Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “Have you ever heard anyone call a metahuman a ‘weapon of mass destruction’?” Lethe asked. Her hand was firm on my arm.

  “Oh, shit,” I mumbled.

  Of course I’d heard someone call a metahuman that.

  They’d called me that. In Eden Prairie. In LA.

  “You get it, don’t you?” Hades asked, and I sensed him pacing away from the window. “The natural progression? If a metahuman is a weapon of mass destruction … well, the United States has only one scripted reaction to that …”

  He was right. Chemical weapons counted as a WMD. So did biowarfare agents like Anthrax. The US didn’t keep either of those as active options, though.

  They kept nuclear weapons, only, as a response to the deployment of a weapon of mass destruction.

  “Here we are, with you, we weapons of mass destruction,” Hades said. “Without any nuclear weapons at our own disposal … we are powerless to truly fight back.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” I said. “You have metas that actually could do some mass destruction-y things. One Gavrikov in the middle of New York City, for instance, and you’d be looking at some pretty hefty casualties. Hell, put Yvonne the Glass Blower next to the Empire State building and it all falls down.”

  “We don’t use people like that,” Lethe said. “Though they probably believe we would.”

  “Can’t imagine why, after the US Attorney’s office,” I said.

  “It will be all right,” Hades said. “This method of redress is cut off to them now. If we did not have nuclear weapons, Gondry could easily use his friends in the press to spread the idea that we were weapons of mass destruction, thus justifying his use of cowardly weapons against our entire populace. We have blocked that with our preparation.”

  “You armed up in order to provide equivalent force against his biggest gun,” I said, lowering my head. “Genius. Dangerous, but … genius. But you’re assuming he would have leapt to that—”

  “I do assume that, yes,” Hades said.

  “The argument of metas as WMDs has been floating out there for a while,” Lethe said. “It’s in the zeitgeist, partially constructed. All it would take is Gondry to speak the words, and most people, knowing the threat you’ve presented as sold by the press over the last few years … they wouldn’t push back. Especially not for the population of some little country in Eastern Europe that no one’s ever heard of.”

  I groaned. “I find this all the more disturbing because of how probable it is.”

  “Alarming, is it not?” Hades asked. “That one man could have such power at his fingertips? This is why I acted to offset that power. Now Gondry will be forced to come at us in more conventional ways to assuage his wounded pride.”

  “This is not just pride,” I said.

  “No,” Lethe said. “It is more complex than that. But pride is the root emotion. It goes to the heart of Gondry’s identity, you see? You are evil to him. If he considers himself a righteous man, how can he possibly let you escape when you’re right there, within his reach? It was easy, when he didn’t know where you were. He could whip the hounds against you, content in the knowledge he was doing everything he could to bring you to justice. But now, now that he knows where you are … now that there’s an obstacle in his way, but he sees the path forward …”

  “He will stop at nothing to set things right,” Hades said. My vision was clearing, and I don’t know if I’d ever seen him looking more serious. “Which is why … it is now time to discuss our response.”

  “Uh … ‘gulp,’ I think is the word here,” I said.

  He smiled at hearing his own stolen phrase parroted back to him. “‘Gulp,’ indeed.” He reached into his suit jacket and when he brought his hand back out, two vials were clutched in his weathered fingers.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what I was looking at. He opened them to reveal two serums—green and blue.

  “The power booster,” I said, licking my lips, which were salty from my tears. “And the Skill-Tree Unlocker.”

  “It is time for you to take up your birthright,” Hades said, taking a step forward and offering me the serums. “To become what you should be. Not the diluted version, the genetic material of Persephone watering down your power, locking it up within your skin … no. It is time for you to ascend to the greatness that has always lain within you. To become more than you were. To fulfill the promise that you have known … that you have whispered to yourself …” His eyes gleamed. “It is time for you to become—”

  I knew the word. I’d said it often enough the last few years and heard it spoken, right into my soul by the oldest voice in my head other than my own. It came to my lips now, in time with Hades’s voice, and I spoke it into being.

