IRA III

The Golden Road was thick with travelers. A fisherman from Leonholt City, Lord Lyonel Vandemair's seat in the southeast, told them the rebel queen meant to sack Rassian and fire its churches. An old woman traveling with her daughter's family said the true queen was coming back to oust the traitorous s. An unwashed vagrant claimed that sorcerers from hell commanded both sides of the war and meant to drown Artaxas in blood.

They went down the rugged coast to Vastanbul where an army of Easterners was encamped in the shadow of the city's salt-eaten walls and the seabird-infested cliffs that fell away into the sluggish sea with its slow waves and sucking sounds. Vandemair's lions, Evraheim's stooping eagle, the thorny coronet of Rosecrown, the proud ram of Ramm and a score of others snapped and fluttered beneath the Imperial and the swords-and-wings. The Grieving Reach itself, the passage between north and south, lay like an old corpse at the mercy of the ocean. It was a broad expanse of marshland, reed-covered tidal flats shot through with tangled watercourses like an old man's sprung veins. Ira removed his felt cap and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. This is where it happened.

The Rhyddish legions had died screaming on that drab, blotchy stretch of floodplain. How many skeletons lay under the sand and clay? How many still went about in mourning blue for the sons, the fathers, the daughters and sisters whose minds Sepirahkt had scraped clean or shattered. Ira could feel it when he opened his First Eye: the enduring stain of that bloody day. Terror and madness soaked the very soil like salt sewn by conquering legions. It's a bad place now, whatever it was before.

Ira led his nag along the cliffside path. Edrea rode her carthorse, Brutus, ahead of him. There was a checkpoint cordon at the base of the cliff road. Sandbags and coils of barbed wire stretched like a snake from the cliffs beneath the city walls to the rough tumble of broken stone that led down to the sea. Logistics officers manned a dozen crossing points from chemical-board desks and it was to the back of the shortest line of travelers that Edrea took them. Beyond the soldiers and their barricade the road dwindled to a profusion of muddy, rutted tracks half-filled with brackish water. The tide wouldn't be in for hours. Ragged trains of men, women, horses, even a few automobiles were making their way across the flats toward the flat green country on the other side. Three hundred miles of the clean Eastern air before the Waste.

They had papers. A vulturous woman in a little harbor town called Wrath had made them up for a disgusting sum. They were Lyella Pin and her hired man, Audley, which seemed good enough for the unshaven officer who waved them through the checkpoint without apparent interest. Ira kept his head down and his cap pulled low, but if there were photographs circulating they'd know him by the wormlike scar that hooked from the corner of his mouth up past his eye in a ghoulish grin. Marius made sure I'd never travel incognito again. At least his uncle had botched the job, though sitting a saddle still made Ira's wounded stomach itch and ache. He preferred to walk.

Salt mud sucked at Ira's boots. His horse tossed her head and whinnied as she picked her way over the flats. It was naked country, raped and oozing. Ira looked back at the thousands of tents pitched like barnacles in the shadow of Vastanbul. The remains of the clash between John Blackwall and the Eastern Houses still littered the mudflats. Gulls roosted by the hundreds on the blasted hulks of tanks and trucks. Heaps of greasy ash were all that remained of the dead, burned to safeguard against plague. The Vastani Bridge, the railroad span that crossed the marshy plain on three huge pylons, had been blasted at its center and chunks of concrete and twisted steel lay strewn about the mud like a giant's forgotten bones. Ira walked through its tangled shadow.

His First Eye found the birds among the circling clouds who had tasted flesh either in the battle's wake or on some other day, and for a while he hung above the Reach on dirty wings and watched the haggard skeins of refugees stumble like drunks across the pitted, muddy earth, through stands of thick marsh grass and pools of standing water. He watched them through the eyes of clever water rats, and yellow marsh snakes the length of a man's arm. There was nothing to see, though, and nothing to feel but fear and despair, so he closed his Eye and left the spying to the rats.

Horses flicked their tails at biting flies. Men and women burdened beneath the weight of their uprooted lives toiled through the muck and standing water. This is hell, thought Ira. He crushed a fly against his cheek and flicked the bloody corpse into the mud. An old woman staggered past him with a child of three or four held in her trembling arms. Beyond her a balding man in laborer's clothes stood staring in despair at an automobile with smoking pouring from its bonnet. Ragged children clustered around the man like motes of dust. The sinners just walk around, wondering what's happened. They don't know they're already dead.

Past the muddy graveyard of Lord John's defeat the land formed a sandy ramp in a cut that ran up into the witchgrass of the vertiginous coast. A few scrawny maples grew gnarled and windblown from the arid soil and besides the crying seabirds there were great black clouds of sparrows whipping back and forth across the sky like schools of fish. The Golden Road, a shaped stone highway as old as Vulgar Dosht and running alongside the elevated highway called the Road of Thorns, returned a few hours after they'd left the fish-stinking Reach at their back. Ira took off his coat, lit a cigarette and tried to ignore the blister forming on his left heel. When he did mount his swaybacked mare the Reach was a whiff of salt on the wind.

The flat land nodded and the sun sweated them. It was senescent country. Empty. Flat. Knee-high grass as far as the eye could see in every direction. The other travelers thinned. They fell behind, forged ahead, took other roads out into the vast green sea. Ira watched them go and felt nothing. I spent my whole life a mad fisherwoman's son trying to get north. Now I'm a prince, headed south. I wonder if the bitch's cottage is still there? The sun gasped its way toward the shimmering horizon.

Ira drowsed in the saddle, slipping in and out of dreams about an endless plain covered in a foot of brackish water, translucent trees growing up from the silt. Edrea's gloved hand like a vise on his shoulder dragged him rudely back into the waking world. It was dark, or nearly dark, and a canvas-topped troop truck blazoned with the Rosecrown coronet and the Kvalus bull approached them on a parallel track. Dust swirled in the truck's wake and danced in its headlights. There were men on the running boards with guns. Ira started to open his First Eye, but Edrea's grip on his arm tightened.

“No sorcery,” the old woman said through gritted teeth. “They aren't here for us.”

The truck passed them by. Its reddish taillights receded into the flat, dark distance.

They pitched their camp in the gloom beneath the branches of a dead baobab. The tree's swollen trunk was hollow and stank of guano. Ira pissed against the knotted bole while heat lightning spidered glasscrack-wise across the inky sky. Since Marius had opened him it burned when he pissed, a sensation like forcing ice chips through his cock. Wind whistled through the nodding grass and made the tree creak with old voices. It's too flat here, Ira thought as he buttoned his trousers, hands stiff with the gathering chill. One sniper in a blind and we're meat.

Edrea was brushing her horse by their impromptu picket line, a pair of metal stakes driven into the ground to keep the animals wandering. The horses watched Ira approach. Their soft dark eyes were empty in the firelight. Ira lit a cigarette. “How much longer until we're past the Imperial patrols?”

