What had originally been a simple land dispute- land, of all things- had evolved into a five-man clusterfuck of epic proportions. The various friendships/rivalry between all five of them only made it worse. This thing had festered for years, with three servants who didn't even know who their masters were. Every time they untangled one holding, it was tied to this other thing, which was done by this contractor in normal land who was owned by this Illuminatus here, but those servants were really part of... The fact that one of the participants was Donald only made things worse. There was also no easy-way-by-force out of this mess; all five of them were behaving as expected and had mutually come to their Dominator in good faith.
But they didn't call it the military-industrial simple, now did they? What the twins thought would be a 45-minute process, tops, was stretching into three hours with no end in sight; they found themselves wishing for something, anything, to just make this stop. A message from Northberg, oh goodie, and he even bothered to use the top-priority indicator. If the Operator was part of this mess...
"We're under attack."
The message was not echoed back and the petitioners didn't hear it; all five drew back in shock when they saw the twins move with alacrity. "Northberg's hit, send everything now," William shouted at the screen, as Howard yanked open the opening in the couch that held their favorite weapons. A second later, Paul and Sarah were out of their rooms and leaping down the stairs, armed.
"Servants?" William asked as they hauled ass to the jet.
"Training recruits. No time. Go," Sarah replied. Howard made it to the cockpit first and instantly slammed on the engines; everyone else buckled up and hung on. G-forces, secrecy- all of it be damned. Massive pillars of hot fusion exhaust shot from the back of the plane as it rocketed into the sky, slamming all of them back into their seats as they fought furiously to keep some blood in the front of their heads. Sarah contacted the island and told the servants to join ASAP, then found out which of her forces were in the area (practically nothing- shit!). William did the same thing with engineereds- they all heard the Operator's call but apparently none of them could get there sooner than the twins. Paul checked the satellite feed of the area, swearing when he found out the microwave death-beams weren't in the right part of their orbit to use here and it was too damn cloudy to see crap anyway, trying to determine if they should forgo deceleration and strafe the attackers, or slow down and try to establish a constant defense.
The answer was neither. A break in the clouds- "Shit, they're already inside!" he screamed, prompting Howard to simply stop caring and blast the engines as hard as they would go, pure rage preventing him from blacking out. Warnings screamed, first about acceleration and then about air friction. Normally he would have went to the stratosphere to even try going this fast- Mach 12 and rising, any normal craft would be in small pieces by now- but fuck it, if the metal ablated it fucking ablated, Northberg wouldn't fucking ablate... at one point he realized they really were going to shake apart or burn to a crisp, and, swearing, pulled back on the throttle.
William switched tactics and started trying to call Northberg sub-systems. The Operator wasn't available. Xavier was too busy moving babies to talk. Everything else was either confusing ("You saw them carrying something, what?! Okay, they're carrying multiple things, that doesn't help...") or getting outdated fast. All hell was breaking loose down there.
"We're going to pass it!" Sarah shouted.
"No we're not," Howard grated. Ten minutes, it was taking them a whole ten minutes to get there, any damn thing could happen in ten fucking minutes... "Because I'm doing this!" He yanked on the control stick in a way that it was never meant to be yanked at these speeds and blasting the VTOL thrusters as well. The Illuminated jet spun a dizzying half-turn, wrenching the structure against the airflow, causing more warnings to blare as he fought for control, and through power and precision they were pointed directly backwards- and upside-down as well. Fuck! ('Note to self,' William thought. 'Put forward-facing thrusters on jet.')
Then he gunned the throttle again. "Any hostiles outside?" he screamed as they were sent into their seats even harder.
Paul struggled to answer him through the black haze he found himself wallowing in, desperately trying to get enough oxygen to his cortex to identify friend from foe. Well, if it was standing around and not interfering with the invasion- "There- there- that's support, that's not friendly!" Engineered reflexes found targets through the pain and disorientation, and the lasers blasted the emplacements, immolating equipment and Enforcers, as well as two missiles aimed at them. The speed of light is like a train, Paul thought incoherently. It always wins.
And then suddenly they were moving at sane speeds again, Howard stopped the fire pillar and flipped back around, and in seconds they had a hard, VTOL-assisted landing just outside the closed hangar, some of the holes blasted in it bent inwards and some bent out.
