“You can visit him,” Chester confirmed, gravely. “Just don’t take the lawyer with you if you do.”
***
“It’s a shitty deal,” Lane said, afterwards. Youngster had given himself up without a fight, although he’d been chained up and locked in a sealed van just in case he intended to escape halfway to the airport. “We should be shutting down the entire operation.”
“We might be doing just that,” Chester said. He wiped his brow, feeling a sudden tiredness now that the mission was over. “God alone knows how many of the young punks are involved with the smuggling operation. Maybe all of them.”
Lane snorted. “But we can't put them on trial,” he said. “Washington would prefer to avoid a confrontation with the superhuman community.”
Chester nodded. There were upwards of seven thousand superhumans in the world, depending upon who was doing the counting. If the Young Stars were put on trial in an open courtroom, it would become a media circus and their lawyers would raise the question of if they were receiving a harsher sentence because of their superhuman celebrity status. The last thing anyone wanted was an open confrontation between superhumans who felt that they were getting picked on and the rest of the world.
“They’ll be in jail, and then they’ll be in the Pit,” he said. “They won’t get away with it, we’ll just...ensure that they are punished without anyone knowing what happened. Justice will be served and we won’t have to worry about a crisis.”
“I wish I was so confident,” Lane said. “What do you think the Young Stars will tell their fellow superhumans?”
Chester shrugged. “What can they tell them? That they took drugs, that they were involved in smuggling drugs, that they killed to keep the secret and failed spectacularly?”
He smiled and started to walk towards the van. “The only ones who will listen to them after that are the anarchists,” he added, “and they hate us anyway.”
Chapter Thirteen
“That’s the last pallet for the moment,” Gateway said. She’d opened a portal between Kinshasa and New York, where a number of charities had prepared emergency supplies for the Congo. It wasn't as well-organised as Hope would have liked, but it would have to do until the governments got their act together and started sending some proper help. “Enough to last us a week?”
She started to collapse and would have hit the dirt if Hope hadn't caught her. “Maybe,” he said. He didn't have the heart to tell her that the supplies they’d shoved through the portal were barely enough to feed half the city for a day. But the medical supplies should last longer, he hoped. The sight of children with everything from scurvy to poorly-set broken bones was heartbreaking. “I think you’d better get some rest.”
“I’m not tired,” Gateway protested. Her yawn rather spoilt her pretence and Hope laughed, not unkindly. “I just need to lie down for a few minutes and then...”
“I’ll take you back to the mansion,” Hope said firmly, “and put you to bed. Get at least a few hours sleep before you open the next portal. The effort is killing you.”
He picked her up and lifted her through the air towards the mansion. He didn't really need a comfortable bed—and insects couldn't bite through his skin—but the superhumans who lacked his invulnerability had insisted on air conditioning, comfy blankets and insect repellent. At least they were being more reasonable than the representative from a world-wide charity who had arrived in the city yesterday. He had expected luxury: excellent food, a chance to make statements in front of the growing army of reporters and authority, even though he knew next to nothing about the actual situation on the ground. What sort of mind believed that the people who had been there from the beginning knew less than someone with a fancy degree and absolutely no practical experience?
Kinshasa was slowly coming back to life, although the engineers who had emerged once they’d seen the heads on poles had warned that it might take months or years to repair the city’s infrastructure. Between successive warlords and periods of anarchy, the city had been battered; almost no one had been trying to maintain either water or power supplies. The generators were primitive and in bad repair, while the water filtration system had broken down completely and fresh water was unsafe to drink. At least the women knew to boil it before drinking, using heat to kill the bacteria that spread disease. But some of them had even been arrested for hoarding water.
The rest of the country wasn't in a better position, really. They’d crushed or scattered the various factions and sent the foreign outsiders running for their lives, but as far as he could tell, no one was interested in cooperation. The hatred had struck so deeply into the country that farmers were refusing to sell food to the cities if the cities held people from different tribes, while engineers were refusing to work to benefit people other than their own tribes. It was madness—they were all in the same boat—and yet they seemed inclined to try to sink it without the warlords. And the few farmers who had survived were simply unable to produce enough food without expanding their farms, because many of the other farmsteads had been devastated by the fighting. It would take years to get them all up and running.
He dropped down outside the mansion and gently pushed Gateway towards the entrance, hoping to get away before the reporters spotted him. They’d been reluctant to get their hands dirty until he’d made it clear that there would be no interviews unless they helped, yet it was difficult to keep track of who had put in a stint helping to distribute food or repair power lines—or disable the IEDs scattered throughout the countryside. The ones away from people could be detonated safety by a superhuman, but the ones attached to what vital infrastructure was left had to be disarmed. There was just so much to do...hadn’t the world seemed simpler before he’d decided to try to fix some of the problems at the source?
