War
The intergalactic ship rapidly entered the Solar system of the galaxy, called the "Milky Way". The commander of the ship gave the order;
– Slow down. Wake up the earthman, he has been in the bio-chamber for more than three hundred years. We are approaching the planet Earth. Let him admire his planet. This was his wish before going to bed.
The humanoids immediately obeyed the order of the ship's commander and brought the man to the observation cabin of the ship. At the same moment, the man leaned greedily against the porthole. He wanted to see the blue, beautiful, familiar home planet. But behind the porthole, I saw a dark gray, sometimes black, as if charred by a vast, large-scale fire, perhaps even already lifeless, dead planet. Where the blue oceans and seas are located, grayish-dark clouds covered in places. The continents have lost their former shape, have repeatedly decreased in size, we can say they have turned into many large and small islands. He was horrified and numb, began to mutter "it can't be, it can't be, this planet is not Earth", Slowed down after a long and forced artificial sleep, his memory was gradually restored. He really wanted to remember his first and last name, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't do it. He only remembered that he was a citizen of the Russian state, as a cosmonaut, together with astronauts from other countries, whose names he could not remember now, as part of five people, an international space crew, he did not remember the exact year, somewhere in the first half of the twenty-first century, they flew to the international space station (ISS) and replaced the previous crew. They worked together on the ISS, conducted scientific experiments, joked, had fun, discussed their upcoming, future flight on a manned interplanetary ship to the planet Mars. The crew had already been on the ISS for four months and they were soon to be replaced by another international crew. Nothing foreshadowed trouble, everything went according to a pre-planned plan. And so, being on the ISS in near-Earth orbit, in an instant they became the only unwitting witnesses of the catastrophe and the destruction of the Earth's civilization. Whether as a result of a fatal mistake of the human factor, or as a result of a successful terrorist attack by hackers on the system of early detection and prevention of an enemy missile attack, followed by hacking the lock and provoking a simulated nuclear missile attack, or because of the geopolitical ambitions of the leaders of the nuclear superpowers, a global thermonuclear war suddenly began between the nuclear superpowers. Of course, over the past decades, interstate relations between the world's leading nuclear powers have been strained and strained to the limit due to many problems and contradictions, mainly over spheres of influence in the world of a geopolitical, territorial and economic nature. In various hot spots of the Earth, undeclared wars of the leading powers of the world have been going on for a long time, in the form of their indirect participation in regional skirmishes, in coups d'etat, in which, defending their economic and geopolitical interests, the nuclear powers of the world supported one or another opposing side, providing them with assistance in the field of weapons, information and support in the UN. In addition, in order to win in the confrontation, the warring parties and their allies have long waged undeclared hybrid wars of an economic and informational nature among themselves, cyber attacks were carried out aimed at undermining the economic basis of the state and at weakening the political institutions of state power and other fundamental foundations of statehood. In an effort to dominate the world, some powerful powers, under the guise of "democratizing the world" or under the guise of "protecting the economic interests of their state" in a particular region of the world, resorting to various sophisticated methods to damage the opposite side, did not disdain anything to achieve their goals. They constantly violated the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations and violated other international rules of relations between States developed in the 20th century and established for years. Double standards, economic blockades and other various restrictive measures were widely applied to those who did not agree with the policies of the superpowers. When resolving certain geopolitical or geo-economic disputes, conflict situations in hot spots of the world, even the opinions of some economically undeveloped and militarily powerful states located in that region, whose interests were directly affected there, were not taken into account, and the preservation of their statehood depended entirely on objective solutions to these problems. This, in turn, led to protracted civil wars and the complete ruin of these states in economic and humanitarian terms and the mass migration of their citizens to other countries of the world. Against the background of the confrontations of the nuclear superpowers, skillfully taking advantage of their irreconcilable differences, in addition to this, they were also financially fueled by third forces from outside, international terrorism was also growing everywhere in the world. In a word, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because of the gross mistakes made, or the deliberate actions of some leading politicians of the world elite aimed at creating so-called "controlled chaos" in certain regions of the world, everything and everything changed in the world. This led to a deep diplomatic crisis in the relations between the leading powers of the world. Another feature of this period of time was that in the relations of states, in solving various international problems, peace politicians, in order to tilt the thicket of scales in their direction, increasingly resorted to the services of brazen provocation and false propaganda. As a result, the world became such that it was as if truth and falsehood had changed places in people's minds, and the truth as such, as if it no longer existed in the world. And it seemed that along with the rapid scientific and technological growth of the world economy in all its directions, people, and