Neptune's Revenge: Sailing the Dark Sea

by cliff.west

INTRO: You need to read Neptune's Revenge before starting this book. The Colonials after joining forces with a group from Rifts Earth had thrown the Cylons off of New Caprica. Now they must repair, rebuild, recover, and then prepare for the future. The Cylons are gone, for now. The now mixed group must work together to find the planet that the Colonial are looking for along with th

45. Chapter 45 who wants round 2

I would like to thank Sable Cold for taking on the impressive job of being the Beta Reader for this book. As always reviews are welcome. If you find this is easier to read and follow. Thank Sable Cold and all of his hard work

I do not own Battlestar Galactica or have any connection with them, other than I have seen the shows. And it was a long time ago. I also do not own or have input into the game of Rifts. I don't even play the game. But I do own copies of some of the books, and I have used them for this story.

Chapter 45: who wants round 2?

Earth Dec 2020

Many weeks after the celebration, deep under the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, a shadowy beast slowly rose from the cold dark depths of the inky waters. It stopped its rise at just twenty meters below the wave tossed sea, and hovered in that one spot under the ocean like it was an alien craft. It didn't move a foot any direction after coming to a stop. Inside the hard metal hull, the master of this leviathan was stone-faced. He was standing at his place as a captain of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy's most deadly capital weapons system. He was like living stone as he stood rooted to that one spot of the deck while his ship changed depth.

Ching Shih had aged a decade over the last year. He wore the lines on his face, and his crew could hear the age in his voice the few times he chose to use it. He could see his country starting to break up before his eyes, and there was very little that he felt he could do to stop it. He owed his loyalty to the party, not the man that led it. Just as every other officer selected to command weapons of this class. In his eyes, it was the party headquarters out of Beijing that should be the leader of all of China and then the rest of the world after it had been properly educated.

This mission was so black that his orders had been handcarried to his safe without him knowing beforehand. He had no idea how long they had been resting there before he received orders to open them and saw the date on the signature block. He had been verbally told over dinner one night with a 'friend' before leaving on this deployment that he was not allowed to open his safe until they had been underwater for two days or after receiving a special code word over the ELF radio. He had been instructed not to reference his orders at any time via radio or any other methods of communications, or the mission would fail. If that unfortunate event happened, he would be held accountable at the very highest of levels in the party for his failure.

After reading his orders for the first time, he now knew the whats and the whys of his mission, no matter what the verbiage in the dozens of folded up sheets of paper might say. The mission was a pure revenge attack and nothing else. It was hoped that a massive nuclear strike against the alien outpost would stop the slide of China into a full blown massive civil war. It was hoped that if this group was wiped out, then the show of strength would, if not stop, then at least slow down enough the downward slide into civil war. That alone might just be enough to make a nuclear strike worthwhile in the eyes of the leader of the party.

The Chinese government needed the breathing space so that she could get her feet back under her. They needed time to get things working on being put back to somewhat normal ways. Everything about this mission had been selected for a reason. His ship was of a design that even if found out after could be mistaken for a United States, British, French or even some of the Russian vessels of the same type.

The location to launch this nuclear ballistic missile attack had been selected because both Russian and the United States submarines of this type had been detected there over the last decade. Shih had made his way slowly to this location in the middle of the great ocean. He had had to use every bit of hard-won knowledge and skill to achieve this location in the deep blue. He had done this all without any signs of being detected.

His ship was one of the newest SLBM or submarine launched ballistic missile carriers his country had in service. She was not as quiet as her counterparts in other larger navies but she was the quietest thing in the Chinese fleet so far by a good margin. In fact, there were only three ships of her class in operation by her great country. Even he had no idea how many of this class was planned to be built.

He knew that three more of this class were being built back home in massive covered building sheds but in his heart, he knew that only one might make it to the sea in the near future. This one had been the first of her class. She had the most experienced and trusted crew of the lot that was left in his country's navy, so she had been sent to do this task for her political masters. She had been creeping along as deep as she could and going only at a speed of six knots or less for most of the trip out of her home port in southern China.

Now it was time as set down in his written orders. This was the day after what was hoped would be the biggest party or event that the enemy seemed to celebrate. He had no idea what 'The Battle of the Resurrection Ship' was but the aliens thought enough of it to have a party every year to celebrate the outcome. It was hoped that the aliens and their closest allies would not be on their best game during this time. It was hoped that being attacked with ICBM weapons that were coming from an unexpected direction and at an unexpected time would be enough for the mission to succeed. After all, the aliens were not magic users. They were human like, and humans had all of the same weaknesses. This was what they were counting on, at least.

When Captain Shih announced to the crew their mission four days after leaving port, it was greeted with loud cheers from the crew of his ship. It was just as was expected from a proper crew with their political training. Unlike other SSBNs, it was not one person or even two people who had to supply the launch keys. They were held by five different crew members as required on a PLA(N) ship. That was the reason for the shipwide announcement of what their mission was going to be. That way the crewmembers with the other three keys could come forward and report to the ship's masters when they were close to launching the weapon.

He was not surprised by two of the key holders to release the weapons of mass destruction. One was with the senior enlisted member of the crew, and the other one was held by the person in charge of maintaining the huge multistage weapons. The last one was held by, of all people, the ship's youngest cook. What the Captain did not know was that the cook was not just the ship's cook. He was a very well-respected member of one of the Chinese secret intelligence agencies. He also was one of the few people on this whole ship that knew why this mission was so important.

Now with all the keys accounted for and collected as required by regulation, the SSBN commander had them all installed in the master launch system. With this done, all they would need to finish the deed were his and the XO's physical keys to be turned at the same time. Those last two keys would send the command to the weapons to go forth and do what they were designed to do all those years before. It would be a simple thing that could lead to a massive loss of life so far away.

Captain Shih was lost in thought and didn't notice things going on around him for some time. His XO and second in command looked up when his commander didn't respond to his last statement. He had to repeat himself, this time a little louder but sill in a mid-level volume normal in a ship service that prided itself on silence.

"Captain we are at launch depth, and at a hover. We are green to launch."

An SSBN had to be perfectly steady and at exactly the right position in depth and in where it was in relation to the rest of the world. The hard part was that the submarine could not move during the entire launch sequence or very bad things could happen. If they moved an inch in any direction without planning, that would cause a huge distance change at the end of the massive missiles' 8,000 km track. It took a lot of work to keep over 20,000 tons of machine from moving an inch in any direction amidst the three dimensional space that was moving around it. It was why the helmsman on these classes or types of submarines were such highly valued personnel. It also was the hardest position to fill and keep filled with those skilled hands. This was one area of technology that China had not been able to acquire from other nations and so they had to do things the old fashioned way.