“Hope,” a voice called. Hope sighed inwardly and smiled as the reporters ran towards him. Some of them fancied themselves superhero groupies, but others were sceptical that the Saviours could accomplish anything in the Congo. Never mind that the country had had two days of near-complete peace; they still suspected that Hope’s project would fall apart in the next two months. “Can we have a statement for the evening news...?”
One of the problems with superhuman ears, Hope had learned early on, was that it was difficult to focus on any given person if they were all chattering away like birds. “Please,” he said, holding up his hands, “one at a time. I cannot answer you all at once.”
He waited while the reporters jostled among themselves to establish a pecking order, with representatives from CNN finally getting into the lead. They had probably been filming him since he’d landed, transmitting their pictures back to the United States, where they would be most likely taken out of context and shown to the news, depending upon one’s political bias. He resisted the temptation to sigh out loud and studied the reporter with interest. At least she was pretty enough to be worth looking at.
“The United Nations issued a statement condemning your invasion of the Congo, without a single major power dissenting,” she said. “Do you have a response for the United Nations?”
Hope scowled. He’d hoped there would be some support, from Iraq at the very least, but there had been nothing. Not that that was too surprising. There weren't many states willing to grant even conditional legitimacy to an outside invasion force that overthrew a government, even if that government had barely been in control of a tenth of the country.
“My response is this,” he said, flatly. “I refuse to listen to the hectoring of an organisation that has so signally failed to bring either hope or justice to the failed states of the world. I refuse to respect an organisation that has either been unable to prevent genocide or has been an active accomplice to mass slaughter. The issues at stake are not those of national pride or self-determination, but of protecting threatened populations from abuse, rape and slaughter. I will not wait for talking politicians to talk and talk until the problem goes away when everyone is dead. I will take action
.
“The UN may condemn as it pleases. I will not consider myself bound by their declarations and self-interested warnings. It is my intention to ensure that the Congo—and every other failed state—is put on a firm footing towards the rule of law, democracy and prosperity. And if the UN does more than issue condemnations, I will consider it a threat and act accordingly.”
There was a brief shuffling among the reporters and then someone else came forward. “Hope, Senator Terns has stated in a public interview that he has started proceedings to have you stripped of your American citizenship in response to your actions,” he said. “How do you feel about that?”
“Well, I renounced my American citizenship when I founded the Saviours,” Hope said, dryly. It had been quite a media issue at the time, made more complicated by accusations that he kept a secret identity in the United States that allowed him to present himself as an average citizen and take a rest from the superhero life. “In that sense, Senator Terns is wasting his time—but I do concede that it is his time to waste. God forbid he actually did something useful, like representing the people who sent him to Washington.”
There were some titters from the reporters. “But on a different note, I am ashamed of my country for allowing the war in this country to go on for so long. We claim to support freedom and justice, but America chose to hold its nose and deal with factions that committed all kinds of atrocities against the population of the Congo. It is my intention to ensure that those crimes are exposed to the world and the CIA operatives involved are put on trial before the International Criminal Court.”
The FOX reporter seemed shocked. “But America isn't a signatory to the ICC...”
“This isn't an issue of legal fiddling,” Hope said, sharply. “This is an issue of the CIA’s collusion in rape, murder and genocide. I will not allow legal quibbles to stand in the way of justice for the dead.”
He scowled at them and noted, with some private amusement, that they took a step back at his expression. Some of the reporters had helped uncover the fifth mass grave they’d found near the city, crammed with men, women and children whose only crime had been being born into the wrong tribe. They’d been sure to report on what they’d seen, but it hadn't helped loosen the international purse strings. Most governments were unwilling to send anything beyond very limited help, or wanted to ensure that all future contracts were made with government-selected corporations.
“There are those who will interpret that as a threat,” the FOX reporter said. “Can you threaten entire counties...?”
Hope felt his temper rising. “Look around you,” he said, coldly. “Look at the condition of this city, look at the faces of the population, look at the mass graves we’ve found, or the wounded we are trying to treat in makeshift hospitals. I don't see how anyone with the power to intervene, to stop a genocide fully comparable to the Holocaust, could refuse to do so. It is time for the world to realise that such suffering is unnecessary and that it can be stopped! I will stop it and I will punish the guilty—and the guilty include those who could have done something, but chose not to intervene.”
He would have continued if his communicator hadn't buzzed. “We'll finish this interview later,” he told them, and flew up into the air. “This is Hope.”
“I think you’ll want to see this,” Warrior Girl said. There was something in her voice that he didn't like at all. “Come and find us now.”
