Strategic Assets
Ficlets refugee.
My previous stories:
http://ficlets.ficly.com/authors/whitehat
http://ficly.com/authors/whitehat
I'm getting back into writing after a long break.
Your comments are greatly appreciated!
The Office of Strategic Assets was responsible for a number of things: planetary deuterium stockpiles, mothballed military bases, and reserve nuclear weapons.
We'd all been shocked three years ago when the order came down to unseal one of the black sites on Luna, where some Alliance bureaucrat had stashed weapons only semi-jokingly referred to as "Planet Buster"-class nuclear warheads.
That plan had been on a triply-encrypted file on the departmental mainframe, and had taken three minutes to unpack. It didn't even have a code phrase, it was just "Strategic Offensive Plan 41" and we'd sent someone on the next shuttle to escort the logistics team through the sublunar warrens.
It had been less shocking when those weapons had been used to deny extrasolar moons to the Song-jiang insurgency.
This ELECTRIC RAVEN plan, whatever it was, was inside a safe, in a shielded vault, underneath our backup headquarters in St Kilda.
Swiping my security badge for the third time finally convinced the ancient thing to open.
Prequels
Sequels
Comments (3 so far!)
WhiteHat
I'm trying to balance exposition with activity, so the actions aren't entirely without context.
I guess the presentation still needs work...
- #3103 Posted 7 years ago
-
0
Robert Quick
I tentatively agree with HSAR but due to the nature of our work here, somethings often have to be hinted at, until a particular revelation (or focus) makes them worthwhile. So if the shocking use of nuclear weapons to destroy entire moons was the main point here, then the focus would probably have to narrow into feelings and memory but as it is, I think the information is fine as background, potentially to be explored later.
- #3106 Posted 7 years ago
-
0
Inspired by (sequel to):
I tapped the mute key on my terminal.
"Boris! Where's the QS-19 document safe?"
The sleepy NCO loo…
On HoldThis story's tags are
INSURGENCY NUCLEAR WEAPONS CODE WORDS FIRST CONTACT ALIENS SCI-FI MILITARY TO BE CONTINUED- Published 7 years ago and featured 7 years ago.
- Story viewed 10 times and rated 0 times.
All stories on Ficlatté are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. What does this mean?
HSAR
The line about the insurgency is meant to shock, I think, but the impact was a bit lost on me because I had to read multiple times to understand where the point of contrast was. My final conclusion is that you mean that the Echo Romeo plan is even more secret than Plan 41, but I'm not sure what the relevance is.