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 46: Our Turn
Earth Dec 2020
Charles used the time after giving out his orders to get his military option moving to make a live statement. It was to be broadcast to the world via BBC as well as online podcast. He announced that once again, they had been attacked by China. That this time they tried for a surprise nuclear strike against the Colonials. He stated that if China wanted unrestricted warfare, they would get unrestricted warfare. It was only three sentences, but blood ran cold around the world when he ended his interview with a final very short statement.
It did not take long for confirmation of the attack to come out from the US and a growing list of other countries around the world. Having a few nuclear warheads going off had a way of attracting some attention from all corners of the planet. That would have been true even if a lot of eyes had not already been trained on that part of the world for some time now. It was so shocking that the numbers had to be looked at again. This was the only second time that the automated military response had been activated by some of the planet's most powerful countries.
It was half an hour before the Colonials were ready for the next step to back up what their commander had said to the world. First Charles sent word out to the two XS-24 Sea Bats and the one XS-30 Torpedo Attack Sub that were manned and ready. The second XS-30 was still getting a qualified crew put together but once it did, he would have orders ready for her as well. The world was about to find out that he had not been joking or making an off the cuff remark.
The orders were simple. They were to find and kill every Chinese submarine they could find. If they were not sure it was Chinese, the Colonial warships were to order it to identify themselves. If the strange submarine refused or made actions that might not be friendly, then they were ordered to try to make contact twice, then ping them hard and loud with active systems. If they did not get a responses after that, then they were to sink the sub and move on to the next target The three strikes rule was in effect as of today.
By now, he had every Raptor he could get armed flying, along with half the Vipers on the planet. He sent them out with a list of ground targets he wanted taken care of. They would be keeping only six armed Vipers as a CAP for the pair of islands. This left him with the four Raptors that he could not arm with external ordinance for various reasons. That did not mean that they were useless craft. Far from it.
Instead of carrying heavy weapons, those Raptors were filled with ten fully armed and armored troopers. They also were given a list of targets. As luck would have it, they took longer to get ready than first thought. Before they launched, the Colonel made another press statement for the world to hear. He declared that any Chinese submarine or warship was going to be sunk unless they raised a white flag and headed to the nearest port. Any Chinese flagged or owned vessel of any type that the Colonials found would be seized. That is, unless they were in a port or in another country's territorial waters. This was what those Raptors were going to help accomplish.
When asked by Mell after his prepared statement whether the Colonials were at war with China or not, he looked level into the camera and replied flatly.
"What would your country do if someone just launched at least six ICBMs at you in a surprise attack?"
Mell did not give an answer and the transmission was cut a few seconds later. Now that they were done with the interview Charles could clear the main room for the staff to get to back to the main work of fighting a war. The converted light carrier might not be in orbit near the moon but her Vipers and her ammunition were stored where Charles could use them. And he was going to use as many of them as he wanted. Wanted, not needed He was going to use as many as he wanted. If the Chinese government wanted to act like old style Cylons, then this commander was going to treat them like old style Cylons, the Colonial Fleet way.
Around the world, navy ships were already seizing Chinese ships as news of the nuclear missile attack spread like wildfire. If a Chinese owned vessel was in a port, soon they had heavily armed police and SWAT teams storming the docked vessels. Coast Guard forces from around the world started using helicopters to land on any Chinese ships they could find within or even near their claimed waters. If a ship in question had open deck space, they would land. A lot of the teams just fast roped down. The heavily armed teams quickly took control of the vessels. Within hours of the attack, and just as quickly, new flags were run up the flag masts. And that was how hundreds of ships had new flags flying from them.
The Chinese vessels that were keeping an eye on the Colonials had different worries. When the reports of the missile launch spread and they were named as the ones who had done it, nearby vessels of different nations started flying out craft and crews to take over the nearest Chinese intelligence ships. Very few of those new owners were worried about the crews of those vessels, but the information that the competing countries could get off of one of those ships could be amazing. By the time Charles had notified the world about his response to the attack, US submarines in the area were already stalking Chinese warships with shoot on sight orders in the COs' hands. With grim looks on their faces, they were going to execute those orders.
One hour after the attack, the rest of the entire deployed Chinese SSBN fleet of five warships were underwater. And they would never rise to see the surface or their home ports again. On the mainland and supporting islands, every Chinese military base that was supporting their navy was burning.