“The Throne's patrols.” Edrea bent and lifted Brutus's hoof. The huge horse snorted agreeably. “There hasn't been an Empire since your grandmother's murder.”

“How much longer?”

“A day. Two days. Lord Sumner Hammerton is waiting for us at the edge of the Waste.”

“And then what?”

“Valsir. Then Golden Harbor. War.”

War. He was sick to death of guns and tanks and sorcerers. He'd been bled, stuck, shot, and played for a sap since that day at Second Genault when his uncle had left him for dead on the shore. There are people who have to answer for this. He put a hand to his half-healed stomach. Eating anything but the blandest food still gave him unbearable cramps, and he'd taken shits he'd thought would be the end of him. I'm still alive, though, and I can still make them answer.

Lorne had to go. That much he knew, or felt in his ruined gut. His uncle, too, or else he'd never be truly safe. The rest of the Kvaluses, the Rosecrowns, and the rest of their angel-worshiping ilk, and it remained to be seen whether or not the Umzadi could be bought. Ira rubbed his nag's neck, but the old horse just looked glassily at him. “I've been wondering,” he said. “The Third Eye. Kazimir mentioned it to me, and I've read enough of the Conqueror's Gospel to know it has something to do with the soul. Why can't I open mine?” And oh, but I've tried. Hours and hours of pointless meditation wasted in Lorne's little mansion.

Edrea prized a stone loose from Brutus's dinner plate-sized hoof and let the big horse go. She lit a long, black cigarillo. “The Leviathans could do strange things with their Eye,” she said after a while. “Your uncle was imprisoned by his own soul, warped into shackles and warden both, and most priests agree that's how the House kept Eleazora in thrall for so long. No sorcerer outside the Imperial House has ever touched that kind of magic, and there's nothing I can do to help you use it.”

They sat in silence by their campfire well into the night. Ira ate tinned corn and pickled beets while Edrea read through a slim leather-bound folio. The stars were clear and bright. Bats swarmed in the warm night air, looping madly around one another in a rush to gorge themselves on as many insects as they could eat before sunup. The voice of heat lightning murmured in the distance when Edrea slid her folio back into her satchel and looked up at Ira.

“Your mother was a gentle woman.” She unscrewed her thermos and took a drink, then wiped her chin. “When you were born she was taken by a black depression. For weeks she kept to her bed. She would weep at the very sight of you. It happens to women sometimes after childbirth, and Lyannis was morbid at the best of times. Twice she tried to end her own life. Only Kazimir's surgeons kept her from succeeding.

“It took her the best part of a year to recover her strength, to leave her bed and take you in her arms. Still, there were days she sat by the window and stared out at nothing for hours. She wouldn't speak, she wouldn't eat. We feared she might die.”

“Before Lorne could get another whelp on her.” I'll never forget, teacher; you lied to me. “What's the point of this story?”

Edrea looked older than usual in the firelight. Too old to be out riding on the eastern plains in the dead of night. “Not everyone is made for war.” She puffed on her cigarillo. “We're riding toward blood, my prince, and I know what blood does to young men. You've seen your share of killing. If you chose to take ship to Barkult or Al-Dosht or Jek then, well, that would be that.” She took the cigarillo from her mouth. “Do you understand me?”

It was a door she held open for him, a way out of the web woven by people like Sofia, like Luke, like Kazimir, and Lord John. Ira looked down at his twisted hands, at the iron ring on his little finger that was all he had left of his dead, broken mother. When had anyone ever offered him a way out? Never. Not even Sofia would have done this for me. I could go...not back to the coast, but somewhere good. Somewhere new. I could ride off into obscurity, sign on with some half-penny crew out of Lion's Bay or Stone Harbor... And then what? Would he live his life as a deckhand, a corsair, a clam diver? My home a shack by the docks of some foreign city, my wife a crabber's daughter, my children dirty ragamuffins, my grave a pit dusted with lime. He chewed the inside of his scarred cheek, his forced half-grin. “No.”

“No,” Edrea repeated, disappointed. “Of course. As you wish.” She rose and went to unroll her pallet among the roots of the baobab tree.

When Ira slept he dreamt of little girls with scabby knees laughing as they raced through the shallows beneath the rotten piers of some dead city. Their hair was dark as the sea, their eyes grey as gull feathers. The elder carried the younger on her back up a crumbling stone stair to the bones of a ruined lighthouse overlooking a great black bay mobbed with circling seabirds. “There it is,” said the older girl, her sister's moon-wide eyes peering over her shoulder. “That's where it happened.”

Ira woke with a splitting headache and an aching bladder. He had a long, stinging piss behind the tree while Edrea, who had already risen, saddled Brutus. They rode away from the baobab before first light touched the grasses. The half-light of dawn lurked by the horizon when they returned to the road. Six miles into their day's ride they passed the first slave farm they'd seen since coming south of the Reach. Ira, his head still pounding, watched the slaves toil in their sweating hundreds. Dark-skinned Islanders, ashen Xuli, hairy men from the archipelagos north of the Shatterstones, and the lanky coffee-hued men of Barkult sweated with sickles, scythes, and handcarts among the ripe head-high grain in the endless summer heat of the south. Every slave, men and women both, was branded with a livid eagle. Evraheim's chattel.

The whole empire rests on their shoulders, and when they're old and bent they'll go sailing off to Heaven to feed the Throne's brood. Where was the justice in that? Where was the justice in any of it? Nobles are leeches, but what does that make me?

Some slaves watched them from behind the chain-link fence that ran for miles and miles along the fields, and then that was gone and they went on into the morning and the grasslands. A few cars passed them, and a handful of ox carts and carriages, but foot traffic was non-existent. Even when they rode past a little trading town no one came out to recommend hotels or beg custom. The east still went in fear of John's defeated armies, or else the soldiers of their own rulers. There were signs to justify their fears, as well. Twice they passed Blackwall men and townsfolk strung up from makeshift gallows by the roadside, and once a burning car left to smolder in a ditch. The next town they saw was a blackened skeleton, the one after that a still-smoking grave. A crashed airship lay like a whale's shark-stripped carcass in a field and dead men, carbonized husks, spilled from its ruptured gondola.

“It will be worse in the open grassland where John fled,” Edrea said when they stopped to water the horses at a cattle trough. The cattle, great beasts with cut horns and wet noses, watched them placidly from their pastureland. “He was always a hard man, and defeat makes the best soldiers into ravening dogs.”

Ira spat through his teeth and pushed a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. “As long as he stops sniffing himself long enough to crack Laurent and the East.”

