"Charles Stross - A Colder War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

and test bird: twelve other birds await criticality on
the ground, for once launched a B-39 can only be
landed at two airfields in Alaska that are equipped
to handle them. This one's been airborne for nine
months so far, and shows no signs of age.''

Cut to:
A shark the size of a Boeing 727 falls away from
the open bomb bay of the monster. Stubby delta
wings slice through the air, propelled by a rocket-
bright glare.

Voice-over
"A modified Navajo missile -- test article for an XK-
PLUTO payload -- dives away from a carrier plane.
Unlike the real thing, this one carries no hydrogen
bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet to bring
retaliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at
Mach 3 the XK-PLUTO will overfly enemy territory,
dropping megaton-range bombs until, its payload
exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final enemy.
Once over the target it will eject its reactor core
and rain molten plutonium on the heads of the
enemy. XK-PLUTO is a total weapon: every aspect
of its design, from the shockwave it creates as it
hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross


its atomic reactor, is designed to inflict damage.''

Cut to:
Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: a holiday in
hell.

Voice-over
"This is why we need such a weapon. This is what
it deters. The abominations first raised by the
Third Reich's Organisation Todt, now removed to
the Ukraine and deployed in the service of New
Soviet Man as our enemy calls himself.''

Cut to:
A sinister grey concrete slab, the upper surface of
a Mayan step pyramid built with East German
cement. Barbed wire, guns. A drained canal
slashes north from the base of the pyramid
towards the Baltic coastline, relic of the installation