Team Omega

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  “The government is power with responsibility,” Chester said, quietly. “I know; half the population would say that the Federal Government wasn't responsible at all. But the fact is that the Government of the United States, or even the Government of China, has a certain responsibility to its population. A rogue state feels no responsibility towards its people, but the dictators do feel responsible for maintaining their own power base.

  “The Saviours have no such limitations. They judged the Congo themselves, without considering the international effects of their actions, and then attacked. Where will they go next? There is no shortage of suffering in this world. Will they attack North Korea, or will they attack China...or will they buy into the claim that the United States is the source of all evil and attack Washington? These people have no responsibility. Their actions are therefore unpredictable—and dangerous.”

  The President slapped the table. “Those concerns have been noted,” he said. “The question remains, however; what do we do now?”

  “I shall speak to Secretary-General Jefferson and ask him to convene an immediate meeting of the Security Council,” Gayle said. “God knows that the General Assembly will already be buzzing, but maybe we can moderate them into trying to help rather than hinder. After that...we have supplies we can spare to help them, maybe that’s what we should do.”

  “You want to help them?” Kratman demanded. “The real question is, do we recognise their government as being the legitimate government of the Congo!”

  “They certainly fit the standard definition,” Chester pointed out. “They hold territory and all opposition is too scattered to fight back. We can recognise them as an occupying power until they manage to form a proper government to run the country.”

  “Assuming they ever do,” Kratman said. He looked over at the President. “Mr. President, I understand that there is an argument for helping them—and the poor folks in the Congo. I wouldn't raise the slightest objection to sending humanitarian aid to the state; the Saviours might at least be able to distribute it properly. But if we recognise them as an occupying power, or even as a government, we legitimise any other superhuman power grabs. What happens if that bunch of religious creeps from Pakistan manages to take over the government? They would become an instant superpower and a potential threat.”

  “The Saviours are already a superpower,” Gayle said, softly. “What happens if they manage to gain more allies—not just mutants, but other high-ranking superhumans?”

  The President looked at Chester. “Your recommendation, Mr. Harrison?”

  Chester hesitated. “For the moment, we have to accept that they rule the Congo and we cannot dislodge them—at least not without further devastating the area,” he said, slowly. “But Tom is right; we cannot accept their action without opening up a whole new can of worms, one that might explode in our faces. I would suggest agreeing to send humanitarian aid—the charities will start doing that without our encouragement—but refusing any form of formal recognition until the Congo has a proper government and the Saviours go back to their clubhouse at the South Pole.”

  “I wouldn't count on the charities doing anything useful,” Kratman muttered. “They always do well by doing good.”

  “We can also flood the area with reporters to see just how well the Saviours manage to operate when they’re trying to hold territory, rather than just smashing through anything in their way,” Chester added. “It might help discourage others from trying the same thing if the Congo collapses into chaos despite their presence.”

  “Possibly,” the President agreed. “Are there any other recommendations?”

  “The opposite,” Gayle said. “The world has changed, whatever we think about it. We should seriously consider supporting them to the hilt--”

  “Which will convince other nations that we are behind them,” Kratman snapped. “Do we really want the blame for crushing the Congo’s government and occupying the country?”

  “Hope is American,” Chester pointed out. “We will get much of the blame anyway.”

  “It can't be helped,” the President said. “We will send humanitarian aid while watching closely. And General? Draw up a plan to evict them from the Congo if necessary. We need to be ready for anything.”

  Chester scowled, inwardly. Superhumanity had finally come into its own—and God alone knew what would happen next. Human history suggested that it wouldn't end very well.

  Chapter Nine

  “Can you believe this shit?”

  Jackson looked up from where he was peering through a window down onto the grimy streets of downtown Chicago. The area had once been peaceful and prosperous, but changes in the economy had driven the industries out of the city and most of the population had followed, leaving the streets to the poor, the gangsters and the drug lords. Jackson wondered what would have happened to him if he’d grown up in such a hopeless area, where boys were killed off in gang fights and girls became whores almost as soon as they started their first period. It took a special kind of personality to climb out of the gutter, and most of those personalities moved away as soon as they could.

  Basil thumped the portable television in irritation. “A bunch of capes decide to knock over an entire country and what do we do? Nothing!”

  “Not the mission,” Jackson said. He’d been surprised that the Young Stars—assuming that the DEA was right—had chosen such an isolated area for their drug deals, but perhaps there was a certain kind of logic to it. Doing something closer to their hangout would have been asking for trouble; besides, the area was effectively neutral ground between two different gangs. “It’s only been a day. Give them a chance.”

  “That’s why we were created,” Basil informed him, rolling off the pile of blankets they used as a sleeping pad. “Sooner or later, one of those caped assholes is going to think that they’re God and we’d better all bow down to him. I think we’d better get ready to fight them.”

