If the goal of the recording that had just played on the news was recruiting, it backfired in a spectacular fashion. Rather than gaining the support of the majority, it had enraged them. As the attacks had happened all over the world, nearly every citizen in the empire had lost someone, whether they were close family or simply acquaintances, or even friends of a friend. So other than those that had already been extremely dissatisfied with the empire, no one even thought of answering the masked terrorist’s rallying call.
Despite that, the conspiracy theorists’ heyday continued. Now, they had another piece of “evidence”; obviously, the person in the video was a scapegoat brought forward because the theorists were absolutely correct in saying that the empire had planned and carried out the attacks on their own.
That said, while the conspiracy theorists were patting themselves on the back, believing they had proven their theory true by a preponderance of the evidence, most normal people were still watching the livestreams of the ongoing rescue efforts. They were curious as to how the empire would rescue those trapped under the unstable rubble, as most rescue equipment was bulky and slow, and had to proceed at a crawl in order to not collapse the small pockets of life stuck between slabs of instant demise.
……
Dubai.
A crowd had gathered outside the perimeter the LEAs had established around the downtown area, watching the progress of the rescuers dispatched from the cube on the outskirts of the city. They were disheartened and disappointed, as all they could see from their position was a veritable swarm of beetle-shaped RES-QR bots and GEMbots shoring up the rubble and strengthening foundations to prevent collapse. The onlookers were completely unable to see what was happening within the rubble itself, so they naturally thought the rescuers were dawdling along and nothing of real substance was happening.
But that didn’t last long, as precisely an hour after the Burj Khalifa fell, someone noticed that their surroundings had grown slightly dimmer. They looked up and saw an arrowhead-shaped shadow growing against the backdrop of the afternoon sun. The rest of the crowd also noticed the oddity and looked up as well.
It didn’t take long before the shadow resolved itself into a kilometer-long pristine white vessel with a bright red cross painted on the bottom. It stopped in the air and hovered in place, completely still, about a hundred feet above the highest point of the rubble.
If it wasn’t for its white color and the highly visible red cross painted on its underside, people would probably have thought it was an alien spaceship, given its method of arrival and ability to hover without any visible methods of propulsion. The flying carriers, though also extremely oversized, were at least reasonable; they had visible ducted rotors providing lift. But this particular vessel had arrived much like alien invaders in alien movies! One minute the sky was clear, and the next moment, the ship was just suddenly... there. It boggled the mind.
People were asking themselves questions like where did it come from? How did it get here? How is it hovering like that? What’s it going to do? When was it built?
And none of those questions had any answers for the stunned spectators save one. It soon became obvious what it was there for and what it was going to do.
A soft yellow light, like that of an old 60-watt incandescent lightbulb, was emitted by hidden projectors on the underside of the enormous hovering vessel. Shortly afterward, the rubble began vibrating and slightly shifting in place. Though the shaking was subtle, it was still noticeable to the nearest line of spectators, who furrowed their brows in confusion.
Then a miracle happened as all of the rubble, large and small, began slowly lifting into the air in front of them. The process picked up speed as layer after layer of broken buildings rose into the air, exposing the suffering people, and corpses, that had been trapped within.
Soon, everything had been exposed and a sorting process began. People continued floating into the air and rubble was gently floating down, creating two entirely separate layers in mid-air. The top layer was made of human suffering, while the bottom layer was made of scrap concrete, metal, and other assorted materials.
“Holy shit....”
“Fuck....”
“Oh my god....”
“What the hell!?”
Surprised exclamations came from practically everyone in the crowd as the ship above them continued sorting the rubble as though it was playing a live game of Tetris. It didn’t take long until the wreckage was completely sorted into three categories. One was made of roughly equal-sized blocks of similar compositions, another was made of mangled corpses, and the third was the group of wounded, but alive, individuals. Then three enormous doors opened on the underside of the hovering vessel and each group was sent through a different door.
Everyone watching, whether from a position near the wreckage or the screens they watched the livestream on, were frozen in shock. They had just witnessed a live demonstration of the laws of physics as they knew them being turned on their head.
Although all of the robots and other technology they had seen were advanced, people could still comprehend how they were built and how they operated. But the scene in front of them now had completely overturned their preexisting notions of the empire’s tech level and affirmed Aron’s earlier declaration that he had been holding back quite a lot in The Last War. After all, what they had just seen was something purely out of science fiction! A ship had come directly out of a popular movie franchise and appeared in front of them, then launched a fucking tractor beam to perform a nearly instant cleanup of a devastated metropolitan area and carry out a perfectly executed rescue operation!
The sheer capability demonstrated by those two simultaneous operations was something the people watching had no ability to comprehend. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Three Laws” stated that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. And what people had just witnessed was absolutely, to them, magical indeed.
