Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  Aleksy snapped to attention again. Lethe nodded at him as well, and Aleksy swelled with pride, saluting her, then me, in turn. I just waved back; Lethe returned his salute crisply. Doctor, army lady … my grandmother was a real renaissance chick.

  “He is a good lad,” Hades said after Aleksy closed the door. I had a feeling the “good lad” could still hear him, and that he was intended to.

  “Seems like a nice enough guy,” I said, more to be agreeable (why, Sienna? Why?!) than anything. “Can I ask you something about this missile system?”

  Hades studied me, then nodded. “Of course. It is your right as crown princess to be as involved as you choose in all the decisions of our government.” He chuckled. “After all, someday this will all be yours.”

  I looked out the window past Lethe at the lone skyscraper of Bredoccia, hanging in the background. “Uh. Okay. So … about this missile system … and the nukes …?” He nodded, and I found my words. Or word. “… Why?”

  Hades traded a look with Lethe, a complicated one, filled with significance. She nodded, just once, and Hades sat down, in the chair by my bed, a little heavily, before he looked back up at me with those crisp, blue eyes. “Of course you ask, Sienna … so bright. The question is good. Very good indeed. Why would our tiny country, so long out of the world’s sight, seek power enough to place ourselves in everyone’s view?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking of it a little more gut level, a little more … ‘Hey, Vlad the Impaler now has nukes. This sounds bad,’ but … yeah. That geopolitical stuff … that’s a good point. Now they’re looking at us. Because of nukes. And taking over Russia, probably.”

  “It is a good question,” Hades said, letting his long fingers stretch out over the wooden armrests of the chair, playing along their lengths. “You are the answer, Sienna.” He looked back up at me. “You are the reason we sought this power. Sought to take over Russia.”

  “I … what?” I asked.

  “You ask why we could not have brought you here sooner?” Hades asked. “There were several reasons. Humility was but one. The other … the bigger, especially now that you have made such a stir …” His gaze hardened, and I could tell as he looked at me that this was something he was serious about. “You are hated by the US government. Hunted by them. Hiding in England? They wouldn’t have dared start a war with their oldest ally just for you. But us?” He put his hands out, palms up. “We are nothing to them. Almost no diplomatic ties to speak of. No treaties. Little trade. No leverage.” His eyes flashed.

  “The reason we sought alliance … sought nuclear weapons, sought missile defenses … is you,” Hades said, and here he pushed to his feet. He moved slowly, and I did not stop him when he put his hands on my shoulders. He loomed over me, but there was not an ounce of threat in the way he stood there, casting a protective shadow over me. “You see, they are going to come for you. As they did in Scotland. But instead of finding a toothless country with nothing to bargain with, nothing to trade … nothing to fight with …” He smiled. “They now find us with power. With strength. With the ability to fight back to protect …” He held onto my shoulder with just the slightest pressure. It was …

  Reassuring.

  “And protect you, I shall,” Hades said, “as though you were the last of my line.” A flicker of sadness glowed like a dying ember in his eyes. “Because you are, Sienna Nealon. The last of our kind. And if they come for you …” His gaze hardened, and he turned it toward the window, where Lethe waited, and once he looked her, she nodded. “… We will fight them with everything we have.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Passerini

  Washington DC

  Passerini rode in the back of the SUV as it thumped along the DC roads toward the Pentagon. It wasn’t a long drive, but long enough that he could get his thoughts in a disciplined order before arrival, which given the circumstances, was something he sorely needed.

  “Sir?” the young colonel across from him in the SUV spoke, pulling Passerini out of the darkening cloud that was forming in his mind. It sure seemed like they were heading toward a showdown with Revelen, possibly a war …

  “Yes, son?” Passerini asked. He still didn’t even know the younger man’s name. “Sorry, colonel …” He looked at the nameplate. “Huh.”

  “Yeah, not a great name for an army guy, is it?” the colonel asked with a grin.

