The Gotland Deception полностью

Gao would report the arrest up the chain, along with his final message to Cuī Zemin: “Storm achieved. Narrative fracture complete. MSS element compromised. Phase two continues.”

And then he boarded the ferry for Xiamen, leaving Kinmen behind in flames.

National Security Advisor Jim Batista sat rigid in his chair, reading the detailed outline of the unmanned combat vessels that comprised Task Group 79.2, “Jericho One.” His fingers traced the specifications as he recalled the first time he’d seen these vessels when they were just PowerPoint fantasies presented by his former employer, Palantir.

Batista had sat in on one of the meetings in the early 2020s, when the idea of UCVs had first been pitched. Admirals who had spent careers commanding billion-dollar manned warships had dismissed the concept of having unmanned frigate-class warships augmenting manned ships.

Whose side are they on? Batista had wondered. The US or China?

Still, the SECNAV had greenlit the program in the mid-2020s, and it had taken just six years to go from concept to operational deployment. That was a verifiable miracle, considering the Navy had started work on the DDG(X) program to replace the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers in 2022 and still hadn’t settled on the final requirements so a prototype could be built as of 2033.

The Navy wasn’t exactly known for efficiency as a general practice. Over the last couple of decades, it had taken over five years just to finish the designs for the Constellation-class frigates, let alone build any of them. It had nearly driven Batista to drink.

But change was coming, like a freight train. It had been ramping up for a while, actually. Batista thought back to the tour of Saronic’s facility in Austin he and his fellow Palantir employees had taken in 2025. He’d expected another dog-and-pony show — some Silicon Valley startup promising to revolutionize warfare with “vaporware” and venture capital arrogance. Instead, he’d found a converted catamaran production facility churning out Corsair-class vessels using automotive assembly techniques. Young engineers worked alongside grizzled Navy contractors, welding commercial radar arrays onto hulls built from the same aluminum used in F-150s.

He recalled Saronic’s CEO explaining, “We’re not building yachts.” They walked past workstations, where students fresh from MIT were installing targeting software originally developed for virtual reality video games. “Think of these things like iPhones that float and kill. When one breaks, you don’t fix it — you build five more.”

That philosophy had shattered forty years of Navy doctrine. Where a Burke-class destroyer was costing the Navy two and a half billion a ship and taking five to six years to build, a Corsair cost five to six hundred thousand dollars per ship and just seven to twenty-one days to build. Of course, the old guard of the five big Defense Prime companies that had controlled the US defense industry since 1993’s “Last Supper” threw a big stink. But Batista knew they were only howling because the Corsairs threatened their bottom lines.

Admiral Blackwood, the then-Chief of Naval Operations, had practically vomited his coffee during a Joint Chiefs briefing when Saronic pitched the idea to start building newer classes of large, unmanned autonomous vessels. Batista still remembered a captain on the admiral’s staff joking, “You can’t be serious — disposable warships? What’s next, cardboard carriers? Tupperware cruisers?”

Batista had wanted to choke the man. Instead, they listened as the Tech CEO explained the design for their 140-meter-long Doomhammer-class arsenal UAV. It would augment manned ships like the Burkes or a carrier strike group with a capable, long-range hypersonic strike and defense platform, capable of carrying 96 VLS cells and two 150kW directed energy weapons.

“With a large, modular, mission-capable UAV platform like the Doomhammer, the Navy will have a new way of projecting power into the Pacific… or wherever these UAVs are directed,” the CEO of Saronic had concluded.