GMT: 14:44:12
PDT: 07:44:12
Ragnar: +01:44:12
Fyrenn smiled down at the private as the tank ground to a slow, ponderous halt on the pier.
"'Scuse me soldier; Which way to Berlin?"
The man stared on in absolutely stunned silence, trying in vain to grasp the sight of two Gryphons in a tank, historical reference lost entirely to the absurdity of the moment. Matters were only compounded when the three Ponies all piled out of the rear of the vehicle.
Carradan's mane had gone wild over the course of the antics. Skye was bruised in several places. Celestia looked majestic and regal as ever, but even she had not escaped unscathed. Several items of her regalia were comically out of order.
As Neyla disembarked, Fyrenn paused to stare out at the chaos of the harbor.
A cargo ship, doubtless hulled by a missile barrage, had capsized at the mouth of the space, and was burning steadily as its reactors melted down.
The Blue Ridge had barely fared better. It looked almost as if it were ready to keel over. Only a pair of service tenders seemed to be keeping its list from developing past eight degrees.
Most of the fires on the carrier seemed to have been extinguished, whether by internal crews or the two firefighter tugs behind the ship, Fyrenn wasn't sure. A steady stream of SWCC boats, civilian skiffs, and the odd yacht were going to and fro, transporting wounded sailors to a makeshift hospital on the pier.
As Fyrenn leapt from the turret, and touched down lightly on all fours, a familiar figure emerged from the roiling crowd of civilians, soldiers, casualties, and nurses.
The red Gryphon hissed sympathetically, "General Sorven. You look... Windswept."
She smirked, and shook her head, "Hello Fyrenn. Making an entrance as always I see. No this..." The General gestured to the chaos behind her, "This is not as bad as it looks, and not nearly as bad as it could have been. They underestimated what Blue Ridge was capable of."
Neyla stepped forward, eyes set firmly on the horizon, "That's all well and good, but none of what you've accomplished today will matter if we don't do what we came here to do."
Sorven raised an eyebrow, "This day just keeps getting better."
Fyrenn sighed, "You have no idea. We need whatever navigational instruments you can scrounge, especially a GPS and something to measure declinations."
The General nodded, her tone as clipped and businesslike as the gesture.
"Done. Providing you explain what's about to go down."
The red Gryphon raised an eyebrow, as Sorven conversed in hushed tones with an underling.
"You may not want to know."
Sorven glanced up.
"That bad?"
Fyrenn nodded sharply.
"Worse."
GMT: 14:44:43
Ragnar: +01:44:43
"Admiral! We have an incoming priority one communication from Northcom!"
Admiral Laren raised his head from its dozing position against the side of a porthole, and ran one hand through his hair to straighten it.
"About damn time. What are they saying?"
The Admiral strode swiftly across the bridge to stand beside his communications officer, glancing down at the screen just in time to catch the last of the coded missive.
The Lieutenant's face blanched.
"We have an incoming keter-class kinetic weapon. They're planning to divert it to a splashdown not far from here, and our orders are to aid the effort. We've been sent a series of firing calculations based on known mass, velocity, and our position and armament."
Admiral Laren glanced out the forward bridge windows, and grit his teeth, muttering under his breath.
"I thought they didn't make weapons *that* big anymore..."
He allowed his eyes to sweep over the entirety of his charge. The UES Yorktown was the largest of Earthgov's small contingent of supercarriers, and it was a gloriously mammoth statement of Naval power.
A dozen squadrons of FA-26 Scythe fighters, bombers, and a few assorted jamming and early warning planes, along with four contingents of special forces troopers, two embarked cutter boats, thirty-odd SWICC craft, fifty VTOLs, and a handful of missiles and torpedoes for self-defense.
The Bridge alone was a multi-story affair, split into the command bridge on the top deck, with C&C functions and helm, and a fly-bridge beneath for aircraft control, observation, gunnery control, and in-port maneuvering.
Laren grunted, and turned to face his officers once more.
"They do realize that we're a carrier, not an assault gun, right?"
He shook his head and held up a hand before anyone could respond.