They leaped out of the jet, spreading out to see around every corner, and the smell of a room full of freshly dead Enforcers hit them. They had experienced this enough times that it no longer smelled like slaughtered pork or fresh liver, particularly with the faint smell of used explosives lingering. Immediately they rushed inside the largest holes- big enough to stroll through- and got what they expected- no living hostiles, a room full of blown-apart dead meat in two sets of uniforms, the other aircraft in the hangar with pieces falling off, blood everywhere. No ambushers? No one to spare to try to kill the Dominator now that he's out of his metal shell?
Gunfire to the right, along with a low growling noise and a loud thump, but the kids were to the left. Fast decision- "Sarah. Paul," William said instantly, gesturing down the hallway to the children. They moved. The twins moved towards the center tram themselves, looking down the right hallway to see more corpses, some of them halfway cremated. An immense jet, more than twenty feet long, of bright orange flame sizzled from a bend in a corridor to a room, lighting up something inside it and cooking off ammo. The twins recognized jets like that. An Enforcer's head and gun-holding arm reached around from its cover, and Howard cut it off with one thundercrack beam. Immediately attention was on them- several Enforcers, in uniforms he didn't recognize- and carefully angled microwave shots dusted them in a single sweep.
The dragon peered out from the corridor, its left eye coming into view first, then its mangled, shot-up right. "Duuummmviraaate," said a voice that could never have come from a human throat. Bullets had torn holes in its flesh and ripped apart its wings, and it walked with a terrible limp, its middle right leg barely able to bear weight, its articulated forefingers flat on the floor. Nose to thick tail it was roughly as long as the twins were tall. Uninjured it would have been majestic. Badly injured- and some of those holes in its face had barely missed its brain- it resembled a wounded dinosaur, thick red blood oozing over green scaly skin. "They sought something in that room," it said, ignoring the pain. The twins immediately rushed towards the room in question, a pre-processing room for research acquisitions. "Did not push further, they failed", the dragon was saying, but the twins were already there, but held their fire-
And they were very glad they did. A four-year-old servant boy was the sole living creature in the room, both his wrists bleeding and at unnatural angles, an anti-Enforcer weapon still clutched in one of his twisted hands, a huge hole in the ceiling marking his entrance. Tears dripped from his eyes, but he smiled a forced smile on seeing his Dominator, obviously in agony and refusing to express it. A dozen dead Enforcers, shredded to gibs, surrounded a large, blasted device that had obviously come in with them. It was a wonder the weapon didn't completely tear it apart, what could it be made of? "I got the drop on them," he said in one quick breath. He had fired the weapon more than once after the first shot had broken his wrists, shattering every bone between his fingers and his forearms.
It took no time for the twins to figure it out- the kid had blown away the whole room from the air vent, the recoil far too powerful for his own bones. He'd scurried through the vents until he found Enforcers he could 'get the drop on'. Since this cluster was assigned to guard the bomb, and not running around, they met the kid's criteria and he had done what he thought would protect his future master, not even knowing the plan.
But what the hell did the enemies carry in? A five-foot rough cube with a single keypad on the side, was it some kind of- oh holy shit- if it was subcritical it could be leaking radiation, who knew what the actual design of the damn thing was- get him and get out- if this kid hadn't been here they would have been fucking nuked-
Okay, priorities- one, stop nukes from going off. The plan was obviously 'Lure the Duumvirate in and blow the whole place up', so it was safe to say that if any enemies with nukes knew they were there, it would have been detonated by now. Priority two, get the kid to a safe place. Problem: there was no safe place. Okay, scratch that too. Priority three- well, shit, they were expecting a bigger fight this way, they'd sent Sarah and Paul down the other way, maybe there was more?
"No more enemies on this side, right?" Howard asked the dragon. If there were, they probably would have come out by now.
"None I hear or see," it replied.
William wanted to carry the boy but figured it would be a bad idea, pulling him out of the room instead- by the forearm, past the broken wrist- and shutting the door. "Protect that room, then," he ordered the dragon, and rushed with his brother down the hall.
Quiet- strangely quiet, too quiet, kids' voices- Xavier and the Operator would get high praise for keeping the kids alive. Smell of blood, whose? A head peeked around a corner for a split instant and a six-year-old shouted "The Duumvirate's coming!" Cheering followed. The twins turned the same corner, seeing part of a massacre at the far end of the hall, and got their answers as they turned the next one.
