Thanks to Drago38, OechsnerC, and CajunBear73 for their reviews and commentary.

=O=

Chapter 42: Fallout

The Soviet Ambassador, a serious-looking man with a cropped-back hairline and square glasses, was ushered into the room, followed by the Indian representative. The Pacificans posted Marines in their halls of power - not Army men. A wise precaution, the Ambassador thought, to stave off coups against the regime.

His eyes widened in surprise. "Ah! Mr. President. I was expecting… someone else."

"I'm right here, Mr. Ambassador." The Secretary emerged from behind the door, and slammed it shut. He crossed his arms even as the President coolly examined the duo. "Have your governments responded to our proposal? Are you finally willing to negotiate, after all…" The Secretary gestured around the room. "…this?"

"Neither our government, nor the government of the Republic of India, ordered the launch of missiles from our missile complexes." The ambassador insisted. "And you know very well that the damaged inflicted by those missiles was a trifle compared to the sufferings of the people of India."

"Whether or not the launch was accidental or not has yet to be determined." A tinny voice emerged from the speakers of an odd contraption, about the size of a large oven, with a TV screen on the front. The firm visage of the Vice President appeared on the screen.

Why a face when a voice would suffice? The Pacificans really did worship technology, the Ambassador thought. And why wouldn't they? With a vast educated population from which to draw scientists, Pacifican technology was nigh-unbeatable. How could smaller, weaker nations like the Soviet Union resist the Pacifican juggernaut by any other means than iron discipline and perpetual readiness for war?

Not that their technological superiority was helping them right now.

"You can choose to believe whatever you want. But the fact remains that neither of our governments ordered a strike." He frowned. "Surely you are… reasonable men. What point is there to the murder of yet more millions when we have acceded to your demands to withdraw our nuclear missiles? Do you demand more? The reunification of Germany under your fascist West German regime, perhaps? What madmen are you, to pursue… unlimited aims?" He gestured to his comrade. "And our great friend, India, wishes not to negotiate. Nay, the guiding lights of World Socialism desire peace more than the militaristic industrialists of capitalism. We wish to capitulate to your unreasonable demands!"

The Indian representative stepped forward. "In the interests of World Peace, the Republic of India is willing to submit itself to the unreasonable imperialistic demands of the Joint Government of the Pacific, whose cruel bombs have murdered so many of our long-suffering people. We fully accept the Pacifican proposal. You can keep the accursed wasteland of the Western Sector, and we shall take back the Eastern Sector that is rightfully ours!"

The Soviet ambassador tried not to smile. The Pacifican highway running through the Western Sector had been badly damaged in the nuclear war.

Across from him, the Secretary seethed. "We have strong reasons to suspect… that instructions were given to commanders on the ground… to launch their weapons at specific targets in the event that communications were lost with New Delhi during a nuclear attack. Regardless of whether you ordered the launch, you created circumstances under which a semi-accidental launch could occur. You thought we wouldn't escalate against targets in the Indian interior, especially against such a calculated strike – and you thought that claiming that you had lost control over your nuclear arms would allow everyone to back down. I don't know which one of you came up with that scheme, but you didn't think it through, didn't you?"

The Secretary paced. "Now you get to say you gave us a bloody nose… by accident; and wave your peacenik credentials around by capitulating when it means diddly squat. You have no missiles left to withdraw from India, don't you – or maybe we missed two, three, out of two hundred?" He pointed at the Indian representative. "You got to say you resisted the big bad imperialists to the very end before giving up your cause – well, a million people are dead because of your idiocy! I'm sure that plays well with your crowd! More martyrs for the World Socialism!"

The Secretary threw his arms in the air. "Oh, I'm sure you didn't think this all the way through. You made it up as you went along, and lo and behold, it's turned out great for you! Your superior foe looks like a bully, you get to keep the square deal we offered in the first place, and you get to look like you got the last laugh! I should have just let General Bludvist burn you all to…"

"That's enough, Richard." The President turned to the two foreigners. "You have achieved peace with honor. But your conception of honor sickens me, and the price your people paid for it even moreso."

