Sounders' Plan to Destroy the Time Bridge with a Nuclear Blast

The Sounders’ plan to destroy the Time Bridge with a nuclear blast turns the Bridge’s own origin into a possible means of closing it. Rather than rely on conventional sabotage, which might damage only the structure surrounding the passage, the resistance intends to reproduce the extraordinary event believed to have opened the Bridge. The proposal is both a bid to end the invasion and a calculated gamble: even if the Bridge survives, the blast may buy time for SYLO to organize a stronger defense.

A desperate strategy

The plan emerges when Tori asks how the Sounders can hope to stop the Air Force without sufficient numbers. Colonel Pike presents the answer as a basic military tactic, but Kenny Sokol makes its scale plain: they intend to blow up the Bridge. The abruptness of the proposal gives it the blunt simplicity of a battlefield answer, while the ensuing explanation reveals how little about the Bridge is actually understood.

The immediate strategic target is not merely an enemy formation. The Sounders are trying to prevent the Air Force from using the Bridge to invade the past. The wider conflict also includes the Retros’ desire to escape their devastated era, return to a more hospitable time, correct what they regard as past mistakes, and benefit from an improved future. Pike explains that, in theory, this project would require an atomic device in each of the new domes. The Sounders’ intended explosion is therefore an attempt to break the route that makes invasion and colonization possible, rather than simply to win one engagement.

The Bridge and its surrounding frame

The physical distinction between the Bridge and its frame is central to the plan. The rigid structure visible around the Bridge in both eras defines the opening but does not create or sustain it. The Sounders fear that conventional sabotage could destroy that frame while leaving the phenomenon itself intact. Their objective is consequently more exacting than bringing down a visible structure: they must seal the Bridge.

That difficulty reflects the limits of what anyone knows. Although the Bridge was created more than seventy years earlier, physicists from both times have not produced a definitive explanation for the time anomaly. The one point on which they agree is that the original atomic blast propelled matter faster than the speed of light. From that observation comes the theory that the Bridge could have opened only toward the future, not as a doorway that can be created by blasting into the past. The plan proceeds without a complete account of the mechanism it hopes to reproduce.

Repeating the original event

The Sounders have enlisted physicists and engineers who are not all members of the military and who share their opposition to the misuse of the Bridge. Their theory is that the only way to seal it is to create another event like the original one, this time on the other side of time. The proposed atomic explosion inside the dome is thus intended to act directly on the anomaly, not simply to cause damage around it.

The operation has a defined sequence: smuggle one of the atomic devices from the heavily guarded building outside the dome, get it inside, seal the door, and detonate it. The order matters. The device must be brought into the dome and the entrance closed before the explosion; the plan depends on producing the event inside the structure that contains the Bridge. The physicists’ theory offers a chance of sealing the passage, but the Sounders acknowledge that it is not an exact science.

The fallback is also part of the calculation. If the explosion does not destroy the Bridge, the radiation released inside the dome could still delay the invasion and colonization. That interval would allow SYLO to regroup and prepare a better defense. The plan therefore carries two possible outcomes: its best case is the closure of the Bridge; its lesser case is a dangerous delay that could change the defenders’ position. The Sounders judge the risk worthwhile precisely because even failure might have military value.

From proposal to operation

The proposal initially lands as a shock. Tori and the narrator exchange looks, while Kent reacts to its apparent simplicity before the limits of the theory become clear. Olivia checks that the others understand the implication, and the narrator identifies it plainly: the Sounders mean to set off another atomic bomb inside the dome. Kenny Sokol confirms that this is the plan. The exchange moves the discussion from a vague call to destroy the Bridge to the concrete, hazardous means by which the Sounders hope to do so.

The later account places a small team on the approach to the Bridge city’s dome, five kilometers away and three hundred years in the future. Colonel Pike leads the group with Airman Eric Lewis, Airman First Class Olivia Kinsey, and Liger, a civilian nuclear engineer in gray fatigues. They pass a queue of giant black aircraft waiting to make the journey into the past. Although the team shows no outward interest in the planes, their presence heightens the group’s anxiety and resolve. Liger’s inclusion connects the abstract nuclear proposal to the technical work of the mission, while the aircraft make visible the invasion the Sounders are trying to prevent.

The plan’s significance lies in its double bind: the Sounders must use the same kind of unprecedented force associated with the Bridge’s creation, while acting without certainty that they can control the result. Its strategic purpose is not simply destruction for its own sake. It is an attempt to close the route between eras, with radiation and delay as the last defenses if the central theory proves wrong.