The kids rushed towards the twins, still cheering. Sarah, Paul, Xavier, the Operator, and other adults were on their phones and PDAs, trying to get intel and security, both of which were in short supply. More than a hundred dead bodies were piled high at the entrance to the kids' ward, some of the invaders having apparently been shot dead the moment they turned the corner, others pulped by blunt objects, still others mangled beyond recognition. There was a minigun- why the enemy'd brought that, they'd never know- on a wheeled platform. It had been decimated before it could possibly be fired, the kids' fingersnap bullets ripping apart its workings and hopelessly clogging the barrel. Anti-Enforcer weapons had been fired late into the battle, slaughtering the stragglers. Some of the bodies were Enforcers in three types of uniform (the kids' had their own), none were children themselves. Some were normals. Normals! Who had worn the heaviest armor their master could bestow, thick black Kevlar-variant plate and helmets with thick face glass- and a nice, long strip of exposed neck in between. Fools! The twins laughed aloud. Most of the normals had been jugulated, naturally, the kids seeing the exposed weak point and placing their tiny, fast "training" bullets into it, over and over again. The only smart thing the enemies had done was attempt to use some sort of grenade, but they had to throw it around a corner.. with their arm. Which explained the missing hands on a couple of the corpses. The Operator had apparently taken the chance to get down and dirty, blood up to his elbows and bodies with various parts mashed to hamburger. Xavier's feet showed the same effects. Their Night counterparts were there as well, but hadn't had the chance to get involved either. 'Oh, Xavier, with your clean hands but dirty feet,' Sarah thought. 'Is it symbolism you're after? Do you not want to maybe break a finger punching something unexpectedly tough? Or are you a fan of the martial art that encourages exactly this?' (The second was true, which led to the third.)
The twins had always envisioned themselves coming to the rescue if something this happened, but ten minutes had been far too late. Well, they did rescue, the dragon and maybe that other kid. Fuck it, you mount your counter-raids with the Duumvirate and fusion-powered rocket planes you have, not the ones you want or wish to have at a later time.
The normals had brought some squad automatic weapons (almost a big a joke as the minigun, really, the kids had slaughtered its carrier before he could even bring it to bear), some standard normal assault rifles, some combat shotguns. But the Enforcers had carried anti-Enforcer weapons of their own, and a few of those would have decimated the entire hall.. but instead they had to use the shotguns, as evidenced by some dead friendly Enforcers and a few of the kids having pellet-sized rips in flowing clothing. Why?
"I had asked myself why you gave me and Xavier the override procedure," the Operator said, shaking his head, relaxing somewhat. These were original Barnums, the trump card finally played. There'd be no situation in which the Operator could ever possibly use it, he had thought, so why give it to him?
He's relaxing? Thinks it's over? It's never over, Operator. You of all people should know that. "There was a nuclear weapon in the other side," William informed him, and panic mode resumed. And that was when Sarah got a call from her servant that she had just shot down a nuclear missile aimed at them.
"It's a fucking trap," Luke had said eight minutes before, almost casually, as he went through the one-item pre-flight checklist: Start the engines. Helicopter rotors ascended the craft to fifty feet before the jet alone was enough to keep them aloft and the rotors folded back in. ('What a waste of metal that is when we really need to move,' Luke thought. 'Somebody in the Illuminati must have really liked Transformers.') "They just have to be big damn heroes." Which, he figured, would get them turned into an heroes sooner or later.
"It is predictable," Ruby agreed, bracing against the acceleration.
"They want to lead from the front. Seriously, if I was them? More engineered servants, and make them do it. We should be in that plane, not them."
"Then you'd get to be the big damn hero. But we should do the opposite."
"Are you saying we should just tell them no." He wanted to, how a part of him so deeply wanted to, but he decided he'd rather stay alive for the time being...
"I'm saying we should take a longer route. Follow the.. 48th parallel, twenty miles from the coast, go in a straight line there at the.. 53rd parallel. And stay just below the clouds." The damn clouds. High, fluffy.. and in the way. She needed line of sight, lots of it, preferably in visible wavelengths.