There was one set of images of a massive graving dock that held one of the three Type 003 aircraft carriers and four type 052D(M) being constructed at the same time making the rounds. The image taker did not get a glimpse of what launched the weapons but a flash of a smoke trail was visible in the high definition recording. All of a sudden, something exploded against the main lock of the graving dock. The lock was blasted apart and a massive wave of dirty water rushed into the once dry working area. The two closest destroyer sized ships were picked up and used as twin battering rams by that wave of grey water. They shoved their two other sister ships aside, and then they were thrown like huge metal spears into the side of the over half finished 100,000 ton ship. The lone Type 003 carrier was snapped in half with only both ends of the burning ship still afloat and still tied to a nearby pier There was not a recording of what had done that damage.
The Colonials had basically started at both ends of the huge country, and their warcraft had worked their way towards the center. By the end of the full day of combat that saw the Colonials launching every crew multiple times, everything that was even close to being a navy base for the Chinese from the North Korean to the Vietnamese border was on fire. Each major base was visited by at least a single fifty kiloton surface burst nuclear weapon of Colonial manufacture, and that was not the only other weapons used that day by the Colonials. They had a very tailored weapons load out for any given target.
The surface burst for the nuclear weapons had been selected as the best option to take out hardened facilities in any given attack area. Some military related sites had also been hit with weapons designed to penetrate hard rock and thick concrete. This was to hit things like deeply buried sub pens, command and control support centers, nuclear storage sites and other high value targets. Most of the people on Charles' staff had wanted this wave of attacks done in the first place but they had been vetoed before. Now they were being let off the leash.
The last target on the Colonial hit list of very high value and high payoff targets was the central command bunker for the entire communist party. It was not under the historic area of the Beijing mega city like the older bunker had been. It was under a new building some distance away from any location like that. The Colonials knew about it but had not wanted to drop a nuclear weapon into a city. That was something that the Cylons would have done.
When that idea of using a nuclear weapon had been brought up, the statement asked to the operations planner had been pointed and not kind. There were not many Colonials who like being asked if they were another human form Cylon in hiding. However, it did get the point across and other ideas were devised to handle targets next to or in heavily populated areas. Bill Adama much less Laura Roslin would not authorize a nuclear strike on any civilian target or city. They would not leave those targets, but they would come up with ways to take them out without nuking civilians.
It had been decided months before that they would use a Rifts Earth made smart missile to take out this particular hard to take out target. The chosen weapon was launched from the port wing of a Raptor in low planetary orbit The targeting had to be very precise and would need all of the help it could get from Colonial and Rifter technology and experience. It was going to be a hole in one shot on a par 7 or something equally hard to do.
The long weapon went straight down the hard covered elevator shaft that was only three and two-thirds meters wide and it went deep into the ground at over the speed of sound. Then the specially modified long ranged, proton warhead equipped weapon did its job on the key leaders of the communist party who were located and had been living there for the last few months. It was a deeper and more heavily protected bunker than the Central Military China Commission's Joint Military Command Center.
Daniel had been given this target. It had been more out of luck than by design, or the good graces of the military commander. He had not been a happy camper, and it was not about the mission he was on now. He had been with one of the local support staff assigned to the growing number of local scientists and contracted workers on the island. He had hooked up with her at the party, and everything was going great.
That is, until the Big Voice started yelling loud enough to make ears bleed. Talk about a mood killer on an epic scale! So now he was horny, blue balled, tired, hung-over, and he was armed with a weapon that was one of the most powerful weapons in the fleet that was not a city killer sized nuclear weapon. So yes, he was not a very happy camper as he came screaming down from over three hundred kilometers up to his launch point for the missile. That launch point had been set at just under five kilometers above the ground.
The speed of the dive was added to the missiles' high thrust engines. The super hard nose punched through the heavy concrete and steel like it was not even there. Not surprisingly, it was not an empty shaft that it fell through. Every forty to fifty meters down for about the first five hundred meters had a five centimeter thick metal hatch locked into place to block access to an attack just like this one.
The now dented warhead made it almost two kilometers down the narrow shaft before it ran out of steam and came to a rest at the bottom. The sensor built into the weapon waited a full three minutes before sending the command for the high tech warhead to do its thing.
