In the modern age, the success of any large-scale conflict is almost wholly dependent upon airpower superiority. Without it, victory on the ground comes at the far greater cost of casualties and material resources. These factors in turn take a grinding toll on troop morale and public support for the campaign, particularly for the aggressor.

In the months before the breakout of fighting, pressure was mounting on Tammy Li to resolve Canberra's frustrating stalemate with the Esterlands. Her Unity government - regarded primarily as a mouthpiece for the Joint Special Advisory Cabinet - was still suffering at having failed to act on the ECR problem early on while it had the chance.

Shortly after Unity had swept to power in the election, the country was harshly divided over the controversial nature of Li's victory. With serious allegations of electoral fraud and foreign interference plaguing her first steps in the leadership role, a federal investigation was threatening to derail her newly sworn-in government before the ink had dried on the paperwork.

For Li, the struggle to fend off accusations of corruption while consolidating her power among the senate far outweighed the trivial issue of some insignificant township collective on the east-coast refusing to pay its taxes while spouting anti-government rhetoric. It was thought the rebellious co-op, playfully christened the Eastern Cities Republic by admirers, would simply die its own death if starved of federal funding.

Nevertheless, the recently established National Intelligence Authority (NIA) was not entirely willing to dismiss a potential threat developing in its periphery. It formed a taskforce charged with monitoring the territory for signs of potential trouble.

Records show, however, that a number of warnings presented to JSAC ministers concerning the ECR's growing separatist ambitions, foreign financial backing and proliferating regional influence were inexplicably ignored by the cabinet which, at that time, was facing renewed backlash after dissolving the country's long-standing ANZUS alliance in favour of strengthening military ties with Beijing.

Around the halls of Parliament House, the ECR was referred to jokingly as Kon-Ron, short for 'Kingdom of Nowhere, Rulers of Nothing', which perhaps goes some way to explaining JSAC's dismissive mindset. Some in the cabinet even believed the NIA taskforce was overinflating the threat to justify a budget hike. The oversight was soon to be lamented.

For Canberra, the first overt sign that the problem was not so trivial came after the startling declaration from an international coalition recognising the ECR leadership as a legitimate territorial government. The member-nations of this new Australasian-Pacific Coalition Command (originally AusPaCC but later truncated to just PaCC ) included the United States, the U.K, India, Canada, and Germany, who were quick to push their agenda across the table by dispatching a combined merchant/military convoy at port in New Zealand across the Tasman Sea. Their stated intent was to establish trade relations with the ECR.

Far from the ECR having slowly withered on the vine as expected, it had mutated into a clear and present danger to the government. Blindsided, Li was now confronted with a whole new minefield of hostile foreign policy to negotiate while protecting the integrity of her borders.

The first PaCC vessels approached the Australian east-coast days later, where Li had already sent naval forces to blockade the span of maritime boundary claimed by the ECR, with additional muscle provided by Canberra's newest defence ally in the form of a sizeable contingent from the Chinese navy.

A clash ensued as Li's government steadfastly refused to allow the PaCC convoy to cross the maritime boundary and port at the Esterlands harbour town of Kingston. Attempts made by ECR vessels to venture out and rendezvous with the fleet in open waters were countered by aggressive tactics from Australian and Chinese naval ships, including two incidents of trawlers being rammed by larger military frigates to prevent their passage through.

Then, an unexpected naval crisis for Beijing in the Indo-Pacific region provided opportunity for the PaCC fleet to make an incendiary, game-changing move. On a wet September morning, as the stand-off at Kingston entered its second week, Capt. Neil Hayden of the Royal Navy exploited a weakness in the reduced Sino-Australasian ranks to spear his HMS Renegade through the blockade and harbour his ship further north at Ellis Cove.

At Cosh's urging, the ECR leadership immediately granted Hayden 'ambassadorial right' to occupy the cove and surrounding region. Three hours later, the USS Rigel and HMS Vigilance were also stationed offshore at Ellis, having escorted the first merchant vessels to officially make port in the Esterlands.

The outrage in Canberra was palpable. It furiously proclaimed Hayden's actions an invasion of sovereign territory while demanding all PaCC vessels remove themselves from Australian waters. That demand was refused, and the resulting naval escalation came a hair's breadth from igniting all-out war in the South Pacific as Beijing threw its own military support behind Li.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this moment in the Occupation saga, as the coalition's determination to hold its ground at Ellis Cove laid the foundation that ultimately secured the ECR's future.