The captain shook his head from side to side to clear his mind and to help focus on the upcoming task. He was about to launch the first ever nuclear missile strike from a submarine in human history. That was not something a person should take lightly, and without reverence to the state. It was just that something did not seem right about what he had been ordered to do. He had been thinking about it every second of every day after he had read those orders in his private cabin.

"Thank you, comrade. Now let's be about this business, shell we." The Captain filled his voice with bravado and tried to channel the proper party look.

The last part of his statement had been pitched to carry the length and breadth of the command center of the massive vessel. He pulled the key and its attached chain from its place around his neck over his head. This move was copied by the vessel's second in command. The two men inserted the keys into the slots in front of each them. On a nod from the captain, they both turned the keys and pushed a yellow button, all in one smooth motion and in perfect sync with each other. It was just like they had spent the last few years training to do.

Outside of the ship, the surrounding water was dark, almost blue in color. The sun would be coming up in a few minutes in the local area. It would have penetrated to this depth and shown what was happening, but only after it had been up for a few more hours. There was some unwritten rule taught in most leadership schools. Any sneak attack needed to start at night. It was all about using the night to hamper any response that could be made by the lazy enemy.

The tall black painted sail of the ship was almost all the way forward of the ship's center of mass. Behind the sail and running aft was a large turtle back that was lined with odd shaped hatches also running down its length to the single shrouded many bladed propeller. Right behind the sail on the port side, one of the hatches popped open. While the hatch was still in motion, a huge device called a gas generator went to work doing what its name said it was for. It used both a chemical reaction and large pressure tanks to make gas.

As soon as the double hatch locked back and out of the way, the gases had already built up enough pressure to do its job. This gas was used to shoot the thirteen meter tall and forty-two ton missile out of its metal casing. The gas charge kept pushing the long weapon up to the wave tops above the long hunter and killer of cities. The gas had enough push to get the weapon clear of the water, propelling the weapon through almost twenty meters of water between the submarine and the wave tops. The missile kept on coasting upwards, clearing the water, until the whole missile had cleared the small waves in the predawn light.

When the systems told the main computer on the missile that it was clear of the water and was just about to start falling back, four massive bell nozzles came to life in flashes of first smoke and then long tongues of flames and noise on the level of a large bomb going off. For a heartbeat or two, the missile looked like it was not going to take flight under its own power. After hovering for a second over the ocean waves, it started to move higher over the deep blue water, and race faster and faster into the still dark sky.

Below the waves and the now fire tossed water, a second hatch popped open. This time the hatch was all the way at the end of the turtle back, and on the starboard side of the vessel. The whole ship had recoiled and rocked, when the first missile was launched out of its tube. A launch from the opposite side of the ship would cancel most of the oscillation, or at least keep it to recoverable levels for the ship and missiles to handle. That was how it was going to work to get all twenty-four of the modified Giant Wave 2 missiles out the ship and on their way to the targeted island to the south of them.

Captain Richard H. O'Kane was not a happy camper as he sat in his metal command chair. The same could be said of every other crewmember currently on the Virginia-class submarine number SSN-775, also known as the USS Texas to the people who lived in one of the largest states in the United States. Both they and their captain had failed their last combat readiness review. It was only because of his family history that he and his crew had been given a second chance to requalify after the fiasco the last review had become. If he and his crew did not pass the next test, he would never command a submarine or anything larger than a rowboat again. More than likely, he would be asked to leave the navy within a year or maybe two at the outside after the failed report was filed.

That was why O'Kane and his ship were here in the first place. Guam had been a forward submarine base for decades but it had been shut down in the first months of the last administration. It had been hoped to be the first part of the peace dividend that she had run on to be elected. Word was now floating around that it might be brought back into use in the near future. The winds of change were starting to blow hard.

The captain had spent many a month underwater in these parts during his life so far. He could not think of a better place to get some training in. Training that the failed test had proven that his crew badly needed. One of the nice things about the location was that there was no one around. You know, like say his peer sneaky attack submarine commanders, who might be watching him and his crew work through their problems. He hoped that by being out here, they would have a few surprises for the ship they would go against for the re-test. He wanted to take any advantage that he could squeeze off of the training time they had left.

The four sonar operators had their headsets pressed against their ears trying to pull out every bit of data they could and maybe a little more. The senior sonar NCO had been very upset with himself and his crew when they failed the test. It did not help his ego that he was a man born and bred in the great state of Texas. He had been very proud of the fact that he had drawn her as his current assignment. He had written home and even bragged to his friends on his last visit home about his great and beautiful ship. He was not going to tell anyone that they had failed their pre-deployment test.

He had been tracking what they called biologics on his multibillion dollar system for the last few days. They were basically mammals of different types. He had been helping the rest of the crew set up attack runs on them and other fake targets that might be in the water column or at its bottom. He was getting tired after all of the long hours that he had already put in over the last three shifts but he still had two more hours to go before this shift was over. Then he could get into his still warm bunk for some much-needed sleep. He would only get a few hours of sleep before he would have to start the next shift of retraining his team.

When the first massive metal hatched popped open on the Chinese submarine, the noise passed through the water as a sound wave. Sound moves much faster through the water than it does through the air. If that had been the only sound generated by the SSBN, it might have slipped by the tired sonar operators on the American submarine. In the real world, there were very few ways to keep quiet when you launched a four-story building from twenty meters under the water. When the first missile started on its way towards the surface it caused another wave of sound. And that was the sound that could be the death knell for a submarine in time of war.

The head sonar operation about came out of his padded chair as the sound of the moving parts that made the gas generator work passed through the water and covered the distance between the two vessels. His hands flew across the buttons and nobs on the systems that were his trade. By the time the gas generators had kicked out the missile from its canister in the number one tube, he was singing out his report to the command center of his vessel.

"Transit! Transit! I have a Sierra bearing 67 degrees! Range is still working! This is not a drill." He did not need to repeat what he had just said to get the CIC moving.

He added the last bit just to remind everyone that this one was not a training call out. This was a real world event. About as real as everyone had hoped would not happen to anyone, ever. That is, outside of a movie playing in the mess hall.

Alarms were not blaring and there were not even lights flashing around the room or ship. That was not the way of the American silent service. Captain O'Kane took the three long steps so that he was now looking over the shoulder of the younger man. O'Kane was looking at the waterfall display that showed the sonar information in almost the raw form. He had come up through the tactical track for most of his career as a navy officer. That meant that he could read the display, just not as well as a dedicated operator could. So when it spiked again on the display, he noticed and he had some idea of what it meant in the real world. That did not stop the operation from sounding off with the second set of noises.

"Sir, new transit same bearing. It's loud and we're getting spill over. It sounds like a passenger train or something slamming through the water column."