Luke smiled. He had considered betraying Paul in a more direct way- many, many times he had considered it- but this kind of subtle passive-aggressive subversion wasn't his style. But for Ruby to suggest that... "Well, we won't be there in time to do anything anyway." He did take the course proposed, angling up the nose of the plane. "What are you looking for?"
Good, he wasn't a complete moron. "Do you remember them telling us about the missiles?"
"Yeah, Paul mentioned that.. I thought that was dealt with. We have defenses. Northberg definitely does, or it should."
"Unless the first target of their attack was the missile defenses. In which case they're going to get rained on."
"And your best guess is boats."
"Yes. Just follow the route, I'll worry about the scanning."
"Yeah, unless they see us first, and just wait." Well, she suggested it, he was just listening to her. It made sense, but seemed damned unlikely, especially since it was a tactic that had failed before. If the twins started asking questions.. Slight disobedience was never his style. It would be something, though, if she was dead-on right, and the missile came from too far north for them to do anything about it. Then he independently came to the same conclusion that she had- the twins were surely calling in other engineereds, at least one of them lived on an Aleutian Island (he'd seen the girl a few times), and she'd have a chance of spotting the missile on the way there herself. A slim chance, but..
He focused on flying- just below the clouds, not terribly hard, although it made for some lurching ups and downs a few times- when a thundercrack of air came from below him and something enormous exploded in a bright flash about thirty miles away, ten degrees to his right. Very faintly, he saw the symbol for radiation appear on his HUD. But there wasn't any serious EMP, no mushroom cloud... "You shot their dirty bomb!" Holy fuck, she was right.
"Dirty- radiation leak?" She checked the plane's Geiger, hearing a series of occasional sharp pops. Yup, that was traces of gamma all right. "Damn, it probably wasn't dirty before I hit it. That was a nuke." Luke figured out what must have happened- she'd melted the hollow sphere of plutonium and predetonated the damn thing.
The vessel that had launched the Trident-variant was a couple of hundred feet beneath the sea, and so thought it was safe from detection and attack. Another long, loud thundercrack, a bright flash of plasma, and a massive explosion of steam later, Ruby informed her mistress that they had blasted a nuclear-missile submarine and would do what they could to patrol the area for more, for the time being. Fifteen seconds later, Sarah acknowledged and ordered them to go straight to Northberg now, as Canadian and American militaries would converge on the area, all of their submarines would be ordered directly home, and a full-on sonar sub hunt was being orchestrated, ostensibly as a military exercise. And with the hope that no normal found the predetonated nuke. Secrecy cleanup would take days, possibly weeks.
Ruby sighed and Luke changed course. The military exercise was being overseen by Donald himself, who they had little choice but to trust at this point. But fuck, normals? Sure, aircraft were shit at finding Illuminati-modified subs (she was surprised she could hit the one she did- he had to get too close to the surface before firing), few engineereds could get to boats any time soon, and normals had numbers, but.. normals? Fuck it, Sarah knew what she was doing.
It was a shame they weren't there to watch the twins freak out. The consensus at Northberg was that if the enemies had more missiles they would probably not be by sea, but rather by land or air, and they were beside themselves sending out orders to trace and track all movements of anything large enough to fire missiles from. Military records were immediately searched, Sarah's squads would cover as Canadian military and go hunting on motorcycles for suspicious trucks or installations, and anything civilian that showed up would not get the usual "military installation here" warnings but blown up preemptively.. all of that was just frantic searching. But what else could be done? The enemy had fissile material. And they had just come incredibly close to dying by both Plan A and Plan B involving it. Plan C (D? E? F?) had to be nipped in the bud similarly. Was there an ICBM somewhere? Hell, the Illuminati could construct a long-range artillery piece in man-portable sizes, go anywhere in the wilderness, and have an Enforcer out there with U-235 or plutonium on its back right now! But they would have done something when they learned that Plan A failed, same as the submarine had, or maybe there was no communication at all. 'Nuke them, and then nuke them again, just to be sure.' It made sense. The four of them (and the kids- the younger kids were standing right there listening to their Duumvirate talk about them getting bombed) agreed, if it was going to happen, it would almost certainly be happening already or within the next minute.
