Burn
2001
Ash fell from the sky, and James Conrad trudged through desolation.
He had always wanted to visit Prague; he’d heard good things about the architecture, the food, the nightlife. It had seemed like one of those bucket-list places, somewhere to go on a lengthy trip, a months-long tour of Europe. Now, its skies were black and its foundations rocked with tremors just like everywhere else near Russia. Near what was left of Russia. Near the burning crater in the ground.
James shuffled on through twisted pathways, picking his way around rubble and ruin, past buckling buildings and collapsed streets. The world seemed quieter now, since the impact, more subdued. Maybe it was the layer of ash covering everything, stifling all the colours, muting all the sound. Maybe it was the lack of people, those who had died, those had fled. Maybe it was the emptiness that came from inevitability, from picking up the pieces of a war you knew you’d lost.
Giselle’s smile glimmered at him from a broken window, and James clenched his fists.
It didn’t take him long to reach his holdout – his little outpost, once someone’s ritzy first-floor apartment, now abandoned in a hurry. James occasionally wondered what the owners would say if they knew he was squatting, but he thought in all likelihood they probably wouldn’t care or complain too much. In a way, he would almost have liked for them to come home and start blustering at him away all indignant – would’ve given him someone to yell at.
He plodded up the creaking stairs and with a subdued grunt shifted aside the concrete slab he’d left sitting across the doorway. Only silence greeted him, cold air hanging in the dark. That was alright. He stepped inside the apartment. At least it was calm and quiet in here. Relatively clean too, as he’d made sure to keep the windows closed. Finally, no effing ash. The antique tables and chairs were scattered with empty bottles and food wrappers, but that was a different sort of discrete dirty, and entirely his own doing. He’d clean the place up later, pick up the trash before he left.
James sunk down into a leather armchair, closed his eyes and pressed his face into his hands. He stayed there for a minute, letting the weight wash over him – of the day, the week, the year. He knew he should take his armour off, filthy as it was, crusted in ash and mud and worse. The colours were all grey now, worn from constant use, and what little red poked its head out was probably not paint. His shoulders slumped and James leant back and let out a long, weary sigh.
He’d lost count of how many buildings they’d cleared. How many bodies. Searching was easier when you had powers, but it just meant that it felt like there were more expectations – like every moment they weren’t racing was another moment when they failed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a few deep breaths. He had a good crew, he reminded himself – a dedicated bunch of locals. They saw him moving through there, picking through the destruction, and it seemed to stir something in them, some hardening resolve. The Legion is here, their eyes seemed to say, they have not forgotten us – we will stand with them to recover our homes. There was no complaining, no despair. Only grim‑faced determination and steady, ceaseless work.
James let out another sigh. A beer, he decided. The electricity might be out, but he’d stashed an icebox in the kitchen. He’d earned himself a beer. With a heavy grunt the strongman pushed himself to standing, then lumbered over into the kitchen, knelt down and pulled a six-pack from the chest. The ice had hardly melted – felt like it barely peaked above freezing nowadays anyway. But the beer hadn’t exploded so hey, chalk one up for the good guys. He trudged back over to the living room and sunk full‑length down on the couch.
To the future, he cheers-ed glumly, to no one and to nothing. He flicked off the bottle cap with his thumb and drew a long, deep draught.
And then across the room, an invisible figure twitched its fingers, and James’ throat slashed open in a spurt of silent blood.
*****
“Remember: they’re frightened.”
A thousand miles away from his physical body, Viktor Mentok glared through the eyes of a suit of armour at Rakowski’s worthless comment.
“Be more than just self-evident,” he snapped. Beside him – beside his current avatar – a similar suit of armour, a Siegfried of the younger genius’s own modification, stared back at him, its metal face expressionless beneath its glowing eyes. The boy had dubbed the machine ‘Montoya’, whatever that was supposed to mean. The hollow pair stood motionless backstage behind a curtain, waiting to be called.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“You’ll get nowhere lecturing them into submission,” Edward’s voice crackled back. Neither were anywhere near their respective armours, yet the conversation flowed as if they were in person. Routed halfway across the planet just to come all the way back to another part of the same cave. It was months since either of them had left the sanctum. Would that the other Acolytes were so obedient and wise.
“I’m laying out the steps for their survival.”
“And if men were creatures of pure logic, that would be enough,” countered Rakowski. He had taken to talking back more and more lately. Shedding his soft, demurring shell. “But they’re not. They’re frightened. Frightened of you, frightened of Heydrich, frightened of everything. Court their emotions, not their intellect.”
