A few hours later, outside the planetary defense shield.There was no sound in space, so all was silent. And there was an almost hypnotic rhythm to the dance of barely visible satellites in the emptiness between the shield and the gorgeous blue planet acting as a backdrop. The only disturbance was the glowing blue trails of ionic thrusters traveling in a convoy that stretched from the shield to the surface of the moon, where Aron had built an automated logistics and distribution base.If an observer were to stand atop Ceres Station and look up, they would see enormous vessels shaped and colored like planks of burnt wood, each of them blending in against the blackness of space save for the output of their ionic thrusters. Thousands of them were sailing in a line, headed toward the entry port of the now permanently active shield.The frontmost vessel came to a halt a few hundred kilometers outside the shield as the convoy fleet commander reported their arrival to Ceres Station and reque
The enormous logistics vessels continued their journey, and soon, the entire convoy had passed through the shield. They split up from there, headed to different areas of the planet before initiating their deorbit burns and dropping into the atmosphere. However, having already entered the core of Earth’s gravity well, they had disengaged their ion drives and were using their gravity drives to control their descent, ensuring a smooth, silent, and pollution-free journey the rest of the way.As they reached an altitude of 30 kilometers above sea level, they turned and oriented themselves toward the site of their first deliveries and rocketed off at a speed that was incomprehensible for objects of their size and mass. Each of the thousand vessels carried the machinery required to dig the foundation for five cities—industrial atomic printers and ARCHies, primarily—and enough raw materials to lay the cities’ foundations to cover for the atomic printers as they dug out the secret subterranean
A few days later.Rick was watching a recording of the livestream that he had smuggled out of the empire by one of his “unwitting lackeys”, as he called them. He had been spending quite a lot of his time compiling a list of imperial citizens who were disgruntled or dissatisfied enough with the empire that they became connected to him by a thread of belief. The faith they generated was absolutely minuscule, but that didn’t matter; what mattered was that he could use them.The person he was currently using was one of his finest unwitting spies. Albert Harris was a former climate “activist” who was incited by the Earth Liberation Front and had a long history of protesting against fracking.He had even glued himself to the ground during one protest, which had led to the arm being amputated. But with the empire solving the problem he was so adamantly against, and even reversing the damage caused by fracking, he was left with a gaping hole where his conviction used to be. The empire had tak
The Cube, Avalon Island.“Finally, a moment of peace,” Aron said as he lay on the roof of the enormous edifice. As utilitarian as it was—from the outside, at least—it was still his home and the place he was the most comfortable. No amount of busyness or rushing caused by the day-to-day operation of the Terran Empire would ever disturb his peace there; it would all just fade away and become background noise in the background to his ears whenever he was present in the real world.Even now, as he lay gazing into the sky on the rooftop, the work of the empire was endless. Helicopters, space vessels, and other vehicles continued landing and taking off around him as if he wasn’t there. Maintenance robots, haulers, and other assorted purpose-built robots streamed around him like ants around a stick, carrying cargo to and fro. His small section was ignored by them, as Nova had cordoned off the area he was resting at.“Yeah, some alone time is nice, every once in a while... outside the bedroom
December 20, 1 AE.Aron, John, Gaia, Nova, and the heads of the imperial police agency, the Nyx intelligence agency, and their AI counterparts were seated around an oval conference table in Aron’s working office. Aron and Nova were there to receive a briefing on the imperial security situation and the progress of Operation Hunting Dog.“We’ve managed to take down seventeen hundred cult cells around the world, adding up to a little more than seven hundred thousand cultists. But unfortunately, we’ve so far failed to discover how they’re communicating with other cells and their leadership. That said, some things happened when they were captured, or a few hours later, that attracted our attention and we’re still investigating,” Arielle Richards, the head of the NIA, reported.“What anomalies?” Aron asked. He had only been monitoring the broad strokes of the investigation progress during his daily briefings, so this was the first time he’d heard of anything out of the ordinary.“The cult h
Aron wasted no time after sealing Rick’s fate and immediately got to work. He turned to Gaia and asked, “How long would it take to do a deep scan of everyone with any connection to an imperial institution? And I mean all of them, all the way from the ministers at the top to the janitors at the bottom. And ARES and the nyxians, too, for that matter. We need to know if they’ve experienced any memory loss or any abnormal activities that don’t have an explanation.”{A day, Your Majesty. It would be faster, but to do it without alerting anyone will require them to be logged into the simulation of their own will, so I’ll have the recordkeepers do it shift by shift. The employees who aren’t scheduled to work the day we choose will almost all be in the simulation anyway, since it’s still fresh and new to them so they spend all their free time in it,} Gaia replied, generating a timetable for the deep scan along with a detailed plan for its implementation.“Good, start the scan as soon as possi
The moment the meeting ended, Hephaestus and Mnemosyne got to work. Hephaestus had already received the updated schematics for the DR gear version 2.0 and the massive industrial atomic printers inside the Cube switched from what they were doing to printing hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of new DR gear. As most government officials used both glasses and pods, the printing and delivery would take a few days.But Mnemosyne’s job could immediately begin. She directed the individual librarians in the Akashic Library to begin doing immediate deep scans on the people they were monitoring. A full 80% of the government officials were immediately scanned, while the others would be scanned as they came on shift and began working. The civilian scans, however, would take some time; unless it was absolutely necessary, no orders would go out to interrupt people’s daily lives. Not only would it increase dissatisfaction and resentment among the populace, it might tip off the tar
In orbit above Avalon Island.Aron’s stealth shuttle had reached apogee and was about to descend. Its target: Shelton, Washington. He called up the reports by the operatives who had been assigned there and began reading them during the short trip.Jason Todd and Catherine O’Shaugnessy signaled that they had found a cult base a few months prior. Not just a cell, but a full-blown base. They hadn’t been able to infiltrate it, but they were positive that the entire gated community of Hartstene Pointe was a disguised cultist base. Once they had discovered that, they’d opted to lay low and continue their covers as Tim and Siobhan Roberts, fully immersing themselves in their respective roles.Months later, the call to go to ground had gone out, and the two had been living in their underground facility since. On the surface, they had gone to care for an ailing relative, even going so far as to hire one of their suspected cultists to housesit for them until their return. But instead, they had