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 uracy should be decent enough to saturate such arge target; the total area they were aiming at was the size of Australia, after all. So the missiles were using initial position determination. The nket of shrapnel orbiting the prevented most forms of celestial navigation from working, so the missiles had to rely on IPD, which was made possible by elerometers and gyroscopes working together along with knowing the initialunch coordinates to determine where the missile isn’t, thus telling it where it is.
(Ed note: See more on how missiles navigate without GPS here: https://.youtube/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 I’m sure you’ll figure it out... and if you do, please exin it to me because I’m 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 waspletely 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 thate 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 wasunched, it was detected by the Panopticon satellitework and reported to Panoptes. In a matter of nanoseconds, the report had made its way to every AI involved in Aron’s military, plus Nova and Aron himself. All of the people and AIs involved knew the n, 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 iing missiles and bombers.
The distribution of sectors allowed the military AIs, even including the assistant AIs in the equipment, vehicles, and vessels, to pool theirputing resources in real time and acted as a guarantee that no idents would happen. Nova had learned her lesson since her panic reaction during Aron’sst 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 andunched the first interceptor missiles, repeating the process ofunching the missile, printing a newunch cover, evacuating theunch tubes, printing new missiles, andunching again. All told, the submarine fleet took out nearly all of the submarineunched nukes, then sank the subs thatunched them. It was both retaliation and warning; retaliation for theunches themselves, and a warning that Eden would not let the coalition forces do whatever they wanted.
[Sir, Poseidon has already taken out the submarineunched 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.
“It’s finally time to end things. Let’s get on with it,” Aron sneered, standing up from his chair and sping his hands behind his back. He turned his attention to the main monitor in the control center, which showed the real-time position of eachnd-based missile and the paths they were taking on their way to Eden.
“Aeolus, it’s your turn. Teach the idiots thatunched 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) andunching them as soon as they were ready. Over the next eight minutes, the sky noticeably darkened as wave after wave of upscaled beehive swarm missilesunched, 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, des of grass, shrubs... even organisms like earthworms and ants were formed by colonies of nanometer-scale robots, which served as both camouge and ast line of defense for the hidden silos.
Aeolus had sent nearly 14,000 countermissiles from his ground-based silos, almost two for every nuclear ICBMunched. And once those countermissiles released their submunitions, the count rose to nearly a hundred thousand interceptor missiles.
Then, after the countermissileunch, 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 impable VR training the pilots had all received, the entire roster ofbat-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.
“Nyx,” Aron said.
[Yes,] she replied.
“Make them pay.”
[With pleasure, sir.]