Lord Sumner Hammerton met them a week later at the desert's edge where the waving grasses of the eastern plains gave way to bare gorse and dead acacias standing black and thorny in the sunlight. The herds of antelope, wild cattle, and bison that roamed the east were nowhere to be found. Vultures perched in the branches of every tree, and once Ira saw a strange long-snouted beast scratching at a termite hill, but life was sparse and dusty on the burning plain. Lord Sumner's legion rode dark, men, camels, and horses dressed in duns and tans, greys and browns in place of their commander's own blue and white. Even the trucks and their lone tank had been repainted to blend into the barren landscape.

Sumner himself was a stocky, white-bearded man with leathery skin and windswept hair. He found them in the shadow of a lonely red pillar of time-eaten rock, him and his ragtag band of survivors sent to escort the prince and his tutor south to dusty Valsir. He climbed down from his horse and knelt. His men did the same.  “Highness,” the old man said. “House Hammerton is at your service.” The irritation at bowing to a younger man was plain in Sumner's terse voice.

“Thank you, Dominus.” Ira didn't bother dismounting. “It's been a hard ride. How many days until we reach Valsir?” His horse dropped a load of dung, spattering its own fetlocks.

The bearded nobleman stood. “Three days, highness, and I have good news for a change.” He cracked a smile. “Lady Yvaine fled back to Golden Harbor last week, defeated.”

Small favors. “Good news indeed,” said Edrea. “Has Lord John pursued?”

“Not yet.” Lord Sumner, aided by a slave, climbed back into the saddle. “He's pacifying Valsir before he rides out. The angel-lovers are throwing a tantrum over some priestess dying in the siege.” The bearded noble's men were on their feet again and preparing their own mounts and vehicles to move out from the shadow of the standing stone. Ira heeled his nag forward to ride beside Lord Sumner. A peek through his First Eye showed the seers in the old man's honor guard; three of them dressed as rank-and-file soldiers with Hammerton's warhammer on their collars. Like most seers they'd shaved their heads and their pale scalps were peeling in the sunlight.

He doesn't trust me, Ira thought. The old man's unease and anger were there to read, jumping like the lines on a pulse tracker. His men were similarly on edge. They've been dodging the Church out here for months and now they're babysitting a man they've never met and some old sorcerer crone; I can't blame them for being sour about it.

They made good time that first day, though Ira's nose and cheeks were peeling and he'd sweated through his shirt by the time they made camp beside a muddy oasis. Sumner ate with his men, clapped their backs when they joked, shared out his liquor like a lax uncle, and joined them in their crudest marching songs. Ira had a place by the nobleman's fire, but neither the man nor his knights or soldiers so much as looked his way. He considered easing their disease and resentment with his Eye, but with Sumner's seers so close it seemed more likely to start a fight than to win him any friends.

“This is ridiculous.” Ira wolfed down his stew of tinned spinach, onions, and leathery beef. The broth warmed him against the cold night air. “What have I ever done to the old man?”

“He's been fighting wars since before you were born.” Edrea had crumbled stale crackers into her own stew and was fishing unenthusiastically for the pieces with her spoon. “Leave him be. Even princes can't be loved by every lord who swears his House to theirs.”

Ira lit a cigarette. Out beyond the circles of the camp's fires the eyes of jackals glowed like coals, and for an instant the cigarette's end matched them. He smoked it, watching Lord Sumner trade war stories with one of his client knights, a bull-necked man with a brown roadrunner on his ceramic breastplate. I could blast them all to slop. He blew smoke. One second and this whole camp is a charnel house. Ani had told him stories when he was a boy of Rassianus kings and queens who had brought whole cities to their knees with the strength of their sorcery. Aurax the Mad had once, in a fit of wrath, reduced Rassian to cinders from the Palace to Leviathan Bay.

Edrea rose, stretched, and departed for the tent the men had set aside for her. Ira sat by the fire and smoked until one by one the soldiers drifted away to their posts or their pallets. Lord Sumner gave him a stiff bow before taking his own leave, and then it was only Ira, the dark, and the fading fire. That night he dreamed of a tree that was a woman, her eyes dark knots in the rotten bark, her fingers twisted branches, her mouth a black pit working, working, always moving, never speaking.

Beautiful boy, came the woman's voice, not from the tree but from far, far away and deep, deep beneath the earth. All our sins are crashing down.

Ira woke shaking and sweaty in his slant-topped tent. It was still dark. He went out to the water barrels, drank deeply, splashed tepid water on his face, and watched the gelid sun rise fat and shimmery from the belly of the night.  

The Metawars, Chapter 13: Negotiations

Chapter 13: Negotiations

“Are we ready?” Nucleon glanced at his watch again, confirming what he already knew. They were right on schedule.

“Yes,” Professor Portal said. “Still ready.” He bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet, twiddling his fingers. Nucleon ignored him. Behind them, Brainwave lounged against the concrete walls of the small room and stifled a yawn behind his long hands. They were in a cell in the depths of Professor Portal's base. The room had no windows, just bare grey walls and a blank door. The only thing in the room was a metal chair.

“Well, then let's get on with it. We only have a small window.”

“Patience,” Nucleon said. “We must be precise.” This, of course, assumed that the schedule Charles had leaked to them was accurate. If not, they would have to improvise, and fast. “Now.”

Sofia III

The countryside was bare as a priest's tonsured scalp. Once again Sofia sat in the backseat of a long black car rumbling down the Iron Road to Rassian, but this time it was with an army at her back. The ladies and lords of the Hornea, Brightwater, Welker, Gross, Anchor, and Brahm were all shut up in their castles with what men Laurent had left them. Most of the wealth and arms of the lands around the capital were now nestled in Rassian's bosom, along with the lion's share of the autumn crop. Between that harvest and a constant stream of grain and beef from the Rhydderlands in the south Laurent could sit on his ass until summer without fear of plague or famine in his city.

The snow was melting. Even at night meltwater flowed fast in the ditches beside the road and cascaded down the rolling hills in makeshift streams that would dry up and die in summer. The moon was full and washed the fertile countryside in argent light. The legions left churned earth and stubbled fields in their wake as they marched west to buy a fleet.

The baby kicked and Sofia's stomach roiled. She had reports to go over, clipboards stuffed with messages from her uncle's spies, from Kazimir's, from quartermasters and legion tribunes. Lord Rhovan's legions were embattled at Cold Fords but had both guns and numbers to their advantage. The rail lines running from the Empire's northern half to Rassian had been cut, the bridges dynamited so that the only way in was through the gates or the harbor. This war will bury me in paper. She set the reports on the seat and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her gown was tight and her swollen breasts had been tender since the morning sickness started; it made for frequent headaches.

Sieur Magnus, seated opposite her, looked up. “Are you well, Highness?”

Am I well? I'm losing a war I haven't started and my child is determined to transform me into some sort of dairy cow. “It's nothing, Magnus. I'm anxious to see the night's business done.”

“Lord Norman is a snake,” Sieur Magnus said reassuringly, “but we have his back to the sea. His ships will be yours.”