  “No, it is not,” Passerini said with a dark chuckle, tearing his eyes away from the Colonel’s name plate. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I was in the Situation Room with you, sir—”

  “I noticed. Your efforts to make me look good were wasted, unfortunately, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless.”

  “Thank you, sir. I was wondering …” The young colonel seemed to lose his train of thought for a second, looking up as though thinking about something, “uhm … sorry … I was wondering if the president is always so … ah … looking for the right word here so as not to give offense …”

  “He’s the Commander-in-Chief, son,” Passerini said, suddenly very serious. No pejorative term the colonel could have come up with would have sat well with Passerini. “But … I take your meaning. Let’s keep these ideas out of our discussion, though, all right?”

  “Sir, he fired you,” the colonel said.

  Passerini let a swift nod be his answer. “And he is well within his rights to do so. I serve at the pleasure of the president. If he wants my resignation at the conclusion of this crisis, I will write it out in my own blood, if asked.”

  “That is commitment,” the colonel said. “Loyalty.”

  “That’s the job, son,” Passerini said. The Pentagon was in sight ahead of them. “We’re the sword and the shield. We follow the civilian leadership.”

  “Even if they’re leading us into a war?” the Colonel asked. “An unprovoked war?”

  Passerini hesitated. “Look …”

  “We’re not the FBI, sir,” the colonel said, leaning forward. His hair looked freshly cut. “The president seems to be trying to get you to fulfill their function, though, doesn’t he? I understand loyalty—more than you know—but this … tracking down an accused person in another country … it seems over the line.”

  “I don’t disagree,” Passerini said. “But he’s the Commander in Chief, and we’re the grunts. I will follow his orders up to the edge of the law. Thus far, all we’ve been asked to do is plan, nothing more.”

  “But he’s ordered other stuff before,” the colonel said. “That attempted grab in Scotland … Harmon completely weaponized the military for use against Sienna Nealon—on American soil, no less—”

  “We’re not doing any of that,” Passerini said, holding up a hand to stay his complaint. “We’ll take it as it comes, but that … other stuff happened on someone else’s watch. I’m not attacking US soil on mine. As to this other thing …” Passerini shook his head. “We’ll present options, but my concern is not Sienna Nealon, wherever she is. We’re not a law enforcement agency, whatever the president thinks. My concern is the Revelen situation, and specifically, how it pertains to their new-old friends, the Russians … and the nukes.”

  “Heh,” the colonel said. “That’s a little more nuanced thinking than your callsign would suggest.”

  Passerini smiled. “‘Hammer,’ you mean? They called me that because when I’d come in hot, I’d drop the hammer on the enemy. Air support for the ground pounders.” He nodded at the colonel. “I’m guessing you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Air support is a beautiful thing,” the colonel said.

  “What’s your first name, son?” Passerini asked, sticking out his hand. This colonel … he was no dummy, for a ground pounder. The SUV was pulling into the Pentagon, squeaking to a stop.

  “Harrison,” the colonel said, smiling back. He took Passerini’s hand, and his grip was firm. “But you can call me Harry if you want … sir.”

  “We should probably stick to rank,” Pas
serini said with a smile of his own. Formality. Discipline. These were crucial elements in the running of Passerini’s world. Rules. Bylaws.

  Duty.

  These were important things in the military world. Still …

  “Welcome to my staff, Colonel Graves,” Passerini said, flicking another look at the colonel’s name bar. “It’s a pleasure to be working with you … Harry.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sienna

  As you can probably imagine, sleep didn’t come super easy after Hades’s little revelation about the US coming for me. There was some tossing and turning after he and Lethe left my room, wanting to, “Let me rest,” as he put it.

  Rest.

  Hah. Yeah, that didn’t seem likely.

  A knock sounded at the door and I sat up in the dark. “Who is it?” I asked, looking around for a weapon in easy reach. Old habits and all that.