After five days of intense confrontation, Li backed down, conceding the disputed coastline to the PaCC fleet. Although seen as a loss of face for her cabinet, Li's decision came in response to warnings from the National Intelligence Administration of a suspected coup being plotted against the government from senior elements within her own military. At NIA's urging, the withdrawal at Ellis was a necessary compromise for JSAC to retain power.

Still, JSAC knew that if PaCC's ground forces pressed further inland, they would permanently extend their foothold on the continent. Australia simply lacked the military strength to even consider going up against such might - an order which many active service troops would revolt against anyway. It meant any offensive action would require Beijing deploying vast numbers of PLA soldiers on the mainland.

To compromise, Li treatied with the coalition to hammer out a laundry list of deals and accords determining the requisite protocols regarding foreign military involvement in the country.

Chief among these was the Tasman Accord, which placed strict controls on the number of troops or material support Beijing could deploy on Australian soil. In return, PaCC would likewise have to retain its forces behind the demarcation line at Ellis Cove, a region now considered an embassy protectorate of the Esterlands.

Essentially, this arrangement meant PaCC could maintain an unmolested - if somewhat restricted - presence on the Australian mainland, but that the ECR would need to fend for itself in the event it was confronted militarily by Canberra.

Over the next half-decade, the PaCC coalition rapidly developed Ellis Cove into a fortified operations centre dubbed Neilstown-on-Sea, in a nod to Hayden. His name was also lent to the narrow, fleet-protected naval channel extending from the coastline at NoS out to international waters.

The Hayden Naval Corridor (colloquially known as the Hayden Gap) presented the Esterlands with a much-needed interface to the outside world and the economic advantages it offered. It saw massive industrial expansion throughout the ECR as coalition nations pumped a wealth of resources into fast-tracking its development, with Villastona soon adopted as the territory's capital.

In the same time period, the prickly truce with the ECR had given Li time to fully assert her authority over the nation's rebellious states. She had quashed the investigation against her electoral victory, purged her dissenters and opponents from the senate, and re-structured the military command hierarchy to place allies in the top jobs. With the exception of a growing insurgency taking root in the south, the country was close to being wrapped up in her increasingly iron-fisted grip, though she faced ongoing struggles to find respect among the international community.

Foreign trade sanctions were being imposed on Australia due to mounting evidence of human-rights violations by security forces, while its scientific community was being shut-out of multinational research and development projects, essentially blacklisted in every field where sensitive data could not afford to be compromised.

The country was also suffering deeply from a brain-drain crisis, with tens of thousands of academics and highly skilled workers migrating away to escape Li's increasingly authoritarian rule, many of whom would later resettle in the Esterlands.

In what is sometimes referred to as Australia's 'Dark-Age', it was a period of foreign exclusionism and scientific stagnation that further eroded the country's former prosperity.

Unsurprisingly, Beijing had not been thrilled with the terms of the Tasman Accord, and after five-years of suffering the PaCC fleet harboured at NoS, began breathing down Li's neck to reclaim the separatist territory before it grew any stronger.

To highlight the need in acting sooner than later, intelligence chiefs were pointing to a worrying rise in seditious chatter nationwide. Li's hesitation to confront the ECR was being seen publicly as weakness, and the last thing Canberra needed was for the territory to inspire others in testing the waters of revolution.

Despite Beijing's growing insistence that military force be her primary option, Li was highly wary of sending armed troops into the Esterlands to snatch back streets and cities at gunpoint. It was well known that the southern insurgency had been gun-running arms to Cosh for years, meaning the chance of being dragged into violent guerrilla warfare was almost inevitable.

To this end, the government launched its oddly-named Eastern Progression campaign, whose mission was to annex the Esterlands slice-by-slice and as passively as possible

The first stage of the campaign was to extinguish the ECR's extended support framework by wrapping up its so-called 'breadbasket satellites'. These were agricultural townships whose existence at the outermost fringe of the territory made them easy targets given their relative isolation from the core-state.