"Feed the numerics to tac-con, and get it all set up as-asked. Sound ready-stations and wake the beta-shift."
As his crew repeated the orders with typical decorum and stone-faced purposeful visage, Laren turned back to the windows, and contemplated the possible outcomes of the day.
As a series of yellow lights began to pulse softly along the wall stanchions of the chamber, synchronized to the mournful tune of a ready-stations alert, he decided that whatever was happening, it certainly wasn't a training exercise.
He glanced over his shoulder at the chief telemetry officer, locking eyes with her to get her attention.
"Commander, I want every eye we have turned on this thing. I want to know when it arrives, how fast its going, where its going to arrive... I want to be able to see pits and bumps on the outside of the damn thing."
The woman nodded curtly, "Bringing SPY-Seven fire control LADAR to bear, requesting SatVision taskings, preparing thermal and radiological pallets, and tuning SONAR to record impact data."
Laren turned his head to listen as his radio operator fed the numerical calculations to the gunnery control officers.
"All kinetics, all missiles; We are tracking a single target coming down from orbit, proceeding at three-zero kilomachs inbound on track seven two seven five. Lock kill-box on target and task AI racks with full-precision tracking. Load warheads for maximum payload and direct gun carriages for acute impact angles."
The man glanced back to the Admiral for final confirmation. Laren nodded once, slowly.
The operator clutched his headset closer, and spoke fervently into the microphone.
"Fire! Fire! Termination order dispatched on killbox one alpha."
The admiral turned to watch as the flight deck vanished in a cloud of smoke. Missile after missile belched forth from the VLS and side-launch tubes, generating a mile-high plume of ejecta as dozens of independently controlled warheads streaked skyward.
Moments later, every single kinetic weapon aboard the ship began to cycle through its ammunition magazine as if the world were about to end.
Laren's eyes hardened as he watched the streamers of hot tungsten blaze off into the teal void.
He felt the deck quiver beneath him, and heard the roar of a thousand cycling breeches, and he wondered if perhaps, the world were about to end in a literal sense.
Captain Eldridge wanted to make something explode.
The commanding officer of the Battleship Tohoku had been having a bad day. First a munitions officer had dropped a Shiva missile on a gunner's leg, and sent him to the infirmary, disrupting an entire shift of drills.
After that, the battle net had died abruptly, and the entire system had gone downhill pell mell into complete chaos.
No one seemed to be able to give him answers, and that frustrated Eldridge. When the Captain became frustrated, he liked to take it out on the nearest acceptable target. In full.
The UES Tohoku was one of the single deadliest weapons Earthgov fielded. The Battleship's gargantuan main battery was capable of reducing something the size of a megatropolis to fine glass powder from half a world away, within a matter of minutes.
'No muss, no fuss,' As Eldridge liked to say. The phrase had become the ship's unofficial motto in recent months.
While not as large as a carrier, the vessel was practically all guns, armor, and engines, with room for only a few VTOLs and eight fighters. Afterthoughts in the logistical sense, at best.
When paired with a battlegroup, Eldridge believed that nothing short of the wrath of God Himself had a chance of stopping the Tohoku on its worst day. And even God would suffer long odds in his opinion.
The Captain burst onto the bridge at full-stride, barely pausing to ensure he didn't shatter his ankles on the lip of the bulkhead door.
His eyes went directly to his XO; A tall, dark man from South Africa with a voice nearly as deep as the sound of the ship's forward armaments.
Eldridge sighed, "Give me some good news. Scratch that. Give me *any* news, as long as it's news."
The Commander gestured to a standing console, and allowed the captain to read the digital ticker as he summarized in baritone.
"Northamerizone Command just came back online. There's been a series of sweeping attacks, and the enemy gained control of something called a 'THOR.' Initial projections say that we're looking at---"
Eldridge interrupted as he read the number for himself. The statistic chilled him to his marrow, as surely as if he had jumped into the sea, and sank to the very bottom.
"One Hundred MILLION dead?!"
The XO nodded slowly, "Based on initial impact, radiation flash-out, secondary tidal effects, and tertiary geological and logistical effects. Vancouver will suffer nearly complete mortality rate. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and every settlement in between will suffer the secondary and tertiary effects. Earthquakes, fires storms, weather pattern disruptions, tsunamis..."
