Chapter 17-448: Those Were Not Booms. THIS is Booms! (+Epilogue votes) (1/2)

October 29, 2019, the middle of the Indian Ocean...

I had my own Glory Award sweep through me as I closed that final point of darkness in my Commune, and the oceans of the world, and the lands below them, were all in The Map.

It was the greatest trove of oceanographic and geological data in the entire world. The location of endless veins of minerals alone were priceless, although that level of data was revealed only to a select few.

Sleipner slowed to a stop with a sympathetic nicker of his own. If his tires weren’t enchanted, he would have long worn through many, many sets of them with the hundreds of thousands of miles we’d driven together. We were easily the most-traveled duo on the entire planet right now, as there were no astronauts above us to claim the title, and commercial pilots didn’t fly near as many routes often enough to take it away from us.

It wasn’t the violent, gratuitous ego-boosting sweep of a Conquest-type Glory Award, more an Enlightenment of a grand intellectual goal achieved and laid down before the world.

It wasn’t everything I had to do, of course. Now I had to map the continents...!

But that didn’t bother me. You could drop all the continents into the Pacific and have a great deal of room to spare.

There were a lot of winking red lights on The Map right now. They were the locations of ships with atomic weapons, traveling here and there towards the hundreds of sites painted in The Map, coordinates made in real time, data on currents and depths precise to a meter, all getting ready for a final moment.

Most of the crews had no idea what was happening, and wouldn’t right up until the payloads were dropped. The men involved in those ships had been scanned repeatedly for Aural weakness and loose lips, and if there were any questions, they were reassigned for the duration of what was going on. The personnel movements were covered over as training missions, as all the questionable sorts got involved in retraining to the newer ships coming out. They actually felt flattered that they were among the first crews learning to use the steam and wind-powered ships that would comprise the new navies, while all their compatriots got to pointlessly sail around on oil-combustion and nuclear-driven vessels that would be useless antiquated scrap in mere months.

More to the point, The Jet and Silver had at least one Marked aboard every single vessel, including most of the captains. There had already been some surprises that had been dealt with harshly, and I could reach any of those ships in twelve seconds, tops. Teleport to my nearest lived-line, and FastcastWaterjump directly to them; they’d be within my 50-mile range in two spells.

Those forces that were going to make moves, like the Templars, already had and failed, simply because I was available to stop them. This time, there were Senior Forsaken and Powered along for the ride and operational security, and even elite standard military didn’t stand a chance against them. If the sahaug or Deep Ones or anyone else wanted to try a boarding attack, they were in for it... and they had no history of using explosives on surface ships, so we weren’t too worried about being mined.

The ships were all off-station, slowly pulling up anchors and heading for where they needed to be, tracking one another via The Map, an unprecedented level of global coordination and scale that the military dearly wished it had exclusive to itself.

Alas, alas.

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Despite everything, they did give me the honor of issuing the final command.

I considered that if stuff went wrong, they could all conveniently lay the blame on me, who would be gone in the end. Politically, a great thing!

“Feed them to the Land,” I said aloud. I was sitting on Sleipner, leaning on Legion, Shvaughn actually having a hand on my shoulder, right next to the Compact Obelisk on Weddell Bay in Antarctica. Ughril was floating there silently, looking down in the Markspace at what was going on, appreciating the power and scope of the wrath of humanity.

Bombs dropped over the sides of ships, sometimes in series, with their own little propellors to push them into proper position. A few were dropped from low-flying bombers, or even helicopters if need be, if the targets were in shallower waters. Full flank speed was engaged on all ships to get them out of the blast zone as fast as possible, as heavy hunks of steel plunged for the floor of the oceans.

The armies of America and Europe had a lot of nukes between them. There was no need to spare any of them, and disposing of them was just going to create more problems in the future, so all of the sites were overcompensated for, whole spreads of bombs getting sent down together.

And they began to go off.

The ones in shallower waters went off first, naturally enough. Bombs exploded in nuclear fire in the depths. Water instantly heated into plasma in the area of effect, but was weighed down by the crushing pressure there, and did not expand freely. Pressure waves still shot out in all directions, and radiation still ate into everything around as shockwaves tore through the ocean floor and pulped anything living in the immediate area, sending the rest flying out of control and generating many mudslides and earthquakes.

The plasmic water began to rise against the pressure there, but was leaking monstrous amounts of heat into steam, creating a sheathe of super-heated water trying to rise against the pressure and stay intact as it did so. The pressure waves of the explosions didn’t really clear the way, as uncounted tons of water simply ran in to replace those fountaining into the air on the surface.

As the bombs went off, the ocean floor shook repeatedly, but not fast enough for those there to be warned of what was coming. Rifts, buried canyons, sunken cities, and cavernous cliff abodes all got their own sun-bright messages and the death that followed them.

In the deeper rifts and canyons, the explosions triggered mudslides and avalanches of millions of tons in size, whole sides of the rifts giving way and falling to crush all below them, even while superheated waters and plasmic reactions sent exploding stone in every direction to add to the mayhem.