The sonar tech tried to push the headphone deeper into his ear canals as he listened to what his systems were trying to tell him. In a few seconds, his eyes shot up. "Sir, something broke the surface. It sounds like a missile, but a lot bigger than any Tomahawk or Harpoon launch I've ever heard before."

The second sonar operator looked up with eyes so wide that the whites were almost fully around the irises like an egg on a hot iron skillet. "Second transit. It's like the first. It sounds like a hatch popping. It's kind of like that old Ohio boat from training school." His eyes closed as his training kicked into high gear and he almost became one with his detection systems. "It looks like she's about ten nautical miles out 270 degrees off our bow."

He stopped talking as his computer station started beeping and now little flashing lights were going off all over the CIC. Hearts across three different compartments stopped as their minds processed what those little lights meant. "Sir the computer knows this Sierra! She is cataloged as an SC-75, a Tang-class boomer!"

The sonar crewman was already talking to thin air, as the captain was already moving towards the front of the command area. "Weps, fire tube 3 on that bearing, NOW!. Ready tube 4 for wire guidance! It's going to be a hip shot," was shouted from the sub commander to the CIC crew. Thanks to the retraining, all were on the task like a cat on a patch of fresh catnip. Most of their brains were not fully online with what they were doing yet. It was all training and muscle memory.

After the Chinese attack that caught most people around the world with their pants down, the rules had changed. Some of those changes were made public and some were very much on the classified side of the world. A new directive was put out to every ship in the CINCPAC area of operation. They all would now carry armed weapons ready to launch as soon as they left their home ports. This was one of those orders that had been slipped through the President's desk by the Joint Chiefs that she had not noticed, and it had not been changed under the new administration.

In the case of the USS Texas, that meant that they had two MK 48 Mod 7 CBASS torpedo in two of the four launch tubes she had been built with. And those warheads were ready to fire on very short notice. While the machines were doing their work, the human brains could catch up to what was going on around them. Well, more like try not to fall any further behind what was going on in the world around them.

The Texas had been working on a number of different scenarios for the training event they were preparing for. Most were centered on the idea of a Chinese missile strike on the continental US. What they knew was that they had just picked up an SSBN launching some kind of large missile out of the water. And the US was within range of even China's first generation of SLBM from this location. They had no idea who was going to have the missile or missiles raining down on them but some of the more quick witted of the crew of the vessel were starting to wonder if they would have a home to go back to. Those few wisely did not voice those concerns with the rest of the crew.

The weapon control operator or 'Weps' was very well trained. After the previous failure in testing, he had now been put through certain drills and skills improvements so that he had the muscle memory for his tasks. His right hand moved four inches and flipped up a plastic cover switch without his mind knowing what was going on. His left hand was already pushing a button to flood the torpedo tube that held the pump jet propelled weapon.

While this was going on, the third massive missile was leaving the Chinese death machine to start its journey of dropping its nuclear warheads on someone who did not know that they were at war yet. The fourth hatch was just popping open on the Type 096 class ship when the USS Texas' number three torpedo tube door slid open. The 50 kilometers per hour, 3,700 pound weapon swam out of its mothership at slow speed. One second after leaving its protective tube mounted almost a third down length of the American submarine, it used its very sensitive passive seeker to find the noise it had been pointed to by the computer of the larger ship. A new computerized killer had just been unleashed into the local waters. It moved away from its parent ship at a steady twenty-five knots.

It took about one minute and a half for the second torpedo to follow behind the first weapon leaving the Texas. This was well within the training requirements set down by the inspectors and evaluators. This torpedo was getting updated information passed to it from the larger and more powerful targeting system on the attack submarine. That information was sent between the two objects via a hair thin wire. This meant that it was moving a little slower than its partner in crime was. That could be changed by a single command sent down the hair thin wire as soon as the warhead on the second weapon was armed.

The Chinese SSBN's sonar was not that great in passive mode to begin with, but it was better than what the older boats that the Chinese Navy used. It just was not that good compared to the systems used by other boats in the local area. Now add in the massive amount of noise and shaking due to the 13 meter long missiles being thrown out off of the ship at a steady rate and the Chinese ship and her crew had no idea they were under hostile fire.

The first warning that the attack on the Chinese submarine was underway was when the passive system got a sniff of the charging weapon. This was mainly caused by the huge air bubble umbrellas caused by the launching missiles, but it was only a sniff and a light one at that. That little sniff lasted just two and a half seconds before the 650-pound warhead's proximity fuse went off. The water hammer was just a meter and a half from the metal side of the submarine's heavy turtleback. The hunting weapon had been attracted to all of the noise coming from that area of the ship, just as it had been designed to do. It was just that the weapon's designers had thought the noisiest part of a ship would be near the engine room.

The sonar operator had enough time to know that he was about to die. He didn't have enough time to shout a warning to the ship's master. The long gray and black weapon came charging from behind the long warship out of the inky black water. It was like a great white shark going after a seal in the early morning waters. It was homing in on the massive sound waves coming from the launch of the SLBMs and nothing the sub could have done would have stopped it. Those massive sound waves also were giving some cover to the other noises the submarine was making. The term was active jamming, even if it was not intentional.

When the American torpedo exploded, it had several things working against it. First was that Chinese SSBN's or boomers had been designed to carry very large weapons. The Chinese shipwrights had learned the hard way about dealing with them and that those large weapons might or might not explode when they were launched out of their tubes. It was not a minor engineering feet to build the launch section in the first place. Then they had to find all kinds of ways to go about reinforcing it as those weapons got more powerful. By now it was very well designed, and it could take a hit from a falling four story building. One that also was full of stuff that burned quick, hot and with a lot of built up energy. Someone had once made a comment that these types of weapons required a controlled explosion just to get them off the ground.

Another thing working against the warhead was that it hit an empty missile silo in that hard turtleback. The thick metal around the empty missile tube had acted like water filled spaced type armor on a World War II battleship. This worked to dissipate the forces of the explosion before it could move deeper into the underwater warship. The weapon had a warhead that was even smaller than the ones most countries in World War II used to hunt a lot smaller targets than a Tang-class SSBN.

Another thing that was working against the attacking torpedo was that it was designed to sink submarines in a lot deeper water than just the twenty meters under the waves this one was hovering at. So, one of the items it was designed to work with was missing and that was the presence of a lot of water pressure squeezing in on the target of the attack. When a sub is deep underwater the weight pressing in on the ship from the surrounding water alone could reach into the tons per square inch range. Even a small crack can be a ship ending event for that boat.

Now that is not to say that no damage was done to the Chinese boomer by the torpedo. The one design feature that was working was a fact about water. Water is not that compressible. The silo tubes to either side of the torpedo strike were damaged. It was just lucky that only one of those silos had a missile still in it at the time of the hit.