Gull's Folly, the seat of House Daguerre, was the westernmost of all the Hornea's great fortifications. It was a plain, stark place, a square tower with foundations hacked from the granite and basalt of the seaward cliffs. Its pilings stretched down to the dark, wild surf where the lights of Lord Norman's battle fleet rocked at anchor. Stepping from her car Sofia thought that the armada looked like a city, all buildings moored loosely one to another and subject to the sea's ruinous whims. A hundred ships. Two hundred. Enough to break Laurent ?

Sieur Magnus, Sieur Enri, and Sieur Jayne walked with Sofia toward the lighted tower. In her headpiece of gold filigree and trailing dress of midnight silk, its train embroidered with leviathans rampant, Sofia knew she looked her part. Still her palms were damp with perspiration. Daguerre's black cormorant on blue flew from a hundred flagpoles hammered into the naked stone along the path and at the gates men waited to admit them. Lord Norman's steward, a dour Rhyddish woman all in mourning blue with her Lord's cormorant tattooed on her wrinkled brow.

Sofia held out her hand. The woman kissed it.

“Take me to him.”

The climb to Lord Norman's apartments was a steep one. Sofia counted two hundred steps before they came to a landing with a seaward window on the left and a stout oaken door on the right. She took a moment to catch her breath before waving to the steward to admit them. The old woman opened the door on a long, low-ceilinged room forested with plain-cut beams of cedar. At a dining table sat a long-faced man with a head of thinning grey hair and a great red-veined beak of a nose. He wore a plain silk dressing gown and a stained undershirt. “Your majesty,” he said, looking up from his newspaper and his bowl of fruit and yogurt.

“Lord Norman.” Sofia took the seat at the table's end as her knights took up positions by the door. Mistrust radiated from Sieur Magnus like heat from sun-warmed pavement. I don't trust him either, but I have no choice.

Norman Daguerre folded his paper and set it aside. He produced a silver cigarette holder, extracted a cigarette, and lit it. “You want my fleet.” Smoke trickled from his hairy nostrils. He scooped up a spoonful of peaches and yogurt and, holding his cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand, ate. “One hundred and sixty-six ships.”

Sofia clasped her hands in her lap as the baby kicked again. She hoped the dress Lord Kazimir's tailors had sewed for her hid her rounded stomach well enough. “I am your Queen.”

Lord Norman took a long drag on his cigarette. “What of it? I have a telegram from Rassian saying there's a king wants my ships as well. He'll pay, too, though that part's what we call a silent understanding.” He spoke the last words in a stage whisper. “So why should you get them?”

“It is your duty, Dominus. You served my grandmother-”

“Duty!” Lord Norman threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. “If I started doing my duty now, then where would I be tomorrow? I fought for Ysandre because I thought she'd win, and when the war was at an end and I knew I'd laid my bets like a fool I hurried off to Rassian to bend my knee to old Hanley.   You'll need a better reason than duty if I'm to send my men off to die with you.”

Sofia leaned back in her seat and let her Eye fall just the slightest bit open. At once the hundreds of minds within the tower assaulted her with their clamor, but she shoved them aside and focused her scrutiny on Norman. The knot in her stomach loosened as she probed the edges of the nobleman's mind. He would be trained against succumbing to a seer's influence, but she could still sound out his thoughts in safety. With a flicker of surprise she came upon herself seen through his eyes, a silly girl playing games with knights and cannon. Very well, let's change the game.

“Laurent is a fool.” She took her headpiece off. Her oiled hair slid out of its elegant knot and fell around her shoulders. “Give him your fleet and he'll take your oath for a year, maybe two, before his mother tells him you're plotting against him, or else he suspects it himself, and what's worse is that you will be plotting against him.” She reached back and loosened the satin ribbons binding her bodice. Dead God, that feels good. “So he'll have your head if he's feeling impatient, and if he's in a patient mood you'll rot in a dungeon less your hands, your tongue, your feet and most likely your cock.”

“A frightening tale,” said Lord Norman, looking thoroughly un-frightened.

“No,” said Sofia, shaking her head. “The frightening part is what happens when he's bored with you and you go down to the harbor to board a ship bound for heaven.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in his half-eaten bowl of yogurt. “The same heaven you would topple. You're an ambitious one.”

“I wouldn't be here otherwise.” She stood, knowing she gave Lord Norman a brief glimpse of her breasts. “I'd be in a ditch beside the Iron Road, where the Throne tried to put me.

“I'll require your answer by sunrise.” She turned to go.

“Exclusive fishing rights for the eastern coast, a one percent stake in all Rassian-based businesses and Imperial initiatives, the patronage of the Imperial Navy at my shipyards, primacy in the provinces of the Hornea and the exile of every living member of House Brightwater with their lands and titles ceded to my family, my son Nathan to assume governance of those lands at once, a one-time cash payment of six million marks, the marriage of your firstborn to one of my own children of fitting age, and...oh, let us say the restoration of my right to whale in northern waters.”

Sofia looked back at Lord Norman. He had lit another cigarette and was slumped indolently in his seat, his skinny legs crossed, his hands on his belly.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “that should do it. Just.”

She closed her Eye. “Then consider it done, Lord Governor.”

In the shadow of Gull's Folly the legions were pitching camp. From the tower gates it seemed a river of men and machinery stretched back along the road, miles and miles of violence coiled up like a fist. Sofia inhaled deeply. She'd given Lord Norman enough to ensure that if the war tipped in her favor House Daguerre would rest comfortably on the spoils for a century. That Lord Norman had sons and had not so much as breathed the word “marriage” spoke volumes of his confidence in her achieving that outcome. What will he do if I fail? Fall to the floor and grovel, pleading that he was forced into treason by sorcery? She started down the banner-lined track toward the camp's outskirts. She had to piss, an occurrence now so common it no longer even irritated her.

Sieur Magnus fell in at her side like a gigantic bald raven. “You did well, highness.”

Sofia pulled a sour face. “I gave him everything but my underclothes.”

“You needed his ships, highness.” Magnus looked distinctly uncomfortable. “The northern fleet is small and outdated, and Leviathan Bay is strongly defended.”

The council tent was abandoned except for Lord Kazimir and the dwarf, Tilly Lemure. She had come south with her brothers and even wore a soldier's uniform in miniature, Lemure's water strider stitched on the collar. Seated on a high stool she perused a welter of dusty maps and troop movement reports. What a strange little woman, Sofia thought as she left Magnus and Enri and slipped through the tent flap into the musty murk of the tent.

“Your majesty.” Tilly looked up from her study of the maps. “Lord Norman is with us?”

“He is,” Sofia said. She sat down at the table's head and dipped her hands in a silver ewer set out for departed diners. Sieur Jayne brought a towel for her to dry them on. “Once we meet Lord Rhovan we will be ready to take the capital.”