in some cases even high-ranking politicians, relying entirely on information distributed by the media or on the Internet, taking various biased, custom-made fake news for the truth, forgot how to see the truth and therefore, as if only lies began to rule the world. But everyone believed, based on the predominance of high human reason, that the leaders of the nuclear powers, knowing what a global thermonuclear war would turn out for the planet, would refrain from a military solution by force with the use of nuclear weapons in solving any acute issues in interstate relations and would agree, as during the Caribbean crisis in the sixties of the twentieth century. In any case, humanity will never know what was the reason for the beginning of a global nuclear war. So, from various points of the Earth, from land, from ocean and sea surfaces and depths, short-and medium-range ballistic missiles and huge intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads were launched in an instant. The vaunted anti-missile, anti-aircraft missile systems of the opponents, although they shot down several missiles that had just launched, were not corrected by streams of thousands of missiles flying at huge hypersonic speeds at the target, filled with nuclear warheads that split when approaching the target. It seemed that the parties used all their nuclear arsenals accumulated during the years of confrontation to defeat the enemy and used all means of delivering them to the targets for this purpose. In addition to ballistic missiles and other means, recently invented, secret, automatically self-loading, super-powerful electromagnetic guns, that is, the so-called railguns, stationary-mine-based, were used to deliver destructive strike nuclear arsenals. Previously, only a few of these electromagnetic guns, and then with the strictest secrecy, were previously used by the military to secretly launch small, barely noticeable for radars, military reconnaissance satellites into near-Earth orbit. With their trunks almost vertically pointing into the sky, these super-powerful electromagnetic guns, with their lightning-fast, sharply repulsive shots, gave an unthinkably high speed to a metal capsule designed and made specifically from particularly strong metal alloys, inside which small-sized, high-precision, so-called "smart" cruise missiles stuffed with thermonuclear warheads were placed, working on tiny nuclear installations. With the shots of electromagnetic cannons, these capsules in the blink of an eye, that is, in a few seconds, overcoming the Earth's gravity at unimaginably high speeds, were directly launched into the low Earth orbit of the planet and continuing to fly at hypersonic speeds in the near-Earth orbit, these capsules were automatically opened and the rockets inside them were separated from them. The missiles immediately at the command of the operators or automatically according to the programs laid down in advance in them, tuning in to the target and in flight sharply and very difficult maneuvering like small swifts, thereby effectively confusing ABOUT the enemy, flew at unthinkably huge hypersonic speeds towards the enemy. When approaching the target, these ultra-precise, small-sized, smart missiles, while still in low Earth orbit, made a sharp turn over the target and as a result of this maneuver, from top to bottom, almost vertically-perpendicular flight to the Ground, without even having time to get particularly heated by the oncoming air resistance, overcoming the lower, dense layers of the atmosphere, vertically and accurately hit the targets. These small-sized, ultra-precise missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, were designed to deliver pinpoint strikes on small, but strategically important military facilities, deep bunker command posts of the enemy and jewelry hits exactly on target caused irreparable damage to the enemy. The anti-missile means of the warring parties not only failed, due to their small size and unprecedented speeds, and also, especially because of their low visibility for air defense radars, to shoot down these missiles, but did not even have time to detect and distinguish them from many other objects and space debris randomly spinning in near-Earth orbit. Due to the special electronic complexity of the designs of their targeting heads, which did not perceive other people's radio signals or radio interference at all, the means of electronic warfare against missiles were also not effective against these missiles. And not only EW-s, but even powerful anti-missile laser guns of land and ship-based, as well as special anti-missile neutron guns based on special satellites in a high geostationary orbit of the Earth, could not shoot down these missiles. Because these smart rockets during the flight for a second, at unthinkably huge hypersonic speeds, zigzagged more than three hundred meters unpredictably difficult and varied to change the trajectory of their flight. The ISS crew members watched with horror as at huge hypersonic speeds, huge ballistic missiles with powerful nuclear warheads and small-sized cruise missiles filled with nuclear warheads, fired from electromagnetic cannons, rushed to all the edges of the Globe. Several rockets even flew to the Arctic, that is, to the North Pole of the Earth and to the icy continent of Antarctica. Perhaps there were also military bases of the opponents there. At the same time, in order to achieve a final victory over the enemy, the opposing sides also used a new, the use of which is categorically prohibited, top secret, gravitational weapons in the conditions of any war on Earth. Explosions, dazzling bright lights, thousands and thousands of large and small mushrooms from nuclear explosions have grown on all continents and islands of the Earth, where military bases, strategic objects of opponents or their allies may have been located. These numerous powerful nuclear explosions and the use of gravitational weapons, in turn, served as resonant detonators for indescribably super-powerful wave earthquakes, natural disasters and man-made disasters across the entire surface of the planet. One after another, nuclear power plants, oil and gas storage terminals and everything that could