The blizzard reached its peak at midnight.
The pitch-black sky was pressed low by a thick mass of clouds, as if one could reach up and touch the rolling gray above.
Snow no longer drifted down in soft flakes, but was torn by gales into sharp fragments, whistling as they struck the reinforced glass of skyscrapers, producing a fine, metallic-sounding hiss.
The storm devoured the city's light pollution; the neon's brilliance blurred into hazy patches, like oil paint bleeding slowly in water.
The technological marvels of the UED capital seemed fragile and small before nature's fury.
Signal lights on the air traffic control towers still blinked stubbornly, but the once-busy hovercraft lanes were now deserted — only a few auto-piloted snow-clearing drones moved with difficulty through the storm, their ion thrusters flickering blue like dying fireflies.
On the ground, maglev lanes lay buried under snow. The intelligent snow-melting systems ran beyond capacity, but still failed to keep pace with the accumulation.
Once in a while, the wail of an emergency vehicle's siren pierced the wind, only to be swallowed almost instantly, as if it had never been.
And in the city's darkest corners—
Under overpasses, at the vents of abandoned pipelines, and beside the warmth leaking from heating systems, huddled the people forgotten by UED's glossy facade.
They wrapped themselves in cheap thermal blankets issued by the government, clustered like hibernating animals, their breath freezing into ice crystals the instant it touched the cold air.
Occasionally a drone's scanning beam swept over them, only to record the data for "low-energy-consumption urban population" before leaving without concern.
And then dawn tore open the blizzard's curtain.
When the first shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds, the entire city felt as though it had been reset.
The snow's remains sparkled with diamond-like specks in the morning light, and UED's intelligent municipal system had already begun working at full efficiency.
Snow-removal robots poured from underground hatches like silver ants, melting the snow in their path to reveal the smooth composite roads beneath.
The hovercraft lanes resumed operation first.
The wealthy's private craft rose from exclusive rooftop pads on skyscrapers, their streamlined hulls catching the dawn, their blue ion trails tracing elegant arcs through the low sky.
They enjoyed private lanes, bypassing both traffic control and security checks, flying straight into the government's core sector.
Inside their cabins, holograms streamed morning news and market data while uniformed butlers served freshly ground espresso brewed from coffee beans grown in Martian greenhouses.
Middle-class commuters were not so lucky.
By rush hour, the ground maglev lanes were already gridlocked, the mass of civilian skimmers like insects trapped in amber.
Passengers inside drummed fingers on their steering yokes or refreshed their tardiness timers on holo-screens.
Every extra minute of delay triggered an automatic deduction of credit points from their wage accounts.
At intersections, holo-billboards still looped UED recruitment ads—
"Fight for the Glory of Humanity!"
The crisp-uniformed officers in the footage stood in absurd contrast to the reality of cramped commuters chewing on synthetic protein bars.
The slums woke in greater silence.
The surviving homeless shook the ice from their blankets, queuing for nutrient paste from charity groups.
It was a viscous, grayish-white colloid with a faint metallic taste, but enough to sustain minimal bodily function for a day.
Three hundred meters above them, the golden domes of high-rises bathed in sunlight, their nano-coated walls refracting the rays into brilliant rainbows — as if mocking the suffering below.
Though the Earth Federation's technology could support such a dazzling capital, the rot of its social structure surpassed even Mengsk's Terran Dominion.
At least Dominion commoners could curse the Emperor in taverns over cheap beer, but UED's lower classes had even their outlets smothered by the "psychological health monitoring system." Anyone whose negative emotion index exceeded limits was sent to "re-education centers."
Their orbital defense platforms could indeed launch devastating missiles, their soldiers' bodies were theoretically perfect, but unlike Terran marines or rangers, they couldn't maintain morale in extreme conditions with just a bottle of whiskey and a few curses.
In some fringe colonies, UED's efficiency at exploitation was even worse than the Dominion's slave mines — at least the latter could whip and liquor its workers into crude productivity.
When sunlight fully blanketed the city, a shuttle bearing the UED crest skimmed over the slums, its shadow briefly covering the queue below.
No one looked up.
They had long since learned not to gaze at unreachable lights.
The orbital train roared through the morning, the maglev hum beneath the track like the breathing of some giant beast.
Leon leaned against the carriage's blast-resistant glass, his own reflection overlaying the blur of the city flashing past outside.
He wore a worn pilot jacket lined with nano-fiber ballistic weave, and work pants whose reinforced seams hid dynamic camouflage modules.
