A few minutes earlier.
*A superpowered individual is currently attempting a bank theft. Situation: rainbow. Casualties: one. Damage: white. Evacuation in progress.*
The pod barracks in the cube outside Pyongyang dimmed and a red light began flashing. Ten extended-stay VR pods hissed open, revealing a squad of ARES troopers. They climbed out of their pods and jogged to the armory, where they drew their kit. They had already been briefed on the mission in the simulation, so they knew what they needed to do.
All that remained was to execute the plan.
The men had relatively few nervous jitters, trading jokes and insults back and forth as they drew their equipment, geared up, and headed toward the roof through the express deployment elevator in the middle of the enormous structure. An unenhanced, normal human would suffer severe injuries due to the G force of the elevator itself, but to the enhanced ARES troopers it felt like little more than taking off in a passenger jet would to that same unenhanced human.
As the elevator went up, they ran their self test programs on all their gear. Everything naturally came back all green, as gear was recycled and reprinted between missions to ensure that no damage due to wear and tear would accumulate, leading to avoidable deaths and injuries among the troops.
Seventeen seconds later, the elevator reached the roof and the troopers ran to the waiting shuttle, which lifted off and came to a stable halt three kilometers above the ground. The gull wing door opened and the trooper carrying a pulse rifle stepped in front of the opening and took a knee. He pulled his left elbow close in against his chest and rested the forestock of his weapon atop his hand, then pulled the buttstock tight against his chest. He gave a command through his HUD and his armor locked in position, ensuring he had a stable shooting platform.
Integrating his HUD with the controls of the shuttle, he fine-tuned its direction, treating it as little more than an extension of his body as it made adjustments too fine for even the enhanced senses of his squadmates to detect. The shuttle's sensors fed an overwhelming amount of data to the trooper, whose onboard AI filtered it and displayed it in his HUD. Combining that data with images from security cameras and weather detection LiDAR from the Panopticon satellite in orbit above him gave him all the information he required.
"One shot..." he whispered as his fingertip quivered against the firing stud of his pulse rifle.
A single Type XVII penetrator round flew down the barrel and out with a great, cracking report. With a muzzle velocity of 6 kilometers per second, it would take roughly four seconds and some change to impact its target, Kim Ho Song, who was currently standing in the vault of a bank, holding a hostage in front of him by her neck.
One second passed.
"Please release her and tell us your demands. With her alive, there's a greater chance your demands will be met. But if she dies, that chance becomes zero, and the empire will come down on you with the weight of billions," the negotiator said.
Two seconds passed.
Kim Ho Song's hand stopped burning his hostage's neck.
Three seconds passed.
The target inhaled, preparing to unleash a vitriolic spew of insults at the hostage negotiator.
Four seconds passed.
"Listen here, you unblessed peasant filth, I'm superio-"
Impact.
"...one kill," the sniper whispered, having just fired the longest sniper shot in history at just under 25 kilometers away from his target. "And may almighty God have mercy upon his poor, benighted soul."
The initial stage of the mission completed, the gull wing door hissed shut and the sniper, now mobile, stood up and returned to his seat to the resounding applause, hoots, and hollering of the rest of his squad.
The shuttle, having been released to normal operations by the sniper, turned and flew to the bank at a relatively "sedate" pace, timed to arrive shortly after the perpetrator's head bag was carried out the front door. It soon arrived and the shuttle door opened again, this time to allow a RES-QR to board with its cargo: one NETS'd head bag. The scene was so chaotic that virtually nobody had noticed a single squad transport land, receive a package, and lift off again.
The transport shuttle reached orbit, oriented itself toward the magnetic North Pole, and rocketed away, nobody the wiser.
"The Hole" was the nickname that people in the know had given to Awakener Prisoner Complex #00001. Located nine kilometers beneath the sea floor at the magnetic North Pole, it was powered and kept warm by a vast geothermal generator sunk into the magma of the mantle. It was cylindrical in shape, about five hundred meters wide and three hundred stories tall, that was designed to contain hundreds of thousands of awakened prisoners in relatively minor discomfort.
(Ed note: Picture the prison under Crematoria in the movie "The Chronicles of Riddick", except not quite as run-down. It *is*, after all, something that Aron designed and built. The movie scene is just to give you an idea of the style of the prison, or rather its inspiration.)
It was a prison, after all, not a luxury spa resort.
[ARES transport 14.8721, you are cleared to land. Proceed to the central docking ring, bay 72. Understood you are transporting a single awakener, designation "Kim Ho Song", present in a NETS head bag.]
"Roger, control," the shuttle pilot replied. "Will proceed to bay 72 to unload our cargo-one RES-QR emergency rescue bot and one headbagged prisoner, designation 'Kim Ho Song'."
The pilot deftly made his way to the docking ring of The Hole, the only part of the enormous structure that was above the sea floor, camouflaged as it was by nanite guardian colonies masquerading as rocks, gravel, and various species of flora and fauna native to the seafloor in the hostile waters of the North Pole.
He navigated into the open bay and patiently waited for the docking bay to be evacuated of seawater before opening the door, allowing the RES-QR to carry his erstwhile "passenger" out of his vehicle and down a drab corridor.
"Better him than us," the pilot murmured, then sealed his shuttle and waited for the docking bay to flood, whereupon he lifted it back to orbit and made the relatively quick flight back to the cube on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
