Amarillo, Texas.
In the Oakdale neighborhood of Amarillo was a shabby, dilapidated one-bedroom house. Its windows were boarded up and the outside was covered in graffiti, and the front lawn had overgrown with weeds until it spilled out over the curb and onto the street. Inside, a young man was sleeping on a pile of old U-Haul moving blankets.
He opened his eyes, a purple glint flashing through them, and sat up. He pulled an old flip phone out of his pocket and called the imperial police agency’s non-emergency number, then reported that a homeless person was squatting in the house he was in, then sat back to wait for the police to arrive.
A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The young man opened the door and, as he had expected, two men in neat imperial police uniforms were standing on the porch.
The taller of the two officers gave a friendly smile and said, “Hello, sir. I’m Officer St. Pierre, and this is my partner, Officer Mendoza. We received a report that someone here may be having some issues with housing. May we come in and have a chat?”
“Ah, um... sure, thanks for coming, I guess?” the young man replied. “Oh, right—I’m uhh, Dave. Nice to meet you,” the young man nervously stammered and stretched out his hand for a handshake.
Officer St. Pierre returned the handshake, but the moment their hands touched, “Dave’s” eyes flashed purple again, followed by the same purple glint passing through the police officer’s eyes. They returned to normal fast enough, though, that Officer Mendoza didn’t catch the abnormality.
“Dave” turned to Officer Mendoza and repeated the process, then both officers stood before him like statues with blank looks on their face.
“The empire sure creates some strong willed people,” the young man complained to himself, knowing that he would be having another massive headache waiting for him when his consciousness returned to his own body. He’d had to drain nearly all of the faith he’d gathered over the past two weeks to break the mental defenses of and take over two mere imperial police officers! The overdraft from that would be downright vicious, especially since he needed to force all of it through a single thread of belief and work remotely.
In absolute terms, sure, it wasn’t that much; he had over a million threads of belief now, and his daily income of faith pulses was in the hundreds of millions, so he still had plenty of faith left. But using so much at once would still give him some problems.
“You know what to do, right?” he said, looking at the human statues in front of him.
“Yes, sir,” they chorused in a monotone, then turned and left.
……
‘Hmm... thousands of awakeners spread all through the city, living like normal people. Almost none of them are registered in the imperial awakener’s database, nor are they imperial citizens. Looks like I’ve found the right place,’ Aron mused to himself. He was so high in the air that the entire city below him was the size of his pinky fingernail.
‘And although all of it can be solved if I just deal with you....’ He focused on one particular video feed from his sensor swarm that showed a man sitting in an office with a pair of guards outside the door. ‘I can’t simply just do that without risking whatever programming you’ve planted in them erupting after your death and turning the streets of my city into rivers of blood.’
“Fuck!” he shouted.
Without the awakeners being registered in the imperial awakeners database, or even being imperial citizens, there was no way of telling what affinities they had awakened to. Add to that the level of destruction that even known awakeners are capable of dishing out in a short time, he feared that pulling out the cult from the empire’s side would be devastating to citizens and noncitizens alike.
He thought for a moment, then asked, “Where’s the standby force?”
[The emperor’s aegis is fifteen miles outside town with their stealth fields engaged awaiting further orders. ARES is on high alert and the Amarillo cube called a full force recall ten minutes ago. Police and fire have been notified and are on standby. They’re calling in all of their members who aren’t already on shift as we speak,] Nova answered.
“Suggestions? We need to take out all of the targets at the same time I deal with the cult leader,” he asked. He was currently focused on how to kill the cultists, rather than capturing and parading them in front of the empire for a public trial and sentencing. But that said, the thousands of awakeners in the city would provide a substantial number of troops in the empire’s penal legion, so if they could be captured without risk of civilian casualties, he would much prefer it.
[How about snipers?]
“Can we get enough of them here in such a short time? There are thousands of targets and they all need to be taken out at the same time.”
[Athena says she can have them all mobilized and present in twenty minutes.]
“And what about the penal legion? If we kill them all, wouldn’t that be a waste?”
[They can’t be saved, sir. Who can guarantee that whatever programming they’re under won’t erupt in the future? It’s better to wipe them out now than have them explode down the line and wreak havoc.]
Aron thought about it and conceded the point. He already knew that they would have a problem with “supervillains”, and cutting these thousands of awakeners out now would mean fewer problems in the future, but he still sighed at the waste.
“Okay. Tell them to be fast about it. I’ll use that time to make my final preparations,” Aron said, his expression grave. He was about to execute quite a few people without trials, and he felt that it should be handled with the gravity and solemnity it deserved.
(Ed note: Only one chapter today. Next is a two-parter, and we don’t want to leave you hanging off a cliff.)