On the surface, the first warning something was up was when every window within an almost ten kilometer radius was blown out by the sonic boom of an object moving at high mach numbers only a few dozen meters off the ground. That would have been Daniel and his Raptor coming and then leaving the area at full throttle. Not too many people were hurt by this event, but a dozen heart attacks were later blamed on the low level pass of the high speed Colonial Raptor in many reports and lawsuits that were filed.
Three minutes later people were still coming out of their homes to see what had happened to make such a loud noise. That was when the real show began. The proton warhead had the explosive force equal to a few megatons of TNT going off all at once. When it decided that it was okay not to play nice with the rest of the world, the warhead went off on the local area. It had a tendency to change large areas of the local geography in a few seconds.
The weapon turned into a massive ball of fire. It was several times hotter than the suns core as protons were stripped and freed to vent their energy on anything made of matter that happened to be near them. The ball of white-blue energy got bigger and bigger as the area around it got hotter and hotter. The fireball went from the size of a suitcase to the size of the average American car in an eye blink and it still kept growing.
Soon, reinforced concrete was burning like it was made of wood, along with anything else that was remotely combustible. Even the hard granite walls of the bunker started to combust along with the lighter metals that were inside the bunker. The pressure built as the proton warhead did its job. Soon a bubble of gas and liquid rock started to force its way to the surface like a slow motion air bubble in a large pot of thick mud. It was like a lava lamp that had just started to get warm. It also resembled the way lava worked its way through the hard rock of a mountain.
The center of the bubble started at the point of entry of the missile but the ground around it also started deforming farther and farther out from this center point of the attack. That was until part of the ground over a kilometer and a half in diameter started to rise above its normal grade. At first the ground only deformed by a few centimeters, and then at some breaking point it started moving in distances measured in decimeters and eventually meters. Buildings that now found themselves on a non-stable surface started to rise and tilt at random. Some even started to fall over as the bubble grew larger underground and affected a larger area of the surface above ground.
The ground rose like a mud bubble and underground pipes broke, and still the ground kept lifting up towards the sky. The bubble popped when its center had changed the surface ground elevation by over three meters or about the height of the average one story building. A massive blast of steam, smoke, flame, and dust went into the open air as the bubble broke. And as quick as it had built up, the ground started falling back into place. As soon as the pressure stabilized the ground stropped moving.
By then the proton missile had reduced, devoured, and converted a huge amount of material in the bunker area into gas. A larger void now was in place of what once held the command center for the central government. The weapon had blasted a perfect ball shape into the surrounding rock in this shallow part of the planet's crust. The top arch of metaled and fused rock might have held, if the void had been another fifteen meters or so deeper into the crust. The arch is one of the strongest support structures in nature, and can support a huge amount of both weight and stress.
Unfortunately it was not that deep and at the bottom of this void was a large pool of stuff that could best be termed as 'magma'. Still, even that was not a true picture of what it was. The arch at the top of the dome cracked in a crazy quilt of lines in a blink of an eye. Then it cracked again and again, and then some of the still hot rock fell into the still glowing pool of liquefied stuff. It kept falling in slow growing amounts until the arch overhead just suddenly gave way to the pull of gravity. In a sudden avalanche of hot rock, the top of the void crashed down into the magma pool below. Without the support of the arch, the void started pulling down the ground and buildings above it that now had no support for their foundations.
The ground at street level started to slump slowly, and then faster it dropped until it was falling like a black and brown avalanche. People, cars, and buildings were now being sucked in, going down into the now rapidly filling hot void. A massive outrush of a second eruption of steam was released into the air. It took only a few seconds for the ground to stop moving, but the center of the perfect round-lipped hole was thirty-six meters below where the streets ran only an hour ago. It was like a god had used an ice-cream scoop, and it had taken a huge serving out of the planet's crust.
Steam was still slowly seeping up from a few different points in the new crater as the liquid rock below started to vent some more of the excess heat into the cooler air. It was taking the path of least resistance to get to the cooler surface and more people died. The area was marked off after being picked over by rescue crews making sure everyone that could be saved had been saved. No one would know how many bodies were left below in that mass of destruction. Some would say hundreds, others would say thousands. But people did live through it, and many of them were able to dig themselves or be dug out of the massive hole.