The little red-haired woman had proven herself useful time and time again. She'd plotted courses for their long and troop-burdened advance, advised the quartermasters in planning their camps and even set with deft brilliance supply lines that kept even the poor fruits of the marshland provinces flowing quick and undetected across the breadth of the Hornea. Talia frowned down at a map of Rassian and its countryside. “My brothers say I should return to our fortress at Blackwater Pool.”

“War's a game,” Sofia said. She took a cigarette from a little brass dish on the table and lit it. “Men like to pretend they're best at it, to keep us away from the swords.” She felt cruel, rebellious, and bold. Beside her Sieur Jayne, who had earned her own knighthood driving the Umzadi from the coast, flashed a crooked smile.

The dwarf's oversized brow wrinkled. “Will you be on the battlefield, your majesty?”

“Yes.” Though Sieur Magnus had spent hours trying to convince her otherwise. “I'll command from the deck of Lord Norman's Masquerade.”

“I've read accounts.” The girl deftly rolled the map and returned it to its leather tube. Her face was pale. “I've never been in a battle, though.”

“Neither have I.” It felt strange to admit it when every day was spent playing the Queen, the Empress, the grand commander. The last woman of House Rassianus to take the field had been Queen Valeria the Wrathful, Lysander's youngest daughter who had seen nine of her brothers and sisters buried within the palace walls before herself rising to the throne. It had been she who finished her father's bloody work, bringing the Broken Isle, the Rhydderlands and the deep south of Artaxas into the imperial fold with two decades of brutal war.

“I think I'll stay, then.” Tilly climbed down from her stool and curtsied before leaving the pavilion. As the flaps parted Sofia glimpsed for an instant the lights of her new fleet rocking gently on the black waters of the bay. She watched the ships for a long, cold while and thought of Rassian. What would she do once she'd taken it? Bigger wheels than me are spinning. I have to be prepared.

“Highness?” Magnus, still standing like a pillar beside the tent's entrance, looked at her. “Do you need anything?”

A wave of nausea swept over Sofia, a tidal swell of it. Her stomach, now noticeably rounded, clenched and roiled. She looked up at the night. “No.”

The Metawars, Chapter 12

You'll find that a lot of the dialogue and interactions from the end of this chapter are recycled from the previous Chapter 13.  I wasn't able to squeeze in Ghost's conversations with Captain Chicago or Brick.  Your opinions on their exclusion would be nice.

This chapter needs some severe editing, fyi.

Chapter 12:

“Is this really happening?” Ghost asked, brandishing the ivory-colored envelope. It was addressed to The New York Guardians, 90 Park Avenue, New York NY. The return address was somewhere in Washington, DC. “A party?”

“It's not a party,” said Evermind as she leafed through the contents of the letter. “They're strategy meetings and a Metahuman solidarity and unity summit. That's what they're calling it, anyway.”

Ysabelle III

 YSABELLE

Lord Rhovan, dressed for battle, sat his charger in the brittle chill of spring dawn. His ceramic alloy plate was a deep, dark red and his snorting, ill-tempered mount was the color of blood. He wore a pistol at his left hip and across his knees was a long-handled warhammer heavy enough to smash a knight's ceramic breastplate into his lungs. It reminded Ysabelle of Fyodor's hammer, that Eye-stained thing with its broken stone head and splintery handle. Sieur Boris sat beside his liege with the manticore banner flying from his ceremonial pike.

Lord Rhossart was too fat for armor; he wore a fur-trimmed coat over his red suit and orange vest. His mount was a placid, stocky mare. Vitali had gone south to pledge the allegiance of the Northern Provinces to Sofia's cause, but the rest of Lord Rhovan's family and client lords were with him on the field. Lord Renfield Urquhart, Lady Bazhukov with her gimlet eyes and massive shoulders, Sieur Simeon Yarinoff, and the pitiless Harkov triplets who ruled their lands jointly. Them and their families, those who'd been knighted and blooded. A few northern priests, Fyodor among them, walked alongside the horses in their bearskin cloaks and old-fashioned armor.

The town of Cold Fords lay at their back, and before them were the three frozen rivers that gave it its name. A mile away on the near bank were arrayed the legions of Sieur Siegfried Ramm, the man everyone said had killed King Luke on the night of Lord Saul's and little Rhossart's deaths. Half of us are gone, thought Ysabelle. Now they said her aunt, still Anaias's vassal, had been crushed by the Blackwalls beneath the walls of Valsir. Ysard's brother had died in that city. I never want to see it again. Not if I live to be a hundred.

Ysard, her cousin and protector, rode beside her in the thick of Lord Rhovan's command. He wore no armor and stubble darkened his once clean-shaven jaw. His green stormcoat was rumpled and soiled, his shirt collar yellow with sweat. The long yellow scarf he wore was stained with dark blotches of wine, unless it was blood. He'd spent much of his time in Cold Fords at the pubs and wine sinks, drowning his brother Yannis's memory in cheap liquor. They were close, she remembered from their visits. Hardly away from each other. On Ysabelle's other side Master Drusus cut a cleaner figure in his black suit, good winter coat, and flashing spectacles. He'd found a round fur hat somewhere to cover his balding head.

Across the mile-wide no-man's land between armies, another command prepared itself to treat with Rhovan's. The gilded armor of the Knights Corpus flashed in the wintery sunlight. Atticus Cloyt, the radical scholar who'd founded Mule's Point University, had disparaged the Knights Corpus as a bad joke on the legacy of the Knights of the Branch, but Sieur Siegfried and his cronies looked impressive enough. We outnumber them, though. Her father's captain of the guard, Sieur Bowman Grant, had taught her how to take a rough account of a legion's strength by its standards and formations. At least forty thousand of them. Two full legions to our three and change.

A hush full over the assembled nobility. Lord Rhovan looked out over the tundra to where Ramm's escort had formed an honor guard around him. “Now,” he said, and heeled his horse forward.

They advanced, thirty-odd men and women in fur, wool, kevlar, and ballistic plate. Ysabelle urged her pony after them. It felt strange. Wrong. What am I doing here? It should be my father, or my aunt. Except she's on the other side of the war.

Closer, Ysabelle recognized most of Sieur Siegfried's men from court. There was squat, squinty Geoffrey Vanciber, there Abram Reincrow and his sister Lethe, and beside them the barrel-chested figure of Sieur Robert Rath. A few collegiate sorcerers with shaved heads and red robes trimmed in golden vair rode beside Sieur Siegfried, while behind him rode a tall, hooded figure in a brown cloak that hid his face. The knight himself was tall, his dirty-blond hair windblown and messy, his blue eyes lively. He smiled as the two groups drew near one another.

“Lord Rhovan,” said the traitor knight, flashing his charming grin as he pulled back on his golden stallion's reins. The horse halted with a snort. “It doesn't look as though you've come to dip your banners to the King. Are we going to have a tiff in front of the children?”