By implementing reinforced blockades to encircle and starve a target population into submission - known as blockstar tactics - JSAC could keep its distance and mostly avoid the accusations of excessive violence levelled at its security forces in the past.

Responsibility for enforcing these blockades fell to the government's newly badged SADR paramilitary outfit, which many critics pointed out was just a rebadged model of JSAC's original bilateral security force, largely dismantled in the wake of the William Oakey riots as a concession to calm public anger.

SADR had actually been covertly operational for some years, employed heavily to combat the southern insurgency, though it had failed to make much headway while taking more casualties than the government cared to admit.

With surprise on their side, SADR moved in rapidly around Gammerston, Tenbarrow and Marlow Peak in the ECR's furthest south-west region. Heavy blockades were established on all known trails and roads as power, water and communications were severed or jammed. SADR's primary order was simple: nothing in and nothing out until these towns 'voluntarily' relented to complete federal control.

Unprepared for such a scenario, Tenbarrow and Marlow Peak both capitulated within a week. Their local leaders were dismissed from public office, though granted amnesty from prosecution as a means to encourage further cooperation as the campaign rolled on.

Gammerston, the largest of the three which had access to its own water supply and was supplementally powered by a bio-gas plant managed to hold out another twelve days before it too relented to the reality of life under siege. Some desperate civilians had even tried to run the blockades, resulting in several violent encounters.

The further SADR moved inland, however, the more resistance it faced, and when Cosh decided to enforce an armed border around the ECR core-state, Li had all the justification she needed to trigger reactive measures in accordance with freshly legislated anti-secession laws.

Unleashing her crucial advantage over Cosh's ground-based militia, Li gave the order to initiate an air-intimidation campaign in the hopes of shaking the ECR's resolve.

Deploying both Australian and Chinese airforce contingents attached to the Joint Defence Task Force (JDTF), fighter aircraft began invading the skies over the Esterlands day and night in a relentless and menacing reminder of just how utterly exposed the territory was to airpower.

The effect was terrifying for the civilians below, but the move proved a double-edged sword for Canberra. While JSAC had been able to censor much of the Eastern Progression's ground campaign, there was no hiding from the world images of warplanes buzzing the skies over the ECR.

Although the Tasman Accord did not strictly prohibit coalition air-sorties, PaCC dismissed putting up their own aircraft to run interference ops. Airspace delineation over the Esterlands was an already highly contentious issue as there was no legal consensus on where the territory's border officially began and ended. If the collision risk alone wasn't already high enough, it would only take one nerve-wracked pilot to start the missiles flying.

As such, PaCC chiefs elected to keep their own aircraft on stand-by primarily to defend the fleet at NoS, leading to further debate among the coalition as to what measures could realistically be taken if bombs started falling.

A serious discussion took place about covertly arming Cosh with mobile anti-aircraft weapons (AAW's), delivered to the Esterlands via a proxy. This was already standard practice for supplying the ECR with traditional small-arms.

The notion made some member-states nervous. Providing Cosh discreetly with assault rifles was one thing, giving him the ability to shoot down JDTF warbirds, a third of which were on assignment from the Chinese Airforce, raised the stakes by an order of magnitude.

Then, around early April, the subject became a moot point after an incident in the northern Philippines, where rebel forces had fired two surface-to-air missiles at a Chinese fighter as it scraped the country's airspace boundary. Footage recorded by the militants showed both missiles tracking towards their target before simply losing control, splashing down into the sea without detonation. The fighter escaped unscathed.

Amid a flurry of speculation from the intelligence community, it was surmised that the fighter had been armed with EMBERS (Electro-Magnetic Burst Emitter Reaction System), an advanced countermeasure using intense bursts of focused EM radiation to bit-flip and corrupt data being processed by an incoming missile's internal guidance system. A difficult-to-implement technology, EMBERS had until then only been successfully integrated by the U.S, British and South Korean airforces. Now, it seemed, China had joined the ranks.

There was heavy speculation that Beijing had knowingly been sending its fighters into range of the militants solely to provoke such a response, likely hoping to demonstrate the effectiveness of their EMBER system on a public stage.

Of course, PaCC chiefs were never going to allow their fleet and forces be threatened by aircraft that could dodge standard countermeasures. They responded by heavily bolstering air-defence capabilities at Neilstown-on-Sea, installing state-of-the-art high energy laser weapon systems and railgun interceptors. The United States also deployed its deadly Black-Arrow missile defence system for the first time on foreign soil.

