Team Omega

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  The nightmare was that the Russians or the Chinese might launch a massive nuclear attack, in the hopes of wiping out the Saviours before they could come for the rest of the world. In that case, Hope believed that they could intercept most of the missiles before they landed and destroy them—ICBMs hadn't been designed to target individual superhumans—but it was quite possible that a number would get through and slaughter vast numbers of Americans. Or the remains of the American government might fire on Washington themselves, accepting the deaths of millions of their own citizens to destroy Hope and the Saviours.

  Hope had once found it hard to believe that anyone could be so callous. He’d learned hard lessons since.

  “Keep working on it,” he ordered. Mainframe nodded. “Let me know if you can locate any particular dissenters. Maybe we can convince them that this is all for the good of the country.”

  “You’ve struck at one of America’s most cherished offices,” Mainframe said. “You removed the President by force. I think it will be a long time before the majority of the country realises that this was all for the best.”

  Hope nodded. “And bring me Mr. Harrison,” he added. “I want to speak with him.”

  ***

  Chester had endured an uncomfortable night in the White House Ballroom, sleeping on a blanket and eating basic rations provided by the Saviours. At least they’d taken the wounded away to a proper hospital, something that suggested that they’d already consolidated their control over the entire country. The pre-Hope contingency plans had evidently proven to be badly inadequate for the crisis they’d finally faced, leaving Chester to wonder if they’d acted wisely or foolishly. Would it have been smarter to round up the SDI and as many superhumans as they could, and use them to force Hope to stay in the Congo?

  He was still mulling over the possibilities when a pair of mutants beckoned for him to follow them. Resistance was obviously futile, so Chester stood up and allowed them to lead him out of the ballroom, up the stairs and into the Oval Office. He felt a pang as he saw the destroyed wall, revealing the President’s emergency exit, and the plaster and metal scattered on the floor. The Saviours had clearly decided that they had better things to do with their time than repair the damage they’d inflicted on the White House.

  Hope was seated behind the President’s desk, reading through a series of reports that had probably been produced by what remained of the civilian bureaucracy. If Hope was smart, he’d probably try to keep the bureaucrats and policemen working for him, or running the country would become pretty much impossible. But Americans rarely liked government officials at the best of times; and now, those officials would be working for an enemy occupying the White House. They’d feel perfectly justified in shooting any IRS agents they happened to encounter over the next few months.

  “Mr. Harrison,” Hope said. He sounded tired. The SDI had taught him to be charismatic, but the lessons had clearly been forgotten over the last few hours. But then, Hope still needed to sleep and he’d probably gotten little rest since he’d invaded the United States. “Why are you immune to telepathic probes?”

  Chester had to smile. “That’s your first question?”

  “I intended to have your mind probed for information,” Hope said. He sounded more irked than angry, but it was difficult to be certain. Any Level 5 superhuman would have good control of himself, or he might lose control of his powers. “But the Redeemer says that your mind is a complete blank. Why?”

  “You know what they say about bureaucrats being brainless,” Chester said, dryly. Needling Hope into killing him might be the best possible solution. He had few illusions about his ability to resist torture. “I have no brains to read.”

  Hope merely lifted an eyebrow. “You were the one who sent Sparky to the Congo,” he said, flatly. “I saw your face in her mind. And the General believed you to be the main...coordinator of superhuman affairs, including some that were never placed under the SDI. Why are you immune to telepathic probes?”

  Chester sighed. “There’s a process that grants a person the ability to...shield his thoughts,” he said, finally. Given enough time, Mainframe would probably pull the details out of Langley’s database—or the SDI’s, if they’d managed to capture it intact. “I was one of the lucky few who had the treatment.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Hope said, flatly. “If there was a way to shield thoughts from being picked up by a telepath, everyone in the government would have used it—but the Redeemer doesn't have any problem reading the President’s mind. Why were you the only one given the treatment?”

  “The treatment has a very low survival rate,” Chester admitted. “The odds of surviving such complex brain surgery are roughly one in ten. I had my treatment done before the doctors realised just how unlikely it was that anyone would survive—as far as I know, only three people had the treatment and survived. President Cheney later ordered a halt to all further testing, at least until technology advanced to the point where we could provide the treatment to someone with a reasonable chance of survival.”

  “Which explains why the next President kept you around,” Hope said, slowly. “I’m surprised that Cheney didn't order the treatments to be continued on condemned criminals, in the hopes of making it safer.”

  “Cheney wasn't the monster the media made him out to be,” Chester said, dryly. “The sad truth behind the American Presidency is that while you’re in office, you’re the worst President the country ever had. Everything that goes wrong is your fault, even if it started under your predecessor or came out of nowhere—and your approval ratings will reflect that. And then, once you retire, people will actually miss you because your successor will seem even worse.”

  He snorted. “I suppose the same could be said for you. How long do you intend to sit in that chair and call yourself the President?”