Slush still clung to his boots, out of place against the spotless synthetic flooring.
The train shot between mega-towers, their adaptive-glass skins adjusting light transmission with the sun, reflecting golden-red like a row of burning greatswords thrust into the earth.
Holo-adverts floated between passengers, pitching the latest neural interface chips and military-grade enhancers.
A woman in UED clerical uniform muttered about commute times into her wrist device, two security personnel behind her, pupils glinting with the faint light of implanted scanners.
Leon's gaze flicked to the carriage connector—
Mike and Chris weren't here. As planned, they were in separate cars, avoiding forming a cluster.
Mike was probably playing the part of an office worker absorbed in the news; Chris would be near the emergency brake, the commander's fixation on exits as strong as ever.
One stop before their target, Mike and Chris disembarked.
The platform's lighting flickered from the storm's earlier damage, stretching passengers' shadows into warped shapes.
Mike pulled his cap low, following the flow toward the exit, his posture perfectly mirroring the tired slump of night-shift workers — shoulders lowered, eyes down, as if drained from a day of meetings.
Chris maintained a practiced balance of distance — enough to avoid notice, without seeming to avoid people.
They crossed an aerial walkway spanning a canyon of the city hundreds of meters deep, morning hovercar traffic weaving a glowing net below.
The walkway ended at the mid-level commercial floors of a mega-tower, where neon from fast-food signs cast cheap purple-pink light across glass walls.
Inside, the place was packed with commuters in a hurry.
Lines snaked before auto-order kiosks, synthetic patties hissed on hotplates, releasing an overly perfect "charbroil aroma" — a lab-crafted chemical signal engineered to trigger human hunger.
Mike took a window seat, its view aligned with a pyramid-topped building two kilometers away — the UED auxiliary personnel office. In the morning haze, its top-level quantum comm array rotated like a crown woven from metallic thorns.
"Beef burger, synthetic coffee."
Chris set down a tray, the packaging promising "75% real meat" — a false assurance.
As he sat, his jacket fell slightly open but revealed nothing of the pulse pistol beneath; no one was paying attention anyway.
Every diner was immersed in their own holo-screen or consuming the calories they'd soon convert into productivity.
Mike tapped a fingernail on the table, the sound carried through the nano-coating into a bone-conduction mic, reaching Chris's implant:
"In position."
At the same moment, Leon stepped into the mirror-lined lobby of the office building.
The revolving door swallowed and released him into a different world.
The floor was deep-red sandstone imported from Martian colonies, each slab veined with golden mineral threads.
A twenty-meter-tall holo projection floated in the center, looping footage of UED fleets in "peacekeeping" missions — carefully edited to omit the civilians vaporized by plasma fire.
A long queue waited at security.
Leon studied the guard rotation.
Every forty-five seconds, the third guard would glance at the break room coffee machine.
He merged with a group of mid-tier employees into the biometric zone. As the scanner's red beam swept his iris, his disguise layer injected falsified employee data into the system.
"Good morning, Engineer Raines," the AI said sweetly.
His clearance was moderate — enough to reach non-core R&D zones from B3 to B5.
In the elevator, a perfume-soaked woman beside him skimmed a document via neural link, the text flowing across her irises — unaware Leon's cuff collector was silently siphoning her feed.
When the lift reached B4, a data packet flashed in Leon's retinal overlay —
From Mike: analysis of the fast-food window's reflected light spectrum revealed anomalous energy fluctuations in a seventh-floor room — their target data center.
The corridor lighting switched to dark red; the alarm's tone was softened to a polite chime by the building's smart suppression, and the AI announced:
"Routine fire drill, please remain calm."
Leon knew this was Chris's doing — a hack to cover his movements.
He headed quickly for the fire stairs, his nano-soles absorbing his steps. Outside, through two kilometers of haze, Mike aimed a condiment-bottle-shaped laser mic at the building.
In the greasy air of the fast-food joint, Chris bit into the flavorless synthetic meat, eyes never leaving the seventh floor — the press conference prep zone.
Through his AR glasses' enhanced modes, he saw tech crews calibrating projection systems, and several high-ranking officers conversing backstage.
"Target confirmed," Chris reported evenly. "Blue suit is Logistics Chief Hoffman. To his right — Warp Technology Director Raines. Both have direct access to the Inter-Universe Project."
The so-called "Inter-Universe Project" was the "spatial gateway to other universes."
Clearly, the Earth Federation had also learned of the Mar Sara portal's existence through agents and spies embedded in the Koprulu sector, sending the intel back to Earth.
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