Chapter Sixteen
Hope forced himself to wait two days before facing the family. It felt like the hardest thing he had ever done. The mocking thought of his own failure haunted him even as he helped transport supplies over the country or hunted down bandits plaguing what remained of the Congo’s road network. How could he have been so stupid?
Because you thought that everyone was as good as you, the mocking voice in his head said. You thought that all they needed was a little push, but it was much more complex than that, wasn't it?
The strongman had set up a courtroom, but as far as Hope could tell he’d never actually used it. It was quite possible that one of his predecessors had created it, because the room was dusty and almost untouched, odd for a building in Kinshasa. Perhaps it had acquired a bad reputation before the warlords had defined “guilty” as “anyone we don’t like.” Hope was a firm believer in the rule of law, which was enshrined in courtrooms, but there were times when he wanted to move ahead regardless of the letter of the law. He’d certainly broken a number of laws when his forces had invaded the Congo.
He sat down as the family were shoved into the courtroom by four mutants. From what he’d heard—what he’d been unable to avoid hearing—the family had been too badly shocked to put up any resistance, something that to his mind just signified their guilt. How could they have done that to their own daughter if they hadn't believed it was right? But it was wrong, as wrong as anything the warlords had done to their people and their country. Hope intended to ensure that the entire population understood that it would not be tolerated.
The father was a dark man, with a long beard and torn clothes. Unsurprisingly, he’d been too poor to buy anything better. He stared at Hope, his face torn between defiance and fear; his two sons, both teenagers, seemed more inclined to defiance. The culture they’d been raised in put more stock in boy children than girl children, something that still haunted Africa and much of East Asia. Only Bangladesh had had remarkable success in breaking down the old gender differences—and that was only because the country was effectively run by a team of superhumans, including several women.
Hope looked at the girl’s mother and shivered. She couldn't be much older than forty, perhaps a great deal younger, yet she looked old enough to be a great-grandma. People were married young in the Congo, assuming that they could find a suitable bride; perhaps she was actually thirty, maybe having children as soon as she’d had her first period. The men would have cowered at home, hiding from the press-gangs and secret police, while sending the women out to get food and water.
Not for the first time, Hope wondered just how an entire population could be brutalised into submission. If they’d risen up together, the warlord would have been defeated long before Hope and the Saviours had arrived. But they’d been too cowardly to fight for their freedom, while murdering a single girl had been far too easy.
The Redeemer appeared from a side door, staring at the family. “They all did it,” she said, quietly. “The mother held her while the men beat her, and then killed her. They truly feared for their reputation among their fellows, for it was all they had left. And so they killed her and dumped her body outside the slums.”
Hope would have been happy—if happy was the right word—with that alone, but the Redeemer reached into their minds and brought out the memories, telepathically channelling them to Hope. He looked into the father’s mind and saw a mixture of helplessness and a frantic determination to control what he could; he saw the self-obsession of his young sons and shuddered at how quickly they’d accepted the need to kill their sister. It was the only way to maintain the family’s honour, they’d believed, and perhaps the only way to ensure that they would ever be able to marry in turn. Hope fought down the urge to be sick as he stared at the family, unwilling to look into the mother’s mind. He didn't want to know what lurked inside her soul.
He cleared his throat. The various media stations who had sent representatives to the Congo had all accepted his offer to witness the proceedings. He’d promised them something to remember, something to broadcast over the entire country—and the world. There was a surprising number of radio and television sets in the Congo, despite the warlords hating the very thought of the population hearing the BBC or Voice of America. And there were more computers, hand-powered radios and even televisions being distributed now.
“You see before you a family that murdered their only daughter,” he said, softly. “We have looked into their minds and sifted out the truth. They believed that their daughter had been dishonoured by her brief imprisonment, that she had lost her virginity to an act of violence, yet they were wrong. Her virginity was intact.
“Even if they had been right, it would just not have justified murdering their child, their flesh and blood. No state that calls itself civilised can allow itself to tolerate such actions. No law that exists to protect the weak from the strong can accept such excuses for their actions. They believed that they were in the right, yet they sinned against human decency itself.”
He felt his temper rising and fought hard to control it. “If they were put in a court, with the money and power to hire a lawyer, the core issue would be buried under a mountain of bullshit,” he stated, his voice growing louder. “The lawyer would demand to know what right we had to object to aspects of their culture. He would insist that it was racist to suggest that all cultures, that all actions, should be held to the same standards. A media that fawns on dictators while lashing out at democracy would pick up such a narrative and run with it, completely obscuring the truth. The truth is that they murdered their only daughter because they believed that she had sinned.
