Special Feature: Rocky Island, the Transparent "Theater": The Truth Behind the Lies

In Strangereal, the setting of ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE, war is about to begin. The Sotoan military will launch a surprise attack and sweep across the continent of Usea with the help of a new superweapon called the Land Battleship, tearing apart the Federation of Central USEA or FCU. Their primary target, the capital city of Theve.  

This article is from a Strangereal magazine, published just days before the start of the war.

GAZE - June 29, 2029

Over the lead-gray sea of eastern USEA looms a massive concrete coffin, a reminder of conflicts past. Now, Sotoa appears to be assembling something there behind closed doors and away from the eyes of the international community. As the July summit draws near, one man braves the icy sea breeze as he sets his gaze on the truth behind one nation's world-shattering deception.

1. A "Theater" Floating on the Sea

Somber gray waves relentlessly pound the hull of our ship in the waters surrounding Rocky Island off eastern USEA. As we make our way through the turbulent sea, four enormous shipbuilding docks appear before us.

Within one mile (about 1.6 kilometers) of the island's coast, yellow buoys and military sonobuoys stand at rapt attention in neat rows, forming a strictly enforced no-entry zone that allows no civilian vessel to pass. Through the telephoto lens, the island looks every bit the impregnable, unfriendly fortress it claims to be. Even the panoramic view captured by a drone flying high overhead shows the vast complex of shipbuilding facilities as nothing more than a reticent graveyard wrapped in an eerie silence. Nowhere is there a trace of the hustle and bustle from its glory days as one of the world's leading shipyards, when the clang of hammer on steel rang ceaselessly to fill the world's orders for supertankers, and welding sparks flew day and night.

At the center of the island, presiding in overwhelming majesty, stands a massive concrete structure. Immediately after the nuclear incident was made public in February 2028, Sotoa took charge to seal the area around the shipbuilding docks with thick concrete walls and a steel top plate, turning the facility into an enormous sarcophagus. The lifeless monolith, 80 meters high, 150 meters across, and nearly half a kilometer long, now looks down over the cold waters like a giant gravestone.

Under supervision of the Sotoan government and navy, a process mitigate damage from the reactor meltdown began working around the clock. Supposedly, this involves cooling and containing the fallout from one vessel's severely damaged nuclear reactor.

From the rough joints along the sides of the docks stretches a serpentine mass of heat-resistant high-pressure hoses, which are hooked up to banks of large diesel pumps placed on offshore pontoons, or floating platforms. When pumped, the seawater passes through heat exchangers and flows into the shipboard reactor inside the docks, eventually being discharged as white, wavering steam from gigantic exhaust filters towering above the site.

At the dedicated piers around the docks, military engineers and workers clad in protective suits and full-face masks board decontamination shuttle boats as they move back and forth with brisk efficiency. In the port area sit large water treatment vessels and flat-bottomed barges for carrying in materials, while high-speed Sotoan patrol boats slice across the water, maintaining a tight security cordon.

The site is the very picture of a desperate containment effort following an accident aboard a cutting-edge warship before its launch, down to the most minute details.

"We've started calling it the 'Theater.' Sotoa has so stubbornly refused international inspections for one reason only: The nuclear incident is a farce," says Arthur Creswell as he sternly gazes out at the sea.

A senior analyst for the FCU (Federation of Central Usea) National Security Council (NSC), Creswell serves as the security policy coordinator in the preparatory secretariat for the upcoming Summit of FCU Member Nations to be held in July. With the keen eye and bearing of a former naval technical officer, Creswell has directed on-site monitoring operations as the head of the Joint Special Investigation Committee, which brought together government ministries and agencies and private-sector organizations.

Despite repeated requests for on-site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Organization and United Nations inspection teams, the government of Sotoa remains unwilling, citing concerns of military secrecy and site security. Creswell emphasizes that this extreme stance heavily suggests that the containment efforts are, in fact, an elaborately staged piece of theater.

