Chapter 50: Tactical Repositioning
Translator: ShutDoor
If July was the season of torrential rain and typhoons, March and April were the season of yellow dust.
It had taken a back seat to fine dust and pollen since the 2020s began, but yellow dust still proudly held its place among spring’s signature natural disasters.
The problem was that the yellow dust now blowing toward the Korean Peninsula had far surpassed anything that could be called a mere ‘natural disaster’.
“…In fourteen hours, a radioactive yellow dust storm will blanket the entire Korean Peninsula.”
How could the words ‘radioactive’ and ‘yellow dust storm’ possibly coexist in the same sentence?
The expert studying the weather satellite imagery clearly understood the danger implied by that sentence. Their voice trembled like a leaf.
Whenever the news announced that a record-breaking typhoon was approaching the Korean Peninsula, people had seen footage of a vast white vortex swallowing an entire country whole.
That was what was happening in China now.
“…”
A dreadful silence filled the Jeju Island government’s conference room.
The enormous mass of sand and dust that had crept in from the Gobi Desert on the westerlies greedily devoured the immense updrafts, soil, and radioactive ash produced by indiscriminate nuclear detonations, swelling to grotesque proportions.
The result was a yellow curtain several times larger than the Korean Peninsula, blanketing China.
The thick, undulating ocher sandstorm was dense enough to blur the boundary between land and sea. It was devastating eastern China as it crawled east at a terrifying speed.
It looked as though part of the continent itself had been torn loose and was crossing the sea.
Considering that yellow dust from the Gobi Desert normally took dozens of hours to reach South Korea, it was easy to imagine how quickly the ocher storm on the screen was advancing.
It was just as easy to imagine what sort of catastrophe would result when the radioactive fallout from hundreds of nuclear missiles combined with a colossal yellow dust storm.
“…Estimated visibility is three meters.”
No one on the Korean Peninsula could escape that yellow dust.
No one except those farsighted enough to prepare thoroughly before the NIV virus arrived, the cowards who had holed up underground in hopes of surviving alone, and a lucky few.
“…Recall everyone indoors, including the Navy personnel on the west coast.”
“Yes, sir. Then what about the critical facilities on the mainland…?”
“Tell them to put on protective suits and hold those facilities somehow, while keeping casualties to a minimum. Authorize unrestricted fire as well.”
“…Yes, sir.”
The aide hurriedly picked up the internal phone to recall the Navy personnel stationed near the west coast.
Beep!
A notification sounded.
ADMIN1000: (Urgent) U.S.-China War Begins
ADMIN1000: Colossal yellow dust storm detected over China. Estimated to persist for four days.
“…”
“…”
…Just who the hell were these people, and how did they get information faster than us?
*****
The ‘education’ given to the new settlers was also being administered to the existing settlers without exception.
In short, it felt like a constant effort to instill a sense of unity with the ‘Ark’ by showing them in the clearest possible terms that ‘the outside world is completely fucked, but things are different if you’re with us!’
The leadership apparently understood that subjecting modern twenty-first-century people to such insidious ideological indoctrination would eventually cause problems, because the curriculum also included some fairly wholesome material intended to reduce resistance.
One example was the constant reminder that this place was saving survivors across the Korean Peninsula.
「March’s outstanding researcher: Kim Yu-jin, virology research building」
「Your research is saving the world.」
The faces of the virus researchers passed across the enormous monitor in the central square.
Who could fail to find their work rewarding when its results were being used to save countless lives?
Perhaps that was their reward for being gaslit(?) into working themselves to the bone for forty straight days. Eom Tae-yun, a researcher in the space science building, which was the most important research institute in the ‘Ark’—well, not quite the most important, but roughly the fifth—had finally been granted leave.
Of course, leave did not mean he could go outside the Ark. It was obvious what might happen if he ventured out under the current circumstances.
“Yaaawn…”
So Eom Tae-yun had decided to spend his day off sprawled on a sun lounger in the central park, sipping a drink.
He knew it was not the real sun. Still, it looked incredibly realistic and even felt as warm as actual sunlight, so it did a respectable job of making him feel as though he were sunbathing.
Best of all was the high ceiling. At well over fifty meters, it felt like the real sky as long as he did not consciously think about it.
“…”
Without it, he probably would have missed the outside world a hundred times more.
He did not know who had built it, but they had certainly possessed remarkable foresight.
“Phew.”
This might make the researchers inside the shelter seem completely carefree, but that was not really the case.
Word that the Korean Peninsula and the rest of the world had gone to hell had already spread widely among the researchers.
But the reports ranged from stories of the military firing indiscriminately on infected people to unbelievable news that European governments had fallen, so the scientists, being the ‘highly intelligent’ people they were, responded with skepticism first.
Their reactions varied wildly. Some wanted to verify for themselves whether it was fake news generated by AI, while others proposed putting on gas masks and going outside.
But then.
—Would everyone care to read a paper? It’s one we wrote on the NIV virus.