  “Once the country is sorted out, I intend to hold elections and then retire,” Hope said, flatly. “I didn't want to do this.”

  “But it was inevitable once you started hammering away at the world,” Chester said, darkly. Maybe he could talk Hope into leaving the United States. “Don’t you see that your actions, no matter how justified they individually seem, are spreading chaos from nation to nation?”

  Hope looked back at him, coldly. “You know just how much these ears hear?” He tapped his right ear with one gloved hand. “I hear the cries of children who starve because they don’t have enough to eat, while giant warehouses in their country store food for delivery to rich foreigners who pay more than the locals. I hear the moans of men who die on battlefields fought out for petty reasons. I hear the screams of women as they are abused and raped by the fighters who invade their villages, or their husbands as they take out their helplessness on their wives. I hear the sobs of people jailed for daring to oppose the governments. I hear the sounds of leaders indulging themselves while their country starves because they simply don’t care about their people. How could I hear all that and do nothing?”

  “You might have managed to save the Congo,” Chester said, seriously, “but what were you thinking when you lashed out at Libya? You didn't just kill their terrorist of a leader; you smashed their entire government and military edifice. Now the country is in chaos, and refugees are fleeing everywhere. The CIA picked up reports of ethnic cleansing as Libya fell back on the old tribal structure and religious violence as the lunatics banished from Iraq started inciting sects to fight their opponents in the name of God!

  “It’s a fragile world out there, Hope. Don’t be too surprised when it starts to push back.”

  “You tried to kill me,” Hope said. “I know that you sent the assassin into the Congo with orders to kill me.”

  Chester sensed the wounded pride hiding under his tone and almost smiled, grimly. It was personal. For all his claim of being detached from the world, to be able to do the right thing without fear or favour, he had taken the assassination attempt personally.

  “It’s a fragile world,” he repeated. “We
acted in the hopes of preventing you from spreading more chaos—what were you thinking when you promised to remove every non-democratic country in the world?”

  “My popularity ratings in the United States are higher than the President’s,” Hope said. “Did you make a democratic decision to have me killed?”

  “Are they higher now than they were before you decided to launch the invasion?” Chester asked, wryly. “No, we made the decision without consulting the public.”

  He shook his head, tiredly. “You want to know something about the average American citizen? Joe and Jane Public have a view of the world that is very far from the truth. The government is there to take care of them, the world is America’s oyster, and they don’t really need to care about the bigger picture. Those who dislike the government come up with grand theories that explain its failures; corporate interference, bribery and corruption, political correctness, transnational elites replacing local governments, the vast right/left-wing conspiracy...

  “The truth is that the government isn't all-powerful, and it certainly isn’t all-knowing,” he pointed out. Was there anything he could say that could get through to Hope? “But no one wants to believe that the government can be incompetent, so they prefer to believe that there was some secret reason for the government to fail rather than admit it might not be all-powerful. Instead, we have the results of endless compromises, of endless attempts to come up with new legislation to deal with new problems—and then people who don’t like the results bitch and moan, so we get a new series of compromises. And none of them are any better than the ones they had before. They just annoy different people.”

  Chester looked up at Hope, willing him to understand. “You have superpowers,” he said, “and when you have superpowers, when you consider yourself a hero, the entire world looks like a problem you can hit. But the real world is a messy place, and you destabilised the fragile balance of power when you proved yourself to be out of control. If you care, even slightly, about the country and the world, walk away now. You cannot save the world by naked force.”

  Hope looked back at him. “Bullshit,” he said, flatly. “Naked force is the only thing the warlords respect. No amount of pleading and whining from the international community stopped the fighting in the Congo; hell, nations that played the lead role in whining about how bad the warlords were being were also the ones supplying them with weapons, just to keep the area nicely destabilised. They respect force, and so I showed them greater force.”

  “This isn't going to work,” Chester said, insistently. “You have to stop before it is too late.”

  He saw fire in Hope’s eyes and braced himself, expecting every second to be his last, but instead Hope controlled himself. “Your people destroyed the Pit,” he said. Chester allowed himself a moment of relief. Some of the superhumans in the Pit were deadly dangerous. The thought of allowing them to rampage free was terrifying. “They killed upwards of three hundred superhumans, including several whose only crime was defying SARA and trying to help people.”

  Chester swallowed his anger with an effort. “You don’t think that most of the superheroes who have signed SARA help people?”

  “I think that they don’t do enough,” Hope said. “I will put you on trial for your actions, before the American people. And the evidence presented will be enough to convince them that I did the right thing in removing the American government from power.”

  “If you say so,” Chester said. Hope had crossed the line into fanaticism. He’d have to be stopped—but Chester was no longer in a position to organise resistance. The only thing he could do was hope that there was enough of Team Omega and the SDI left to fight back before America shattered under the occupation. “Tell me something, please. Did all of the Saviours go along with you without question?”

