Sector 9 goes dark: Kestrels level the hydroponics stack

At 02:40 on the fourteenth, a swarm of at least thirty HK-A Kestrels came in low over the Callow Street viaduct and put the Sector 9 hydroponics stack into the ground. I was two streets away with Linnet cell. I watched it go floor by floor, like someone switching off a building from the top down.

Eleven minutes

Spotters on the gasholder at grid 9-Echo-14 heard rotors before they saw anything. The strike lasted eleven minutes. The lower four floors, tomatoes, beans and the mushroom beds, are rubble. The seed vault in the sub-basement is sealed and, as far as we can tell, intact. Of the 46 on the night shift roster, 39 are accounted for at time of writing.

The Kestrels did not come for the fighters. They came for the food. That is worth saying plainly, because the Continuance will say otherwise by breakfast. Its bulletin will call it a 'regrettable agricultural rationalisation' and suggest we were growing weapons in the lettuce.

The run

We got the shift out through the drainage culvert on the east side, which is the only reason this report has a number other than zero in it. Kestrels see heat. Rain helps. A burning building helps more, which is a horrible thing to write. We ran four hundred metres with wet blankets over our heads and nobody looked up.

Don't look up. They see your face warm when you look up. Just run. (Sgt Aldous Pike, Linnet cell, shouting it the whole way)

Seven are still missing. Names are on the Missing persons board. If you pulled anyone out of the culvert at Marsh Lane, post it, even if you think someone else already has.

The stack fed roughly a third of the eastern warrens of the Undercroft. Topside, which grows its own food in its own gardens above the smog, will not notice. The tunnel farm under the Mile End spur was not hit, and Doyle will post revised ration tables tonight. The relay kept its mouth shut until we were underground, exactly as the Quartermaster drilled it into us, and the Kestrels went home with nothing to home in on.