Trailblazer – Dream of Eden

Discussion in the room paused to watch the video. As with most things related to its construction, Veda had streamed the arrival of the colony and coordinated its orbit with space agencies across the world.

It was a monumental achievement. The kind that would be recorded and mentioned in textbooks for hundreds of years. One of those moments that changed the state of the world.

And it almost seemed too soon.

There were still so many problems on Earth.

Still though.

"Our agreement forbids the weaponizing of space," Representative Derling pointed out for the third time. "You know this!"

"You think the United States won't weaponize space?" An older representative, white-haired and wrinkled scoffed. "That's naïve."

"The Trilateral Agreement calls for all participants to refrain from weaponizing any mega-structures in space."

"Do we expect that to last? What happens when China finally gets back on its feet? The power balance in East Asia is not going to remain seated in India and Indonesia. What happens when China gets—"

"You're being absurd."

"Absurd? What about—"

"The agreement is the agreement," President Joule pointed out. "It's also not the purpose of this discussion. We were handed the means and methods ten years ago. Regardless of who else does so, the AEU assembly has spoken. Into the next century, the construction of an orbital elevator will be pivotal, as will partnership with countries in Africa where we will need to build it."

"If we're going to talk about the construction and building plans for an orbital elevator, we need to discuss how to protect it." Representative Mass tapped his finger against the table. "Building such a structure will take years and significant investment. Even if we petition Veda for assistance and she agrees, we can't become wholly dependent on her without sacrificing our own interests in the long run."

"You think she wouldn't agree?" someone asked.

She mostly likely would.

"That's not the point," the older representative pressed. He was a hold out from the old EU. A hawk who wanted Europe to stand on its own without the need for American assistance. He also advocated that colonialism wasn't so bad. "We cannot discuss defense considerations for a project of this scale without considering terrorism."

"Let's not ignore the big white elephant in the room."

All eyes in the room turned on the Representative of England, a younger man named Frost.

"What about the moon?" he asked. "What do we do if the 'Network' decides to attack us again?"

"You don't think they'd have done so by now if they wanted to?" Mass asked.

"They changed their minds once," someone recalled. "They could change it again."

"How are we to know?" Frost pressed. "We have no relations. No diplomatic channels. They don't talk to us. There's an entire alien species that we can neither see or hear and for a decade they've been silent with their—"

"Have they?"

Eyes turned again, this time to a woman just off to the side in the gallery. The camera crews, mostly poised in balconies overhead, all swiveled about and focused.

Relena looked the man in the eye, fully prepared to keep speaking.

"You're merely an observer Ms. Peacecraft," Frost charged. "Your penchant for interruption—"

"She's a member of the diplomatic corp," President Joule interrupted. "Regardless of any preliminary outline we make here, it is ultimately the diplomatic corp who will have to execute it with our partners. Ignore their opinions at your own risk, representative."

"The number of trigger events has dramatically declined in the past decade," Relena noted. "Can we not take that as a form of communication?"

"How so?" Mass asked.

"In the sense that up to a point, the number of trigger events and parahumans in the world was rising." Relena held her hand out in a placating gesture. "Then they revealed themselves to us, and since then that trend has reversed. The average age of parahumans has risen from sixteen to twenty-two. Third-generation children of capes are triggering at a rate astronomically lower than their parents."

There was the other matter too, but Relena couldn't discuss it publicly. So far no government was discussing it publicly.

"She's not wrong." A man across the room rose from the opposite gallery. "Since we began tracking trigger events in more detail, their nature has shifted. Parahumans are triggering older, and the broken trigger events have virtually vanished."

"Virtually?" someone asked. "The last one was seven years ago. Since then, none. I'm not sure there's any 'virtually' about it."

The man nodded in agreement. "Some parahumans now trigger with no apparent stress factors. They simply become parahumans. This trend has been global."

"There are more heroes than ever," another voice commented. "And fewer villains."

"And the villains we have are less…"

The sentence wasn't finished, no doubt for lack of the right word.

Despite that, the entire room nodded in agreement because they all had a sense of the meaning being sought.

Things had changed in ten years.

"They could have sent a memo," someone finally said, drawing a few laughs from around the room.

President Joule checked the time and sighed. "Let's take a recess. Thirty minutes."

With that the discussion was paused and most rose from their seats. Doors were opened, and people were allowed out of the room, and those outside were allowed in.

Relena drew her phone from her pocket and typed out a quick message.

RP: You were right.
PJ: He's gonna push it too
PJ: We need to keep an eye on him
PJ: He's dangerous

Yes. Frost did remind Relena of Djibril, and that was not a comparison she enjoyed making. You ensure one madman grabbing at power tumbles and is sent to prison for corruption, and another simply aspires to take his place. It was—

"Ms. Relena."

A cup was held out in front of her, breaking Relena from her thoughts. She inhaled and let the tension flow from her shoulders before taking it.

