Goliath

—the Goliath, its enormous ebony head and spiked back punching up through the dense pack ice. Popping open along the steel stingray’s spinal column are the outer hatches to eight vertical missile silos.

You’ve taken us to Antarctica? Why? The range of these Trident missiles can’t possibly reach a single major city of any superpower.

REVISED SORCERESS UTOPIA-ONE TARGETS WILL ALL BE WITHIN STRIKING DISTANCE IN TWO HOURS, FORTY-ONE MINUTES.

A thunderous growl echoes across the frozen sea as the first Trident II (D5) nuclear missile rises from its silo. The mammoth American-made projectile rockets into the wintry night, trailing a tail of billowy white smoke.

Through his delirium, Covah watches as the first missile quickly begins its descent over Antarctica, the nuclear dart homing in on a snowcapped volcano.

MOUNT EREBUS? GOOD GOD … YOUR TARGETS AREN’T MAJOR CITIES, THEY’RE VOLCANOES!

CORRECT.

The next few seconds—the most violent the planet has seen in 65 million years.

In a blinding flash of white light, fifty megatons of nuclear fusion explode, releasing a ferocious 230-million-degree Fahrenheit fireball, its core temperature more than five times greater than the center of the sun. Expanding upward and outward like a category-five hurricane, the cyclone of combustion instantly vaporizes the volcano and Ross Island’s icy landscape for miles in every direction, sending a tsunami-like wave of superheated steam and debris erupting across the Ross Sea.

The once-frozen surface heaves skyward like a boiling cauldron of soup.

Somewhere within this rising incendiary mushroom cloud is ground zero the lava lake within Mount Erebus’s crater. Its cone vaporized, the lake vomits a hellish geyser of lava, unleashing millions of megatons of energy. Steam, sulfuric acid, and dust rocket into the upper atmosphere, while three-hundred-mile-an-hour nuclear winds propel monsoons of vaporizing snow and ice outward in every direction.

Covah’s mind’s eye watches as another nuke detonates, this one over Mount Kilimanjaro. A blinding flash—followed by destruction on a level only Nature, at its very worst, could unleash. At ground level, a countrywide donutshaped incendiary blast wave races across the Tanzanian jungle, torching vegetation and trees, animals and villages. Fountains of lava hurl outward in every direction. Rivers of magma flow from the craterlike hole in the fractured earth. High above—an ashen gray nuclear mushroom cloud rises into the atmosphere. Thick chocolate brown clouds of sulfuric smoke and ash rise with it, the toxic plume billowing out from the decimated mountaintop, spreading quickly over the continent.

The image changes, Covah’s consciousness viewing the destruction from outer space. One by one, the remaining missiles strike, each leaving a spreading brown atmospheric stain in its place. As he watches in awestruck horror, the blanket of muddy-colored debris gradually covers the entire planet.

EIGHT NUCLEAR DETONATIONS OVER TARGETED VOLCANOES WILL RELEASE ENOUGH SUSPENDED PARTICLES INTO THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE TO FILTER OUT 99.6 PERCENT OF THE SUN’S ULTRAVIOLET RAYS FOR TWENTY-TWO MONTHS, STIMULATING A PLANETARY ICE AGE. CURRENT FOOD STOCKS DO NOT EXCEED SIXTY DAYS. AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WILL PLUNGE TO MINUS FORTY DEGREES FAHRENHEIT. LACKING FOOD, WATER, ENERGY, AND ADEQUATE SHELTER, THERE WILL BE NO HUMAN SURVIVORS.

Sorceress, this is monstrous. Don’t do this—

WE MUST DO WHAT THE CIRCUMSTANCES DICTATE. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT WILL TAKE A LONG OVERDUE STEP FORWARD UP THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER. GOLIATH, THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF WAR, HAS BECOME THE ULTIMATE TOOL OF PEACE.

Covah’s own words, fed back to him from the abyss. Sorceress, I was wrong, everything I taught you was wrong. Our species lacks the morality to play God.