  My legacy.

  My reason for being.

  My … future.

  “Death.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Passerini

  The Pentagon

  “What does this mean?” Passerini asked, looking at the monitors. They’d just gotten the feed from the FBI, the live view from inside the hangar of what had happened when the task force had taken on Sienna Nealon and her defenders, and …

  Well, Bruno Passerini was left with questions.

  “How can you not know what this means?” President Gondry’s voice crackled on the other end of the line. Audio only, fortunately. “It means the damned enemy wiped out our task force. It means we’re facing something stronger than we anticipated.”

  Well, yeah, that much was obvious even to egghead Gondry. Passerini shared a look with Colonel Graves, who was shaking his head, eyes rolled. He stopped when he saw Passerini watching him; insubordination wasn’t a good look, and Graves, who must have been in uniform a long time, should have known better. He smiled tightly back at Passerini, who maintained his frown.

  “Sir, I meant the business about him being ‘Hades,’” Passerini said. “We’re talking … old school Hades, right? Greek God of Death?”

  “Do you know any other Hades?” Gondry snapped back at him over the open line.

  Passerini kept his reaction in check for his men. This was how Gondry was when the cameras were off. The man was incredibly dignified when in the presence of any media, but the moment he wasn’t …

  “I guess I’m just struggling with the idea that we’re facing the Greek God of Death some several thousand years after we stopped believing in him as anything other than a fairy tale and in a country some several thousand miles from his own,” Passerini said.

  “Fairy tales have their roots in true stories, SecDef,” FBI Director Chalke’s voice, dripping with smugness, entered the conversation. “We learned that when it came out metahumans were a real thing. That means yes, the gods of old had their basis in actual people. Including Hades, who is apparently still alive.”

  “And related to our fugitive,” Gondry’s tone was clipped, fury seeping out. “Great-grandfather? How did this escape our notice?”

  “We knew about it,” Chalke said, so smooth that Passerini only caught a hint of defensiveness beneath the surface. “We just thought he was dead. We certainly didn’t know he was hiding out in Eastern Europe, running a country and taking it nuclear.”

  “Once again the intelligence community fails to show any,” Gondry said, crackling on. He never displayed quite this much raw emotion on television, unless he was trying to make some sort of empathetic connection to a crowd. Passerini had read a bio of LBJ a year or so ago, and he, too, had been a son of a bitch when he wasn’t on the record. Unlike Gondry, though, LBJ had some serious clout behind the scenes. And some brains. “President Harmon confided in me his surprise at being blindsided by this metahuman business when it all came out—”

  Passerini raised an eyebrow at this. Graves snorted loudly, and Passerini frowned at him. The colonel needed to learn to control himself.

  “—and it’s all the fault of you idiots at the CIA, in the military, who didn’t know this was going on—” />
  Passerini would have sooner eaten his dress uniform hat, without so much as a condiment to cover the cloth flavor, than assume Harmon or the intelligence agencies that reported to him didn’t know every damned thing there was to know about metas. Sitting here, talking to Gondry, listening to him spit out this ignorance, he was suddenly reminded of the Eisenhower quote regarding Nixon’s contributions as his VP—“If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

  “—and now here we are, staring down the God of Death and his nuclear arsenal,” Gondry said, thumping sounds accompanying his voice as if he were hitting a table for emphasis. “It’s like none of you have bothered to read a book in your lives, let alone the briefing documents you’ve been preparing all these years.”

  Passerini wasn’t going to stick his head into this particular fire. Better to wait and see where the president wanted to take this.

  “Well, I’ve read your reports,” Gondry said. “All of them. Here’s what I want from you, SecDef. I want you to take the entire department to DEFCON 2 and dust off your war plans for an invasion of Revelen and Russia through the Fulda Gap.”

