High Earth Orbit.
After cleaning up the debris in orbit following the Last War, the empire had launched a few thousand satellites of their own. And among them was a constellation of satellites dedicated to monitoring the movement of mana around Earth. After all, it was a new discovery, so they needed to know how it worked and why, so it was worth studying. And as an added benefit, the empire had gained the capability to track the changes mana caused in its surroundings.
Currently, seven of the satellites responsible for monitoring mana were sending alarms to the staff of the imperial space agency.
……
Central Command, Ceres Station.
The imperial space agency had a dedicated secure section of the dwarf-planet-turned-space station, and their central command was based there. They were responsible for monitoring every imperial asset in space—barring the ARES and NIS assets, each of which had their own monitoring stations. As reliable as the VIs that ran the satellite networks were, and as much as they trusted Panoptes, they still maintained their own monitoring staff.
Even though the staff joked about being nearly as useful to the empire as an appendix was to a single human being, they still took their jobs seriously. They were the ones who had verified the information about the recent Carrington event and triggered the news going up the chain of command to the emperor.
The staff always came to work ready to receive all of the bad news and were, by and large, serious and dour-faced men and women. There was always something happening in the solar system that required their intervention, and because of that hectic, busy schedule, they only spent three days a week on the monitors themselves. The other two workdays were spent filtering and sorting the reports from other shifts.
And that day, things were going as usual, until an alarm whooped from the speakers in the room and yellow lights began flashing to grab their immediate attention.
*Extreme use of mana within habitable areas detected [Damage: Medium] [Situation: Orange]*
“Now that’s new,” the shift chief said as he read the notification. It was the first time there had been a mana-related orange situation alert.
“Fuck...” he muttered when he switched his monitor to a live satellite feed of the situation. Goosebumps popped up all over his body as he continued, “Pass this directly to the relevant agencies.”
[Report sent,] the AI replied almost as soon as the chief finished speaking. It knew best which agencies and departments would need the information.
“Which department did you send it on to?” the chief asked, curious as to which agencies would be responsible for acting on it. The more he knew, the better he could do his job in the future.
[The first responders on scene, imperial blessings agency, imperial police agency, and ARES,] the AI reported.
“What’s ARES supposed to do about a civilian situation?” the chief asked. It was the first time he had heard of the military being brought into a civilian matter. Normally, the police were plenty to handle any issue that cropped up.
[ARES is listed as the correct agency for an incident on this scale,] the AI answered.
“Oh, okay.”
The chief returned to his normal work; the universe wouldn’t take the day off just because something weird happened on Earth, though he did make a mental note to check up on the situation as it unfolded.
……
At the hidden joint ARES-NIS base, a single yeet pod detached from one of the arms and oriented itself in a specific direction. It fired a deorbit burn, then fell completely silent as it dropped toward the surface. Its target? Mogadishu.
……
“How’s the evacuation going?” the local Mogadishu police chief asked the emergency coordinator, who was standing next to him.
“We’ve fully evacuated a radius of a kilometer and we’re in the process of pushing out the cordons. But we still need to figure out a way to stop this fire from spreading, since it seems to be able to burn our firefoam,” the coordinator replied.
“Silver linings, I suppose. At least we’re ahead of it... for now. Keep me updated,” the chief said, then turned his attention back to the eerily silent fire and its slow, but steady spread.
The chief was alerted by a flashing icon in his glasses, indicating a virtual meeting he needed to join. He blinked the icon away and joined the meeting, which was in progress.
“Okay. Time to spitball. What do you all think is happening, and how can we deal with it? If the fire keeps spreading like this, it won’t be more than another hour and all of Mogadishu will be gone,” the head of the emergency response task force asked from his virtual control room.
“We’ve run out of normal methods to stop it. Firebreaks don’t work, firefoam doesn’t work, water doesn’t work... hell, we even tried flooding the area with halon. Everything seems to just contribute to the spread, so we were forced to stop and evacuate, since the more things it burns, the faster it spreads. We need to either deal with the awakener who triggered it or starve the area of mana,” the representative of the imperial blessings agency suggested.
“We haven’t picked up any life signs on our scans, which means there’s nothing living in that blaze. So how can we deal with the person if we can’t even find him or her?” the task force leader asked.
“There’s two possibilities. Either the awakener died and the fire is feeding on the mana in its surroundings, or he’s reached an understanding of fire mana that lets him literally become the flame. They’re both equally unlikely, but once you rule out the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth,” the representative explained.
“That makes sense. If the awakener turned himself into fire, it explains the lack of life signs in the blaze. So we should widen the scope of our life sign scan to the entire fire to confirm or rule out that possibility. If we can rule it out, it means this was accidental and isn’t being maliciously controlled, which should make it easier to deal with... at least in theory,” another aide interjected.
“Okay, let’s—” the task force leader began, but was interrupted by an incoming communication.
“This is QRF Bravo inbound, requesting field clearance.”
Before anyone could respond, everyone in the meeting got a direct message from the heads of their agencies ordering full cooperation with the incoming vessel.
The task force leader sighed in relief; the entire incident had been a shitshow from start to finish and he would be happy to let someone else take charge of it. He had done his best.
He opened up a wide channel and ordered, “This is task force command. Clear the field for classified ops.”
