The rest of the world had offered what help they could, although Chester knew it wouldn't be anything like enough to make a big difference. Reports from Russia and China suggested that they had been on the verge of launching a joint nuclear strike on Washington when Team Omega had fought its final battle against Hope and the Saviours. A few more days and Washington would have been destroyed, if Hope hadn't intercepted the nukes in flight. Who knew what would have happened then? The only thing that had forced them to hesitate was the fear of what Hope would do. Perhaps they would have suffered the same fate as Libya—but then, they had tactical nukes too. It would have devastated part of the world.
He looked up as Michael Lee entered the secure room, looking somewhat the worse for wear. Las Vegas had been devastated by the battle between Fireman and Hope, a battle that hadn't even been fought to a bloody conclusion. Level 5 superhumans could inflict terrifying amounts of damage on the surrounding area when they fought. Hope had managed to stun Fireman, knocking him out of the fight. What would have happened if he’d managed to kill Fireman didn't bear thinking about.
“I’m glad you survived,” Fireman said. “Your wife?”
“Alive and well,” Chester said. He waved a hand at the stack of paperwork. “I may even get to see her in a year or two.”
Fireman chuckled. Chester motioned him to a seat.
“I understand that you’re going to the Congo,” he said, as Fireman took a seat. “Are you sure you want to go there?”
“Someone has to ride herd on what remains of the Saviours—and the mutants—there,” Fireman said. “Besides, without a strong American presence in the Congo, someone else is going to undo all of Hope’s good work.”
There was another reason to send Fireman out there, with the kind of support that should—perhaps—have been offered to Hope when he first invaded the Congo. The American public had been badly shocked by the superhuman attack; they’d believed, not without reason, that most superhumans were nothing more than celebrities. Hope had shown that they were really godlike beings with few restraints—and the Redeemer had shown that even the most decent of them could be manipulated by telepaths. At least that little detail hadn't leaked out, and if Chester had his way it never would. There was enough anti-telepath hysteria already.
But keeping Fireman in the Congo might—might—prevent the anti-superhuman candidates from opening a new Pandora’s Box. The United States had inherited most of Dr. Death’s records after the collapse of South Africa, and some of them had suggested ways to inhibit or destroy superhuman powers. And yet Chester knew enough to be sickened by what the racist bastard had done to develop his treatments. One incident had led to the indirect sterilisation of over fifteen thousand black women in South Africa, while another had committed genocide on every black superhuman born in the country. Chester was one of the very few people who knew what had happened to Dr. Death after his capture by American Special Forces—and that was something he never wanted to address. What would happen, in the future, if that particular box was opened again?
“I hope you’re right,” Chester said. In the end, the Congo was expendable. All that mattered was keeping a lid on the next crisis before it blew up in their faces. The next superhuman who wanted to take world power might be more careful. “Good luck.”
***
Jackson knocked at the door, opening it when he heard the instruction from inside. Mr. Harrison was seated at a desk, working his way through a stack of paperwork and looking harassed. His normal support staff had been killed or scattered when Hope had invaded Washington, and most of the ones who had reported in weren't cleared for the Greenbrier Bunker. Jackson himself had been surprised to discover that the bunker existed; from what he’d heard, it had been created as a fall back in the event of Russian nuclear attack. It had kept the Vice President safe, if disconnected from the grid...
“Captain McDonald,” Harrison said. “Take a seat, please.”
Jackson blinked in surprise. “Captain? I’m a Corporal.”
“You’ve been promoted,” Harrison said, gruffly. “We’ll go over the pay and benefits later.”
“What's on your mind, sir?”
“Would you be willing to stay with Omega?”
“We're rebuilding the teams?”
“We are,” Harrison confirmed. “The federal mandate I've been given allows for the rebuilding, plus creation of two more platoons.”
Jackson frowned. “That’s nice.”
“Captain,” Harrison said. “You’re the last reasonably healthy survivor of Team Omega. I need you to take command of rebuilding the team.”
Jackson couldn't fault his logic. Almost all of the active team was dead, apart from Basil and himself—and Basil would never return to full operator status. None of the support staff were qualified to lead the team, even though they had survived almost completely intact. And the other SOF operators in the United States had no experience of working with Team Omega or fighting superhumans, although some of them had fought Hope’s forces during the brief period when he’d ruled the country. Maybe there would be a healthy pool of potential recruits for him to draw on.
But they would all be older and more experienced than himself ... except in taking on superhumans. And that was the point, wasn't it?
“There are other issues,” Harrison continued. “Our funding has been increased—the President wants us to proceed with the Cybermen program and the Borg program. DARPA has a whole list of possible ways to augment a soldier and upgrade him into something that might be able to stand against a superhuman in open combat, but some of them have a very high fatality rate. Every time they tried to strengthen a person’s bones for combat, the test subject died. I need someone in that seat who knows that superhumans can be beaten, without enhancing soldiers and risking their lives in the process. We don’t need a program that effectively wipes out our entire cadre for Team Omega.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson said. The responsibility scared him—in some ways, it was more responsibility than Captain Lane had ever enjoyed. He’d had the impression that the four Captains compared notes frequently, but he’d be alone. Any other Captain would be junior to him. “I’ll do my best.”