“But even if they had been right, how would it have been her fault? She did not ask to be swept off the streets by the secret police, to be carted away to the bed of a man who brutalised his people; it was not her fault that his goons had marked her for rape. The core of criminal investigation is to draw a difference between mischance and deliberate malice, between one person’s fault and another person’s fault. They claim that in being raped, she committed a sin—but how can she have committed a sin when she did not choose to be raped?
“The heart of the rule of law is holding everyone accountable to the same standards. If someone is poor and weak, they should get the same protections as someone who is rich and powerful. There is one law for everyone, not different laws for different people. The system is far from perfect, but it does not—it cannot—accept a different culture as an excuse for breaking the law. To do so is to invite chaos.
“We have looked into their minds. This was no accident. This was no chain of unfortunate events that looked like a conspiracy to paranoid investigators with the benefit of hindsight. This was a deliberate, premeditated act of murder, committed against a helpless girl by her own family. There is no question of their guilt, only of their sentence.
“There are those who would argue that they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong, that their culture insisted that it was right. It is not an argument we can accept, not without fatally undermining the rule of law we intend to bring to this country—and to the rest of the world. Murder is still murder—and none of the petty evasions they might offer can be allowed to obscure that fact. They didn't strike her down in anger; they planned the murder—and even now, they refuse to understand that they did wrong.
“We have imprisoned people in this country for being part of the forces that were oppressing the people. In time, we will sift through them and separate those who were reluctant participants from those who participated gleefully, ensuring that the latter never have a chance to return to the Congo and threaten the population. But this is a very different crime. It demands a strong response, one that will make it clear that such actions will not be tolerated. There is no sentence we can offer but death.”
He stood up and walked steadily towards the prisoners. The father understood a little English, enough to cringe back as Hope advanced. It wasn't enough to save him a
s Hope reached out, took his head in both hands, and crushed it like a grape. Blood, brain tissue and fragments of bone fell everywhere. He caught the older son and hesitated, just for a second, before snapping his neck like a twig. The boy was already contaminated so badly that there was no way that he could ever be redeemed. He picked up the youngest son, feeling a glimmer of disgust at how someone so young could be turned into a monster, and crushed his skull with one hand. The mother’s screams died away as Hope put his fist right through her chest. Whatever the role of women in their particular subset of the Congo’s fractured tribes and religions, she horrified him almost as much as her husband. She had done nothing to speak up for her only daughter.
Blood was dripping off his hands as he looked back at the cameras. “We killed everyone involved in the murder,” he said. The Redeemer had scanned them thoroughly before allowing them into the courtroom, ensuring that they had wiped out the entire conspiracy. “If this happens again, we will kill everyone involved in the next murder—and the next, and the next, until they realise that there is no way that they can escape justice. The rules apply to everyone, be they helpless young girls or powerful warlords and religious leaders who think they’re above justice. There will be no mercy for those who murder in the Congo.”
He took one final look at the bodies and walked out, ignoring the shouted questions from the reporters. They were quieter than usual, he noted with some amusement; they hadn’t really expected to watch him kill the murderers with his bare hands. But they’d ensure that the news spread around the world. Perhaps it would help unlock some of the purse strings that were holding up aid to the Congo. In hindsight, they should have made more preparations...
Cursing, he shook his head as he walked out of the building and leapt into the air. Hindsight was always clearer than foresight—perhaps he should have studied the problem more carefully before committing himself and his team—but he was stuck with the problem that he had created. They couldn't just pull out and abandon the Congo, not at the first hiccup; besides, things were getting better. It just wasn’t happening as quickly as he’d hoped.
There was a river, not too far away from the city. Hope landed beside it and carefully washed his hands, knowing that the blood would never leave his soul. It hadn't been the first time he’d killed—he’d killed long before forming the Saviours—but it was different, somehow. He’d killed to make a statement, a statement that would shake the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, it would change it.
But how far could he go to save the world?
The question kept echoing through his mind. There was no disputing the fact that the world was poorly organised. Someone who saw the big picture could do a better job of organising it than petty national governments who held up aid shipments merely to force concessions out of those who desperately needed help. But the big picture was imprecise; he’d seen all of the Congo without considering the patchwork of tribes and religions that blurred together to form one nation. The Belgians hadn't known either, when they’d drawn the lines, or perhaps they simply hadn't cared. Divide and rule worked as long as the divider had no intention of leaving the country to try to fend for itself. It was almost perverse to realise that Belgium had been a worse master than any of the other colonial powers, save only for Imperial Germany. The Kaiser’s government had committed the first true Holocaust, long before Hitler had been anything other than a penniless would-be student. But was that really the first?
He looked down into the water and found no answers.