The Captain raised an eyebrow as he glanced back down at the ticker.
"They actually think they can stop this...?"
The Commander shook his head, "Not exactly. Apparently someone had the bright idea that we didn't have to stop it. Just make sure it lands somewhere far enough out in the ocean. They sent us telemetry with the initial comm burst."
Eldridge nodded curtly and gestured with a hand, shouting to make himself heard by all the officers in the chamber.
"Listen up! We have a priority tasking! Prepare the ship for level zero operations. Sound red alert, action stations, and begin a ninety degree starboard snap-turn. Cut all forward engines and deploy sea anchors and stabilization gyros. Put the formation at combat alert alpha and prepare a staggered-X firing plot. Link all ships to our central server racks and standby to begin bombardment operations!"
To their credit, the men and women snapped to their orders without so much as a curious glance. They had been serving with Eldridge long enough to know what the tenor of his voice meant.
As the bridge went dark, and dull red emergency lighting began to pulse, Eldridge raised a hand towards the XO, gesturing forward.
"Let's move!"
The two men dashed to the forward port side access door, and out onto the companionway. A stiff breeze kicked a spray of salt into their faces, but it did absolutely nothing to deter them.
The officers took a set of ladder-stairs down one deck two at a time, racing forward on the lower companionway towards the next nearest entry door. As they reached the middle of the catwalk, alarms began to sound, and the ship lurched sharply to starboard.
Eldridge's hat got caught in the shifting breeze, and sailed away aft, flying out over the nearest destroyer in the formation, which itself was practically swamped by the wake of the battleship as it cut an incredibly tight circle into the sea.
He ignored the loss. It was inconsequential.
The two men burst into the gunnery control center at full tilt. Eldridge had to pivot smoothly to avoid sending a Yeoman into the bulkhead. He snapped his fingers rapidly to get the attention of the personnel on deck.
"Gentlemen and ladies, this is the day to end all days! We are going full-bore. So break out the special stuff and don't hold anything back. I want every AI on this ship tasked with the following directions, and I want every single weapon we have loaded and ready. Warning red, we are live-fire as soon as you get these numbers into the plotting stations."
The XO raised his DaTab, and began reading out information at a volume that seemed to shake the monitors in their sockets. As he spoke, the crew jumped to their tasks with a will, feverishly entering data into consoles, and allowing their partners to cross-check swiftly for validity.
"All weapons, acquire track seven two four three descending from orbital track. Calculate for acute impact angles. Cycle VLS to dispatch heavy warheads first. Disengage refire governors and disconnect the main engine spindle. Retask all engines to capacitor charging duty and prepare fire crews for coolant duty."
The vaguely horse-shoe shaped space came alive, and Eldridge savored the thrum and the tension.
He listened intently, and caught the distant clanks and thunks as immense shells cycled through maglocks and into the breeches of guns.
He stepped over to one of the few external viewports the chamber boasted, and watched as fire crews began pumping sea-water over the muzzle-brakes of the main battery in preparation for an intense stationary no-holds-barred emergency barrage.
As the final instructions died away, and the room returned to relative silence, he pivoted back and stepped to the room's central console.
"All ships, all stations; Fire control redirect to Tohoku-actual server. Verify command keys are valid and release all safety interlocks."
Eldridge watched as all three main turrets rotated left with a smooth, deadly surety. The Tactical Actions Officer made one final report as the weapons came to bear.
"All batteries, killing track seven two four three. Helios control, link to main battery guidance. VLS tubes one thru thirty;
Lift-locks released, launch when ready. All hands, all hands; Prepare for main battery firing cycle! Brace. Brace. Brace."
A piercing screeching klaxon sounded across the ship, denoting the imminent shock that was to come.
The vessel bucked sharply as all nine barrels spoke out in sequence. The light was so bright, the main deck cameras struggled to compensate. The fire crews and maintenance teams huddled in their firing shelters, eyes covered by nearly-opaque protective visors and ears protected by high-frequency cancellation headsets.