"Thank you, Marie."

The woman sat in a recently vacated seat and looked out over the room. "How did it go?"

"About as expected," Relena admitted.

Behind her, Allelujah stood and surveyed the room. "Frost?"

"Yes." Relena sipped at the tea and let the heat relax her throat. She simply couldn't carry her voice the same way she used to. It was amazing how young she felt, and how often she wondered if she was starting to grow old. Ridiculous. She was only twenty-seven. "I fear he will find a waiting audience for the brand of fear he is trying to spread."

"But the parahuman situation has improved," Marie noted.

"Yes, but that improvement is difficult to describe because it is so nebulous."

Everyone knew what it was in abstract.

The nature of the parahuman world had radically shifted over the past ten years. There were more rogues than ever, for one. Parahumans applying their powers to legal monetary pursuits or public services were at an all time high. At the same time, there were more heroes than there had ever been, even in the 'glory days' of the Protectorate's peak.

By far though, the most obvious change was in villains.

There were many still. Almost too many, it seemed at times. Yet… It's not that there weren't still horrible villains, but the bar for horrible had dropped. The last group to try and imitate the Slaughterhouse Nine and revive the name had been put down so rapidly that they were the last to try. That had been eight years ago. After Veda's dismantling of the Three Blasphemies five years ago, rampant mass murderers had virtually vanished as villains.

Oh, they still existed.

But it was hard to qualify if they were less violent than their predecessors, less powerful, or if heroes had simply become so much more capable of dealing with them that it didn't matter.

She'd been to a school just the other week and the children had never seen a cape. That was unfathomable to her as someone who grew up in the 'age of heroes' and the time of the Endbringers.

Brawls between superhumans had been so common nearly the entire world turned a blind eye to them, or simply reported them like the weather or celebrity gossip. Warlords were vanishing too, forced back by combined prongs of popular uprisings, military and hero intervention, or their own sense of self-preservation kicking in and resulting in cooperative reforms.

And the most alarming part to her had been the presence of one of the children in the room.

She had the ability to pull colors from objects and create forms with them.

The other children didn't see her as a 'cape.' She was just Hilda and she liked art class.

"The nature of things is in flux," Relena mused, glancing down into her tea. "Moreso than ever."

"There's still no word?" Marie asked.

She'd been asking for ten years. Mostly because Relena appreciated the reminder not to forget, Relena thought.

"No," she admitted. Relena closed her eyes and smiled solemnly for absent friends. "Last I heard, her father and boyfriend were going out to see if there was anything to find."

"To the colony?" Allelujah asked.

"As I understand it."

Relena raised her head and stared into the ceiling.

Ten years was a long time to wait and wonder.

But, Relena couldn't do much about that. Whatever Taylor was doing for all this time must be important, but the world didn't stop turning. There was still a lot of work to do.

"We need a resolution soon," Relena thought. "The United States has already fulfilled its five-year obligation one year ahead of schedule by completing the Miami-Dade Port site."

"Space shuttles," Marie concluded.

Relena nodded. They would need to build the anchors in high orbit as a first step to elevator construction and that would mean getting people and material to high orbit. Veda was capable of fulfilling the second requirement, but the world's governments were ever nervous of her. She remained at arms-length, always the third or fourth option when facing any problem.

To her credit, Veda didn't seem to mind that much.

Relena supposed if she felt as Taylor did, she preferred to see people getting up and resolving issues themselves. That was always what Taylor wanted. She was never trying to get them to just sit down and ask Veda to fix everything for the world.

That wasn't the way forward. People needed to reach their own conclusions.

That said, "We haven't even begun construction of a port in the AEU because we can't agree on a loca—"

Relena stopped as a noise rocked the building. Her eyes instantly narrowed, and she rose from her seat and faced the door.

Marie pulled the gun from her jacket as fast as Allelujah did. They both stepped between her and the door, weapons aimed along with dozens of others around the room.

The sound echoed again.

Gunfire.

Several armed guards went to the door and started moving outside. Then Marie and Allelujah turned and faced the other ways.

The wall exploded, and a red eye burned through the smoke.

"Mobile suits!" someone exclaimed.

The suit burst into the room, stomping along in quick heavy steeps. Two more followed and all three carried armed men and women in body armor. And three in costumes.

One of them, a dark-skinned woman in a suit with a silver mask over the top half of her face, jumped down as the suits barreled through the gallery to the center of the room. A few men opened fire, and Marie knocked one of the armed men off the suits. A canister shot into the air, flashed, and then exploded with a bright light. It wasn't blinding, though Relena did cover her eyes in expectation it would be.

Instead of blinding the room, many of the guns began popping and burning. Marie and Allelujah tossed theirs to the ground and grabbed knives from their clothes instead.

By then, one of the capes had jumped off the suits and grabbed President Joule. She pointed a gun at the woman's head while a second pressed a button on the President's tablet.