Using multiple redundant, radiation-hardened components, it was one of the few operational surface-to-air missiles that EMBERS was wholly ineffective against.

Complicating matters further, government aircraft found themselves being constantly targeted by Black Arrow's LiDAR tracking station at NoS. JDTF pilots were becoming increasingly unnerved at the prospect of being fired upon, prompting yet another furious war-of-words between governments.

Beijing issued a severe warning to PaCC that if a single Chinese aircraft was shot down, the response for the West would be nothing short of 'cataclysmic'.

Canberra began arming JDTF fighters with anti-ship missiles while doubling the number of sorties over the Esterlands in 'enhanced freedom of air navigation' missions - a stickling reference to the maritime manoeuvres practiced by Western nations through the contested South China Sea, frequently at Beijing's outrage.

Cosh, meanwhile, was busy watching the steady encroachment of SADR troops close in on the ECR's core-state with growing concern. A confrontation on the ground had been anticipated, but Li's employment of airpower was a bold and unexpected move, and the question of whether she would actually commit to her threat remained to be seen.

Then, on May 28th, the shooting war ignited at Barminwah, a cluster of independent settlements just beyond the ECR's western border that had remained largely neutral until that point. What began as a brief skirmish at a bridge crossing quickly turned into a hard push by SADR to claim the settlements, erupting into a much fiercer battle after Cosh committed his Esterlands militia to the fight.

The Barminwah settlements, as you are surely aware, united during this period to become the city now known to the world as Harburg.

Within days, the Battle for Barminwah was inciting firefights across the ECR's border as SADR forces were unchained from their restrictive rules of engagement and ordered to fight their way to Villastona - the designated capitol of the Esterlands.

When it became clear that Cosh's militia were more organised, more numerous and far better armed than previously thought, SADR troops found their previously fluid advance beginning to stall. JSAC, desperate to retain the initiative and capture the ECR quickly, opted against any convention of staged escalation, instead going straight for the kill and choosing to deal with the ramifications later.

On June 8th, two JDTF fighters on a sortie out of Williamtown Airforce Base were given the greenlight to drop ordnance, striking a known militia weapons cache and training facility just outside of Kilrossy in the ECR's south. Three of Cosh's fighters were killed in the attack, with eleven others seriously wounded. No civilian casualties were reported.

As air-strikes go, it was a relatively minor action, but the bombing was a statement in itself - a crystal clear message to the Esterlands citizenry that Canberra was done playing games and that nowhere in the ECR was safe from its reach.

The U.K, which had been the most vocal by far in its criticism of the Eastern Progression and JSAC's rampant influence over the Australian government, was quick to respond to the bombing. Foreign Secretary George Pyrmont, often scathing in his contempt for Canberra, said during a press conference:

“I fail to see how Chinese warplanes engaged in offensive operations over Australian soil fits any rational narrative of democratic autonomy. It seems more an embarrassing testament to the ludicrous facade at hand, and I think it's high time we accept that within the halls of Canberra, Beijing is the tail that wags the dog."

The remark prompted a storm of protest from Canberra, who accused Pyrmont of being 'the perfect template of regressive colonial nostalgia in the face of Australia's new alliances'.

Pyrmont also earned a stern rebuke from Beijing, who strenuously insisted their supporting of anti-insurgency operations in Australia had come solely at the behest of the government without 'any undue influence on national governance or policy'.

To this, Blaise Sanders, in an article for The Post, retorted; "...you could hear the collective eye-roll sound out from the foreign press corps after being fed a line straight from page-one of Subversion for Dummies."

Regardless of the international condemnation it faced, JSAC pushed ahead with the air campaign. Fighters began hitting bridges, roads, utilities infrastructure and weapon caches while SADR continue its advance. The defences at Tamsin Ridge and Kilrossy collapsed in days under sustained bombing raids, both towns later serving as SADR forward operating bases.

Although JDTF fighters had attempted to avoid striking civilian-heavy targets, the casualty rate among Cosh's militia was growing by the day. When Cambria, the first town inside of the ECR's core-state began to crumble, many believed it signified a death knell for the Esterlands and its PaCC alliance. It was clear the lines could not be held nor the losses sustained without some way to clear the skies.

