Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4)

by Andrew Seiple

  “I see. I accept the promotion, Tyrant. What are we to do with these dissidents?”

  “THEY’RE RIGHT OF COURSE, SHE IS A USURPER. DEPENDING ON HOW COMPETENT THEY ARE THERE MIGHT YET BE A PLACE FOR THEM IN THE COMMAND STRUCTURE. UNDER YOU. BUT WE DIGRESS. SHE INQUIRES, FOR A SECOND TIME, HOW HER CITY FARES IN REGARDS TO THE WAR?”

  “All is quiet. The rebels are out of the city, and reports have them moving north to link up with the Liber Mariposa insurrectionists in Malo Verde.”

  “JUST AS PLANNED...” I chuckled, shaking the windows.

  “If you say so. I still think—” he bit off his reply.

  “NO, NO, SPEAK YOUR MIND. YOU ARE HER GENERAL, SHE WOULD BE FOOLISH TO DISREGARD YOUR ADVICE.”

  “And yet you did, yesterday, when you let them go. They’ll link up with rebels, up north, and be harder to put down. We gave them free reinforcements, and it will cost us that much more blood from my soldiers when we go to dig them out.”

  “YES AND NO. FIRSTLY, GETTING EL HOMBRE ÚLTIMO OFF THE BATTLEFIELD WAS A NECESSITY. IF THE PRICE OF THAT WAS SEVERAL HUNDRED MORE REBELS TO FIGHT LATER, SO BE IT. SECONDLY, THIS GIVES US TIME TO RE-ARM.”

  “My men are already well supplied. Save for the artillery you destroyed, we should be set to move on Malo Verde at once.”

  “YOU ARE WELL SUPPLIED WITH CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS, YES. DIRE CAN GIVE YOU UNCONVENTIONAL ONES AS WELL.”

  “Well now...” He sounded pleased. From what Bunny, an old friend, had told me she’d never met a general who wasn’t interested in new ways to kill his enemies. This one seemed to be no exception. “Except wait, is there training associated with these new weapons?”

  “NONE THAT MATTERS. EASY ENOUGH TO BUILD THEM WITH SIMPLE INTERFACES.”

  “Wait, you have to build them first? We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “AH, GENERAL RICIO... YOU ARE TOO USED TO DEALING WITH INFERIOR INTELLECTS. DOUBT DIRE IN MANY THINGS, BUT DO NOT DOUBT HER ABILITY TO CREATE TECHNOLOGY. BY THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW YOUR MEN WILL HAVE THE WEAPONS YOU DESIRE.”

  “If you say so, Tyrant.”

  “SHE DOES. GOING TO ASSUME YOU’RE PATROLLING THE STREETS, RIGHT?”

  “Of course!” He sounded vaguely offended.

  “GOOD. KEEP A WATCH, AND LET HER KNOW IF ANYONE TRIES ANYTHING STUPID. DIRE OUT.”

  The military was in hand for now, at least within the territory that I could control.

  More importantly, the people snooping on the military bands now knew that I was going to be developing new weapons to escalate the war. If this didn’t draw a few heroes out of hiding, then I’d eat my mask.

  I’d learned something, from my last few major operations. Every time you think things are going great, every time you’re finally progressing your goals, dealing with the hardships, and managing to accomplish something worthwhile, heroes will come and then everything will fall apart. No matter what you do, no matter how you prepare, they’ll find the exact weak point in your plans or preparations and knock them to bits with spandex-clad fists.

  Every city in the world had heroes. It was foolish to think that Mariposa City didn’t. They’d be the dangerous ones too, hiding from El Presidente’s own metahuman and mundane thugs, and doing their damnedest to bring down the system from within.

  I’d memorized the files I’d found from the Minister of Secret Police’s computer, so I had a few names and pictures of suspects, but I’d simply have to see who turned up. Until then, they could spend time looking for munitions that didn’t exist yet and secret factories. Sooner or later they’d get fed up and come for me directly. Funny enough, it was better that they did that now, rather than later.

  Later on, if things fell out like my best case scenario predicted, I’d be way too busy for random heroes to jump me.

  The next step was the economy, stabilizing and shoring it up. Right now things were in freefall, with people hiding in their houses, jobs going undone, and food being stashed away against expected shortages and hardships. Black marketers and profiteers were stocking up in anticipation of making a killing, at the expense of people who couldn’t afford to pay the prices they’d demand.

  The normal checks and balances to this required government intervention, emergency purchases, and long hours for the paid personnel who would be called up to deal with this. But the treasury was bare, the dollars that weren’t shifted to Corazon’s Swiss Bank account had fled with the various ministers.

  Fortunately, I had a solution. And after fifteen minutes of super-genius speed research and work, I had leverage. So I paged Spetta.

  She arrived after ten minutes, looking a little tired. “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” I asked, surveying her. My flawless memory confirmed that she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on last night.