  “Mimic quit,” Hope admitted. He sounded rather rueful, unsurprisingly. Mimic had had a through military training before sparking and becoming superhuman. “He told me that it would end in tears. I thought he had gone to warn you about my plans.”

  Chester’s eyes narrowed. “He never reached us,” he said. “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing,” Hope said. He studied Chester for a long moment. “Your pulse rate suggests that you are being truthful. What happened to him?”

  “Maybe you should find out,” Chester said. Mimic had been a SEAL. There was no way that he would have gone along with the plan to invade America, particularly after Libya had collapsed into chaos. “Because he would have had the ability to contact us and warn us that you were planning something—and we never heard anything. Not a single word.”

  He expected the mutants to lead him back to the Ballroom, but instead they led him to one of the White House bedrooms. They were intended for officials who worked too late and couldn’t go home, or military officers who had to sleep at the White House during times of crisis; they were certainly comfortable enough for Chester. Team Omega—wherever they were—would have called them too luxurious for comfort.

  Shaking his head, he sat down on the bed and tried to meditate. The door was locked—he’d tested after the mutants had left—and there was no other way out of the room. He didn’t dare ask if he could call his wife. There was nothing he could do, but wait.

  And pray.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The protest march had started at Central Park, walking up the blocked roads, and shouting loudly for Hope to leave the United States. Jackson had seen a handful of protest marches before, but this one was the largest he’d ever seen; all of New York appeared to be out on the streets, demanding an end to the superhuman government. Given that it had only been two days since Washington had been taken by the Saviours, someone had clearly been working overtime to organise the march. It was even escorted by a large number of police and soldiers from the National Guard, making their own feelings clear. This was one march that wasn't going to turn into a riot.

  “He can hear them in Washington,” Lane said, as they started to walk away from the march. A handful of would-be pickpockets had been caught by the NYPD and were being searched and arrested down a side-street, although no one quite knew what would happen to them in Hope’s new world order. “And this isn't the only march being organised today. I wonder how he will react.”

  Jackson nodded. The Soviet Union had responded harshly to any protest movement that appeared in the satellite states, long before the Polish superhuman had sparked and moved to evict the Russians from Poland. China had crushed protest movements using armed soldiers and policemen—even superhumans. The United States needed to be a little more careful—public opinion counted in the United States of America—and besides, it wasn't as if the protesters were marching against a repressive government. But that might have changed. Who knew how Hope would respond to a protest march demanding that he left the country?

  He caught sight of a superhuman flashing through the air above him and looked up, only to see the superhuman vanishing into the distance. New York’s vast number of superhumans seemed to be doing nothing, either out of fear for their lives—Hope was powerful, and he had powerful allies—or because they sympathised with Hope. Lane had pointed out that Team Omega would have been grateful for the SDI’s existence, but the SDI’s overt team had all passed carefully-designed psych tests to prove that they were reliable. But the SDI was gone and the other superheroes were far from trustworthy.

  There were almost no moving cars on the road today. From what they’d picked up on the internet, the Teamsters—the Trucker’s Union—had called a wildcat strike; most of them were refusing to work until Hope and his superhuman goons were out of the country. There were strategic food stockpiles in all major cities—superhuman battles sometimes wrecked parts of the interstates—but the sudden shortage of consumer goods would cause its own problems. And there were no new deliveries of gas from the oil refineries due to the ongoing Teamsters' strike. Every car that didn't have one of the Halo batteries developed in the years since Iraq occupied the Saud
i oil wells would be marooned as soon as it ran out of gas. The NYPD had advised civilians to remain at home, or to walk if they needed to leave their homes for any reason at all—such as joining the protest march.

  Parts of New York looked to be collapsing into chaos as they walked towards Hell’s Kitchen. The gang warfare that had broken out in the wake of their mission against two unregistered superhumans had, thankfully, broken the power of two of the gangs, but the others were still fighting it out for supremacy. It didn't help that the mutant gang was linked with the occupation, unfairly as far as anyone could tell. But incidents of violence against mutants and lower-ranking superhumans had been on the rise ever since Washington had fallen. They might wind up joining Hope out of self-defence.

  He hesitated as they reached an older apartment block, the place he had visited with Harrison before the shit had really hit the fan. “Captain,” he said, “are you sure about this?”

  Getting back in touch with the rest of Team Omega had been relatively easy, even without the internet. There had been contingency plans for rendezvous points that allowed the different teams to link up without compromising their boltholes—and, thankfully, most of the support staff had left the base before the superhumans attacked, allowing them to reach their own boltholes before the Saviours tracked them down. But linking up with what remained of the SDI had its own risks. There was still no explanation as to how the Saviours had known about Team Omega, right down to the location of its base. Jackson doubted that it was a coincidence. The attack had been very precisely targeted.