That something was about to make itself known in a big way.

On July 9th, two JDTF pilots, Captain Jianguo Sung and Flight Lieutenant Brad Malvic took off from Williamtown, bearing north on what was far from a routine strike sortie.

The target was a recently identified militia compound. Intel had been received from reliable assets that a number of ranking ECR commanders were meeting that night, with high probability that John Cosh would be among them.

It was the moment JSAC had been waiting for. If the intelligence proved sound, the opportunity was present to wipe out the ECR's upper hierarchy in a single blow and accelerate the territory's defeat on the ground.

The two pilots both carried much heavier payloads than on previous missions. JSAC was taking no chances; if Cosh was at the meet, they wanted enough ordnance dropped to ensure the job was done twice over. Malvic was even carrying a 'bunker-buster' in the event the target building was merely a shell disguising the entrance to an underground facility.

Sung was the more experienced of the two, a pilot nearing the end of his operational flying years. He'd served a majority of his career between postings in mainland China and providing air security around the Paracels in the South China Sea. His family maintain that he resented his attachment to JDTF, feeling disillusioned at Beijing's mission on the Australian continent and the distance from home. Messages to his wife show he was ready to return to China and serve out the final stage of his career as a flight instructor.

At twenty-seven, Malvic was an Australian native who'd longed to fly since childhood. After joining the airforce straight out of high school, he only just failed to make the cut for the fighter pilot program, instead going on to operate heavier surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft.

Malvic was known to be heavily critical of the ECR, seeing it as a smear on the nation's history of solidarity. This opinion he supposedly developed only after his commissioning into the airforce. His father claims he was simply an impressionable young man who fell prey to the relentless JSAC propaganda machine.

In the wake of JDTF's formation and the controversy surrounding its mission, a number of RAAF pilots resigned in protest, including many from the air-combat squadrons. It left a sudden vacuum to be filled, and Malvic was offered a second chance to retrain on fast-jets before subsequently being streamlined into an fighter role with JDTF.

On this night, as Sung and Malvic drew closer to the Esterlands, they were lit-up by the ground LiDAR station at NoS, something they had grow accustomed to and dismissed with little concern. The men had already flown a number of sorties together and knew Black Arrow would remain silent to their deadly agenda.

At just after 23:00 hours, still shy of the border, they turned onto a final bearing to make their attack run on the compound.

Twelve seconds after crossing into ECR airspace, Sung's fighter was suddenly struck without warning by a missile which had escaped detection from his aircraft's EMBER system. Sung was killed on impact, the wreckage of his fighter crashing into a rocky plain just north of Balron.

Malvic, having witnessed the strike, panicked and immediately banked around hard to clear the kill zone. Moments later he, too, was struck by a second missile which completely sheared through the fuselage of his fighter. Though severely wounded, Malvic was able to eject, coming down in the mountains just shy of the ECR border where he was later recovered by a SADR search and rescue team. The young pilot would succumb to his injuries several days later.

Within minutes of the two aircraft going down, the entire state of conflict changed. PaCC immediately denied responsibility, claiming the missiles had not originated from their Black-Arrow system. An enraged Beijing, however, seemed determined to strike against the fleet at NoS.

For the second time in half-a-decade, the world was brought again to the tipping point of war until Canberra's own analysis showed there had indeed been no launches of any kind from NoS before the attack.

Nevertheless, next-gen AAW's capable of shooting down an EMBERS-equipped aircraft were among the most highly controlled inventory within national arsenals. They didn't just fall off the backs of trucks and they couldn't be purchased on the black-market.

Given that only a handful of governments even possessed such missiles at the time, the implicit accusation was that one of the coalition's member nations had broken the arms-treaty to supply Cosh covertly, which in Beijing's eyes was no different than PaCC pulling the trigger itself.

The accusation was legitimate, of course, but leaders of the West again refuted the claim, demanding proof of collusion that would stand up to international scrutiny.

In the days that followed, Beijing cast the net wide, turning to its massive global intelligence network to find said proof. With highly placed and reliable sources installed across a multitude of foreign military industrial complexes, a missing consignment of next-gen AAW's should not have been overly difficult to spot.

