It took Hope several minutes to remember who Jennifer Horton actually was. An English-born pop star with a gift for self-publicity, she had become the public face of a number of charities that did what they could to help the poor in the Third World. Hope would have been more impressed if they’d actually seen any return consummate with the vast sums of donated money they’d poured into the continent. As far as he could tell, they would have done better if they’d spent the money on mercenaries and used them to overthrow a few of the warlords who prevented food distribution to the needy masses. She’d spent more time lobbying governments to do something to help than Hope himself, but she’d had far less return on her investment. It probably didn't matter as long as she claimed her huge salary and her managers collected their kickbacks from the warlords.
“With all respect to Miss Horton,” he said, sharply, “I must note that we have achieved more in three weeks than she has achieved in ten years. If she wishes to assist more people than she has in the past, she can help us streamline aid into the Congo and out into the other needy states. We don’t take bribes and we don’t brutalise aid workers who refuse to supply warlords with weapons and vehicles.”
A third reporter jumped in before the last one could ask a follow-up question. “The United Nations has formally condemned your attack on Libya as an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state,” he said. “Do you have any response to the UN?”
Hope would have liked to have a few words with Jefferson about it, but the Secretary-General hadn’t called him since the Libya operation. “I hardly think that an international organisation that numbers the former Libyan Government among its defenders of human rights is in any position to preach to us,” he said, coldly. “We are here to save lives, to remove bad governments and to allow democracy to flourish. If non-democratic governments find us threatening...they should. We will deal with them in due course.
“Throughout history, democratic governments have been forced to make deals with the devil and work with non-democratic states. The West worked with the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and then with a whole array of undemocratic warlords during the long struggle to contain the Soviet Union. Such measures were demanded by the cold demands of politics; they held their nose and worked with people who allowed the West to get the blame for their harsh repression of their own constituents. It was argued that there was no choice; if the West didn't support the dictators, the dictators would fall and their countries would turn red. And, after the end of the Cold War, there was no willingness to pay the price for bringing down those dictators.
“But now we exist to spearhead their removal,” he concluded. “We can invade rogue states, destroy their weapons programs that threaten the safety of the entire world and clear the way for international aid. Dictators no longer need to be tolerated, or coddled; we can finally ensure that the entire human race sees the blessings of democracy. And that is what we intend to do. To those nations nervous about supporting us, fearful of blowback from the rogue regimes, I say this. There will be no better chance to ensure safety for their people in the future. Democracies do not go to war with democracies. An era of peace and prosperity awaits us if we reach out our hands and take it. There is nothing to fear, but fear itself.”
***
“Nice monologue,” the Redeemer said, thirty minutes later. “I think you even convinced a couple of them.”
Hope scowled at her. “Why are so many people so...parochial?”
“How many people can see the world the way you do?” the Redeemer asked, dryly. “How many of them can fly above the mundane world and look down from a great height? Like it or not, we are not all created equal. You can afford to shrug off concerns that would tear down their entire lives.”
She smiled, leaning closer to him. “I could change their minds for you...”
Hope hesitated. “No,” he said, finally. The thought of the Redeemer turning the reporters into his cheerleaders had a certain appeal, but it would be wrong. Besides, the signs of telepathic tampering on such a scale were easy to notice, if someone thought to look for them. “I don’t think that that will be necessary.”
“I’m starting to wonder,” the Redeemer admitted. “While you were out there looking good for the cameras”—she winked at him—“and very good you looked, too, I was out looking for corrupt officials. You know that some of the locals have started to believe us when we promised to remove those who demanded bribes in exchange for doing something?”
Hope nodded. Running the Congo would have been harder without what remained of the government’s bureaucracy. Unsurprisingly, most of the paper-pushers had switched sides whenever it seemed convenient, offering to assist the new warlord to extract the largest amount of graft from the helpless population. By Hope’s count, some smaller villages had owed thousands of dollars in taxes to a dozen different warlords. Anyone who wanted to set up a business of any kind had to cross the local bureaucrat’s hand with silver, as well as paying bribes to the secret police and to anyone else with a little power.
“Guess how many I found?” the Redeemer asked. She kept speaking before Hope could answer. “I scanned over fifty people who were named and shamed by their victims, and forty-five of the complaints were genuine. Forty-five! Between them, they extorted money, land and even a pair of daughters from their victims! A couple of them even wanted to claim first dibs on a girl’s virginity in exchange for a marriage licence.”
“Jesus,” Hope said. How could anyone run a country where local enterprise, even local life, was stifled by bureaucracy? No wonder the foreign aid workers hadn't managed to get much done; some of their money would have vanished into the bureaucracy’s pockets, while they’d be directed towards the people who paid the biggest bribes, instead of people who genuinely needed help. “How deep does it go?”
