Seethe
The world fought one man, and slowly, the world lost.
The days following Viktor Mentok’s assault on Klaus Heydrich had been filled with frenzied communications between world leaders, panicked mobilisation of militaries, an outpouring of charitable relief. Two cities lay devastated, the stability of the world upended overnight – there were questions to answer, refugees to resettle, foreign policy to adjust. Panic at the Black Death’s re-emergence mingled with fury from the vast mass of governments who had been kept uninformed, and across the world demagogues howled with condemnation of the Mindtaker and his arrogant control over the truth.
Then the moon fell on Moscow and all anger turned to dread.
It was the incomprehensible horror of Africa, worsened exponentially by the terror of defeat. When the first Devastation had struck, humanity had reeled, but it had recovered – the full power and attention of a superhuman population united to focus on repairing and preventing further damage, on dispersing tsunamis in the oceans, filtering contaminants from the air, subduing earthquakes in the ground. Now, again, that struggle was called for – only this time they had lost. Now, there was no safety. Now, Death could strike at any time. It was one thing to rise to fight an unthinkable disaster; it was another entirely for that disaster to mark not the climax of a war, but the beginning of one.
As days turned into weeks following the Russian Devastation, the Black Death’s attacks came slowly, but with increasing violence. A village in Scotland found torn to pieces. A Japanese township swallowed by lava. Johannesburg bathed in nuclear fire. Sometimes days went without incident, sometimes almost a week, but other times there rained down a rapid succession of horrors. Rocks hurtling from space became a constant issue, and for every barrage they identified in time two more projectiles seemed to follow. The destruction was random, indiscriminate – as likely to hit small towns and remote farmland as urban centres. Heydrich's goal here was not annihilation; he launched no more country-sized meteors, wove no more replicas to explode in sickening magenta flame. This campaign was a siege of global retaliation – a wordless message, simply, that nowhere was safe.
In defence of their nations, the leaders of the world moved quickly; raising levies, refitting industry, retooling economies with sleepless urgency towards a state of total war. Mentok assisted however he could – directing groups willing to be commanded, sharing blueprints and manufacturing schematics, spreading information like a web. Rockets launched daily carrying new orbital defence platforms, hyper‑accurate magnetic cannons able to blast falling debris from great distance, prohibitions on space weapons be damned. Astronomical satellites were recalibrated, turned back towards the Earth to scan for Heydrich or to its immediate vicinity to watch for incoming attacks. Siegfrieds stepped from factories the world over and mobile Disruptance and hologram drones shadowed people of import. Yet no matter how much they did, no matter how hard he strove, the world’s political bodies simply could not match the flexibility of one man. The mechanisms of modern governments were complex, built for stability in peacetime, not responsiveness in war – and as each day dawned with new crises, the many ships of state remained sluggish, unable to turn fast enough to meet the shifting tides. It mattered not what Viktor did or urged or organised. Governments were simply comprised of many people; and all around the world those people continued to need to consult with one another, to err and question and argue, or simply continued to disobey.
Hour after hour, week after week, Mentok paced in fury within his sanctum as he failed to mobilise mankind. Again and again the old man ground his teeth with frustration at the indecision, the pettiness, the denial; unable to do anything but look on, helpless, as life-saving measures stalled in quagmires of bureaucracy and paranoia, as small little kings clung to small little hills and so doomed the world to death. He could not make China accept plans for their armies. He could not force Qatar to redistribute their oil. He could not stop any of them from enacting new useless, reactive, or counterproductive legislation, be it blindly attempting to censor the Internet or wasting manpower lynching empaths.
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And all the while Heydrich flitted, in and out and around his net, bringing nothing but destruction, leaving nothing but black earth and death.
*****
“Sir.”
Mentok looked up, the skin beneath his eyes feeling gaunt from lack of sleep. There was only so much that stimulants could accomplish. A squadron of armour had intercepted another bombardment, this time over Los Angeles. A lazy attempt by Heydrich, suspiciously crude. Mentok’s mind spread out through his array of sensors, looking for the true threat behind the feint.