When the researchers led by Virology Research Institute Director Grace presented a paper along with a logical body of evidence, everyone who read it promptly fell silent.
—And this is a separate analysis of the pathogen.
Thud!
Wasn’t the best way to persuade highly intelligent people to put a paper in front of them that offered absolutely no opening for rebuttal?
When more than two thousand pages of material landed before them with a thud, every last member of the skeptical bunch who had been making a fuss moments earlier went mute.
For the record, Eom Tae-yun had watched the scene from a distance and even whistled in delight.
Because he had believed them from the very beginning.
Remembering that incident, Eom Tae-yun sat up and took out his phone.
It was a phone with a few security measures installed, which the researchers had recently been allowed to use freely outside working hours at the research institute directors’ request.
In keeping with those ‘security measures’, the issued phones could access only the shelter’s intranet, but that was more than enough.
No matter how good the facilities or his superiors were, a workplace was still a workplace, and he normally had to wear a mask to some extent. There was no need for that on an anonymous forum.
Sure enough, a new post had gone up while he was away.
Anon: Ugh… Every time I see those powered-exoskeleton soldiers, I lose my mind.
He opened the post.
-EverytimeIseethem-Iseriously-losemymindpleasecan’t-youjusttellmehowtheywork-I’llcrawlbetweenyourlegsifI-havetosojust-please-tellme-please
“…”
It had obviously been written by someone from the robotics research institute.
Anon: 131st Discussion of Projected Powered-Exoskeleton Soldier Specs
Aside from the people there, no one was quite that fanatical about ‘those things.’
Come to think of it, the people in the energy engineering research building had also begun showing a creeping interest at some point, though they were not nearly as obsessed as the people in robotics…
Perhaps because those two institutes boasted such unrivaled insanity, the intranet boards for the other twenty-one research buildings had a more ordinary atmosphere.
Anon: Seriously, why Director Grace is the GOAT
Anon: Am I the only one scared of the powered-exoskeleton soldiers? I did a rough calculation last time and got a height of 2.3 meters. Are they really human?
Anon: Does anyone happen to know how old the hospital director is? ^^
Anon: The development of this nervous system stabilizer has proven beyond dispute that the virology research building is number one. Applause, everyone!!!
Everyone posted on the intranet whenever they had a spare moment, so new posts appeared surprisingly quickly for a community with only a few hundred users.
Anon: (ApuApu resting) I’m off today haha
Eom Tae-yun made a post of his own. He did not forget to attach a photo of his glass of cola filled with ice.
But there had been a commotion nearby for a while now.
“…”
A group of people followed a personnel office employee somewhere, visibly intimidated. One look was enough to identify them as newcomers.
They had finally entered the shelter proper after a month of quarantine, and he understood that they were people who had been ‘rescued’ from outside.
Hadn’t they said newcomers spent about a week touring the place with personnel office employees as an adjustment period? The way they stared up at the lofty ceiling and gawked around made them look exactly like country bumpkins fresh off the bus to the big city.
Hmm.
Eom Tae-yun casually lowered his phone and listened in.
“…!”
“H-how did you possibly build an underground space this large?”
“…Is that sky made of LEDs? Really?”
Hmm. Was it really that impressive?
A facility grandly called the ‘Ark’ ought to have a university hospital, a massive apartment complex, an enormous park, and a fake sky nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, shouldn’t it?
If they were already this amazed, how shocked would they be when they saw all the cool research equipment later…?
Of course, Eom Tae-yun himself had once behaved less like a country bumpkin and more like a caveman, but that memory had long since been favorably repackaged and forgotten.
“Good heavens, just how large was the budget for all this…?”
“Whoa…”
From what he overheard, the new settlers appeared to specialize in architecture or construction.
They stared up at the vast central square with their mouths hanging wide open for a long while, then slowly nodded with dazed expressions. They looked less as though they understood and more as though they had decided to accept it for now.
“All right, everyone, let’s keep moving. There’s still a great deal for you to see.”
“…Th-there’s more than this? Really?”
They, too, had probably realized that only a government or international organization could have invested this much money.
Quite a few of the research institute directors had also been revealed to have one Korean parent, so opinion among the researchers was gradually leaning toward the theory that this place belonged to the South Korean government.
They honestly did not look mixed-race at all, but surely Director Margaret would not have lied?
Of course, no one here had ever gone around openly declaring, ‘We are the legitimate government of South Korea.’ But what government in the world would feel the need to publicly announce something so obvious?
As a rule, anyone insisting, ‘I’m an innocent civilian!’ in a game of Mafia was on the mafia’s side nine times out of ten, and anyone who went out of their way to proclaim themselves the legitimate emperor was usually from a minor branch of the imperial family with little real clout.
…Strictly speaking, if a force with an underground facility of this magnitude was not the South Korean government, that would be an even bigger problem.
To put it bluntly, even this place’s research facilities alone surpassed every such facility on the Korean Peninsula combined.
If the standard was the ability to conduct such intensive research across so many different fields in one place, there might not be another facility like it anywhere in the world.
