Her eyes were the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel. They flitted from his haggard face and rumpled uniform down to his boots - which still had mud and a little bit of blood on them - and back up. It was an exercise in self control to keep her eye from twitching in the face of his disheveled appearance. She was leaning against the parapet with an easy confidence, appraising him with an eerily penetrating look. In turn he examined her, taking in the severe blonde bun, default sour expression, and dark grey pantsuit that hid a not unattractive figure.
"Piggot," he said, giving her a nod of acknowledgement, "it's been a while."
He extended his right hand, barely keeping the smirk off his face. He was obviously expecting her to stumble. Everything was a fucking power play with the man, it was honestly exhausting. It would be so easy to get rid of him - the right words in the right ears, an unfortunate incident with a secretary, and she could arrange a dishonourable discharge for him within the week. But no. He was a known quantity, and moreover he was competent at his job. She saw too little of that while working for the government.
Expression carefully modulated, she stepped away from the parapet and turned to face him. The metal of her right arm flexed fluidly as she reached out and shook his hand, making sure to squeeze slightly harder than was comfortable. His only concession to surprise was a raised eyebrow and a slight wince.
"Director Calvert. Congratulations on the promotion. I must say, you ran a neat operation with the Sendero Luminosa."
This time he was visibly surprised. "Ah, thank you. I actually just arrived from Lima, I suppose news travels-"
She cut him off. "Although, the research department would have preferred it if you brought Gùzman in alive. They suspect he may have been one of the oldest triggerees ever encountered."
"Ah. We did recover the good Chairman's head, for what it's worth."
She nodded and turned back to the parapet, looking out onto the cityscape before them. "Manton won't be too disappointed."
He walked over and leaned against the edge, a companionable distance away from her. "They sent me up here to be debriefed by Intelligence before I head to Chicago. Goddamn PSD." He laughed mirthlessly. "I spend two months in a narco-terrorist infested shithole, and I don't even get a day off. At least I'm finally getting a desk job like you." Glancing casually in her direction he continued, "I take it that it is not a coincidence that you're up here?"
Her expression remained serenely neutral. "It is not." She retrieved a metal disk from a pocket and placed it on the ledge in front of them. A blue LED lit up on its surface. "Privacy field," she explained. "We're surrounded by a 12-foot bubble from which no sound will escape for the next fifteen minutes. It also obscures our faces so we can't be lip-read, and blocks various other sensory powers."
This was interesting. First the high-quality bionic arm, now this little gadget. Calvert was aware of how tightly regulated tinker-tech tended to be from his own abortive attempts at getting his hands on some devices off the record. Most of it went to outfit strike teams and PSD law enforcement; there was no way she should have access to such devices. Calvert made it his job to know things, and by all accounts Emily Piggot was just another Intelligence Department bureaucrat, albeit a relatively high level one.
"So why am I actually here? Why all the skullduggery? Let me guess, you want to recruit me into your secret cabal of officers working to overthrow the US government."
"What?" She frowned. "No, of course not. Don't be an imbecile Calvert, we have enough of those working for us."
Good god, the woman was unable to recognize humour. She seemed even more uptight than when they had last met, which scarcely seemed possible.
"What do you recall about the aftermath of Ellisburg?"
The sudden non-sequitur threw him off, and it was a moment before he answered. "Ellisburg? We were both there. The PSD was overhauled after that clusterfuck, heads rolled. They booted out all the political appointees, replaced them with military and intelligence men. And women, of course." He said the last bit with an indulgent smile, as if it was supposed to be funny.
"What else?"
"Well, that's when they established the Intelligence Department, and the Strategic Policy Group under Concordance. And there were rumours… " He trailed off, finally connecting the dots. "That was you?"
She nodded. "My strike squad was the second to land in Ellisburg. I took command after our captain got... eaten. PSD wouldn't send in reinforcements on the first night, so we were stuck there while he ate through the town." In a fleeting moment of shared sympathy, Calvert's grimace matched her own. They had both been through that hell. "The researches call it a 'multiple synchronous threshold event'," she continued, "A mass trigger. Myself, and four others. My entire surviving strike squad, and one civilian. It's the only reason we made it out alive."
Calvert let out a low whistle. "So you're Concordance." A strange note had crept into his voice. Jealousy? "I'm impressed. If the rumours are to be believed, you and your 'policy group' are running the show around here."
She shook her head sharply. "I obey executive authority. We do the research and provide recommendations, but the agenda is set by the Chief Director, and the President. My job is to deliver the plan of action."