The shock wave transmitted through the water bent the long weapon sitting in that silo. This was coupled by the metal walls at the side of the silo bending in to puncture the thin side of the missile. This hole allowed cold sea water to start flooding into its sensitive insides. It would not be going anywhere, anytime soon, and so it would not be able to launch. The explosion also shoved the massive ship sideways, just as one of the other JL-2(M) left the tube on its way to the surface. The contact was slight, as those things went. The thing is, a fully loaded 20,000 tons of ship hitting a lightly built rocket did affect the delicate path the missile was to take on its way to the surface of the ocean.

Captain Shih was first thrown forward, and then to one side but did not get knocked off his feet by the sudden motion of his ship. He was thinking maybe one of the missiles had misfired out of its silo. It was not an unknown occurrence for the PLA(N) to have to deal with. It was one of the reasons that they were using modified JL-2 or Giant Wave 2, and not the hoped for and long promised JL-3. The JL-3 was still exploding in the launcher more often than leaving it.

Then the sonar operator on the SSBN started to get a better read of the nearby area as the sound wave of the warhead detonating went outwards from the ship. That sound wave then bounced off something else that was not a biologic, but something made of metal and moving towards them at a speed no animal in the sea could match.

The three of the four sonar operators only had one ear covered by their headphones when the explosion of the torpedo happened. That was good for them, somewhat at least, so that they were not taken out of commission by the blast. They each only lost hearing in one ear, but they all were able to get their headphones back on quickly. Now they each only had one good ear while the other ear was ringing like bells from hell. And they were to try to make out what had happened to them and the nearby sea. Almost as one voice they called out.

"Torpedo in the water!"

The better of the three crewmen added more information at the end of the chorus. He kept his voice level as he gave up the information that his systems were giving him. "Closing from port side and aft. Maybe medium speed. It could be on some kind of passive mode. Sounds like an American Mark 48!" The last part was yelled at some volume.

The Chinese captain and his crew's training kicked in as they worked the problem. The ship's master's mind went into overdrive to find a way to counter this attack. "Down! 35 degrees down bubble, fill auxiliary air tanks, come hard to starboard! Deploy counter measures and bring us to 12 knots!" His training told him that a sitting target was a dead target.

It all rattled off his tongue without any thought or direction coming from his forebrain. It was all just a reaction to the surprise attack. He would have started to pray but he was a good communist and churches were just another power block that tended to work against the party. In his rush, he had forgotten one little thing. Whenever they had done these drills for all of these years, they had not been launching four story buildings off the top of the ship while being attacked by an enemy attack submarine.

The Type 096 SSBN was not an attack submarine by any means that would describe those sharks of the sea but it still was very maneuverable compared to other boats in her class, including the vaunted Ohio-class. The ship's short nose dropped as the diving planes did their job, and the SSBN started to dive into deeper water. It was a race to see if they would live or die and it was only a matter of math, timing, and just a little luck on what side of that coin the crew of the vessel were going to land on.

The second torpedo launched from the Texas was an older model of the Mark 48 torpedo made primarily as a wire guided weapon. This one weapon was slated to come off the ship in six months and never see service again. It also had been preset for a slow, long range run while it had been sitting in the tube. So it needs a little time to reach its target from the launch point. If this had not been a snap shot, the fire control system on the Virginia-class submarine would have changed it to a faster setting, but that would have automatically set it for a shorter range.

There just had not been enough time and she went out the tube as is. As the light green weapon closed in on the target, she started to change course in two dimensions but still stayed on the target that the tether to her mother ship said she should. She even stayed lined up pretty well when the first noise maker popped out of a side mounted bay on the Chinese submarine.

The pair of six inch counter measures started to sing their death song to the attacking weapon. The weapons operator was able to keep a pretty good idea where the real target was through the pair of singers. That was even when the second pair of counter measures hit the water and added even more confusion into the water's sound environment. All the while the attacking older American torpedo kept coming and closing on the underwater target.

That was not the only noise coming out of the fleeing submarine. The main computer of the Chinese ship was caught in a trap. Its programming was caught in between two sets of orders or subroutines. One subroutine said that if the ship was not at hover or had exceeded certain parameters then it should stop launching the long ranged nuclear tipped missiles. Why waste the extremely expensive weapons if they were not going to be useful at the end of their flight?

The second subroutine and the second jaw of the trap knew that it had been ordered to get rid of the massive weapons and now they were under attack. Why keep weapons on board a ship that might be sunk at any second. According to this logic, the SSBN should keep on launching the heavy things. In the end, it was the second argument that won out in the hidden computer programming conflict that the captain and crew had no idea was going on. The code that won had simply done so because it was written by a higher ranked user than the first subroutine had been.

So as the massive submarine tilted down on its nose and went deeper into the water column driven by its massive propeller and water filling its main ballast tanks, the Giant Wave 2 missiles kept right on launching out of the tubes behind the great sail of the submarine. As the angle of the descending submarine got steeper and steeper, and the distance to the surface got greater and greater, fewer missiles would reach the surface where their first stage could kick them on their way to some kind of target.

The missile that had been bumped by its launching submarine did make it to the surface and even completely cleared the wave tops. The missile JL-2(mod) number 44 was having a bad day today. He had always been temperamental, and even as long ranged missiles went was considered to be very temperamental. It started with the fact that he was the 44th missile of the JL-2 line to ever be built. The Chinese did not like the number 4. It would be like a car or jet liner that had the number 1313 for most Americans.

He had always needed more attention from the supporting maintenance people to keep in flight status than other missiles of the same make and model. That was why he was the first JL-2 to be modified and placed in the Type 096 SSBN. The JL-3 was not coming along as quickly as had been planned, so it had been decided by the PLA(N) leadership that the JL-2 would be kept in use but it would be updated to fill in until most of the major JL-3 issues were fixed.

It was like what happened with the American Trident I and Trident II missiles a few decades before. Number 44's need for so much more attention was the main reason it had been the first JL-2 to be modified and updated. Still, he had been the second missile to complete the modification program. Again, he had issues that delayed him from being certified and loaded into the tube in the submarine that had held him until just about a minute ago.

When Number 44 breached the water, he was not angled correctly and was a lot lower to the waves than he should have been. When the bump that he had taken during launch was added in, the missile had the ICBM equivalent of a heart attack or stroke. If he had been launched by someone like say, NASA, they would have said something like, "The device had a slight containment issue shortly after launching."

A Colonial would have just said it turned into a big frakking fireball and fell back into the water with a big frakking splash.

The waves were still radiating outwards from this impact when the next Giant Wave 2 cleared the churned-up water. The nuclear payload on number 44 did not detonate when its propelling engines and all of its stored fuel went up in smoke. The warheads had not even been armed yet, so they just fell back into the wave tossed water with the rest of the missile's surviving debris from the fireball.

