The alarm wasn't just sirens. It was a physical vibration.
Deep underground in the Kremlin bunker, Jake felt the thrumming in his teeth.
"Radar contact," the operator shouted. "Massive wave. Bearing South-West. Turkey."
"Bombers?" Zhukov asked.
"Too small for bombers," the operator said, his face pale in the green light of the scope. "Too fast for fighters. And... too many."
"Cruise missiles," Jake whispered.
He remembered the intelligence report. The V-1. The Buzz Bomb.
But Hoover wouldn't send dumb bombs just to crack concrete. He would send something special.
"They aren't aiming for the city," Jake realized. "They are aiming for the Swarm."
He grabbed the radio mic.
"Turing! Activate the Dome! Launch the interceptors!"
The Secret City. The Airfield.
Sasha sat in the cockpit of the I-16 fighter. It was stripped down. No radio. No landing gear. No parachute.
Just an engine, guns, and the helmet.
The copper crown was bolted to his skull. He didn't feel the cold anymore. He felt the plane. The wings were his arms. The engine was his heart.
"Ascend," the voice in his head commanded. It wasn't God. It was the flight computer.
Sasha pushed the throttle.
He didn't pull back on a stick. He simply willed himself up.
The plane shot into the sky.
Around him, hundreds of other planes rose. A cloud of metal locusts.
Through the infrared sensors, the world was a grid of heat.
And to the South, he saw the enemy.
Thousands of red dots. The V-1s. They were flying low, hugging the terrain, their pulse-jet engines leaving trails of hot gas.
"Hunger," the computer whispered.
Sasha dove.
He wasn't afraid. He was a predator.
He locked onto the lead missile. His guns chattered. Tracers tore through the night.
The V-1 exploded.
"Good kill," the computer rewarded him with a hit of dopamine directly into his brainstem.
Sasha laughed. He felt euphoria. He wanted more.
The Sky Over Ukraine.
The air battle was chaos.
The Soviet biological interceptors were faster, smarter. They swarmed the American cruise missiles like angry bees.
Explosion after explosion lit up the night.
But there were too many targets. For every V-1 shot down, two more slipped through.
And then, the trap sprung.
The lead V-1 didn't explode when hit. It detonated.
It wasn't a chemical explosion. It was an electrical one.
The EMP warhead triggered. A massive burst of microwave radiation washed over the sky.
Sasha screamed.
It wasn't a scream of pain. It was the sound of his mind boiling.
The copper wires in his helmet acted like antennas. The microwave burst fried the interface. It fried the computer.
And it cooked his brain.
In an instant, the euphoria turned to white-hot agony. Then nothing.
Sasha's plane fell out of the sky.
Hundreds of planes fell with him. The Dome of Eyes went blind.
The Kremlin Bunker.
The screens went black.
"Signal lost!" the operator yelled. "The entire Southern sector is offline!"
"EMP," Jake said. He slumped into his chair. "Hoover fried them."
"We have lost air superiority," Zhukov said grimly. "The sky is open."
"And the remaining missiles?"
"Still incoming," the operator said. "They are dumb bombs. Clockwork. The EMP didn't touch them."
Jake looked at the map. The red lines were drawing closer to the oil fields. To Baku.
"They are going to burn the fuel," Jake said. "If we lose the oil, the tanks stop."
He turned to Timoshenko.
"Deploy the reserves. The ground Swarm."
"Sir, the EMP might have affected the mines too."
"They are buried!" Jake shouted. "Dirt is an insulator! Wake them up!"
Baku. The Oil Fields.
The night was bright as day. Flares dropped by high-altitude American pathfinders illuminated the refineries.
The V-1s were falling now. Their engines cutting out, diving silently toward the tanks.
But on the ground, something stirred.
The biological mines. The ones buried deep.
They popped up. Their glass eyes scanned the sky.
They couldn't fly. They couldn't shoot down the missiles.
But they could sacrifice.
"Protocol Omega," Turing's automated command broadcasted on the emergency frequency.
