James Cameron and Charles Eglee own Dark Angel. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is unintended (and would really be sorta whacked, given some of the events and persons depicted herein).
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V – Crossing the Rubicon"You son of a bitch," Max snarled as soon as the door to the well-secured hotel suite had closed. McElroy remained silent, gazing at her indifferently. If he was at all impressed by Max's anger, he didn't show it. "You lied to me."
"No I didn't," McElroy answered smoothly. "I offered my help in exchange for yours. Nothing has changed. I predict that you and yours are weeks, if not days, away from freedom."
"Because you made the Familiars out to be the worst thing this side of Satan," Max growled. "That's not how it was supposed to be."
"And why not?!" McElroy suddenly roared. "Explain that to me, child! Why . . . not?" Max was so taken off-guard by the senator's sudden outburst of rage that she found herself completely unable to respond. "The Familiars tried to wipe out humanity two times, Max. Two times!" he continued. "I know it's a little hard for you to put yourself in my place, but try. For just once – try. That first thing – The Coming – would have wiped out every man, woman, and child in the world. All except for you transgenics, of course. See, even if you failed at Megiddo, you still would have survived long enough to have the chance to defeat the Familiars in an all-out war. We ordinaries wouldn't have even have had that much. We all would have died and probably never known why. Then there was that Venetian Contingency. I don't know who nuked the Jordan River Valley, but whoever it was probably saved billions of lives. Once again, my bet is that your people would have survived whatever plan the Familiars had for the ordinaries. You don't know what it's like, Max. You want to play it cool. You want to pretend that there's no bogeyman trying to wipe out humanity. You're lying to yourself and everyone else. There is a bogeyman. The Familiars are monsters. Just because you would have survived doesn't make them any less dangerous. I'm not immune to their various doomsday weapons, and neither are all but a few of my constituents. I had information that needed to get out, and I took care of it. Don't think I'm going to feel guilty because you didn't think the truth was sugar-coated enough."
"It's not a matter of sugar-coating," Max countered.
"Yes it is," McElroy insisted before she could finish her thought. "Two times the Familiars initiated plans that would have killed billions. That can't be sugar-coated."
"The speech was fine as it was, before you changed it without telling me," Max insisted. "You made yourself into some kind of demagogue. That doesn't help us."
"Of course it does," McElroy shot back, his voice suddenly even and eerily calm despite the intensity that continued to glow in his eyes. "You don't want people to be paranoid and irrational. Fine, I can understand that. But remaining calm does not mean that they shouldn't be afraid. And they should be afraid, Max. And they should probably be a little paranoid, too"
"You really believe that?"
"Yes!" McElroy barked, once again raising his voice as he continued trying to sway Max's opinion. "And let's get something straight right now. You're probably right; I probably did sound like a demagogue. And I'm likely going to build a huge political base because of fear – the fear that ordinaries will feel now that they know the truth. Just don't forget that just because I may have been wrong in my methods, that doesn't mean that my message is any less right. I'm right about the Familiars, Max. And so are you. They need to be stopped."
"Not like this," Max muttered, needing to make the senator see how he'd stepped carelessly. "You're going to start a witch-hunt. Innocent people are going to die."
"I know," McElroy replied, his voice suddenly weary, guilty. "Don't you think I realized that? I'm well aware of humanity's inherent paranoia. But I also know about the transgenic that called herself Tinga." Max gasped at the mention of her sister's name. "Does that surprise you?"
"I don't know what you mean?" Max admitted.
"She was the only transgenic that ever passed on her traits after mating," McElroy answered. "Do you know what that means?"
"No." Max knew it meant a lot of things, but she had no idea to what, specifically, the senator was referring. Still, she had a sudden uneasy feeling in her stomach. There's something I haven't considered yet, she told herself nervously. There's something I overlooked, something that should have been obvious.
"It means that your people's days are numbered," the senator told her. "Hasn't that occurred to you?"
Max felt a shudder shoot straight through her. In all of her time with her people, she'd never once given any thought to their future beyond escaping the siege. The immediate threat was so great that it never occurred to her to consider what would happen years down the road. "I never --"
"You never considered that, did you?" McElroy asked. Max only shook her head in confirmation. "How does it feel, Max?"
"Huh?"
"How does it feel to know that your people will be extinct in a matter of a hundred years?" McElroy asked. Despite the cruelty of his words, McElroy's face was sad, just like his voice. Max suddenly understood – he was facing the same situation. If he didn't act in some way, if he didn't succeed in destroying the Familiars, then the ordinaries would face extinction just as certainly as the transgenics would.
"You'll sacrifice as many as it takes, won't you?" Max asked.
"Yes," McElroy nodded. "And don't think I'm going to try to make myself seem heroic; my hypocrisy only goes so far. The path I've chosen leads directly to hell. I know that much. But if the Familiars win, billions will die. If my plans succeed to fruition, then millions will likely die. Millions, rather than billions. The species will live on, and that's what really matters. I'm sure that if you were in the same position, if you could sacrifice a few dozen of your people to guarantee survival for the rest, you would do so." Max thought about that for a long time.
"No. I wouldn't," she finally answered, resolve well up within her again. "I'd find another way."
"No you wouldn't," McElroy assured her. "You'd make the same sacrifice I just did."
"Don't fool yourself," Max shot back. "I'm not that kind of person. There's got to be another way."