The weapons operator controlling the torpedo from the USS Texas was getting sweaty palms as his weapon closed on the target. Then the world went white as the shock wave from the 13 meter tall rocket exploding just a few inches above the wave tops hit, followed by the debris hitting the water as a fiery mess. It was in this lapse of concentration that the older Mk 48 thought it had a target and let its six hundred and fifty pounds of explosives finally be set free after so many years in storage.

The American weapon was too far from the retreating sub to crack her hull like a direct hit might have done. The two hundred and forty meter long submarine still did not get off without a scratch after its close encounter with the American torpedo. With the water just a little deeper when the warhead detonated it had gone from 3 atmospheres or about 44 psi to close on 11 atmospheres or 160 psi. It now had over a hundred pounds more per square inch on the ship's hull to work with.

The whole vessel was under a lot more stress. So much more that the shock wave from the torpedo's warhead still was able to crack the outer hull. This ruptured some air tanks, and the shock wave was too much for the nuclear reactor to like. The controlling computers auto-started the SCRAM process so that it would not melt down. And just like that, the sub was without its main source of electricity.

The Tang-class boomer was not out of the woods yet. She was going deeper but she was hurt very badly. It was not helping that she was rocked again and again as more of the 100 ton missiles were kicked out of the back of the hull. This increasing stress opened the small cracks in the hull just a little more, and the rate of flooding increased again and again after every shock.

Before the second Mark 48 torpedo had even left the USS Texas, the autoloaders had already gone into action on tubes 1 and 2. They were loading the almost 4,000 pound weapons that had been prepped for use but not loaded for action. These two weapons were in the water before the second torpedo had almost lost its target and detonated too soon. They were far enough away that the exploding ICBM overhead did not affect their search for a target in the least bit. There had been time enough to set these weapons up on something other than what had been pre-selected weeks ago. They were on an all-out sprint to the target. By now there was little need for stealth. It was a knife fight in a phone booth.

Captain Shih and his ship's crew were pros, and they were using every trick in the book they knew. They even tried some things that they had only seen on TV or in the movies, but now they could hear the pump jet on the twin closing machines of death. It was like listening to the fat lady warming up, and it was their death song she was about to belt out.

The torpedoes on their tail were not even close to the Mark 48's that had come off the production lines back in 1971. They were not even close in relation to the much feared ADACP version of that weapon that started showing up in the fleet in 1988 and were made popular in books and movies over the decades. These were more advanced and almost dog smart compared to the older generations of weapons. Nothing the fleeing submarine tried to do worked, and at most bought them a handful of minutes of life.

The two torpedoes set at their maximum speed closed in on their target and both weapons hit the aft of the ship less than three seconds apart. They had to make a slight climbing attack, and as they were coming up hit the bottom of the ship. This was because the ship was almost vertical to the weapons, having dived to get away from the first two attackers. The impact from both weapons snapped the ship in half. It was not cleanly broken in half but it was more like it had been broken in half like a very green stick. The whole crew of the SSBN was dead before the shock wave made it back to the USS Texas.

The dying ship started to sink to the ocean floor. The reactor room along with the shrouded propeller and rudder were in one part falling away. The missile tubes, sail, and bow were in the other section of the sinking wreckage. They would sink in close formation until they were around a kilometer below sea level. By this time, the air and life would be long gone from within the metal hulls, and even the compression fires had stopped burning.

They would hit the south side of the mud volcano called the South Chamorro Seamount at about fifteen knots of ground speed. They would slide deeper below the waves for another thirty meters down the mountainside. The two major parts would bleed off speed until coming to a rest only around 3 kilometers apart on the sea floor.

As luck would have it, something rested only twenty meters away from where .the massive bent and broken bronze propeller that used to be at the stern of the Chinese made weapon of strategic attack came to be. It was another wreck on the sea floor, but this one had been there for a few more decades than the People's Republic of China had been in charge of its holdings on the mainland.

A B-29 that was believed lost to enemy fire during a bombing mission flown out of the Old North Field, she was sitting there quiet as the grave she was. The craft had survived the attack, but she had made the trip home with dead crew on board her silver metal hull. She had kept going until the old girl ran out of fuel, and crashed into the empty waters of the Pacific Ocean. She had lost speed as one by one her four powerful propeller driven engines stopped due to fuel starvation or battle damage. She had slowly drifted closer and closer to the blue water below as the engines failed.

She still struck the water at almost a hundred and thirty kilometers per hour on her belly, just forward of her bomb bay. She skipped, splashed, and skidded across the smooth water until all of her speed was gone and she was still again. Her outer skin had been breached and mangled in places, so she did not stay on the top of the ocean for long. She had slipped below its blue waters in a slow drift down to the depths. She had come to rest on the underwater mountainside and she was still there with the bones of her crew locked inside her aluminum hull.

She had seen almost half a dozen different ships make the long trip from the bright surface down toward her over the following years. None had found her however, so she still sat waiting for the time she could get her crew home. She had finally given up hope when it turned out that her next visitor was just another wreck and not a scout. It would take another two years for bright white and red lights to light up the area around her body. She had been sleeping and had not even noticed the latest scout on the way down from the surface.

They were looking for the Chinese submarine, and they had tracked the radiation coming from her nuclear pile to this location in the dark and cold waters. The great old warplane was marked as all newly discovered wrecks were. Just a normal day of diving.

That changed when the large UAV's lights peered into the cracked glass of the cockpit and saw an eyeless white skull looking back at them. There was still some hair waving in the slight movements in the water caused by the UAV's propellers working to keep the craft in place.

The UAV pilot dropped the little craft lower and started to get a more detailed inspection of this newly discovered wreck they had not been looking for. Right under the glass panels still visible but very faded was her name still legible to the naked eye. It was a simple name but one with lots of power. In reds and blues, it simply said 'Get'em home.' Below the name, and in black letters, was the plane's motto in letters three feet tall. "Getting them home, completing the mission."

The video was sent back to the home station in Hawaii where it quickly made national news. An MIA/POW recovery team was put together to see if they could recover the bodies or leave her marked as a war grave. It was only because of the Colonials and the technologies they brought that they would be able to extract the crew and plane from the mud. That is, if they decided that this was the plan they wanted to go with in the first place.

The new advances in metallurgical technologies had made the trip safer and easier. Besides, the CIA, the US Military, and even Green Peace wanted the wreckage of the Chinese SSBN recovered from the sea floor. So, both missions were planned to take place at the same time. It was a cost savings, adding the bomber recovery to the mission only added fifteen to twenty percent to the whole budget. If they ran two different missions it would have been at least double the cost of recovering the two parts of the Chinese warship.