“I’m counting on you,” Harrison said, bluntly. “The SDI has been devastated. It won’t be long before someone with unfriendly ambitions realises that we’re critically weak in superhuman manpower; maybe we'll see another attempted coup, maybe something with more limited objectives. We’re going to need your team in place to cope with it before the shit hits the fan—and it will, Captain. The world was turned upside down when Hope struck Washington and the shockwaves will take a long time to fade.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson said. He couldn't disagree. “How much freedom do I have?”
“As much as I gave Captain Lane and the others,” Harrison said. “Just remember that you have to lead Team Omega into combat next time. And try to learn some diplomatic skills. You need them.”
Jackson nodded. He didn’t feel up to the challenge; being a fire team leader in the Marine Corps was different from serving as a field team leader in any Special Operations Force, but Harrison was right. There was no one else, unless he could find some retirees. Even a former First Sergeant would be helpful.
“I understand,” he said. He hesitated. There was something that had been bugging him. “What are we going to do with the captured Saviours?”
Harrison frowned. Gateway, Triple A and Warrior Girl had been taken alive; Lightning had been captured, but she had been crushed to a bloody pulp when the White House fell in. Mainframe, Mimic, Hypersonic, the Redeemer and Hope were all confirmed dead. Darkness and Flash Freeze had remained in the Congo and vanished shortly after Hope’s defeat and death. Like the enhanced humans who had escaped South Africa, they’d probably add to the chaos gripping the continent in the future. A number of lesser superhumans had also been captured or gone on the run, along with a handful of mutants.
“They may have been influenced by th
e Redeemer too,” Harrison said, “but the new administration isn't going to take that into account, not after everything else that’s happened in the last few days. I understand that the leaders will be tried for terrorism—treason, too, for those who were born Americans. Fireman suggested that the mutants could be exiled to the Congo and put to work there in the work gangs Hope founded to punish the former warlord supporters. It may be the best possible solution.”
He shook his head. “The world changed and we didn't really admit it to ourselves,” he said, flatly. “We cannot let that happen again.”
Jackson nodded, but he knew that it wouldn't be easy.
“We won’t,” he said, finally. “Because for all their power, they’re still human. And that means that we can beat them.”
The End
Afterword
“That’s the whole point of [superhumans], isn't it? Something complicated; you make it simple, something you can hit, or else you just ignore it. You stay as far as possible from the real world - which, let’s face it, can be a messy fucking place.”
-Billy Butcher; The Boys: Get Some (Garth Ennis).
Most superhero stories are instantly forgettable.
I think, to be honest, that that is a limitation of the genre. The typical superheroes - Superman, Batman, Captain America, Iron Man - are heroes. They rarely come to grips with realistic problems and, when they do, it tends to lead to some of the worst writing in comic book history. Their stories show them punching something, as Garth Ennis noted in The Boys, to make a problem go away. The real world doesn’t work that way.
DC and Marvel are particularly bad offenders because their mainstream comic books attempt to create an impression of superhumans in our world. Superman and Batman meet real-world presidents, for example, and super-advanced technology co-exists with a world that isn't that very different from our own. The failure to actually look at the concept of superhumans and how they might affect the world around them leads to stories such as Panic In The Sky and Our Worlds At War, which have a number of similarities (they both focus on an alien invasion) and yet are largely forgettable. No matter what happens - Superman goes red and blue, Batman is accused of murder and becomes a hunted fugitive - their world never changes.
This became particularly absurd in the argument, after 9/11, of how the comic books should acknowledge the destruction of the Twin Towers. To us, 9/11 was a horrific mass murder, a major terrorist attack; to the denizens of DC and Marvel, it’s merely another Tuesday. The aforementioned stories above both featured far more damage, on a global scale, than the 9/11 plotters could hope to inflict in their wildest dreams. And yet, 9/11 is still held up in both universes as a particularly horrific attack.
But what really undermines the mainstream comic book stories is the refusal to have superhumans genuinely change things, for better or worse. Mark Miller sent The Authority to liberate a Third World hellhole from the clutches of an oppressive dictator, yet refused to focus on the aftermath. (They later found a silver bullet in the form of a semi-reformed supervillain, who was sent to clean up the mess.) One might as well cheer on American forces that liberated Iraq, yet ignore the bloody struggle to stabilise the country afterwards.
This is, in many ways, the core problem with most comic book stories. Having spent time and effort on settling up a universe, writers are reluctant to knock it down. (And, at the same time, a radical change will often upset long-term readers - Spiderman’s One More Day/Brand New Day, for example - without adding more readers.) Superman doesn't save the world from itself, Batman doesn't snap the Joker’s neck ... because either one would fundamentally alter the comic book universe. There are very few moments of genuinely lasting change within both DC and Marvel (even Jason Todd came back to life). And that is why most comic books are instantly forgettable.
