Iron Empire

Forty: M.A.D World

The Third World War had been short and brutal. The war lasted three days and involved no armies. Millions of people died.

I had only been two years old, far too young to understand the atrocity of war. I had no memory of the day, so my knowledge of the events prior was based only on historical records.

An argument during a meeting of the United Nations led to months of cold war. One ill-timed rant from a prominent leader escalated the conflict. Endless demonstrations, shows of power and threats followed before a nuclear drill was mistaken for the real thing.

August fifteenth, 2030.

One nation launched a missile, another responded, and soon the world had to wake up and face a possibility that hadn't ever existed outside of science fiction movies.

M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction.

The official death toll of those three days of nuclear warfare is only estimated. At its end, after much of the world had been ravaged by missiles, the world's governments found a common ground strong enough to stop fighting.

Mass panic.

Many people were sure we'd destroyed ourselves, that the clouds of nuclear fallout circulating the globe were our death sentence. Research into nuclear radiation skyrocketed as our time ran low, until suddenly the cure was found, created by a team of scientists from around the globe.

By 2038, the impossible had been achieved—a chemical that neutralized nuclear radiation. It did little to fix the environmental damage or bring back the lives that had been taken, but nothing would ever truly atone for that.

With a cure so readily available, nuclear power was now safe to be used in increasingly common ways. Radiation leaks were considered a minor annoyance and could be cleaned up far easier than any oil spill.

Without access to much of the technology that had been fried in the war, conventional nuclear power became commonplace. I remember watching my father bring home a new car, one with a miniature reactor tucked deep inside its engine.

Nuclear warheads. They had been a symbol of national power, of military might. Now they were considered obsolete. Their most terrifying concept, radiation bombardment, was commonplace and ineffective.

All of this happened in only a few years. At the time, many thought humanity had reached a golden age, that we have overcome our differences to stave off the apocalypse and grow closer as a whole.

Then the first mech attacked, and instead of banding together, the world fell apart once more.

Nowadays, instead of missiles, nuclear power took the form of mechs. The last warheads were either dismantled or left alone. As far as we knew, only a few ballistic missiles remained, rusting in the Vietnamese jungle. It was the only weapon with enough firepower capable of reaching Terminus in time.

Which explained why I was now hundreds of meters in the air, climbing down the slope of a crater.

I lurched around in my seat as the Sentinel marched down the sheer crater wall, massive legs pistoning into the stone as I descended. The mech was certainly not designed to be comfortable. I felt every step of its massive legs.

A few muffled grunts over the comms confirmed that Martin was having as bumpy a ride as I was. His Sentinel scrambled along the rock a few hundred meters to my right.

From my angle all I could see was rock and the sparse stone floor far below me. The crater wall was a near-vertical slice of rock, making it feel as though I was standing on flat ground and the rest of the world was tilted. Feeling nauseous, I rotated my Sentinel's cockpit halfway around so that I faced upwards instead.