The room sealed in an instant, the doors snapping shut and locking down the assembly.

Relena blinked at that as it happened. That took a code. A code only the President would know.

The suits surrounded the central table, taking the representatives as their first hostages. The armed men jumped down from their seats, spreading out with weapons raised.

"Take a seat!" they shouted. They spoke with accents, though Relena couldn't quite place them. "Everyone down."

"I must ask you to be our guests for a time." The cape at the President's seat looked up. She was dark-skinned, with large lips and a silver mask over her face. "Please, take a seat."

Relena dropped her cup and tapped Allelujah and Marie's shoulders. When they looked back, she shook her head. Knives would do no good against a mobile suit, their enhanced reflexes and abilities aside.

The two put their knives away without a word, fortunately.

Relena sat, cautiously looking around the room as the armed men began collecting weapons, phones, and computers. Relena listened to their accents as they spoke. Somewhere in Africa was the best she could do. There were just so many languages and so many accents, picking out which took more of an ear than she had.

The mobile suits stood sentry at the center, large weapons held in hand. They weren't the ones Taylor had made. They were one of the knockoffs that started appearing a few years ago. If she recalled right, these ones were called Leos. They were made in Europe and had been sold to military and security forces. She'd heard nothing of any being stolen or 'misplaced' but she wasn't sure she'd be told if any were.

The news crews above were still reporting… There were no armed men there. None paying them any mind at all. They were free to point their cameras and tell anyone watching what was happening.

A show then, was it?

"Let's get on with it." President Joule remained calm, defiant even, despite the gun pointed at her head. "I assume you have demands?"

"No," the silver-masked leader replied to some surprise. "I have a message."

Somewhere in the room, someone started clapping.

The cape turned her face, as did many others.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did I interrupt?"

A figure rose near the back and smiled. Taller than the last time Relena saw her, hair grown out longer and her figure a bit fuller. She wore a familiar costume of black boots, white pants, and a red coat in an old aristocratic style. She'd changed the mask though, switching the bulky silver one for a more compact white one that covered her eyes and nose.

Marie and Allelujah turned their heads and smiled at something unseen.

"My bad," Lisa said. "It's just, well, I thought you were going to go the whole hostage route but if you're just going to grandstand"—the doors to either side of her, sealed by the President's code, swung open—"I have better things to do."

"Preventer!" one of the armed men shouted.

Guns pointed at her, but a man in front of Relena stood and snapped his fingers.

The weapons all began to shimmer and jerk. The men holding them pulled and pushed but the guns remained exactly in place, as if frozen in the air.

The mobile suits began to move but a cape teleported behind them with four figures in black body armor. One rammed a long rifle into the back of the closest suit and fired. The thunderous noise raked Relena's ears and echoed through the room, but the front of the suit exploded outward with oil and gore before collapsing forward to the ground. A second suit literally froze as ice rapidly enveloped it, and the third was removed from the room by the teleporting cape when he ran at it.

The black armored figures turned their weapons on the three capes in the room, ignoring the other armed men as they were overrun and surrounded. The weapons they'd carried remained hovering in the air and unusable.

Marie and Allelujah lashed out and grabbed the two closest men while other guards from around the room did the same. There were a few brawls and punching matches. One man was cut with a knife, but within a minute the hostage situation ended as quickly as it began.

Lisa tapped her foot on the floor, hands behind her back.

"Feel like surrendering?" she asked. "Because I can do this all day."

The silver-masked cape glanced around, flanked by the other two capes who'd yet to use their powers.

Relena assumed they'd fight. Capes often did, even against stiff odds.

She was surprised—and not pleasantly so—when all three raised their hands and gave up.

"Oh, right!" Lisa snapped her fingers and pointed. "Arrest that asshole!" She pointed squarely at Frost. "He procured the mobile suits for these guys with a buddy of his at a shipping company. He's totally pulling a Djibril, he just sucks at it. Check your email. I sent all the details you can investigate at your leisure."

Relena watched the scene unfold, contemplating that it was the shortest hostage situation she'd ever witnessed.

Somehow, the accusation that Frost had tried to manipulate public opinion much as Djibril and Azrael had before him was unsurprising, and disappointing. How had he managed to swipe some mobile suits? Those weapons were strictly regulated and monitored. Ever since the world had witnessed first-hand what they could do ten years ago, no one wanted them falling into the wrong hands.

Though, Frost had been one of the champions pushing for the arms-lease agreement with certain African and European countries last year.

Relena had opposed it for exactly this reason, but she hadn't thought Frost would purposefully try to supply non-state actors.

"Stranger."

Relena glanced over and smiled. "Contessa, is it?"

"That's my name," Lisa sighed. She stood next to Relena, the black clad figure of Stella at her side nodding to Marie and Allelujah. "Someone's gotta do it."