“Surrender or die, regicide.” Lord Rhovan's scowl was black as a thunderhead. “The north knows no monarch but Sofia Rassianus.”

“And yet,” said Sieur Siegfried, “you've spent thirty years doing an excellent impression of a province that recognized Luke Kvalus as its king and sovereign.”

Rhovan's face tightened. His knights had murder in their eyes and their hands were on the butts of their guns, the hilts of their swords. Ysabelle's pony whinnied and stepped back, shying from the violence in the air. She glanced left at where Fyodor stood with his hard-faced brothers. The priest was frowning at Lady Bazhukov, who sat brooding in her saddle with her sword half-drawn.

“I offer your men the chance to take up valorous arms,” said Lord Rhovan through clenched teeth. “You'll face trial for your crimes once Rassian is taken.”

Sieur Siegfried looked unimpressed. “Well then,” he said, “I suppose that's that. Vitali?”

The brown-cloaked man threw back his hood. Lord Rhovan gaped, speechless, at his son.

Vitali? But he went south to meet the Queen's armies. Ysabelle's heart was a frozen lump of stone inside her breast. He can't be here.

Lady Bazhukov's sword took Lord Rhovan's head off in a spray of blood. Red droplets struck Ysabelle's sleeve and her mount's flank. The pony spooked and broke into a gallop as Sieur Boris turned his mount, his bearded face bloodless, and was cut down in a hail of bullets. The two armies stood silent and dark against the snowy plain, their breath misting before them, as in the dead white space between their ranks the two honor guards came together in a bloody tangle. A few of the northerners tried to break for freedom, but sorcerous fire engulfed them as they fled. Lord Rhossart was shouting for his sword when two men dragged him from his horse.

Ysabelle saw Master Drusus slump in his saddle, then fall to the ground. She saw Ysard dueling Sieur Geoffrey until another of the Knights Corpus rode up and shot her cousin through the heart, then again in the head. She twisted, thumping her heels against her pony's heaving flanks, but the animal just plunged on through the brittle snow. I'm going to die, she thought as an Imperial sorcerer met her eyes across the churned expanse. I don't know enough to stop him.

He was theatrical. There was no burst of flame, no thunder of phantasmal guns. Instead a great bear of hoarfrost, snow, and frozen dirt heaved itself up out of the ground and lunged at Ysabelle and her pony with a roar like rotten ice breaking. The pony screamed as icy claws raked its rump. The bear shambled after them. No, thought Ysabelle. No. This is ridiculous. She opened her Second Eye, swallowing the bile it brought to her throat.

There is no bear. Snow doesn't live.

The construct collapsed mid-lunge, its feeble ideation unable to stand up to sorcerous scrutiny. Ysabelle laughed out loud, fury and grief forgotten in that golden moment. Then something heavy hit her in the stomach. She grunted, doubling over, and saw blood in her spit as it dribbled onto the pommel of her saddle. The snow raced by beneath her. My womb, she thought sadly. Her glove, pressed to her belly, came away red with blood. The world was fuzzing around the edges, and what sounds she could still hear were screams and the thunder of hooves.

She turned, her head spinning, and saw a knight on horseback pounding toward her, a rifle in his hands. He shouted something and then sparks flared around his flying hair and he went up like an oily rag. His horse had just started to burn when the world ran together and dribbled down into a deep, black hole, and then there was nothing left at all.

The Metawars, Chapter 11 (new)

New content!  This one comes after the chapter where Evermind reprimands Ghost.  I borrowed a lot of stuff from Chapter 15 with some new stuff at the end.
In the edited Chapter 8, Nucleon and Charles briefly talk about planning an attack on Houston...so the mentions of that at the beginning of this aren't totally out of left field.

Not sure if this is a good direction to take the story...I'll tell you what my tentative plans are after you read the chapter.

Chapter 11:

“The exact origin of the Metahuman is unknown. From the time and place of the first recorded Metahumans – beginning in Japan in 1946 – it can be surmised that high levels of radiation initially led to the creation of superpowers in normal human beings. If this is indeed the cause, it is still unknown how this phenomena became a worldwide one and how abilities are passed on.”

-Summary of analysis of metahuman history and abilities, by Gold and Morris, et al, 1983.

YSABELLE II

YSABELLE

The caribou herds were gone when Fyodor took her in the grey predawn light to the field where before they had coursed in their endless thousands and tens of thousands. The field of snow was churned to slush and mud. A few packs of lean grey wolves feasted on unfortunate stragglers, ripping at meat already freezing in the bitter cold. Ysabelle stood on the roadside with her teacher, shivering in her fur-trimmed coat, woolen dress and fez. Winter is unkind, she thought.

The Metawars, edited Chapter 7

The beginning of this chapter is pretty much identical to the earlier version.  It's the second half that's different.  New characters include Senator Spencer Alan and Secretary Grant Chapman.

Not 100% happy with the chapter title, but not sure about what to change it to.

Chapter 7: The Plot Thickens

“Though not a well-known part of the Vietnam War, the Metahuman conflict was a crucial component. They represented China and the entire Soviet bloc's ambitions of a superhero program to match America's. The efforts of American superhero Nucleon is the primary reason the Vietnamese and Chinese superhero programs faltered and is often considered a significant factor in the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.”

-Exert from “History of the Vietnam War,” by D.R. Murphy, PhD, 1998.

IRA IV

 Dead leaves and snow skirled through the open cellar door. It banged against its frame, caught helpless in the gusting wind. Ira dressed himself in the simple workman's clothes laid out for him. Felt cap, long pressed-wool overcoat, starched shirt and stained waistcoat. The shoes were cracked, the socks thick and knobbly. He rubbed his hands together, trying to chafe some warmth back into them. His stomach ached where Marius had opened it. Uncle, he thought, I owe you a favor.

The Metawars, Chapter 13

With the addition of Charles Ramanujan to the plot, the Omegamen are going to come in much later and thus this chapter probably won't happen.  Ignore for the most part the events and focus more on the characters, since the relationships are going to remain regardless of what the new Chapter 13 will be.

Chapter 13:

“Do you, John Morgan, codename Deluge, take Cora Conrad, codename Miss Amazing, to be your wife, through sickness and health, war and peace, to uphold justice and the tenets of the MPA, so long as you both may live?”

- Vows at the public wedding between Deluge and Miss Amazing, 2002.

ANORA II

Anora walked barefoot along the shore, beyond the reeking clamor of the dockside and the industrial riot of Leviathan Bay. Seagulls hopped ahead of her through the seaweed and melting snow, shrieking in their ugly, metallic voices. Concrete pipes large enough to swallow automobiles whole, their mouths crusted with icicles, belched runoff into trenches laid in the sand and small grey crabs scuttled in and out of the sluggish streams. Anora brought her foot down on one. Its shell broke beneath her weight and purplish ichor oozed out onto the sweep of the shore. It felt like stepping on an egg. The crab died, after a time, and Anora walked on.