  “It’s me,” Lethe’s voice came through the door. “Mind if I come in?”

  “It’s a free country … maybe?” I asked, because hell if I knew what sort of government Revelen actually had other than Hades as king and Lethe as princess and me as crown princess.

  Lethe opened the door and stepped inside. Still dressed in her jeans and sweater, she didn’t look like she’d even tried to sleep, though she’d shed the jacket that she’d been wearing earlier. She kept her arms folded in front of her. It was such a mom thing to do, which made me realize …

  Mom had probably gotten it from her.

  “I couldn’t sleep, either,” Lethe said, standing in the middle of the room like an awkward statue. In the faint light from the window she really did look like Mom, all shadow save for the outline of the bone structure. The voice was different, the hair was different, but … the height, the shape …

  Shit.

  She was just like Mom.

  “Do I even want to know what’s on the future queen’s mind?” I asked. “Because your worries have gotta be heavier than the crown princess’s.”

  She snorted in the darkness. “Maybe. Everyone’s worries carry weight for them. They might not look heavy to someone else, but that doesn’t make them any lighter for the carrier.” Her tone softened. “What’s on your mind?”

  “How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping?” I asked.

  She shuffled over to the bed in the darkness and sat down on the edge, unfolding her arms. “Call it a hunch.”

  “Good hunch,” I said, putting my legs over the side next to her. “Why do you think I can’t sleep?”

  She blew out air between her lips. “Why are you asking me questions like a shrink instead of just answering?”

  “It’s a well-honed defense mechanism,” I said. “Once you let someone inside, it’s really tough to go back to wanting to kick their ass, see, but if you keep them at a distance and don’t bond …”

  “Oh. Right.” She put her hands on the bed and leaned back. “Should have known that. Fine. What’s on my mind? Geopolitics.”

  “Sounds … weighty,” I said.

  She made another noise of amusement, this one deep in her throat. “It’s not what I would have considered serious or worrisome if you’d told me about it when I was fighting armies of Norseman for my very life, but … it is no less perilous should things go awry.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure bringing in the nukes was a great move for defusing the tension in the region,” I said. “Same goes with taking over Russia. Or whatever you did there.”

  “We took a situation in turmoil, put a semi-popular former ruler back into the wings, then pushed him out on stage once we had some things in place to cushion his return. Once he was in place, it was easy from there because Russia is well set up for the exercise of nearly unchecked power.”

  “That … sounds kinda gross,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It is ‘kinda gross,’” she said. “Realpolitik disgusts me. And yet …”

  I waited for the explanation. It did not disappoint.

  “I long for the days when I could just take someone I disagreed with and hack them to pieces on a battlefield or in a duel or pound the stuffing out of them in a fight,” she said, getting back to her feet and pacing. “It was so much simpler back then. Might made right. There was no moral ambiguity. There was a clarity that came with strength. If you could, you did.” She let out a sharp breath. “I’m not longing for those days again, exactly, because the food was terrible, the people were savage, and I’ve grown rather fond of civilizational progress and cell phones and whatnot, but …” She shook her head. “I do miss the simplicity. Fight, win, done.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we’ve come a long way, baby.”

  She looked right at me, and I could feel the irony oozing off her. “Have we?”

  “Yeah, I mean, look at me,” I said. “I had the might, but it didn’t make me right. The US government decided I was in the wrong, boom, they come after me. Across the damned world, in fact.”

  “They’re mightier than you now,” she said. “And you didn’t even really fight them.”

  I sighed. “I never wanted to fight them. On the whole, I do believe in that civilizational system you talked about. I believe in outsourcing our might to just causes. That instead of just me bowling whoever pisses me off or gets in my way, that there’s a system, flawed as it may be, to redress wrongs. And me? Well, they decided I did wrong. Which … I have done wrong.” A little hint of a smile pulled at the corner of my lips. “Just not the wrong they accused me of.”