Paul had freaked out as well, but his guess was that it would be another one, already there. This was a very Illuminati thing to do; let the twins think they had blown up two of them, relax, and then suddenly a hidden enemy's backpack bomb goes off and turns all the engineereds to radioactive carbon in one strike. So he had dragooned everyone he could find- Xavier, Xavier's Enforcers, Xavier's Night counterpart, even some of the kids- into a massive search of every nook and cranny, and every item the enemies had brought, and hope like hell he'd get the drop on them (that kid's phrase was so apt- get the drop on, indeed) before they could go Allah.
It didn't happen. It took a half hour before they even began to relax, but no missiles were found, no nuke-artillery was assembled, no backpack bombs were discovered, and Plans A and B were apparently, for the time being, all the enemy had. Most of the engineereds who had flocked there left shortly after exchanging greetings and fears. Panic mode subsided into information-gathering and post-op mode.
Prisoners had been taken. Two Enforcers with implants reset informed them that they had been created specifically for the purpose with no real information on their master- they did not even know where they had been created, but it sure as hell wasn't Northberg- and one very stupid, very clueless normal who readily babbled all of the non-information he was fed, before and after implantation. (He met his end at the Duumvirate's hands within an hour. "Your job was to come here and kill these children, without knowing anything about who your employers or your targets were, and you did it just for the promise of money?" "Yes." Crunch-splat.) The enemy had demonstrated basic competence; nothing they had brought in had any evidence on or in it as to where they were.
Adam, the four-year-old who had saved all of their lives, had wondered why there were casts being put on his wrists instead of a bullet in his head for disobedience; Xavier had told the children to stay together, but he had rushed to the armory and grabbed an anti-Enforcer weapon instead, aiming to thin the ranks of the enemy before they threatened the life of his future master, immaturity combining with the instilled sense of duty. The twins could have said anything, but went with a pragmatic approach- they asked the similarly-aged masters if anyone wanted him, and out of the chorus of "Me, me" gave him to who Xavier decided was the most compatible. ("But how can I serve?" the boy had asked in Latin. "My hands are broken now." They would regenerate in a few days.)
The other kids regaled the twins with mostly gloating, save for the ones that got their shirts torn, one sweet little girl crying about her dress being shot through ("I shot him in the fucking balls for that right before Xavier punted his head off.") The normals had peered mirrors around the corner, SWAT-team style, only to have them shot out of their hands immediately. The grenades were flashbangs, particularly mean to engineereds' sharpened senses, and some of the kids complained about them having that, and it would have been much worse if the normal actually had time to throw it: "I could still see a flash with fingers on it a minute later!" Other grenades were used, with similar results. What happened next wasn't entirely clear- apparently the attacking Enforcers had orders to prod the normals forward if they balked- and then everything else was blood, guts, and chaos, which the kids sniped into while Xavier and the Operator rushed in with enraged speed, the kids being extra careful not to hit them in the back. Adrenaline, pure indignant fury, and the act of overwhelming their opponents created a battle glee. "Don't tell the Operator I said this, but he looked like he was actually having lots of fun," said a kid in mixed languages, who had obviously been having fun himself. Sarah recognized his face.. oh, he did take after his mother there. Jeremy and Kylie had been fertile; this must be their first, Jack.
Luke and Ruby had used some available downtime to check up on their daughter. (Paul said nothing. Luke had apparently changed his mind about being a father, and Paul wouldn't press the point.) At three and a half Ophelia stayed where ordered and didn't participate in the bloodbath. She also didn't speak very much English, and her parents barely knew a bit of Latin, so communication was slow and laborious, all three of them tripping over words and occasionally using Enforcers to translate. While the girl understood violence, she abhorred it and tried to minimize what had just happened. When asked about her own interests she had mentioned her developing powers, which she demonstrated carefully, almost as if she was afraid to use them. (She was, however, impressed when her parents showed jets of flame and blue pops of voltage in front of her with no fear at all.) She was very polite, seemed to lack anger or impatience, hugged both her parents in turn, and.. and...
...and generally gave the impression of one of the many, many beaten-down children both of them had seen in normal land, through subtle physical cues and behavior patterns. But it wasn't quite that, was their impression wrong? The girl was engineered-progeny after all, taught like the rest of the servants, they couldn't possibly be doing evil shit here?!
Fuck it. Xavier. He'd gone back to his office. He'd give answers or he'd be charcoal.