The Redeemer snorted. “One of the people named was the chief of a committee in one of the disputed zones,” she said. “Between them, four warlords had uprooted everyone from their homes and installed their favourites, only to see their favourites driven out in turn when the tide turned and they were pushed back by their enemies. Right now, every single house in the area has at least four different people claiming ownership, all of whom are linked to tribes who will be very unhappy if they don’t get their papers. The committee is meant to settle the issue once and for all, but they take bribes from everyone—and he who has the biggest bribe wins the case.
“So I sent the entire senior leadership to the camps, but the ones left behind were just salivating at the mouth, thinking of all the bribe money that could go to them instead. God knows that there isn't any solution that will satisfy anyone, yet those bastards aren't going to make it any easier. I could just reach inside their minds and they would behave...”
Hope shook his head. “We can't start doing that,” he said.
The Redeemer ignored him. “All over the world, governments are making decisions that are good for the government, not good for the people,” she said. “We could do a much better job, Hope. I could walk into a government building and force them to confess to all their crimes, or make the bureaucracy actually function properly, rather than slowing things up at every opportunity. Even the best-run countries in the world have huge imbalances between rich and poor. We could change that forever.
“Think about it,” she insisted. “There are troops that could help us stabilise the Congo, Libya and a dozen other nations that really need saving from their own leaders. Those troops would have to obey us if we took over and started issuing orders, rather than having to kowtow to governments to convince them to unlock the purse strings. What about engineers, or builders, or doctors, people who could make a real difference. We could have them sent here to actually do some good. And we could bring in people who didn't have any local ties to disqualify them from actually settling disputes between tribal factions here...”
“Nice monologue,” Hope said, dryly. “Don’t you think we have enough problems with just the
Congo?”
“But if we had the rest of the world, we could use those resources to solve the problems here,” the Redeemer said. “Think about it.”
“I will,” Hope promised. He stood up. “And for once, I need a rest.”
“Take a shower too,” the Redeemer advised. “The stench of those reporters is clinging to you.”
Hope was still laughing when he entered his room. He carefully removed his costume before climbing into the shower. Fixing the city’s water supplies had been one of their first priorities, if only because the aid volunteers would insist upon proper sanitation facilities—and it was good for public health, too. Before the Saviours arrived, the sewers had been wrecked and great piles of garbage had piled up all over the city. Between the workers, who had cleaned and repaired the sewers, and the involuntary labourers who used to be part of the warlord’s army, they had actually made a start on improving the city. There was a long way to go before it matched a First World city, but it was on the mend.
Water washed down over his chest and he sighed, relaxing as best as he could. His superhuman body didn't seem to suffer from aches and pains, unlike a mundane body, but he could be mentally tired even if he could physically go on forever. Back when he’d been with the SDI, some of the doctors who’d poked and prodded at the superhumans had wondered if they still needed sleep because their minds still thought of themselves as merely human, yet Hope found that hard to believe. A mundane human couldn't have planned and executed an operation intended to take over and rebuild an entire continent.
Something...moved at the corner of his eye. Hope spun around, moving so fast that his arm clipped the side of the sink and sent it crashing to the floor, but saw nothing. A cold tingle ran down the back of his spine as he gathered himself and stepped back into the bedroom, searching for...something. And yet there was nothing there. His eyes weren't as sharp—or as wide-ranging—as those of some other superhumans, but...something was wrong. He closed his eyes, concentrating on his hearing. An invisible person would still need to breathe, or move if they wanted to get close to him...
He felt something reach out towards his head. Hope lashed out, only to see a ghostly illusion standing next to him. A girl, her wide eyes staring at his naked body...her hand intersected with his arm, and Hope screamed in pain. He hadn't felt pain since he’d fought one of the other Level 5 superhumans during an SDI exercise, but now his arm felt as if it had been broken. His entire body seemed to be shuddering in pain, even when the girl moved back. Just for a moment, Hope was convinced that he was seeing things; he seemed to be able to look right through the girl. His eyes flared with heat, setting the room alight, but passed harmlessly through her ghostly body. She reached for him again and he managed to stumble back, trying to walk or fly...but his mind refusing to work properly.
What was happening to him?
He screamed again as her fingers brushed his chest. It felt as if his heart was about to explode and tear his body apart.
He lashed out with all his strength, and his hand connected with...something. The girl toppled backwards. He still couldn't see her face.
He pulled himself to his feet. Sweat ran down his skin, and he felt a sheer terror of a kind he hadn't felt since he'd realised that he was superhuman, that bullets and bombs would merely bounce off his body. The girl seemed stunned; he reached for her, only to have his hands pass harmlessly through her leg as if she were a ghost. Or immaterial. One of her arms was crooked, knocked out of shape by his blow. She was lucky that he hadn't torn it right off.