  “Ah, yes. I’ve been talking with Adrian. I mean, El Hombre Último.”

  “ABOUT?”

  She sighed, and wobbled. I dragged out Corazon’s fluffy desk chair, and with some disbelieving looks to make sure it was all right, she flopped into it. “Ay, this is as comfortable as I thought it was.” She fiddled with the levers, got it to recline. “Ah... thank you Empress.”

  “CALL HER DOCTOR. SO WHAT WERE YOU TALKING ABOUT WITH ADRIAN?”

  “Honestly I’m worried about him. He was a teacher before all of this, not a soldier. He saw a lot of his friends die. He made a lot of his friends die.” She took off her glasses, as her eyes misted over. “He didn’t know what was going on, when he got his power at first. And it always takes the nearest people to him. He thought he was invincible at first. He feels a lot of people died who didn’t need to, because he got stupid.” She blinked, shook her head. “So much guilt, all from one day. He’s hurting.”

  “ALL IT TAKES IS ONE BAD DAY,” I said, looking out the windows again. “TRUST HER, SHE KNOWS HOW IT GOES.”

  Alpha flickered in, to the left of the desk. “Do you think we need to arrange a psychologist?”

  Watching Spetta try to leap up from the comfy chair was a cheap laugh, I’ll admit, but she settled down after a few seconds. “Don’t do that!” She glanced up at my mask. “Ah, I’d like him not to do that. Please.”

  “KNOCK FIRST, ALPHA,” I reprimanded. “BUT YOU RAISE A VALID POINT. SEE IF YOU CAN LINE UP A COUNSELOR OF SOME SORT.”

  “I’ll see what I can find. PTSD’s not uncommon in this part of the world, particularly with the Mexican Cartel mess to the west. And if that’s not one of his issues, I’ll eat your mask.”

  “HEH.” I looked back at Spetta. “THANK YOU FOR TENDING TO HIM. UNFORTUNATELY, NO REST FOR NEITHER RIGHTEOUS NOR WICKED. GOING TO NEED YOU TO LINE UP A MEETING WITH THE FOLLOWING NAMES...” I tapped a fresh set of printouts on the desk. She picked them up and leafed through them, eyes growing wider as she went.

  “These are some of the most powerful people in Mariposa.”

  “OH YES.”

  “El Presiden— Corazon was worried about some of these people. He didn’t dare touch them.”

  “SHE KNOWS.”

  “He said they could break us like brittle twigs under the feet of a giant.”

  “AND HE WAS RIGHT. EMPHASIS ON THE WORD ‘WAS’.”

  She took a deep breath. “All right, Doctor. When do you want to meet with them?”

  “IN ONE HOUR, PRECISELY. LET THEM KNOW THAT IF THEY ARE LATE, THEY WILL NOT BE PERMITTED ENTRY.”

  She bit her lower lip. “I really—”

  “GO ON.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Alpha laughed, and hopped up on the desk like some sort of errant sprite. “Believe me, this’ll be fun to watch. Want a visual feed of the meeting, later?”

  “Um...” She looked to me. I shrugged. Took some doing to twitch those oversized spiky shoulderpads without scratching the ceiling, but I managed.

  “Sure...” she said, and departed, with Alpha in tow.

  One hour later I was sitting behind the desk, gravitic nodes going full strength to lighten my suit
of armor down to a mere hundred pounds so that I didn’t crush Corazon’s fluffy chair. It had seemed silly to install a node in the armor’s butt a few months back. Now that whimsy had paid off. Never neglect the ass! I made a note to write that down in a book of supervillain maxims at some point.

  Across the desk from me, six of the ten branch CEO’s of the biggest foreign corporations in Mariposa stood, sweltering in the heat of the sun as it streamed in through my windows. I’d turned the air conditioning off just for this meeting. A petty trick, perhaps, but I’d dealt with enough business sharks to know that if you put them off balance you gained an edge in negotiations.

  “GOOD AFTERNOON,” I offered, voice just loud enough to be uncomfortable. “WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME REFRESHMENTS? TEA PERHAPS, OR HOT COFFEE?” I gestured to the silver service cart parked in a corner of the room. “PROBABLY NOT POISONED YET, SHE DOESN’T ANTICIPATE ANY TROUBLE ON THAT FRONT FOR ANOTHER DAY OR TWO.”

  “No, thank you,” the tallest man ground out, crossing his arms and folding his hands under the sweat-soaked armpits of his suit. He was the branch chief of the local coffee corporation. Mariposa wasn’t its only bean-producing nation, but several key varieties came from our little island. “We’d like to get down to business, if it’s all right with you.”

  “BY ALL MEANS.” I spread a hand with a magnanimous wave, manipulating the gravitics to compensate, frantically trying to avoid squashing the chair. “DO YOU KNOW WHY DIRE CALLED YOU HERE TODAY?”