The hole would turn into a water filled pond within a few months of the event that created it in the first place. This pond and a small surrounding park would be a reminder to the future for generations to come. A monument would be erected a few years after it had become an official park. It was marked as a warning to be careful of what one is looking for, because they might find it.
What had been hatched as a plan to stop the slide of China into a massive civil war now instead had turned the slide into a full on freefall. Where there had only been a few firefights between a dozen or so individuals, now one side had not only just lost its core leadership and powerbase but also was going to take the blame for launching a surprise ICBM attack. And since that attack was on a small group of people and for no real reason other than spite, that added even more fuel to the civil war fire.
Soon fights were breaking out with combatants numbering in the hundreds. Within the day backroom maneuverings would break down and would turn into combat maneuverings within a week. The Colonial attack had taken out a lot of navy ships and bases but they had not touched any tank, artillery, long ranged missile or air bases around the great country. That was a lot of missed firepower, and that did not count the production base to make the items that supported and/or made more those types of units.
While the gunship Raptor and Viper crews were ending their attack runs across the coast of China, the rest of the Raptors started sweeping the area around the island for threats in ever growing circles. They were not as blood thirsty as the Colonial commander had not so subtlety hinted they would be but they were not alone in this quest. The FPS Tahiti, formerly the Chinese Type 052D-class destroyer Kunming, now owned and manned mostly by people from the island of Tahiti, fired her weapons in anger for the first time on her former owners. They also had a few axes to grind with the Chinese. They were an island people and they all could image what those weapons would have done to their homes if they had hit. Close does count when talking about nuclear weapons.
Their first targets were a pair of Chinese spy planes in the area. They were trying to blend in with the local air traffic, and all of it was not strictly civilian. They had been ordered to land on the main airfield of their island as soon as they were found out. At first, the pair of planes had ignored them, then after the third order, both pilots had replied to the coast guard ship to go home and let the real fleets do their job. The statement was in very good French, so there was no lack of understanding by those on the water's surface. That might not have been the smartest move to make for those air crews. It did prove that all pilots were arrogant as the day was long, no matter what country they flew for.
The pair of planes must not have noticed what and who they had been so condescending to on the waters below them. Their first warning was the large Type 348 radar locking on to them. They did not have any time to change their minds as a pair of missiles removed each of them from the skies in a quick succession of large fireballs. This twin event was duly noted by a half dozen other spy and observation planes in the area. It was also noted that the locals with the new SAM's had not gotten close to any other targets. This showed some training in the use of those weapons on a crowded sky. The navy from Tahiti just got moved up in the level of respect it would get from most of the rest of the world. Every ship and aircraft in the area made sure to know where this ship was at all times from that day forward.
As the Raptors continued to search the local area, they spotted two debris fields in the water. After reporting their locations back to the command center, they were told one was a Type 095 and the other one was an older Type 093A, both submarines. The next target in the local area already had an escorting American navy helicopter and a boarding crew. The former Chinese spy ship was left alone when the 'inspection crew' contacted the Colonials and raised the stars and stripes on it. The Raptors then moved farther out from their islands. It soon became clear that they were getting a lot of help from any navy ship that was in the area.
If it flew the Chinese flag, it was being forced to the nearest port, most of the time under threat of gunfire or combat boarding. The three Raptors went to high speed to line up on some high value targets that the orbiting Raptor had pointed out for them. Now they had a bead on the pair of Type 903 replenishment ships that had been supporting the local Chinese forces. These ships soon had ten armed and angry Colonials dropped on them. They also took control of a China Shipping Container Lines ship that was in the area by the name of CSCL Artic Ocean.
All three ships were now on their way to the little island controlled by the Colonials. It would take a while for the Globe-class ship to make final port call because of her slow speed and the distance she needed to travel to the Colonial owned islands. The Raptors would have to fly out a second group of six to ten people to make sure nothing went wrong on the trip for each of the ships. With these three ships now fully under Colonial Control, the Raptors went after more targets at increasing distances from the islands.
Most ships, when approached, would signal on the radio and raise a white flag to let the approaching Raptors know they were not combatants. Only one ship that was not armed was fired upon by the Colonial craft. The warning shot was just to make it comply with the Raptor's command to respond to hails. After a single firing run across the bow, that ship decided that making for the port of Manila, the closest to its location, was a very good idea even if it was not 'flying' the Chinese flag. Most would agree that it was a good idea for that ship's master.