The Secretary spoke. "Here are our additional terms. You are dismissed."

The Marine ushered them out the door, and closed it in their faces.

The Secretary shook his head, and grinned. "Madman enough for you?"

The President made a so-so gesture, a knowing smile on his face.

=O=

The door to the stairwell opened, and General Stoick Haddock, draped in a rubberized suit and gas mask, emerged from the darkness of the Operations Center.

Jiequ was a mess. Thick, choking layers of dust – still radioactive after three long weeks – covered everything. On Jiequ's west slope, dozens of lightly built houses had collapsed in patches. The valleys had channeled the blast wave in unpredictable ways, badly damaging some districts while leaving others untouched. Stoick noted that the chimneys of the aluminum plant were still standing – as was the town obelisk.

Nothing remained on the charred, blackened eastern bank of the river. There, buildings practically untouched by blast had burned to the ground in a massive firestorm, as small fires ignited by the blast had grown unchecked.

Firefighting is impossible when the fallout can kill you in minutes.

A decontamination point, the insignia of the Central Emergency Management Agency proudly emblazoned on its white tents, was being set up near the railway station in anticipation of the need to evacuate the few survivors, and, without a nuclear war on, aid was pouring into the town. Helicopters crisscrossed the sky, and groups of soldiers in NBC suits methodically checked fallout shelters for survivors and cadavers alike.

A bulldozer, a lead-and-plastic shroud over its cabin, roared to life, shoving piles of radioactive debris aside as it cleared the railyard. Jiegu might be uninhabitable for a century to come, but its rail yard would soldier on.

Casualties had been much heavier than anticipated. The people of Jiequ had been well-prepared. Between the five minutes of warning, thirty-minute instructional videos, stockpiling, and duck-and-cover drills, very few had died from heat or blast injuries, and only a few from home collapses.

Many had died when the firestorm overwhelmed their basements and fallout shelters, literally baking them to death.

He gave a pile of dirt marked with a red flag a wide berth. A small pile of tools – too heavily contaminated to reuse – had been dumped right alongside the radioactive debris.

He turned towards the blasted peak seven kilometers away. Nearly three hundred meters had been taken off his favorite lookout - the nuke had been a groundburst, aimed at the airport. An avalanche of dust and rock had slid down the mountain into the sparsely populated valleys below, and from there dust had swept into Jiequ.

A huge cloud of fallout had smothered the city in dust that practically glowed with penetrating gamma radiation. The intense gamma rays had passed through… everything that wasn't heavy enough. People had tried – they'd boarded up their doors and windows, moved to the center of their houses, ducked under layers of stuff, gotten into basements. This would have been enough to shield them from regular fallout plumes; if the missile had just hit thirty kilometers away instead of seven, if the wind had been scattering the fallout instead of gravity, if the warhead had been an airburst… much of Jiegu would have survived to emerge from their shelters two weeks hence. But this fallout plume had been too big, and too close.

Casualties had been near-total among those without dedicated, deeply buried fallout shelters. Even many people in fallout shelters had gotten moderate radiation poisoning from the remaining 1% of the gamma flux that had managed to penetrate the recommended foot of packed earth.

Everyone needed treatment fast.

After three weeks cooped up in the sub-basement, the Headquarters building had begun to run out of supplies. Without running water and toilets, and with immune systems suppressed by subsymptomatic doses of radiation, conditions inside had deteriorated rapidly.

With the worst of the fallout gone (that is, you could stay outside for a half-day, maybe more, before getting ill), it was high time to evacuate.

Heather marched forward beside him, her duffel slung over her shoulder. "We made it!" She gestured at the clear blue sky, almost prancing with joy. "You're gonna see Hiccup again, Stoick!"

Stoick, weak from diarrhea, just nodded.