She turned as the door crashed open, revealing Mainframe and the Redeemer. The girl started to dive down through the floor, only to stop dead and float between floors. A moment later, she drifted back up again, her eyes glazed in a fashion that Hope recognised. The Redeemer had taken control of her mind before she could escape. He watched, shaking in pain, as the girl stopped in the air and returned to solid form.
“I’ve switched off her conscious mind,” the Redeemer said, harshly. “She had an unusual defence; I think that if her arm hadn't been damaged I wouldn't have been able to get a grip on her thoughts. Take her down to the cells while I deal with Hope.”
Mainframe nodded, leaving them alone in Hope’s room. Hope stared down at his chest, where the pain told him that his invulnerable skin should have been torn open and his blood leaking down to the floor. He’d been in training when a superhuman had been torn open by another superhuman and died, in spite of all the doctors could do for him, because it was impossible to stitch up steel-hard skin. It was funny how a strength could suddenly become a weakness. And yet his arm wasn't broken, and his skin wasn't torn.
And if she had managed to do that to my head, he thought, numbly, I would have died.
“She shifted in and out of phase,” the Redeemer said. One hand touched Hope’s cheek, very lightly. “I keep a mental eye on you, but I didn't have the slightest idea that she was there until I sensed your pain. No wonder she slipped right through my telepathic net; her mind was always out of tune with my gentle probes. And as long as she remained out of phase, she was effectively invisible.”
“Better than invisible,” Hope said. “She didn't even move the air until she returned to solid form...what happened to me?”
The Redeemer hesitated. “Two things can’t exist in the same place simultaneously,” she said, thoughtfully. “My guess is that her touching you created a psychic shock that crippled you, at least for a few minutes. If she had rammed her hands through your brain it would probably have stopped working.”
Hope pulled himself to his feet. He’d never felt so weak, not even in the half-remembered days before he’d become a superhuman. Summoning the concentration for flight, even a couple of inches above the ground, seemed almost impossible. The thought of losing his powers made him panic, a moment before his head bumped against the ceiling. He might have to relearn everything right from the start.
“Take it easy for the next couple of days,” the Redeemer advised.
Hope laughed, rather sardonically.
“I’m afraid there’s more bad news,” she said.
“Tell me,” Hope said, sharply.
“Her mind was unusual, but once I got control I managed to pull information out of it,” the Redeemer explained. “Some of it was nonsense—I think her nature scrambles her mind a little—but there was enough left for me to discover who she is and who sent her. She’s a covert operative from the SDI.”
Hope stared at her. He’d only ever been part of the overt team, the one that made all the public appearances; the covert team had been kept under deep security. It was quite possible that he’d never met someone from the covert team in his entire career, at least until now.
“And I’m afraid she received part of her mission brief from the same person who briefed Sparky,” the Redeemer added. She smiled bitterly as Hope felt growing horror. “He told her that it came specifically from the President. This wasn't a rogue mission, Hope. She wanted to kill you for the United States of America. That was an act of war.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“You know,” Jackson said, “I don’t think this person is doing anything.”
Ron shrugged. They’d been assigned to make a random check on an unregistered superhuman living in Maryland, something that Jackson suspected to be of questionable legality. According to the files, Jennifer Ennis had saved a man’s life in a fire five years ago and had marked herself down for government attention ever since. As far as he could tell, she was just a random housewife who worked as a piano teacher to pay the bills. The only exciting thing they’d seen had been a sixteen-year-old girl storming out of her house, followed by her embarrassed mother. Apparently, the mother really wanted the daughter to learn to play the piano and the daughter had other ideas.
“It looks that way,” Ron agreed. Jackson had been promised downtime, but Team Omega didn't have any real downtime, apart from a handful of days leave between operations. “But we’re not just doing this
because we want to spy on people.”
Jackson lifted an eyebrow. It was easy to understand why superhumans such as the Young Stars or the vigilantes in New York had to be monitored, policed and—if necessary—terminated, but it was harder to follow why they needed to spend time spying on an innocent woman. Nothing in the file suggested that she had a habit of donning a skin-tight uniform when darkness fell and setting out to purge the neighbourhood of evil. As far as he could tell, her husband and children didn't even know that she was superhuman.
“Inside her body, there are superhuman organs,” Ron said, very quietly. “Someone like Dr. Death could come along and kidnap her, then cut out her organs to implant in someone else—and that person might not be as benevolent as the Sergeant. All such experimentation is banned, but what does that matter when nations are seeking an advantage over other nations?”
He shrugged. “So we maintain a regular watch on unregistered superhumans for their own safety,” he added. “You may feel that we’re doing the wrong thing, but there isn't much choice. Do you remember the days when the first superhumans started to appear?”
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