Hope hesitated, and then flew out over the city, enhanced senses searching for the ultrasonic pulses emitted by their communicators. Warrior Girl was right on the edge of the city, standing near the shantytowns that had been constructed by thousands of desperate refugees from the countryside seeking an illusionary safety in Kinshasa. Even to a normal human, the stench of human wastes was unavoidable; Mainframe might have plans to produce methane from human and animal shit, but it would take time to clean up the mess and actually start building liveable houses for the population. Some of them had been farmers before they’d been driven off the land and Hope expected that they could be resettled back in the countryside once the remaining bandits had been eliminated.
The searchers had actually found a number of bodies in the slums and dragged them off to a mass grave. Hope had wanted to register them all in the hopes of having their families located, but there had been little time before they'd started to fester. Besides, a number of bodies wore the uniforms of the strongman’s secret police. Now, though, there was another body, right on the edge of the city. Hope dropped down in front of Warrior Girl, who gently turned the body’s head to face him. It was unmistakable.
“I...I took her home,” he stuttered. He’d pulled the girl out of the strongman’s bed and had returned her to her parents. Now she was dead, half her skull caved in by...it looked like something comparable to a baseball bat. Hope had seen horrors and terrors most humans couldn't even begin to imagine, but this...how could anyone do it to such a sweet innocent girl? “What happened to her?”
Warrior Girl had started life as a feminist and still believed that her powers came from the Goddess, rather than God, human science or alien genetic material. Normally, Hope found it as good a theory as any other, although there were superhumans who were outright sexists and worse. Warrior Girl was tall, inhumanly thin with long white hair, and normally had a bright sunny smile that never failed to lighten the weight on his heart. She wasn't smiling now.
“I analysed the DNA on her body,” Mainframe said. He was the original knight in shining armour, wearing a techno-enhanced suit that blurred into his body and gave him an affinity with computers unmatched by any merely mundane hacker. His suit was more than just a personal tank. “The evidence is unmistakable. She was murdered by her own father and brother.”
Hope stared at the featureless helm Mainframe wore to hide his features. Without the suit, he looked more like a cyborg than anything else, but he was still human.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Mainframe said. Hope could hear the cold anger in his voice. “The girl was beaten bloody and then murdered. This was not a chance killing, Hope. They deliberately set out to kill her and succeeded.”
Hope looked down at the body, fighting down the urge to be sick. “I took her home,” he repeated. “Why did they kill her?”
“You’d have to ask the Redeemer to scan them to find out,” Warrior Girl said. “You want my guess? They knew that she was taken away to have sex with the leader—and I bet you didn't bother to make it clear to them that she wasn't violated. And even if you did, they probably didn't believe you. Everyone would know that she’d been raped, that she wasn't a virgin, and her value on the marriage market would fall to nothing.”
Her voice softened. “And she was dishonoured...”
Hope had learned self-control from the moment he had first discovered his powers. Nothing would ruin human-superhuman relationships quicker than a Level 5 superhuman losing his temper and wrecking half a city. Restraint had been worked into his very soul until it was almost a liability in facing other superhumans. And yet he found it almost impossible to avoid losing control and burning down the slums. He could burn them all out, the good and the bad, the decent and the inhuman, eliminate them all once and for all...
“Find them,” he growled. There were no courts in Kinshasa, or the rest of the Congo. But he had the Redeemer, the most powerful telepath in the world, to prove their guilt. And whatever they had had in mind, he would show them that he wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour. A public execution was the least they deserved after what they had done. He’d saved lives before, but he’d never wondered if people would have been better off if he’d left them to die. “Find them and bring them to the mansion.”
“Understood,” Mainframe said. There was a pause. “What if anyone tries to stop us?”
“Don’t let them,” Hope snarled. Anyone who could defend a family that chose to execute its daughter because they believed that she had been dishonoured didn't deserve to live. “If anyone gets in yo
ur way, kill them.”
Boiling rage obscured Hope’s last comment as he threw himself into the air, staring down at the city and countryside below him. An honour killing...the whole custom was so abominable that he hadn't taken it seriously. But he’d grown up in a civilised country, a country so civilised that it accepted other countries as civilised, even if they were manifestly nothing of the kind. He opened his senses, listening for sounds that might indicate another honour killing, or one of the missing superhumans. A fight would allow him to burn off his rage...
...But there was nothing. Merely people trying to rebuild their shattered lives now that the warlords had been killed and their armies scattered. Some of the Saviours were out hunting bandits, or clearing the roads of booby traps; others were trying to help Kinshasa stand on its feet again. But how could they help people so depraved, so lost to humanity, that they killed their own kind? He clenched his fists in bitter rage. Someone had to take a stand against it, someone unaffected by the cultural relativism that had gripped so many universities and commentators in the Western world. Someone had to stand up and say what was right.
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