He made his way to the waiting transport. The turboprop cargo plane would probably have to be dumped in the ocean or something after this. There was no way they could properly decontaminate it. While the aircraft would be safe to fly a few dozen times, continued routine usage would expose crews to unnecessary doses of radiation. Furthermore, there was always the possibility of radioactive dust migrating and then accumulating to dangerous amounts in nooks and crannies of the aircraft – say, in the air-conditioning filters or in the oil tanks – and then seriously injuring someone trying to perform maintenance without proper protection.

He chuckled. Heck, an entire brigade's worth of helicopters and planes would probably have to be chucked by the end of this. They had an army - well, what was left of one - to evacuate.

The aircraft roared off the runway in a cloud of choking, grey-brown, radioactive, dust.

=O=

Toothless soared effortlessly through the stratosphere at Mach 3, twin shock-diamond-filled plumes streaming from his turbojets. Below and behind the roaring engines, a sonic boom cracked across the Deccan.

Silence reigned in Toothless's cockpit.

No alarms blared, the threat board was quiet, and the reconnaissance suite blinked quietly to itself.

This was a simple treaty verification flight, undertaken to make really sure that the Soviets were pulling their missiles and tactical aircraft out of India as promised. The incessant sonic booms also served to remind the Indians who had really won the limited nuclear war.

Hiccup watched the cloudscape pass by his tiny windows. Towering clouds cast long shadows on the plain layers below. He smiled, relaxed, content, and secure. He was a little tired – he thought the rads he'd soaked up at Berk might finally be catching up to him, but the docs assured him his dose had been marginal and that his symptoms were probably a consequence of being an overworked fighter pilot.

He sighed happily.

She said she loved me. And she really meant it.

He had tried to double-check after they landed, of course. Astrid had just given him a huge hug, and kissed him right on the lips at the bottom of the ladder. In front of everyone – at least he thought it was everyone, since the ground crew in the hardened shelter had been in gas masks.

The thought that the girl he had loved – discreetly, politely, at a safe distance – for so long loved him back was enough to make him giddy. The thought that a person he had admired for so long saw something worth admiring in him was something else.

But the best part was that he knew that the girl he cared so deeply for also cared deeply about him. That, regardless of superficial spats, peeves, and the usual friction of life, Astrid would have his back, and he would have hers.

Well, for now – technically, the odds were even that a breakup would occur someone in the future, and he was quite biased at the present time… oh, what the heck. They could beat the odds. He knew it.

Astrid smiled contentedly as she gazed out the window at the cloudscape beyond. Far below her, layers of golden-yellow cloud shimmered magnificently in the light of the setting sun, and the snippets of land beyond practically glowed in the soft light of dusk.

They'd had a lot of time to talk. With moderate fallout from Jiegu raining across Berk, and air defense operations still ongoing, they'd practically lived in their hardened aircraft shelter for a week. While powdery, radioactive ash snowed gently across the tarmac outside, and settled onto the four-meter-thick reinforced concrete roof, they'd swapped stories, played board games, and talked about all the sappy stuff that neither of them had ever found reason to share - man, she'd gone soft – even as they continued to fly sorties, ever-vigilant for a resumption of hostilities.

She shook her head, and chuckled. Songwriters insisted that being snowed in was romantic. What would they think of fallout? Baby, it's hot outside?

Hiccup had done her one better, writing a whole new stanza for Let it glow.

Speaking of which… "Hiccup, you're awfully quiet back there."

"Just… uh… enjoying the view."

"Well, we're coming up on the terminator!"

Ahead of Astrid, where night met day, a wall of darkness, razor-sharp and following perfectly the curvature of the earth, sliced across the cloudscape.

The terminator.

The edge of the great shadow cast by the planet Earth, beyond which, hidden from the unblinking thermonuclear gaze of the Sun, naked apes hid from monsters, gazed at the stars, and serenaded mates.

They hit a wall of black at nearly one kilometer per second, and Astrid sighed as she watched the stars come out of their hiding places to fill the night sky.

She turned the lights off in the cockpit, allowing the stars to shine on them in their full, uncontested glory.

"Astrid, we're over hostile airspace."

