RTS System in the Apocalypse: New World

Hans checked his Gold reserves out of habit before he checked anything else.

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[ Gold: 3,665 (+800) => 4,465 ]

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Fifteen thousand, and he wasn’t even a third of the way there.

He closed the panel without dwelling on it. Wanting something and being able to afford it had never been the same problem, not since the day he’d first learned what a Conscript cost.

He raised his communicator and switched to a channel.

"Golden Eagle to Delta One."

"Delta One here, Commander."

"I have two tasks for you."

"Send it, Commander."

Hans paused before the first task he needed from them. This one was something that kept nagging at the back of his mind.

The route surveys, the FOB planning, the defensive structure placements—all of it had been about ground his soldiers needed to hold, not the ground worth picking through.

He tried to remember the last time anyone had actually swept the blocks immediately around the base for anything sellable and came up with nothing.

Did I just forget the bread and butter of my System?

He almost laughed at himself. Weeks of planning corridors and chokepoints, and it hadn’t once occurred to him that half the streets his own soldiers walked past every day had never been properly looted.

"First," he said, "send a team to sweep near the base. Full sweep, not a patrol. You know what it is. I don’t think anyone’s actually done this yet, come to think of it."

A brief pause on the other end.

"...No, Commander. I don’t believe so either."

"Then it’s overdue. Get at least two squads on it."

"Understood."

"Second. Route One will be held as planned. Assign guards on the approach. Once the sweep force moves through, nobody else advances past the corner building without orders. I want two, maybe three platoons moving into Westgate itself. Full building sweep, not just the structures we’ve already surveyed."

A short pause on the other end.

"For the FOB, Commander, or for—"

"For Gold," Hans said. "The FOB can wait a few more hours. I need the platoons in and out before anything decides to notice them."

"And Routes Two and Three?"

"Already scouted, weren’t they?"

"Yes, Commander."

"Then station a few garrisons over there as well. I’m not asking for a second survey tonight."

"Understood. I’ll have the platoons moving within the hour."

"Do it."

Hans set the communicator down.

Two platoons walking through a district that wasn’t fully his yet, guarded by a route that had barely finished being approved.

It wasn’t the arrangement he would have chosen if he’d had the Gold sitting in front of him already. But he didn’t. And the PCV wasn’t going to pay for itself.

He pulled the map back up and watched the first set of blue markers moving around his base and toward the three routes.

Hans stayed with the Radar longer than he needed to, watching the markers spread outward in slow, deliberate lines.

Squads broke into pairs to cover more ground. A platoon split at the first intersection into Westgate, then split again.

He wasn’t the only one awake to see any of it. The base rarely slept anymore, not fully—but tonight, with soldiers moving in numbers large enough to notice, more windows than usual stayed lit past midnight.

...

Kimmy sat very still on the rooftop terrace, her attention somewhere past the visible skyline.

Yunera watched her rather than the horizon.

"Another one," Kimmy said eventually. Quieter than the last time. "And this time, it’s even bigger."

Yunera didn’t answer right away. She would have laughed the first time, called it a magic trick, then made some comment about wishing she could build a house that fast.

Tonight she just sat with her arms around her knees, watching the faint orange glow spill over the rooftops in the distance.

"You’re not saying much," Kimmy said.

"Neither are you, sister."

Kimmy’s fingers pressed lightly against the stone ledge, as if it might tell her something the air couldn’t.

"My brother used to talk about things like this," she said. "Before. Programs I was not supposed to know about. Or systems that were established in the blink of an eye. He... he never showed me anything."

"You could not see it even if he had, sister," Yunera replied.

Kimmy frowned.

"But I remembered how he had said it."

Yunera was quiet for a moment. "You know you already said this before to me, right?"

"And I will keep on doing that."

Silence ensued.

"Do you really think that guy... Hans... is one of those?"

"I think Hans is something my brother would have recognized," Kimmy said. "I don’t know if that’s the same thing."

Neither of them said anything else for a while. The glow on the horizon didn’t fade, not for a long time.

...

Tyrus stood at his window and said nothing at all.

He watched the light the same way he’d watched it the last time, and the time before that—no longer with alarm, nor caution, nor with the theatrical curiosity he let other people see from him during the day.

He remained there, quiet and still, just like the way a man watches something he has already made up his mind about.

"He’s about to do something. I’m waiting for more surprises, Commander."

...

Near the base, the sweep team worked in a loose grid, moving block by block through streets, looking for anything that mattered to Hans and the System.

This close to the old industrial sector, most of it wasn’t jewelry or coin.

Spools of raw copper wire, untouched since the day the workers who wound them became infected. Pallets of aluminum stock still shrink-wrapped in a loading bay nobody had bothered to check. A drum of unprocessed silver ore sitting exactly where some pre-collapse supplier had left it, waiting on a shipment that was never going to arrive.

None of it took long to find once someone actually looked. It had been sitting in plain sight the entire time, ignored because somebody did not think nor ask whether an abandoned warehouse counted as loot.

At the three route approaches, a different kind of work was underway.

Route One already had a line to build from—the same outer barricade Watcher Six had held the night when Echo One returned from the nuclear power plant mission.

Guardian APCs shifted further out along it now, extending the perimeter toward the corner building rather than starting from nothing.

Soldiers reinforced the gaps with scavenged fencing and stacked debris, enough to slow anything down without needing an actual Wall segment until Hans could deploy one himself.

Farther out, smaller garrisons settled into Routes Two and Three, watchful rather than fortified, exactly as ordered.

None of it was permanent, but all of it would matter for tonight’s operation.

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