The sound itself was so intense, so primal, that the ship's entire hull resonated, as if it were the last great bell, stricken at the close of all things.
Eldridge wondered, as he braced against the console, if the end of the world would be even half as loud. The shockwave of the shells' passing depressed the water on the ship's port side by nearly ten feet, sending out four foot high compression waves.
No sooner had the shells flown, than the crews began a truncated version of the entire process once more. It only took the main capacitors a few short seconds to fully cycle at maximum refire rate, with all governors removed.
The fire crews barely had two seconds to direct jets of supercooled ocean water at the white-hot muzzles of the guns, before the klaxon sounded again and they were forced to dive back into their shelter.
All the while, the dull roar of departing missiles, and the Helios guns, provided a consistently mind-melting background noise. Eldridge could sometimes hear it in his sleep. The racket was made all the worse by dint of the fact that the entire formation was doing precisely the same thing.
From above, the sight was like nothing one could find anywhere else. The sea seemed alive, as if whipped and tossed by a great storm. A fog bank began to form from the sheer amount of spent rocket smoke, and muzzle ejection material. The sky and the sea both remained constantly alight with a hellish red-orange tint, visible for miles.
A half-dozen gray leviathans, desperately making an attempt to serve their calling in their greatest, and perhaps last mission.
GMT: 14:45:00
PDT: 07:45:00
Ragnar: +01:45:00
Fyrenn squinted up at the sky, and nodded.
"You definitely have it calibrated right. I can see it now."
Skye blanched, and hurriedly locked the survey rod into place with a quick burst of her magic. She stepped back anxiously, and glanced to Celestia for guidance.
The Alicorn nodded, and stepped up to the device, carefully using it to sight on the distant, but swiftly closing harbinger of death. The sighting mechanism had been placed at the end of the pier, and everyone else had been moved back to the main road. A distance of several dozen yards.
In the time it took the Princess to close the distance, and for Fyrenn and Skye to return to the group, the rod closed to a point where its displacement effect was visible to the naked Human eye.
Streamers of plasma, generated by pure nuclear fusion in the compression wave, arced off it in a series of oscillating mushroom shapes, each as bright as a noon day sun in a cloudless sky and as large as a city.
Eerily, there was no sound of any kind.
The object was travelling far ahead of its audible shockwaves, by dint of its fantastic speed.
Fyrenn started slightly as he felt a presence to his right. He relaxed as he realized it was simply Kephic. Varan stepped up on his left, while Skye and Carradan moved instinctively to a protected position between the Gryphons.
Fyrenn glanced at Neyla, but he found her face a complete enigma. The pair shared a somewhat confused, albeit emotional gaze, before Fyrenn glanced down at the Ponies.
He smiled as warmly as he was able, but couldn't find any words.
With one accord, the group turned, and locked their eyes on impending death. Fyrenn guessed that every eye in the city, friend, enemy, or civilian, was likely fixated on the same point in space.
He lowered his gaze slightly, and watched in fascination as Celestia began her incantation.
It started out as a few flitting golden streamers. But as she murmured quietly to herself, eyes locked tightly shut, the effect grew.
As her horn intensified its glowing, and began emitting an almost musical choir of chime-like sounds, the streamers turned to much larger, wilder arcs of light. Within seconds, the Alicorn was nothing but a shadow, within a glowing orb that itself resembled the emblem on her flank.
Despite the separation of many meters, Fyrenn felt a wave of heat wash over his face, and ruffle his feathers, like a desert wind.
As Celestia brightened to the point that only the Gryphons could continue to look on unharmed, the sky began to change to an apocalyptic shade of red. Reflected in the water of the bay, it almost seemed as if the sea had turned to blood, and the clouds to magma.
The rod's plasma wake was simply overpowering all other wavelengths of light. The impact from shells and missiles was now visible to the Gryphic eye; Conduits of disturbed air or contrails, terminating in tiny flashes against the rod.
Few of the weapons were actually getting past the plasma envelope, but it didn't matter. Any impact on the structure as a whole was enough. Fyrenn felt his breath catch in his throat as the moment came.
