FWOOOOM!!!!! The space surrounding the Nymari capital star system trembled as a wormhole opened a few hundred thousand kiloters from the capital planet, which looked very peaceful from the current distance.
There were no ships that swished in space; only the satellites in the planet’s orbit remained, as if it were just a planet on the verge of reaching the first Kardashev scale and entering the space exploration age.
“I’m sure I don’t have to repeat this, but I will do so nonetheless,” a Shadari Commander said when the wormhole closed behind them, leaving only their single ship in the vicinity.
“This is our warning to the Conclave mbers to remind them what joining the Conclave ans and that it is not sothing you can just try and leave at the first inconvenience or when things get difficult, after having benefited from our support when you were in difficult tis. For that, a good example needs to be set to make sure everyone knows the consequences of attempting any of those things.
And for that, the Grand Xor’Vak and our leader, the Unseen, have all given us the approval to use any ans necessary to set that example for all to see. Any questions?” the commander asked when he finished giving his short rallying speech. It was very unnecessary, as all those present were ready to do anything they were ordered, and it made no difference if they were motivated or not; the work would get done.
Gubka, the present Shadari team’s commander, was an outlier among their civilization. Unlike the majority, who hated the spotlight and considered being called a son or daughter of light to be one of the worst curse words, he actually liked having attention and being the center of it, going so far as to do things like impromptu motivation speeches before missions. But due to his abilities, nothing was done about it, and he was left to his machinations so long as he got things done.
“Okay, now get to work and do your assigned tasks,” he said before taking the cap of his robe and covering his head, a new invention inspired by human fashion sense. The surrounding light started warping around him, and he completely disappeared in a few seconds.
The rest of the team mbers, having finally received the order to move forward, also did the sa. Shortly, one of the doors to a sealed hatch opened after the air inside was emptied, but it seed like it was just a glitch, as there was no one inside. At least, that is how it was visible on many sensors. But to soone with a god’s-eye view, they would see five Shadaris moving towards the capital planet with their hands around a fifty-ter-diater object at their center, which in itself was invisible to sensors as a result of the active abilities they were using on it.
When they reached about twenty thousand kiloters, they finally released their hands from the machine, which instantly started vibrating rapidly as it continued toward the planet, self-propelled. This ti, it finally beca visible, but it didn’t matter since it had already arrived at the point of no return, and any intervention would be useless. They stopped to watch its journey towards the planet and see what it would unleash.
To their surprise, it seed like it wasn’t even detected, as not even the orbital defenses managed to activate and try to shoot it down. Although they knew that any of those attempts would result in whatever they sent just going through it as if it weren’t there, they were still surprised by the inaction.
But their surprise didn’t last, as finally they started seeing tracers as lasers, kinetic, and every other weapon was directed towards it to try and stop it. As expected, nothing managed to do that.
“Good. Now show your despair,” Gubka said as he propelled himself ahead of the rest of the Shadaris, placing them behind him before he extended his hands wide and used his mana to cause his robe to flutter as if there was an atmosphere around them, another inspiration from the Terra Empire that he liked.
Despite the constant firing of weapons at their cargo, it finally managed to enter the atmosphere. The mont it did, it didn’t wait to start burning from atmospheric resistance, and as if waiting for the mont, Gubka said, “Let there be LIGHT!”
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
Gubka had a wide smile on his face as he watched the brightest object in the surrounding space get overshadowed by his masterwork. As the leader of this operation, he felt even more emotional knowing the history behind the bomb that had just gone off. It was a quite cruel one as well, as it was not one of the Conclave’s conventional bombs; they had far better ones. Its emotional and psychological weight was higher than if they had used their strongest ones, as it was sothing that humans at one ti had been afraid of creating, to the point of shelving the idea: Project Sundial.
In 1954, physicist Edward Teller had proposed a ten-gigaton thermonuclear bomb nad Project Sundial. It was a bomb that, unlike the nuclear weapons of its ti, would yield world-ending destruction if used.
The design was based on an extre extrapolation of the Teller–Ulam configuration, the sa principle behind the hydrogen bomb. But where conventional thermonuclear devices used a single fusion stage, Sundial envisioned a multi-stage cascade, a chain of fusion reactions, each triggering the next, like a row of collapsing stars.
At its core, Sundial would begin with a fission primary, likely a plutonium implosion device. This would ignite a fusion secondary composed of lithium deuteride. But instead of stopping there, the bomb would include tertiary and quaternary stages, each encased in uranium-238 to undergo fast fission when bombarded by high-energy neutrons. The outermost layer would act as a neutron reflector and compression lens, ensuring that no energy escaped unspent.
The projected yield: 10,000 gatons, enough to vaporize a continent, ignite global firestorms, and inject enough soot into the stratosphere to trigger a nuclear winter lasting decades. The fireball alone would have spanned 50 kiloters, with a thermal pulse capable of igniting forests and cities hundreds of kiloters away.
But not stopping there, they had also implented another of humanity’s darkest ideas. The Project Sundial-inspired bomb was then encased in Cobalt-59, transforming it from a weapon of instant annihilation into a device of lingering planetary death.
The cobalt jacket was not designed to increase the explosive yield. Its purpose was radiological permanence. When the bomb detonated, the intense neutron flux from the fusion stages would transmute the stable cobalt-59 into Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 5.27 years. The result was a salted bomb, a weapon engineered to poison the biosphere.
Unlike conventional fallout, which decays within weeks or months, Cobalt-60 emits high-energy gamma radiation for decades. The Sundial detonation would loft millions of tons of irradiated cobalt into the stratosphere, where it would circulate globally, settling over continents and oceans alike. Within weeks, the planet’s surface would beco a death zone, uninhabitable for generations.
That was the bomb they had created and used, as if to show humans that what you fear most is sothing that we are capable of making and using without any of your initial fears, but at the sa ti, reminding everyone that if you join the humans, you will also be killed by the ans the humans themselves ca up with.
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