2.1

-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff Argent --

I caught movement from the edge of my peripheral vision. My eyes snapped to the PRT agent, our escort turned minder, only to watch him finish shifting his weight onto his other leg.

We'd been guided into the heart of the PRT building, up a few flights of stairs, and deposited in a hallway with a couple chairs. The interior was styled in the same cheap, bland fashion as government buildings across the world. Across at least three worlds, actually, though the particulars varied. Drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, and tough beige carpet here.

I suppose I appreciated the responsible use of taxpayer money, though a part of me was disappointed. Wasn't the Justice League Watchtower supposed to be an unmatched display of opulence and technological achievement? The real life equivalent was something of a letdown, though I suppose that the Rig was supposed to play the role of superhero headquarters. Unfortunately, it had been badly damaged in Leviathan's attack, leaving the PRT HQ as an inferior replacement. More police station than Fortress of Solitude, and it showed.

We'd been kept waiting a good twenty minutes with no end in sight and I was feeling a little twitchy. Not because of the wait, per se -- 'hurry up and wait' is fond military tradition, after all -- but because of what could be happening in the interim. I'd elected against 'calling ahead' via communication formula specifically to avoid tempting the authorities to set up a trap. The real deterrent against that sort of thing was the implicit promise of retribution from my men, of course, but people make bad choices sometimes. Better to make betrayal difficult as well as dumb.

It was just a power play, probably. Or they were having trouble sourcing recording equipment. Or the director was just busy with some other matter. But when it comes to survival, 'probably' just isn't good enough. You have to succeed every single time. As for what they might have set up? Well, I'd had a while to think about it.

Even a simple landmine would probably kill me if I wasn't ready for it, and would certainly kill Lisa. Fortunately, if they wanted to kill me, I suspected they'd prefer the certainty offered by one of Bakuda's bombs, which they likely weren't aware I could sense.

If they wanted to capture me, their worrying options were soporific gas or Clockblocker. I wasn't planning on eating or drinking anything, containment foam set up too slowly and wouldn't stick to my shell, and their other capes were too weak and slow. Gas was perhaps difficult to detect but easy to counter. I'd turned my shell airtight and spun up an oxygenation formula as soon the possibility had occurred to me. As for the latter... Well, there really wasn't any legitimate reason for anyone to attempt to touch me at this meeting. I'd try to de-escalate first, naturally, but I'd defend myself if it came to it. Cutting my way out afterwards would be difficult, but doable.

All simple enough. Unfortunately, the possibility I considered most likely was also the most dangerous: a powerful human Master. They obviously couldn't all be as incompetent or unambitious as Cherie and her father. So, where were the competent, ambitious Masters? In positions of authority or close to them, most likely. And there were fewer than a hundred PRT departments spread out across the US and Canada.

They theoretically had countermeasures against that sort of thing, but given the diversity of possible powers, I was dubious as to their effectiveness. Seemed more like a first line of defense against other Masters than a complete solution. Lisa... hadn't found that notion plausible. Then again, she also believed that a small cabal of Thinkers ran the world economy, so her power clearly wasn't perfect.

Oh, I didn't doubt they made a killing on the stock market, in R and industrial espionage, and perhaps even in corporate governance, but controlling the whole thing? Dzhugashvili and all of his thugs couldn't control the economy of a single nation, not really, not even with his total monopoly on violence and his eagerness to use it to destroy whatever he couldn't control. If nothing else, I was dead certain workers still slacked off on the clock in the heart of Moskva, even in the Kremlin itself. To not just control the economy of the entire world but to do so invisibly? To manipulate the aggregate of trillions of individual choices made for as many inscrutable reasons?

Well, I suppose I didn't know where the upper limit on parahuman power truly lay, but if such a person existed, it'd be more accurate to say they ruled the world than the economy, and with a degree of control no despot had ever dreamed of. And what goal could the state of this world possibly serve? Ridiculous.

Lisa's fallibility was not a comforting thought, not when her power was my best defense against a powerful Master. I hadn't even considered the possibility that Cherie was manipulating me until Lisa had spelled it out. How could I respond to a threat that I'm not capable of even recognizing? Much as I wanted to come up with another answer, the only one springing to mind was the one that had actually saved me: have someone else recognize it for me. Lisa had spelled it out, after all.

Having to rest the sanctity of my mind on another's judgment was uncomfortable, to say the least. She was hardly one of those morons in Imperial Intelligence, but once bitten, twice shy. I glanced her over. She noticed and shot me a reassuring smile. I frowned back. On my side or not, it was still disturbing how she always seemed to know what I was thinking. I'd spent every day of the last decade pretending. Pretending to be a child, a patriot, a battle maniac, even a zealot, when I could manage to swallow my disgust. I'd practiced long and hard and I'd succeeded. No one had ever doubted I was any of those things, not even-- But Lisa saw right through me.

Then another, much more worrying thought occurred to me. Was she on my side? Her eyes immediately widened and I maxed out my reflex enhancement. Her response meant nothing -- she'd find my suspicion worrying regardless of whether it was justified -- but I wanted enough time to think it through before she had a chance to influence the direction of my thoughts.

Our arrangement had made sense. I'd given her a stake in my success and me in hers. But it wasn't perfect. In particular, it only made sense to continue to cooperate so long as the expected return on future cooperation outweighed the current return on betrayal, and we were looking at a lot of money. I was confident I could turn that capital into a far greater return in the future but was she? It... hadn't occurred to me to explain my plans to her, not while I had needed her focused on other things.