"Right, you deliver a plan."
"Questioning my loyalty, Calvert?"
"Never." And he wasn't. Piggot was a Patriot, in the fully capitalized sense of the word. He also knew that she wasn't a zealot or a fool. "Just your intelligence. We both know that what 'executive authority' demands is often not what 'executive authority' needs."
Her eyes bore through his skull, as if she was examining the inner workings of his brain. He took that as a cue to continue.
"You brought me here to assess me, see if I'll play ball with your agenda. And presumably there will be incentives too. But I'm not going to be a pawn. I want to know, what's your endgame here?"
She laughed. It was a short, harsh sound. "Everyone thinks it's a fucking conspiracy. It's really not that complicated. Look, how familiar are you with Manton's research on PCS?"
"Was that you as well? It did always smell faintly of bullshit, and it was an awfully convenient way to get the enlistment amendment passed."
"We supported his research, yes, but the results are not fictitious. At least not most of them. Manton sees himself as a latter-day Freud and has a tendency to exaggerate his more… esoteric theories. But the crux of it is true enough. You take an ordinary schoolgirl, give her a superpower, and it'll be 2.3 months on average before she gets into a violent altercation. We calculated."
"People with powers will want to use them, yes."
"It's more than that. At first we thought it was cultural. All those comic book vigilantes somehow seeped into our collective consciousness, making parahumans want to run around with their underwear on the outside. But we see this happening around the world. Yesterday I received a report regarding an emerging warlord in southern Angola. Hydrokinetic - he can draw in water from his surroundings. He's from a San tribe, they've been hunter-gatherers for thousands of years with relatively low levels of inter-tribal conflict compared to others in his region. Last week, he slaughtered four rival tribes by desiccation."
"Human nature. Give a man a stick and he'll use it."
"No. It's more than that. When humans turn into parahumans they change in more than ways than the obvious. It's subtle, but it's there. They're geared up to fight, to kill, to use their powers above all else. And that's why they need to be controlled."
"I'm not saying you're wrong, but this sounds like megalomania more than anything else. Not judging, just pointing that out." He was prodding at her with his comments, trying to annoy her or throw her off balance. She was used to these facile attempts at manipulation; did they really think it would work on her? She changed tacks.
"Your operation in Peru eliminated Shining Path. Well done, you took down a nuclear threat. Is that it? A new age of democracy and prosperity for the nation?"
He snorted. "Hardly. García's government barely has any control beyond Lima and the southern regions. And the MRTA are picking up where Chairman Gonzalo left off."
"Right. We had twenty years."
"What?"
"When I started my working group in the Intelligence Department a decade ago, analysis suggested that if events proceeded without significant intervention, we had twenty years before the complete collapse of the United States government. It wasn't just precog predictions; standard intelligence analysts were backing up the pattern. I mean, look at the rest of the world. The Soviets have collapsed into a kleptocracy where the factions are at each others throats. The UK can't go a fortnight without a bombing by the NIRA, and it's been a decade since the Belfast Accords! In Europe there's constant low level conflict between the Résau and the Gesellschaft. India's still cleaning up irradiated cities after the war with Pakistan, which doesn't exist anymore. There are twelve functional government on the continents of Africa and South America combined. And then there's the CUI. We don't know half of what happens in the CUI, but recently the State Department has been throwing around terms like 'purges' and 'death camps'. And god knows, we have plenty of our own issues. The world is sliding - has slid - inexorably towards chaos. We are one of the last stable states in existence, and that's largely due to the efforts of the PSD."
She didn't rant or raise her voice, her eyes didn't shine with a righteous anger, and her face remained perfectly calm. But her words belied the white-hot rage beneath the facade. "You hate them," said Calvert with something approaching awe. "You are one, and you hate them." You had to admire it in a perverse way. It took a certain strength of character to maintain that degree of self-loathing and still be functional.
She ignored him, continuing in that perfectly modulated tone of her. "Everything we do is designed to reduce chaotic elements. We engineer social and financial pressures, both subtle and overt, to push parahumans into the PSD. We pull them out of schools so they don't get recruited by gangs. We put them in behavioural therapy to try and make them well-adjusted individuals. We manage to get about 72% of tinkers on side simply because we control the supply of rare materials that they require. We deploy heroes to the conflict theatres in Central America, or West Africa, or the Middle-East to channel their propensities in a productive direction. With enough propaganda we can cast those wars as righteous peacekeeping efforts - and that isn't even really a lie. And we kill the dangerous ones if we have to. It's still not enough."