It was the groundswell of support for 'Get'em home' that made the mission possible. Even if it was thought by the higher leadership to be the secondary mission. If they could recover the two parts of the submarine with the bodies they held, then why not recover the crew of the WW 2 American Bomber that had a mission statement of "Get them home"?

When the old girl was raised from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, they did not pull her all the way out of the water. She was lifted into a dry dock not unlike the one that the Colonials used for scrapping. It just had a few modifications so that the still intact wings of the bomber would fit. The rest of the wreckage of the Chinese warship were loaded onto another pair of semi-submersible ships with names like Dockwise Vanguard.

Five years after the sneak attack on the Colonials by the Chinese vessel, the floating dry dock was pulled into Pearl Harbor. Waiting on her to unload was a list of VIPs almost a mile long. While they watched, the B-29 and her dead crew were slowly raised totally out of the water for the first time. The bullet holes leaked water and mud onto the deck of the large ship. When about half of her silver hull was out of the clear water, a loud deep groan that was heard all way back to the cheap seats came out of the old warhorse.

A film crew had been covering the reaction from a small group of WW2 veterans who had been gathered to view the event. Not one in the group had a dry eye. A clear voice was heard on the tape. One that no one would be able to point out who. It was clear as a bell and broadcasted live to world.

"Thank you, old girl. You did your job. You got them home, where they belonged."

It as if the rusty, tattered, and mud-covered bomber heard the statement picked up from the crowd of old souls and she replied with another groan. This one was softer and almost sounded like a sigh coming from the old bones of the waterlogged bomber. Her story was not over yet, but that is a story for another time.

Captain O'Kane was just as mesmerized as the rest of his crew as he watched the last two torpedoes close in and hit the target only sixteen kilometers from them. A target that was still launching massive missiles off its back. It was like watching cars slip down an icy road or a train wreck. They just could not take their eyes off of what was about to happen. Only a very few of them had a little bit of an idea as to the impact of what they had done.

They had just become only the second nuclear powered submarine to sink an enemy capital warship in the history of this planet. The first had been the HMS Conqueror when she had nailed the 12,000 ton ARA General Belgrano. It was an old Brooklyn-class light cruiser flying the Argentinian flag back in 1982. With the USS Texas just bagging a 22,000 ton Tang-class SSBN, well, she was a lot bigger ship and a lot more dangerous prey than the almost 40-year-old light cruiser. They always say things are bigger in Texas. Now that it was over, Captain O'Kane had time for his brain to kick into what he and his crew had just done and what they might have stopped.

"Well I'm either going to be a hero or a goat for sinking that Chinese warship". Thought O'Kane to himself.

What he did say out loud was a bit different. He looked around the CIC of his warship. "Now that is the way to spend thirteen or fourteen million dollars. XO run the tapes. See if we missed anything."

The captain turned somewhat to one side so that this next order was directed at one wall of the CIC. He fought to keep his voice calm and in the same tone and volume, one that his crew was used to him using.

"Helm. Please take us up to communication depth. We need to let the bosses know what happened, and hope to god someone can stop those missiles that bastard got off."

Captain O'Kane didn't recognize his own voice as he gave those orders. He was betting that he and his crew were going to be okay. They were in US territorial waters and a foreign warship had started lofting missile, possibly long ranged nuclear tipped ones, at someone without warning. He now just hoped that he was going to report to his bosses and not meet the dead air of a massive nuclear exchange that could be developing over their heads.

All he could do was get closer to the surface and let his command know what happened. Then the chips could fall as they may. Many years later, when the USS Texas was retired from service because her hull supports were too old for upgrading with the rapidly emerging metal technology, she would be put on proud display next to the battleship USS Texas. A proud kill marker for a Tang-class SSBN would be painted prominently on her tall black sail. This was for the world to see that this Texas also had seen the elephant and had lived to tell about it. That was what happened below the waves. Above the clouds, the battle was just starting.

Hardball was in orbit high over the islands, the normal perch for a Raptor on overwatch. The commander was still frakking hot at her for the situation she had put him in. She was now down checked from flying Vipers. With her belly, she just would not fit in the tight frakking cockpit of the things. She was still a fully qualified Raptor pilot though. So she could still pull a shift or two every week just to get some stick time.

For some strange reason though, it seemed that she was always getting the crap shifts to fly. She was sure that the colonel was why she was up here now instead of enjoying the party that was just now winding down on the island. This was the first time she had missed the celebration of killing that massive Cylon Resurrection ship.

She could not have drunk anyway, but she bet it was a hell of a party and on the correct date for the first time in years. One of the upsides of today's mission was that the local built ISS had been in range. She had a burned up a good twenty minutes of her mission time chatting with them. That is, until it went out of range over the horizon and she was bored again. That had been an hour ago.

It would be a few more hours before their orbit brought her back into range of the short-ranged equipment on the oddly shaped station in orbit below her. She would have broken out the cards, but the colonel had put a stop to that when tensions first started to rise with the Chinese. That was some time before they had launched all of those cruise missions at them. It did not look like he was about to backslide on that restriction any time soon.

She was just using the old mark ones to keep a look out over the planet through the glass covered cockpit. That is right up until her ECO started freaking out behind her. His computer had started yelling and only a second or two later he started blasting her eardrums with his yelling. On her heads up display, icons were starting to rise over the horizon of the planet. They were outlined in red as each object was seen by the Raptor's systems. The computer on the craft already knew these were a threat to if not her, then to her people. The computer also knew that they were nuclear warheads coming towards them faster than the speed of sound.

The JL-2's were already in the second stage burn mode when Hardball picked them up on radar and DRADIS. Before she could do more than make sure the data was going down to the command center below her, the weapons buses released their deadly cargos along with a surprising number of decoys. It was a growing wave of nuclear hell moving at a few thousands of kilometers per hour. The Colonials were under attack again, and this time the enemy had brought out the big guns to swat the two islands.

A total of eight of the twenty four missiles the SSBN had tried to launch made it past the first stage burn after clearing the wave tops. Of those eight, only six were on target towards the Colonial controlled islands. The other two were just heading up and south with no way to make it to the target coded into their guidance packages. Every one of those eight missiles had fully armed warheads.

All of the missiles were being tracked by the Raptor's systems now that the planet was not blocking its view. The two that were not a threat to the Colonial islands were quickly assessed and the targeting systems dismissed them out of hand. The normal JL-2 could carry one large warhead or three to four smaller ninety kiloton warheads. Modifications had been done to a few different areas of the missiles, but most of the improvements were focused on the warhead bus that carried the hell weapons.