Over the next two days COSCO lost six more ships to the Colonials. Ten other Chinese flagged or owned cargo ships were also boarded by the Colonials later in the week. Charles could have taken a hundred more ships if he wanted to take the time and divert the effort. COSCO alone was listed as owning over eleven hundred ships in active service, and they were not the only shipping company that the Chinese government had their fingers in.
The world held its breath as night fell across the area again, ending the day that had started with many nuclear detonations. The UN called an emergency meeting of the full membership to be held in New York. They even politely asked if a member of the Colonial government would attend this emergency conference. Charles said that he would not attend in person but would be able to listen and respond to some questions through a locally sourced teleconferencing ability. He was not going to risk being off island in case another attack was launched.
The head PR person at the UN did not like this but he did not feel like pushing too hard to make the Colonials come to this meeting. After all, the last group to try to push them around had not only just lost their navy but also most of their construction slips and command and control. And oh they just used about a dozen nuclear weapons as retaliation for someone trying to nuke them into dust bunnies. Those were the kinds of people you might want to handle very carefully.
Reporters, NGA's, NGO's and different government assets were scattering like cockroaches when the light came on. This was the second time China had been able to pull one over on the rest of the world and that was not liked by government leaders across the globe. Groups were trying to find out what was going to happen next, as well as try to help the people who had been affected by this new war. The main focus was not on mainland China. China had not liked having aid groups come without an explicit invitation and some very strict rules to work under even before the Colonials came to this planet.
They first wanted to find and help the people that the overshooting missiles had hurt. They could do that with aircraft, ships, and some satellite time on craft that already were in that area because of the Colonials. They had started working on plans not long after the reports of the first mushroom clouds over Chinese naval bases started to make it to the internet and hit the seismic sensors around the world. That was as far as they got with those plans. There were very few groups that wanted to get caught in between a nuclear cross fire event. Close does count with nuclear weapons, if one did not have a deep bunker to go hide in.
Charles had to state and restate during interviews that were conducted between two and four times a day that the Colonials had only retaliated in kind for the attack against them. And that they were happy to let things lie with mainland China for the moment. He still said at every interview that any warship or Chinese flagged or owned ship was a target. And that this state of affairs would remain until they were under control of a third party. That, or they had to have a white flag or were in a neutral port. That is, unless China wanted some more Colonial attention. The Colonials had almost twenty ships under their control and that was as many as Charles thought they could manage without too much risk to his people. Maybe after they got a few of them into the lagoon, he could use those personnel and supporting Raptors to acquire more enemy ships.
The four most powerful Chinese ambassadors around the world had not liked those comments coming out of the Colonial Trading Outpost. They protested long and loud about how they had nothing to do with the attack and how the Colonel's comments were insulting and in bad form to be accusing them of any wrongdoing. After all, the so-called attack had come from waters that the American ballistic missile submarines had been known to frequent. Chinese ships of that type did not need to go that far to be able to retaliate for any attack on them. They were sticking to the playbook they had been given. Even if they could not reach anyone back home for an updated playbook.
When Charles was told about the upset Chinese ambassadors, he simply replied that if they were going to launch a few dozen nuclear weapons at someone, then they should have thicker skins. Then he went into detail about how Russian, French, and American sub launched weapons of that size used a lot more or fewer nuclear weapons per mission. He would go on to say that those weapons each were about twice as powerful as what the Chinese used to attack them.
The NGO's were very vocal over the next few weeks, going after both sides of this latest conflict. Charles and his people were helping as much as they could, but that did not seem like it was well received by some groups around the world. They seemed not to understand that the Colonial Trading Post only had limited resources to divert to help, not without being spread thin. They were not going to let another attacker get close enough to be a threat to the pair of islands. Many groups did not seem to grasp that someone might want to make a third try at them.
The Colonials were also starting to catch flak for their use of nuclear weapons and 'nuclear like' weapons on the Chinese mainland. The response posted on the island's webpage and forwarded around the world news agency was simple. "You try to nuke us, we will nuke you. If you don't want to have any nuclear weapons dropped on you, then don't frakking try dropping them on us." That put a stop to any further media attacks.
