Walsh's thoughts after "Supertroopers". Concurrent to "The Bitter End".
Based on the song "First we take Manhattan" by Leonard Cohen.
Thanks to Robyn for beta-reading.
Disclaimer: 'The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers' is copyrighted by Hearst Entertainment, Inc.
This is a work of fanfiction, and I make no profit of it.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
He sat down at his old desk. The Space Navy would try to track down Killbane and the other Supertroopers, but he did not have high hopes that the renegades would be caught. They were too well-trained. He looked around, feeling suddenly weary. The room was only sparsely furnished. His personal affairs had long been transported to BETA Mountain, but he could not pack away the memories into crates as easily.
Twenty-three years since he had taken the command of Wolf Den.
Twenty years since Gooseman had left the artificial womb.
Two and a half years since the Supertrooper project had failed.
He needed to edit his report for the BWL, but he put it off and skimmed the news sites on the net. Obviously, there was no mentioning of Batch-22. That would only have happened if he had failed. He browsed the headlines: a bomb attack in Lahore, violence in Paris, demonstrations in Lima. Even as it was spreading into space, Earth was far from having solved its problems, but there also were many news reports he did not have to read any more. The civil war with Mars had stopped. Hunger revolts in Africa remained local affairs. Eurasia showed signs of reviving democracy
He walked over to the window and let his eyes wander over the deserted facilities around him as his mind wandered back in time.
Like many other things, Wolf Den was a child of its time. The implementation had been flawed, but the plan had been good.
It seemed times had never been easy since the beginning of historic records, but he grew up in an era that was especially violent, one where humanity as a whole struggled for survival. Food and energy shortages magnified existing conflicts; mega cities attracted crime and diseases, and the seas were rising. Colonization of Mars, beginning in the 2040s, temporarily relieved the problem, but when the Great Drought of the 2060s ended food imports from Mars, old conflicts returned with a vengeance, and a new world order became necessary.
His parents were diplomats, and he and his sister, Vanessa, grew up in cities as diverse as New York, Berlin or Singapore. There wasn't any type of revolution – left, right, center, fundamentalist, secular, environmentalist, unnamed – that Earth in the 21st century did not witness, and as Walsh learned to observe the world around him, he saw the causes for all of them.
When he joined the Pan-American military forces, he hoped to do something real and escape from the life of carefully chosen words and gestures his parents had built. Only later did he find out how wrong he had been in his assumptions– and how useful the skill to mince one's words could be.
He was never one for politics, but he knew how to use it if it helped his troops.
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
With guerrilla fights spreading from slums to entire cities to entire countries, counter-insurgence was the watchword. Poverty and desolation were the tinder, and ideologies were the spark that could set it aflame.
But he also saw what it did to people if you took away their hope for a messiah and their belief that they were called to reform their country. Despair was equally dangerous and just as likely to spark a revolution.
Thus governments established tight controls; they allowed people the tools they needed to build better lives but had the military intervene as soon as there were any signs of revolution.
Those times needed leaders who could make tough choices, and he rose through the ranks quickly.
I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
The Supertrooper project was the first command he was given, and he gave it a large part of his life. There was never time for private things, and that was probably the better choice. Sawyer tried to balance work and family, and Walsh observed what it cost him to stay weekends at the base and to administer drugs aimed at genetic modifications to his charges at Wolf Den while his mother in law wrote him long letters where she discussed the benefits and drawbacks of measles and rubella vaccinations for his own son and his wife manufactured yet another excuse to his friends why he was not home.
Private happiness was fleeting at best.
When his sister married, he could not even make it to the wedding because of an unannounced review by the UN committee for genetic engineering. He watched the wedding video. Vanessa looked happy.
Worn down by their fruitless struggle to have children, she and her husband divorced three years later. Vanessa went to work for a humanitarian aid organization as a hospital director in Lagos, Nigeria. He warned her about the dangers, but she had always been stubborn.
She was shot dead in a robbery during the first week she was there.
He remembered the date: March 28, 2067, at 1104.
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
What did one more dead person matter in the high death toll that hunger, disease and revolution were constantly claiming? Except to him, it did matter. He and Vanessa had always been close, and she had been the only family he had left after his parents died in an airplane crash.
He threw himself into his work, to help engineer a better future. Around him, politics continued.
The constant upheaval and environmental catastrophes of the 21st century had forced many states into bigger unions – the Eurasian Union, the Pan-American Federation, the Chinese Alliance, the United States of Central and South Africa…
By 2060, Australia had been one of the few remaining independent states, and it was determined to stay so. It started a secret project to create top soldiers with super powers at a point in time when many other states had already outlawed genetic engineering on humans. Top scientists from Russia, India and Mexico flocked to work in the Land Down Under.