  “Not a clue,” the sole thin man in the room said, hands firmly in his pockets. He was the deputy CEO of Amalgamated Fruit Incorporated, a corporation with a shady past and large holdings throughout the Caribbean and Latin Americas.

  “SHE IS OFFERING YOU THE UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE GLORIOUS RECONSTRUCTION, A GRAND EVENT WHERE THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS OF MARIPOSA LISTEN TO THEIR HEARTS, AND GIVE AID TO UNDO SOME OF THE DAMAGE THAT CORRUPTION HAS CAUSED THIS ISLAND.”

  “Of course,” the shortest man in there smiled. This would be the division manager for the textile plants that turned out sports jerseys twenty-four seven. Appalling sweatshops, each and every one, paying somewhere around sixteen cents an hour for a fifty-cent product that made them about ten dollars in pure profit after shipping and handling was accounted for. The man pulled his briefcase up to waist-level, and popped it open to show me stacks of crisp dollars. “We’d be happy to gift you a small token of our appreciation... El Presidente.”

  My laugh shook the windows, and also my guests. “PLEASE. THIS IS HOW MARIPOSA GOT INTO THIS MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE. AND FOR THE RECORD, SHE IS NOT YOUR PRESIDENT. SHE IS YOUR EMPRESS-FOR-LIFE.”

  The oldest man in the group glared. He was the sugar magnate, and by all reports he took no shit from anyone save the leather-clad ladies he paid fifty dollars an hour to whip him. “We’re all American citizens. You’re no empress of ours, lady.”

  “GIVE HER TIME,” I waved a hand at the sports jersey guy. “OH, PUT THAT MONEY AWAY. SHE’LL TAKE YOUR MONEY, YES, BUT ABOVE THE TABLE, DOCUMENTED, AND THROUGH YOUR TAX RETURNS. WHICH SHE HAS NOTICED ARE NONEXISTENT FOR THE LAST FEW DECADES FOR MOST OF YOUR CORPORATIONS.”

  Even though the room was steaming hot, they acted like it had dropped twenty degrees, all of a sudden.

  “We don’t pay taxes,” the import tycoon whispered. “That’s the agreement the administration signed off on, before we set up shop here.”

  “NO, THAT’S THE AGREEMENT YOU FOISTED ON HIM, BACK WHEN HIS VICTORY WAS FRESH, HIS SUPPORT WAS SHAKY, AND HE NEEDED AMERICA MORE THAN YOU NEEDED HIM. DIRE HAS SEEN FIT TO AMEND THAT AGREEMENT TO REFLECT RECENT EVENTS. YOU’LL HAVE A COPY TO REVIEW AND SIGN, OF COURSE, AND A DAY TO CONSIDER IT.”

  “And if we don’t want to?” The mining guy asked. He was the least wealthy of all of them, thanks to some nasty political infighting, but he still made a tidy sum on a few remaining gold seams. The arsenic and other toxic chemicals left behind from the refining process up north had tainted perhaps a fifth of the island, badly enough that the Northern Chamis had a cancer rate six times the national average.

  “IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO SIGN, THAT IS YOUR RIGHT. HOWEVER, THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT IS AUTHORIZED TO IMMEDIATELY SEIZE ANY ASSETS THEY DEEM NECESSARY UNTIL SUCH TIME THAT THE UNPAID TAXES ARE RESOLVED. INCLUDING YOUR LAND.”

  That caused a stir. “Now you’re joking,” The fruit guy said, pulling out a cigar and lighting it. “That’s American soil, by treaty and by purchase. You know what kind of shitstorm you’d stir up by doing that? You trying to get war declared on yourself, little lady? Trying to get Crusader set on your ass? Nobody cares if you decide to be the boss beaner here, but the second you fuck with American territory, you’re going to—”

  The cigar fell in two pieces, as my pinpoint particle beam lanced through it. Part of his collar floated free of his shirt, and a little puff of charred ash escaped. Eyes bulging, he froze as I stood, and stood, and stood until I towered over all of them.

  “YOU UNDERESTIMATE HOW LITTLE SHE TRULY CARES. AMERICA IS THERE. YOU ARE HERE. YOU SHALL PAY MARIPOSA HER DUE, AND IF YOU WILL NOT RESPECT ITS NEW TYRANT, THEN YOU SHALL LEARN TO FEAR HER.”

  I bent over the desk, looming over them all as they drew back. “FURTHERMORE, AMERICA WON’T DO A THING. THE SEIZURE WILL BE ENTIRELY LEGAL.”

  “Yeah, how the heck would that even fly?” Sugar was studying me with narrowed eyes. Made of sterner stuff than the others, I’d remember that.

