On the fifth of February of the year 7172 an army of doctors defended upon Kas’Aron. But that was not all. Many hundreds of thousand of War’Netra were evacuated. Those whose status as not infected could be ascertained were evacuated to different earths, to assure this status to be permanent. Those who were certain to be infected were transferred to UE hospitals to better treat them.

Soldiers and policemen from all over the UE were send to insure order. Although there were some incidents were those went to far in the course of their duty, those were swiftly dealt with by the UE government through constant surveillance by AI’s.

While this operation would hopefully stop and reverse the humanitarian catastrophe, the UE was occupied with something else. And this something else was figuring out who exactly had been responsible, capturing them and thus condemning them to their just punishment. Uncountable resources were spent on that task, every not so unlikely avenue was being followed. It was only a matter of time until this particular crime was solved.

While all that was going on, Lucas Tarson was not doing anything. He was not trained to control crowds, he was no doctors, and honestly, finding the terrorists had been a stroke of luck. Capturing that one had been crazy and something you do not normally endorse. He had not been trained nor equipped to handle that man if things had gone sideways. As they have a tendency in battle. Luckily everything had gone perfectly and thus he would get a piece of metal to stick on his uniform, but what could have happened if that had not been the case was made very clear to him. Thanks to the magic of AI controlled simulations, with the help of very detailed imagery.

Alrick McCreadie meanwhile was panicking and raging in his home. How could things have gone so wrong?

Sadly he was not making any clear comments over the air, and thus not leading the investigators directly to him. Although he was naturally already in their mind, considering he had a reason, regardless of how tenuous it was, to harm the Kar’Netra.

But even with how serious the crime was, they could not simply storm the building in an attempt to find incriminating evidence. After all, there were laws. But Alrick would get a visit this Friday. Which sadly would not find anything, because Alrick was smart enough to go on an backdated visit to a different earth, which on purpose had no communication net around it. Which in turn meant that he could not be reached. That visit would take a week.

But there were other people to talk to. Other mysteries to solve. Because one thing was certain: McCreadie did not do it alone. He simply did not posses the technical know-how to do it, he needed a partner. The kidnappers might have known about the bioweapon, but at this point, it was still unknown if they helped with its deployment. It would not help them much if they did not, but it might mean that they could actually get out of prison and not die in it. Still, they would get out of it as very old men, if it came to that.

Even though enormous amounts of resources were spent to ensure a quick solution to the bioweapon issue, there were problems. Not that there was not enough of any single commodity, but that Kad’Nagarth especially was not equipped to deal with the sudden influx of goods. Within 24 hours, a traffic jam of enormous proportions developed, which in turn forced the UE to do something it had no much training: prioritise which emergency goods should be shipped first.

Even the evacuations ran into significant problems, those mostly based around the fact that the Kar’Netra needed slightly different food than humans to stay healthy. There was some overlap, but their meals would need to be enriched. But those enrichments were speciality products which did not exist in masses. Not a huge problem, the production facilities for them could easily be scaled in sufficient ways, but it would take a few weeks. In which the existing supplies would, in turn, run out.

This was not bad, per se, because that small break was nothing to worry about. Or at least, it was nothing to worry about in healthy individuals. But sadly, not all of the evacuated were healthy. Which meant prioritising. Which the UE actively dislikes doing when lives are in danger. But it would manage and prevent as many deaths as possible.

Speaking about the death toll, it was already clear that it would be brutal. And it would have been beyond devastating without the UE evacuations. Currently it was predicted that less than 500 thousand non-infected would be evacuated, and the illness had a devastating death rate, which somehow seemed to become worse. Currently it was projected that out of the roughly two million infected, less than a quarter would survive.

Which, if true would mean that only one million Kar’Netra would survive this attempted genocide in the best-case scenario.

The UE was horrified of what could happen if this bioweapon suddenly mutated and became capable of infecting humans. Which in turn meant that quarantine procedures needed to be followed at all times. It was unlikely that that could happen without the UE figuring out in time to develop a cure, modern biotech was impressive stuff, after all, but unlikely was not the same as impossible, and the worst case scenario could mean the death of the UE in its current form.

That specific scenario was laughably unlikely, but it made for a good horrifier in presentations to ensure that everyone followed the procedures, as well as making it easy to pass laws that the enforcement of those procedures was handled by high level AI.

This was not the first medical catastrophe of this scale the UE was dealing with. It was however the first in one of the Protectorates, and in which it could be established that someone did that on purpose. A few of the earlier had been genuine accidents with the handling of bioweapons, but the last such accident had been four thousand years ago. The UE had become lax if terrorists could create such a weapon. And who was to say that the next would not target a Protectorate, but the UE itself? The aftermath of this catastrophe would bring many changes to the medical and biotechnological industries, for this should never have happened and hopefully would never happen again. — A narrator in a documentary describing the events and the aftermath of the attack on Kas’Aron.