Chapter 386 The Result of Hubris and Greed
Somewhere off the coast of Somalia, Edenian Forward Operating Base (FOB) Ganymede.
The former terrorist-cum-pirate stronghold that had been repurposed into a hidden Edenian military base by Reaper Team Eight had been on high alert since the beginning of what Athena was calling the Unification War. The base’s primary purpose was to act as a “5R” base, or fiver for short. The five Rs were rally, resupply, rest, recuperate, and reinforce. But it was just as well-armed as any other Edenian installation, whether at home or abroad, thanks to atomic printers.
The base was equipped with everything an entire ARES division could possibly need. Weapons, uniforms, shelf-stable meals, medical pods, and so on were hidden deep in underwater warehouse complexes the size of city blocks that were maintained by maintenance bots. After all, while atomic printers were capable of incredibly rapid printing, it wasn’t nearly as fast as simply handing something that had already been printed to someone that needed it.
As the panic around the world peaked and chaos reigned, FOB Ganymede sprang into action. Swarms of camouflaging nanites broke their cover and entered concealed vents, revealing enormous, armored hatches. The hatches snapped open, revealing huge missiles inside as alarms around the base blared warnings to immediately seek cover.
A minute later, the alarms ceased their audible warnings and only flashing red lights remained as each silo disgorged a missile. The missiles’ destination: the launch sites and remaining nuclear weapons of the eight remaining nuclear powers.
The missiles launched were different from normal ICBMs. While they were still orbit capable, they seemed much narrower and the reentry nose cone heat shield was a sharper cone shape. They were Type II Kinetic Kill warheads, otherwise known as rods from god. The scientists in Lab City had neatly sidestepped the difficulty of lifting such enormous masses into orbit to arm, or rearm, satellites with them and designed a specialized ICBM that would act as something of a sabot shell around the penetrator core. Thus, they could only barely be considered multistage munitions.
The first stage of each missile was enough to reach orbital heights, where the initial adjustment would be done with canisters of compressed gas contained within the housing of the second stage. At that point, the first stage would detach, leaving something that looked much like a bottle rocket behind. Once the initial direction adjustment was completed, the coast phase would be skipped and the second acceleration stage would be activated and the missile would accelerate the entire rest of the way to its target. Upon reaching 2000 meters in altitude, the second stage would detach and the terminal maneuvering of the now hypervelocity penetrator would begin, the suicidal onboard AI guiding it to its ultimate destination as the second stage rocket engine detonated behind it, ensuring the security of the technology.
The rod from god that remained massed over a ton and would be traveling at roughly Mach 40 at that point, and deliver a staggering impact of nearly 1.4 billion newtons of force to whatever it hit.
(Ed note: Space shuttles, after their deorbit burn, reenter the atmosphere at roughly Mach 23, and that’s *after* they begin decelerating in order to fall back to Earth. So a powered reentry that’s meant to be destructive reaching Mach 40 isn’t too exaggerated by comparison.)
After the first round of rods from god were fired from the camouflaged silos, a second round was rapidly printed and fired as well. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth.... Twelve waves of missiles were launched before the base fell silent again and the flashing lights ceased. The nanites retook their places, camouflaging the silos, and everything was the same as it was six minutes earlier.
The other three FOBs also launched their own missiles. Some launched more, others less, and the launches went mostly unnoticed, save for those from the former cartel compound in Culiacán Rosales, Mexico. FOB Odysseus was in a populated area, unlike the other three, so the launches couldn’t be hidden there.
Thus, they didn’t even attempt to hide. Just the opposite, in fact; an entire reinforced battalion of ARES soldiers rushed out of the main compound one after the other, like clowns emerging from a clown car in a circus tent. They set up a guard perimeter and simply remained in place, defending the base from curious onlookers and enemies alike.
......
Just under a minute after the Edenian missiles launched, the first missile breached the atmosphere and entered orbit just below where the predicted junk swarm would pass by. Two minutes after that, every Edenian rod from god had entered their orbital tracks. Ten seconds after that, the missiles in the swarm began orienting themselves toward their targets.
Eight seconds later, the missiles’ initial orientation was completed and, in two separate waves, they activated their second stage rockets.
The first wave was targeted at missile and air defense networks in the target countries. America’s multilayered THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) network, Israel’s David’s Shield and Iron Dome, Russia’s S300 missile defense system... all eight nuclear powers each had their own name for basically the same thing: a nationwide network of missile countermeasures designed to stop incoming weapons of mass destruction.
The prevailing theory of rods from god assumed that the rods themselves would be nothing more than solid lumps of tungsten, or some other metal that would survive an unpowered orbital reentry. That was the only way such a system could be made cost-effective. But no one could have possibly imagined the sheer number of countermeasures packed into the “dumb” Edenian munitions.
Each one had a multilayered electronic warfare suite that turned it into the equivalent of a blank spot in both automated and manned detection systems. And if that were to fail, there was still the radar-absorbent outer layer of the rods, which combined specific geometric shapes designed to reflect radar waves away from the rod with a radar-absorbent material that the researchers in Lab City had developed and iterated on until it could withstand the stress of a powered flight through atmosphere at Mach 40.
Thus, every single missile countermeasure, no matter how vaunted, failed spectacularly before the might of Edenian technology.
Missile defense sites, anti-air batteries, countermissile silos... everything targeted by one or more rods from god was simply erased from existence, leaving the countries targeted effectively naked in the face of the second wave of rods, which targeted the silos that launched the nuclear missiles and the airstrips that launched the bombers carrying nuclear bombs. They even targeted the remaining nuclear stockpiles that six of the countries thought they had cleverly hid, as well as every site involved in the production of anything having to do with nuclear weapons. Uranium mines, nuclear centrifuges, rocket manufacturing factories... all of them simply ceased to exist when the suicidal AIs guiding the rods violently introduced themselves to each facility.
Emergency systems meant to inform citizens in case of disaster were activated in every country targeted by the Edenian saturation strike. They all passed the same message: shelter in place.
The people behind the nuclear attack on Eden had missed the clue of the Panopticon network’s rapid launches. Then they had missed the clue of the Indonesian pirate elimination. After that, they failed, in their hubris, to realize the vast disparity in technology demonstrated by the Poseidon Navy’s defense against the conventional missile attack. Instead of standing down after that, they instead ignored the military might demonstrated by a single frigate demolishing an entire American carrier group. Still, in their greed for the advanced technologies and arrogant belief that since they had never been beaten, they never would lose, they authorized a nuclear strike using nearly every nuclear weapon on the face of the planet and even that failed.
It was only now, after Eden finally retaliated, that the powers that be and those behind them realized that they had completely, utterly, and unrecoverably fucked up.