"By treaty, Hiccup, they can't shoot at us. And we'll have a minute to evade anything they throw our way anyway."

Astrid lowered her voice to a whisper as the night sky came alive with shooting stars. "Hey Hiccup? Remember that first night when you turned off the lights in the cockpit?"

"Uhh… yeah. I wanted to show you something cool, and…"

"I don't think I ever thanked you for that. So, uhh… thanks for that." She thought of how single-minded she had been before the war. Had she ever seriously considered what she wanted to do with her life? What she wanted to achieve? What she wanted to leave behind?

"And… Hiccup? Thanks… for everything else." She took Toothless into a turn, and they began racing to point out constellations to each other even as Toothless basked in the starlight.

Astrid won. She had the bigger window.

They finished their countrysized turn, and headed back west, towards the tanker orbiting the Persian Gulf. "Hiccup? Wanna see something cool?" Astrid grinned as she caught a sliver of gold out her cockpit.

"What?"

"Sit back and watch the sunrise."

"We're headed west. The sun rises in the east, Astrid… ohhh…"

Toothless hit a wall of light, and Astrid pulled down her tinted visor as the harsh sunlight streamed into her cockpit. "Voila. A sunrise in the west."

At the equator, the Earth spins at just over Mach 1. Toothless, at Mach 3, had outraced the slowpoke rotation of the Earth that carried its continents into the embrace of night, like a runner flying forward off a too-slow treadmill.

The sky around the disc of the sun was bathed in intense oranges, fiery reds, and brilliant golds as the light of dusk was reflected off ash from firestorms, dust from pulverized countryside, and fallout from the bombs and craters themselves, all lofted gently into the stratosphere and scattered to the four winds.

Nuclear war made for the most magnificent sunsets.

"That is cool." Hiccup pulled out a grease pencil, and began to sketch on a surplus worksheet. He'd have to reproduce it in pencil later, but it would do for now.

"You showed me so much. I thought it would be nice to show you something cool for a change."

They both smiled, and flew off into a rising sunset.

=O=

THE END

=O=

This concludes Blackbird, a HTTYD fan-fiction of supersonic air combat, escalation management, and love on the nuclear battlefield. It was a joy to write, and I hope you all found it reasonably enjoyable and came away with some interesting ideas.

I have sketched out a sequel (and a miniseries-type thing) on a napkin, but it's probably not getting written anytime within the next three years. I will tack on a notification to Blackbird (probably complete with Epilogue II) if that ever changes.

Note that I am a mere interested amateur, and have aspired to convey generally accurate concepts rather than strive for 100% technical accuracy, for which I lack the technical and academic expertise. I have a high confidence in the general conceptual descriptions of the technologies, weapons systems (mostly based on real-world equipment or proposals), phenomena, basic science, and basic philosophy of nuclear war. The rough tactics of nuclear, conventional, and supersonic air warfare are mostly based on real-world tactics and doctrine, but the exact details of those tactics are at times squishy best guesses. I have only the foggiest of ideas of detailed operating procedures (which is why I describe them in general terms whenever possible - they are usually long, complicated and involve checklists). The expert will doubtless find countless flaws and errors large and small.

Chapter titles are a mix of Cold War jargon and rungs from RAND corporation think-tank theorist Herman Kahn's (42-step) Escalation Ladder, a model he used to help understand crises in the nuclear age (his 1960 bestseller, On Thermonuclear War, was not particularly good at predicting the future, but it remains a useful reference and is full of interesting ideas).

My thanks goes out to all my readers for sticking with me through over forty chapters of umm... "story", and to my reviewers for their invaluable feedback and excellent commentary (hey, I figured I was at least doing something right). Special thanks must go to CajunBear73 for the analysis and commentary, DrBlazer for the questions and sanity checks, LadyHaddock for the writing checks, Atomicsub927 for the technical discussions, and Ridersofrowan, OechsnerC, and theDeathlyRider2287 for their input and support.

Well, there's still the Epilogue, but it's not all that much to look at...