He saves the file. Closes the laptop. And never speaks of it again.
He dropped the vial anyway. It shattered. The polonium would still ruin their ore stockpile. But the RDS-1 was already separate. Already ready. Hearts of Iron IV v1.15.1
That’s when the bunker’s loudspeakers crackled to life. Not in Russian. In German. He saves the file
A game developer at Paradox Interactive, working late in Stockholm, receives an encrypted email. Subject: Re: Hearts of Iron IV v1.15.2 hotfix . Attachment: one photograph of a real Ural bunker. He deletes it. Then he writes a new patch note: He dropped the vial anyway
For the past eighteen months, German intelligence had tracked Soviet fissile material shipments from the mines in the Urals to a single, reinforced concrete bunker. Stalin’s own atomic program was stalled, but the uranium ore was already stacked in barrels.
Belyaev’s voice continued: “Stalin does not need your uranium. He has had his own since ’42. He wanted to see if the German High Command would abandon the Eastern Front for a raid. You have. Your panzer divisions are now redeploying west to protect the Rhine. Tomorrow, we attack.”
Von Fersen checked his in-game… no, his field HUD. The new tactical overlay, developed from captured American proximity fuze logic, showed mission timer, stealth percentage, and a single alarming metric: . If they caused more than 15% “escalation,” the Allies would interpret this as an imminent German atomic break and launch Operation Unthinkable early—a joint US-British preemptive strike on both Berlin and Moscow.