explode and burn on the ground exploded and burned. From above, it seemed that super-powerful fires had engulfed the entire land surface of the Earth. Perhaps the echoes of numerous powerful nuclear explosions and the use of gravitational weapons echoed in the deep layers of the planet, as not only active, erupting volcanoes were activated along the chain, but even numerous volcanoes that had once fallen asleep, including the largest volcano Yellowstone, woke up and began to erupt. The titanic destructive forces of all these volcanoes were thousands of times more significant than all the nuclear explosions and, as a result, the man-made disasters that followed them. The oceans and seas were boiling with underwater volcanoes that had awakened in the bowels of the Earth and raged with previously unprecedented giant waves. Before the eyes of the crew, the eternal ice floes of the Arctic Ocean first broke into several parts, and then the ice floes encircling Antarctica and all these broken parts of the ice floes were rapidly moving towards the equator of the planet. And then came the moment when, as in the times of the mythical wars of the gods, huge water streams, swallowing everything into their depths, rushed from the oceans to the continents. From above, it seemed that the water element was about to swallow all the land on Earth. Meanwhile, the devastating fiery explosive waves of nuclear explosions, sweeping away and destroying everything in their path, circled the globe several times. In a word, in an instant, everything on the surface of the Earth was mixed up. It was an indescribable real hell, an apocalypse on Earth, in the literal sense of the word. Despite the futile requests of the crew, the flight control centers and all ground services in general were silent. Apparently, after the nuclear explosions, powerful electromagnetic pulses, in an instant, cut off all means of communication on Earth and it is quite possible that the ground services after that, simply for a purely technical reason, could not establish communication. Perhaps, even most likely, these services, like all other services, probably could not even survive, since, after a series of annihilatingly devastating nuclear explosions, super-powerful earthquakes that occurred everywhere on the Earth's surface, numerous small and super-powerful super volcanoes and a planetary-scale water element completed the complete and irrevocable destruction of Earth's civilization. Time passed, and the ISS with the crew on board was still spinning around the planet. And suddenly, for a moment, the Earth shuddered for a moment and seemed to make a short stop in its rotation around its axis, and then began its rotation again. A moment later, something vast, seemingly similar to a huge wide funnel, a vacuum void was formed in the Earth's atmosphere over the African continent, and an extremely critical cosmic cold poured into this part of the Earth that was not protected by the atmosphere, along with the Sun's harmful rays, radiation, in the form of a silvery haze. From above, it was visible how, due to the attraction of the planet, the cosmic cold spread rapidly on the surface of the Earth, and the already frozen and icy land surface of the whole of Africa and part of the water surface of the Atlantic mirrored and reflected the Sun's rays back from themselves. A moment later, the already polluted atmosphere of the planet again filled this vacuum void. After that, the entire Earth, up to the stratosphere, was gradually covered with thick dust from nuclear explosions and a volcanic ash pall. This meant that from that moment on, a long, critically cold, nuclear winter began on Earth, which was disastrous for biological life. All the members of the ISS crew, being in near-Earth orbit and having personally seen, as a result of the world thermonuclear war, the destruction of the Earth's civilization, not yet fully believing in it and not fully realizing the irreparable disaster that had happened to their home planet, silently looked into each other's faces. In their eyes, one could read an indescribable terrible horror, fright, confusion and deep inner heartache for what had happened and was already irreparable, a disaster on Earth, and everyone was asking questions: "How and why did this happen, who is to blame, was it really impossible to solve all sorts of issues peacefully, by agreement. Did the leaders and politicians of the leading nuclear powers, who are responsible not only to the peoples of their country, but in general to the humanity of the whole world, to the thousand-year-old Earth civilization, knowing in advance how the world nuclear war will end, how disastrously catastrophic its consequences will be for life on the planet, allow this?" A day passed, but the Earth remained dead silent. A month passed after the disaster, the Earth did not show any signs of life, as if there was only a dusty void behind the ashy fog and there was no longer a blue, beautiful planet called Earth in the endless expanses of the Universe. But all the crew members knew that she, the only and native Earth for everyone, there, behind the ash fog, did not leave her orbit, as before, continues her rotation around the Sun, turns around her axis, otherwise the Moon, her eternal companion and completely dependent on the Earth's gravity, would have left the Earth's orbit. However, the moon, as always, was still spinning, in its orbit, around the Earth. Now the crew members did not argue, did not swear and did not blame the leaders and politicians of a particular state. They silently thought about the fate of their relatives, friends, and fellow citizens, and in the soul of each of the crew members there was still a small hope that, although the scale of the disaster is immeasurably large, but the ground services of the states together will be able to localize the consequences of the disaster, because the entire thousand-year-old earth civilization could not perish in an instant. All the crew members almost all the time, without looking up from the portholes, looked out at the Earth in the hope that the ash fog was about to open, and they would see their native blue planet again, ground services would start working, and they would return