This bus was the part of the SLBM that carried the warheads, decoys, and guidance package to get the weapons to a given target. Currently, this area had something new, something copied from technologies stolen from both the Russians and the Americans in recent years. They were referred to as penetration aids by the people who built them. Counter missile technologies had been advancing in leaps and bounds over the years since the JL-2 went into production for the Chinese military. Pen aids or decoys were a cheap and low mass way to help the warheads make it to the target safely. They looked and acted like real warheads, but were not. It was hoped that they could suck up as much of the incoming enemy fire as they could so that the real threat could live on to reach its end state.

Just before the third and last stage burned out and dropped away, it deployed six more objects along with its four main warheads and the first batch of decoys. They were heavy, wide, and thus less aerodynamic even at two hundred and forty kilometers up. The upper stage was already starting to fall back to earth while the lighter and better shaped warheads and decoys flew on their pre-planned path. The missiles and warheads did not have the range they normally would have.

Before and by design, they would have been fired to the east and not to the south and a little west. Normally, once above the heavy atmosphere they gained range because the Earth was rotating at 1600 Kph below them. This bunch had been fired in what would have been called a polar orbit. That is, if they had a little more power in the boosters or less mass at the pointy end of the device, their aim point would have been on a little spot in the ocean to the west of the Colonial island. That way, as the Earth rotated it would bring the island into the impact zone of the onrushing nuclear warheads. That was going to work for six of the eight missiles that had made it this far in the mission. The other two were just heading south with four live 90,000 tons worth of high explosive warheads coasting along from each of the pair of missiles.

The decoys that had come off the six attacking missiles were cutting edge. From a radar and other counter measures point of view they appeared to be well over sixty potential warheads in flight along the same general path. The one thing that the Colonials had going against the attacking warheads was that the Colonial Raptor was on station above the island. This was a perfect set up for the Raptor to do a job that it had been designed to do.

The Raptor had been designed as one of her expected duties to shoot down Cylon anti-ship missiles. They were hopefully picking out the Cylons' nuclear armed warheads first when they engaged the weapons heading towards any close by Colonial ships. While the decoys looked real to radar, the Raptor also had DRADIS. That was a whole new ballgame that the localborn did not know that much about much less how to counter. Even the small short ranged system was able to pick out the plutonium of the duel trigger warheads with ease. All Hardball had to do was aim at the twenty four messengers of death, and pull the trigger on her control stick. She did not even have to get clearance from the colonel before she pulled that trigger.

A dozen small missiles leapt from the Colonial craft from various concealed bays on the sides, wings and undercarriage of the craft. Then the number of warheads was half what they had been just forty-five seconds before. The downside for Hardball was that now she was out of missiles, and those had been the easy shots. Now it was time for the hard part. If she had been on an attack mission, she could have shot each one of them down. They just did not have the weapons to do that day in and day out. Like anything else purely Colonial made, they just did not grow on trees and the Colonial support chain was not up to the way it had been before the Cylons' surprise attack.

This overwatching Raptor was fitted out for the scout, people mover, and radar/DRADIS picket missions. She did not have that much firepower compared to what she could have carried with just a little more planning or warning. She only had enough firepower to take out a medium sized city today. After the dozen missiles were launched, all she had to work with was a Colonial gatling style cannon, not even the ion bolt firing type of weapon was carried on today's mission.

Hardball had to drop almost two hundred and forty kilometers of altitude to get a good line up for the upcoming gunshot. Even with the help of a Colonial made targeting system, it was going to be a 'spray and pray' engagement. She pulled the trigger and the line of outgoing shells was displayed on her heads up display as green lines and arrows moving away from her at a growing downward arching fan of death.

Using this queuing on her helmet, she had to sweep the weapon across to spread the shells and lay an effective pattern in front of the attacking weapons. She hoped that the incoming targets would run into them. It kind of looked like a person watering their yard with a garden hose. The speed of closure was impressive, and she was rewarded with a steadily dropping count of threats. That is right up until her 30mm KEW clicked dry of ammunition.

She was still holding her breath when the count of threats went to zero just before the last round cleared that area of space in a very low orbit of the planet. It there had been a few more warheads in this attack she would not have gotten them all. Would they have impacted the island? Maybe, and maybe not. They would still have to make it through two more layers of defense that the Colonials had set up over the islands.

The next layer of antimissile defense would have been from one or two Colonial ships at the port with their lasers and KEW's. The last layer would have been from the defense point between the space field and the sea. Then again, very few defenses are foolproof, and the Colonials were very aware of this fact in military planning.

The Colonial weapons Hardball used had put enough energy in the KEW rounds so that they could leave the orbit of the planet after leaving the barrels of the weapons. The spent projectiles entered the area of space between the Earth and Mars orbit before running out of delta-v relative to the sun. The unguided but hard bullet shaped pieces of metal did impact and destroy two satellites that were in their way. As it turned out, both were Russian made craft. Hardball had not been worried about little things like other satellites downrange of her fire. She was too busy trying to stop many fast moving nuclear warheads heading her way. The little things will work themselves out.

One of the Russian birds was an old military communication satellite that had gone dead sometime back in 2008. The other was one of their navigation birds. She was very much alive, that is until she had a close encounter with some of the Colonial made metal. Both did not leave anything bigger than a few bits of dust from the densest part of the machines, and the Colonial made shells were not measurably slowed down by the encounter.

It would seem that each object was hit with at least two of the hard tipped rounds. Some would later ask why they had not fitted the Raptors with laser weapons. The simple answer was they fired slower and could take on fewer targets per burst than the Colonial weapon she was packing that day. Lasers did hit harder by a few orders of magnitude. They also had a thinner spray and pray density than was needed that day. Many computer models would be made, and just as many different outcomes predicted. It would depend on how the model weighted both the Colonial weapons and the Chinese weapons.

Hardball, now that all the targets were taken care of and she no longer had any ammunition, was not thinking at all. She just was relying on training, and a good bit of muscle memory after so many years in the cockpit. She hit the stick and cold jets from all over the angle sided craft fired in both a confusing and rapid manner. Even with AG, the stress put on the pair of crewmembers was amazing with its brutality. For the first time Hardball understood why she had been downchecked from flying Vipers.

When her skills told her it was the right time, she hit the big button on the stick as hard as she could. This fired off the two big thrusters on the back of her craft, and she went after the last two missiles. She lined up on the nearest group of targets and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, so she pulled it again and not surprisingly the results were the same. Now her hands were flying on the computer touch screen trying to fix whatever might have happened to her weapons. It took her a few seconds to see the red light that said she was out of ammunition for all of her weapons. Her heart almost stopped and the bottom fell out of her stomach at the same time.

The Raptor was toothless and all Hardball could do was watch the warheads start getting lower and lower in the thickening atmosphere of the planet. As the weapons sank into the thicker air, her heart was sinking right along with them. It was like the Cylon surprise attack all over again. She was helpless again. She could just see the tips of the warheads start to glow from the air friction. And still she followed the weapons down.