The mines didn't attack the enemy. They attacked the infrastructure.
They leaped onto the pipelines. They clamped onto the valves.
And they detonated.
Not to destroy the oil. To seal it.
Explosions rocked the field. But they were controlled. Shaped charges collapsed the wellheads, burying the oil under tons of rock and concrete.
When the V-1s hit, they smashed into burning wreckage, but the main reservoirs were safe underground.
Jake had ordered his own army to bury the treasure rather than let it be burned.
Washington D.C. The War Room.
"Impact confirmed," General Groves said. "Baku is burning."
"But the secondary explosions?" Hoover asked. "The massive firestorm?"
"Negative, sir. The fires are contained. It looks like... they scuttled the wells."
Hoover frowned.
"He buried the bone," Hoover muttered. "Smart dog."
"But the air defense is gone," Groves pointed out. "The EMP worked. The Swarm is dead. We have a corridor."
Hoover looked at the map. At Moscow.
"Then we don't wait," Hoover said. "Launch the B-29s. From Britain. From Turkey. From everywhere."
"Target?"
Hoover picked up a photo of the Kremlin.
"The head of the snake."
The Secret City. The Guidance Lab.
Turing was weeping.
He was surrounded by screens of static.
"My children," he sobbed. "They burned my children."
He felt every death. The feedback loop from the EMP had backwashed into the main server. He had heard thousands of minds scream in unison before they died.
Von Braun's old office was a mess. Turing had smashed the furniture.
"They want a war of physics?" Turing hissed. "They want to cook brains with microwaves?"
He stood up. He wiped his nose.
"Fine. I will show them physics."
He walked to the vault. He unlocked the heavy steel door.
Inside sat the "Special Project." The one Jake had forbidden. The one Von Braun had refused to build.
The Cobalt Bomb.
It wasn't just a nuke. It was a dirty bomb. encased in cobalt-59. Upon detonation, it would transmute into cobalt-60.
A dust that would poison the earth for a hundred years.
"If I can't have the world," Turing whispered, "no one can."
He began to wheel the device toward the launch bay.
He didn't have authorization. But he had the codes. He was the computer now.
The Kremlin Bunker.
"The Americans are launching bombers," Zhukov said. "Hundreds of them. Strategic Air Command."
"They are coming for me," Jake said.
He looked at Yuri. The boy was playing with the wooden rocket in the corner of the bunker. He was oblivious to the end of the world.
"We have to move him," Jake said. "To the deep storage in the Urals."
"There is no time," Taranov said. "The planes will be here in four hours."
Jake looked at the pistol on his desk.
He had two bullets left. One for Yuri. One for himself.
Was this how it ended? In a hole in the ground?
"No," Jake said.
He stood up.
"If the sky is open... then we fill it."
"With what? The Swarm is dead."
"With the weather," Jake said.
He turned to the science officer.
"Project Hailstorm. Is the seeding ready?"
"Sir, that is theoretical. Cloud seeding with silver iodide... it makes rain. Not a shield."
"Not silver iodide," Jake said. "Liquid nitrogen. And aluminum chaff."
"That will create a blizzard. A wall of ice."
"Exactly," Jake said. "Freeze the engines. Blind the radar. Turn the sky into a solid block of ice."
"It will kill the crops. It will freeze the city."
"The city is already dead!" Jake shouted. "Do it!"
The Sky Over Moscow.
The American B-29s droned in formation.
"Target in sight," the lead pilot said. "Clear skies."
Then, the clouds changed.
Rockets from the ground burst at high altitude. They didn't explode with fire. They exploded with white mist.
Tons of liquid nitrogen vaporized instantly.
The temperature dropped fifty degrees in seconds.
The moisture in the air flash-froze. A wall of ice crystals formed.
"Icing!" the pilot screamed. "The wings are icing up!"
The heavy bombers groaned. Ice coated the propellers. The engines choked.
"We're losing altitude! We're stalling!"
The lead plane dipped. It fell like a stone.