"The numbers reported by Sotoa's monitoring posts still show serious levels of contamination. Yet, when we compare them with data from points across the island that we obtained independently, there are critical discrepancies. We are also currently monitoring the surface water from this ship, yet the data again tells us the sea's relatively clean. As we close in on the Theater with hard science, the clearer it becomes that what is proceeding inside is not the containment of a catastrophe's aftermath, but the construction of a new military threat."

2. The Quiet Invasion

Why was an island that should have been under the sovereignty of the FCU transformed into Sotoa's inviolable sealed chamber in the first place? To understand what led to this chain of events, we must examine the domestic issues with which the central government, Creswell included, have been grappling for decades, as well as the extremely cunning economic strategy Sotoa has employed. It isn't military coercion behind Rocky Island's transformation into a monstrous sarcophagus, but a process of quiet erosion through infrastructure, pursued under the supposedly noble pretense of international cooperation. The beginnings of this grand scheme trace back to the 2020s and the Joint Development Initiative for Erusian Coastal Islands, proposed by the Republic of Sotoa to be carried out in the west of the Verusan continent.

Ever since the end of the 20th century, Sotoa's national policies have focused on large-scale rare metal and lithium mining projects in response to ceaseless worldwide demand in high-tech industries and weapons manufacturing. However, the excessive pumping of deep groundwater to meet that enormous demand and the illegal disposal of highly acidic wastewater ultimately brought ruin upon the country's own environment and social structure.

In addition to the death of vegetation as the aquifers failed, secondary salinization spread as the evaporation of surface moisture drew salts up from deep underground. The former oasis area turned into a "saline desert" covered in a layer of white salt that had risen to the surface. Sotoa then faced the serious problem of what they dubbed "salt-dust storms," or highly saline windstorms laden with harmful heavy-metal particles, striking the capital region.

The Sotoan government's response to this environmental collapse was remarkably well-thought out—while concealing its own hand in worsening conditions, it raised a banner under the noble cause of global climate action. Backed by state capital accumulated from enormous rare metal profits, Sotoa pulled the curtain over its own anxieties over state affairs and redefined itself as a driving force for clean energy and environmental support. It began to expand toward the nations on the coast of the Erusian Sea, in the form of a call for a cooperative framework among equals.

The main targets of this campaign were the nations of eastern USEA, which had failed to ride the high of the construction boom for the International Space Elevator (ISEV) in the 2010s, and were struggling with serious fiscal deficits and the hollowing out of their industries. The FCU central government in particular had tended to neglect the east following the Ulysses disaster in favor of a prolonged recovery and rebuilding of its central cities. In a sophisticated gambit, Sotoa opted to establish a multinational joint enterprise that incorporated eastern municipalities and local companies, rather than offer straight financial assistance to the FCU. With the development of next-generation communications networks, the installation of independent power grids, and the construction of deep-water ports with advanced logistics functions, it built a framework for sharing profits with neighboring countries. To the eastern local governments, which had followed a steady path of decline, Sotoa appeared to be a dependable economic spearhead that would lead their regional economies toward revival.

The saline nation further proved its brilliance through political frameworks. In 2024, Sotoa formed a broad coalition with the eastern nations and won the bid for a facility renewal project at Comona Space Base, which the FCU had opened to the private sector as a desperate measure to cut spending. Through this, Sotoa succeeded in gaining de facto control over the space infrastructure, orbital control rights, and large rocket launch capability in the eastern part of the continent, all the while successfully evading accusations of unwanted intervention.

In 2025, Sotoa and its neighboring countries pushed forward the flagship movement of this multinational development project: the redevelopment of Rocky Island.

What was once a quiet fishing island featuring the site of a former geothermal power plant was given a new, grand purpose as an international wide-area marine research and logistics hub in the Erusian Sea. Soon, a mad rush of rock and earth excavation and construction enveloped Rocky Island. Numerous local companies from the eastern nations took part in the construction of all-weather runways and enormous docks, and the regional economy thrived on a special-demand boom led by Sotoa.