The Metawars, Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Alpha and Omega

“What can we do? We are, as a people, as a species, reduced. What can we do against beings with such power? We have reached an end.”

- Professor Gregory Gould, chairman of biology, Duke University, 1953

The elevator hummed as it descended to the basement of Lynch Labs. Majesticus stood straight-backed next to Shade and Patriot, hands clasped behind his back. He watched the numbers on the elevator tick down.

“I don't see why we have to do this,” Patriot said. He pounded his fist into his open palm. The sound of his armored hands slamming together rang through the small space. Majesticus winced. The sound almost eclipsed the harsh static of Patriot's frustration. “We should be out there, following Nucleon and the rest of those traitors. Instead we're going to be stuck doing a stupid publicity stunt.”

“It's important, isn't it?” Shade said. “And they worked.”

 

Patriot nodded. “Right. So let's follow up on their performance. Let's get out there and chase 'em down. They're on the run. We're wasting time doing this.” He looked down at his open palm and curled it into a fist. “I want this over. Now.”

 

Majesticus touched Patriot's shoulder, the highest part of his teammate's body he could reach. “Patience,” he said. “We have our orders.” Inside, Majesticus shook. Patriot's anger made him uneasy. Patriot had been like this since the funeral in Chicago. Eager for a chance to get back at Nucleon after he'd literally slipped through their fingers.

 

The rest of the ride passed in silence until the doors slid open onto the main basement of Lynch Labs. The basement was at least forty feet tall floor to ceiling, all of it vast and echoing space lit by flat florescent lighting. Glass tubes lined the room from floor to ceiling, each of them large enough to hold a man and filled with some thick blue liquid. President Lynch was already there, talking in low tones to Dr. Stewart. Sweaty cameramen and glossy reporters stood about, talking and finalizing preparations. The sounds they made bounced around the cavernous room, lost amongst the constant hum and bubbling sounds emitting from the endless ranks of glass tubes.

 

President Lynch looked up at the approaching heroes. He clasped his hands together and smiled. “Good. We can begin.” He nodded to the scientist. “Ready, Dr. Stewart?”

“Ready,” said Dr. Stewart.

 

Lynch beckoned to the heroes. “You remember your lines?”

“Of course,” said Majesticus, speaking for all of them. He could always feed them their lines telepathically if needed. Patriot grunted. Shade smiled automatically.

“Cameras ready?” Dr. Stewart asked as he adjusted his tie.

“Ready,” came the response.

 

Majesticus positioned himself by the president, next to Patriot and Shade. He tugged at the bottom of his cowl, smoothed out his cape, and assumed a sombre stance, something appropriate for the occasion. Patriot stood with his fists on his hips, the dramatic pose the public was used to seeing him in.

The red lights on the cameras blinked. “Aaand, three two, one...”

“Good afternoon, America,” Lynch said to the cameras. “As many of you have surely heard, Lynch Labs, under the watch of Director of Research Dr. Lyman Stewart, has developed a new weapon to fight the evil Metahumans in this war: the Omegamen. Just yesterday we proved that these new weapons have what it takes to win. The Omegamen found Nucleon and his supporters and handed us a clear victory.”

 

It was interesting, Majesticus thought, the range of emotions flying through the room at that moment. Pride and a nervous energy from Dr. Stewart. Resentment from Patriot. Tightly coiled excitement from the president.

“Our very own National Heroes will soon be fighting alongside the Omegamen,” Lynch continued. “And with the power and leadership they provide with the might of the Omegamen, victory in this war is a certainty.” The president swept his hands behind him into the depths of the basement. Majesticus now saw that in each of the glass tubes floated a man, wires hooked into arms and chest, breathing apparatuses in their mouths. Their minds were blank, less than the babbling thoughts of infants.

 

Lynch strolled down the path between the towers of glass tubes. “Tell us about the Omegamen, Dr. Stewart,” he said, speaking half to the doctor and half to the cameras.

“Of course.” Dr. Stewart pushed his glasses up his nose, opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “We created them using the latest technology. Years of research. They're artificially created. Like clones. Test-tube bred. We used genetic material from various soldiers in our service, as well as Metahuman DNA. It grants them an astonishing level of powers.” Dr. Stewart gestured to the ranks upon ranks of men in the tubes. Further down, some of the Omegamen looked different, less human. Younger ones, Majesticus reasoned. Less developed. They had a doughy look to their flesh. The muscles weren't fully developed, undersized or bulging under skin not yet grown to fit. Wires and electronics fit in under the skin on their bald heads. Some looked younger still, but not like children. Like small adults made of clay. “Super strength. Bulletproof skin. Not that we don't provide them with armor, but having Kevlar-tough skin never hurts. Enhanced senses, the most useful of which are microscopic and telescopic vision. We gave them flight too, of course. No need for troop transport. And it's a very intimidating sight to see them fly in rank. Strike fear into the enemies.” He held his hands out above him, indicating the grandness of his vision. The shirt fabric under his arms was wet. “And, this is the best thing: a hive mind.”

“Could you explain what that means, doctor?” the president asked, his tone light and inquisitive.

“Yes. Quite simply, they share one mind. Single thoughts in all of their heads. The fastest method of communication we could think of, far faster than speaking or even telepathy. Each Omegaman perceives the world independently, sees and hears it by themselves, but they all know what each other sees at the same time. They can create complex strategies and plans and they'll all instantly know them. We call it the Omnimind.”

 

They had reached the end of the walkway, where a group of new Omegamen stood, suited in their crisp new uniforms. The bright red Omega symbol and the white stars on their chest pockets were the only things that stood out in the beige camouflage-patterned fabric and similar faces. Large black assault rifles lay cradled in their arms. As one, they saluted President Lynch and the National Heroes as they approached. Patriot nodded to them, stiff-necked and irritable. Dr. Stewart rapped on the chest of one of them. It made a dull ringing sound.

“They've also been given the finest military training available,” the doctor continued. “Downloaded directly into their minds. Mind,” he corrected.

“Fascinating,” muttered Lynch, his face turned away from the camera. “Amazing. So shiny and new. Perfect, like gods.”

 

Like gods, indeed, thought Majesticus. What did that make the Metahumans, then? The titans? Creators of the universe, perhaps, but diminished and forgotten when the gods arrived. And in many ways, perhaps the heroes were like the old gods of myths. They had flight, super speed, incredible strength, lightning at the tips of their fingers...some heroes even had the egos and hubris to match. They'd had stories told about them so many times that there was debate over what the real story was. Not that it mattered. The characters themselves were what mattered. The tales of their deeds were mutable. So too, the superheroes lived on in stories.

 

The only difference, really, was that the new American gods wore capes.

 

Majesticus walked up close to one of the Omegamen. The artificial man stared back at him with flat eyes. “May I look into your mind?” he asked. The Omegaman didn't respond.