  “Tell that to the Sergeant,” Jackson said, tiredly. “And if you blow this mission, he won’t ever forgive you.”

  He scowled down through the dirty window onto the streets below. This part of the city had once accommodated warehouses, but they were abandoned now, slowly decaying into rubble. Someone had looted everything that had been left behind and then left the doors open, mocking the civilised society that had abandoned its poor to the gutter. Everywhere they looked, there were traces of drug users and worse in the area. The rooms of the office block they’d taken over as a watchtower were littered with needles and empty injector tabs. Some of them were probably contaminated with AIDS or worse, they’d been warned; since then, they’d brushed them to one side and hoped for the best.

  The latest update from the DEA had stated that the drug courier was going to arrive just before evening, when the sun began to set. Jackson wondered why they hadn't bothered to arrest the courier on his way up from Texas to Chicago, but it wasn't his decision to make. By then, they had to be ready for the Young Stars—assuming they bothered to show. The media had been driven into a frenzy by the events in the Congo and the Young Stars were no doubt being pressured for statements that could be taken out of context by the media. Lane had noted that their backers were probably ordering them to say nothing until they decided what they wanted them to say, but teenagers weren't noted for restraint. The only reason they believed the Young Stars would still show up to meet with the drug courier was that they were addicts, and they needed those drugs.

  He’d never had a chance to use surveillance gear before joining Team Omega and he’d been surprised—and a little horrified—when he’d realised just how much information the gear could pick up. Tiny sensors had been scattered around the area, each one linked to the computer gear in their hideout through an almost invisible cable. The spooks who were part of the support staff had admitted that they would have preferred to use microburst transmissions, but with superhumans involved it was possible that they might hear the transmissions and escape before it was too late.
Superhumans screwed up everything, they’d grumbled; they’d been saying it long before the Congo invasion.

  One of the consoles bleeped. “I’ve got movement,” he said, as several teenagers came into view. They clearly weren't the Young Stars, almost certainly gang members from one of the groups or refugees from their wrath. Or, more alarmingly, they might have been scouts sent ahead to ensure that the area was clear. “What do you make of that?”

  Basil knelt down beside him. “Looks like one of those politically-correct multi-ethnic gangs you don’t see outside bad television and worse comics,” he said. “And look at those outfits, dude. Those kids are working for the drug lords or I’ll eat my gun.”

  Jackson had to agree. The lead kid was a tall black teenager with glasses and an afro. Beside him, there was a Goth girl, a pair of blonde white kids who might almost have been brother and sister, with a mutant and a little girl bringing up the rear. Their clothes were expensive, far too expensive. Basil was right, he decided; they looked too rich and healthy to be native to the area, particularly the Goth girl. Someone like her would have been pimped out by now, along with the blonde girl. Hell, maybe the boys would have been added to the brothels too. They catered to everyone.

  “That one could be a problem,” Basil said, grimly. Behind the teens, there was a single mutant gambolling along; it resembled a cross between a man and a lizard. It seemed to be acting as an animal—there were plenty of stories of mutants growing up isolated and becoming more animal than human—but Jackson saw the pattern in its movements. The blasted creature was sniffing for signs of trouble. “How well do you think we covered our tracks?”

  “Well enough, I hope,” Jackson muttered back. He keyed his communicator and gave the CO a quick update. If the kids down there spotted them, they might have to fight their way out; the mission would definitely be blown. “You think someone could just pick off that lizard guy before he got up here?”

  “Chris is on sniper duty,” Basil said. “He could probably pick them all off before they came in to this building.”

  “But that would blow us,” Jackson said. He settled back and watched grimly as the teenagers came closer, walking up to the warehouse below them. It didn't look particularly safe, but that wouldn't have deterred him as a child—and it didn't deter the scouts either. “That little girl should be in foster care.”

  “I was in foster care,” Basil said. Jackson blinked. The operatives rarely shared stories of their past, even of their careers before joining Team Omega. They knew he had been a Marine—and he was fairly sure that he’d picked out Rangers and Delta Force from among the other operatives—but most of them obscured their past. “My dad died when I was a baby and my mother just couldn’t cope, so they said she had to give me up. Even the worst of parents couldn't have treated me as badly as the foster family did—and no one seemed to listen to my complaints. Eventually, I left them and never looked back.”

  He shrugged. “And here will be worse,” he added. “That kid might be safer on the streets, at least until she reaches her teens. After that...”

  “All bets are off,” Jackson agreed. He cursed under his breath as the teenagers seemed to stop outside their building, looking across at the burned-out vehicles someone had stripped and then shoved into one corner. As a child, he would probably have played with the remains until his parents dragged him home and lectured him on the dangers of touching burnt rubble. “I think we may have a problem.”

  Basil picked up his M-22 and loaded it with standard rounds. “If we have to fight, take out the mutant with guns and then kick their asses hand-to-hand,” he ordered, calmly. “They’re just kids. I don’t want to have to explain to the Sergeant why I killed kids.”