***
“That recording was broadcast all over the world,” Jasper Stillwell said. The National Security Advisor had a reputation, but that didn't stop him looking a little sick at the sight of skulls being crushed by superhuman hands. “By now, I doubt there’s a person in the world who hasn't heard of it.”
“So Hope killed a family of murderers,” Senator Hamlin said. He was one of the President’s more controversial advisers, not least because he always played devil’s advocate. “I fail to see a problem here.”
“The entire world just saw him execute people whose guilt had not been legally proven,” General Kratman pointed out, dryly. “Whatever the truth of the matter, he decided to kill them without a trial.”
Chester smiled at their expressions. “Sam Colt would be turning in his grave,” he said. “All of his work has been wasted.”
The President looked at him, sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” Chester said. “We’ve known that superhumans exist since 1979, even if we didn't see an American superhuman until 1980. It was an event as powerful in our collective zeitgeist as the development of the atomic bomb, or the discovery of the Holocaust. And yet we as a society have taken a very blinkered view of our superhumans. We like it when they save cats from trees and small children from drowning; we try to avoid thinking about the power they wield, the power that could be turned so easily against us. So we tell ourselves that most of them are smart enough to realise that they get a better deal by working with us rather than against us, and use the cooperative ones to keep a lid on those less inclined to be cooperative.
“But now, superhumans have stepped forward and started to act independently of the world’s governments,” he continued. “And suddenly we realise that there’s no longer any security in the world. It hits us right in the face—there’s no security, and only luck and improvised measures have prevented us from realising it sooner. What is the President of the United States in a world that includes walking, talking atomic bombs?
“Sam Colt put the power to kill in the hands of the average person. He made men equal in a very fundamental way. No one needs real training to handle a pistol, where it took years to become an armour-clad bully boy from the Dark Ages. Hell, our country was founded on the belief that men have the right to own guns that can be used, if necessary, against the government. But now...what good is a pistol against a man who can shoot laser beams from his eyes or disarm an army before they can blink? No hiding place, no security...and our country has been hiding from that fact for the last thirty years. Time has run out.”
“We have created our own superhuman teams,” General Kratman pointed out. “The SDI has passed all the psychological tests that we devised for them...”
“Tests that are badly flawed,” Chester argued in return. It had been a sore spot between the SDI and Team Omega ever since the latter had been created. “As individuals, a human’s ability to cause damage is very limited. Those who become highly-trained military operatives are built up slowly, each one tested and retested before they are allowed to advance further. But superhumans? We don’t really account for their powers in our tests. How can we account for a person who spent his life in helpless rage suddenly being gifted the power to change the world?
“Hope cares—and our best psychologists say that he will continue to care,” he said. “But he’s going to discover that healing a country, particularly one as war-torn as the Congo, will be incredibly hard. He may still succeed, but our people believe that he will become heavily frustrated along the way, maybe even more violent. Patience has never been one of his characteristics, not when he could merely hit his problems to make them go away.”
“All of a sudden,” Marlowe observed, “you seem to put a lot of faith in your psychologists.”
“The Congo and the Saviours are going to become a powder keg,” Chester warned, ignoring Marlowe’s snide remark. “I think we have to be braced for trouble—and do what we can to assist them in repairing the country. Besides, it would be popular.”
“Not with Congress,” the President growled. “They’re still insisting on a stern warning that further invasions will not be tolerated, a warning backed up by force if necessary.”
“Look at it this way,” Chester said. “How would we react if some Podunk little microstate issued a warning to us?”
“They have,” General Kratman said. “And we do nothing.”
“Because we have to worry about kee
ping the world stable,” Chester said. “Hope does not share our concerns. And why should he? In his mixture of idealism and ruthlessness, he will punch the world if it doesn't give him the help he thinks he needs. This situation will likely grow a great deal worse in the very near future.”
Chapter Seventeen
Von Shrakenberg opened the door and stepped through, sliding on ear protection as he did. A fringe benefit of the budget Team Omega enjoyed was a properly set-up range. It might not be as advanced as the Shooting House, but it let the troops practice regularly. He waved to Gunner Bell, a Chief Warrant Officer, who nodded and turned away from watching the monitors.
“Looking for somebody, Shrake?”
“Heard my jarhead is down here, sir.”
“You mean Gasman?” Bell asked.
“Yeah, him,”
“He's down on lane twelve,” Bell said. He nodded towards a screen on the display. “About to shoot right now.”
Von Shrakenberg nodded coolly, then watched the live feed as the targets presented themselves to Jackson. Jackson’s left hand blurred, snatching the weapon out of the holster on his hip. The pistol bucked in his hands repeatedly before he brought it down, right hand coming up with a speed loader. The empty casings fell to the ground in a clatter, even as the new clip slid into place, before the cylinder snapped back and he holstered the weapon.
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