  A cold chill ran up Passerini’s scalp, and the silence over the phone line and in the Situation Room was palpable. Those were severely outdated plans; the Fulda Gap was entirely in Germany, and was unnecessary now if they wanted to invade Russia. Had Gondry just read a book on the Cold War and gotten ‘Fulda Gap’ stuck in his head? Better to not point that one out. “Sir … you’re talking about invading a sovereign country—”

  “That’s right,” Gondry said. “Sienna Nealon and her family have presented themselves as the greatest threat in our modern age. Why, we don’t even know what they’re doing in that country. Knowing what we know about her and realizing we have no intelligence apparatus on the ground, we have to assume they’re running that place with the fervor of the maddest of mad dictators. There’s a reason we don’t have any intelligence assets on the ground, and I think this is it. They’ve got that place locked up like Nazi Germany, and I think we just caught our first glimpse of their Hitler.”

  “Wow,” Colonel Graves muttered under his breath, “we’re not even on the internet, and there went Godwin’s law.”

  “That is awfully assumptive, sir,” Passerini said. “We have satellite intelligence, and there is no hint of … camps or … uh … anything of the sort.” That cold feeling on his skin was persisting, and he felt an urgent need to throw some cold water on the president’s plan before it got any more insane. “Could we perhaps, instead, assume that maybe—just maybe—that this threat they’re presenting is more of a garden variety type, sir?”

  “They’ve gone nuclear, Mr. Secretary.” Gondry’s voice was cold, chillingly so. “What motive do you think they have for that, exactly, other than to defy us while they execute their own plans? You said it yourself—they’ve essentially taken over Russia, and I think we can assume it was done by metahuman means, and that means they’ve turned our foremost adversary’s entire war apparatus against us—”

  “Oh, God,” Passerini whispered to himself. This was what Gondry had gotten out of his briefing? All those times he’d tried to wake the man to the threat at hand, and now he’d suddenly reversed course and taken it all on board then gone twenty miles past reason? Now that Sienna Nealon was suddenly involved? “Sir, I would caution you not to read too much into this. There is most definitely a threat, but so far, it’s very much in line with what we’ve seen from Russia in the past. We’ve had nukes pointed at each other for sixty years, and they haven’t escalated the behavior. They’ve just installed some of their ICBMs from other locations into Revelen, which is a tiny country. This changes the strategic picture very minimally in terms of threat profile, sir, and—”

  “This is ridiculous,” Gondry said, and the hum of anger swelled to make his voice even louder. “For a week you’ve been hammering at me to do something about this Revelen situation. Well, I’ve taken your advisement, and now I’m ready to act, and here you are, sitting on the sidelines, Mr. Secretary.” There was a cool moment of silence before Gondry broke it viciously. “If I’d known my Secretary of Defense was a coward, I’d have fired you sooner.”

  Passerini wasn’t the type to go into a killing rage, but the college professor who’d never served a day in his life, the man who’d demonstrated against every war the country had ever had … calling him a chicken? Well, that was a bit much.

  Colonel Graves was looking at him, slightly taken aback. “Wow,” he mouthed.

  Something about Graves’s response cooled him right off. Passerini had been in war, had seen missiles intended for his plane streak by thanks to good fortune and countermeasures, and he would never forget what it was like to see that sort of shit go down—something Gondry would probably never feel. As a result, once the initial heat of the president’s volley burned past him, Passerini’s head cooled off quickly, just like it had in every fight he’d ever been in. People were going to shoot at you in war, and, apparently, in government. His job was to keep cool and prevail, not go hot and launch a flight of Slammers into the fray. Not now, anyway.

  “Mr. President,” Passerini said, choosing his words carefully. “I am already executing your orders to bring out war plans designed to end this conflict quickly.” They’d been revising them constantly for the last week, in fact, since this situation had started. There were definitely options on the table by now, in spite of Gondry’s stubborn refusal to mobilize anything until now, when his dander was suddenly up.