Looking for discrepant shipping logs, altered armoury records, unchartered flights and even analysing the gossip and pillow-talk from the sailors and soldiers based out of NoS should have yielded some clue leading to proof of PaCC's complicity, yet the search turned up nothing.

After forensic analysis of FLT Malvic's downed aircraft showed the offending missile was foreign to the known arsenals of PaCC member nations, it was suggested that the ECR might even be producing its own AAWs - a possible but highly improbable scenario given the time-frames involved and that such a specialised capability was unlikely to have escaped the notice of Canberra's spies.

Crucially, without a guilty party to blame, Beijing had no one to vent its rage upon, nor a strong enough reason to violate the Tasman Accord. Furthermore, it was hard for the superpower to plead victim when footage of its warplanes making bombing runs across the ECR was making headline news across the planet each night.

What the world couldn't know is that Sung and Malvic were the first victims of a weapon that would soon become synonymous with the battle for the Esterlands - the Axion.

Developed by the Norwegian military to counter the rising threat of advanced Russian airpower, the Axion surface-to-air missile was a fearsome weapon which had been the country’s best kept secret for years. Outside of Norway, its existence was known only to a handful among British intelligence, read-in on the weapon while war-gaming NATO responses to Russian invasion, and who cautiously proposed Axion as a solution to the dilemma.

The Norwegians, at first heavily opposed to their wunderkind system being employed outside the European theatre, eventually relented, perhaps in solidarity given their own history of resisting occupation. It's also likely they were keen to field test the system given that political upheaval in Russia at the time suggested Axion might never be called to use.

Even today, the original weapon specifications remain classified. What is known is that Axion's propulsion technology was revolutionary at the time, the first operational hypersonic interceptor missile that was also man-portable - a key factor in the role it was to play.

The U.K now had access to a powerful and virtually untraceable weapon the ECR could defend itself with, though getting Axion into Cosh's hands would prove more challenging. It was no secret that NIA was operating numerous spies throughout the Esterlands, and while ECR counterintelligence units had become proficient in weeding them out, there were still enough flying beneath the radar to make a handover risky.

Making matters harder, the arrangement would need to be kept secret from other PaCC member-nations, not just to create a genuine state of plausible deniability, but also due to suspicions there were leaks within the coalition. With the demarcation line at NoS under constant surveillance, British intelligence needed someone with the skill and experience to infiltrate Axion over the border while also willing to play scapegoat in the event the weapons were discovered.

Enter Chris Truman.

Leader of the bloody southern insurgency responsible for numerous attacks on government officials and national security forces, Truman was already a sworn enemy of the state - a polarising figure enjoying almost folklore status across his homeland.

Although better known for his militant activities, Truman was a master smuggler with an established network expanding across the continent. It was he the coalition had turned to in arming Cosh's militia forces with small arms. As far as the British were concerned, Truman was a proven asset and their best chance to get Axion over the border before it was too late.

For the task, Truman entrusted only the closest of his inner-circle, men and women who'd been beside him since the earliest days of the insurgency.

Precisely how the weapons were smuggled into the ECR while it was near surrounded by SADR forces remains a mystery, but from most accounts it is believed the launchers and their missile complements were brought ashore somewhere on the central northern coast by operators from Britain's elite Special Boat Service.

These men rendezvoused with Truman and his reduced team before travelling east into Queensland and then down the coast into New South Wales. From there, Axion was infiltrated across the ECR border using one or several of Truman's many routes before being handed over to Cosh in a highly secretive meet.

Like Truman, Cosh would entrust Axion and its usage only to those whose loyalty was beyond reproach. These were men he had known for years, long before he was named the ECR's primary defence commander. Most were themselves experienced ex-military operators who'd been fighting alongside Cosh since the shooting began. This also made their training in handling the weapon much more fluid.

These crews were left under no disillusion as to the absolute condition that Axion could not be captured, photographed, sketched, discussed or even dreamt about. It did not exist. Failure to uphold this contract would offer Beijing the proof it needed to justify fully committing its own military forces to the war effort.

So imperative was the need for secrecy, the weapons were each armed with scuttlebugs – little more than overkill thermite devices able to disintegrate the Axions into fine ash if capture seemed imminent.

