To the Navy Seals arranged around her, the dull thuds of the initial explosions could not be heard above the barrage of fire they were laying into the seemingly indestructible woman on the ground. But those seismic rumbles were but a precursor. Each disk had each been placed inside of one of the submarines’ many massive ballistic missiles. When their white heat encountered the chemical fuel stored in the missiles’ engines, it triggered an exponential chain reaction. The fire ripped through the reinforced steel plating of the huge ships like paper, engulfing their hulls in less than a second and igniting the remaining twenty-three missiles’ chemical boosters on each submarine as it went. From overhead, the huge shed suddenly ballooned at two points, the roof expanding outward even as it was absorbed by the two expanding balls of fire coming from the submarines’ missile tubes.

Sixty years of perfecting missile design meant that not one of the nuclear warheads on board actually went thermonuclear, but the sheer volume of explosive material on each submarine created a blast radius over three hundred meters wide. This solid wall of flame washed outward from the submarines like a wave of death, covering the area around the sheds in a matter of seconds. The team that had been firing on Agent Lana Wilson was instantly baked at a thousand degrees as the fire engulfed them.

Within two more seconds, two thousand men and women in the surrounding buildings were dead.

And in the middle of the hellish cyclone, the Agent lay, curled in a ball, her skin flayed from her body, the midnight black of her core exposed to the nightmare. She remained crouched for a moment as the shockwave passed, protecting her relatively fragile eyes from the blast.

All her touch sensors had been built into the fake skin that had coated her and so she watched the scene using the satellite’s doomed eyes. She saw the explosion clearly from space as the shockwave washed outward. No doubt they would report that one of the submarines had suffered an accident. Either way, the combined nuclear material from two nuclear submarines would soon irradiate all of Georgia and northern Florida before it started its path northward.

In its last few moments, the AI informed Agent Lana Wilson that by deliberately setting off nuclear weapons she had violated the mission parameters. It was a pointless accusation, but the AI did not understand such things. Even as it counted down to its own destruction, and that of its two remaining cohorts, it still diligently logged and categorized the information in a database that would be obliterated within moments.

The final missiles closed in, and at the last moment the surviving rockets detonated. As if in response to the huge fireball that Lana had set off, the upper atmosphere answered with three silent but massive explosive clusters around the globe, each consuming the last of the Mobiliei’s satellites.