcons. The Great Project was canceled some 6000 miles short of the its mark, its engineers retasked to build a railroad through the Salt Jungles to reach to the Egyptian's Southernmost holding of Byblos.
The New Project persevered for 20 years, engineers dying of sickness, disease, and attacks from the never-ending Egyptian navy and elite, VTOL calvalry forces. Green-trimmed Night Gyrs trickled onto the Blood Fields between Byblos and the Salt Jungles and were slain wholesale, broke by the Egyptian's air forces and fearsome Timberwolf battlemechs.
Even after the completion of the New Project, and its terminal city of Twilight(pictured above) built around the Memorial Gyr, Jade Falcon forces fought and died for over 50 more years just to reach by Byblos, the city that would determine the course of the most important war in the world, waged between its two juggernauts.
Meanwhile, the original expedition forces sent to Rome were cut off from supplies and no longer supported by the Jade Falcons proper, but rather by the limited industrial apparatus of the cities they had already gained.
The people of Baghdad--rebellious and prouder even than their Khan--found to the surprise of all of Dinot, that there was no shortage of loyal Jade Falcons in their midst. The Egyptians who expected to be welcomed as heroes were torn from their helicopters, never again to bother Baghdad, which to this day maintains 9 divisions of loyalist partisans defending its walls.
Unable to garner help from their friends, the Persians, punished under constant aerial and naval attacks from across the Trell Wan Sea, deadlocked on the ground, and pushed into two wars at the same time, the Jade Falcons continued to pin all of their hopes on the front at Byblos, funneling troops and material into a battlefield so unforgiving that current estimates--100 years later--put the estimates of those lost over fifty years at an equivalent to 62 divisions of troops.
Comments:
Sounds like an insanely costly war just to deny a tribute. Almost wasteful, but when war is required, what clan can deny it.
Well, I'd only add, "...but when war is considered--or even found written on a piece of paper somewhere--what clan can deny it?" ;)
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