The fact that the combined efforts of Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce were sufficient to carry this off, even with Malick and Konstantin's votes on the U.N Security Council, was just one more reason why I should be in charge of the world instead. I mean, I know that Main Characters are bizarrely successful in this universe, but holy crap.

The Panopticon ain't got nothing on the Helicarrier Fleet. Gene-reading from space, bullets if you walk outside or even stand in a window for more than two minutes. All in the hand of one unelected dude in an office somewhere. I was salivating at the prospect of that dude being, well - Probably not me, the governments of the world aren't that stupid. But my subordinate. I was going to have more precautions in place than a stern glare and the possibility of relief from station, that was for sure.

Nakia of the River Tribe was substantially less impressed. Wakanda had already tried lobbying the council against it, but they'd been shut out or ignored - So they were now working their backroom contacts which, I was surprised to learn, included me. They had apparently decided that since I did not rat Nakia out to U.S. intelligence, I must be fond of her.

"Look, I'm a mid-level functionary," I lied through my teeth, as we sat down in my office "I don't know what you want me to do."

"You were required to submit a report on the safety of… this and you approved it?" Nakia was trying not to be accusatory, but she was a passionate woman. She was dressed in very formal, Western pantsuit. This was a sign of how strong Wakanda wanted the helicarriers taken down or put under restriction. They did not like dressing 'colonizer' style, although even their current fashions followed American hegemony to some degree.

"Sure?" I said, "It is an excellent weapon against enemy ground forces. There's no reason from our prior experiences to expect air based superiority."

Nakia waved a hand in dismissal, "A weapon is a weapon, the firing power of the helicarriers is not our concern. We are worried about the scope of their mission parameters."

"I wasn't consulted on the mission parameters of the system," I lied. It was true that I hadn't been formally required to submit notes on the specs for that purpose, but obviously I had been consulted informally by Pierce, SWORD Director John Garrett, United States Council Member Gideon Malick, and "Emergency" Russian President Konstantin Dubinin. Maybe consulted was the wrong word - I had issued the order to make it happen.

Nakia slapped one of her hands with the back of her other one. She wasn't here for my bullshit, "If you told them to stop, they would stop."

"Why would I do that? I need a high end munitions and rapid response capability and they have that."

"Surely you can see the folly of handing the sole power over to one man. Simply have them restrict usage to the consensus of the Security Council nations."

"All of them?" In full honesty, if I were making the rules to protect me and I were formally in charge of a security council, I would do exactly that. Then nobody could murder my puppets or allies but if aliens really showed up, we could cut them right out of the sky. "When there is a threat, we need to act decisively." Amazingly, I did not think that in a world when the WSC tried to nuke a major city after fifteen minutes that they were going to waste much time.

"They are putting a snake on every doorstep, a scorpion on every windowsill, and a jaguar in every shadow cast by the sun," Nakia said. "Everyone on the globe will live the rest of their lives in terror, their life at the mercy of some spy master's pen. How does that make anyone safer from alien life?"

It didn't. The police function of the new Helicarrier fleet was an unnecessary addition to an otherwise quite functional plan for global defense spending. It could serve just as easily without a kill switch in Fury's palm and unlimited discretion. I would say that it was trust in Fury as a Main Character, thus reassuring me that the leaders of the world were not insanely stupid - But I was the only reason why Project Insight had been mothballed and that had been a nearly black box computer algorithm that most of the World Security Council could not even understand the basic principles of, much less its true function.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"It could've killed me," which was theoretically true but practically false. It could've killed me if I didn't know it existed. Obviously, if Selvig, Hawkeye, and I, all people with ready access to privileged information, had intended to escape military reprisal, we could've worn heavy enough clothes and left no exposed skin to stay concealed from the DNA scanner and made our base in a region where heavy clothes were the norm rather than the exception or in a cave. If that hadn't been an option, the Tesseract was a teleportation device. Today, I would use the Quantum Tunneler, which any would be terrorist could steal assuming they could face down a GDT Firefly and then crack one of the security codes.

"You are smart enough to know that is not true," Nakia said, "You were under for two days, at most. What the helicarriers make impossible is living any life free from the terror that at any moment, you might discover your name has been written down in a little book and passed to a man at a console because several sniper rifle rounds have gone through your heart. A mind-controlled slave does not have these concerns and would wear plate armor in the Sahara or tunneling underground. Human beings do."

"I believe I also warned of super-soldiers. Today, we have over two thousand Super-Soldier Serum enhanced individuals. We have the two Iron Man pilots, each of whom is substantially more dangerous than a middle income conventional army. The governments of the world have been made weak and this they cannot abide."

"So they put an eye on every cross street and a gun to every head? Peace through terror unceasing and everlasting? How would that stop the Iron Man?"

"If it works, we get world peace. If it doesn't, well," I shrugged, "it's less collateral than the pre-Iron Man regime."

"Earth is the most peaceful it has ever been," Nakia said, her voice coming out in even, measured clips now, her face was too neutral. She was starting to lose her temper. "The governments of Earth are laying down their arms, America's hand of friendship is widely received all over the world, and you want to go back to the failed bombing strategies of the Aughts? To fill the air with an occupying army"

"It's not about what I want," I said, giving a heavy sigh and standing up. What Nakia's fair and reasonable arguments failed to understand is that the motive here was to re-even the score. Nearly every government in the world had been neutered. Made perceptibly, sensibly weak because it had no power to address the real fear of people's lives. We were offering them the chance to prove their strength through cruelty and they were taking it because they were fool enough to think it would always be their man on the trigger and a guy with an eyepatch and a growl told them to. "Look, Nakia, I'll pass your concerns up the ladder. But there's not much I can do at this point without lying to my superiors."

I rose and offered her my hand and she shook it. Nakia was unhappy, but I wasn't Wakanda's asset. They could deal with it.

Ultimately, the only way this would backfire on me was if Nick Fury figured out that we intended to replace him and used the hellicarriers to shoot us. But if he went down, they might balk. We were going to have to thread the needle here.