"There isn't. At least, not anymore, that is. If there was another way, it's gone now, that's for sure. The Familiars are out there, and now they've been backed into a corner. They know we'll be gunning for them."
"The die is cast," Max muttered.
"You understand completely," McElroy agreed with a grim nod. "We're both dead. You know that, right?" Max nodded. "Don't ever forget that," he told her. "It'll free you. It'll allow you to do what needs to be done. Just remember that what happens to us is unimportant." Max looked in the senator's eyes, and saw clearly that he meant every word of what he said. He fully expected to die because of his actions, and he seemed to accept his fate as long as he achieved his goals. Despite his betrayal, despite a decision she felt was foolhardy, Max understood what he was trying to do. She understood McElroy's Machiavellian motivations. It was the end, rather than the means, that motivated her ally. Such noble ends, she thought with wonder, and such a fate… The senator's expression made it perfectly plain that he knew exactly the damnation he had assured himself. It was then that Max shuddered. That look, she thought with growing horror. I've seen it before.
"Now we have to get down to business," McElroy said, startling Max out of her reverie. She fought to stuff her fears down inside her and concentrate on the task at hand.
"And what, exactly, is there to discuss?" Max asked. "The news outlets are reviewing your information while the president meets with the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Homeland Security, reviewing the same info and trying to decide if our offer is worth accepting."
"Verification of the information I provided will be the first thing that gets resolved," the senator explained. "Our intelligence is very thorough, due primarily to the information gathered by Lydecker and Eyes Only. The threat will be clear, and the Joint Chiefs will espouse an immediate reaction."
"Which would entail what, exactly?"
"An armed response," McElroy said. "Bear in mind that I'm not entirely familiar with the military; my expertise as a senator has always been in the intelligence community. However, I do know the Homeland Secretary fairly well. Remember that he used to be a general, and then went into government work, becoming the Deputy Director of the NSA."
"I know," Max assured her guest. She'd done her homework – in order to predict the decisions the government would make, it was necessary first to understand what type of men would be making those decisions.
"He was chosen for the job of Homeland Secretary precisely because of the fact that he had expertise in both the military and intelligence arenas, not to mention numerous contacts in both of those fields," McElroy told her, letting her in on some of the finer points of Washington politics. "Dollars to donuts he'll want to deploy the Black Omega Guard."
"Huh?" Max asked, suddenly reaching a point where her knowledge was completely insufficient. She'd never even heard rumors about a Black Omega Guard.
"Black Omega was the name given to the absolutely most elite soldiers in the U.S. military. Like the Delta Force, they were recruited from all of the other branches of the military. But while the Deltas specialized in anti-terrorist ops, the Black Omegas were simply trained to destroy anything and everything that stood in their way; they're masters of sweep and clear operations. Their recruitment process was intense beyond anything any soldier had ever faced before, and many of them received cybernetic implants to increase performance or compensate for the crippling injuries they often suffered during their training."
"How come I've never heard of these guys?" Max asked. She found it surprising that no one in Manticore had ever mentioned a program that seemed to have similar goals as the one in which she was produced.
"You have," McElroy told her with a coy smile. "You just didn't know them as Black Omegas. You knew them as Manticore Special Ops."
"Huh?"
"The soldiers that lived at the Gillette facility – those were the Black Omegas," McElroy explained. "At the beginning, when they weren't deployed in the field, their primary purpose was to guard the facility, to make certain that no one from the outside ever got their hands on classified intel. Then, as your generation began to grow up, they adopted the secondary role of controlling the transgenics. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the transgenics could be a problem as they grew up, especially as each succeeding generation proved to be stronger and smarter than the ones that came before."
"So they were your security precaution," Max surmised.
"Then came the Pulse," McElroy continued. "Our strong economy went the way of the 8-track, and we found ourselves needing to do more with less. That's when Lydecker came to us with the idea for the Black Omega Project. Up until that point, the guards had simply been referred to as Manticore Ops, the name that you knew them by. Lydecker proposed that the guards train alongside the transgenics. The benefits would be twofold – first, the transgenics received the benefit of training with seasoned, elite troops, and second, the operators trained with a new generation of super-soldiers. They were forced to take themselves to a new level in order to remain competitive with opponents that were engineered to be superior."
"So the president has the option of using elite troops that have trained with transgenics," Max said, summing up the situation. "So of course he'll decide to go with them instead of freeing the transgenics."
"Of course," McElroy agreed. "And those troops will take serious losses. They may be the best human soldiers that have ever walked the earth, but they're still only human. Sooner or later, the president will be forced to turn to you and your people."
"And you figure it'll be sooner rather than later."
"Of course," McElroy said again with a thin smile. "The Black Omegas, as good as the are, will prove insufficient on their own. Of course, the transgenics, as superior as they are, will likely lack the necessary experience and cunning to succeed without unnecessary losses."
"But a combination of the two…"
"Would be frightening," McElroy finished for his host. "A unit with the physical capabilities of transgenics, but with the tactical ability developed by soldiers who've spent years competing against those very same transgenics, trying to milk any advantage they could find . . ."
"It's the best of both worlds," Max concluded.
"Yes, it is," McElroy agreed.
"I just hope this is a good idea," Max muttered.
"There's some risk," McElroy admitted, "but in times like these, better a mistake than a regret. You know what I mean?"
"Yes, I do," Max answered, though her mind was no longer on the subject of transgenic soldiers. I have to make one more stop before I go back to Terminal City, she decided.
To be continued………………………………