Once it had cultivated a sense of community under the name of co-prosperity by drawing the surrounding regions into its project framework, Sotoa made the final move to construct a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It presented the project as the foundation of a new security environment to stabilize the waters around the eastern nations, following the 2020 withdrawal of the IUN-PKF from the Erusian Sea. Despite these claims, the FCU government strengthened its opposition over the measure, imposing sanctions on the companies involved in the development and filing criminal complaints against them on the grounds that unilateral development without the FCU's permission was illegal. The government of Sotoa flatly rejected this accusation, stating that the islanders abandoned by the FCU government also have a right to self-defense. Geopolitical tensions rose sharply.

In February 2028, Sotoa made the sudden announcement that a core meltdown accident had occurred during a start-up test of the aircraft carrier reactor in the dock. Re-emphasizing its stance on bolstering the safety of the region and all concerned countries, the nation issued an emergency military blockade on the island. It then proceeded to refuse every request for on-site inspection by the FCU or international organizations, thus closing the door on a sealed chamber within which to further its plans.

"Sotoa's methods were truly brilliant. They did not seize the island by a show of force; rather, they presented an attractive framework for regional development, had the eastern nations welcome them, and built up a secret chamber with complete consent. Because the legislation to make foreign investment screening mandatory was also delayed, we in the central government at that time had no means of stopping this tactic silent erosion," says Creswell.

3. Ever-Increasing Mass and Vanishing Workers

The repeated refusals to allows inspections raised a formidable wall around the now impenetrable black box that was Rocky Island. However, the truth unfolding inside would soon be unraveled layer by layer by a scientific investigation network created by the FCU's Joint Special Investigation Committee.

In August 2028, half a year after access to the site had been cut off, minds from the fields of geophysics, radiochemistry, oceanography, satellite image analysis, and even submarine acoustics gathered inside the joint operations room in FCU capital Theve. Creswell's team was given a single mission: Disregard all eyewitness testimony and penetrate Rocky Island's concrete wall using only natural science-related physical data.

Another six months went by, and the first decisive inconsistency the investigation committee identified came from minute gravitational changes detected by a constellation of high-precision Earth observation satellites in orbit.

For months, no change at all was visible in the exterior dimensions of the shielded shipbuilding docks, or in their silhouettes as viewed from the sky. But the geophysics team, which had combined the surface displacement observed from the satellites with separately obtained estimates of local mass distribution, noticed that something seemed off. The total weight of the docks and all surrounding structures was steadily increasing, to the tune of several thousand tons each month.

"The laws of physics do not lie," Creswell explains. "Sotoa claimed that it was circulating cooling water for molten nuclear fuel, but we knew there was no way that this process would result in a net increase in the total weight of the structure. We also ruled out any conspicuous delivery of materials from outside by optical surveillance. So, then, what is the source of this increased mass?"

The structural analysis team focused on changes in the weight of the vast underground materials depots near the docks. They built a picture by analyzing data obtained via high-resolution crustal survey radar: construction materials and prefabricated blocks were secretly being brought into the docks by way of underground tunnels. Furthermore, the dimensions of the structure within as calculated based on gravitational distribution, far exceeded the size of the standard nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Sotoa had made public before the accident—over 450 meters in total length. Moreover, its weight distribution was not flat like the deck of an aircraft carrier, but peaked like that of a battleship. The team reached the conclusion that, rather than cleaning up after a nuclear incident, Sotoa was assembling, in the concealment of the shielded space, an off-spec massive "weapon" that far exceeded their original design.

A second inconsistency was found after performing water quality tests and spectroscopic analyses of the high seas around the island. The decay heat of a reactor core meltdown is normally supposed to diminish over time in accordance with the laws of physics. But seawater data that the observation fleet collected day after day outside the blockade zone from water affected by the discharge from the docks showed exactly the opposite trend. Far from diminishing, the amount of heat being released continued to increase slightly by a few percentage points each month.

Furthermore, the chemical analysis team's mass spectrometers detected a strange group of substances, while only detecting abnormally low amounts of the expected radioactive materials. The actual substances included traces of inert gases used as excitation media in ultra-high-output laser weapons, minute metal particles thought to originate in the processing of titanium alloys, and fluorocarbon-based heat transfer media used in the cooling systems of high-performance electronic equipment.

