The world's adoration was a wave Reuben rode with grim determination, not triumph. The smallpox containment effort was a global firefight, a savage, resource-devouring battle on a thousand fronts. He was the commander, his office a humming hub of data streams and desperate logistics. The System was a relentless taskmaster, its maps a constantly shifting battlefield of red zones and tenuous containment lines. Every triumph was tallied in lives saved, but the cost in DP and human exhaustion was staggering.
Amid this planetary triage, the first warning was easy to miss. A twitch on the edge of his awareness, a slight deviation in the steady flow of status reports from the field.
[HON Clinic 12-B (Kandalar Border Region): Supply Chain Disruption. Cause: Ambush. Status: 3 HON personnel wounde