to Earth. The crew members were silent and no longer discussed this topic, because each of them well understood and knew what a global thermonuclear war was and how catastrophic its consequences could be. Meanwhile, the ISS was still spinning around the Earth, all the instruments and equipment of the station were working properly. The supplies of provisions and oxygen were sufficient. But the hopelessness of their current situation, and although they did not yet know and could not even conceivably determine the scale of the catastrophe, however, the premonition of the global disaster that had already occurred on Earth, the feeling of losing their relatives and loved ones, increasingly pressed on the psyche of each of them. In addition to this, the Earth for all this time did not give any, even the slightest, signs of life and still continued to keep, a terrifying soul, a dead silence. Although there were five of them on the ISS, but they all already felt lonely and abandoned to the mercy of fate, they occasionally communicated with each other, the rest of the time they were silent, and sometimes, hiding bitter tears from each other, someone, remembering their loved ones, and someone, their former life on Earth, silently cried. All the crew members knew in advance that if the situation did not change, no matter how long their life on the ISS would last, although they understood perfectly well that after the catastrophe on Earth, their further life no longer made any sense even for themselves and that such a situation could not continue forever. They also knew that what an unenviable and painfully tragic end to their life paths was waiting for them ahead. At the end of the fourth month after the disaster, one of the solar panels failed, then the second. Fuel and other means for maneuvering and maintaining the necessary speed of the ISS in orbit were also running out, and were used only for maneuvering, so as not to collide with space debris or, already unmanageable and uncontrolled by numerous satellites that were still spinning around the Earth, issuing emergency radio signals on their radio frequencies. And now the moment has come when, due to an acute shortage of energy, the instruments and equipment of the station began to fail one after another. The usual temperature regime inside the station began to rapidly drop down and the ISS gradually began to freeze. The crew members silently put on their spacesuits. Fortunately, there was still enough food, water and oxygen. He, as the commander of the ship, turned to the crew with the question of what to do, to descend to the dead Earth through an ashen veil at random, not knowing the landing point reliably, or with the rest of the fuel, raising the station to an extremely high, geostationary orbit, accelerate and remain forever in space as extinct exhibits of the human race in the Universe. We decided to do the first, that is, in the absence of ground services coordinating flights, we ourselves made the necessary preliminary calculations to ensure the maximum safe trajectory of the lander's entry into the atmosphere and calculations for the preliminary selection of the landing site and descend to Earth. Because, with a successful and safe landing, if of course they suddenly succeed in this, everyone wanted to see firsthand everything that was happening on Earth, and there was still a small hope in everyone's souls that everything was not lost yet. They hoped that after the necessary acclimatization of the musculoskeletal and other organs of the body to terrestrial conditions, they themselves would be able to get out of the lander, and the spacesuits would reliably protect them from the effects of thermonuclear radiation. And then, with the remnants of the reserves of space food, they will be able to survive on their own planet. With such hope in their hearts, they all moved into the lander. However, due to a lack of energy or perhaps for some other reason, the emergency sensors in the descent vehicle triggered. Despite all the efforts of the crew members, they could not establish and eliminate the cause of the emergency sensors, and for the same reason, they could not undock and break away from the station. In addition, while they were in the descent capsule, for some unknown reason, perhaps due to a slightly larger meteorite hitting the outer skin of the station or for another reason, the ISS was depressurized and the air inside the station and, together with the air, somehow the entire oxygen supply quickly flowed into space. The energy on board the ISS was running out and due to the lack of the necessary energy for management, that is, for these purposes, enough necessary energy, the station became unmanageable. In addition, after depressurization, the temperature inside the station dropped so quickly below the critical norm, so even while inside the station, it was no longer possible to open the visor of the helmet of the spacesuit. All the crew members understood the critical irretrievability of the situation that had already come. After a day, the oxygen in the spacesuits also ran out. The oxygen starvation of the brain cells was already felt, there was a noise in the ears, the head became heavy, it was increasingly difficult to breathe. The crew members hugged each other and said goodbye for the last time. Everyone could see such deep emotional pain and sorrow for the mistake made by their relatives on Earth, but never incorrigible anymore. It was impossible to convey this pain and sorrow in words, because each of them understood that there was no more Earthly civilization, relatives and friends, and soon, very soon, they, that is, the last earthlings from the genus of Adam and Eve, would go into an irrevocable eternity. After some time, the instrument monitoring the health status of the crew members showed that two of the crew members did not show signs of life, two were unconscious. He, too, like all the other crew members, already resigned, prepared for them by fate, the tragic end of his life, began to lose consciousness, but at the last moment, before losing consciousness, he felt a slight push and on the monitor screen saw an alien spacecraft smoothly docked to the ISS. After that, he lost consciousness.