Creswell offers his conclusion. "From a site that is supposed to be cooling decay heat, chemicals were being emitted that could only be produced in the manufacturing processes of cutting-edge directed-energy weapons and extremely large radars. What was taking place beyond the concrete wall was neither decontamination nor cooling. It was the final assembly work of high-output weapons and a ship's core systems."

Finally, a third inconsistency was found in movement data for the most fluid element of all: human beings. In other words, workers were mysteriously disappearing inside Sotoa's sealed chamber.

On the island, webcams and surveillance cameras were installed to stage an open work scene, streaming an image of workers in protective suits to the world. But when the investigation committee's image analysis team traced all the footage frame by frame of the dedicated shuttle boats coming and going, a statistical anomaly stood out in sharp relief.

They found that approximately 40 engineers in protective suits entered the island per incoming shuttle boat. But from April of this year onward, the count of the passengers leaving the island at the end of the workday was invariably a few heads less than the number that had entered. One day the discrepancy might be two passengers. The next day, four. Instead of going home after finishing decontamination work, the engineers seemed to be disappearing into the sealed-off sections inside the docks.

The net total of missing people reached 412 by the end of May. If they hadn't simply been abandoned at the site of a nuclear meltdown, then the possibility remained that they had directly boarded the mystery vessel inside the docks as part of its initial crew.

After integrating the scientific teams' quantitative findings, the Special Investigation Committee reached a perfectly clear conclusion. Sotoa's accident story was a sham—under the lie, they were actually constructing a massive superweapon in violation of international treaties, and had already entered the final stage before combat deployment.

"We were only able to break through this facade because we took the step to eliminate the bureaucratic barriers between ministries and agencies, letting the best minds in each field pool what they knew," says Creswell. "Sotoa must have thought it had pulled the wool over our eyes by crafting a meltdown story and refusing inspections, but it could not obfuscate the hard truths of geophysics and the natural sciences."

4. A Moment of Truth for the FCU Summit

Even in the middle of his interview with the reporting team onboard the survey vessel, Creswell is being continually approached by official associates of the working-level officials responsible for the preparatory negotiations for the summit. Coats fluttering in the salty winds and encrypted terminals in hand, a councilor from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and senior security officials from the Ministry of Defense are deep in discussions concerning the wording of a draft joint statement on Sotoa and the latest state of alignment among the neighboring countries.

"The delegations from the local eastern governments are worried that their economic relations with Sotoa will worsen," Creswell clarifies. "But if we show them the decisive scientific data we presented on the gravitational anomaly, the water quality analysis, and personnel movement, they will have no choice but to accept the fact that Sotoa's web of lies is about to collapse."

Creswell has been examining the situation reports from each country as they arrive in real time and organizing his material for the diplomatic maneuvering ahead of the main summit session. The team's trump card, created to persuade the eastern nations in turning their backs on Sotoa's support and to bring the FCU together as one to press for mandatory inspections and severe sanctions, is being fine-tuned at this very moment and aboard this very ship as it rocks amid the waves.

With the opening of the July summit approaching, warships of the allied nations, led by the FCU Navy's 5th Fleet in response to the shared crisis, populate the naval port of Expo City in eastern USEA where the United Nations is located. The fleet had just completed a large-scale exercise in Waosun Bay in late May, in which the Army and the Air Force joined forces to test port attacks, anti-ship attacks, and an advanced defense posture. These developments also bolstered the diplomatic position of Creswell and his allies.

"All that remains is to guide justice to victory," Creswell asserts. "The warships of various nations have gathered in Expo City to ensure that the diplomatic background for upholding international law and order is unshakeable. Nobody yet knows whether a clear line can be drawn at the summit next month with regards to mandatory inspections and sanctions aimed at Sotoa. We have little time left, but we won't stand for a compromise. Everything needed to bring the FCU together is right here, in our hands."

The lifeless silhouette of the sarcophagus stands in the distant haze as white spray beats fiercely against the hull. Creswell's keen gaze remains fixed on this vast "theater" and the historic, decisive battle to occur the week after next. Which will prevail—truth, or deception? There can be no doubt that the upcoming summit will be a national trial for the FCU, and a moment of truth that will decide the balance of the world.

The theater's curtain is about to rise.