“Sir.”
“Yes. Update me. How goes the vote?” Three days now; United Nations were still in session, still debating. A hundred plodding primates willing to let everybody die just so they could each have their hoot.
“Well enough.” Rakowski’s words were a flurry of sound and signals, voiceless now and intangible, their communication evolved through familiarity into a rapid‑fire transition of information transcended beyond mere words. Mentok caught a brief glimpse of the young genius in his section of the compound, a single frame to show where his physical form still stood. Images followed of the assembly.
“A hundred and forty in favour. Twenty still waiting or abstaining. Eight rejections outright.”
“In line with what we predicted and intercepted. Annoying. Acceptable.” Mentok’s mind swirled with orders he was already undertaking, control that had been ceded to his will.
“There’s something else.”
Another packet of information appeared at the front of Mentok’s attention amongst the images from Montoya and the still-debating delegates. The old man’s mind moved into it, glad to see the boy too was multitasking. Pictures swirled through Mentok’s head, and had he been surprised he would have sworn.
“Another death.”
“Yes.” Images of an Acolyte strongman, living and deceased, flashed through Mentok’s vision. An empty Prague apartment and a sizeable amount of blood. Beneath the analysis flowed an anger in his protégé; a multilayered bitterness Viktor did not have the empathy to unpack.
“Another waste,” Mentok told him, “They need to be here. Reorder the recall.”
“It won’t matter. They want to help.”
“Nobody helps by being butchered.”
“And nobody saves anyone from hiding.” Through their connection, Viktor heard Edward’s defiance, felt his words harden in defence of his peers. “This is your precedent, remember? Would Harsheel Singh and Elsa Arrendel have waited while the world suffered? Would Caitlin Alba? Would Captain Dawn?”
“You list the names of dead men,” Mentok countered, “As if that does not exactly prove my point. Recall the Legion home. Demand them. Beg them, guilt them, trick them for all I care – just make it so. Every one who dies is not just an asset lost, but a morale blow. Dead heroes summon despair. I am not merely trying to save their lives; I am trying to save their uniform.”
To his frustration, Rakowski did not immediately indicate his acquiescence or departure. Instead, the other genius’s mind stayed connected, pinging flashes of some emotion. Frustration? Rage?
“We are going about this wrong,” he sent finally. Alone in his cave before his monitor, Mentok clenched his jaw.
“Boy-”
“If you will just consider-”
“Boy,” Mentok overrode him, “I have considered. It is fruitless.”
“But if-”
“The true human genome hides behind billions of combinations. There is no way to identify the proper variant other than growing it in a lab.”
“If there was proper simulation we could-”
“If! If a predictive AI could be programmed as flawless. If it was given sufficient time to reach the combination by brute force. If the resulting DNA was human. If Heydrich’s system could be tricked into absorbing it. If it had the effects you imagine. If he wasn’t able to simply replicate another body and isolate the spread. If, then, we summit all those obstacles, a standard genetic-empath absorption still takes 2-3 days for full effect. Still, then, at the end of your thousand ‘ifs’, stands a psychopathic killer facing his own extinction with the power to annihilate the world. He’s blown up two continents now, and he is winning. What do you think he’ll do if he starts to lose?” Mentok glared at the screen, making the next thoughts as hard as he possibly could. “You would waste three decades chasing a fantasy only to bring about our deaths. My answer is no. We protect the world from Heydrich, then we trap him, then we destroy. We cannot neuter him with some pseudoscientific blood-magic.”
The connection with Rakowski fell silent. He was still there, Mentok felt, but his mind sent nothing back.
“I believe that you are wrong,” the boy said finally, and let the connection between them fall. The old man let him go without pursuing. He did not have time to nurse his pain and wounded ego.
He had a world to turn to war.