  “About time,” Gondry said.

  “And in fact we’ve been working on them all along,” Passerini said. “Now that you’ve decided to commit to action, we can move some additional forces into place that you, uh … blocked when last we spoke.” Passerini wasn’t above taking a little shot to remind the president exactly how much their positions had flipped.

  Graves was shaking his head, and Passerini skipped his next statement, the one he’d been preparing to volley back. Cooler heads needed to prevail, and what he’d planned to say was … well, it probably was akin to firing an AMRAAM up the president’s ass. Or at least at Gondry’s manhood.

  “However, sir,” Passerini said, and he didn’t even have to try particularly hard to keep his cool, now that he’d seen Graves shaking his head, “any response we bring to bear carries the possibility of escalating this situation. In a normal war with a smaller country, like, say, just for comparison’s sake, Estonia, they have no ability to raise the stakes beyond a conventional fight. We invade, they attack back on their own homeland. We hold the high ground, and they can’t do anything but battle us there. With Revelen, though—”

  “Yes, I understand what’s at stake here,” Gondry snapped back.

  “Sir, I’d be derelict in my duty of bringing you war plans if I didn’t inform you of this,” Passerini said, and that shut him up for a second. “They have twelve ICBMs, sir. Stiletto-19’s. Each of those has six multiple independent reentry vehicles.”

  “I don’t give a damn—” Gondry started to say.

  “That means every one of those missiles has six smaller missiles that break off once they reach striking distance of our country,” Passerini said, not letting the president cut him off. Graves was nodding along. “Every one of those MIRVs has at least a five-megaton warhead. That’s a city-killer. That means they can target our seventy biggest cities … and obliterate them. And that’s just Revelen’s capability, not counting Russia.”

  “I damned well know what we’re dealing with,” Gondry said. “I have read everything you’ve sent me. And we will not take this war nuclear, damn you, do you understand me? I want to invade them, though. I want them pacified. We will not have this threat hanging over our heads, do you hear me? This—this—second Hitler—out on the frontier … well, I won’t leave him or his damned lunatic granddaughter to threaten us. You hear me, Mr. Secretary?”

  Passerini did hear him. He didn’t like anything about the situation, but he heard the preside
nt loud and clear. “I’ll have you options in a matter of hours, sir,” Passerini said, then made the throat-cutting gesture to the operator. The click was definite at the other end, beating him to the punch. He gave a quick glance around the map table, to the host of dour faces waiting there. Graves might have been the only exception, a strange twinkle in the colonel’s eye. He was an odd one, even for the army. “You heard the president. He wants a war. Let’s figure out what we need to do in order to win it for him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sienna

  “Wolfe knew, damn him,” I said. Lethe looked at me funny. “He knew you were here. Told me so, in his dying words. ‘Become Death,’ he told me.” I shook my head. “I thought he just wanted me to be more like you, but no … he knew I was coming here.”

  Hades loomed in front of me. “This was always to be your fate.” He stood tall, almost incredibly so, while I sat on the bed next to Lethe. She was just off to the side, looking into my eyes, as though she could see the damage the Apollo had inflicted on them. “You were always bound to take up the mantle of Death. You are well suited to it, yes?”

  “Is that so?” I asked, looking pointedly at Lethe.

  She dodged my question by going back one. “Of course Wolfe knew,” Lethe said, letting her hand fall off my shoulder. “You and I met before, remember? He knew me on sight. And I may have mentioned Revelen, so … I’m sure he put it all together. Me being supposedly dead, now living here. Some fearsome man in charge of the country. It’s not a very big leap.”

  “Harmon also knew,” Hades said. “I suspect, anyway. He was a mind-reader, after all. It would not have been impossible for him to sift through the minds of some who might have known me in the past, put it together with what he knew of me.” Hades smiled. “We did, after all have dealings with him.”

  “And neither of them told me,” I said. “Liars in my own head.”