With time against them, the next step was to put Axion straight into action and create a shield the Esterlands so badly needed. This meant demonstrating the weapon's power. For that, a trap would need be set, and so Cosh offered JSAC a target it couldn't refuse - namely, himself. By feeding just enough information to the ears of known spies, he could offer his new Axion operators predictable targets, while also forcing the government to question the veracity of future information being received from their assets.

Cosh's plan, as you now know, worked as smoothly as hoped, and when Sung's aircraft went down outside of Balron, the wreckage was turned over to PaCC scientists and engineers, giving them a sample of Beijing's fighter technology and its vaunted EMBERS system.

All that remained then was to keep Axion on the move and invisible from the spies and satellites, made possible by its relative portability. Over the next two weeks alone, JDTF would lose another three fighters trying to reclaim its dominance, with two pilots killed and a third taken captive by the ECR's militia forces.

Realising they must be dealing with a well-concealed, mobile surface-to-air weapon, they turned to higher altitude autonomous air-combat drones to continue the mission, yet even these advanced and expensive vehicles fell victim to Axion's impressive reach and power.

While Beijing was publicly threatening to eviscerate whichever nation was supplying Cosh with such technology, JSAC realised Axion would cost them too dearly if they pushed the air campaign further. With no choice but to side-line the most lethal component of its offensive capabilities, the government found itself locked out of the eastern air-corridor, forced into a brutal ground war it would eventually lose.

After weeks of relentless bombings, mounting casualties and a sizeable chunk of the ECR now annexed by the government, Cosh finally had the shield his fighters desperately needed to make a stand on equal terms.

Ironically, it was the Axion deterrent responsible for pushing JSAC into approving the use of artillery against the Esterlands - weapons that would go on to wreak enormous damage on militia forces and the civilian population alike as the conflict turned bitter.

As for Norway's role in the war effort, its involvement was never intended to be made public for at least fifty years, yet on the tenth anniversary of war's end, Tobias Vikanes - the former Norwegian defence minister - inexplicably revealed during a live television interview that his country had been responsible for provisioning Axion to the ECR.

Even a decade after hostilities ended, the fallout of Vikanes' revelation was disastrous for Sino-Norwegian relations. Beijing furiously pointed out that Norway had portrayed itself as a friendly trade partner throughout that period while simultaneously arming the ECR with weapons to shoot down its aircraft, and the country along with its people were accused of being collectively responsible for the killings of Jianguo Sung and a second pilot, Zhou Desheng.

The Norwegian ambassador was expelled from Beijing, lucrative industrial contracts were lost, boycotts against Norwegian products became commonplace throughout China and cyber-attacks on national infrastructure increased ten-fold. Furthermore, security had to be increased for some war-era officials amid serious threats to their physical safety.

Exactly why Vikanes chose to make such a damaging statement is a mystery. At the time, he was pressing ahead to claim the prime-ministership and perhaps, in a moment of naivety, thought a swell of national pride at Norway's contribution to the Esterlands war effort - an action he himself approved - would edge him ahead in the race.

Such was the fallout that Vikanes became a pariah within his own borders. His support collapsed as Norway's economy was struck hard by China's response and he was consequentially investigated for breaching the country's Official Secrets Act. Vikanes would later admit deep regret for his confession, later beset by a number of mental health issues which sadly saw him take his own life some years later.

The whole affair demonstrated just how sensitive the issue still remained in China, encouraging some nations supportive of the ECR to reevaluate how the subject of the war was publicly discussed for fear of similar retaliation by Beijing.

Through successive governments, Sino-Norwegian trade relations have stabilised well in the years since passed, though like a growing number of countries, Norway has sought to diversify its manufacturing and export dependencies by turning to the powerhouse markets o Brazil, India and Indonesia to avoid the kind of economic suckerpunch brought about by the Vikanes incident.

Whatever his reasons, however, and despite the consequences of his mistake, it must not be forgotten that Tobias Vikanes was still the man who gifted the ECR a fighting chance to win, and for that we should remain forever grateful.

The Esterlands war was savage, and testament must duly be paid to the grit of those who stood their ground in the face of such adversity. It is the human element, after all, that ultimately wins battles. Ask any strategist or war historian for their two cents however, and they will tell you in no uncertain terms - Axion was the weapon that won the war.