At first, he thought the weapon itself had struck. Only after his ears flattened reflexively, and shock deflection bone plates snapped shut inside his ears, did he realize that the effect was generated by Celestia herself.
The beam of heat, and light she had generated caused its own miniature fusion reactions as it generated a plethora of complex interleaved compression waves. The roar of the sound shattered every window on the west side of the city.
Every Human within sight fell writhing to the ground, eyes clenched shut, hands clutched over their ears.
Fyrenn did his best to shut it out, but to his sensitive aural faculties, the sound was like experiencing the very pit of hell. The heat was more manageable, but he felt his skin drying out appreciably even under the protection of feathers and fur.
He reflexively opened both wings, and crouched to protect Stan and Skye from the worst of the temperature extremes. Both Ponies were curled into bawling fetal sacks of flesh, screaming inaudibly as their incredibly sensitive eardrums were completely destroyed.
Fyrenn gave in and clutched both claws to his ears in a vain attempt to stem the pain. Kephic, Varan, and Neyla did the same in quick succession.
The red Gryphon watched as everything washed out. All the world was saturated with white light to the point that there were no shadows anywhere. In some places, Fyrenn could see straight through the skin of several Humans.
He watched, wincing reflexively, as the dermis of every homo sapiens on the block abruptly turned lobster-red, to a hue not unlike his own feathers, bathed to saturation in the light and heat.
He realized that some of them would need serious medical treatment if they all survived. All at once, just when he thought he could endure no more, the sound came to an end.
Absolute silence descended, and he realized that he was still reflexively clenching down on the plates protecting his ears. He released them tentatively as the light and heat finally began to fade, and turned his face skyward.
The rod remained, framed now not only by its own plasma streamers, but by the gargantuan bloom of a hyper-nuclear detonation. The result of the collision between its unstoppable force, and Celestia's immovable beam.
Fyrenn realized he had simply stopped breathing. His heart was barely beating at all. His claws were clenched so tightly, that he was near to drawing his own blood.
Around him, nearly everyone else lay still. The humans and Ponies were bathed in small pools of blood gushing forth from their ears.
Celestia was doubled over as if she were about to disgorge the contents of her stomach. All the luminosity normally gracing her mane was gone. For a moment, Fyrenn feared she had simply died where she stood. He noticed, with a flush of relief, that her chest was heaving.
He forced himself to inhale, then exhale, and prayed fervently for some sign or indication of the outcome.
If the end of the world was to come, then the stage, he reflected, had certainly been set in high style.
Midnight
Ragnar: +01:45:00
When the object punctured the Barrier, Luna finally came to an understanding. She at last grasped the particulars, and extent, of the situation.
And she was afraid.
The difference in realities did nothing to stem the energies of the fearful city-killing javelin. It lost a small part of itself, and generated a ripple, visible to any observer flying above the Earth, but otherwise it remained unchecked.
Slowly, gracefully, the midnight blue Alicorn rose, and directed her visage upwards. The moon had been joined in the sky by a new light. A day-star brighter than her sister's sun. A herald of death, destruction, ruin, and decay.
As Luna opened her muzzle, she wryly recalled that her sister had always been the one for cantrips and incantations uttered in a low and somber voice. Luna, for her part, had always preferred song as a means to powerful magics.
To the surprise of all within earshot, a strange and striking melody poured forth from the monarch's lips. Though the words were alien to all but the most studied scholars of ancient thaumomancy, the sound seemed somehow comforting to everyone it reached.
As Luna's horn began to fill with a piercing silver spear of moonlight, the sound of her voice began to magnify, reaching out to the whole city as it grew in volume through the aether.
Moonlight and starlight streamed down from the sky, focused onto one interminably small point at the tip of her horn by the interwoven strands of her song-spell.
As the Human-engineered calamity finally came within striking distance, blotting out the sky itself with the sickly yellow light of its passing, Luna released the power she had accrued.
Not since she had succumbed to the Nightmare itself, had she been a conduit for such destructive energies.
Reality itself split along an infinitely thin, yet infinitely long line, radiating upwards from her horn. She felt every ounce of herself drained, to within a mere fractional breath of absolute mortality.