  I sat back down. “SIMPLE. ACCORDING TO THE DEEDS OF PURCHASE, IT REFERS TO EVERY TRANSFER AS MARIPOSAN SOIL. IT DOES NOT REFER TO THE PLANTS, TREES, ANIMALS, MICROBES, AIR, SUNLIGHT, AND WATER UPON THOSE PLOTS. AS SUCH, YOU DO NOT OWN THEM AND IN SUCH AN EVENT, AS DICTATED BY THE MARIPOSAN CODE OF JUSTICIO, SECTION FORTY-ONE CLAUSE NINE, THE RIGHTS REVERT BACK TO THE STATE. AND IN FACT, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE YEARS OF USAGE OF SUCH PRICELESS RESOURCES UPON YOUR ‘PROPERTY’.”

  “There is no section forty-one,” the mining guy said.

  “THERE IS AS OF THIS MORNING, SIGNED AND STAMPED INTO AUTHORITY BY DIRE HERSELF. YES, IT’S ALL LEGAL WITHIN MARIPOSAN LAW.”

  Amusement faded to shock, as they realized that I was serious. They all started talking at once, these powerful men who suddenly realized that they were dealing with someone who gave pretty much zero fucks about their rules. I let them rattle and yell for a second, before I held up a hand. It was carrot time.

  “ALTERNATIVELY, YOU COULD JUST PAY YOUR TAXES. IN WHICH CASE IT GOES BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL.” I nudged a finger toward a stack of folders on the desk. “TAKE A LOOK AT THEM, THEN DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT IT’S WORTH YOUR TIME AND MONEY AND STRESS TO YELL.”

  Anger simmered as they came over, all at once, fought briefly until the sugar guy took charge and distributed the folders. Anger that turned into surprise as they riffled through the papers and saw the bottom line.

  “This is... less than I thought it would be,” The sports jersey guy said. “Hell, it’s less than the bri... gift I brought.”

  “YES. THE FORMER REGIME GOT RATHER AMBITIOUS WITH THEIR CORRUPTION. DIRE IS IMMUNE TO SUCH PETTY NEEDS. MARIPOSA, HOWEVER, NEEDS BOTH A RESTOCKED TREASURY TO RECOVER FROM DECADES OF NEGLECT, AND THE SOURCES OF EMPLOYMENT THAT EACH OF YOU REPRESENTS.” Shitty and exploitative as they were, kicking them off the island would kill a lot of local jobs. They were mundane evils, petty evils that I could address later, bit by bit. Well, depending on how long before I began Phase Three, anyway.

  “I see,” the coffee guy said, rubbing his chin. He glanced to the four unclaimed folders, for the four companies that hadn’t bothered sending representation. “What about the others?”

  “AH, THANK YOU FOR REMINDING HER.” I took the folders, tossed them into the wastebasket. It roared, startling them into jumping, as the industrial-grade shredder I’d installed this morning sprayed confetti all over the carpet. “THE OFFER IN THOSE FOLDERS IS NOW NULL AND VOID, SINCE THEY COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO ATTEND.”

  I reached under t
he desk, desperately manipulating the gravitics to keep the chair intact as I drew out four big, red, skull-marked folders filled with thick reams of paper. They made a satisfying crunch as I dropped them on the desk. “THIS IS THE OFFER THEY’LL HAVE TO SETTLE FOR NOW.”

  Grins around the room, and I knew I’d taken the right tack. Ah, businessmen, so predictable. Show them how their peers and rivals are getting the shaft, and suddenly you’re their best friend.

  But as they left, Sugar stayed behind. “And if they reject the terms in those four-alarm folders?”

  “THEN DIRE WILL SEIZE THEIR ASSETS. IT WAS NO IDLE THREAT.”

  “Lady, don’t take this the wrong way, but that’ll get you dead. The folks in Washington running this show have long memories and don’t like change. And no matter how big or tough you are, there’s always someone tougher.”

  I’d learned that one the hard way. Lost friends because of it.

  And sworn to do better.

  “HER FOES ARE GREAT AND WITHOUT NUMBER, BUT SHE IS DIRE.” I folded my fingers. “THANK YOU FOR THE ADVICE. CALL IF YOU HAVE ANY MORE. DO NOT LET HER DETAIN YOU.”

  The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. I had Spetta schedule a few necessary things for tomorrow and the day after, and sent her off to get some sleep. A few quick checks on the palace’s growing infrastructure grid, and I was pleased to find that its progress was well within parameters. By the end of tomorrow night the entire place would be wireless, and ready for the new broadcast grid.

  Speaking of which...

  I detoured to the dungeon, and confirmed that the tunneling bots had worked their way under the bay.

  Then I consulted a map, and a list of property deeds.

  Mariposa city was divided into five barrios, or districts. There weren’t exact lines, places tended to blend into each other here. No real building codes or regulations so people did what they could to bribe or sneak things through. But some generalities applied.