“The won't take orders from you yet,” Dr. Stewart explained. “Not yet. They're programed to take orders from only select people. Makes them easier for us to control, you see. No risk of enemy takeover.” Majesticus nodded. “Omegamen,” Dr. Stewart said in a clear voice, “this Metahuman is going to read your mind. Admit him.” Majesticus closed his eyes and opened his psychic awareness.

 

Ah. Yes. It was true. Despite the many Omegamen around him, hundreds and hundreds of bodies, there was only one mind, a singularity that marched through their heads in perfect syncopation. Multiple bodies perceiving, one mind analzing. It boggled the imagination. It had to be a sensory overload for them, with one mind processing so much input and information. But they were artificial. The more Majesticus looked the more their mind resembled not a human brain, but a computer, obeying preset rules and programs.

 

President Lynch turned to Patriot. “Are you ready to serve alongside the Omegamen, Patriot, and secure the future of this country?” The question was clearly asked for the benefit of the cameras. To Patriot's credit, though, he contorted his chiseled features into a close approximation of his usual toothy grin.

“I am.” He put an arm around the shoulder of the nearest Omegaman. The artificial soldier didn't respond to the gesture. “Anything to win this war.”

 

Lynch smiled. “That's what I want to hear. We're in good hands.”

 

The show and tell session continued for some time, with Dr. Stewart and President Lynch bragging about the many traits of the Omegamen and how they were perfectly equipped to deal with Nucleon and the rogue Metahumans. Majesticus played his part, the silent and respectful observer, nodding along with the comments made and answering questions asked of him. Secretly, he was concerned. He waited until the cameras were off before voicing them.

“Mr. President?”

 

Lynch broke away from a conversation with Dr. Stewart. “Majesticus?”

“I understand,” he began, “that these Omegamen have proven useful. But they do not sit well with me. Is this wise? How long shall we need them?”

“As long as is necessary, Majesticus.” The president's face hardened. “Nucleon has been free for almost a month. A month that he's held our nation in the grip of terror and anarchy. Clearly, the efforts of our heroes are not enough.”

“But keeping them a secret from the public until now...”

“We needed the element of surprise against Nucleon,” Lynch said. “We could not risk tipping our hand.”

“And what will become of the Omegamen once the war has ended?” Majesticus pressed.

“What do you think? They'll stay, of course.”

“Stay. So you plan on incorporating them into the military and MPA.”

“With the approval of the varying other parties, of course. They need to be officially approved by Congress and the generals of the army, and the Departments of Defense and Metahuman Regulation will have to look into it, but it's all formalities. After the success of the raid on Nucleon's base, Congress will vote in favor of the program, and the army won't be able to say no. We can only benefit from them.”

 

The two men walked through the corridors of the basement together, president and superhero. Both influential in their own ways. Without the political clout of the White House the Metahumans would have amounted to nothing, and the might of the state superhero gave the government power. Majesticus remembered each president since Eisenhower had signed the Metahuman Police Act into law. Each had used the superheroes for something different. War, back in the sixties and seventies. Hope and unity in the eighties. Peacekeeping in the nineties. And now?

“I wonder,” Majesticus said, “how did you know where to find Nucleon? We've been searching since the breakout and made no progress. And to find him in Professor Portal's old headquarters of all places...” It was the first time the villain's base of operations had been found, despite the many years he'd been in operation and the years he'd spent in Eisenhower Memorial Prison. Majesticus had always assumed that the base had been hidden in a pocket dimension, a product of the professor's space-bending powers. With all the temporary pathways Professor Portal made by folding space onto itself, a permanent wormhole would have had to emerge, or some other disastrous side effect. Instead the blasted thing had been hidden in the desert, protected with turrets and clever cloaking devices.

“Good old fashioned detective work, Majesticus,” Lynch explained. “That, and we were able to figure out where the portal that took Nucleon out of Chicago led to. Stupid move on Professor Portal's part, leading Nucleon right back to his secret base.”

 

Majesticus frowned. “I thought we tried that when we were tracking Professor Portal during his big crime spree in 1988. And a number of other methods too.”

“Well, it worked this time,” Lynch said. He stopped and turned to face Majesticus, hands in his trouser pockets. “Majesticus. May I ask you something?”

“By all means.”

“Do you trust me?”

 

Majesticus blinked, taken aback. “I'm sorry?”

“Do you trust me?” the president repeated. “It's a simple question.”

“Why?”

“You're on edge,” Lynch said. “Suspicious, I'm afraid. And the Omegamen aren't helping. It's a big change, I know. I wasn't sold on the idea myself until Dr. Stewart showed me the figures and results on the project. He was very adamant, and the rest of my cabinet was with him. After the results at Professor Portal's base, well, I couldn't say no.”

 

Majesticus nodded.

“I ask again, Majesticus: do you trust me?” Lynch put a hand on the Majesticus's shoulder, comforting and fatherly. “We need to all trust each other, or else we crumble. If we become paranoid and start seeing knives in the shadows, then Nucleon wins. We can't have that, can we?”

“No,” Majesticus said, but in his mind he remembered Nucleon from thirty years ago, young and fresh-faced as the crowds applauded for him while Majesticus looked on. “Never.” Part of Majesticus realized the absurdity of the situation, of two grown men having a frank and serious conversation while one was dressed a suit, the other in tights and a cape.

“Then...”

“I trust you,” said Majesticus. “Don't worry. And Shade and Patriot do too. Believe me Mr. President, regardless of the outcome in this war, we will stay together.”

 

As the President walked away Majesticus realized that he couldn't read Lynch's mind.

“I don't like 'em,” Patriot declared the moment the team left Lynch Labs and had gotten past the swarms of reporters and paparazzi (Patriot had stopped to sign autographs and shake hands, and several teenage boys had begged to have their pictures taken with Shade). “Not at all.”

“They're useful,” Shade said. “Just get over them.”

“Hmmph.”

 

Majesticus was lost in thought. Did President Lynch simply have an extremely guarded mind, difficult to read and perceive? Perhaps he'd had training. It was not uncommon in this day and age for politicians to be trained to block their thoughts against invasive telepathy. It had happened enough in the Cold War, presidents and senators afraid of having their secrets ripped from their minds by Soviet Metahumans. He could have used a Psiblock, standard among DMR officials working with telepaths. But Psiblocks were either large and bulky, meant for large radii, or personal earpieces. Majesticus had seen no earpiece.

“We must do something!” Patriot said, interrupting Majesticus's musings.

“We already have a plan,” Shade said. “Look: the DMR's tracking Nucleon, and we'll lead a raid on them with the Omegamen.”

 

Patriot slapped his hands together. “I won't have them win this war on their own.” He frowned. “I'm speaking to the president. We'll organize a strike force, find Nucleon, and end this. Now.”