In the real world, things are different.
There is a fundamental difficulty between ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘equal outcomes.’ As an indie book writer, I am in competition with every other indie writer for the coveted number one slot on Amazon. We all have the same shot at it - may the best writer win! But only one of us can hold the place at any single time. There’s no such thing as an equal outcome; writers are ranked according to sales and only one of us can be at the top.
This is true across many fields of achievement. A person who wishes to be a top violinist must work to master the instrument; they must practice, practice and practice. Everyone can be given the opportunity to learn, but not everyone will make use of it. There is no guarantee that giving two people the same opportunity will lead to the same outcome. Child One may stick with the violin into adulthood and go on to play in concerts; Child Two may decide very quickly that he/she doesn't want to be a violinist and find something else to try.
I was brought up to believe, and still do, that we are all born equal, with equal potential for good and ill. Our lives are determined by what use we make of the opportunities presented to us as we grow older.
But when superhumans are involved, everything changes.
Batman is the peak of human perfection; he’s strong, intelligent and frighteningly good at picking the weak spot to strike. Given time to think and plan, he’s almost completely unbeatable (one of the few JLA stories I recall had him besting a trio of White Martians though deduction and careful planning.) You could easily imagine Batman serving as a Navy SEAL, if things had been a little different. But he isn't a match for Superman. He’d get swatted aside casually if Superman really wanted to kill him.
(One of the few comic book series I actually remember is Irredeemable, where the two Batman-counterparts get killed very quickly. One of them, in particular, is a genuinely brilliant deconstruction of the Badass Normal trope.)
If humans are born equal, what does it do to society if superhumans genuinely exist?
Call me a cynic if you like, but I don’t think it would be a very pleasant world. A superman-type character could make himself the ruler of a nation and no one could stop him. Or, on a smaller scale, a mind-controlling superhuman could build himself a harem or mentally dominate an entire city and, again, no one could stop him. What does it mean for humanity if a bullied schoolboy develops superpowers and tears apart an entire school, killing thousands of innocent children? And what happens if no one can bring him to account for his crimes?
Humans have a tendency to develop tribal attachments. Why wouldn't superhumans have the same problem? They may have powers, but they’re still human. It probably would not take long for superhumans to start banding together - and tribes can easily become echo chambers, where contradictory ideas are rarely tolerated. Some superhumans will consider themselves ... well, saviours; others will think of themselves as superior to the mere mortals under their feet and able to do whatever they like to people who cannot fight back. Why not? If mundane humans can engage in schoolyard bullying even as they grow into adulthood, why not superhumans?
As a character, Superman is simply too mature to be believable.
And so, as I noted in the foreword, I set out to ask myself what sort of world might be shaped by superhumans - and how would the world respond?
I hope you enjoyed the story. If you liked it, please feel free to leave a review.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Edinburgh, 2015.
The World of Team Omega
The first (known) superhuman appeared in Sudan, in 1979. According to the reports (which were not believed at the time) the superhuman was a young female who was to be burned to death by her family for an unspecified offence. She somehow took control of the flames and used them to incinerate her village before vanishing into the vast continent. None of the stories sounded plausible until 1980, when a New York fireman fell from a burning building and sparked into a superhuman. Several others, including a Polish dissident, sparked later in the same year.
It was not long before they started having an effect on world politics. The Polish superhuman ended up leading a revolt against Russia
n dominance, something that was bitterly resented by the Polish population (and the rest of Eastern Europe). This superhuman, powerful enough to tear through tanks with his bare hands and bring down aircraft with his gaze, was eventually killed by a heavy nuclear bomb (the Russians vastly overestimated the required blast) that devastated Warsaw. Russia became a pariah internationally as the Soviet Union eventually disintegrated into chaos. The appearance of the first Russian superhuman came too late to save the USSR.
Other sparking events continued to reshape the world. The Falklands War created the first British superhuman, Invincible, and the Iraq-Iran War produced an Iraqi superhuman, although he remained largely undercover until much later, when he overthrew Saddam and took control of Iraq. The United States attempted to remain in the lead by forming the first superhero team, headed by Fireman, which would be heavily involved in tackling the first supervillains to appear in the world. These included Slaughter, a serial killer, and Jim Crow, a racist with a pathological hatred of non-white people.
It was not long before research into superpowers started in earnest. Foremost among them was Dr. Wouter Basson of South Africa, who became known as Dr. Death. He experimented on captured black superhumans, eventually pioneering a technique for transferring superhuman organs from a superhuman into a normal human, granting some form of superhuman abilities. While these techniques rarely produced anything that could compete with a natural-born superhuman, they did give the Apartheid regime an answer to increasing black unrest. Dr. Death followed up this success by creating drugs that could inhibit superpowers, as well as a retrovirus that he claimed would eliminate the superhuman gene altogether from the black population. Field tests of this virus achieved nothing more than the mass sterilisation of countless black women.
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