  “Understood,” Jackson said. The teenagers were probably drug addicts working for the local drug lord; it would certainly explain the fancy clothes. That didn't mean that they deserved to die. “I think...”

  He grinned suddenly as the teenagers moved away. “They’re going,” he said, in some relief. “One is pulling out a box of pills.”

  “Watch them carefully; leave the rest of the surveillance to me,” Basil ordered. “If that’s anything but ultimate, we shouldn't have a problem. Ultimate, however...”

  Jackson winced at the thought. He'd found out more about ultimate now; it was actually distilled from superhuman blood and for a few minutes it gave someone the powers of a superhuman. Not a very powerful one, true, rarely over Level 2, but enough to make a drugged-up fighter a deadly enemy. He'd read through all the files, including some that covered attempts to create enhanced soldiers before SARA had made all such experiments illegal. Repeated use of the drug eventually burned out the body and left the user either comatose or dead. Some had even died when their wounds had caught up with them after the drug faded from their bloodstream.

  “They’re taking pills as they go,” he said, slowly. “Do you think that’s something dangerous?”

  “No way to know,” Basil said. He keyed his communicator. “Papa-Mike, this is OP; teens coming your way, watch them until they’re gone.”

  “Understood, OP,” the response crackled back. “Gee...that girl just walked over a sensor. You think we can get a peek up her skirt?”

  “As you were,” the Sergeant’s voice snapped. “Besides, she’s probably jailbait.”

  Jackson watched the teens leave and then looked back at the warehouse. “How much longer do we have to wait?”

  “Another hour, if the DEA was on the money,” Basil said. His voice twisted into a bad impression of Yoda. “You’ll have to start learning patience if you want to be a Jedi, young Skywalker.”

  “And stop lusting after my own sister,” Jackson countered. They shared a chuckle. “Do you think that Lucas will ever produce the first prequel in the movie series?”

  “I very much doubt it,” Basil said. “These days, no one wants to see movies about superhumans—even Jedi Knights. The last Superman movie was a total flop.”

  Jackson nodded. He hadn't been a big fan of comic books as a child, but then the golden age of comics was long over. Who wanted to read about Superman when you could look out of a window and see a superhuman flying past? Besides, real superhumans were edgy, even those who were patriotic and fought crime on behalf of Uncle Sam. Superman had been escapist fantasy in a world that had never had to face superhumans in real life. The only comic book hero who had remained popular outside the fringe was Batman—and he was a regular human, just like Team Omega.

  “They were going to call us the Batmen,” Basil said, after Jackson had voiced his thoughts. “And then someone pointed out that it might get the Pentagon tied up in legal shit, so they dumped the idea. They wanted us to take out a superhuman who dressed up as Superman two years ago, before someone at DC decided that it would make them look like bastards in the eyes of the public. The guy wearing the costume saved plenty of lives before they decided that perhaps they should sue him.”

  “I...see,” Jackson said. “And I have to be familiar with all this shit?”

  “Study it in your off-hours,” Basil told him. “And try to have a chat with Grimes about it—I know, you don’t like him and no one else likes him very much either. But he does have some interesting insights into how some superheroes can cross the line into outright criminality and force us to take them down.”

  Jackson nodded, reluctantly. He’d learned to dislike psychologists before coming face to face with Grimes, who was a perfect example of the worst of the breed.

  “He had a theory about professional limits,” Basil continued, absently. “You see, it isn't uncommon for teachers to fuck their students, doctors to fuck their patients and policemen to fuck their prisoners. It should be very uncommon, but it isn’t. Grimes suggested that everyone needed to keep a mental barrier between themselves and someone....vulnerable, but that that barrier was always porous. The more involved they became, the more they broke the barriers and turned into monsters. And many of them remained convinced that they w
ere doing the right thing even as they were hauled off into jail for underage sex.

  “Superhumans see things on a much bigger scale than us. Someone like the Sergeant isn't too far ahead of us; he’s strong and tough, but little else. But someone like Hope or America or that Russian with the unpronounceable name? They are so powerful that every failure is a kind of little death for them. Their powers make them feel so involved that they cannot look away. How well would you cope if you knew that the little girl across the road was being beaten every night by her mother and abused by her father?”

  “Not well,” Jackson said. He would have killed the parents, if he had known, and to hell with the consequences. “I couldn’t leave her there.”

  Basil shrugged. “I knew a Green Beret who knew a SEAL who knew a Delta who served in Lebanon before the capes arrived to make our lives more complicated,” he added. “He said that one of the Deltas had seen a man beating his wife while trying to take out a pair of enemy snipers and shot him. They’d watched the whole area so closely that they lost all detachment and decided to interfere. I don’t know what happened—I don’t even know if it really happened—but it’s something to bear in mind.”