  “Might still makes them right, if they hammer you down.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a collective action, at least. Not a single king doing what he wants.”

  “Is it?” She was smirking.

  “In theory,” I sighed. “There are established principles. Laws to guide us. Or there were supposed to be.” I shifted uncomfortably on my bed. Obviously the law hadn’t done much to guide the people who’d tried me and thrown me into prison, but …

  Well, it was a nice theory, I’d thought. Until it smashed me in the face.

  “How do you feel?” she asked. It came out of the blue, a radical departure from what we’d been talking about a moment before, with might and fights and whatnot.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Confused, mostly, I think. Like I said before, this isn’t going how I thought it was going to.”

  “You expected a fight,” she said. “You weren’t expecting a home.”

  Boy, that word hit hard, right in the gut. I let out a long, slow breath. “You’re right,” I said, after most of the emotional impact had passed. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve really had a … home.”

  I’d been in Minneapolis only days before, crawling through backyards and hiding from the cops. Fighting it out in a quarry, visiting old friends …

  But I’d been on the run pretty much the entire time, and never once, even when I was chillin’ in my old backyard …

  It had never felt like I’d come home, not really. Ditto for when I’d been back in January to fight the Predator when he’d gone nuts in the city.

  Was that just because I’d been running for so long, because I’d been feeling hounded? Disconnected from everything that had made Minneapolis my home? I mean, I’d been raised there, but pretty much entirely in my own house. My world growing up, from as long as I could remember, was the inside of that house and the small section of backyard I could see whenever I dared to move some furniture so I could look out the back window.

  “You could have it here,” she said. “With us.”

  There was a funny feeling that came along with that. I pushed it away, focusing instead on the question throbbing away in my brain. “What are you not telling me?”

  “Quite a bit,” she said, folding her arms in front of her again. “I mean … Hades and I have both lived a very long time, so the sheer volume of what we know could fill an awful lot of books individually. Combined, it’s even more—”

  “You know what I mean, and it ain’t that.”r />
  “I know what you mean,” Lethe said, stopping short of the window. “Of course there are things we aren’t telling you. There’s so much more going on here than anyone could know looking from the outside. But we will tell you everything. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Why?” I asked. “If what you’re doing here is decent and aboveboard and in the name of protecting me—”

  “And our people,” Lethe said.

  “—then why not get it all out at once?” I asked. “‘Hey, this is the savage-ass shit we’re into. Here are the terrible things we’ve done, loading our rapists and murderers into a catapult and launching them into the sea.’ Actually, I might be on board with that one, depending on—”

  “You joke, but …” she shifted uncomfortably, “… might makes right, and the might given to you by the modern nation-state is powerful. More powerful than the armies of my day by orders of magnitude. When I massacred Viking invaders—”

  “You must be a Packers fan.”

  “—I had to do it by hand, with my chosen,” she said. “We looked our enemies in the eye, felt the battle fury, and claimed their lives. These days, a modern police force in Anytown, USA, could wipe my old army off the map with their superior weapons. I learned this lesson—our whole species learned this lesson—in the Great War. It changed the landscape. You want to talk about people and systems and justice and rule by the masses? Well, the masses, the agglomerated power in modern nation … it beats the living hell out of the destructive power we wielded back then. No one, save for perhaps Genghis Khan, ever had that level of annihilative power at their disposal. And it’s only getting heavier.”

  “That’s dark,” I said, “but it doesn’t exactly clear up the secrets you’re keeping from me.”

  “My point is,” she said, “whatever reputation you think Hades built as Vlad, the things he could do back then—and they were dark, to be sure, and he has rejected them now, also to be sure—they pale compared to what your country can do almost accidentally in a war. Collateral damage, they call it. Well, any modern army, air force, navy—even a modern police force … they can create similar amounts of havoc. The examples are all around you of what an unchecked government can do to its own people. Turkey, Iran—”