They walked in on him at his computer- a mammoth thing, with multiple monitors and even multiple mice, keyboards, and other controller-like input devices- and he looked up slowly, as if he was expecting something. "Our daughter, the perfect, sweetest little angel. Why is that?" Ruby asked immediately, her cadence and tone precisely matching the Dominator's. Xavier smiled slightly. How would she react if he told her most of the master kids tried that on him at least once?
"Hm. I was wondering if you'd notice," Xavier said instead, leaning back in the chair. He'd noticed the juxtaposition long before and had imagined this conversation, although not the circumstances leading to it. "Imagine if you had no experiences in the world. And every time you got mad- you lost something, you missed something, whatever, you screamed and cried about it- you hurt yourself? Maybe you burned or shocked yourself a little bit. And it wasn't coming from something outside your body, it was part of you." Silence, for a moment. "Very young children cry with their whole bodies," he explained needlessly.
The Law of Unintended Consequences. No one was immune. No one.
"So she tortured herself," Ruby said. "In baby-size doses. And you didn't do anything about it."
"And doing something about it would entail what?" Xavier replied. "The idea was that she would learn to master it naturally, the same way you did. And all the clothing we have here is electrically insulated and practically fireproof." That had been true years before she was born. "She was given toys to develop her abilities. Would you prefer that we restricted them in her formative years?" As intended, that cut like a knife.
"And you do nothing to.. change her," she replied.
Xavier looked at her like she was a fool. "Of course we do! We raise children. And if you equate anything we do here with whatever idiots you have known in the past, I will take that as an extreme personal insult." Luke almost said it anyway, just to be extremely personally insulting.
A brief staring contest, in which Xavier just stared them down while Luke and Ruby looked for signs of something in his eyes, an evil they could recognize. It wasn't there. Oh, there was something in his expression and body language, but it wasn't that. Xavier had no perversions, no intention of raising anything but solid servants and gleeful masters, just.. that damn quality that their own masters had.
They turned and walked from the room, swinging the door behind them solidly shut, to give their daughter a short-but-memorable education in how and when not to care if it hurts. (And when Ophelia did things right- when she used the powers like her parents did, when she used caution this way and not that- it turned out not to hurt at all.)
Xavier started chuckling to himself, pride welling, having not only won physical combat but psychologically bested tough opponents without even needing to bring authority into it. He seldom did. He was the architect of new society, after all, and didn't have to resort to such low tricks. Even in his position, he almost never had to say a straight "No" to any Illuminatus-to-be over the age of three, and paradoxically even less to the servant children who were simply taught to never ask. For the Illuminated ones, it wasn't a matter of 'limits' so much as it was a matter of basic sense, laws of physics and suicidal danger and whatnot. Then again, his job was easy in that respect- kids everywhere wanted the world, but this was the only place on Earth where they were expected to have it. What they would make it would be a reflection of what he made them.
Speaking of architecture...
He finished sending various parents letters of 'hell broke loose, and we aren't telling you jack shit, deal with it' (there is no PTA in the Illuminati), opened up a retooled version of AutoCAD, and began making sketches. He was proud of the ventilation system even if Skyler, since moved out, hadn't been (and he knew about that, and he also knew that if he ever gave a single hint that he was spying on all the kids' conversations, he would get very owned very fast- he promised himself he'd stop, but this was his best method of finding out how well he was actually doing in preparing the kids for real life), he loved the organic growth, he'd grown quite fond of the overall setup and it was starting to develop its own history with its quirks (such as being part of a medical facility), but it all lacked a certain.. design. The growth was good, the base wasn't quite right. It took him about fifteen minutes to realize that what he was designing wasn't so much a change to Northberg as it was a whole new educational facility, and they wouldn't be building one of those until the End of Secrecy... and then all the hidden defenses and emergency escape routes he was putting in would be completely worthless, as in the future society who the hell would do it?
('And that's what was being said before this latest attack.')
Xavier put the new building aside and focused on the one he was in. The kids could deal with a little inconvenience. Although it'd give the crawlable vents' real secret away earlier ('probably better that way'), they'd love them in their rooms. The weapons were something he wrestled with for a while ('all it takes is one kid too young or just not thinking right'), but they needed something that would kill real enemies even if it posed a risk to each other, he couldn't in good conscience leave them anything close to defenseless... and the next attack might come totally without warning.
