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
Just a few streets away from the courthouse in Shelton was an irish pub. To tourists and locals, it was a gathering place for people to drink their worries away, eat “ethnic” cuisine, and, on St. Patrick’s Day, celebrate by gulping down cheap beer with even cheaper green dye added.But to the cult of the progenitor, it was a beginning. Its basement was where Rick had first begun preaching his ideal of a new utopia where the progenitors would live hand-in-hand with the human descendants they’d left behind when they left to explore the vast universe. It was a shrine, a place of pilgrimage, and the closest thing to a holy site that the cult had, and it was why not just one, but two of Rick’s inner circle were present in such a flea speck town that was only included on maps out of a sense of obligation.One of them was hidden, masquerading as the chief of police, and the other was the Hartstene Pointe Maintenance Association’s vice president.The phone on the police chief’s desk rang, but
An hour before the strike in Shelton.Aron walked through the hatch into the underground facility constructed by Jason and Catherine. He looked around in approval, thinking, ‘This is a good aesthetic, but it needs a little something... extra.’He gestured for his escort to halt, then bent down and, perhaps in a fit of chuunibyo, clapped his hands and placed them on the ground. Unseen by his unblessed escort, a runic circle spread out from his hands and the floor, walls, and ceiling began changing. Line after line dug itself through the imperial steel alloy structure, leaving behind a mystifying, maze-like pattern. The lines etched themselves throughout the entire base for an entire five minutes before the etching process was completed. Once they stopped, the runic circle under Aron’s hands began pulsing like a heartbeat, each pulse coming faster and faster as the process continued. Finally, the pulse was so fast it appeared that it was a solid light, then rune after rune flew out of
(Ed note: Trigger warning. Torture and gore.)The emperor’s aegis was the best of the best of Aegis, and well deserving of their title as the most elite special force under the ARES umbrella. Though their training focused primarily on defense, a wise man once said that the best defense was a good offense. Of course, nobody knew exactly who first said that, and sports coaches and military strategists around the world all laid claim to it coming from one of their forebears, but whoever said it was still an incredibly wise man.Thus, the emperor’s aegis was also unparalleled in all areas. They could perform counterintelligence operations with the grace of a nyxian, special military operations with the ease of a reaper, and were still the strongest shield standing between Aron and those who would wish to target him. So capturing a few terrified cultists was as easy to them as drinking water or snapping their fingers.Twenty minutes after they had captured the last fleeing cultists, they