The Power of Ten

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.

Creatures centuries, even millennia, old, unable to predict the future while under the Shroud, were caught completely off-guard by the attacks and died in numbers that were never counted, incinerated by atomic suns in the depths of the ocean, pounded by solid walls of water greater than any earthquake, or simply buried under millions of tons of the ocean floor’s stone and mud as the world broke apart around them.

The sailors watching all this saw superheated plumes belatedly explode in the depths of the sea and rode out the massive waves from the detonations, but there were no casualties, aside from non-secured objects bouncing around and hitting a few sailors.

Secure in their depths and the miles between them and the surface from surface-dwellers, the powers of the deeps perished in multitudes as the sun came down like the wrath of the gods themselves, and destroyed them, their empires, and their legacies without consideration or mercy.

In the wake of the explosions, the waters swirled with sparkles of white, as everything that died burned with vivus and was fed back into the water. The radiation seething about was cleansed away promptly, chances of mutation were minimized, and even the super-heated steam cooled down and re-oxygenated the seas in its immediate area. The great billowing clouds of mud stirred up by the explosions rapidly clumped back together, fell back to the sea floors, and like lubricants, flowed back towards the rifts, canyons, and craters blasted into the sea floor, bringing with them more mudslides to cover up the damage caused and seal the traces of the dead beneath them forever.

Buildings wrought by inhuman hands that had lasted ages unknown crumbled into powder and fell into the deep, followed by carvings, monuments, statues, and other remnants of the dead, vanishing into the dark of the sea as if they had never existed at all.

In the midst of all this, the Father Oceans opened lazy eyes, pondered the hot flashes, killing radiation, and short but intensely soothing rush of vivus that resulted from it all, sighed into the endless waves contentedly, and went back to sleep.

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I was particularly worried about the lethomorg, as the ancient creatures had access to powerful magic that could devastate a world, which they would definitely retaliate with. My Commune found no trace of them in the four rift-canyons they had claimed, but that was not an absolute proof, as there were certainly ones deeper in the Felldeep, where the bombs could not reach.

Still, the oldest and most powerful should have been gathered in their ‘capital cities’, such as they were, and been destroyed by the shockwaves, or were buried under the endless avalanches and mudslides that had followed. Pure crushing weight could certainly do the job if the shockwaves could not.

I was fairly certain that we took out Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, especially after seeing the chaotic ways the Deep Ones acted in the days and weeks after the event, showing no leadership and attacking suicidally in all directions as the creatures that had held their race together perished.

There were many coastal attacks in the month following Halloween. There were a lot of Senior Levels there to face them, too.

The merfolk and tritons boiled across the seas, hunting down survivors and heaping woe upon their disasters, merciless and as thorough as they could be. They couldn’t get them all, but any staying dazedly near the centers of their nuked civilizations were meat on the plate to the forces of Lemuria, and what would end up being a new undersea civilization of Atlantis if the new discussions taking place went well.

The sahaug adapted better than the Deep Ones, being naturally barbaric and not as closely bound to their rulers. Still, their power was shattered, and it was their turn to be hunted through the seas by tritons, merfolk, and orca-led hunting parties. They didn’t seem to like the shift in power too much.

Scanning the individual zones, blank or not, once again was much easier once all the Wards went down, and I did so as I began the process of riding across North America and Mapping it. I would follow with Eurasia, avoiding only the Russian Shroudzone, then quickly polish off Australia, do Africa, and end with South America and Antarctica.

My Commune with Nature was still ninety miles in radius. Even if Sleipner couldn’t go streaking at 600 mph like he could across the sea, he could do 200 mph with the right spells, which was still half a million square miles a day, a massive swathe of territory... and if he was on roads Veilwalking, approach our original speed.

Eurasia was 21 million square miles, minus the Russian Shroudzone and what I’d done of China, India, and South Asia, which was actually quite a lot. About a month of work.

North America, 9.5 million square miles. South America, about 7 million. Africa, 11.7 million. Antarctica, about 5.4 million. Australia, 3 million.

The job would take me into next year, without a doubt. Metagamey crap, while the elites of the world ventured first into the Felldeep, and more urgently into the Strata and all the crap below it, while taking down the Banes and the Shattered in all their hidden hidey-holes.

The ships that carried all the nukes headed back to port to be chopped up and made into something else. The nuclear-powered ones also had to dispose of their fuel with Disintegration spells, or there would be some very Wild Magic excitement when the Shroud came down.

As for the crews, there was no chances taken on them. Lesser Geases and Suggestions, and even some deft Memory Modifications were used to make sure they wouldn’t talk, would consider it all the after-effects of some storm, or would just forget about it entirely. This was done for their own benefit and ours, as we wanted to make it as difficult as possible for outside forces to figure out exactly what had happened.

Even the seismic monitors around the world had their charts re-configured to show multiple localized earthquakes going off, instead of the singular shockwaves of nearly two thousand nuclear warheads detonating so close together. It was just a case of adding overlapping foreshocks to the charts to match all the aftershocks running around the globe, and making sure those who monitored them wouldn’t talk about anything other than the wild earthquake and wave activity going on.

Was it perfect? No. But some very smart people were laying very misdirecting clues, to the point where a temporary Disintegration facility in Chattanooga had been set up to dispose of nuclear material. Although it was mostly medical waste, the records showed much more...

There were less than thirty nuclear bombs left on the planet now, and all of them were heading for Eastern Europe and the edges of the Russian Shroudzone. One way or another, they were going to be put to use there... or Disintegrated, before the Shroud went down.