They were both silent for a moment as he processed this, and she watched him.
"So the end of the world is nigh, and you're trying to stop it."
She shot him a humourless smile. "Extinction is easy," she said, snapping her fingers. "There's just oblivion afterwards. No, we're not worried about that - to ply a tired cliché, humans are as resilient as cockroaches. What we're trying to stop is the fall of civilization, a prospect which I find far more frightening."
Calvert exhaled deeply, and for once he wore a thoughtful expression.
"Just one question after all this. You distrust them because of their propensity for violence, for chaos. You're trying to control them, but you're one of them. So what does that make you?"
"Very, very careful," she enunciated slowly, "is what it makes me. Every plan I come up with is audited. My team consists of some of the smartest non-parahuman analysts in the country. They scrutinize every detail before it is put into action."
She's so paranoid that she doesn't even trust herself. For some reason, the thought delighted him.
"Now, if that's all, I have work to get back to." She turned to leave, before pausing. "One last thing. I understand you're bringing some staff with you to Chicago. Governess will be dropping by later in the month, and she's willing to hand out a few enhancements to volunteers."
The default calculating smirk was back on his face. "Enhancements? Aren't parahumans prohibited from serving in administrative ranks?"
"The enhancements don't technically make one a parahuman, since no Corona Pollentia is developed. I trust you can be discreet. Other directors have found it useful to have a person on the higher staff with a minor Tinker or Thinker ability. And of course, it doesn't hurt that the process ensures loyalty to the PSD."
"It ensures loyalty to Governess, you mean."
"And by extension, the PSD."
"That's a lot of trust to place in one woman. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, eh?"
"Your pronunciation is awful, Calvert," she commented, dryly. "And to answer your question, I do. She's been with me from the start, and I trust her. I still watch her like a hawk."
"And who watches you?"
"Most of the time I do that too. And I hire people to do it for me when I can't."
Only a few of the newer analysts raised their heads in greeting as she walked past. The rest kept working. By now most of them had learned that Emily Piggot didn't care very much for pointless niceties. She made her way to a boardroom where three other individuals were sitting around a conference table.
"Sibyl, you were watching. How did I do?"
"Not bad. 72.3% likelihood that Calvert will be cooperative."
"That's not the most reassuring figure."
"For someone as scheming as Calvert, it's probably the best we're going to get."
She nodded. "Alright. Do we have any new action issues for today?"
"Two more Maersk container ships were hijacked off the coast of Haiti. This is the third attack by the Drowned Rats this month."
"Do we have any intelligence on their base of operations yet?"
"We've narrowed it down to north-western Hispaniola, but nothing more accurate yet."
"Ok, next."
"Flynn delivered another stirring campaign speech in Ottawa last night. It incited minor protests outside our embassy."
Piggot gritted her teeth. That sanctimonious cock was currently the frontrunner in their electoral race, and it grated on her nerves. His little igloo of a nation had only survived so far through relatively isolation, and because the US was willing to do the dirty work. Dragon played a large part in keeping things stable, she had to admit, which was rather worrying in its own right. She was a power player who they had shockingly little information on. They still weren't even sure if Richter had been a false trail or something else entirely…
And now Flynn was on the scene, parroting populist anti-American bullshit to stir up crowds. Something might need to be done about that, but not yet.
"Okay, no useful steps we can take at the moment. Next."
"This isn't big picture, but I thought you'd want to know. Fresh trigger in Brockton Bay. Victoria Dallon, daughter of Carol and Mark Dallon of New Wave, ward of the state. She evaded custody, and we believe she was aided by a previously unknown rogue."
Piggot pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling the opening twinge of an oncoming headache. The clusterfuck with New Wave had been before her time, but she was still dealing with the fallout today. Honestly, what were they thinking. New Wave had been popular, made-for-TV heroes, and they had children for god's sake. They could have played hardball by threatening them with a few fines, disbarment, loss of custody of their kids, and then handed them a plea deal with a little compensation in a show of mercy. They could have been brought into the PSD with minimal fuss. Instead a trigger happy strike team tried to take them down on the street, ending with four PSD capes, Brandish, and Flashbang dead and the others facing manslaughter charges. The abortive escape attempt by the Pelham siblings last year had been even more bad PR to add to the fire. There was probably no chance of getting to Victoria Dallon, her history had already made her absolutely hostile towards the PSD.
"Low priority for the moment," she said, "and get me information on the unknown rogue."
