The Persian Gulf shimmered under a crimson dawn.
Allied warships-American carriers, British destroyers, French missile cruisers-formed a steel wall along the coast of Kuwait. The world was waiting for the final blow against Saddam Hussein, whose regime teetered on the edge of collapse.
But Vekom was no longer interested in Saddam.
He had already taken everything of value from the man his networks, his secrets, his scientists.
Now, Vekom wanted to test the world itself.
Deep beneath the shattered remains of Tikrit, Major General Hadi al-Mufti, Saddam's most fanatical surviving loyalist, knelt before a towering steel container.
Inside: Vekom's gift.
A nuclear warhead. Compact. Clean. Designed by uknowns . Assembled in an off-world forge and smuggled through a hundred hands most of whom were clones.
Al-Mufti didn't ask who gave it to him. He only knew it was the last card left to play.
A final act of vengeance.
From orbit, aboard the Stratos Forge, Vekom monitored the targeting systems.
Subroutine: OPERATION CINDER SEED / Status: GREENTarget: Allied carrier fleet / Detonation Mode: High-Altitude AirburstEffect: EMP Disruption + Symbolic Nuclear DemonstrationAttribution: Saddam Loyalist Hadi al-MuftiTraceability: ZERO
Vekom smiled.
"Let them feel fear again."
The missile launched from a repurposed oil rig along Iraq's southern coast.
Coated in stealth polymers. Powered by fuel cells cloned from Iranian blueprints.
It climbed past 15,000 feet before triggering.
And then—the sky caught fire.
A blinding white flash. An expanding sphere of plasma. An invisible wave of electromagnetic force swept across the Gulf.
Aboard the USS Liberty Ridge, systems died in a heartbeat.
Engines went silent. Guidance arrays crashed. Backup generators overloaded and burst into flame.
Two destroyers collided during emergency maneuvers. On the Saint-Juste, a French cruiser, every crew member's commlink fried, and the ship drifted powerless.
In all, eight ships were disabled.
Hundreds of sailors were dead.
The world had just witnessed the first deliberate nuclear detonation since 1945.
The President of the United States demanded immediate retaliation.
MI6 accused Iran. Mossad blamed Syria. China warned of "imperialist chaos." Russia deployed a "peace fleet."
No one suspected Vekom.
And that was exactly the point.
News stations across the globe ran wall-to-wall coverage.
They showed the mushroom cloud. The scorched decks. The floating wreckage.
Vekom leaked intercepted audio of al-Mufti swearing revenge on the West. He doctored it himself, recorded by a clone in an underground lab.
Within hours, the world believed the attack had been Saddam's final curse.
And then, Vekom made his next move.
He offered "private military stabilization units" to NATO.He sold EMP-hardened tech to every carrier group.He sold nuclear response tech to terrified governments.He launched a new initiative: Vault Cities deep bunkers advertised as the only protection against future strikes.
The world was buying.
Fear was currency.
And Vekom was now its banker.
Far from the blast, in a desert village untouched by the war, a boy stared up at the sun. His father was dead. His home was dust. His future was ash.
Above him, a satellite drifted silently.
It blinked once recording the face of the child.
Vekom would clone him someday, raise him as a hero, sell him as a symbol of peace, and then use him to justify the next war.
Because this wasn't just about domination anymore.
It was about rewriting what humanity feared.
And Vekom had just introduced Act One of a nuclear world.