When Australia was forced to join the Pan-American-Pacific Federation in 2064, he was given provisional command of the facilities of Wolf Den. Although the initial intention was to dismantle the project, the government soon saw the advantages of keeping it alive.
The first batch of Supertroopers saw the light of day on November 14, 2064; it took the UN three more years to enforce the ban on the genetic engineering of enhanced humans, but that only meant that the scientists at Wolf Den could not create any new Supertroopers. The training of the existing soldiers continued.
When the FEMA, the Federation of Earth, Mars and Allied Worlds, was founded in 2068, the original intentions for keeping the Supertrooper project alive became obsolete, but the civil war with Mars soon gave the BWL new rationales. If humans could slaughter each other like they did in those bloody years between 2070 and 2075, what would aliens be able to unleash on the entire human race?
Oh yes, their intentions had been very good. He understood the politics behind them perfectly.
I don't like your fashion business, Mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
The basics of politics had not changed between then and now. Only he had changed.
He never allowed himself to see the Supertroopers as his children: they were his charges, soldiers he needed to train, and emotional involvement would impair his judgment. Yet the human heart was a treacherous thing.
He thought of Vanessa again. She had died never knowing for what research he had used her genetic donation. He doubted she would have approved. It had taken him a long time until he could admit that, but in the end, it did not matter. He did what he believed to be best for Earth's safety.
He did not like it when senators in cashmere suits and silk saris who never left their air-conditioned offices gave him orders, yet they were right about one thing:
Those who had been trained to smother revolutions were now revolutionaries themselves, and they needed to be stopped.
Supertroopers had been trained in counter-insurgence, but that also meant they knew everything about insurgence: biological, chemical and psychological warfare, weapons, explosives, basic theory of economic systems, strategies, tactics, spying, smuggling …
Any single Supertrooper was more dangerous than an atom bomb, and he had helped create them.
He couldn't ignore or downplay the matter any longer, and he couldn't spare Gooseman from the full extent of his duty any more. Gooseman's failure to bring in Killbane was one thing – their powers were evenly matched, and Killbane was among the most ruthless of the escaped Supertroopers. But Goose had to go after the other renegades before they too banded together and became a danger to Earth.
And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I'm ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
He walked down to the ground floor to the storage hall where they had put the cryo units with the frozen Supertroopers that they had used as their bargaining chip.
They BWL committee for Earth's security had ordered him to destroy the frozen Supertroopers, but he would not comply. He did not take orders on a project that had never officially existed. It was the one small thing he could do, the little spark of hope that remained and that he could not stifle.
He would have code locks installed that self-destructed as soon as the wrong code for reviving the occupant was entered.
Ah, remember me, I used to live for music
Remember me, I brought your groceries in
Well, it's father's day and everybody's wounded
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Negata glided into the room. Walsh turned around reluctantly and faced his former accomplice in the Supertrooper project.
"The data the genetic analyzers have collected during the fight are invaluable in understanding how X-factor worked," Negata said.
"Understanding it will get us nowhere, Owen."
He was angry and tired, yet there was no rest for him.
"Their superpowers are only part of why the Supertroopers are such a grave threat. Any other terrorist group could have tried to steal Batch-22. What makes the escaped Supertroopers dangerous is their ruthlessness and efficiency. We were lucky they wanted to negotiate instead of releasing Batch-22 straight into Earth's atmosphere."
"Do you think they will strike again?" Negata asked methodically, ever the chief scientist and strategist.
He hesitated for a second, wishing that the answer was different.
"Yes. And we need to be prepared."
"We could expand the Series 5 program, both in terms of number of carriers and power levels. I think both Ranger Gooseman and Ranger Niko could handle stronger charges."
"We already have too few candidates for the Series 3 program, let alone the Series 5 implants. A stronger charge increases the health risk for the carrier, and the Board of Leaders is suspicious of another group of enhanced soldiers that it cannot control."
Walsh turned half away from Negata and stared at the cryo units.
Those Supertroopers had fallen, but he would make damn sure something similar never happened again.
"Maybe that was our mistake," Negata spoke after a while.
"We tried to control the Supertroopers too rigidly. They never had a choice if they wanted to defend Earth against its most dangerous enemies."
"They made their choices, Owen."
"Joseph – do you think if we had treated them differently, they would not have turned out this way?"
He sighed, and the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
"This is too wide a field, Owen. And it doesn't matter now."