A month passed in the blink of an eye. The air in the Hive City seemed to carry the scent of anxiety.
Just as everyone had expected, Martha's Silverthorn House made its move. Supplies to the Mid-Hive Promethium Factory were completely cut off. More and more vehicles became useless, and public order fell apart along with them.
The people of Mid-Hive began frantically stockpiling supplies, and several violent clashes broke out as a result.
Wade was powerless to do anything about it.
Besides, if this dragged on any longer, even the Guard Regiment's Armored Vehicles would grind to a halt.
At this point, unless they could retake the Promethium Factory in Lower Hive and break Silverthorn House's blockade, nothing else would work.
However, Wade didn't wait for a solution. Instead, he received orders to attack.
"Colonel Wade, we've got only 3,000 men, and they've got 200,000. Even if they're all rookies, they could kill every one of us if each of them fired just once."
"And that's the Promethium Factory we're talking about! It has twelve watchtowers and two Laser cannons. Every time we run a simulation of a frontal assault, we get wiped out!"
"Exactly! Even if we sneak in at night, the Hive Auspex at the factory can detect heat sources within five kilometers. Even if we drive in, we're still sitting ducks. We'd be targeted as soon as we got close. How's that any different from walking to our deaths?!"
Wade didn't respond. He raised his eyes and looked toward the factory in the distance.
In the darkness, the building looked like a crouching beast.
The only way in was a bridge thirty meters wide and a kilometer long!
Wade knew a frontal assault was hopeless, but he still snarled, "What are you all yelling about? The governor said he had a backup plan. What are you afraid of?!"
Even so, the others remained worried.
Just then, ten cargo trucks slowly approached.
Fu Haoran jumped down from the first truck.
"Is everything ready?" Fu Haoran asked.
"Yes, sir."
Fu Haoran nodded in satisfaction. "Good. Let's move. Once you see my signal, launch the full-scale attack."
"Remember, your job is to lead the men across the bridge. Leave the rest to me."
"Yes." Wade didn't ask any questions.
Their governor had never let them down.
At dusk, the Armored Vehicle convoy set off at a slow pace. Its headlights were off, and it drove toward the bridge to the Promethium Factory under cover of darkness.
After watching the convoy leave, Fu Haoran got to work too. He opened the cargo containers, revealing rows of drones!
The drones had bodies made of engineering plastic, with "Firefighting Drone" spray-painted on their sides. Each had a large bulbous nose and an engine mounted at the rear.
These were the drones Professor Wang and the others had built. They used motorcycle engines, injection-molded engineering-plastic bodies, and flight controllers that they had soldered together themselves from open-source designs. The warheads were modified civilian gas canisters... All the odds and ends came to 9,800 yuan.
Less than ten thousand.
Five hundred drones cost less than five million, not even half the price of a single United States military drone—and these were the cheapest models.
They cost less than a fraction of a United States military MQ-9 Reaper drone. Fu Haoran figured he wouldn't even feel a thing if a hundred of them went down.
They were incredibly easy to operate, too. They used black-and-white video. The picture looked cheap, but the upside was that they had night vision.
On top of that, Professor Wang and the others had thoughtfully programmed them to fly patrol routes and dive toward fixed coordinates.
As for the lack of autonomous target recognition and evasive maneuvers... Fu Haoran considered those minor issues.
After all, every flaw could be overcome with sheer numbers.
"All right. The show starts tonight. Let's go."
At Fu Haoran's command, the five hundred drones took off from the cargo containers in wave after wave.
Their bodies lifted into the air and flew straight toward the Promethium Factory, without the slightest detour. The steady buzz of their motorcycle engines merged into one and rang out sharply in the night.
As a side note, all the pilots were Servitors, to maximize operational efficiency. Their Cogitator units were just powerful enough to handle simple flight commands.
They almost never made mistakes.
In a sense, that made them "intelligent."
At midnight.
The Armored Vehicle convoy's engines rumbled softly as it headed toward the bridge.
Wade sat in the lead vehicle, watching the tactical display.
They were still six kilometers from the bridgehead. Any closer and they'd be spotted.
"Slow down. Stop," Wade ordered.