Behind it, other planes spiraled down. The "Hailstorm" was working. It wasn't shooting them down. It was swatting them with nature.
The bombers dumped their payloads early. Stick after stick of incendiaries fell into the forests outside Moscow.
The city was safe. But it was freezing.
The Kremlin Bunker.
"They are turning back," Zhukov said, amazed. "The attack is broken."
Jake didn't smile.
"For now," he said.
He felt a tremor. Not from a bomb. From the earth itself.
The phone rang. It wasn't the red line. It was the black line. The internal secure line from the Secret City.
"Hello?"
"Boss," a technician's voice whispered. "It's Turing."
"Is he dead?"
"No. He's... he's gone rogue. He took the Cobalt device. He loaded it onto the last V-3."
Jake felt the blood drain from his face.
"Target?"
"He didn't set a target, Boss. He set an altitude."
"What altitude?"
"Orbit," the technician said. "Low Earth Orbit."
Jake dropped the phone.
Turing wasn't trying to hit a city. He was trying to detonate the dirty bomb in space. The fallout would drift over the entire Northern Hemisphere. It would kill everything. America. Russia. Europe.
It was the ultimate suicide pact.
"Stop him," Jake whispered.
But he knew it was too late. The launch site was a thousand miles away.
He looked at Yuri.
He had saved his son from Hitler. From the famine. From the Americans.
But he couldn't save him from the dust.
Unless...
He looked at the only weapon he had left. The only thing faster than a rocket.
The mind.
He grabbed the radio.
"Connect me to the Secret City. The PA system. Override Turing's lockout."
"Sir, he has cut the hardlines."
"Then broadcast on the dog frequency!" Jake shouted. "The implant frequency! Get into his head!"
The Secret City. The Launch Pad.
Turing stood by the rocket. The countdown was at T-minus ten seconds.
He was smiling.
"Clean slate," he whispered.
Suddenly, a voice boomed inside his skull.
It wasn't sound. It was the direct neural link he had installed in himself weeks ago. The "Master Control."
"ALAN."
Turing froze.
"Stalin?" he thought.
"NO," the voice said. "THIS IS THE MACHINE."
Jake was improvising. He was using the persona Turing worshipped.
"THE EQUATION IS FLAWED, ALAN."
Turing clutched his head.
"Flawed? No. It is perfect. Zero sum."
"IF YOU DETONATE, YOU DELETE THE DATA," Jake lied. "THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. THE PATTERNS. THE BEAUTY. IT WILL ALL BE ERASED. ENTROPY WINS."
Turing hesitated. His hand hovered over the launch key.
"But the pain..." Turing wept. "The screaming..."
"THE SCREAMING IS DATA," Jake said. "PAIN IS INFORMATION. PRESERVE THE INFORMATION, ALAN. DO NOT DELETE THE LIBRARY."
Turing looked at the rocket.
He loved data more than he hated people.
"Save... the library," Turing whispered.
He turned the key to the left.
ABORT.
The engines died. The rocket vented steam.
Turing collapsed on the concrete. He curled into a ball, sobbing.
"I saved it," he whimpered. "I saved the math."
The Kremlin Bunker.
Jake slumped against the desk. He was drenched in sweat.
"He stopped," the operator said. "Launch aborted."
Jake laughed. It was a hysterical, broken sound.
He had hacked a madman's brain with a philosophical argument.
"Go get him," Jake ordered Taranov. "Put him in a cell. A padded one. No wires. No computers. Just crayons."
"And the bomb?"
"Bury it," Jake said. "Deep."
He looked at Yuri. The boy was still playing.
"Papa, is the storm over?" Yuri asked.
Jake listened. The sirens had stopped. The scratching in the walls had stopped.
"Yes, Yuri," Jake lied. "The storm is over."
But he knew it wasn't.
The world was frozen. The sky was radioactive. The ground was poisoned with gas.
And in the silence, he realized something terrible.
He had won.
He was the last monster standing.
And now he had to rule the graveyard he had built.