My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 531 Departure Date

Chapter 531  Departure Date

For the public, the days crawled. For the selected staff, they crawled slower still. But for the governments of the nations hosting designated airports, the same calendar moved at an entirely different pace. It was fast and getting faster.

The coordination notice had been clear about the volunteer operation date. The staff departure required no guesswork, which was five days after application deadline, per the recruitment announcement. The math was straightforward. The shuttle was coming, and it was coming soon.

What the coordination notice hadn’t specified was how many shuttles Nova Technologies intended to send.

The technical specifications had described a vehicle with a standard seating capacity of twenty and a trial operation passenger load of eight. Thirty-six staff across the world and potentially twenty-four airports.

A single shuttle making sequential stops was one possibility. Multiple shuttles running parallel routes was another. The cost-effective answer was one. But Nova Technologies had never optimized for the appearance of restraint, and every government intelligence team that had spent the past weeks studying the company’s behavior had reached the same conclusion independently — if they wanted to send more, they would send more, and the decision would be made on their terms rather than anyone else’s.

Most governments were quietly assuming one shuttle. A few were planning for more.

What none of them were planning for was nothing, which is why intelligence and military assets had been deployed at the designated airports without announcement and without public explanation.

It wasn’t directed at Nova Technologies. Every government that had deployed additional assets had been careful to frame it that way internally, and the framing was genuine enough.

The shuttle landing wasn’t the threat. The shuttle landing was an unprecedented event at a civilian airport, carrying staff bound for a lunar facility, in an operational window that had been coordinated but not controlled. Anything could happen in the margins of an event like that — not from Nova Technologies, but around it. Crowds. Media. People who had decided the shuttle’s arrival was something they needed to be present for regardless of whether they’d been invited.

The security infrastructure was there for the margins.

That was the official position and it was also true as far as it went.

What it didn’t fully account for was the intelligence value of being physically present when a Nova Technologies shuttle descended vertically into a civilian airport for the first time. The technical specifications document had been thorough. It had told them what to expect on paper. Watching it happen in person, with sensors running and personnel in position — every tracker oriented, every analyst at their station — was a different category of information entirely.

***

Time moved slowly, then all at once, as the departure day arrived.

Across every city hosting a designated airport, people were up before their alarms. Not because they had somewhere to be, but because something big was happening and being awake for it felt like the minimum they could do.

Rooftops filled quietly. People stood at windows with phones already recording. Others had gone to open ground near the airports the night before and simply stayed, unwilling to risk missing the window by sleeping through it.

Nobody knew exactly when the shuttles would appear. Nova Technologies had said staff would depart five days after application deadline, and anyone paying attention had circled the date weeks ago.

What they didn’t know was where — the designated airports had never been made public. The coordination notices had gone to airport authorities under confidentiality. Nova Technologies had said nothing about locations beyond confirming that pickup points would be available per continent. The volunteer transport details — the airport list — hadn’t been released yet either.

But people didn’t need that information to know where to be. They needed a date, a city, and an airport. All three had been available for weeks.

Governments don’t deploy unusual military and intelligence assets quietly. Or rather, they try to. And in a world where five billion people were on a platform that had made the circulation of photographs instantaneous, trying wasn’t the same as succeeding.

When photographs began circulating on LucidNet the previous evening showing unusual vehicle concentrations near airport perimeter roads and what appeared to be additional radar equipment at several locations, the conclusion the public drew was immediate and unanimous. Governments didn’t deploy that kind of visible asset placement for routine operations.

The footprint was readable to anyone who had been paying attention to how institutions responded to Nova Technologies events, and by this point, most of the world had been paying attention for months.

A user had posted the evening before: “Military assets confirmed at multiple designated airports. They’re not trying to hide it. Which means either they want us to know, or they’ve accepted that hiding it isn’t possible. Either way — tomorrow is real and it’s happening and I need to go outside.”

The post had accumulated hundreds of thousands of likes before midnight.

By dawn, the areas near the designated airports in every host city had gathered crowds that the authorities had not formally authorized and had also not moved to disperse.

The calculus was the same one that had governed every government decision involving Nova Technologies for months — the cost of visible obstruction exceeded the cost of managing the presence. People standing outside an airport perimeter with their phones pointed at the sky were not a threat. They were witnesses.

In Queens, the sun had just finished climbing above the horizon, its light cutting low and flat across the borough, catching the glass faces of the terminals and throwing long shadows across the tarmac. The crowds had gathered along the public roads bordering the airport, phones raised, some with proper camera equipment, some with nothing but the patience of people who had decided this was worth standing in the cold for.

Inside the perimeter, the military and intelligence assets were running quietly. Every radar system active. Every tracking station oriented toward the approach corridor the vector notice had specified the previous evening — six hours out, exactly as the technical specifications had committed to.

The air traffic controllers had the approach integrated. The coordination team had been on-site for days. The lounge was ready. The boarding zone was clear.

A military observer tracking the designated approach corridor was the first to catch it on radar, appearing exactly where the vector said it would, at exactly the altitude the specifications had described for final approach.

He watched it for two seconds, confirming it was real and not an artifact, then he called it.

The shuttle had entered JFK’s airspace.