The cargo coming into the islands and sent off planet did not stop. The Colonials were just a little more vigilant about keeping an eye on the local areas. That did not stop the trade that was coming in and off of the Trading Outpost. The crews of the 'visiting cargo ships' had been taken off and were put on airplanes to be flown off the islands after only a few days of detention. That delay had only been because they had to wait for passenger space to open up
They were asked where they wanted to go, and the Colonials bought them the required tickets to those locations. Getting visas to some of those locations was a little harder. For the first time, at least for most of those ship crews, they had access to the news from the rest of the world. Only about one in thirty of the crew said that they wanted to go back home for one reason or another. The rest wanted to go anywhere from the United States, to Canada and half a dozen different countries in Europe. Even New Zealand was asked for.
By the time that the last of the 'detained' crew left the islands, it was obvious to the rest of the world that China was in a full blown civil war. Not many countries knew what to do or how to stop it. So the countries of this world just let it play out as it may and hoped for the best. China had been a powerhouse for some time and it had a lot of money, with individuals and the country itself both having deep pockets. That money started to be used and materials started to flow both out of and into the distressed country at an alarming rate. People and groups were doing whatever they thought need to be done so that they could cut their own country out of what was one of the largest countries on the planet.
Perhaps as a way to compensate for their inability to affect or stop the growing Chinese civil war, the anti-nuclear weapons and power groups were in full swing, and they were into anything. They were way more vocal than they had been at any other time in this planet's short nuclear history. They were now demanding that something be done to protect the world's oceans. They were hyper focused on the dangers from ships with nuclear power that were now sitting on the ocean floor.
Not much was being said about who or what had sunk most of those nuclear powered ships. Those same groups were also trying to have any surviving nuclear powered ships removed from the world's oceans. It was just that there were so few things that could make ships go that fast, that long and not leave a smoke trail. There even were carefully hidden reports of companies wanting to make new nuclear powered cargo ships. As it was, more and more warships and military support vessels were looking at going with atomic instead of petroleum based fuels.
Rumblings were very soft in some of the more effective or lucky intelligence agencies around the world. They were saying that the Colonials might have a powerful sub-surface force and weapons that no one had seen before. The US Navy was scrubbing all the data their ship and unmanned systems might have been able to collect during the incidents. They also were looking at any reports from all sources that might have seen anything. They had even sent out requests for information to all those other agencies and even to the Colonials themselves. They did not want to leave any rock not looked under.
This was because they knew that they could only account for at most 10 of the known deployed Chinese subs. That was counting the one that the USS Texas had popped at the start of the current conflict. To get this information, it was going to take a lot of work with any power in the local area that was willing to be interviewed.
After some work, official and unofficial, they found out that Japan had gotten two Chinese boats with their own submarines in the area. The Aussies got two more, one with one of their own attack subs and the other credited to a surface hunter killer team that had lived up to the name to the detriment of a Shang-class submarine.
Even the Indian fleet's underwater branch got one, but they were keeping this information very low key. The problem in China was just too close to their border for them to want to stir that pot just yet. That did not mean that the American and a few others did not know about that kill. This kill also impressed the larger navies of the world that had never thought very highly of the fleets from the subcontinent. That would change, and the Indian Navy would be getting invitations to a few more navy training exercises in the coming years. It was not just anyone who could take out an SSGN, much less keep it that quiet after the fact.
That left all of the intelligence agencies short of fifteen known underwater events. What they did not know was that one of those events picked up by the SOSU network was very different from the others. It was from one of the two Seabats the Colonials had deployed taking a solid hit from a pair of Yu-9 torpedoes fired from its prey. The Seabat was not even been scratched by the twin blasts from the enemy weapons. It would need a lot of paint, and the pilot would need to clean his underwear when he got back to base.
The same could not be said of the Type 095 or Sui-class vessel. She had been a third generation nuclear power attack submarine. When hit by a pair of short ranged torpedoes fired in return, the 8,000 ton warship cracked like it had been dropped from a ten story building onto a concrete street. Her crew would not be making it home. Many years later the recordings of an odd bubbling and sizzling sound picked up on underwater mics from that area would be pointed to as a plasma warhead torpedo detonation. It would not be until almost the end of the Golden Century that her wreck would be found and the reason for her death known to the rest of the world.