*Three Gorges Dam has suffered structural damage and is failing [Damage: catastrophic] [Situation: red]*
*Svalbard Global Seed Vault has suffered a biological attack [Damage: low] [Situation: white]*
*Taweelah Desalination Plant has suffered a chemical attack [Damage: high] [Situation: yellow]*
*Chichen Itza has suffered a suicide bombing [Damage: low] [Situation: green]*
*United Nations Headquarters has been carbombed [Damage: medium] [Situation: orange]*
Reports of ongoing terror attacks continued streaming in even as Minerva, Hephaestus, and Asclepius were coordinating rescue efforts. Even though they reached each site in an average of twenty minutes, and fifty minutes at the longest, the estimated death toll continued its meteoric rise despite their best efforts.
[Dispatch LEAs to assist with evacuation along the Yangtze River. Send RES-QRs and constructor swarms to shore up the dam and buy time for the evacuation. The Yangtze River downstream from the dam and the Yangtze River Delta are a total loss,] Minerva ordered.
[Notify the citizens in the UAE that their water is contaminated by chemical weapons. Inform them that relief supplies are on the way and give them an ETA. Dispatch LEAs to distribute water and other disaster relief supplies,] Asclepius added.
[Send constructor swarms to build emergency shelters in Dubai, Port-au-Prince, Paris....] Hephaestus rattled off a long list of locations for emergency shelters to house the citizens displaced by the attacks after they evacuate.
[Transport 25% of the medical pods from the cubes to the hardest-hit areas. Assign ARES to guard them in shifts. Print mobile hospitals and get them in the air, ready to respond in their area of operations,] Asclepius said.
Though the library seemed like it was in chaos, there was an underlying order to it as librarians buzzed around, flying from book to book and shelf to shelf while the AIs below them continued issuing order after order at a speed that only quantum superclusters could allow.
[Found one!] Nyx exclaimed. [It’s time to go on the offensive. I’ve got a nyxian in place to extract a cultist before she strikes. Estimated operation time: 22 minutes 37 seconds.] She smiled wickedly.
......
Taweelah Power and Water Complex, Abu Dhabi.
A flight of sixteen yeet pods impacted the ground, kicking up a localized dust storm and cracking the asphalt parking lot they landed in. They righted themselves, having impacted at an angle, and twelve of them released squads of General Engineering and Maintenance (GEM) bots to inspect the damage to the reverse osmosis filtration systems in the water plant. They were accompanied by ten RES-QR bots, three constructor swarm queens, and twelve LEAs from two of the remaining four pods; the final two pods were stuffed with atomic printer cartridges to within a millimeter tolerance of the interior space of the pods they came down in.
GEMbots were nanite colonies that took the form of unassuming, stern-faced humans. While LEAs were designed with the intent to inspire trust in the people they dealt with, GEMbots were designed to fade into the background like wallflowers at parties so they could do their jobs unimpeded. The Lab City researchers had gone through design after design, none of them satisfactory. By the time they settled on something that could effectively do the job, Aron bought nanotechnology knowledge from the system and threw them right back to the drawing board.
It wasn’t like their work had been completely wasted, though, as the design they’d settled on for the first production iteration of what later became the GEMbot had been repurposed as the RES-QR bot.
Still, they couldn’t pass up nanites as the ultimate winning design, and nanotech was unanimously decided to be the future research direction for Aron’s robotic auxiliary legions in the future. They had all of the advantages and the only disadvantage was that nanite colonies required some fairly rare elements, which wouldn’t be an issue for long once Project Trojan went into full swing.
The constructor swarm queens began building their swarms while the LEAs set up a perimeter around their landing site and the RES-QRs scuttled into the desalination plant to find and extract any casualties of the chemical attack they could find.
Within minutes, the all clear was announced and the GEMbots moved into the desalination plant to begin the repair and decontamination process.
......
Lake Tanganyika, Eastern Africa.
Providing water for four African countries—Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia—Lake Tanganyika was one of the most important lakes in the world, despite only being the sixth-largest lake on Earth by surface area.
And the cultists had released a cocktail of the nastiest biological weapons being studied in the “black labs” that pharmaceutical corporations and governments had secretly maintained in Africa into that very lake.
Nyx had caught wind of the theft, because one of the cultists involved in it had been given a pair of AR glasses and ordered to use them during her part in the attacks. It was a test, she was told, to see how effective their use would be in any of the cult’s upcoming plans, though she still had no idea what those plans were or when they would be implemented.
But from Nyx’s point of view, she couldn’t be sure if the cult knew of the hazards that the empire’s digital reality tech held in store for them. Either way, she could either sit on it and not take the risk, allowing four entire countries to be attacked by some of the worst biological gribblies that humanity could come up with, or she could risk revealing the empire’s memory-reading capability and send operatives in to prevent the attack entirely.
(Ed note: AR and VR will be referred to as digital reality, or DR, in the future. So instead of having augmented reality glasses and virtual reality hardware, they’ll just have digital reality gear. At least unless it makes a difference, like during the heist.)
[Gaia, I need your advice,] she said, unable to make the decision herself and throwing her concerns to Aron’s plenipotentiary.
Gaia took a few picoseconds to consider the issue, then came to a decision.
[Send in the reapers,] she said, her face a rictus of frozen fury. [And remember to scan the targets before executing them with prejudice. Furthermore, there is no reason for those labs’ continued existence. Make them disappear from my sight.]