The Raptor's ECO was giving all his best to cyber-attack the warheads as they fell towards the planet below but they were dumb and had no receivers he could sneak his electronic attack in through. While Hardball had just finished killing the threat to the islands her people called home, he was sending a broadband warning to anyone in radio range about the incoming nuclear attack, and all of the remaining weapons' projected impact points. Those impact points had changed with each weapon that his pilot had taken care off.

On his system, the screen would change the number and location of the anticipated impact points as Hardball took out targets. It was his voice that gave the three minute notice that death was coming to some parts of the South Pacific. Planes from all over the area had started dropping altitude as fast as they could at receiving the flash level warning. It was not as fast as they safely could but as fast their pilots could make the aircraft go. They would worry about pulling out of the dive later. It was an aggressive E-ticket roller coaster ride whether the passengers wanted one or not. It added a whole new meaning to the phrase 'keeping your seatbelts on while you were seated'. The aircraft crews did not care about the unlucky few who were now plastered on ceilings or walls as the planes dived like they were in some World War 2 movie.

EMP is pretty much a line of sight effect and those flight crews were trying their best to get out of the line of sight of those remaining weapons. The Colonials had no idea how powerful the inbound weapons were, but all eight of the locations were given to within thirty meters of each impact point. Hardball's ECO kept up the reports until Hardball stopped chasing the last two missile payloads. She was not going to follow the weapons to her death. She pulled up and then started looking for something else to kill, or have killed by someone she knew. She wanted to land but she knew that she had to stay in orbit until relieved. If she landed, then the Trading Outpost would lose its long ranged eyes. That could clear the way for a follow on attack get through.

The islands targeted by the Chinese were small, so all the weapons were programmed to stay close together and overlap the explosive force of the nuclear weapons as much as they possibly could. That was the Ma part of MaRV or maneuverable reentry vehicle. They could maneuver as they reentered the atmosphere. In some ways that helped the people at the other end of their flight paths. In other ways it was not helpful at all.

The close flying weapons were now falling and gaining more speed, helped along by the pull of the Earth to keep increasing that speed. They were heating up fast and this was one of the last chances that Murphy had to step in and affect the situation what was developing. The decoys only lasted to about eighty kilometers above surface level before being turned into brief flares in the sky as they burned up due to friction with the air moving around them.

Each of the eight nuclear weapons exploded a kilometer and a half above the water, and they were only about four hundred meters apart from one end of the engagement zone to the other. The EMP from the blasts were weaker than had it been a single weapon in the 700 kiloton range. It still was bad, very bad. Aircraft lost all computers, including the ones in the engines and avionics bays. Without fly by wire, or computers to help keep them flying and engines burning they fell out of the sky like giant metal broken winged birds.

Tidal waves raced out of the target area pushed along by the shock waves of the nuclear explosions. The racing wave of water started swamping any ship within sixteen kilometers of the blast's center. Only a handful of planes in the threat area had gotten low enough before the EMP blast hit to be able to coast to landings or suffer 'only' primary control loss.

It was weeks later that the numbers were finally totaled up. The total killed from the eight nuclear blasts was listed at 'only' 7,534 people confirmed dead. That number would be argued as being both too high and too low at the same time. Most people say that number was close enough for them. It would slowly rise again every couple of months as a new floating wreck would wash up or be found in a shipping lane. The dark side of the argument was that eight nuclear weapons were used in combat, and less than 10,000 people died from them. That was amazing all by itself.

The radiation from the blast was blown across the South Pacific onto both sides of the ocean, but the highest readings were found weeks later in both Chile and Argentina. Australia had to install radiation detectors on all of its east coast beaches and along key points of the Great Barrier Reef. These detectors were put out more because of pressure from the public than any real threat or health risk. It was done to keep the panic down at those locations and it seemed to work for the most part. That is except for the occasional false alarm. Those did not go over that well with the local population.

These were not the only areas to get a dose of the after effects of this attack. Hardball's cannon had not completely taken out the incoming weapons. She had instead turned them into low hanging (for space) clouds of poison. The clouds came down slowly and onto sites that ranged from the Antarctic Ocean or Southern Ocean to the South Pole, and going all the way to Seal Beach in South Africa. They all were hit by these clouds. They all had readings anywhere from high to very high radiation for eight months after the event. With every report that came out, more and more people got upset about the failed attack.

Chinese embassies soon saw mass protests and riots all over the world. They started on the first full day after the attack and grew in number as more reports came out over the following weeks. The Chinese delegation to the UN had to replace every car that they owned three times. It seemed like groups would target those cars even if they were empty at the time. The Dalai Lama was invited onto talk shows so that he could talk about Nepal or anything else he wanted to say. As long as it was against the Chinese government, it got some air time.

The Taiwanese government got more and higher level support in the public and private venues from around the world. A lot more pressure was being applied to support their independence from mainland China.

There was not a swell of support into changing the names of foods, like there had been with frankfurts and hamburgers back in the 1917/1940's. It was very close in some countries, but cooler heads stepped in before it got that far. Any subject that was anti-Chinese or anti-communist Chinese was headline news for a while, again after each report of a spike in radiation levels around the world.

Charles was just getting to the command center when Hardball took out the last threat to his command. It had been a perfectly timed attack on the Colonials. If Hardball or another Raptor had not been in orbit, he would not have bet that the anti-air weapons around the islands would have been able to stop all of the attacking weapons. He also would not have bet that half of the people on the island would live to see the sun set today. That is, if those weapons had not been stopped so high up and so quickly by Hardball.

He was a little upset and was quickly looking to get his mad on, and he had an idea of who was going to be on the receiving end of that mad on. Mell and Ruth had come running into the command center not two minutes after the all clear had been given via the Big Voice. One of the upsides of having more people on the islands was that now they had more available transportation. It was all local, but it did make getting around the island faster.

He was still working on getting an armed replacement Raptor launched to cover the orbital plane. It was only in case this was just the first attack. He had made sure that the order was given to have Hardball stay up there. He had also ordered a full turn out of manpower to both the airfield and large vessel pier. It was going to take about half an hour to find people who could complete the jobs he wanted done. It might take a long time to find people were not still legally drunk or too aggressively hungover to do the needed tasks. Now Charles was kicking himself for letting the party grow too big this year. He would make sure that this did not happen again. He had only about ten percent of his military people scheduled to be on duty today. The rest had been cleared to have a good time.

Notes: The B-29 story kicked started an idea that I sent to Palladium 4 or so years ago. It was to go into their Ghost tech book. They never published it or showed any interest in that more defined story of the lost B-29. If you would like to know what happened to her in a more refined state? Then please read "A Loyal War Horse" on this website.