The convoy came to a halt.
The soldiers gripped their guns and stared at the fortress looming in the darkness ahead.
"Just what is the governor's signal supposed to—" The adjutant didn't finish.
The first explosion rang out.
"Why is the factory exploding?!"
No one could answer.
As everyone was still wondering whether the first explosion had been an accident, a second and then a third rang out.
There was no need for Wade to explain. Everyone knew this was the "signal to attack" the governor had mentioned.
"What are you all standing around for?! Full speed ahead! Charge the factory!" Wade roared excitedly.
A few minutes earlier.
Scarface was a small-time leader in the Iron Hand Gang, in charge of the factory's outer wall.
He smoked as he bragged to his men. "The new governor? Ha. I hear he's just some wet-behind-the-ears kid, and he only got his position by selling out his own brothers."
"A man like that thinks he can attack us? Tell me, isn't he getting ahead of himself?!"
His men chimed in. "Exactly. Anyone can see that this place is easy to defend and hard to attack."
"If that inside man hadn't opened the gate for them back then, even the old governor's fifty thousand regular troops couldn't have gotten in."
Scarface was quite pleased with his men's agreement. He continued, "Our boss is worrying over nothing. Some outsider of a governor thinks he can lay a hand on our turf?"
"But I suppose it's not all bad. At least someone's bringing us weapons and equipment."
"Right. I hear they came from the Upper Hive nobility."
Scarface was about to share another bit of "inside information" when one of his men suddenly called out, "Boss, there's some kind of buzzing sound."
Scarface raised his hand and slapped him. "Quit being paranoid! It's the wind. Keep running your mouth and I'll send you to guard the underground passage!"
But the buzzing grew clearer and clearer, like countless flies circling their ears. Just as someone was about to warn him again, the next second...
BOOM!
An exposed watchtower exploded with a roar. The blast flung the gunner through the air, and his body slammed into the ground in a bloody heap. Debris scattered at Scarface's feet.
Scarface froze. The cigarette dropped from his mouth, and he shouted, "Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"
Then another watchtower exploded.
The attack hadn't come from the ground. It had fallen from the sky.
A small, gray-looking aircraft slammed into the tower's firing port. Flames immediately burst out, and the explosion tore half the tower away.
The machine gunners inside didn't even have time to scream before they were reduced to chunks of flesh.
Debris scattered at Scarface's feet. It was a twisted piece of engineering plastic.
"Shit! Enemy attack!" Scarface roared as he snatched the Auspex from his belt.
The screen lit up, showing a dozen or so small red dots rushing toward them. They weren't moving particularly fast.
"What the hell is that?" Scarface frowned.
He raised his Laser gun and fired wildly into the sky.
The gang members around him opened fire too, their Laser beams and bullets streaking across the night sky.
They actually hit a few.
One drone was struck and spiraled down, crashing into the wall.
Scarface was just about to laugh when the aircraft blew up with a bang.
It wasn't an ordinary explosion.
The flames were mixed with a blinding silvery-white glow: burning aluminum powder.
The blast radius wasn't large, but it flung countless metal fragments in every direction—nails the size of fingernails, shards of glass, bits of plastic—spraying outward like buckshot.
Screams erupted.
The three gang members closest to the blast fell, clutching their faces. One had a fragment pierce his eye, and blood welled between his fingers.
Another had a nail lodged in his throat and was gasping hoarsely.
Scarface was stunned.
"That thing... explodes even when it crashes?"
He looked down at the Auspex.
There were more red dots on the screen now.
Not a dozen. Dozens. No, hundreds.
The buzzing came from every direction, growing louder and louder, like someone had kicked a hornet's nest.
Scarface looked up and saw things flying through the night sky—so many of them, packed close together, like a flock of migrating "birds."
The problem was, they weren't birds!
They were planes.
Small, ugly, crude little planes.
"Shoot! Shoot them all!" Scarface shouted. His voice had started to tremble without him noticing.
When he thought back to the moment after the explosion, he saw a fragment of a drone's wreckage stamped with the words "Firefighting Drone" in High Gothic—and completely lost it.
"What firefighting? This damn thing is here to silence us?!"
Before you continue