Eom Tae-yun watched the new settlers disappear into the distance, then lay back down on the lounger.
His leave ended today, after all.
But that peace did not last long.
「All meteorological observation researchers, please return to your laboratories. Once again, all meteorological observation…」
As the announcement sounded with a siren in the background, the ‘sky’ that had been blue moments earlier began turning ocher from the edges inward.
Beep!
A moment later, his phone displayed an emergency alert unlike any he had ever received.
“…”
Apparently, the claim that those panels reproduced the actual weather outside had been true.
*****
“Does the shelter need to make any special preparations for this yellow dust storm?”
“Not within the shelter itself.”
The shelter had been designed to withstand even a direct nuclear strike. A mere radioactive yellow dust storm was hardly going to cause problems.
That did not mean there were no complications whatsoever.
“Our calculations indicate that more than thirty percent of the ten thousand surveillance nodes installed across the Korean Peninsula will cease functioning during this storm.”
“What about recovery measures?”
“We have plenty of spare nodes, but we currently lack the capacity to retrieve and reinstall every lost node individually.”
“…”
Moments like this really drove home how short-handed we were.
For now, we were somehow managing with the Enigmas alone, but the day might come a few years from now when we would have to organize an expedition composed entirely of real humans rather than Enigmas.
“Keep monitoring the surveillance nodes. As soon as the actual scale of the losses is confirmed, determine the repair priorities and submit a report.”
“Yes, Administrator.”
“How much damage is expected within the country?”
“Anyone outdoors for three hours or more will be at high risk of severe radiation exposure. The soil and crops in particular are unlikely to escape widespread contamination.”
In other words, outdoor activity was effectively impossible.
Still, South Korea had not been directly hit by a nuclear attack, so it had avoided the worst.
On the west coast, except in a few specific areas, people could forget about anything resembling farming until all the radioactivity was finally washed away.
Who could have guessed this shitstorm would happen in spring, just as the crops were sprouting?
Whatever else might happen, it seemed certain that South Korea’s harvest was ruined for the year.
“Share the yellow dust’s projected route and the relevant information on SurvivalNet, within the limits of shelter security.”
“Yes, Administrator.”
“General Kang, tell the external teams to take plenty of protective equipment and filters with them. They’re for the people they rescue.”
“Understood.”
Now that the countries with the world’s first- and second-most powerful militaries had entered an all-out war, the entire world had effectively begun the countdown to nuclear war.
U.S. Forces Korea bases, including Camp Humphreys, had already entered combat with China.
Under ordinary circumstances, South Korea, as an ally, should have immediately declared war and joined the battle. Yet the Chinese Navy and South Korean Navy facing each other across the Yellow Sea had ‘so far’ refrained from launching any attacks on each other.
They knew it too.
They knew that the upper echelons of their countries had already ceased to function, and that with the radioactive yellow dust storm blotting out the sky, fighting would mean throwing their lives away.
The Pyeongtaek U.S. military base continued sending secure radio messages toward Yongsan, Yeouido, and Jeju Island without pause, but the South Korean government that had fled to Jeju Island sent no response.
Just as the British leadership had abandoned London and fled to Ireland the moment the crisis erupted, the South Korean leadership that had abandoned Seoul for Jeju Island appeared to have chosen strict nonintervention under the principle of ‘let’s not stick our necks out and get killed for nothing’.
It might be a different story if China launched a nuclear weapon at South Korea, but for now, at least, South Korea was maintaining its ‘neutrality’.
This was a genuine shitshow.
Which was exactly why we would turn the situation to our advantage.
“…What do you mean by turning it to our advantage?”
I whipped around to face Rachel, who had asked the timely question.
“Compile a complete list of the rare metals, spare parts, and testing equipment the laboratories need and submit a report within thirty minutes.”
“W-what?”
The massive radioactive yellow dust storm had completely shut down all outdoor activity and air travel, and even outside observers watching through orbiting satellites had been blinded just like everyone else.
There should not have been a single force anywhere capable of detecting our movements.
“Y-you’re right, but…”
“Then we should get as much use out of the surveillance nodes as possible while they’re still online. Don’t you think?”
“…!!!”
Rachel stared at me wide-eyed. Her expression said she could not believe I was suggesting what she thought I was.
But I was.
“General Kang, take every available transport vehicle and trailer out.”
“As you command.”
General Kang instantly grasped my meaning and answered with gusto.
The South Korean government had evacuated to Jeju Island in haste. There was no shortage of resources it had abandoned on the mainland.
If left where they were, those resources would only be covered in radioactive fallout and become waste, or be erased without a trace by the nuclear missiles China was launching.
In that case, it would be better for us to ‘borrow’ them and use them to expand the shelter and rescue survivors.
“How could those who abandoned the Korean mainland and withdrew possibly claim ownership of supplies left behind there?”
“Exactly.”
As General Kang said, finders keepers.
Therefore, this was absolutely not theft.
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