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The fortress waited like a spider in the deep…
The war is over. Sixty-five days after it began, it's hard to say who has won. Europe is devastated.
Oilfields still burn uncontrollably. And in the southernmost reach of the Indian Ocean where Antarctic drift ice litters the sea, a doomsday nuclear weapon is still on guard - Krak-1, an undersea fort which maintains a thousand-kilometre-radius exclusion zone.
As technicians attempt to deactivate the seabed fort, Krak-1 goes right over its failsafe threshold. Now it recognises no friends. It cannot be talked down. It can only kill - or be killed.
Firepower is limited, and what few resources remain are stretched thinly as the former combatants struggle to retain their control over the world. There's almost nothing left in the Southern Ocean. There's absolutely nothing they could afford to lose.
There's Barbara Kastner. She's alone like everyone in a stripped and ruined and barely recovering world. She's been given the power she needs, and lined up to take the blame. She was seconded when the war had deteriorated into its final phase, she showed initiative - and she's been paying ever since.
"My case," she said to Martin Hausmann. "Map two."
Martin lifted her document case onto the table, unzipped it and searched through the contents.
She looked round at the military. "The problem with taking out Krak-1 is that it's designed so you can't take it out. It sits down there under four-point-seven kilometres of water so you can't drop anything on it without it hearing the entry splash and hearing it coming all the way down. It has strong point defences and a deep defence capability out to its denial perimeter. It can hear anything moving in the water right out beyond the thousand kilometre perimeter, and it can deploy passive and active radar floats to monitor the airspace above. The only hope of taking it out is to soak up so many of its defences that it can't knock out a final strike." She sighed. "Unfortunately, we don't have the capability. Down here we have no long range robotised weaponry and insufficient medium range RCSs, and we have no air attack capability. If this ship's main armament still worked and we could risk taking it up to the denial perimeter, it wouldn't quite reach halfway in to the fort…"
But there's one thing Barbara can use, a new weapon system, untried and not even fully mission trained. It's small, it's silent and it's lethal. It's a system with a terrifying difference…
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