Chapter 385 ...And Let Slip the Dogs of War

Already knowing that the remaining satellites were currently unreliable due to all the jamming and other electronic warfare happening in orbit, the missiles had been programmed with strict courses. Thus, the accuracy should be decent enough to saturate such a large target; the total area they were aiming at was the size of Australia, after all. So the missiles were using initial position determination. The blanket of shrapnel orbiting the planet prevented most forms of celestial navigation from working, so the missiles had to rely on IPD, which was made possible by accelerometers and gyroscopes working together along with knowing the initial launch coordinates to determine where the missile isnt, thus telling it where it is.

(Ed note: See more on how missiles navigate without GPS here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ - it may seem confusing, but if you can grasp the logic, it makes more sense. Just watch it a few times and Im sure youll figure it out... and if you do, please explain it to me because Im still a bit lost myself.)

The main benefit to using the backup initial position determination navigation system was that it had absolutely zero reliance on any outside information to determine distances and directions, so it was completely immune to hacking in any form, much less electronic warfare such as jamming.

The bombers themselves would find their way to Eden via dead reckoning. For them, the mission would be much easier, given that all militaries basically trained the same way. They spend 99% of their training time learning to deal with the issues that come up 1% of the time, and for pilots and sailors, navigating by dead reckoning was definitely one of those 1% issues.

The moment the first ICBM was launched, it was detected by the Panopticon satellite network and reported to Panoptes. In a matter of nanoseconds, the report had made its way to every AI involved in Arons military, plus Nova and Aron himself. All of the people and AIs involved knew the plan, so they reacted without any need for specific orders to be given.

Athena issued an alert to all personnel, then personally took control of the entire military infrastructure, assigning sectors to her subordinate AIs to swat down the thousands of incoming missiles and bombers.

The distribution of sectors allowed the military AIs, even including the assistant AIs in the equipment, vehicles, and vessels, to pool their computing resources in real time and acted as a guarantee that no accidents would happen. Nova had learned her lesson since her panic reaction during Arons last system upgrade, and would carry that with her for the rest of her digital life.

Poseidon was the first to act. Stealthy submarines from the Edenian force rose to firing depth and launched the first interceptor missiles, repeating the process of launching the missile, printing a new launch cover, evacuating the launch tubes, printing new missiles, and launching again. All told, the submarine fleet took out nearly all of the submarine-launched nukes, then sank the subs that launched them. It was both retaliation and warning; retaliation for the launches themselves, and a warning that Eden would not let the coalition forces do whatever they wanted.

[Sir, Poseidon has already taken out the submarine-launched weapons. Our other forces are online and awaiting your orders.] Only after all sectors had reported ready did Athena update Aron on the progress, though her update was redundant as both Aron and Nova were already tracking the situation.

Its finally time to end things. Lets get on with it, Aron sneered, standing up from his chair and clasping his hands behind his back. He turned his attention to the main monitor in the control center, which showed the real-time position of each land-based missile and the paths they were taking on their way to Eden.

Aeolus, its your turn. Teach the idiots that launched this attack a lesson.

[On it,] Aeolus replied, then got to work.

Thousands of missile silos across Eden snapped open and atomic printers mounted in the walls got to work printing ICCMs (InterContinental CounterMissiles) and launching them as soon as they were ready. Over the next eight minutes, the sky noticeably darkened as wave after wave of upscaled beehive swarm missiles launched, forming a cloud of countermissiles that was dense enough to eclipse what little sunlight passed through the junk in orbit.

Then the silo doors closed and billions of nanites flooded out of disguised vents, swarming over the closed doors and assembling themselves into the shape of innocent foliage. Soil, sand, blades of grass, shrubs... even organisms like earthworms and ants were formed by colonies of nanometer-scale robots, which served as both camouflage and a last line of defense for the hidden silos.

Aeolus had sent nearly 14,000 countermissiles from his ground-based silos, almost two for every nuclear ICBM launched. And once those countermissiles released their submunitions, the count rose to nearly a hundred thousand interceptor missiles.

Then, after the countermissile launch, came the interceptors. Practically everything that could fly and shoot was scrambled and sent on intercept missions to intercept the bombers carrying nuclear bombs across the ocean. Short-ranged fighters, medium-ranged interceptors, and even the extended range hybrid multirole jets of the Aeolus Air Force all took flight. With guidance from their assistant AIs and the impeccable VR training the pilots had all received, the entire roster of combat-capable jets was in the air in less than four minutes from receiving the emergency scramble order.

Then... there was no then. Every single nuke, no matter the delivery method, was easily swatted out of the sky over the vast Pacific Ocean. Destroying them over the sea had also ensured that the radiation would have almost no negative effects on anything; after all, the concentration of radioactive particles when dispersed over the roughly 350 billion cubic miles of seawater that covered the majority of the planet.

Nyx, Aron said.

[Yes,] she replied.

Make them pay.

[With pleasure, sir.]