Forty years ago, the stars fell from the skies.
On the eve of 1983, the first fragments of the Calamity Astroid broke apart in orbit over the earth and rained down on earth. The collective yield of all these fragments was estimated to be the equivalent of a billion nuclear warheads detonating over every continent. Every single scientific expert on the planet declared this Sixth and final Mass Extinction.
But humanity had prepared in the decade since the destruction and done the impossible by uniting the entire world against this common foe. Nations that had been at total war against each other laid down their arms and embarked on a mission of Herculean proportions. Development in any area that might assist them was accelerated beyond belief. In those ten years technology advanced by leaps and bounds as if thirty had passed. Every nation by the time 1983 approached had created some sort of defense in the form of disaster management, expansive bunker complexes, or population evacuation.
But some nations decided to confront the fragments head-on.
Santoak was one of the nations and their main defense took the form of the Stonehenge Turret Network system.
Stonehenge was a series of twenty massive 400cm cannons built on Santoak's Northern Fortress Island of Hokkaido on the outskirts of Auckland. The weapons were officially called the "400 cm anti-air-and-surface, gunpowder-and-electromagnetic hybrid acceleration-based semi-automatic fixed-gun system", operated on a hybrid energy principle using gunpowder to initially propel projectile shells, and then accelerate them to maximum velocity with electromagnetic energy. It was capable of launching projectiles with 30-ton warheads at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. These warheads were N2 mines capable of nearly replicating the yield of nukes with none of the fallout that had been specifically built for this occasion so that these shells could airburst to either further shatter or utterly disintegrate the incoming fragments. The effective range of the gun was given to be 6000 KM but theorists believed they could even push the limits to 10,000 KM this was shot down as the propellant needed to reach that range would not only warp the 400cm caliber barrels but the shockwave of the firing could trigger minor earthquakes. While pushing this limit would have extended the range of protection to a majority of North America it was decided by Santoak to consolidate over Asia.
The proposal drawing for Stonehenge's Cannons
To direct these twenty turrets a synthesized control network was established in a bunker half a kilometer beneath the facility. It was formed by a complex of 20,480 supercomputers split into 1,024 sets of eight; each was capable of performing ten billion floating point arithmetic operations per second. Stonehenge was capable of performing a total of 400 trillion operations per second using all of its computational power. Feeding into this massive data-hungry beast was a series of powerful radars, orbiting satellites, weather models of Pacific atmospheric conditions, and about anything else that could give information about the sky. It would be needed in order to intercept hundreds of thousands of fragments.
The sheer cost of construction for Stonehenge nearly bankrupted the Government and when its acceptance into the general defense plan was announced placed the nation on the verge of civil war as some demanded that a focus be placed on bunkers and simply enduring the damage, rather than preventing it. For that decade of preparation a tenth of the national budget was dedicated to its program, forcing many public services to be dialed back or stripped bare to provide for Stonehenge. Thousands died in the construction as workers fell into a desperate fever to complete it before the deadline whatever the cost for failure they knew would mean the destruction of most of East Asia.
But when on December 1st when the first fragments came into the atmosphere, Stonehenge fired the first shot and proved its worth. For the next 25 days, it would be instrumental in defending a billion lives from the wrath of the heavens. On December 25th, First Impact was declared over and the guns fell silent for the final time.
The question of what to do with Stonehenge after First Impact was answered when in 1994 the Angel Ireul hijacked the supercomputer and poised to use the massive cannons to rain untold death upon the world by deploying it as twenty of the largest N2-armed artillery pieces ever built. Only the newly created Evas of the Evangelion Project placed a stop to this attempt though in the battle that followed all but eight of the guns were destroyed. In the aftermath, Stonehenge was declared to be deactivated until a later date.
Well, that date has come now nearly 29 years later.
On January 7th, Lord Project Asuka Ikari the supreme commander of the SSDF (Santoak Self-Defence Forces), made the following announcement at the end of her usual State of the Union speech after Prime Minister Ikari Soryuu had made his:
"The danger of developing threats abroad to the Home Islands has led the SSDF to decide must take drastic measures to ensure its protection. As of just before this, I have given the Engineering Corps the orders to begin measures to reactivate the Stonehenge turret network. Stonehenge will serve as the ultimate point defense system for Santoak capable of intercepting hostile air threats in the forms of aircraft and missiles of all measures. Its range all the way to the limits of Central Asia and to Australia and Hawaii is a declaration of Santoak and the SSDF commitment to self-defense. It will supply us with the means to total air domination over this area that the SSDF sees as necessary for our protection. No doubt this range will cover nations hostile to us and should they protest I will now say upon them this: Santoak will no longer tolerate your attempts to impose your tyranny nor evil over East and South-East Asia. Santoak has sworn itself to be a peer amongst these nations and regards their protection now as our National and Socialist Duty."
"Councillors and Representatives, Stonehenge will be expected to be reactivated in a month with all eight active turrets and we will explore the possibility of restoring the other twelve. In the meantime, before it is reactivated and to ensure its protection I have ordered the deployment of three divisions of the Ground Forces totaling around thirty thousand men and accompanying air support to guard against any evils that may desire to prevent us from its reactivation."
"Additionally as a member of the UCN, we will declare that this action was taken to ensure peace and protection over Asia."
"That is all."
What the Lord Protector left unsaid was Stonehenge's capability of becoming the most lethal artillery battery in the world, capable of extending Santoak's reach over the majority of Asia and all of China, just like the dreaded Ireul had attempted to do.
To say this would be controversial both domestic and abroad... was to say the least.