As an officer, I'd gotten used to expecting obedience from my subordinates as a matter of course, and my responsibility to them in turn was to handle the long term while they focused on immediate issues. It was an efficient system, so long as everyone fulfilled their roles. Easy enough to trust in that, at least on my end, when the whole of the Imperial Military would back my authority. That was not the case anymore, obviously, and it had been a mistake not to seek buy-in from my stakeholders when I'd had the chance. Well, the change would probably have just worried the men, soldiers through and through. Really, if they were going to prosper in this bizarre new world, they'd need my guidance now more than ever.

Understanding my mistake wouldn't solve the problems it caused, though. I'd have to kill her if she had decided to betray me, of course. She was very likely able to predict my response, so that response had to provide proper disincentive. As I'd noted soon after we met, one of the upsides of her power was the ease of making credible threats. Simply explaining the error in her reasoning and letting it go might let me retain a useful asset now, but precommitting to apparently irrational behavior in such instances would make them much less likely to occur in the first place.

And minimizing that chance was certainly worth some apparent irrationality. The amount of damage she could do with just a few sentences was astronomical. Unpredictability is life, on the strategic level as much as the tactical. And, as I'd just noted, I was actively depending on her warning to handle the most pernicious threats. And after what she managed with Coil's mercenaries, she could even have turned... No. No, I doubt it. I had no illusions about their personal loyalty to me, especially after...

I took a breath.

After my recent failures.

But to the Empire? To their own sense of pride, duty, and integrity? They'd take the offer of a bribe for betrayal, however delicately phrased, as a deadly insult. Possibly literally, in Koenig's case. Far more likely she planned on deceiving them if it came to it. There'd be questions if she returned without me, of course, but there were a lot of ways she might answer them.

None of that mattered unless she actually had decided to betray me, of course. Had she?

It was a lot of money, but not that much. Given how long most of those bounties had been left unclaimed, it was provably too little to purchase the services of a group like mine on this world. And we were far from the strongest group out there: Legend alone could have done everything we had, and more quickly and with less risk. Purity alone might have managed most of it, and she was just the best suited cape in this one city. Though it'd be a mistake to reduce a parahuman to their power. As I understood it, capes were closer to professional wrestlers than soldiers, and most of them had very little experience with and no training for sincere violence. Still, the point stood.

And there was the risk on the other side of the scale, which was substantial. Her power was good, but she hadn't known whether Hatchet Face could affect me and she'd been surprised I'd been able to resist Cherie's power. Another mistake like that here would get her killed, and no amount of money could make up for that. In my first life, I might have stopped there, satisfied that no rational person would knowingly take that risk. I'd been naive.

When danger is unavoidable, risking your life now to get the resources you need to survive later can be a good trade. I'd made such a judgment myself earlier today in choosing to fight the Nine instead of running away. Of course, the fact that such a risk could be worthwhile didn't mean every opportunity was. It was a matter of measuring the expected value against your other options, like any other investment. And I wasn't seeing it here, though it was possible she knew something I didn't, or simply miscalculated.

I obviously hadn't taken my eyes off Lisa since I'd started down this line of thought, but now I moved my attention back to her. She'd already noticeably paled, eyes scanning my face for clues. Her tongue darted out, wetting dry lips. It'd been two seconds, maybe? A pretty extreme response, given her baseline thinking speed. Huh. I'd thought earlier that her response didn't mean anything, but that wasn't quite true, was it? She was scared of me. Genuinely, viscerally terrified of my displeasure. That was... probably not healthy for a working relationship, but it was useful now. People certainly could work through fear. I should know: I hadn't had any choice but to learn. But it wasn't easy. It took practice she likely lacked.

Still. Even if the chance was small, the potential damage was large. It'd be wise to take some precautions. I couldn't punish her without being certain, of course -- if I were willing to hurt her over mere suspicion, she'd have picked up on that, too, and it'd have paradoxically incentivized her to work against me in truth. But there were other options. I relaxed my reflex enhancement to normal levels, dropped the formula relaying sound through my airtight shell, and turned the exterior reflective to prevent lip reading, plunging myself into darkness.

"Weiss, listen quietly and use your best judgment. Keep a recording."

"Yes, Ma'am."

I returned my shell to its earlier settings, leaving the channel open.

Lisa looked confused for a moment before she figured it out. She opened her mouth to speak, then flicked her eyes to the man from the PRT. He had taken a half step towards me, staring. I shrugged at him. He had surely seen weirder, and explaining would obviously defeat the purpose of disguising the action. But why had Lisa... Ah, we couldn't speak freely in front of him. Well, what was there to talk about? I'd satisfied myself on the subject. I deliberately looked away from her, hopefully indicating that I had no immediate plans to hurt her. I heard her sigh and lean back, chair creaking.

Director Piggot's voice emerged from the door at the end of the hall.

"Come in."

I was on my feet in a moment, and then off my feet and hovering a couple centimeters in the air a moment later. Lisa stood and tried to pat me on the shoulder, hand bouncing off my locked-down shell.

She sighed again and whispered, "Just relax, OK? I'll let you know if they're up to anything."

And whatever it was, I'd be ready for it.

A\N: Well, that omake was a little too exciting, so here's twenty four hundred words of Tanya sitting quietly and working herself into a panic over literally nothing. (Or maybe???)

I'd say sorry, but I'm not.

Thank you again to Readhead for editing!