Alone in his underground complex, standing before the central monitor, Mentok scowled, though he had to admit the boy had a point. He’d never excelled at rousing the masses to cooperation – that had been far more Caitlin’s specialty. He’d always found it too infuriating, like trying to explain the internal combustion engine to a dog. You don’t need to understand it, you dumb animal, he wanted to scream; all you need is to accept that I know and not go running into the street.
But sometimes you couldn’t force idiots into self-preservation. Sometimes you had to convince them to save themselves. That’s why they were here.
“Thirty seconds gentlemen.” A short, peach-faced Korean woman with a clipboard ducked her bob‑cut head around the curtain, glancing between the two robots with only the briefest glimmer of unease. “Straight out and to the podium.”
We know how to walk, Mentok wanted to snap at her, but he held his tongue and swallowed the vitriol. Rakowski was right – this was the time for empathy, not high-handedness.
The curtains parted, and the pair stepped out into bright lights and tenuous applause.
The interior of the United Nations was a large auditorium that stretched out and fractionally upwards in a great, expanding dome. Hundreds of delegates sat at rows of uniform tables, segmented lines of outward-spreading seating that ran the room like fragmented rings of a great tree. All eyes were turned to the centre. Cameras flashed; the room rang with clapping and noise. In the distance, Mentok’s mechanical lenses zoomed in on the Russian delegation, storming from the hall in angry protest. They blamed his secrecy for their destruction. No matter; he had little use for landless lords.
The pair of mechanical bodies strode forward, and with Siegfried at the lead walked over to the speaker’s podium. Mentok’s armour stood before the microphone, Montoya a shadow at his side.
“Honoured delegates,” uttered his mechanical voicebox, “Esteemed assembly.” Behind him, through cameras with which he was linked that were broadcasting live around the world, Mentok could see his surrogate’s imperious figure – see his metal, inhuman face projected large on the wall-mounted screens. “I will waste no time on introduction.”
A thousand eyes bore into him, and Viktor Mentok powered on.
“You have summoned me here. I answer you. The Legion has always answered you, the world and its people. Has always served your needs. This crisis is no different, changes nothing of our goals. Peace, freedom, life. We fight for them, as we fight for you, as we have done and will always do.”
He stood Siegfried a fraction taller. “We meet today facing catastrophe. Global annihilation on a cataclysmic scale. We know the man responsible for this calamity. We know his purpose. And we know the ends to which he will go to achieve his dreams.” The armour paused. “I will not mince words. We stand on the brink of extinction. The consequence of failure here is death. Has already been the death of a billion souls.” He waited, allowing space for the words to sink in.
“If, in time,” he continued, “You wish to place responsibility for this failure onto myself or those by whom I was aided, I will not quarrel. I will be led to the gallows without protest and will join my comrades in death. But the time for blame, for accusations and reprisals, is not now. Process, sovereignty, justice and restraint are luxuries we cannot afford if we desire survival. All that matters now is unity. All that matters now is that we act.”
On the gigantic screens behind him, Mentok’s glowing eyes stared out over the assembly. “You know what I propose. Most of you have already implemented martial law. What I ask – what we need – what is our sole, prevailing hope – is now beyond that. The world faces a threat unlike any that has come before. Only with international unison – with selfless cooperation – can we repel it.”
“I am asking you, now, yourselves and all your people, to surrender your independence today, so that we have any hope of it existing tomorrow.”
He paused, waiting for shouts, for protests and denunciations. None came, so he kept going. “Many fear this road. That is wise – it is fearful. It is a dark and terrible thing to give up one’s autonomy, one’s identity, to cling desperately to life. Yet this is not an age when we can live free of fear. There are no gentle options. There is only a choice between a dictator and a god-king; between temporary submission and eternal slavery.” The man in the machine let the weight of his words take root. “I ask you. I beg you. Give me control of your resources, give me command of your nations. Anoint me your Cincinnatus; before the barbarian burns everything to the ground.”
Murmurs churned amongst the assembled – heads turning, fingers touching to earpieces. Invisible to all but Edward, Mentok turned his central focus away from the presentation, leaving the Siegfried there to the control of his peripheral thoughts. His message had been delivered; now the machine would minister to the delegates’ contentions, their questions and querulous thoughts. The details had already been relayed, the plan distributed. His attention was required elsewhere; his genius needed for greater tasks than the slow placation of national egos.