When Stan and Quad had sworn never to be weaponless ever again, they had meant it, and Xavier only put up the most token of resistance; how could he possibly say no when they had almost died from lack of firepower? But the Dominator's kids had left Northberg a year after that ('and fuck, do I wish they were still here when this went down') and the other kids hadn't followed their lead, thinking them overly paranoid- then. Engineered kids only need to be taught things once, and most of them had become just as possessive of their weapons- some were even more, clutching their firearms like a teddy bear and more than a few would probably need one to sleep tonight. (A couple of Xavier's servants had made sure that the younger ones didn't actually cuddle it when sleeping, so they wouldn't squeeze the trigger while having nightmares.) But fuck, these were still small children and although they readily understood 'deadly' not all of them quite understood what could lead to 'deadly'. Keeping the kids safe was his...
Wait. Of course. 'Keeping the kids safe' was exactly backwards. To protect Northberg's charges, he had to make the kids more dangerous, giving them an iron grip on their own survival. Stan and Quad had not even come close- not once!- to discharging their Duumvirate-granted weapons for childish reasons. They carried them but never used them, choosing instead to use the provided weapons on the target range; their real weapons, they had declared, would be used against real enemies and them only. Their brush with death had sand-blasted their naivete clear off their psyches, and done some similar things here. Xavier pondered sacrificing some normals or Enforcers to stage something like this every so often, making death kindergarten an actual class. It wouldn't work- one of them would get clued in sooner rather than later, especially if they realized the enemy was aiming to be dodged or miss- but it was a nice thought.
What he needed to do, ultimately, was educate them about the truths of life and death from this fundament in a more coherent way; if the kids could learn it, he could teach it. Which was what he should have been doing from the beginning. They needed to be taught the basic realities of their existence as soon as they could possibly understand them. Trying to shelter them from that was normal-originated bullcrap. And so when they needed guns, they would have guns.
('And then the next nuke will probably work anyway.')
A lot of the kids followed the twins out all the way to their jet, some of them running and rolling alongside the tram and almost keeping up, a crowd of mostly four-year-olds. A couple managed to get in the tram with them, forcibly quieting themselves to hear something from their Duumvirate. The twins merely smiled at them, and it was enough; the kids waved as they reached the hangar and entered the jet, Luke breathing a heavy sigh. "Finally, privacy. Okay, I've got to tell you something."
"Private? This ought to be good," Howard replied.
"Actually, I need to ask you guys a question." The twins raised their eyebrows at him. "What the FUCK is wrong with you?!", he exploded, preventing a 'say it, don't spray it' situation by engineered tongue reflexes. "You learn Northberg's under attack. Do you let someone else handle it? Do you let your servants do it for you? No! You fucking haul ass over there as fast as possible, waiting for nothing and no one, not even knowing what's going on, your all-powerful asses jump in the jet and go, just like that! It's like if the President jumped into Air Force One to head towards the towers as soon as the first one got hit!" His electric fists slammed against the soft cushion as they displayed mild amusement at his tirade.
Sarah chuckled, softly. She'd thought similar things, once. "Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen him fly." She described Howard's Mach 15 Immelmann turn.
At age 14, he would have thought it crazy-awesome instead of just plain crazy. Four years of maturity, experience, and Paul had taught him to look before he leaped, a concept the twins apparently denied utterly. "The fuck.. there's no fucking modern society in the world that does this. The last time top honchos went on the front lines themselves was what, motherfucking pre-Christian Europe? You two walk right into this shit face-first, guns fucking blazing, and then you go 'oh shit we walked into a fucking trap'?!" He sputtered, looking for phrases, and found a good one out of several. "This kind of shit is what these people do, you know that! Hell, I get this fucking asshole telling me not to do anything stupid all the time!" he continued, shoving his forefinger almost under Paul's nose. "And you're smiling, like it's some kind of fucking- for fuck's sake! What?! The fuck?! Is wrong with you?!" He saw the twins subtly shift into the intentional relaxation of their pedagogic mode. ('Saddling up that fucking high horse again.') "Please. Lecture me. I've got to hear this." He then leaned back into his seat and placed his hands on his lap, as if he were taking notes.
"You've probably given the most solid description of the conventional position we've heard in some time," William began.