The impact of her energies with the rod was, at first, silent. The fabric of all space itself in the region twisted out of shape. Within another moment, the weapon was gone. Isolated, and then quantum-erased entirely from the fabric of existence, and the majority of its energy with it.
What little energy remained combined with the air rushing to fill the void to produce a thunderclap heard as far away as Appaloosa.
Every window, and every other piece of glass, in all of Canterlot, and all of Ponyville, shattered as the compression wave traveled out and down at the speed of sound.
So great was the impact of pressure upon the earth, that it triggered a small land-quake.
Small bits of masonry fell from above, the clatter of their descent lost in the roar of the wind storm.
At last, however, the insanity was ended.
Luna barely managed to muster the energy to look up once more, and confirm that the sky was as it should be, before she collapsed in an unconscious heap.
GMT: 14:45:00
Ragnar: +01:45:00
"Projectile on short-range LADAR scope!"
"Course change! The rod has changed vector, and is now set to impact at forty-seven degrees, twenty-seven minutes lat, by neg one-forty-three degrees, ten minutes long!"
"Range three-five-oh kilometers from two-twenty-three degrees port... We're inside the outer field of the projected radiation burst!"
The Bridge of the Yorktown immediately plunged into shades of deep red as combat alert lights began pulsing in time to an insistent General Quarters klaxon.
Admiral Laren straightened his cover, and strode to the port-side bank of windows. He wasted no time on lengthy consideration.
"Sound collision alarm. All hands to crash positions. Seal bulkheads at critical access points and close blast shields on all portholes and windows. Evacuate the flight deck, seal all elevators, and order the CAP to proceed to max patrol altitude."
He turned to the front of the bridge, "Helm; Emergency deep. Make your dive angle thirty five degrees, open all ballast tanks and flood non-critical storage compartments on lower decks. Open water-garage seacocks fore and aft."
Moving an area-control vessel swiftly was an exercise in extremes. The ship out-massed pre-winnowing carriers by many thousands of tons, and was difficult to sink or surface in a short duration.
Yorktown's crew had little choice. The best protection an Earthgov ship had from radiation was submerging itself in the trillion-gallon embrace of seawater. It was not the first time the crew had been forced to enact similar protocols to escape an attack. It likely would not be the last.
The officer of the deck snatched up a wireless PA headset, "All crew; Prepare for emergency deep protocol. Evacuate the flight deck, water garages, and noncritical lower-deck storage. Seal all red and yellow state bulkheads. Medical teams to standby ready-two."
The ship's internal-conditions AI responded next, its atonal digitized voice lending a chilly note of surreality to the scene.
"Sealing all porthole and window shrouds."
Laren could just barely hear the comm officer speaking into his own headset across the room.
"CAP One, Yorktown actual; Proceed with flight group to waypoint designated Sierra-three at full speed. Hold high-altitude pattern at Angels Forty and prepare for atmospheric turbulence and loss of communications. Cockpit polarization is advised at this time."
The officer of the deck glanced at the ship's internal systems screens, then up at the Admiral.
"All stations report ready."
Laren nodded curtly, and reached out to grip the nearest railing firmly, "Initiate crash-dive protocol."
The helmsman's stony demeanor remained unchanged, but the Admiral could tell that beneath the military exterior, the young man was terrified. Laren sighed, if he were to be honest with himself; so was he.
The helmsman seated himself and swiftly clicked a five-point restraint harness into place. He then revolved a small carbon-fiber wheel, inscribed with a digital indicator, until the luminescent numbers on its face read '035.000.'
"Dive planes and actuated thrusters angled for thirty five degrees."
He pressed a series of controls on one of his touchscreens, then depressed a series of physical switches built into the panel's frame, flipping open their covers first with practiced speed.
Finally, he opened a larger switch cover, turned the small red nub within ninety degrees, and depressed it, "Ballast tank, sea-garage, and storage compartments flooding."
The ship automatically began sounding the alert klaxon once more. Laren shifted his legs, bracing himself as the ship began to list forward. He watched grimly as a wave overtook the bow, tossing an unsecured VTOL off the deck and into the sea. The expense of three lost aircraft and a few tons of munitions was tertiary at best, but still galling.
The Helmsman gulped slightly, "Bow submerged."
Laren nodded and tensed, "Flank speed!"
"Flank speed! Aye!" The helmsman followed up by placing a white gloved hand on the enormous throttle quadrant. He pressed the large rubberized gray assembly sideways, disengaging the built-in locks, and pushed it all the way to its stops.
The large convex curved screen beside the quadrant went wild as it responded to the requested change, displaying current speed and acceleration at the top, as well as a series of glowing arrows on a line of numbers and dashes, and a number at the bottom estimating time until the requested speed was achieved.
The Yorktown bucked like a bronco, the shuddering and squeal of alloy beams under pressure providing a deeply unnerving counterpoint to the collision alarms.
Anyone, and anything that wasn't securely fastened to a surface immediately went flying. The remaining objects on the carrier's deck were swept away as if by a typhoon. Laren caught one last glimpse of a munitions cart tumbling away in pieces as the bridge window shrouds irised closed.
The view was immediately replaced with a holoscreen representation of the ocean beyond, complete with depth and trajectory markings.
Laren winced as the ship continued to accelerate at a sickening downward angle, turning his world on end, "When depth is sufficient, level us. Avoid the thermocline at zero-five degrees starboard."
The deck officer operator spoke up, unable to turn in his own locked seat and five point harness, "At present speed and angle, we will achieve minimum sufficient safe-depth. Barely."
The Admiral grunted, his face grim, "You better pray so lieutenant. And get the medical teams moving as soon as we're level."
The rod streaked across the final leg of its journey with a sound that would have made Apollyon, and all the minions of Hell itself, screech in protest.
Passing over the last of the Northamerizone's landmass, the object traveled in a dreadful, graceful, morbid arc towards the north Pacific.
The moment of its first impact went unobserved by any direct form of sight. This was to the advantage of all, for the blinding flash was so bright that it turned the sky momentarily blue across the entire hemisphere.
It was as if the sun had somehow risen properly for the first time since the Winnowing.
As the light abated, the radiological fallout poured forth. Unseen, but not unmeasured, the horizon absorbed the majority of it, Mother Earth's curvature shielding her inhabitants from the unseen, but searing atomic foe.
The kinetic release of the first impact vaporized a crater into the sea that was over a mile and a half deep, and ten miles wide at the rim.
Two survey craft, unfortunate enough to have been in the region, were instantaneously reduced to a fine cloud of carbon mist by the pure energy release.
Seismographs registered it as a 15.6 Earthquake.
It was the most powerful Human-caused nuclear detonation in all of Earth's history.
An untold quantity of air was vaporized as well, though the surrounding atmosphere was unable to rush back and fill the void for several seconds, as the compression wave of the impact-proper emanated outwards at Mach one.
When the void finally did fill, the thunderclap was so powerful it punched a temporary four mile hole in the ozone layer, ensuring a permanent and noticeable disruption to weather patterns across a quarter of the globe for a decade to come.
The slagged remainder of the rod went on unchecked, finally reaching the seafloor at a speed of just under Mach twelve, protected from the water's retarding effect by its own super cavitation.
The secondary impact created another, smaller momentary nuclear explosion, and accompanying bubble of vacuum.
As the sea-water finally began to rush back into both the primary, and secondary impact zones, the last vestigial fragments of the rod buried themselves half a mile into the crust of the Earth with their remaining momentum.
The final impacts loosed ten dozen tremors across the rim of fire as fault lines burst, and magma chambers popped like balloons under the pressure of Rayleigh waves.
The sea floor for a hundred miles underwent sudden liquefaction.
The ocean itself seemed to collapse into a jet of water three miles high.
The sea level for the entire Pacific Ocean changed instantly by several measurable millimeters.
As the ejection column collapsed downwards, punching a peculiar mile-wide hole in the seventy-mile wide mushroom cloud of the initial impact, it became the genesis for a hydrological compression wave that made Cascadia look like a child's toy dropped on the kitchen floor.
The largest Tsunami on Earth.