"And it's conventional for good reasons," Howard continued. "You don't expose your king in chess, you don't let your president walk around without bodyguards, you don't let your Roman dictator walk into a room full of unfriendly senators unless you want him to get stabbed 23 times."
"We are not kings in chess," William said, with force. "We are not presidents. We are not Roman dictators. We are the masters of this whole world. We live in what's effectively a fortress, and we armor and arm ourselves with everything we and our supporters know. We answer only to the laws of physics, and even those we turn to our needs."
"There was a time that we acted like we were invincible, because we pretty much are," Howard added. "Then there was a time we were afraid, because we felt we could not anticipate the future, or influence it enough to protect ourselves. But now? We reject both. We protect what we want to protect, and we destroy what we want to destroy. If something turns out to be more effective than our power, if that future comes to pass, then we will die. But to hide, to fear exposing our selves to the world we control, when we most need to control it? Never, servant. Not in our universe."
There were times Luke wished the retrovirus didn't grant him such an intelligence increase. You can't un-understand something, much in the same way as you can't unsee a man's exposed lower intestine or unexperience evil shit. "And you can't add five minutes travel time in not taking crazy risks, because that would mean you aren't the absolute manifestation of power in the physical world, and something you could have physically done, and wanted to do, you didn't do. Right. No, it makes sense. So the only way to keep the two of you fuckers alive is to do everything possible to prevent futures like that from taking place, doing everything the way you want it done, before you can go there and do it yourselves."
The twins smiled widely at him. An independent servant had independently figured out the logical conclusion, that the act of 'doing things in your master's stead so he won't end up doing them himself' was the fundamental basis of any loyal servant. The fact that he displayed no cowardice of his own sealed it: he really did have their interests in mind.
Luke, for his part, was waiting for them to say something like 'You've figured it out, then, servant: all Illuminati and their servants belong to us, your goals are our goals.' Then he could come back with 'No, fuckheads, my goal is to keep THIS asshole's friends alive.' and hopefully, maybe, possibly knock them off their high horse before they really did get themselves killed, possibly creating a future in which some real douche controlled everything. And his own life was cheap. But instead they said absolutely nothing and he let the conversation die, having no hope of convincing them to at least pretend to be sane.
Ruby was nervous about this. Anticipation of anything these two did was not a skill she had. From her perspective, their train of thought ran a straight track in non-Euclidan geometry- some of it inspired, some of it innovative, some of it batshit insane. The way they conducted themselves was far from her experiences with the testosterone-fueled petty, demanding douchebags she had known, which was her only other reference point for power (and Paul acted too much like the twins when expressing it- no help there). Well, that and Sarah, but she didn't express power in any recognizable way at all. She just analyzed situations and had things done, period. 'But I don't need to anticipate them, they don't control me directly. I just need to anticipate her.' And that was a lot more comforting.
But what puzzled the servants the most, even though they knew they should be used to this shit by now, was the fact that everything went back to 'the usual' the next day. Precautions were taken, yes. Facilities gained an extra level of outside surveillance, laser and projectile defenses were upgraded, paranoia was more concretely applied, materiel like the destroyed sub and the dead Enforcers were investigated, and conclusions were drawn: mostly that they couldn't properly conclude anything related to the identity of the assailants. The only things they truly knew were that the enemy had its own Enforcers, developed on a separate line entirely from the standard models (the Operator considered them completely inferior and refused to incorporate any of the enemy's modifications), they had access to military facilities (as so many Illuminati do), and that they had a small supply of uranium, which they may or may not have exhausted. Nothing else happened; the Duumvirate made no official proclamation of any kind, the Operator made nothing but statements of fact, and although it obviously made Page 1 of the Real News it was little more than a summary of known events (with some mild word-choice bias towards the heroism of the engineereds) and some speculation into enemy motives. The servants, amazed, were informed that there was no way for the twins to politically take advantage of this crisis any more than they had the initial one. There was no extra crap about "with us or with the rogues"; that much was already known, anyway. The twins did get a few well-wishings and congratulations for their success in Northberg's defense, but that was mostly standard ingratiating fare. There was none of the social scarring that would have occurred in the normal world after this kind of attack, successful or not. If any other Illuminati were surprised by this, they didn't show it.
But engineereds don't scar, Ruby reminded Luke. They just regenerate.